August 1st, 2005
A Group As Diverse As The Borough Itself
By JOSEPH BERGER
With its vast ethnic palette, Queens is often described as a United Nations of a borough. So it is fitting that it should have its own General Assembly made up of people representing two dozen nationalities and a fair assortment of religions and races that meets once a month to discuss the state of the world as it has collected in a single corner of the globe.
At July's meeting at Borough Hall, the topic was hate, and Helen M. Marshall, the borough president, gave the delegates an insider's perspective on how officials handled the racially tinged violence on June 29 in Howard Beach, in which three white men who said they were afraid of being robbed chased three black men, one of whom was viciously beaten with a bat. The discussion that followed included comments from people who had the experience of bigotry coiled into their ethnic DNA.
"What were six young men doing there at 3 o'clock in the morning?" was the question from Sirpuhi Mark, president of the Armenian Cultural Center of Forest Hills, who immigrated in 1971 from Istanbul.
Tracey Bowes, an immigrant of Caribbean descent from Manchester, England, said that even if the three young black men were in the largely white neighborhood at an odd hour, questioning their right to be there tells someone like her 16-year-old son, Kyle, that "he cannot go to every part of this city because of his skin."
Richard Khuzami, a son of Lebanese immigrants, pointed out that prejudice was "carried from generation to generation."
"The reality is that if you grow up in that kind of household, you're going to have those prejudices," he said, then moved the discussion toward remedies.
Egyptian, Korean, Trinidadian, Italian, Chinese and Indian participants offered suggestions about ways to diminish bigotry by changing the outlooks of young people, for example, through programs in schools and colleges that expose them to other cultures. There could have been suggestions from other delegates - Ecuadorean, Uzbek, Greek, Dominican, Bangladeshi, Sikh, Mexican, Peruvian and Malaysian - but time ran out.
The 28 members of the Queens General Assembly are volunteers picked for their work on community boards and ethnic organizations, and the topics they chew over include education, housing and hate crimes.
The assembly's coordinator, Susie Tanenbaum, said no other borough had anything to match it, which seems fitting, since Queens is by some measures unmatched in its diversity: 46.1 percent of the borough's residents were born abroad. Certainly there are not too many borough halls where the pastries served at meetings include Filipino chiffon cake, Korean sweet purple bean curd and Greek baklava.
The assembly has no legal powers, so its achievements since it was started in February 2003 are somewhat intangible. But most crucial, many delegates and former delegates say, is how the meetings have deepened their understanding of unfamiliar cultures.
"This helps all of us understand that even if we're different and speak different languages, at the end of the day we're all human and have the same concerns for our families," said Manizha Naderi, director of Women for Afghan Women, a human rights group.
Jagir Singh Bains, a 74-year-old turban-wearing Sikh who grew up in the Indian state of Punjab, has gotten to know his assembly colleague Boomie Pinter, a 46-year-old yarmulke-wearing Jew from Far Rockaway. In an interview, Mr. Bains told
The New York Times
Adjora Gzifa, top, Alef Mohamed, center, and Harbachan Singh are among the members of the Queens General Assembly.
how he had learned more about customs of his Jewish neighbors, like how they put up huts on balconies or in backyards for the holiday of Sukkot.
"When I see them eat outside their house in a small shelter, that's because in the old times they didn't have a shelter," is how Mr. Bains, a postal supervisor in Jamaica, explained the practice.
Mr. Pinter, who had scarcely met any Sikhs before, said he has learned that their religion, which is influenced by both Hinduism and Islam, is "fairly moderate" and "not at all like the Jihadists." Indeed, Mr. Bains, he said, is not very different from his own father, an immigrant who escaped from Nazi Germany in 1939 and became a civil engineer.
"He's someone who comes here, works hard and sees his children go onto a higher level," Mr. Pinter, a medical device salesman, said of Mr. Bains.
The assembly meetings have also taught the delegates, many of whom are still striving newcomers, much about how the city works. Ms. Naderi said she had never known the city had a Commission on Human Rights that investigates complaints of discrimination, nor that the Police Department had a community relations department.
"Just yesterday, an Afghan woman called me to say she's being exploited by her employer at a supermarket," she said, saying that the woman was getting paid less than the market's Korean workers. "Now I know about the human rights commission, we're going to call it and see if we can do anything for her."
In an interview, Ms. Marshall said her idea for the assembly very much had the United Nations in mind, particularly because the world body held its first meetings in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in 1946. Another inspiration was her own cosmopolitan life, including her Guyanese heritage, her attendance at a camp run by a largely Jewish settlement house in the Bronx and participation in battles in northern Queens for school integration.
In recent years, the borough's increasingly polyglot character persuaded her that a way was needed to introduce people of various ethnicities to one another, she said.
She made sure that the assembly also represented all of its neighborhoods, so there are two members from each of Queens' 14 community districts. The mix is spiced with 22 alumni from the assembly's first term, like Ms. Bowes and Mr. Khuzami, and an advisory committee of 14 professionals in communal relations.
One of them, Madhulika S. Khandelwal, an Indian immigrant who directs the Asian/American Center at Queens College, asked the delegates to describe their insights into other groups. Bess DeBethama, a black delegate from Cambria Heights, told of how simply talking to each other eased tensions between the black residents of Cambria Heights and the Hasidim visiting the grave of the Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
At the time of his funeral at Montefiore Cemetery in 1994, she said, black residents could not appreciate why tens of thousands of Hasidim were converging on their neighborhood, and why they were being asked to show ID's to enter their own streets.
This year on July 10, the anniversary in the Jewish calendar of the grand rebbe's death, thousands of people visited the grave without serious tensions, she said, because any complaints were cleared up by "my good friend," Rabbi Abba Refson, who was sitting across the table.