Beth Am celebrates $5.5M overhaul in city
While others flee to ’burbs of Baltimore, synagogue invests in Reservoir Hill
With a grand new indoor stairway, a reconfigured downstairs classroom space and a redesigned sanctuary that brings the celebrant and congregation closer together, Reservoir Hill’s Beth Am Synagogue on Sunday proudly showed off the wonders that $5.5 million in renovations can bring to a 97-year-old building.
But perhaps the most notable wonder of all, congregants and residents of the Beth Am community agreed, is that the synagogue remains ensconced in Baltimore. Even as so many Jewish houses of worship have moved from the central city to the outskirts and Baltimore County, Beth Am remains as both a center of Jewish faith and a gathering place for the surrounding community.
“It’s quite an accomplishment. I’m very proud of what they did here,” said Daniel Appleby, 63, who lives near Mount
cooperating with what they dismiss as a sham investigation. Testimony suggests he was intimately involved in discussions that are at the heart of the investigation into whether Trump held up U.S. military aid to Ukraine to try to pressure the county’s president to announce an investigation into Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading 2020 candidate, and his son, Hunter.
Multiple witnesses overheard a phone call in which Trump and Sondland reportedly discussed efforts to push for the investigations. In private testimony to impeachment investigators made public Saturday, Tim Morrison, a former National Security Council aide and longtime Republican defense hawk, said Sondland told him he was discussing Ukraine matters directly with Trump.
Morrison said Sondland and Trump had spoken approximately five times between July 15 and Sept. 11 — the weeks that $391 million in U.S. assistance was withheld from Ukraine before it was released.
And he recounted that Sondland told a top Ukrainian official in a meeting that the vital U.S. military assistance might be freed up if the country’s top prosecutor “would go to the mike and announce that he was opening the Burisma investigation.” Burisma is the gas company that hired Hunter Biden.
Morrison’s testimony contradicted much of what Sondland told congressional investigators during his own closed-door deposition, which the ambassador later amended.
Democrats hope Trump sheds new light on the discussions.
“I’m not going to try to prejudge his testimony,” Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said on “Fox News Sunday.” But he suggested, “it was not lost on Ambassador Sondland what happened to the president’s close associate Roger Stone for lying to Congress, to Michael Cohen for lying to Congress. My guess is that Ambassador Sondland is going to do his level best to tell the truth, because otherwise he may have a very unpleasant legal future in front of him.”
The committee will also be interviewing a long list of others.
On Tuesday, they’ll hear from Morrison along with Jennifer Williams, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence; Alexander Vindman, the director for European affairs at the National Security Council; and Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine.
On Wednesday the committee will hear from Sondland in addition to Laura Cooper, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, and David Hale, a State Department official. And on Thursday, Fiona Hill, a former top NSC staffer for Europe and Russia, will appear.
Trump, meanwhile, continued to tweet and retweet a steady stream of commentary from supporters as he bashed “The Crazed, Do Nothing Democrats” for “turning Impeachment into a routine partisan weapon.”
“That is very bad for our Country, and not what the Founders had in mind!!!!” he wrote.
He also tweeted a doctored video exchange between Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, in which Schiff said he did not know the identity of the whistleblower whose complaint triggered the inquiry. The clip has been altered to show Schiff wearing a referee’s uniform and loudly blowing a whistle.
In her CBS interview, Pelosi vowed to protect the whistleblower, whom Trump has said should be forced to come forward despite long-standing whistleblower protections.
“I will make sure he does not intimidate the whistleblower,” Pelosi said.
Trump has been under fire for his treatment of one of the witnesses, the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, whom Trump criticized by tweet as she was testifying last week.