The New York times has a story today about the El Estero incident in New York harbor during World War Two. My sister's father in law, Seymour Wittek, served in the US Coast Guard in New York harbor during the second World War and is one of the last survivors of the team that, literally, saved the city of New York from the danger of an exploding ammunition transport ship. Seymour is standing second from the left (wearing the grey jacket), next to his son, Dr. Alec Wittek, my Uncle Eli Cohen, and my father Jack Cohen (this photo was taken on the final day of sitting Shiva for the late Anne Wittek - hence the black mourning ribbons. She was a wonderful woman and a living treasure chest of Yiddish folk songs!) Writes the NY Times: "For Seymour Wittek... there have been other significant days over his 87 years... One October day last year, death claimed Anne Wittek, his wife of 64 years. That was a most important day. But for altering his life, April 24, 1943, stands out. [photos of US Coast Guard supervising the loading of bombs onto transport ships during World War Two.]
"That was the day in World War II when a fire aboard an ammunition ship in New York Harbor threatened to cause a gigantic explosion that could have cost thousands of lives and destroyed swaths of Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the New Jersey ports of Jersey City and Bayonne."
"That April day, his detail had just finished stowing roughly 1,400 tons of explosives on El Estero, a freighter of Panamanian registry docked at an Army loading pier. Other ships with the same type of cargo were tied up nearby. On the pier sat railroad cars similarly loaded. In all, an estimated 5,000 tons of bombs, depth charges and small-arms ammunition were concentrated there. As evening approached, the Estero caught fire. Oil had leaked into bilges under the boiler room and ignited. The fire threatened to blow up the freighter and then, in a chain reaction, the adjacent ships and railroad cars. Not far away, fuel storage tanks in Bayonne and on Staten Island were in jeopardy as well"An officer announced that he needed volunteers to board the burning ship and man fire hoses. The freighter’s deck and its holds were becoming perilously hot. “Nobody looked left,” Mr. Wittek recalled. “Nobody looked right. Nobody looked backwards. The men that volunteered all stepped forward — immediately... Standing on the ship’s decks, Seaman Wittek could feel the heat through the soles of his shoes. The fire was beyond control... In a race against time, tugboats towed the Estero to deep waters in Upper New York Bay. Coast Guard and New York City fireboats pumped water into the cargo holds. Not quite four hours after catching fire, the Estero sank to the bottom."
The danger can be estimated by comparison with the Halifax Explosion on Thursday, December 6, 1917, when the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, was devastated by the huge detonation of a French cargo ship, fully loaded with wartime explosives, that had accidentally collided with a Norwegian ship in "The Narrows" section of the Halifax Harbour. Approximately 2,000 people (mostly Canadians) were killed by debris, fires, or collapsed buildings, and it is estimated that over 9,000 people were injured. This was the largest man-made explosion until the first atomic bomb test explosion in 1945 and is still one of the world's largest man-made, conventional explosions to date. A picture of the Halifax mushroom cloud can be seen below.
The generation that fought in WWII are becoming fewer and fewer, and these lesser known actions that make up the heroic whole deserve to be acknowledged. Seymour: Abi gezunt!
Now, I'm not the world's biggest fan of kosher food - it isn't that I like eating birds of prey or anything, but most kosherei is handled as fuel, not food. It fills you up so you can wait a few days until you find another kosher food outlet. I travel all around Europe with an orthodox kosher klezmer clarinet player, and the stuff that keeps him going can sometimes give me the willies. Being in a Hungarian klezmer band has some strange benefits: we once packed into a mini bus on tour supplied with one carton of kosher salamis from Budapest's best kosher butcher for Yankl:
and one big carboard box of extremely fresh Transylvanian bacon and kolbasz that came from this little feller, hand raised by Toni Árpád, the last of the great Transylvanian cimbalom virtuosos who still plays a repertoire of older Jewish music (he plays with Muzsikás on 
Árpi bacsi never travels anywhere without his own home made bacon, and Yankl never travels anywhere without his kosher goose kolbász. The problem started when Uncle Árpi discovered the box of kosher smoked goose sausage: it was like discovering meat crack. He couldn't help himself. Yankl, on the other hand, would never be able to dig into those delicious Berkshire hog goodies - he's a good frummer yid. I'm sure we are not the first Klezmer band to experience this problem. I'd love to know what these guys ate:
Sometimes you just gotta eat what the Angels eat. For my forint... I'd go for flodni. 
Zerkula was one of the last generation of old style Transylvanian Hungarian Gypsy folk fiddlers whose 
With the passing of the older generation of folk musicians we hear a lot about “the last of the line” “end of the traditional” and I would have to say that is simply not true. Yet, at least. In Gyimes – a string of mountain settlements strung along several steep valleys in the high Carpathians between Moldavia and Transylvanian plains – there are still a living tradition of village fiddlers. Zoltán „Finánc” Antal is still playing, probably the last of the old blind fiddlers in Gyimes, and there are some others, neither blind nor old nor Gypsy. 
The music of Gyimes is always played as a duet – a fiddler playing lead with his wife accompanying him on the gardon, a string percussion instrument carved from a wood in the rough shape of a cello. The gardon is hit with a stick, while the one outside string is plucked – essentially it is a drum and plays the role that the large davul or tapan would play in Balkan and Turkish zurla music. The style is unique to the area – besides Gyimes, only a few Romanian villages near the Bekas Pass use the gardon..jpg)
To be honest, Gyimes music is not exactly my cup of tea. It used to be some of my favorite music, and back around 1990 it was the in thing among fiddlers learning from 
Whenever Feribacsi would be at some dance house or folk festival in Budapest and hear Gyimes music, he would simply lose it. “How can they call that music!” he would fume… “Some guy sawing on a fiddle and his fat wife whacking on a log… and they call that music?” It was, however, my job to agree with everything Feribacsi said, and eventually the prejudice against whacking musical logs stuck with me. I lost my ear for the stuff. To this day I tend to go out for a drink when the dance cycle switches to music from Gyimes. But then, I don’t exactly have much patience for the music of Szék, either. Most Hungarian fiddlers wouldn’t share my enthusiasm for the rough hewn Romanian mountain fiddle style of Maramureş, either. Heck… to each his own. But nonetheless, I’ll miss Zerkula. Good, honest fiddling is simply irresistable to me, even if it requires whacking on a log. While a lot of Hungarian revival fiddlers tend to play Gyimes style as an expression of unbridled fiddle wildness – “look how loud I can play this thing!” Uncle János always kept his playing within the strict bounds of taste – careful fingering, expert bowing, dances played at the proper tempos, nothing just for show-off. The man was a class act. 
Uncle Janos was a great character, always happy to chat about fiddling, and unlike a lot of fiddlers, never too pushy about asking for a few forints tip. He lived a tough life – lost his sight at the age of twenty, and trying to make a living as a blind fiddler in one of the poorer mountain regions of Romania is no picnic. "Nem kell látni, érezni kell!” - “You don’t need to see… you need to feel it!” he used to say. He managed and built up a decent farm and was one of the few rural Transylvanian musicians who was capable of adapting to a new role as a teacher of folk fiddle and festival performer later in life. They won’t be making many more like him. Here is a clip of Zerkula and Gizi néni (the gardon player Pulika Gizella) playing last year at the Budapest Palace of Artists.