Libertyville Sunrise Rotary Bulletin January 18, 2023

 

Written by Patrick Hart

 

President Pinsel presided this week, and we opened our meeting with a pledge and a prayer.

 

This week our past district governor Kevin Stevens joined us for breakfast.

 

With so many of our members having apparently made new years resolutions to be more modest this year, we once again had a meeting without brags.

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

At the requests of the residents, we are moving up the time for the bingo games which the club sponsor at Liberty Towers to 6:00 p.m.

 

We received an update on our winter fundraiser this week.  We are still looking for a presenting sponsor; although Jim Curtis is working on having a coalition of Libertyville auto dealers serve as our presenting sponsor, and he is mildly optimistic. We also need more lower level sponsors.

We have sold 80 tickets, but we want to sell 600 more, and with the larger size of our event this year, we could use a lot more silent auction items.  Seven restaurants so far have agreed to reserve spots for attendees of the event, who wish to dine out first.

 

Our club received a Shelter Box Recognition award and a thank you letter from the township food pantry for our contributions to their holiday meals program.

 

This week Rick Mittelman tested our abilities to name state capitals.  Fortunately, I was sitting at the table of Howard Jaffe, who among his many lesser known talents can recite all fifty state capitals in his sleep while standing on his head and probably drinking a glass of water at the same time.  Needless to say our table won.

 

Our speakers this week was Trent Spoolstra, Associate Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League. The Anti-Defamation League, or the ADL, is often thought of as a Jewish Civil Rights Organization, although they are attempting to rebrand themselves as an anti-hate organization.

 

They consider their mission to be to Investigate, to Educate, and to Advocate.   The organization does report hate activity, which they discover, and they have trained tens of thousands of law enforcement officials on how to deal with hate crimes.  They also lobby for anti-hate laws and for mandatory holocaust education.  

 

Mr. Spoolstra feels that this is a crucial time for his organization, because they have just completed a survey on attitudes in America, which they have been conducting periodically since 1964, and the results indicate that antisemitic sentiment has doubled since they took their last survey in 2019.  The survey consists of two categories of statements which they ask respondents to state whether they agree or disagree with.  The first set of questions covers attitudes toward Jews in general and includes such statements as “Jews have too much power in business.” 

 

The second set of statements concern attitudes toward the state of Israel.  The ADL believes that criticism of the government of Israel is legitimate, but they pose propositions that they consider extreme enough that they do indicate a problem such as “Israel can get away with anything, because they control the media.”   

 

This week Tucker Olson won the $21.00 weekly raffle, but Tom Gore failed to pull the ace of spades out of 48 remaining cards to win the $110.00 “big pot.” Perhaps someone next week will be luckier; however the odds of that happening are actually only one in 47.

 

“We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.