Good morning. We'll look at the memories that hung over a model Seder held in advance of Passover, which begins tonight. We'll highlight our coverage of former President Donald Trump's arraignment. And we'll also look at an unusual garage sale in Brooklyn, with a television star offering a mink coat from the 1970s for $400. |
 | | Yuvraj Khanna for The New York Times |
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Lyudmila Chernyavaskaya was talking about getting out of Ukraine — a very different Ukraine, the Ukraine that was occupied by the Nazis in 1941. She was six years old then. The fear she felt has not faded. |
"I knew we needed to go because we saw the Nazis' planes," said Chernyavaskaya, who is now 87 and attended a model Seder for Holocaust survivors in Manhattan last week in anticipation of Passover, which begins tonight. And so she found herself revisiting the Jewish story of escape while telling the story of living as a refugee herself, as many Ukrainians have done since the war with Russia began last year. |
"It was the Holocaust against Jewish people" in World War II, she said. "Now it's against Ukrainian people." During the Holocaust, the Nazis killed more than one million Ukrainian Jews. |
Chernyavaskaya — whose family escaped from Kyiv, ending up in Kazakhstan — remembered the rumbling sound that woke her before dawn on the day the Nazi occupation began. "The first thing we thought was an earthquake," she said. "When people got up, they said it was war. Now I feel I understand what people in Ukraine feel because I went through this." |
Rabbi Menachem Creditor, who led the Seder, mentioned the "intersecting legacies" of the two wars. He is the scholar-in-residence at UJA-Federation of New York, whose Community Initiative for Holocaust Survivors provides financial help and programs for about 25,000 Holocaust survivors in New York City. The agency says that many survivors struggled with isolation and the loss of younger loved ones during the pandemic, as well as friends in their 80s and 90s. |
"Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, we lost many survivors during the pandemic, and a lot of people who used to be able to come to events," said Stacy Chilton, the program director of the Holocaust survivor program in Manhattan for Selfhelp Community Services, a partner with UJA that began providing care for Jewish refugees in 1938. "We had to go a long time without being able to connect in person." |
As my colleague Elizabeth Dias wrote during the pandemic, religious ritual holds power not only because it connects people in one place, in this case a large room at UJA headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, it also connects people across time. "There's something about being able to come and be in a room with other survivors and know there's a commonality, even if they're not talking about their histories," Chilton said. |
But some did have stories to tell — stories like Chernyavaskaya's, of childhoods upended by war. Gaston Silvera, who also attended the Seder, talked about seeing an airplane for the first time — for many children a happy memory. He saw two. But they were firing at each other over the bay off the coastal Tunisian city of Sousse, where he grew up. And then one crashed on a beach. |
Amid the fighting in North Africa, three of his brothers were sent to a camp. Sousse, he said, "was completely gone, like you see in Ukraine." And, he said, a cousin left a light on in the house next door during what was supposed to be a blackout. Someone, a German soldier or sympathizer, saw the light and threw a bomb at the house. His cousin died. |
The Passover story "is not an ancient story of human vulnerability, it's a current story that we are consistently, unfortunately, re-experiencing as a world," said Rabbi Creditor. "This is a Jewish framing of a terribly current situation and Passover gives us a hopeful trajectory through it." |
He said that he had gone to the Polish-Ukrainian border with a group of rabbis at this time last year. He said he could not read the text for the Seder there "without being thrust exactly into the real world we inhabit." |
"I could barely see the Haggadah through my tears," he said, choking up again, "and now to have some of those people here and Russian speakers who've been here for some time and survivors, it's overwhelming." |
Prepare for patchy fog and a chance of a drizzle, continuing through the evening, with temps near the high 50s. At night, temps are steady around the mid-50s. |
In effect today. Suspended tomorrow and Friday (Passover). |
 | | Andrew Kelly/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/AFP Via Getty Images |
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- The plea: As he was charged with 34 felony counts, former President Donald Trump barely spoke. He walked into the courtroom around 2:30 p.m. and entered a not guilty plea about 15 minutes later.
- The indictment: The Manhattan district attorney's office unsealed the indictment against Trump, which listed 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. Read the indictment.
- A timeline: The investigation by the Manhattan district attorney's office that led to the indictment has spanned nearly five years. Here are some key moments.
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'The garage sale to end all garage sales' |
 | | Adrienne Grunwald for The New York Times |
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She called it "the garage sale to end all garage sales," and it was different from the usual garage sale. It did not take place in or near a garage, but in an alley in Brooklyn. And there were no Pyrex bowls or workout gear, as there so often are at garage sales. |
Most of the clothes London was selling were priced between $40 and $80, although there was a mink coat from the 1970s for $400, which London slipped into on an afternoon when the temperature barely reached the 50s. There was also a shaggy knit coat from the 1960s with a matching hat, also $400. And there were Yves Saint Laurent pants for $100. |
London, who is moving after living in the same apartment for 17 years, sounded unhappy about having too much stuff to take to her new place. "As I get older, I'm resentful of how much I have accumulated," London said. "I'm actually angry about it." |
London and two fashion-world friends — who brought things from their closets to add to London's offerings — had sold about 90 percent of their inventory by the time they called it quits on Sunday, the second day of the sale. |
And the $400 mink coat? With London still wearing it, it ended the day unsold. |
In 1979, I was a freshman in high school. On a warm spring day my friend and I took the Long Island Rail Road into the city to sign up for an American Youth Hostel bicycle tour. |
Having finished our business by noon, we looked around for someplace to eat. We saw a pizza place with a line of people out the door. The line was moving quickly, so we joined it. |
When I got to the front, I placed my order. |
"Two slices and a Coke," I said. |
"Two slices, Coke," the counterman repeated. |
Within an instant, the food was in front of me. |
"I'll have the same," he said. |
"Same," the counterman repeated. And then he ran through a door into the back. |
My friend and I stood there for about a minute, wondering what was going on. |
When the counterman reappeared, he had another man with him. |
We put the wrong verb in a headline in yesterday's newsletter. It should have said that former President Donald Trump was to be arraigned, not indicted, yesterday. The indictment was handed up last week, although it was not unsealed until yesterday. |
| Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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