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New Castle News

Greeley Boys Swim & Dive Team Wins State Championship Title Second Year in a Row

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Chappaqua, NY – On March 4, 2023, Horace Greeley High School’s Boys Swim & Dive Team earned the State Championship title at the 61st annual NYS Public High School Athletic Association (NYSPHSAA) Boys Swimming & Diving Championships held at Ithaca College. This is the second year in a row that the team has won the title. They are the first sports team in Greeley’s history to win back to back state titles. With a final score of 247 points, Greeley won the meet by 50 points over the second-place competitor.

Greeley also won the divisional and sectional titles for 2023. NYSPHSAA is made up of public high schools divided into 11 sections, as well as the NYS Catholic High School Athletic Association, and the NYC Public School Athletic League. Greeley competed as part of Section 1, comprised of teams from Dutchess, Putnam, Rockland, and Westchester counties. In total, 433 athletes from teams throughout NY State competed at the meet.

Four Seniors and six Juniors of the 35-member Horace Greeley Swim & Dive team represented the team at the two-day championship meet by achieving qualifying time standards throughout its regular season of eight dual meets, divisionals, and sectionals. All ten members of the team qualified for finals in the meet. This was a true team effort, with all team members contributing points to the final score.

The 400 free relay team (Hudson Chung, Erik Nadecki, Oliver Engel, and Connor McHugh) swam a 3:05.53 and came in 1st place, achieving a school, section, and state record and qualified for automatic All American status (top 100 times for the year). In addition, the team’s 200 medley relay (O. Engel, Nadecki, Jack Moran, and Trey Schlomann) came in 4th, and the 200 free relay (Lawrence Gulotta, Jamie Lynch, Schlomann, and McHugh) came in 8th.

Other top 20 finishers include:

Hudson Chung: 12th in the 200 free and 19th in the 100 fly

Jack Cornish: 9th in the 500 free

Eric Engel: 18th in the 200 free

Oliver Engel: 13th in the 200 IM and 7th in the 100 back

Connor McHugh: 7th in the 50 free and 6th in the 100 free

Erik Nadecki: 3rd in the 200 IM and 2nd in the 100 breast (All American consideration in both events)

In addition, McHugh was honored for Sportsmanship for Section 1, Chung and Lynch were named as Scholar Athletes, and Chung and Moran were elected as Captains for the Section 1 team.

To learn more about Greeley Sports Boosters, visit https://greeleysportsboosters.org/. To learn more about NYSPHSAA, visit https://nysphsaa.org/sports/mswim.

News courtesy of Greeley Sports Boosters. To learn more about Section 1 Swimming, visit http://www.section1swim.com/

New Castle Fire District No. 1 Announces Bond Referendum to be Held April 25

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Bond Referendum would Authorize Borrowing Funds for Fire Station Addition

Project Designed to Ensure the Safety and Health of Volunteer Firefighters by Providing Space to Accommodate Modern Emergency Apparatus and Decontamination Facilities

CHAPPAQUA, NY (March 2023) – The New Castle Fire District No. 1 has announced that a bond referendum vote will be held April 25 to authorize the Fire District to borrow funds for construction of a 13,000-square-foot addition to the current fire station in Chappaqua.

The modernization and expansion would provide the Fire Department with the space to accommodate modern emergency apparatus and equipment as well as decontamination facilities. It will also ensure the safety and health of the volunteer firefighters of the Chappaqua Fire Department. The project is estimated to cost approximately $15.2 million with construction starting November 2023.

The current fire station, which was built in 1954 and expanded in 1979, is grossly inadequate to meet the legal requirements under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and  the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). As a result, current conditions expose Chappaqua and its taxpaying residents to costly litigation in the event of a serious accident or death of a volunteer firefighter.

“The Fire District’s proposal is not what the Fire Commissioners WANT but rather what they are REQUIRED to provide under the law,” said Brian Murphy, Chairman of the Fire District’s Board of Commissioners. “The Fire District has been studying the fire station space needs for nearly 20 years. Since the project was first studied in 2003, construction costs have nearly tripled. The sooner this project begins, the better,” he added.

Based on the 2022 average assessed value of $178,508 for all taxable residential parcels in the Town of New Castle that are served by the New Castle Fire District, the estimated average annual tax increase would be $282. For the parcels in the Town of Mount Pleasant served by the New Castle Fire District, the estimated annual increase would be projected at $225. These estimates are subject to change based on interest rate and other market fluctuations.

Prior studies dating back to 2003 recommend additional bay space to accommodate future needs; drive through bays to accommodate 7 or 8 vehicles; adequate storage space; decontamination capability and bunking for up to 10 firefighters. The current fire station bays are too small for today’s larger and wider apparatus. The space between the modern fire-fighting apparatus in the current fire station is less than 3 feet. A firefighter in gear can barely pass through the bay, creating a dangerous and potentially deadly situation. Studies recommend 8 feet between each piece of apparatus.

Lack of adequate decontamination facilities is another issue to be addressed in the modernization project. When materials burn, they release a number of carcinogens  including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Firefighters may also encounter other known carcinogens such as asbestos and diesel exhaust. According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), “the fire department shall provide for the cleaning of protective clothing and station/work uniforms by a fire department facility that is equipped to handle contaminated clothing. Fire departments shall provide facilities for disinfecting, cleaning, and storage in accordance with NFPA 1581, Standard on Fire Department Infection Control Program.” The current fire station does not have NFPA compliant equipment for disinfecting, cleaning and storage.

The new addition is being designed by Mitchell Associates Architects which has more than 40 years designing buildings and 30 years designing fire stations. The firm has designed 193 public safety projects, 331 facilities and 77 fire station renovation projects. The firm has a full-time staff dedicated solely to fire station and emergency facilities design.

More about the District’s hopes for a fire department addition can also be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/809065743/f90f65b36e

The April 25th vote will be held at the fire station at 491 King Street from 12 noon to 9 pm. For more information about the bond referendum vote and the proposed modernization project, please visit www.ncfd1.org

News courtesy of the New Castle Fire District

Holocaust Survivor Helga Luden Relates her Story of Escape, Rescue and Survival

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“I always listened to my mother.”

Helga Luden Speaking at an International Holocaust Remembrance Day Event Sponsored by the Horace Greeley High School Club ENOUGH and the Town of New Castle Holocaust and Human Rights Committee 

New Castle Holocaust and Human Rights Committee Co-chairs Stacey Saiontz (right) and Alexandra Rosenberg with Helga Luden and members of ENOUGH, the student group at Greeley. Inside Press photo.

January 27, 2023–In a panel on the stage at the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center yesterday eve, Helga Schmitz-Fernich Luden–holding multiple documents and pictures to help relay details–shared her harrowing but ultimately triumphant and inspiring story of herself as a very young girl (she was born in 1934) surviving the Nazi invasion. Her family was the only Jewish family in Ulmen (a town in the Rhineland region of Germany).

Despite her family’s rich history as residents of the town, she and her mom after being separated from her father–who was sent to a slave labor camp–were sent to the Gurs transit camp in the Basque region of southwestern France.* There, her mom, growing increasingly aware of the Nazi plans, each day actively coached her young daughter to prepare for a daring escape–instructing her ‘to play dumb’ with her German-sounding name, and also promising to join her.

While of course terrified at the prospect, Helga also offered, “I always listened to my mother.”

As the dangers escalated, her mother finally sent her daughter on her way with money hidden in her clothing too (the money had been saved in the wires of her mom’s girdle!). This part of the journey was painful to contemplate, an exceptionally young Jewish girl traveling alone in the rolling hills of Europe, in dire danger. She described being found passed out in a field but, miraculously enough, revived by a group of French Jewish partisans who helped her find refuge first in a convent and later in an orphanage.

Helga Luden, Members of the Greeley Club ENOUGH with New Castle Town Supervisor Lisa Katz (lower left) and (lower right) with New Castle Holocaust and Human Rights Committee co-chairs Stacey Saiontz (left) and Alexandra Rosenberg, Helga Luden, and state Senator Peter Harckham. Inside Press photos

True to her word, her mother (who eventually escaped Gurs too) and she were reunited there! From another safe haven in Marseilles, Helga and her mom boarded the famous ship, the Serpa Pinta, which was heading to North Africa–it held 750 Jewish men and women in its hull in secret and these refugees were rarely allowed to come on board, Helga explained.

Helga related another miracle as she and her mom found her father among the refugees too, having survived and escaped from a slave labor camp. He was emaciated but alive. A challenging (to say the least) journey, the ship would span two continents over six weeks as they were turned away from different countries for refuge, including sadly, from the New York Harbor in the United States.

Eventually, the ship was accepted in the Dominican Republic, its government saving its Jewish refugees, after 100 or more of whom had already perished from typhoid and other life threatening conditions (funerals were held daily on the ship, Helga related, through tears). Their journey to freedom began in earnest as they settled into farm life in the seacoast town of Sousa.*

In 1946*, the family, which now included a young sister to Helga, was finally allowed to emigrate to the United States, bringing the family to the melting pot neighborhoods of Inwood and later, the Lower East Side of Manhattan–where Helga also related a touching and funny story of how she met her ‘beshert’ and came to have three children, 12 grandchildren and four great grandchildren. Throughout her presentation, Helga communicated gratitude for the incredible strokes of luck that aided her family’s survival.

The Town of New Castle Holocaust and Human Rights  Committee and the students of Horace Greeley High School’s ENOUGH club made this inspiring presentation possible. Helga’s story was relayed after remarks from students of ENOUGH,  from New Castle Town Supervisor Lisa Katz, and from state Senator Peter Harckham.

*Additional facts about Helga’s story are from the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center, www.hhrecny.org  Helga is member of the Center’s Survivor Speaker’s Bureau.

 

Four Winters Shines a Light on the Bravery of World War II Survivors Among the 25,000 Jewish Partisans

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Can you imagine climbing through an unlikely opening and hurling yourself off a speeding train (while your beloved family members huddle together, terrified and exhausted) to take your chances at surviving so that you can escape arrival of almost certain murder at the death factory, Treblinka?

Or of attempting to convince others to take that chance with you? So that you can both LIVE and one day tell the story? To tell what happened–a reason to live that Holocaust survivors collectively have shared in many documentaries.

To jumping anyway when others would not or could not?

In Julie Mintz’s riveting and inspiring documentary Four Winters, we learn of such unimaginable circumstances and also mind bogglingly courageous acts of Jewish resistance through the testimony of eight  survivors who were members of the estimated 25,000 Jewish Partisans in the forests of World War II Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and the Ukraine. In Mintz’s discussion following the movie with Bruni Burres, the curator of the Jacob Burns Film Center Jewish Film Festival, we learn that only one of the survivors Mintz worked with to tell their stories and produce this film as authentically as possible, is still with us today for the film’s release. A takeaway reminder to me that the survivors are leaving us. A reminder that so are their stories. So we must honor them. And this film, honors them immensely.

Documentarian Julie Mintz discussing Four Winters with Bruni Burres, curator for the Burns Center Jewish Film Festival.

If I may go on. I also don’t consider these spoilers as you MUST see this wonderful documentary to understand its edge of your seat quality, and my own words aside, you MUST hear the stories from the survivors themselves to truly digest the Jewish Partisans story and the Four Winters theme of perseverance.

Can you imagine walking for miles in a weakened state in an expansive, eerie forest in the cold and the snow, with only the glowing eyes of wolves in the distance to guide you, without survival gear or survival skills per se, at different junctures being hunted down like animals for slaughter by the sick Nazi regime and its unholy web of spies and collaborators?

It was a story I was startled and almost embarrassed to have never heard before, or have heard about in snips and pieces, as more folklore. The survivor witnesses in Four Winters weave a tapestry of this most remarkable aspect of Holocaust survival, of Jewish survival. Julie Mintz has lovingly, painstakingly helped each of these dear souls revisit and recall details of those horrific times, so that the story, each story, the collective story, can be released into the world, and so that these survivors can be celebrated and embraced not for what they survived, but for their courage, for the lives they helped save, for whatever evil they conquered or thwarted too against all odds.

None of us really could imagine, and no doubt the survivors who describe their experiences never could have either preceding the horrific genocide that ensued. Or how they eventually banded together in groups and underground, camouflaged bunkers to form true fighting units sabotaging and killing Nazis at assorted opportunities, and surviving against all odds over four endless, brutal winters, often starving, often not knowing what day it was, or what the future held. Early in the film: footage of their happy and productive lives, vacationing in pre-Nazi invasion Poland.

As we approach International Holocaust Remembrance Day tomorrow, I am grateful I had the opportunity to watch the pre-screening of Four Winters yesterday. As the subject matter never stops hitting too close to home (I am a child of Holocaust survivors; most of my family perished), the usual trepidation I feel watching the footage of crimes perpetrated against humanity by the Nazis never goes away. But this story was incredibly uplifting in that we much more rarely hear about the resistance efforts to the Nazi evil. The Jewish partisans collaborated with Polish and Russian partisan units in the forests too. I am eternally grateful to every astoundingly brave and moral person of every religion and race who courageously resisted and fought the seemingly endless atrocities to save innocent lives at grave risk to their own. I’m in awe of the courage it took to save themselves. I’m eternally heartened to learn and proud to know that included a sizeable number of Jewish persons, too.

 

Chappaqua’s Always Magical HOLIDAY STROLL on December 3rd: Ice Sculpting, Tree Lighting, Horace Greeley Encords… and More!

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The annual Holiday Stroll is back in Chappaqua December 3! Memory making and heartwarming activities for the whole family! Discover a host of shops, new and old favorites! Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, or just wish to embrace the spirit of the season, you do not want to miss this! 

December 2022, Chappaqua, NY –  It’s the most magical time of year again and the annual Holiday Stroll is back! The holidays come alive in this charming hamlet; this is the perfect time for families to enjoy a festive day in downtown Chappaqua. 

This year’s Holiday stroll on December 3 will feature a meet and greet with Santa Claus bringing cheer to all and posing for pictures with little ones from 2 to 4 p.m. 

Experience a live ice sculpting presentation in front of Desires By Mikolay at 3 p.m., where you can watch master carvers create two holiday themed carvings out of giant blocks of ice using nothing but chainsaws. This is a decade long tradition you have to see for yourself!

Festivities continue at 4:30 p.m. at the New Castle Historical Society where you can enjoy the sounds of Holiday-themed Carols by Horace Greeley Encords and witness a festive Christmas tree lighting with thousands of twinkling lights.

Enjoy the charm of downtown Chappaqua as you pop into local shops, discover new merchants, checkout the latest fashions, shop local for holiday gifts, and pick up all the necessary essentials this gift-giving season. 

If you are worried about the cold, we got you covered! There will be a complimentary food truck from the Chamber of Commerce serving up Hot Cocoa and apple cider donuts to make sure everyone is warm and toasty.

Chappaqua’s Holiday Stroll will be on December 3, from 2 p.m. – 6 p.m. throughout downtown Chappaqua. 

In addition, save the date December 18 for more holiday festivities in town including a December 18th Menorah Lighting and bonfire!

News courtesy of the Chappaqua Millwood Chamber of Commerce, Desires by Mikolay and the New Castle Historical Society