Did Mike Bloomberg Declare Hitler’s Birthday Jewish Heritage Day?

Yesterday’s square on the calendar of Jewish symbolism was fully booked. It was Hitler’s birthday, a date many of us might prefer not to be aware of but which has sunk into our collective consciousness as a dark, smoky holiday of sorts. This year, it also happened to be Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel Independence Day.

So why would New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg decide to also proclaim the date Jewish American Heritage Day, as a media alert from organizers of Jewish American Heritage Month announced?

Turns out, he didn’t.

A spokesman for the mayor, after initially confirming the proclamation, finally and definitively stated that no such announcement was made. “The only proclamation we have is about May being Jewish American Heritage Month,” said Evelyn Erskine in the mayor’s press office.

“It was just a miscommunication,” Abby Schwartz, the national coordinator of Jewish American Heritage Month, said when contacted by Tablet Magazine. She’d also announced the apparently nonexistent proclamation at a press event yesterday at a Manhattan synagogue. “We were having the event that day and somewhere along the line it got miscommunicated about Jewish American Heritage Day,” Schwartz told Tablet. “That is not accurate and I recant it.”