Many thanks to my pal Rita Ross from the Record’s copy desk, who showed me a wonderful typo in our Letters to the Editor (p. 9) of Monday, Aug. 2.

Written by an Elise Shapiro of Newburgh, the letter pointed out how folks around the city often “anonymously contribute to the well-being of our lives.” How true! And how awful that the letter said she’d seen her gardener working for free “on the pubic square … and stopped to say hello.” Read that again. Check the spelling of the word your brain registered as, “public.” 

Oops.

After reading that sentence — and climbing back up into my chair — my first thought was, “Yeah, I’d say hello too, if someone was working on my pubic square!”

It’s the quintessential copy-editor’s nightmare typo: dropping the “l” from “public.”

I don’t have the software to do this, but i know it exists, and I’m sure that if someone performed a concordance of words in the paper, “public” would turn out to be one of the most frequently used ones. I mean, the whole reason for our existence is to protect the public, be the watchdog of public officials, report on the use and misuse of public funds, and so on.

To be honest, I don’t think we drop the “l” often. But it’s exactly the kind of thing that would prevent poor Ms. Shapiro from clipping her otherwise perfectly lovely letter, and showing it to her grandchildren.

For the record (as it were): I don’t know who edits our Letters to the Editor, but it’s not the Night Copy Desk. (WHEW!)

 Today I found out that a friend who once lived with me in my house, is a paid, undercover informant for the Newburgh Police Department.

Man. And you think you know somebody!

We had a luncheon date of sorts, during which I asked what his plans were for the rest of the day, and he let it slip that he was on his way to police headquarters. I asked why he was headed there, and he prefaced his revelation with, “Well, I know you won’t tell anyone.” Basically, he tips them off when he sees major drug deals going down.

So there you have it. I WON’T tell anyone. Except to say: If you live in the City of Newburgh, no matter what neighborhood, you probably see this man at least two or three times a week.

OK. That’s it. Let the guessing begin. But: I’ll never tell!

Here is a story i drafted for the Record and sent them on Friday, July 31, 2010, for all the world to read just in case they never run it.

Reform Temple, Hasidim Join Hands to Restore Jewish Cemetery

 CITY OF NEWBURGH — Many questions surround the abandoned Jewish cemetery at the base of Newburgh’s Snake Hill. But one of the toughest has been: Who would pay for its fencing and restoration? Now that question has been answered, thanks to unexpected help from Kiryas Joel.

After a member of Temple Beth Jacob, Newburgh’s Reform synagogue, discovered several headstones with Hebrew inscriptions on a steep, thickly wooded hillside while hiking in the fall of 2008, temple members began looking into the cemetery’s origins and ownership. City historian Mary McTamaney located for them a deed from 1916, which yielded surprising news: TBJ itself was the cemetery’s owner.

“Many stones are half-sunk in the soil in that area, so there may be more graves that we are still unaware of,” said Kenneth Packer, chairman of TBJ’s cemetery committee. “But so far, we have definitely identified about 20 names with their dates of birth and death.” No one had been buried at Snake Hill before 1892 nor since 1908, according to the dates on the stones that are still readable.

The temple’s youth group did an initial cleanup in April 2009, hauling brush and taking rubbings of the headstones. But it was clear that the area, obviously a hotspot for youthful revelers, would need a locked fence. It seemed a miracle was needed.

That miracle arrived in December. Several residents of the Satmar community of Kiryas Joel, led by Zalmon Weinstock of Congregation Oitzer haChesed, read about the cemetery’s discovery and its need for a fence and drove to TBJ to talk about it with Packer and his committee.

The Kiryas Joel delegation ended up doing fundraising within their own community and hired a company to erect a gated chain-link fence, interwoven with green material on just three of the cemetery’s four sides so that folks can still look in while passing by.

On Wednesday, Packer and several men from Kiryas Joel gathered in the cemetery to say Kaddish – the Jewish prayer for the dead – over the graves and, at the same time, to do more work on cleaning and reading the headstones.

“There’s much more work to be done,” Packer said. “Many stones are broken and will have to be repaired, at great expense. Many are still unreadable. And we’re not at all sure we’ve found all the graves. But the generosity, kindness and energy of the residents of Kiryas Joel have been invaluable to us. They’ve forged new ties between our two communities.”

To contribute to the restoration of the Snake Hill cemetery, call Temple Beth Jacob at 562-5516.

Here’s a quote from a story that was published in the Record yesterday (Tuesday, July 27) about a youth-run farmers’ market that just opened on Chambers Street in Newburgh:

“It features organically grown tomatoes, eggplant, basil and mescaline mix.”

Does the New Yorker still reproduce such boo-boos? If so, i’ll have to send a tear-sheet to them.

i know what you’re saying: You’re saying, “Abrams, what did you do for Tisha B’Av?” i’ll tell you.

i spent a lovely hour with a Simon … i believe his last name was … Rottenberg? Honest.

A Kiryas Joel resident, he had read my blog — the very favorite blog of the good people of Kiryas Joel, apparently  (hello, Hasidim! Hello!) — and called me to say he’d like to visit the Snake Hill Cemetery. Since i have the key now, i said sure, i’d be glad to let him in. He showed up at my house as promised, in the standard-issue KJ van with his 3 adorable sons (one tall one, one middle-sized one and one little one), and off we went in two cars, as i had to come back home afterwards to change for work, and they were going straight back to KJ.

This turns out to be one knowledgeable guy. He not only KNEW that Joshua ben Mordecai Falk was Temple Beth Jacob‘s (and therefore Newburgh’s) first rabbi, and that Falk had written the first Hebrew book (other than the Bible or prayerbooks) published in the U.S., but he had actually READ it. All i ever knew about it was that it was a commentary on the Talmud’s “Ethics of the Fathers,” and that he’d come to the U.S. to get it published. Simon asked me why Falk needed to come here from Poland to publish his book,  and I had to tell him I had no idea why. By 1854, wasn’t there  a large Jewish population in Poland, and wouldn’t it have been much easier to publish a book in Hebrew there? That’s a good question for me to look into. He also told me that Falk also had written that he had a disagreement with the TBJ congregation over their interpretation of Judaism — i guess he had never heard of Reform in the Old Country and disapproved of it. After all, in that year, there was still no organization to ordain Reform rabbis. And yet he agreed to serve, albeit very briefly, as rabbi of our Reform congregation. Why, Simon asked? My small knowledge of the history of Judaism in the U.S. comes almost exclusively from Nathan Glazer’s classic “American Judaism,” but i was proud to impart to my new pal one fact i am sure of: In the mid-1800s, the great majority of German-Jewish immigrants to this country were rationalistic, intellectual Reform Jews by nature and philosophy, though there was no “certified Reform” process yet, and the Orthodox came only later, in the great wave of immigration from Eastern Europe of the 1880s and beyond.

Anyhoo, once past the absolutely perfect sign i’d recently purchased from my friend Sue Young at Design by Sue on Liberty Street (“This historic Jewish cemetery, consecrated in the late 1800s, has been the property of Temple Beth Jacob in the City of Newburgh since 1916″) and inside the cemetery gate, now secured by the lovely red padlock i’d bought from Liberty Locksmith, Simon and his sons got to work, lifting up the overturned headstones, digging lichen out of some of the letters, and quickly and surely reading the names and — most impressively — the dates of birth and death of the folks buried there. LIKE A COMPLETE DOPE, i had brought along neither my camera nor, more outrageously, even a pad and pen. And he gave me so much info! i never asked his occupation but he seemed to know everything about cemeteries: He instantly recognized the remnants of a small chain hooked to one, barely-protruding obelisk-type stone as being part of the boundary of a marked-off section that was meant for one family. i hardly thought that THAT was conclusive evidence, so he lifted up a few of the nearby, tumbled-down headstones and, sure enough, they were all from the same family. And he said that the cemetery had been cared for by SOMEONE through about 1900, because he noticed a stone with that date had been once broken, but then repaired with caulk. We now could, if we wanted to at great expense, send off a piece of the caulk (he said, peeling off a piece of it) for analysis and find out in exactly what year it was manufactured.

Simon also, noting the large percentage of infants and young kids buried there (in one family, a sister had died on Dec. 4 of one year, and her brother 10 days later), came up with a novel theory: That perhaps Big Rock Cemetery Association, which conveyed the property to Bikur Cholim Benevolent Society on Feb. 1, 1890, did so because there was some kind of rampant illness (flu-like?) killing so many children that they wanted to create a special area to bury their remains and a special group to handle them. It was already known, i guess, that you can get sick from handling dead bodies of people who died of illness, and maybe most folks didn’t want their loved ones buried near these “Plague People,” either??

An intriguing theory, but it doesn’t explain why the father and son who died in some kind of “disaster” (Simon translated it, “accident”) together, are buried there, too. i’d originally thought maybe it was a cemetery for the very poorest Jews, who couldn’t afford a plot, but i think Rabbi Freedman told me the father and son were “Cohanim” so that idea might not work, either.

So i’m sticking with my fantasy that it was simply a case of, back in the late 1800s, old Moishe decided he hated his former partner Murray, who’d been the firm’s accountant but turned out to be a crook, so he went around the congregation saying, “Hey! You don’t want to lie forever next to that crook Murray in Big Rock Cemetery, do ya? Let’s buy some land in the nice, peaceful woods on the southwest part of the city, and make a cemetery for ourselves out of that!” And he succeeded in getting a few families to go along with that.

What? You got a better idea? Let’s hear it!

The time seemed to fly by, during which Simon advised me, among other things,  that almost ANY foam-type cleanser (“like mousse,” he said, but he couldn’t have meant hair mousse, could he?), sprayed onto headstones, will take the dirt off of them. So now, i’m off to Target to buy some foaming hand soap, and see what happens!

i know you’re not supposed to be happy on Tisha B’Av, but for me, a cooler Tisha B’Av had never happened.

On May 12 (Wednesday), a long piece ran in the New York Times about Newburgh’s drugs/gangs/crime/violence problems. It was quite good, for the Times — nothing that the Record’s Doyle Murphy hadn’t written 148 times in the past, but a decent summary of it all. The next day, federal, state and local cops launched a HUGE sweep here, busting into houses at 6 a.m. and arresting 78 gang members on federal charges. (i teased Doyle about it: “See? When the New York Times does a story, they get results!”) But a lot of people were upset about the “negative picture” the Times story painted of Our Fair City, and i was drafted to write a “rebuttal.” Since neither the Times (“Letters to the Editor must be 150 words or less”) nor anyone else will ever run my 750-word reply, i will paste it below, lending credence to the saying that “the power of the press belongs to those who own one.” ( i guess anyone with a blog “owns one.”) Oh: To be completely tedious, i also sent it to David Shipley, the Times Op-Ed page editor. Here it is:

May 12, 2010

Ray Rivera did a good job in these pages (“In Newburgh, Gangs and Violence Reign,” May 12) of pointing out the violence in my “dilapidated” hometown of Newburgh. I know he was taking a snapshot, not producing a travelogue. But he must have shut his eyes to many of the city’s treasures in his search for the all-too-obvious evidence of gangs, crime and drugs. Many of us are wondering how he could possibly have missed:

Washington’s Headquarters, a major tourist attraction and the nation’s first state historic site;

The Karpeles Manuscript Museum, an eccentric surprise situated in an imposing former bank;

the Ritz Theater, where Sinatra played and Lucille Ball got her start in vaudeville;

the Downing Film Center, an independent, locally-owned-and-operated movie theater showing foreign and art films;

the Dutch Reform Church, a magnificent Greek-Revival-style national historic landmark;

Downing Park, designed by the landscape architects who designed New York’s Central Park and named for their mentor, Newburgh’s Andrew Jackson Downing;

Caffe Macchiato, a Zagat-rated restaurant with European charm;

the Wherehouse, offering beers from every single microbrewery in the state, as well as pub-fare lunches and dinners; and

the plethora of first-rate Peruvian, Mexican, Guatemalan, Colombian and Italian restaurants throughout the city (plus one taco cart that was featured on the Food Network).

These are just a few attractions Rivera could have at least mentioned. But most stunning was his silence on the friendliness and kindness of the city’s residents, perhaps developed through our long years of grief, or by having to communicate across cultural and linguistic barriers. Beyond talking to one mother and one former gang member, did he not stop to even ask directions? He talked about our “narrow avenues,” but failed to say that Broadway is the widest main street in America.

By the way, he seemed baffled by Newburgh’s nickname, “The 6^th Borough.” Of course, it was never intended to refer to the city’s size or density, but rather to its ethnic and racial diversity – a fact of which we are proud.

We’re also proud of our excellent schools and thriving arts community. Newburgh Free Academy routinely sends its seniors on to Ivy League colleges and universities. NFA’s physics students win the national solar-car Race Across America just about every year, in a car they designed and built themselves. And our boys’ basketball and boys’ and girls’ track teams are our pride and joy.

The Greater Newburgh Symphony Orchestra produces a full season of concerts in the high school’s auditorium, featuring performers whose “other jobs” are with the New York Philharmonic but who choose to live in the beautiful Hudson Valley.

Has Rivera never heard of Newburgh’s ReadNex Poetry Squad? They perform their socially-conscious form of rap all over the world, and were recently welcomed by cheering youths in South America. Our homegrown band The Morning Of is starting a nationwide tour, and Perfect Thyroid plays to standing-room-only crowds.

Local artists’ paintings, drawings and sculptures are on display at many Newburgh galleries and businesses, as well as at City Hall. Book clubs and poetry and literary societies flourish here, holding regular meetings at the top-notch Newburgh Free Library, which not only serves the city and surrounding areas with its books, e-books, videos, newspapers, magazines and DVDs but also lends laptops to those who have none. The Newburgh Actors Studio puts on experimental plays and classics that the entire community enjoys.

Perhaps most importantly, we have a collection of civic-minded, good-government groups determined to eliminate the city’s raging crime problems. Among them are the Newburgh Lyceum and the newly-formed Mothers and Others and Mothers for Upward Movement.

With our deep-water port on one of the widest stretches of the Hudson River, Newburgh still has the recreational, transportation and scenic chops that inspired Henry Hudson’s first mate in 1609 to write in his journal that this would be “a pleasant place to build a town.”

“Dilapidated?” Sure, but we’re coming back! Newburgh, named an All-American City in the mid-1950s, is like a beautiful woman of whom people say, she has “good bones.” That’s the real story of our city, and future coverage should not ignore it.

(Ms.) Genie Abrams, 32 Bay View Terrace, Newburgh, N.Y.

845-569-2075 (home); 845-764-0635 (cell)

This scares me, but i agree wholeheartedly with Newburgh Mayor Nicky Valentine. He says we should host the trial of accused 9/11 instigator Sheikh Khalid Mohammed, and he’s right. No other city seems to want it, and it poses a unique opportunity for Newburgh.

In today’s Record we have people quoted to the effect that we would be putting the city at risk if the trial were held here.

HUH!? Terrorists are gonna come to the trial?! That’s like saying we should kick out St. Luke’s Hospital, because it attracts sick people.  Or that we should say no if we were offered the Pillsbury Bake-Offs, on the grounds that someone could start an oven fire.

Would we turn down a shot at hosting the Olympics for fear that Tonya Harding might come and kneecap someone? Would we refuse to host an embezzlement trial, thinking that accountants would overrun the city? A divorce trial, because it might attract Larry King? It’s equally crazy to think that terrorists would flock to a trial of a terror suspect.

And if they did, so much the better: We could catch them all in one fell swoop. Meanwhile, here is a chance to show the world that in the U.S., we are governed by the rule of law, and that the wheels of justice may turn slowly, but they are still turning. With the trial complete and this creep Mohammed safely behind bars, Newburgh would be known as the place where he was nailed, in a scrupulously secure and fair trial that we could all be proud of.

By the way: Wouldn’t it be perfect if Mohammed ended up sharing a cell with his teammate, Scott Roeder of Kansas City?

Welcome, Department of Justice!

p.s. If nothing else, a terror trial here would keep our police officers out of the Evidence Room, thus giving us a much better chance of convicting drug dealers.

A quick update on the old cemetery at Newburgh’s Crystal Lake, at the foot of Snake Hill.

Three Hasidim fell on us from the sky during the Jewish month of Elul, just before the High Holy Days, intent on doing a “big mitzvah.” Seems one of them, a youngish fellow named Chuna Jakobits (i know, it looks like an anagram, but that’s how he spells it) had been walking around (that’s his story) and came upon the cemetery … which is pretty much what happened to me, exactly a year ago. Anyway, he got in touch with the Newburgh City Historian, Mary McTamaney, and she got in touch with me, and we were all off to the races. Just before Rosh HaShanah, Temple Beth Jacob’s Cemetery Committee chairman, Ken Packer, and i met at the temple with Chuna and two of his compatriots from Kiryas Joel. His two pals share the last name Weinstock, though they are not related — one is “Abe,” and one is “Rabbi” (don’t ask), and the three of them claimed they wanted to help us put a solid “rock” wall around the cemetery that couldn’t be knocked down by falling trees like the chain-link fence that’s there now, all crumpled and toppled in two or three large places. They would pay for this renovation. We said yes.

Now the differences between the way our congregation works and the way these guys are used to working kicks in. They said, “OK, we’ll pay for it, we have a builder who will do it, when can we get those Jersey walls out of the way so we can get a truck in there and get started?” Apparently, in Kiryas Joel, there’s no Planning Board, no Architectural Review Commission, no Building Department. We said, we have to get a building permit from the City of Newburgh. They said, “OK, get it, and then we’ll start.” We said, “It costs money.” They said, “OK, we’ll pay whatever it costs; if you can get it tomorrow, we’ll get started the day after tomorrow.” i went to the city’s Buildings Department, otherwise known as the Immovable Object, and got the permit, which is 16 pages of PURE crap. Example: You have to specify the type, number, thickness, depth, width and height of all the footings you will use and what material they’ll be made of; then you must draw the wall “to scale” and provide a copy of  the builder’s workers’ compensation insurance and disability insurance policies, naming the City as the “certificate holder.”

i gave our temple president, Rissa Cutler, the 7 pages she’d have to fill out, and faxed to “Abe” the 9 pages his builder would have to fill out. Abe got back to me as soon as the High Holy Days were over, saying his builder had everything filled out and was ready to start. i said i’d need him to give me the 9 pages, so i could put them together with the 7 pages from Rissa and bring the whole shebang to the Building Department. That’s when Abe, otherwise known as the Irresistable Force, said he’d come right over, along with his builders, who turned out to be two Jamaican guys named Clifton and Renford who can’t speak English any better than he can. But the three of them showed up at my house last week. Thank G-d, Tim was there, and he could kind of understand them. They had left out, among other things, the drawings. i told them that, and Abe yanked the pen from my hand and said, “It’s a wall! Here!” And drew a rectangle. Basically, they were saying, “OK, now we’ve done all the paperwork, so we’d like to start building it tomorrow.” Here’s why the hurry: Right now, we’re enjoying a weirdly warm, almost summer-like week. When the temperature drops, they won’t be able to sink footings in the frosty ground and have the concrete set properly, and then winter will come, and then they’ll have to wait til next spring. If they’re still willing to deal with us.

i said i’d have to get the 9 pages back from Rissa, signed by her. They said, “OK, get them tomorrow, and we’ll start the day after tomorrow.” Bottom line: Rissa took the pages to a lawyer to look at before she signed anything, and the lawyer decided he’d need to draw up some additional papers for the builders and/or the Hasidim to sign, and that will take another week.

i took a deep breath and called “Abe” and told him this news, and he told me to call him as soon as “everything is ready.” He sounded a little ticked off.

ABRAMS PREDICTS: Some or all of the following now transpire:

1. The lawyer turns this into a big nightmare with 12 more pages for the Jamaicans to sign, and they and/or the Hasidim get so mad they quit on the whole project, which essentially means that TBJ has screwed up a $25,000 gift (that’s how much the Hasidim have to pay the builder to construct this cinder-block wall — i asked them);

2. The Newburgh Building Department sends us back to re-do the entire building permit application;

3. The Hasidim just start building the wall without permission from the City, figuring they’ll pay any fines as part of the high cost of living (this is my personal favorite, and the one i’m hoping for);

4. The City refuses to move the Jersey walls so no truck can get onto the path to the cemetery anyway; or

5. The City makes us get approval from the Zoning Board, Planning Board and/or Architectural Review Commission and one or all of them puts the kibosh on the whole thing, and/or puts us on their agenda for their meeting of, like, July 24, 2010, at which point the Hasidim give up on the whole project and i go off to a nice rubber-walled room to have my nervous breakdown.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Elul (end-of-August, like) has come around again, and you know what that means: It’s mitzvah-time in Newburgh. Today my husband and his pastor-friends went for a hike at my favorite place — Storm King — and didn’t invite me, so i decided to get back at them: i’d go out and buy bagels, and then not share. (THAT’ll teach them!) Turns out i got two free ones, so i have 14 to bring TO THE OFFICE tonight, so that PEOPLE WHO LIKE ME can eat them.

But i digress.

As i did on my way home from the bagel shop.

NO, i didn’t exactly “digress,” but i got distracted. i was about two blocks from home here in the ‘hood, when what do i see in front of South Junior High School but two guys breaking into a car. They had the requisite coat hanger and long-handled, flat-head screwdriver, and they were trying to, like, “pry down” the driver’s-side window. Now, in any other city, such a scene would accurately be labeled: “Two Guys Breaking Into a Car.” But i had a funny feeling they were just like me: idiots who had merely locked themselves out. i got home, ran inside and put the bagels in the fridge, grabbed my license, house keys, cell phone and Triple-A card, and ran back.

Sure enough, i was right. One call to AAA on my part, and they’d be in. Unfortunately, i don’t speak Spanish “muy bien.” Conjuring my one, high-school course in that language, however, i was able to discern that the shorter fellow either thought i am a prostitute or was named “Jorge,” and that he was the owner of the vehicle; the other had some weird-ass name that i never could understand, and he was the “amigo.” He was trying to “ayudarle,” which means either that he was trying to help, or that they were trying to steal the car. Confident that my instincts were right once again (this would have made at least the third or fourth time in my 60 years), i called Triple-A. Within 15 minutes, a truck from Pat’s Garage arrived. The driver checked my ID and AAA card, took 2.1 seconds to unlock the door, and we were all “finito.”

With muchas gracias from my two new amigos, i strolled home, all pleased with myself. And just think: i never would have done it if it hadn’t been for my husband not taking me on his hiking trip. i guess G-d works in ways misteriosos.

While walking around Newburgh today, the following question occurred to me: When French people use a vulgar expression, do they stop and say, “Pardon my English”?