Protest Sukkah Rises at the Chicago Hyatt
They may be occupying Wall Street with a sukkah in New York, but in Chicago the protest sukkah is at the Hyatt Regency. That is where the Mortgage Bankers Association’s annual meeting is being held this week, and Jewish activists figured the hotel was the best place to make their point about the need for the real estate industry to help struggling families keep their homes.
The activists — among them rabbis and cantors who insisted the erection of the temporary structure outside the hotel constituted a demonstration and not a protest — invited bankers to eat meals with them in it, and to meet with individuals affected by the housing crisis.
“Housing foreclosures are ripping apart one of the important pieces of fabric of family life and American life,” Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann, co-rabbi of Aitz Hayim Center for Jewish Living in Glencoe and Mishkan, an independent Jewish community in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, told the Chicago Tribune.
Another organizer, Jane Ramsey, executive director of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs said, “Sukkot is a very meaningful time to lift up the whole notion of shelter and, in this case, the unstable nature of housing today and the insecurity that families are feeling.”
Although organizers say their sukkah demonstration is not officially part of the Occupy Wall Street movement that is spreading across the nation, there is no doubt that it is related. Also not so coincidentally, this sukkah was built outside the Hyatt, a hotel chain against which the same activists called for a boycott last June because of what they cited as mistreatment of workers. Thomas Pritzker, executive chairman of Hyatt’s board, declined to comment for the piece in the Tribune. Members of the Jewishly observant Pritzker family of Chicago are the largest stakeholders in the Hyatt Corporation.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO