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August 22, 2003/Av 24 5763, Vol. 55, No. 52
Agencies learn from Northeast blackout
RACHEL POMERANCE
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - It was Thursday afternoon, three days before 1,800 Jewish kids were to arrive for the final week of the JCC Maccabi games, and 40 delegation leaders were ironing out the logistics at a New Jersey hotel.
That's when the lights and the air conditioning went dead, and the room quickly became hot and sticky.
But the organizers kept planning, hardly skipping a beat.
"I gotta tell you," said Lenny Silberman, North American continental director of the JCC Maccabi Games, "doing this for the games for 20 years and working with those com-munities, the potential for a big balagan" - brouhaha - "was definitely there."
Thanks to the organizers' calm, the blackout didn't create even "an ounce" of anxiety - and all the athletes, hosted by local families, arrived in time for the Aug. 17 opening cere-monies at the Jewish Community Center on the Palisades.
A mix of determination and calm was found in Jewish communities across the Northeast that were im-pacted Aug. 14 by the massive blackout, the largest in the nation's history.
Jewish communities also mirrored the mood of the population at large, which was relieved to learn that the outage was the result of a system overload, not ter-rorism.
Yet the incident highlighted Jewish organizations' lack of preparedness for an emergency situation.
David Gad-Harf, executive director of Detroit's Jewish Community Council, called the power failure a "wake-up call not only for the Jewish community, but for America as a whole."
Without an "old-fashioned" non-electric phone on hand, "We realized that we were really not prepared for a crisis of this kind," Gad-Harf said.
Hannah Rosenthal, exe-cutive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella organization for local federation community-relations councils, agreed.
"We learned how completely dependent on electricity we are," she said, noting that even the organization's national contingency plan is dispatched through com-puters.
A new backup system has been in the works, Rosenthal said, explaining that a computer motherboard located in the Midwest could release information remotely.
But even that wouldn't have helped last week, as parts of the Midwest went as black as Manhattan.
As a result, every Jewish agency had to fend for itself in the blackout - without the national mobilizations or alerts that are customary in emergencies.
There was "not the time or the communications capacity to mobilize," said John Ruskay, executive vice president and CEO of the UJA-Federation of New York.
"Every agency with whom I've spoken was better prepared and had a better system in place than we did on Sept. 11, and yet there are times when you still need to call audibles," he said, using a term for football plays that are improvised in response to unexpected circumstances.
Despite the enormity of the power failure, Jewish communities across the country took it in stride and were only minimally hindered.
The Jewish contingent of an interfaith mission from Akron, Ohio, to Washington was about to fly home when they heard about the blackout.
"I checked the Internet from my cell phone, and as soon as I found out what the situation was, I just knew that we were not going to be able to fly into Cleveland," said Michael Wise, chief executive officer of the Jewish Community Board of Akron, which sponsored the trip.
Using two cell phones, by 7 p.m. Wise had managed to book the group a flight to Pittsburgh and arrange for a bus from Akron's Shaw Jewish Community Center to pick up the tired travelers at the Pittsburgh airport.
In Detroit, volunteers climbed stairs to deliver water to residents of senior citizen apartments main-tained by the community and a local kosher food bank donated food.
Material for this story came from the Akron Jewish News and the Detroit Jewish News.
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