Allegra Benveniste Honigman, Community Gardener
- Subject: [cg] Allegra Benveniste Honigman, Community Gardener
- From: A*@aol.com
- Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2004 10:03:27 EST
| Thanks Jim, As Jews, our responsibility is to take the world that God has given us and to preserve it and make it better - our word for it is "Tikkun." The other part of our tradition is that we are to strive to have a "good name." As the Union Prayerbook - the Reform Judiasm text that Congregation Emanu-el uses in its daily worship says, in its English translation from the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourners, that the dead, "still live on earth in the acts of goodness they performed and in the hears of those who cherish their memory." Among the many acts of grace and love (for those who experienced Allegra personally, let me add the word "tough" to love. for the occasions that we all experienced her lovingly direct expressions of disapproval) of this woman's all too short life, was her membership in the Clinton Community Garden as both a volunteer and a multi - term member of its Steering Committee. Allegra had an extraordinary eye for color, balance and display in our volunteer beds. Allegra's idea was, " there are alot of people in this neighborhood who will never get to the Botanical Gardens, or can't afford the car fare. In our front bed next to the magnolia tree, we want a three season explosion of color, so those nursing mothers, seniors, or people re-creating from what life gives them can rest and see something nice." Please go to the Clinton Community Garden website and click on "Become a Volunteer" to see what Allegra's keen eye and my back assembled from God's gift of flowers. Clinton Community Garden On building community: Nurses are practical - their job is not diagnosis, although Allegra was a superb diagnostician, but doing the lions share of the work of healing and supporting the patient by marshalling the family's support through teaching. We had a problem in the Clinton Community Garden. New York City, and Hell's Kitchen in particular, has traditionally been a haven for new immigrants to America. Previous waves had brought Dutch, African , English, Irish, German, Italian, Norman French, Serbian, Croatian,Greek, Puerto Rican, Central American, Asians from the Caucasus to Tibet , mainland Americans who had chosen to live in NYC, and what I call "refugees from America" - folks who came to Manhattan to escape prejudice or worse, for the choices they had made for those whom they had decided to love. We had absorbed all into our garden community. However we were having a problem with our latest immigrants, large families of folks from Yemen whose men had opened delis in our neighborhood and had large families of children who were flooding the garden. The situation was this - the local playgrounds were filled with crack dealers, junkies, the lowest grade of street whores and the only decent public space in the neighborhood for kids to go was our garden. The Yemeni mothers were women of cover and our garden was the only open place in the neighborhood where their modesty was respected. In their faces I saw the Jewish great-grandmothers of some of my family members who had lived in the old Polish-Russian Pale, shtetl of the Jewish Ghettoes of Europe, bound by faith, home and a way of life that had not changed for centuries. Their kids, being kids, were tearing through the garden, sometimes 100 on an afternoon, ripping things up, peeing on plants, running into people having the time of their lives. There were confrontations between gardeners, kids and parents and it was beginning to get ugly. After all they had signed our English and Spanish garden agreements, had been talked to repeatedly, and still they weren't complying. So Allegra decided to take another tack. She went to an Iraqi departmental secretary at St. Clare's Hospital and brought him to the garden during her lunch hour and gave him a tour. He was not the easiest man in the world to get along with (neither am I or many of us) but Allegra convinced him to translate our garden rules and membership agreements into Arabic. And in a few weeks, when we had them to distribute to the ladies, who were illiterate, they brought them to their husbands and sons who explained them. The attitudes in the garden changed, because while kids would be kids, they worked to control them better and felt respected, having been given the same rules as everyone else, in language that they understood. The current garden sign on our fence, composed by Egyptian born gardener and former steering committee member Zaki Tewfik, is a continuation of Allegra's work. Thought you might to know about this, Adam Honigman Volunteer, Clinton Community Garden Subj: [cg] CG Volunteer - Adam Honigman |
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