Readers Take Issue With Minister’s Charges About Lakewood

Campaigner writes that he saw a different Lakewood

As a candidate who ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the Lakewood Township Committee, I was appalled, shocked and dismayed to read the op-ed piece (as reported on VOS IZ NEIAS) “Preferential treatment in Lakewood affects entire community” by the Rev. Kevin Nunn. I wonder what Nunn is teaching his followers.

During the seven-plus months that I was campaigning, I saw a much different Lakewood than the one described by Nunn. I saw a deputy mayor who is an Orthodox Jew (Meir Lichtenstein) rush off the dais to administer first aid to a member of Nunn’s group when she collapsed. It didn’t matter that this woman was black or that she was not an Orthodox Jew. All that he saw was a person in need of medical treatment and he provided it to her. It did not seem to me, as Nunn puts it, “that they don’t defile their sick with the blood of our sick.”

I wonder if I would have written the same letter that Nunn had written and changed the word Lakewood to Harlem, would the Asbury Park Press have printed it? Or would they have branded me a racist?