A candidate in the May election for the Board of Education in Great Neck is Emil Hakimi, who, in an online chat expressed disrespect for the rule of law.
This makes him unsuitable to be a school trustee. That’s too bad: It rules out a healthy public discourse among candidates.
Most candidates want to join a team of people working on behalf of children, on behalf of all of us. Hakimi seems, by his own description, a person who would do away with what we know as the balanced approach our school trustees bring to their tasks.
He asserts, for example, that the only children he is interested in are his own. He writes: “Do you support mask mandates in our schools? If so, you are attacking my children.”
He also writes: “…we have like 10 people in Great Neck who are loud and obnoxious” who support mask-wearing and “they [are] the ones setting policy.”
His “10” is short-hand for dismissing the rest of us in a community of 40,000. His “loud and obnoxious” at public meetings actually oppose masks. He aims “the ones setting policy” at the school board. New York state sets policy on masking, but he targets the school board anyway.
He joins the newly elected Nassau County executive to “defy NYS.” He adds: “Similar to how Florida defies Biden”… “we are gonna turn Great Neck into our little slice of Florida.” He suggests “disobedience” to the Department of Health of New York State. His disdain for science puts the health of all of us at risk, and not just from COVID-19.
Hakimi threatened the school board that it will “change its tune” when “3,000 to 4,000” voters turn out to vote for him. He is not in the arena of advocacy for education, so he is not speaking about massive support from the parent body of public schoolchildren. He is speaking about votes from religious congregations.
Something has been happening here on our peninsula and on pain of a fervent denunciation no one is supposed to tell: Candidates and their proxies are soliciting votes and absentee ballots in houses of worship.
This ballot gathering is a problem for congregations and clergy: Houses of worship jeopardize their non-profit status by allowing politics to pollute their hallowed halls. The rabbis in my synagogue of old would never have tolerated such a compromise on the sanctity of G-d’s house.
A wall separates church and state, Thomas Jefferson wrote, and this is core to our country. The two realms, spiritual and temporal, are distinct or should be.
Hakimi is not alone in mistaking religion as the servant of politics. Pedram Bral, mayor of the Village of Great Neck, in a videotaped speech at Chabad following the November 2021 election, promised the coming of a political “bloodbath.”
While Bral and Company invariably find comfort in negativity, families in Great Neck recognize that we derive our prosperity from the renown of our enviable institutions, our public schools, our library, our parks, our volunteer fire companies.
The value of our homes, a primary financial investment, resides with these institutions that serve us. Damage our institutions and we damage ourselves.
Bral set the standard with his secret conclaves with developers and his public complaints against practically every institution spending our taxes to maintain what we treasure and want to preserve about living here.
Some residents devalue our community and are intent on setting fire to it. They light a match to burn our institutions and claim it is their freedom to do so. They blame our teachers for revisiting our country’s checkered history on equality. They blame our library for harboring books they can’t wait to burn, books that belong in a society open and welcoming.
Most of all they blame Democrats, who bear witness, who sound the alarm. If they can destroy the Democrats, the fire will rage on. It used to be we could count on Republicans as well to stand for our Constitution, but the Republican Party abandoned its principles.
If they succeed in taking away someone else’s freedom, their freedom will be next, along with mine and yours.
Listen and hear what they say. They swarm around us with endless repetitions of bogus topics: Immigration is a threat, they say (though we are a nation of nothing but immigrants); Heed what is coming, they say, murders on our doorsteps (as though we live on a street in the Ukraine). Each fiction appeals to fear and prejudice. The general public knows nothing about bail, so they weaponize bail and call for its “reform.” It’s all a distraction. Their true goal is to have you vote for them, so they have the power to contaminate and degrade the definition of justice.
Spreading lies and making fights is a way of life for those who have no interest in American democracy. They represent only destruction. It is up to us to stand in their way.
Going forward through 2022, watch out for people who want to topple rather than support.
The school vote is in May, the library in October, the midterm statewide election in November, and the park district in December. Add your vote to mine.
Rebecca Rosenblatt Gilliar
Great Neck