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by Jack Goldman
The idea for a Freedom Seder began to take shape around the kitchen table of an Ithaca College professor named Harvey Fireside. His family was among the last to flee Austria in 1940 when he was ten years old. Now he had agreed to serve as one of the “safe houses” for Dan Berrigan who had refused to surrender himself after his conviction for his part in the Catonsville 9 burning of draft cards.
Berrigan was no longer satisfied with avoiding imprisonment as a way to express his opposition to the war in Vietnam. He was willing explore riskier ideas to achieve his purpose. Harvey mentioned that he had attended a “Freedom Seder” written and led by a New York rabbi named Arthur Waskow. Would Berrigan be willing to participate in a similar event in Ithaca? He agreed on condition that we could broaden the appeal by making the event more ecumenical.
At the time, I was working as the assistant director of the Human Affairs Program at Cornell whose purpose was to combine classroom study with participation in community organizations concerned with such issues as employment, housing and education. With the agreement of the director, Ben Nichols, who later became Ithaca’s first (and only) socialist mayor, I made use of our office in Rand Hall to help plan what became the weekend event in Barton Hall that featured Waskow’s Seder along with an enactment of the Last Supper by the Bread and Puppet Theater and around-the-clock performances by well-known musicians.
We managed to smuggle a helmeted Berrigan on a motorcycle into the hall where a crowd of close to ten thousand students and “townies” gave him a rousing reception. Of course there were also numerous FBI agents among the spectators, whose attempts to fit in (a few even sported Mexican serapes) were invariably betrayed by their shiny patent leather shoes. We soon realized that we had not given adequate thought as to how Berrigan could evade capture over the course of an entire weekend. After a hasty huddle, it was decided to spirit Berrigan out of the hall in one of the large Bread and Puppet masks. Unfortunately, someone made the mistake of dousing the lights just as he was leaving.
This was enough to alert the FBI agents who were soon in hot pursuit of the car we had arranged to drive Berrigan to New York. By a stroke of luck, our driver was familiar with the country roads surrounding Ithaca and had had the foresight to switch cars with another driver. Coda: Berrigan’s escape from Barton Hall was successful, but a few months later, his older brother, Phil Berrigan, was captured and imprisoned. Not long after, Dan decided to resume one of his customary visits to Block Island which was tantamount to turning himself in. Some FBI agents disguised as bird watchers performed their duty.
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Jack Goldman was one of the core organizers of the 1970 Freedom Seder while a graduate student at Cornell. He was later a peace activist, community organizer, and owned and operated a bookstore in Ithaca.