A New Jersey few
know: Paterson's
thriving Arab
community
BY MILTON VIORST,
NJ.com from the Web. April 8, 2007
I enter Paterson over the Broadway
hill past Eastside Park, where as a kid I biked on clear days, turning to gaze
at the Manhattan skyline a dozen miles away. The park is where I caught
fireflies in a jar on hot summer nights and belly-flopped on a sled on cold
winter afternoons, where I sold sodas to picnickers on Sundays and once tried
out, unsuccessfully, for the high school baseball team.
Just below the park, in the direction of downtown, is Derrom Avenue, whose
elegant mansions long advertised the wealth of Paterson's commercial
aristocracy. Incongruously, amidst these mansions now stands the Islamic
Center, Paterson's principal mosque, symbol of the city's latest transformation.
Paterson, it is widely said, is home to America's second-largest Arab community.
Dearborn, Mich., is first. Paterson is also the hub of several hundred
thousand Arabs living in northern New Jersey. Yet, growing up, how come I
knew no Arabs?
The city, rather handsome and well-kept in those days, was shaped by solidly
middle-class Irish, Italian and Jewish communities. Since Alexander
Hamilton persuaded George Washington to harness the power of the roaring falls
of the Passaic River, its wealth derived from industry, but in the 20th century
it also served as a commercial hub for several hundred thousand residents of the
North Jersey region.
My grandfather came from Poland in 1900 to work in Paterson's silk mills, the
industrial core; my father, after a turn in the mills, found retailing more
compatible. The earliest Arab immigrants were Christian Syrians drawn from
the textile workshops of Aleppo; Muslims, a second wave that began in the 1920s,
preferred to set up small shops.
By the 1940s, Arabs were an identifiable community, but I never saw them.
Paterson's ethnic groups were largely strangers to one another, gathered on
their own turf around their churches, later their synagogues, then their
mosques. Though we lived in neighborhoods that were tightly juxtaposed,
only rarely did we cross the lines.
Over history, Paterson had its share of strife, but it was class rather than
ethnic. The silk strike of 1913 was a milestone in American industrial
history, still discussed over the dinner table when I was a kid; the unions,
though multi-ethnic, showed solidarity, but the mill owners, by moving
operations out of the city in search of compliant workers, triumphed.
By the Depression, with silk facing a vanishing world market, Paterson's
industrial base was already depleted. During World War II, my father worked on
an assembly line in a vacated silk mill, building aircraft engines. But
when the war ended the factory shut down, and Paterson never succeeded in
rebuilding a viable economic foundation.
In the 1960s, my parents, both of them working in suburban clothing shops, quit
their "transitional" neighborhood in Paterson to move to a garden apartment on
the fringe of a shopping center, built on a golf course beyond the city line.
They remained there until they died 20 years ago.
They and the other departing whites in their era left behind real estate
bargains that attracted poor blacks and Latinos -- and later Arabs. Few
Irish, Italians or Jews remained. The newcomers had less capital and more
children. The city's per capita income, along with its tax base, slipped
to roughly a third that of the nearby suburbs. Homeownership fell to half
the national ratio. To aggravate matters, local government was infected
with the New Jersey disease of corruption.
When I returned for the first time after 20 years, I found an impoverished city,
suffering from persistent neglect, barely resembling the Paterson I knew.
Behind the wheel of my rental car, I drove in a daze that mixed nostalgia with
disbelief. I rediscovered the houses in which I lived and the schools I
attended. But the Alexander Hamilton Hotel, a local landmark, had been
abandoned, leaving the city without lodging; I checked into a nondescript motel
on a passing superhighway.
By then, the two Paterson newspapers I once knew, one of which gave me my first
reporter's job, had long closed. Familiar streets now carried the names of
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. The branch library from which I
had borrowed books was shuttered. The half-dozen movie theaters where I
spent Saturday afternoons (once, Paterson even had a symphony orchestra) were
all gone; now it didn't have even one.
The kosher delicatessen, where on special occasions my mother treated me to a
hot pastrami on rye with a pickle, was now "The Queen Supermarket." The
classic Masonic Temple, where my Uncle Bill attended mysterious meetings,
announced in lights, "Love of Jesus Family Outreach Center." The bank
where I opened my first account was a Laundromat, and the ice cream parlor where
I had my first date, after eighth-grade graduation, was the Los Hidalgos Food
Emporium.
At the downtown's edge, the Barnert Memorial Temple, a grand Moorish-style
synagogue which President William McKinley visited in 1900 soon after its
dedication, had vanished. In its place stood a White Castle hamburger
stand.
That brings me back to the Islamic Center. When "white flight" struck the
Barnert Temple, many of its members were too old to move, so its leaders elected
to relocate temporarily uptown. By then, Derrom Avenue's elite families
were disposing of their fine mansions. The temple bought one of them and
made it into a religious school, and on the adjacent expanse of lawn, erected a
synagogue, a red brick schoolhouse-style building surrounded by a blacktopped
parking lot.
A generation later the temple quit the city entirely, and in 1990 the building
became the Islamic Center of Passaic County, acquired with the donations of the
swelling Muslim community in Paterson and the nearby towns.Save for concerns
over traffic, the neighbors raised no objections to having an Islamic
institution in their midst.
BUILDING A COMMUNITY
In the early 20th century, Paterson's Arab community had been composed chiefly
of Lebanese and Syrian Christians, who joined existing churches or established
their own. The Muslims who joined them a couple of decades later had
different religious requirements, which were met mostly in small private
mosques. But a plaque dated 1927 in the King Solomon Memorial Park, a
Jewish cemetery, shows they had already founded a burial association and
acquired land for interments.
By the 1930s, the Arab community, Christian and Muslim, had colonized a strip
along South Main Street. A few Arab immigrants had settled there at the
turn of the century, and successive waves of newcomers, knowing they would be
welcomed, fell in behind them. Christians remained preponderant for
decades, but after World War II, a turbulent era in the Middle East, migration
tipped to Muslims. In time, Palestinians, in flight from wars and military
occupation, became South Paterson's most numerous residents.
Awni Abu-Hadba is considered the mukhtar, the village chief, of South Paterson.
He arrived from Palestine in 1971, having graduated from Birzeit University, on
the heels of a brother who preceded him by two years. Driven by the
American dream, he said, he attended night school to get degrees in accounting
and insurance. He also set up a store to sell jewelry and electronic
gadgets.
In a cluttered back office, Abu- Hadba advises his neighbors on their tax and
insurance needs. A small, rotund man, Awni -- as everyone calls him --
carries himself with the dignity that befits a mukhtar. He seems to know
every Arab on the street. On the wall is his photo with Yassir Arafat.
In 1976, he returned to Palestine for a wife; he came back with Maysoon, with
whom he had five children, all of whom have attended public schools. At
home, the family uses both Arabic and English. His oldest son, he said,
runs a halal -- the equivalent of kosher -- butcher shop, his two daughters are
married to lawyers, and his two youngest sons are preparing to be doctors.
Leaving his back room, Awni and I crossed South Main for lunch. He chose
one of the half-dozen Middle Eastern restaurants that are strung out to the
right and the left. Among them are two Syrian-owned supermarkets, both
fragrant with the spices of traditional souks, offering Arab cheeses, chickpeas
and taboula, grape leaves and malukhia, a leafy vegetable soup. Nearby
butcher shops proclaim their halal credentials. The Nablus Pastry, near
the end of the strip, is considered a treasure for its succulent Middle Eastern
desserts.
Inside the restaurant, dark- eyed young men crowded around a television set,
watching Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Lebanon's Hezbollah, discuss the
recently ended war with Israel. Most of South Paterson's homes have access
to Arab television; roof-top satellite dishes bring in the news from Al-Jazeera
and other Middle Eastern channels. Joined by some friends, Awni and I ate
collegially, Arab fashion, digging into dishes of humus, diverse salads,
falafel, kebabs, pita and rice. We drank Cokes, since no alcohol was sold.
In a scene that would be typical on the West Bank, families came and went, many
speaking Arabic, the women in hijabs.
STRENGTHENING POLITICAL POWER
Paterson, Awni told me, has about 25,000 Arabs -- a more agreed-upon figure is
15,000, about a tenth of the city's population. But his exaggeration had a
political purpose. He was introduced to local politics in 1984, he told
me, by Frank Graves, a legendary Irish mayor, who made clear to him that the
rewards the community could expect were in ratio to the number of votes it
produced. So he started to organize, Awni said, and by the next Election
Day had registered 600 voters and had decided to run himself for the city
council. Though he came in third, he earned Graves' esteem. It is
surely no coincidence that stores on South Main Street carry posters that say:
"Organize, Register, Vote. Help Strengthen Arab-American political power."
The Arab community, Awni said, is hardworking and prosperous; unemployment is
low, homeownership is the norm. Shopkeepers like himself are its backbone,
but it is rich in lawyers and teachers, plumbers and carpenters, small
manufacturers and engineers. The area also has more than 300 Arab doctors,
including a quarter or more of the physicians at both St. Joseph's and the
Barnert, respectively the Catholic and the Jewish hospitals. One day I ran
into one of them at the Islamic Center, who recalled that he had cared for my
mother at the Barnert during her last days, 20 years ago.
Awni's efforts to promote Arab power through politics came close to collapse
last spring. It was when Arabs, already frustrated by the federal decision
to cancel a seaport-management contract with an Arab firm from Dubai, learned
that the Passaic County Democratic party had summarily dumped one of their
community as its nominee for the county governing body, the board of
freeholders. Sami Mehri, born in Lebanon 57 years ago, runs a medical
supply business with two Jewish partners. He is on the board of two area
hospitals and serves as an adviser to the Passaic county sheriff. On 9/11,
he lost a godson who worked on the World Trade Center's top floor.
Esteemed though Mehri was, a statement he had made in 2002, quickly provoked a
challenge from within the Jewish community. At a dinner he had organized
for Congressman Bill Pascrell, he called the 9/11 hijackers "cold-blooded
murderers ... crazy fanatics. They're as far from God and Islam as hell
itself."
He also condemned violence, "whether it's committed by a person, a group or a
state"-- a formulation in which the final word is seen as Arab code for
criticism of Israel. Later, asked whether his condemnation of violence
covered Palestinian suicide bombers, he replied, "I can't see the comparison"
with the 9/11 killers. His words reflected the view of most Arabs, who
endorse the right to make war against Israel's military occupation of their
land. This position is rejected by most Jews.
Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, in search of Jewish votes in a close race,
immediately called for Mehri's removal from the Democratic ticket, and with the
support of Gov. Jon Corzine, he succeeded.
When Mehri countered by announcing his candidacy as an independent, Corzine
nervously invited him to meet and Menendez issued an apology. The outcome
was that Mehri dropped out of the race and, on Election Day, Arab votes swelled
Menendez's unexpectedly wide margin of victory. But the tensions of the
Mehri episode did not quickly disappear.
SUSPICION AND TRUST
Arabs have no doubt that the Mehri episode was part of the wave of suspicion
directed at their community after the 9/11 attack. The same suspicion
animated the FBI, and especially its Newark headquarters, whose domain included
Paterson and the New York area's three airports.
Even before 9/11, John Paige, a senior FBI agent, said he had become a familiar
figure at Paterson's Islamic Center. He and his supervisor, Leslie G.
Wiser Jr., the special agent in charge, talked with me in the FBI's Newark
headquarters. After 9/11, they told me, the FBI was ordered to change its
priority from law enforcement to terrorism prevention, and to this end, Newark
shifted its strategy to establishing a bond of mutual trust with Paterson's
Muslims.
"We understood we could not count on the community's cooperation by using
strong-arm methods," Paige said. "On the day after the attack, we went to
them for help. We began interviewing people up and down South Main Street,
which was the start of 40,000 interviews that we conducted. That was in
addition to following up every tip we received. The Islamic Center and
some other mosques provided us with Arabic-speaking interpreters."
"We also had a long-term goal," Wiser said. "We wanted to neutralize the
negative stigma associated in their minds with the FBI and with law enforcement
generally. It is not that the Muslim community we encountered was at all
hostile. This isn't France, where Muslim kids rioted last summer (2005).
The Muslims of Paterson are integrated into the economy and the political
system. Their mosques are run by successful people, responsible elders.
I think their good experiences in America have discouraged radicalization.
We don't delude our selves about the dangers of terrorism, but we considered
this a start to better relations."
"We know that Paterson is not a hotbed of extremism," Paige said. He made
a point of telling me, however, that 15 of the 19 hijackers had stopped in
Paterson in the days be fore 9/11. They apparently chose it, he said, "to
hide in plain view." They had drop boxes in Arab shops and acquired IDs
and drivers' licenses there, he said. Their presence, he said, was
confirmed in library and ATM records, Internet findings and photos taken by
security cameras in gas stations and retail stores.
Curiously, the 9/11 commission, which conducted an exhaustive investigation,
says in its report that only "Hanjour, Hazmi (two of the hijackers) and several
other operatives moved to Paterson and rented a one-room apartment," in which
the landlord "later ... found six men living." Echoing Paige, the
commission says in Paterson the men "established new bank accounts, acquired a
mailbox, rented cars and started visiting a gym," though neither its staff nor
the FBI could account for the discrepancy in the numbers.
The Arabs in Paterson, however, were skeptical, contending that in a community
as tightly knit as theirs, it would have been impossible for substantial numbers
of outsiders, whether six or 15, to pass unnoticed. If they saw
questionable characters, they say, they'd have reported their presence promptly.
A SOCIAL ANCHOR
Hani Khoury, a lawyer specializing in citizenship cases, was among several young
Arabs who expressed resentment at the suspicion in which the community is held.
Speaking in his small law office, he acknowledged that Paterson's Arabs are
socially more conservative than they were in the 1970s, when he arrived as a
child. Recent refugees, he said, have had a disproportionate influence:
Fewer local Arabs drink, and more women cover their hair. They have used
religion to promote solidarity, he said. Some of them are radical, arguing
that Muslims should not participate in an infidel society, not even to vote.
He called this wave "scary" in its refusal to sacrifice its identity, even for
the safety it enjoys here. But he had no reason to believe, he said, that
their zealotry breeds terrorism.
Khoury described Paterson as more "proletarian" than other havens, and so more
attractive to most Arabs. Arabs like being able to walk down South Main
Street and speak Arabic, he said. They see faces that look familiar and
feel they are at home.
Khoury said he and his well-educated contemporaries, he said, want to live their
lives in America both ways. They move to the suburbs but keep returning to
Paterson, satisfying a longing for a social anchor. He described the city
as a quick and easy fix, a way to get to the Middle East without taking a plane.
"We love to watch the old men in the coffee houses playing backgammon. We
love the restaurants and the music," he said, "Even my wife, who is not Arab,
loves them."
Yet, he cautioned that his generation also shares the community's objections to
America's Middle East policies. It keeps its resentment in check, he said,
only because, as immigrants in an immigrant culture, he and his friends feel
truly American. What troubles them since 9/11, however, is how much the
equilibrium has shifted.
"What we observe is that the internal dynamics of the country has changed,"
Khoury said. "We have to be more tight-lipped now, more fearful. We
already felt abandoned by George Bush and the Republicans. Then, when the
big shots in the New Jersey party threw Sami Mehri under the bus, we felt
abandoned by the Democrats, too. It confirmed our growing apprehension
that 'they're doing it to us be cause we're Muslim.' The lesson we learned
from these changes is that we'll have to stay on our toes, taking nothing for
granted."
A RELIGIOUS HUB
While I was doing research for this article, I visited often at the Islamic
Center, the fountainhead of Paterson's Muslim community. Fridays were
crowded with men in diverse dress, all shoeless, praying in the sanctuary.
Afternoons after school hours, kids played noisily in the vestibule or shot
baskets outside on a basketball court. I could read Muslim community
papers stacked next to brochures offering pilgrimages to Mecca, or watch
white-haired men swinging worry beads as they browsed through religious volumes
in the bookstore. Someone usually offered me a coffee or a tea.
Mostly, however, the visits gave me an opportunity to have a word with Mohammed
El Filali, a bearded 41-year-old ex-biologist from Morocco who, as "outreach
director," is the engine of the mosque's relations with the outside world.
His goal, he says, is to affirm Islam's membership in American society.
A subject Filali doesn't like to discuss -- the Islamic Center has, for now,
chosen to play it down -- is the menacing cloud that lurks overhead in a federal
deportation order pending against the imam, Sheikh Mohammad Qatanani. A
Palestinian with top credentials as an Islamic scholar, Qatanani arrived with
his family from his home in Jordan a decade ago and, having been refused
permanent residency, has remained at his post with successive temporary visas.
In 2003, however, Homeland Security notified him that he would be denied another
visa and, declining to say why, would have to leave the country.
By now, he had won wide favor in Paterson not only for presiding over improved
ties between Muslims, Christians and Jews but for leading a daring campaign
against domestic violence and abuse of women within the local Muslim community.
At the same time, he has spoken with a consistent voice against Israel's
occupation of Palestinian territories, which persuades Arabs the deportation is
the product of Middle East politics.
It was between services at the Islamic Center's busiest day of the year, marking
the end of Ramadan, that I was able to meet Sheikh Qatanani in his office off
the vestibule. Though too busy for a formal interview, he greeted me
warmly and insisted I take a cookie from a jar on his desk. I asked
whether he was troubled by the deportation case the government had brought
against him. He was more willing than Filali to comment, and answered in
English: "We can talk more when we have time, but the government made a
mistake in doing this. I'm here to stay, and I think I will stay."
After the service, the Ramadan worshipers congregated gregariously in the
center's parking lot. On the perimeter was a falafel stand and a set of
soft drink machines, jammed with buyers. Pinned to the brick wall were
placards advertising trips to the Middle East, pharmaceuticals and banks
"financing the Shari'a way." One of them announced that the Barnert, the
Jewish hospital, was "sensitive to the needs of the Islamic community.
Halal meat served."
The men in the crowd embraced one another ceremoniously, the women showed off
their children and their Islamic finery, most of the teenage girls whipped off
the hijabs they had worn at prayer, put on lipstick and let their hair fall.
"The dress code for our women is optional," Filali had told me with bemusement.
The scene brought back to me the throngs, of which I was a part, that once
gathered on Jewish high holidays in front of Temple Emanuel, just down the
street.
THE CITY'S FUTURE
I couldn't leave the city of my birth without paying respects to its mayor, Joe
Torres, the first Latino to win the job. I found him in the landmark city
hall, a beaux-arts palace with stained-glass windows and sculptured eagles,
crowned by a 164-foot clock tower. Paterson's elders, who inaugurated the
building in 1896, clearly meant it to convey an optimistic vision for the new
century. Yet it would no doubt disappoint the long-departed elders, since,
like the city itself, city hall reflects in its shabbiness Paterson's long
industrial decline.
Paterson now has a master plan, Torres said, and its growth rate is among the
fastest in New Jersey. Construction is up, crime is down, six new banks
have established offices, private money is coming in. He boasted of the
designation of the Passaic Falls and the old mill district -- unkempt as they
looked when I saw them -- as a state park, in the running to become a national
park. He predicted they would in time make Paterson a major tourist
attraction.
Torres acknowledges that Paterson politics is a contest between ethnic groups.
"In our city, politics has always been racially driven," he said, though he
notes with satisfaction that in his re-election, he had strong support in every
ward and did particularly well among Arab-Americans, the newest emerging
political force.
But Arabs, because they are prosperous, are also upwardly mobile and, in the
Paterson tradition, continually leave for the suburbs. "Arabs support me
now because I meet their needs," he said. "I talk to their imams and visit
their mosques. ... The city's only night life is along South Main Street, and
they know I appreciate what they contribute. But they're not yet ready to
take over. Demography is against them. Still, politics here is a
revolving door, and I know their time will come."
Milton Viorst has covered the Middle East as a journalist and
scholar since the 1960s. He was The New Yorker's Middle East correspondent, and
has written six books on the Middle East. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his
wife, the poet Judith Viorst
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