Out & About
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous distributes monthly stipends to more than 1,400 aging men and women who helped rescue Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust.
The feelings in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Tuesday night at the foundation’s gala were powerful, a mix of sorrow and joy, presence and absence.
There were moving words from the foundation’s chairman, Harvey Schulweis; the event’s honorees, the generous and warm Hazel and Marvin Shanken, and from their friend Mayor Giuliani. There were tears as a survivor, Ruth Gruener, and her rescuer, Joanna Zalucka, came to the stage. They were reunited five days before, having last seen each other in December 1944.
But the most important voice of the event was that of a child. Thirteen-year-old Jennifer Gruener presented Ms. Zalucka with a photograph of three generations of the Gruener family. “This is your legacy,” Miss Gruener said.
Someday there will be no more rescuers to support, and the foundation will increase its already strong focus on educating children about the Holocaust.
The final ritual of the evening was for each guest to light a candle and recite the Kaddish.
***
“Everyone feels so good,” the chairwoman of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Joan Weill, said as more than 1,400 guests swirled around her Wednesday night after the opening night performance. The start of the holiday season means busy, busy schedules, but this party at the Sheraton New York was not to be missed.
The highlight of the event, as always, was the arrival of the dancers, glowing and rightly proud. They were the ones who got people moving on the dance floor in ways they never knew they could, with the help of the Starlight Orchestra, which played songs by both Marvin Gaye and the Black Eyed Peas.
While the company is settling into its new home on 55th Street and Ninth Avenue, the rhythms of this gala were established years ago by Ms. Weill, and carried on this year with the event co-chairmen, Katherine Farley and Jerry Speyer, Patricia and Philip Laskawy, and Marion and Lawrence Lenihan. (Mr. Speyer left the party briefly to run over to his property Rockefeller Center, where he helped light the tree; he was back before the waiters put down the Cornish game hen filled with wild rice and mushrooms.)
Guests included the Reverend Jesse Jackson; singer Roberta Flack; actor and dancer Taye Diggs and his wife, Idina Menzel, who are co-stars in “Rent,” and the head of the National Urban League and a former mayor of New Orleans, Marc Morial.
