FILE PHOTO
Jonathan Heins, 13, listens during a Norma Marks Shribman Memorial Town Hall gathering at Temple Emanu-El in Marblehead. He is the grandson of panelist, Michael Harrington.
Two events in the last week in Marblehead prove residents in a small community can act locally to think globally.
The Unitarian Universalist Church brought Syrian refugee Amira Elamri to its Meeting House Speaker series to talk about what lecture sponsors called the “human side of a complex issue.”
Devastated by war since 2011 with residents like Elamri seeking asylum as refugees, Syria is a nightmare that does not seem to end. The tide of humanity destruction in Syria has international ramifications with Europe seeing the biggest refugee tidal wave in 70 years and the Trump administration tightening restrictions on refugees.
Elamri’s audience listened with rapt attention as she described how her family endured violence and dislocation to neighboring Lebanon where they opened a business and, finally, a chance to come to the United States on a visa.
Her message to her Marblehead audience was at once a reminder and a challenge to Americans to help refugees: “We cannot turn our backs because they cannot do it on their own.”
Speakers who gathered three nights later at Temple Emanu-El were treated to a different perspective on foreign affairs when journalists and former elected officials discussed the Trump administration’s worldview.
The Norma Marks Shribman Memorial Town Hall honored a woman who understood the importance of following world events and equating their significance on a local level. Shribman’s children maintain strong local ties and they honor their mother by using a local forum to frame national and international issues.
The Emanu-El event included perspectives on Trump’s presidency from people who served in Congress, including Michael J. Harrington, who went to Washington in 1969 when the nation faced tumult rivaling today’s unrest.
Harrington’s perspective is a rare one at a time when social media shapes and reshapes national debate at lightning speed. He knows that the headlines and and flashpoints dominating the news today are superficial evidence of stronger forces working to alter the country, for good or not, over the decade to come.
Elamri’s story would have been moving if she had only shared the bare facts of her family’s struggle during her talk last Sunday. But her account of huddling in bed with her children and moving from hotel to hotel after vandals destroyed their home is unforgettable.
She simultaneously offered a warning to her audience and a sad reflection on her experience when she said, “I thought that what I had would remain mine forever. But I was wrong.”
Elamri, Harrington and others who shared their stories and perspectives in Marblehead last week offered glimpses into the big world beyond the town’s borders and invited their audiences to be forces for good in reshaping the world.
