NEW YORK — It was Thursday afternoon, three days before 1,800 Jewish kids were to arrive for the final week of the JCC Maccabi games, and 40 delegation leaders were ironing out the logistics at a New Jersey hotel.
That’s when the lights and the air conditioning went dead, and the room quickly became hot and sticky.
But the organizers kept planning, hardly skipping a beat.
“I gotta tell you,” said Lenny Silberman, North American continental director of the JCC Maccabi Games, “doing this for the games for 20 years and working with those communities, the potential for a big balagan [brouhaha] was definitely there.”
But “it was amazing,” he said Monday from his cell phone at the site of the games, the Jewish Community Center on the Palisades.
Thanks to the organizers’ calm, the blackout didn’t create even “an ounce” of anxiety — and all the athletes, hosted by local families, arrived in time for Sunday’s opening ceremonies.
“We knew there was no power, but we also knew that we had 1,800 kids that are depending on us on Sunday, so we had to do what we had to do,” Silberman said.
A mix of determination and calm was found in Jewish communities across the Northeast that were impacted Aug. 14 by the massive blackout, the largest in the nation’s history.
Jewish communities also mirrored the mood of the population at large, which was relieved to learn that the outage was the result of a system overload, not terrorism.
Yet the incident highlighted Jewish organizations’ lack of preparedness for an emergency situation.
David Gad-Harf, executive director of Detroit’s Jewish Community Council, praised the spirit of communal cooperation — people took to the streets for block parties, cooking steaks that had defrosted in their freezers — but called the power failure a “wake-up call not only for the Jewish community, but for America as a whole.”
Without an “old-fashioned” non-electric phone on hand, Gad-Harf said, the agency was unable to contact local federation leaders or other Jewish agencies.
“We realized that we were really not prepared for a crisis of this kind,” he said.
Hannah Rosenthal, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella organization for local federation community-relations councils, agreed.
“We learned how completely dependent on electricity we are,” she said, noting that even the organization’s national contingency plan is dispatched through computers.
The alternative plan is to use telephones — which, if they were typical office phones, depend on electricity and didn’t work in the blackout — followed by cell phones, whose networks quickly were overloaded.
“None of those three plans worked for us,” she said.
A new backup system has been in the works, Rosenthal said, explaining that a computer motherboard located in the Midwest could release information remotely.
But even that wouldn’t have helped last week, as parts of the Midwest went as black as Manhattan.
As a result, every Jewish agency had to fend for itself in the blackout — without the national mobilizations or alerts that are customary in emergencies.
There was “not the time or the communications capacity to mobilize,” said John Ruskay, executive vice president and CEO of the UJA-Federation of New York. “Our first responsibility was to deal with the safety and security of our people.
“Every agency with whom I’ve spoken was better prepared and had a better system in place than we did on 9/11, and yet there are times when you still need to call audibles,” he said, using a term for football plays that are improvised in response to unexpected circumstances.
While commending the efforts of his federation’s social service agencies, Ruskay noted that Jewish agencies realized they must establish more effective backup modes of communication.
One incident brought out the ugly potential of the power outage.
The University of Michigan’s Hillel building was defaced with a swastika and obscenities during last week’s blackout.
Police believe vandals took advantage of the Aug. 14 blackout to paint the graffiti, Hillel director Michael Brooks said. No attempt was made to break into the building.
“This was probably some kid taking advantage of the cover of darkness,” Brooks said, adding that police officials are viewing the episode as an isolated incident.