Politics on the Hudson

A surprise Hanukkah phone call last week landed Yonkers resident Rigoberto Emmanuel Viñas in the White House on Monday for a meeting and party with President George W. Bush, Ernie Garcia reports:

Viñas, rabbi of the Lincoln Park Jewish Center in Yonkers, got the unexpected call from White House staffers assembling a guest list for the president’s annual Hanukkah party.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Viñas said today. “Basically what they wanted was leaders from the Jewish community from countries that have political oppression.”

Viñas is a Cuban American born in the United States, but his parents fled the Communist revolution of Fidel Castro.

Viñas saw the president twice on Monday. In the afternoon, he and 14 other Jewish leaders from around the country met privately with the president in the Oval Office.

“He speaks very nice Spanish and he asked me to give him a blessing,” Viñas said.

Viñas then spoke to Bush about his impressions of life for Jews in Cuba. “Until the 1980s it was illegal to go to the synagogue, now it’s illegal not to go. The Castro government is creating a fake resurgence of Cuban Jewish life to get American Jews to go there,” said Viñas, who voted twice for Bush in presidential elections and who calls himself rabidly anti-Castro.

Viñas said that other guests included an Iranian-American Jew from Los Angeles and a Jew from Uganda.

In the evening Viñas and his wife Erica (pictured) attended an elegant dinner party for about 500 guests in the White House, where a menorah was lit by the parents of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by extremists in Pakistan.

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