Mayors stand with Israel

Mayors stand with Israel

Teaneck’s Michael Pagan and Livingston’s Shawn Klein talk about their trip

ON THE COVER: Teaneck’s Mayor Michael Pagan wrote out a prayer for his family and all of Teaneck, and put it in a crack in the tunnel behind the Kotel in Jerusalem. (Michael Pagan)
ON THE COVER: Teaneck’s Mayor Michael Pagan wrote out a prayer for his family and all of Teaneck, and put it in a crack in the tunnel behind the Kotel in Jerusalem. (Michael Pagan)

Our world right now is filled with far more smoke than light, more rage than reason, more hatred than clarity.

As has been well if grimly documented, antisemitism is coming back, from both the right and the left; the war again Hamas in Gaza that Israel has waged in response to the barbarities of October 7 has provided cover for that ancient hatred.

Because the struggle often happens on the local level, it’s often fallen to mayors to fight back.

In June, the Combat Antisemitism Movement sent 13 mayors from six states to Israel to see the country for themselves. That group — some Jewish, some not, some who had been to Israel before, some who had not — included two local mayors, Teaneck’s Michael Pagan, and Shawn Klein of Livingston. (Mr. Klein, who is on Livingston’s town council, has been mayor and will be again, given the town’s governance, which rotates that office among council members. Teaneck’s mayor must be on the town council and then voted into office by that body.)

Last week, Mr. Pagan reacted to a viciously worded threat and then a rally against Jews in Teaneck by releasing a letter in which he acknowledged the protesters’ rights to free speech and to protest, went on to describe some of what he’d seen in Israel, and ended by saying, “As the Mayor of this town, I stand for the truth and with those who fight for it. Which is why I stand with Israel.”

Council Member Shawn Klein of Livingston, left, and Mayor Michael Pagan of Teaneck went to Israel together.

Michael Pagan, 47, has lived in Teaneck since he was 10 and graduated from the township’s public school system. He’s Puerto Rican, a member of a huge, lovingly connected clan — “my mother is the youngest of nine, and my father is the oldest of eight” — and he lives with his parents, Silvia and Edwin, who have been married for more than 50 years, he reported proudly, and his 9-year-old son, Malikai.

His trip to Israel was his first, and “it was one of the most valuable learning lessons of my life,” Mr. Pagan said. “The Combat Antisemitism Movement reached out to me and said, ‘We see what is happening in Teaneck. We know that protests are coming to your town, targeting your synagogues and your Jewish residents, and that it threatened your son’s life.”

Mr. Pagan explained that “they took a picture of Kai and set it on fire. I called the police and the FBI, we have a court date, and we will see how this will turn out.”

He learned firsthand how challenging it can be to fly to Israel. The questions that airline screeners ask travelers to filter out the Jews with strong connection to the community — questions like ‘Where do you go to shul?’ — leave people like Mr. Pagan with more to prove. “The interrogation at El Al was intense,” he said. “A young lady started questioning me. ‘Are you Jewish?’ ‘No, I’m Catholic.’ ‘Why are you going to Israel?’ ‘I have always wanted to go to Israel. I have lots of friends who are Israeli. And this is a work trip.’ ‘Do you know anyone in Israel?’ ‘Just friends who have property there, but they live in Israel.’”

At one point, Mr. Pagan said, his first questioner left and was replaced by a second one, and then by a supervisor. “I started to worry that I’d miss my flight,” he said. “But then they finally said okay.” He made it.

The group of American mayors stands outside City Hall in Jerusalem.

“I heard from other people on the trip. They were interrogated too.”

Everyone made it onto the plane; CAM organizers met them when they arrived in Israel.

Once the program began, “I learned a lot, and I cried a lot,” Mr. Pagan said.

“Meeting the families of the hostages, meeting the families of those who were killed, meeting the survivors of the attacks, hearing their stories…” he said. “And they took us to Be’eri, where we saw the bullet holes in the walls where the grenades went off, where people were tortured, killed, burned alive in their safe rooms.

“They showed us a lot of footage, audio and video. We heard a young nurse plead for her life before the terrorists shot her point blank. We met with military and intelligence personnel. Going to Yad Vashem, seeing the exhibitions, particularly the ones about the children — you think about your own family, your own child, and you can’t help but cry.

“It is heartbreaking. It is an emotional rollercoaster.”

Mayor Pagan stands with Gilad Korngold, father of hostage Tal Shoham, both figuratively and literally.

Mr. Pagan was struck by what he heard “at almost every meeting. Israelis told us, ‘Don’t worry about us. Israel will survive. Israel will be okay. But you should be careful about what is happening in America, because this is a war against Western civilization.”

That brings him back to the issue of anti-Israel protests in Teaneck. Although many local people join in those protests, the organization and the bulk of the protestors come from elsewhere. Many people assume that this is based at least in part on Teaneck’s large, engaged Jewish community, and on how easy it is to get to the town from the web of interstates close to it.

“A lot of the protesters are being paid and bused into our community to target and harass,” Mr. Pagan said. The question of who is paying them “is still being investigated, but although a handful of the protesters are from Teaneck, most are not.” He talked about the anonymous Instagram post containing “an emergency call for f***ing action” to “rally against the sheer audacity of this genocidal war crime happening right in our backyards.” (The word we’ve rendered as f***ing was spelled out; the war crime, according to the post, was “the Zionists of Teaneck continue to sell stolen Palestinian land right in our backyards!”)

It is of course not clear where the funding for any particular march or rally comes from, but it seems that at least some of it is coming from outside the country.

“When we were in Israel, we met with a lot of military officials and intelligence officials, and they showed us evidence that a lot of the talking points are coming from Iran and Qatar,” Mr. Pagan said.

Dr. Klein is in Hostage Square with Tel Aviv’s Mayor Rob Huldai.

He also talked about hope. “We took a lot of hope in what we heard in Israel, and they took a lot of hope in what they heard from us,” he said. “We were in a number of panels, and we kept saying, ‘You are not alone. You have allies. You have us. You have me.’

“‘We will always stand with the people of Israel, and with the Jewish residents of Teaneck, against hate. So please don’t think you’re alone.’

“‘October 7 showed us who your real friends are,” he continued. “You had some allies who have gone silent. I know what it’s like to be abandoned by friends and allies. I will never do that to you. I will always stand with you.’”

So how do you defuse the tension? “It is a challenge that we have to work on every day,” Mr. Pagan said. “There are a lot of good people in Teaneck, who are trying to bring the community together, but there are others who are trying to keep it divided, maybe for political gain, maybe just because of the hatred in their hearts. We are having more community events to bring us together, but you do see that certain folks aren’t coming.

“At our Fourth of July parade and celebration in Votee Park, we had Muslims, Jews, Christians, Asians, Latinos, African Americans, all together, all having a good time. I caught a couple of people looking at each other, and I know what they were thinking. I could see what they were thinking.

Dr. Klein is in Hostage Square with the actor Lior Ashkenazi.

“They were thinking, wow, this is what it used to be like, and this is what we need to bring it back to.

“We’re working hard on that, on bringing it back, through constant communication, more community events. But there are still some folks, unfortunately, who are refusing to talk to each other. And, you know, you can disagree with each other, but you still have to talk to each other if you’re genuine and sincere about learning how to bring Teaneck together again.” But, Mr. Pagan concluded, “Teaneck is going to get through this, and we’re going to get through this as a community. We can do everything together as a community. It might take a while, and we’re gonna have some bumps and bruises along the way, but Teaneck will come through this. I believe that, and so do a lot of other people. We will come through this.”

Livingston did not have confrontations as serious as Teaneck’s, Dr. Klein said — he’s an ophthalmologist as well as a town council member — but “because Mikie Sherrill’s office is in Livingston, at first we were the focus of pretty large demonstrations, but they seem to have petered out.” (Ms. Sherrill, a Democrat, represents New Jersey’s 11th District in Congress and is a supporter of Israel’s military goals while backing a ceasefire and more humanitarian aid for Gaza.)

Dr. Klein’s trip to Israel with CAM was his third, and his first since October 7. “I was thrilled to go on it,” he said. “The itinerary was remarkable.”

About half of the group was Jewish, he said. “I read about Israel every day. I think about Israel every day. There were some other people on the trip who did not have that much information about Israel, who were not well read in the basics of Israeli politics and geography.

“It was a good mix. It would be very easy to just take a bunch of Jewish mayors, or mayors from Jewish towns, and then you’d have everyone agreeing with each other, at least within a certain spectrum. But some of the mayors on the trip were almost outside the spectrum — listening, trying to get their arms around the situation. It was helpful to learn their perspective.”

Mayor Pagan is at the Nova memorial with festival survivor Natalie Sanandaji. Bring them home now, he said.

The trip also was worthwhile from his point of view as an elected municipal official, Dr. Klein added. The program was “split between seeing the aftereffects of October 7 and the psychology of what is going on now and meeting a lot of mayors. We went to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and Ofakim and Modi’in, and we met the mayors and local government leaders. We talked about how they were running their cities; we talked about innovations and the mechanics of running a city.

“We also met with a lot of entrepreneurs. Everybody understands that Israel is the startup nation. I didn’t understand that there actually is an organization called Startup Nation that acts as a hub for the country. All the companies are spokes around it, so if you come to Israel and say, ‘Listen, this is the field that I’m interested in, and I have an idea, and I want to work with people in Israel,’ they’d be like, ‘Okay, here are the four companies that you want to talk to.’ And they help set it up for you.

“Or you might have an idea for a product that you want to make in Israel. They can help you find the financing. And they make handshakes.

“It is fascinating.”

Like Mr. Pagan, Dr. Klein was struck by the gratitude with which they were met. “My overriding impression was how grateful people were to have American leaders come over in a time of war,” he said. “We stayed for seven full days; we spent real time there.

As this post shows, the group called End Jew Hatred recently named Mr. Pagan as its hero of the week.

“I kept hearing, over and over, that people were happy to feel our support, because Israel has felt so isolated.”

The group went to a rally for the hostage families in Hostage Square in Tel Aviv. It was huge, and Dr. Klein was struck both by the numbers of people and the feelings of connection. “I know Israeli families in Livingston who have relatives at the rallies,” he said.

“It was a special moment in my life, that I will never forget,” he said. “We were able to show American love and American support for Israel. We could show that we want to be there, and that we care about the hostages. It was heartfelt and emotional.”

Like Mr. Pagan, and “from three different people in three entirely different contexts, people said to me, ‘You don’t have to worry about Israel. We will be here.’

“As an American Jew, I feel like this situation is existential for Israel, but what I heard from Israelis is, ‘Don’t worry about us. Support us, but don’t worry about us.’ And if they felt comforted by us being there, I felt comforted by them too.”

Dr. Klein is with Mayor Yitzhak Danino of Ofakim, who had to decide whether to evacuate the city after October 7. He didn’t, was criticized, and then handily won re-election.

Dr. Klein met with the deputy mayor of Tel Aviv. “Construction there is crazy,” Dr. Klein said. “There are 30 skyscrapers going up. There is just so much construction. So I said to the deputy mayor, ‘This is wonderful to see, but the first thing I think about is Hezbollah and 150,000 rockets.’” (That’s the number of rockets the Lebanon-based terrorist group is believed to have.)

“I said, ‘Aren’t you worried that these building will be targets?’ And he said, ‘What are we going to do? Not build? Every Tel Aviv citizen has an app that gives you an emergency warning and a place to go underground. The estimate is that it would take the Israeli army four days to control Lebanon. So for four days everyone will go underground — they can run upstairs if they have to — and in four days we’ll come up and see what’s left.’

“That shows you the toughness of Israelis.”

Like Mr. Pagan, Dr. Klein was shaken by what he saw in Kibbutz Be’eri. He also was impressed and interested by what he saw at Alma — according to its website, it’s a “nonprofit and an independent research and education center” that focuses on Israel’s security challenges.

“It’s focused on the northern border, constantly checking, piecing together what’s going on,” he said. “It’s independent of what the official sources are saying,” and to him it also was representative of the brains and sophistication at work in Israel.

“I left feeling buoyed by the fact that Israelis are not worried about being in existential trouble,” he concluded. “I heard that often enough that I am not worried about Israel not being there.”

Mayor Pagan puts his arm around fellow Mayor Rob Huldai of Tel Aviv.

Similarly, he was encouraged by the other mayors. “I was grateful to meet such great people, who are such strong Jewish allies,” he said. “They’re strong to the point where it almost surprises you to see people who care so much about Jewish people. What wonderful allies they are! And how lucky we are to have such allies.”

The CEOs of both the local Jewish federations — the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, which includes Teaneck, and the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest, Livingston’s home — were grateful to the two mayors.

In response to Mr. Pagan’s strong defense of Israel at the rally last week, Jason Shames, who leads the North Jersey federation, posted Mr. Pagan’s strongly worded letter about it, along with a note. “His leadership and commitment to standing against antisemitism reassures us that together, we can foster a community grounded in respect, humanity, and peace,” Mr. Shames wrote.

“Thank you, Mayor Pagan, for being a steadfast ally and advocate for justice.”

Dov Ben-Shimon, MetroWest’s CEO, wrote in an email: “It’s critical to go there yourself, meet with the people who were affected by October 7th, hold hands with the families of those killed or wounded or kidnapped. It is a heavy, awful, but necessary burden, and comes with a responsibility to learn and to come home and share that knowledge.

“I’m deeply grateful for all those who are able to go to Israel at this time, who give their time and resources to experience the pain and hope that so many in Israel — and our Jewish community here — are experiencing, the collective sense of trauma, and the knowledge to confront it.”

read more:
comments