[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 51 (Thursday, March 26, 2015)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E430-E431]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  REMEMBERING ANDREW J. PARISE, MAYOR OF THE VILLAGE OF CEDARHURST, NY

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. KATHLEEN M. RICE

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, March 26, 2015

  Miss RICE of New York. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in honor of Mr. 
Andrew Parise, the longtime mayor of the Village of Cedarhurst who 
passed away last month at the age of 90. A decorated veteran of World 
War II, Mayor Parise fought in the Battle of the Bulge and personally 
bore witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust when his division 
liberated the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. After the war, Mayor 
Parise returned home and spent 60 years as a decorated public servant, 
fully devoted to his neighbors and his community.
  I wish to share the following essay by Rabbi Mordechai Kamenetzky, 
remembering Mayor Parise as a man who led by example, who welcomed 
human beings of all religions, races and ethnicities and created a 
spirit of equality and inclusiveness in the Cedarhurst community that 
will live on long after his passing.

                   [From AMI Magazine, Feb. 18, 2015]

                          A Mayor To Remember

                    (By Rabbi Mordechai Kamenetzky)

       I went back to the shtetl last week. You know, like the 
     fellows who go back to Hungary or Poland 50 years after the 
     war, the ones who left when they were little kids. When they 
     get there, though, it's a different shtetl.
       Of course, some of their old neighbors are still there. You 
     know, the Januariuszes and the Stanislaws in Poland and the 
     Andrashes and Ferkos in Hungary. There they are milling 
     around, looking at you with a mixture of disdain and 
     curiosity, and you're not exactly sure what you're doing 
     there either.
       Still, there's something that always draws a person back to 
     his beginnings. What is it? Maybe it's a longing for ``your 
     land, your birthplace and the house of your father'' that 
     even pogroms, concentration camps and ruthless natives can't 
     repress.
       You are wondering, I am sure, where I went. No, it was not 
     the little village of Tzitivyan in Lithuania, nor was it 
     Dolhinov, Minsk or even Ostrov.
       I went back to the world in which I was born and raised, 
     before it was transformed into a vastly different universe. A 
     remnant of that world was compressed and transplanted into a 
     funeral home in Lynbrook, Long Island, where my father and I 
     went to pay our respects to the old neighborhood and its 
     colorful characters.
       Andrew Parise, our backyard neighbor for 58 years, and the 
     mayor of the Village of Cedarhurst since 1995, passed away 
     last week. At a time when Jews were a minority in Woodmere 
     and Cedarhurst--and Orthodox Jews almost nonexistent--Mayor 
     Parise opened his arms and embraced us warmly.
       Mr. Parise was loved and revered by everyone. Possibly the 
     oldest active mayor in the United States, he commanded 
     respect; indeed, no one ever referred to him as anything 
     other than ``the mayor,'' It was, lehavdil, almost like ``the 
     rosh yeshivah.''
       It's hard for city folks to relate to a mayor who rode 
     around in an older Lincoln Town Car with a license plate 
     reading ``CEDMAYOR,'' stopping to kibbitz with the locals, 
     and offering rides to people when it rained. He implored my 
     father and me to cut through his backyard to shorten our 
     Shabbos walk to shul, and worked diligently on solving zoning 
     problems for the myriad shtiebelach popping up on village 
     street corners.
       It was gentiles like Andy Parise who facilitated the 
     harmonious transformation of Cedarhurst, a very secular town 
     that, along with four other similar villages, burgeoned into 
     the Orthodox community known as the Five Towns.
       My trip to the funeral home in Lynbrook was a trip back in 
     time, as I met so many players of the original five shtetlach 
     there, people whose influence and presence were so prominent 
     when I was a kid.
       Of course, joining me in the room was my father and an Avi, 
     an Asher and an Ari, much younger than I and strangers to the 
     past to which I'd come to pay my respects. Still, for the 
     most part it was the universe of the pre-frum Five Towns, 
     when the Nickys, Jimmys, Tonys, Joeys and Jesses dominated. 
     If I closed my eyes I could almost hear my father pleading 
     and cajoling to get the garbage picked up, the zoning 
     approved or the unions to back off.
       In those days, the Italians ran the town. Orthodox Jews 
     were an anomaly; a yarmulke was such a strange sight on 
     Central Avenue that I remember distinctly tugging on my 
     mother's sleeve whenever I saw another one and shouting, 
     ``Look, Ma! He's wearing a yarmulke!''
       As I made my way up to the front of the room in search of 
     the Parise children I was stopped by Nick Fabrizio. When I 
     was a kid he was a bus driver; now he owns the bus company. 
     It was one of the largest independent bus companies in our 
     area. While he still comes into the business every day he has 
     passed most of the reins--or the wheels--over to his son 
     Michael. ``Hey! Rabbi!'' he called out. ``How's your pop? I 
     remember how he used to call me at five o'clock in the 
     morning on snow days, pleading with me to pick up the kids 
     even though the public schools were closed!'' He was 
     interrupted by Nicky DeSibio, whose father, affectionately 
     known as Uncle Pete, used to be a big Republican politician.
       ``What a loss,'' he said, shaking his head. ``Were you 
     aware that I did all the zoning work for you guys when your 
     father had all these problems with the yeshivah back in the 
     day?'' Then he spotted my elderly father and hugged him. 
     ``Rabbi! I was just telling your son . . .''
       He was relating some of his ``war stories'' when a voice 
     rang out as if we were standing at a wedding. ``Hey! It's 
     Mutty!'' Yes, that was my sobriquet well before my hair 
     turned gray. ``I've never forgotten you! How's your dad? 
     How's Tzqueaky?'' pronouncing my brother Zvi's name the exact 
     same way all the kids, as well as Mr. Shave, our Irish 
     tenant, used to. It was David Parise, the youngest of Andy's 
     three kids, as enthusiastic and warm as always.
       I could remember myself as a seven-year-old kid with a 
     large yarmulke, watching the older fellows, Parise, Ferguson, 
     Collins and Newman, playing stickball. They always let me 
     play with them and never made fun of my head covering or my 
     religion. And I can't remember a negative remark against 
     Leroy Collins, the first and only black kid in the 
     neighborhood. I even joined them on some of their mischievous 
     adventures at the Cedarhurst railroad station, which by 
     today's standards are rather innocuous, but I would still 
     rather not mention.
       David was peppering me with questions and I was asking him 
     if he knew whatever happened to the rest of the gang. All of 
     a sudden my mind was in a 50-year-old place, filled with 
     Farinas, Lanzilottas and DiLorenzos. As the names came 
     swirling back at me I wondered: Why hadn't I experienced all 
     the anti-Semitism I'd heard so much about?
       Then my eyes glanced at the mayor, lying in repose in a 
     half-opened coffin, next to the myriad medals he'd received 
     fighting the Nazis and liberating Buchenwald, including a 
     Purple Heart. I thought about the tone he'd set for his 
     family and for all of his friends.
       When asked, he was proud to talk about his experiences. 
     ``When we got to Buchenwald, there were no live people left; 
     maybe a few. Mostly there were large pits filled with 
     skeletons. General Eisenhower wanted us to go into the 
     concentration camps so we could be witnesses to Hitler's 
     atrocities.''
       I thought of the early years, when he'd embraced my 
     father's presence and vision for the town. I thought of all 
     the times my father went to him to take care of a 
     ``problem.''

[[Page E431]]

       I also remembered hearing stories from other rabbis, some 
     of whom arrived years later. Rabbi Aryeh Ginzberg once 
     related how the mayor had refused to let him sit on a folding 
     chair in his office, insisting on schlepping in a big 
     comfortable leather one for him. ``My rabbi doesn't sit on a 
     folding chair if I can do anything about it,'' he said.
       The Mayor would always visit our sukkah, and I heard that 
     after my parents started going away for Yom Tov he continued 
     the tradition by visiting the sukkah of Rabbi Zalman Wolowik, 
     the local Chabad shaliach. When Rabbi and Rebbetzin Wolowik 
     were sitting shivah for their son, Levi Yitzchak, the mayor 
     visited every day.
       Somehow, he always managed to figure out a way to make 
     things work, whether it was a shul having a problem with 
     zoning laws or trying to get additional parking spaces. His 
     favorite motto was something like the Gemara's ``koach 
     d'heteira adif'': ``Some people in authority express power by 
     saying no. I express it by saying yes.''
       As I looked at the medals I thought of what it must have 
     been like for an Italian kid fighting the Nazis and 
     liberating the Jews.
       I also reflected on how the towns and the landscape have 
     changed. Orthodox Jews are now on the board of local 
     villages; the deputy (and soon to be) mayor of Cedarhurst is 
     a trustee of the Young Israel of Woodmere. Torah-observant 
     citizens make up the majority of the school board.
       I glanced at the coffin and the medals, and the Purple 
     Heart. Being among all the people who had treated my father 
     and our family with such warmth and accommodation, I thought, 
     ``I may have gone back to the shtetl of my youth, but I was 
     not with the Lithuanian, Polish or Hungarian collaborators.'' 
     I was in the presence of the soldiers, and their children who 
     are fighting the Nazis until this very day.

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