[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 124 (Thursday, September 29, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1984]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        CELEBRATING THE LIFE OF 
                           J. GEORGE MITNICK

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. ARTUR DAVIS

                               of alabama

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, September 29, 2005

  Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to offer a tribute to 
Mr. J. George Mitnick.
  Jasper, Alabama was not George Mitnick's first home--he was a 
Connecticut Yankee who migrated south--but Jasper was where George made 
his fortune and found his wife. Jasper is also a city that he shaped 
for over 5 decades: his footprints include the presidency of the local 
Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club; the Mitnick Wilderness Boot 
Camp for troubled teenagers; and of course, his role in founding Top 
Dollar, a retail chain of over 250 stores in 11 states.
  George Mitnick helped make modern Jasper, but what made George 
Mitnick, above all, was the days he spent as an army captain helping to 
liberate Nazis death camps. George was a committed Jew before he 
entered those camps, but the degradation that he saw there alerted him 
to an existential threat to his people, and to the capacity of humans 
to violate each other.
  Those camps never left George Mitnick's soul. They made him a 
vigilant defender of Israel's future and of American politicians who 
understood how essential Israel's future was to any vision of a just 
world. The death camps made him an activist--and I am honored that his 
activism led him to embrace my candidacy against a foe of Israel's 
aspirations. George was honored and humbled that his activism also made 
him AIPAC's ``Man of the Year'' in 2003.
  I think that those awful, wretched camps also made George understand 
his adopted home better. George lived in Alabama during the years when 
the racial cauldron was boiling, and Alabama's ill temper on race was 
one of the aspects of his new state that he most disdained. He was a 
quiet, but real, force for integration in Jasper. George also raised a 
daughter who raised a daughter who married a black man. His grandson-
in-Iaw James, an African American, was one of George's pallbearers, and 
it is a measure of the Jasper that George help make that virtually no 
one stared at James' role. George's friends knew that tolerance was a 
Mitnick family value.
  On August 6, 2005, J. George Mitnick died at the age of 87. I thank 
George for his faith and his life and for the promises he kept. I hope 
that my tenure in Congress will honor the world and the state he wanted 
to build. May the God of Abraham bless George Mitnick and his surviving 
wife Willene.




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