Yes, That Actually Was A Parade You Saw In Portland Today

It's been a while since we've had a decent parade in this town. But if you were traveling around the Deering Avenue section of Portland today, you may have seen a grand parade going right down the sidewalk. We hope this is the first of many parades we see in 2021!

Who was behind today's parade in Portland?  We can thanks the great students, teachers, and staff at the Levey Day School, a Pre-K to 7th-grade independent school in Portland, who were celebrating Israel's 73rd Independence Day - Yom Ha’Atzmaut - with a small parade through the neighborhood. The students led the march while wearing Israel’s national colors and waved flags they made in their art classes. What a great thing!

The Levey school had an official police escort from our heroes at the Portland Police Department.

This is an histroric day for sure. Historian Michael B. Oren has written about April 15, 1948:

"The Jews of Palestine ... were dancing because they were about to realize what was one of the most remarkable and inspiring achievements in human history: A people which had been exiled from its homeland two thousand years before, which had endured countless pogroms, expulsions, and persecutions, but which had refused to relinquish its identity—which had, on the contrary, substantially strengthened that identity; a people which only a few years before had been the victim of mankind’s largest single act of mass murder, killing a third of the world’s Jews, that people was returning home as sovereign citizens in their own independent state."

Way to go Levey Day School!