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Vol. 89 No. 11
MARCH 7 - 13, 2024
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Two groups honored at Black History Month event By MoHAMMAD RAFIQ mrafiq@liherald.com
Courtesy Randy Milteer
The NAACP Youth Council and the Black Educators Committee were honored for their commitment to community service at the Freeport Recreation Center as part of the village’s annual Black History Month Celebration.
The village of Freeport honored the Freeport-Roosevelt NAACP Youth Council and the Black Educators Committee for their outstanding contributions as part of its Black History Month Celebration Feb. 28 at the recreation center. Led by Allois Douse, the youth council adviser and a psychiatric rehabilitation therapist, and Claretha Richardson, the committee president and a Spanish instructor at Freeport High School, the groups have been involved in a variety of community initiatives for years. With over 50 members, the youth council has been addressing pressing issues facing the FreeCoNTiNuEd oN PAgE 3
Learning about escaping Holocaust from a survivor By JoRDAN VAlloNE jvallone@liherald.com
Mireille Taub, a Holocaust survivor and a Freeport resident since 1968, and Bernie Furshpan, a second-generation survivor, gave a presentation to students at Merrick’s Sanford H. Calhoun High School on Feb 27. The students’ reactions made it clear why stories like hers still hold so much significance today. Christina Cone, the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District’s social studies chair, introduced Taub to the students. Taub, who was born in Paris to Polish-Jewish parents, has called her story “the
last train out of Paris.” Her family escaped from France before the country fell to Nazi Germany during World War II. They ended up in New York, arriving at Ellis Island. Taub grew up in Brooklyn, and later became an educator, teaching in Freeport for 34 years and raising a family there. Now she is a volunteer at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County, in Glen Cove. In the late 1930s, Taub was a child when tensions began rising in France, as Adolf Hitler rose to power with his Nazi regime in Germany. Paris — and the nor ther n half of
France — eventually fell to the Nazis, while the southern half remained free. Jews who lived in Paris were subject to harsh rules and re gulations, and forced to wear a Star of David, she said. Taub, who was too young to remember many of the details of her family’s escape, and learned most of the story from her parents, had relatives living in the United States. Her father arranged for them to get to America — but finding a way out of France, in a time of high political tension, was difficult. At the time, the United States created quotas for immigrants, but as French residents,
Taub’s family found it relatively easy to enter the country. “The French quota was n eve r f i l l e d , ” Ta u b s a i d , “because no one wanted to leave France.” In the spring of 1940, she and her family took what her father called “the last train out of Paris,” as France was preparing to surrender to Germany. They
trekked toward Bordeaux, a city on the Atlantic, and from there crossed the Pyrenees mountains, which separate France from Spain, in a truck driven by an American consulate employee who, ironically, had issued Taub’s father his papers to leave France. From Spain they traveled to CoNTiNuEd oN PAgE 4