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Monday, April 10, 2017
GlobalPittsburgh To Host Second Annual Immigrant Entrepreneur Celebration! Now It's Time to Nominate!
Friday, March 10, 2017
Pittsburgh’s leaders pledge support for newcomers
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| GlobalPittsburgh Immigrant Entrepreneur 2016 Awardees |
In two
forums recently, Mayor Bill Peduto of Pittsburgh has made it clear that the
city welcomes newcomers from other countries: “we wanted to let them know the
city has their back”.
At a Feb. 21
gathering at the home of Gisele and John Fetterman, mayor of Braddock, Mayor
Peduto signed a “shared commitment” which included a pledge to welcome to the region “all nationalities, faiths, and
cultures” not only for reasons of morality and justice, but also because “our
economy, our institutions, our culture, our vibrancy…are all strengthened when
we uphold the rights of all of our neighbors”.
In addition to the two Mayors Fetterman and Peduto, the declaration is
signed by The Most Rev. David Zubick, Roman Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh, The
Rt. Rev. Dorsey McConnell, Episcopal bishop of Pittsburgh, Rabbi Aaron Benjamin
Bisno of Rodef Shalom, Imam Abdu’Semih Tádéşe of the Islamic Center of
Pittsburgh, United States Senator Bob Casey, Allegheny County Executive Rich
Fitzgerald, and others.
The Braddock meeting was followed on March 10 with
a meeting between Mayor Peduto, Pittsburgh police chief Scott Schubert, and
other city officials with representatives of local Latino, Muslim, Turkish and
Sudanese and refugee organizations. Mr.
Peduto acknowledged the anxiety and “concern coming from the Latino community
and the Muslim community”, drawing attention to the efforts of the city’s
Welcoming Pittsburgh initiative to create an hospitable environment for
newcomers.
GlobalPittsburgh will hold the Second Annual
Immigrant Entrepreneur Celebration in December 2017, building on the success of
2016’s event where, with Mila Sanina of Public Source and Susanne Cook of Cohen
& Grigsby presiding, awards were presented in six categories to immigrants
who have made a notable contribution to the city’s economic and cultural life: Dorit
Brauer, Masa Uzicanin, Edgar Alvarez, Viviana Altieri, Dr. Jacques
Chelly, Anne Flynn Schlicht, Luis von Ahn and Mikhail Khalil.
Friday, December 9, 2016
GlobalPittsburgh Holds Immigrant Entrepreneur Celebration
* Thirty-two professionals and entrepreneurs, from every sector of the local economy and every corner of the globe, have been nominated for awards in six categories.
* Mila Sanina, executive director of PublicSource, will be Master of Ceremonies for the event. Formerly deputy editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, she is originally from Kazakhstan but “Pittsburgh owns her heart”.
* Susanne Cook, Senior Partner and chair of the International Business Group at Cohen & Grigsby, will present the awards.
* Councilman Dan Gilman will present a City Council proclamation at the event in honor of the nominees, award winners and GlobalPittsburgh.
The event will showcase the talent, tenacity and innovative thinking of the “newest newcomers” who have made Pittsburgh their home and helped to make it a world-class city. The awards, for lifetime achievement and in six area categories, were determined by a panel of four judges: Terri Glueck, Innovation Works; Max F. Miller, Raise Your Spirits; Rachel Mauer, German American Chamber of Commerce, Inc., and Babs Carryer, Innovation Institute, University of Pittsburgh.
The evening is sponsored by the law firm of Cohen & Grigsby, the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing, Istanbul Sofra restaurant, Aesthetic Skin & Laser Center, Brother's Brother Foundation, Highmark and Carnegie Mellon University.
By the time of the 1910 US Census one in five Pittsburghers was foreign-born, and it’s a rare Pittsburgher who can’t share a family story about coming to American and Pittsburgh. Some of our most famous citizens, such as Andy Warhol, Andrew Carnegie, and August Wilson, were immigrants or the children of immigrants.
Mayor William Peduto has said, "I'd like to thank GlobalPittsburgh for creating this opportunity to celebrate and recognize immigrants as valuable contributors to the economic and cultural landscape of our city. Our history is rooted in the contributions of immigrants and our future is based on the innovation of what the next generation of immigrants will bring”.
“We are excited to recognize the achievements of some of the many entrepreneurs who have enriched our region with their talents and tenacity,” said John W. Hindman, GlobalPittsburgh Board Chairman. “We are a region that was built on the hard work and innovation of immigrants, and that continues to this day thanks to newer generations of immigrant entrepreneurs.”
Since 1959, GlobalPittsburgh (founded as the Pittsburgh Council for International Visitors) has cultivated a local network of resources and created valuable contacts for the region worldwide through its work with federally-funded international professional exchanges. GlobalPittsburgh has a network of over 500 members, volunteers, and citizen diplomats who ensure that visiting leaders’ and students’ feel welcome in the Greater Pittsburgh community. For more information about GlobalPittsburgh programs, please visit www.globalpittsburgh.org, call 412.392.4513, or send an email to info@globalpittsburgh.org.
To learn more about the Immigrant Entrepreneur Celebration or to register to attend, please contact Nadya Kessler at nkessler@globalpittsburgh.org or call 412.392.4513.
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
International Peace Day and the Japan Peace Bell
By Monte Bohna, PhD, Coordinator, Study Pittsburgh Initiative
One of the most unusual gestures in the cause of
international peace has been recalled with the sound of a tolling bell in the
heart of New York City.
Today, September 21, is International Peace Day, first
declared in 1982 by resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, and “devoted
to commemorating and strengthening the ideals of peace both within and among
all nations and peoples”.
Little noticed in the United States – and agonizingly
distant to the people enduring any of the twenty-nine armed conflicts now
raging around the world – International Peace Day is traditionally marked at
the United Nations Headquarters with a ceremony during which the UN Secretary
General strikes the Japan Peace Bell, the centerpiece of a garden and pagoda
built in the style of a Shinto shrine on the grounds of the UN complex.
The bell was given on behalf of the Japanese people to the
United Nations in 1954, at the initiative of Chiyoji Nakagawa, mayor of
Uwajima. The bronze for the bell,
inscribed in Japanese characters with the phrase “Long live absolute world
peace”, was made from coins collected by children from delegates of the 60
nations represented at the 1951 Paris General Conference of the United Nations.
The bell normally sounds on only one other occasion each year, on Earth Day,
the day of the vernal equinox or first day of spring. In the half-century since the presentation of
the UN bell the World Peace Bell Association, founded by Nakagawa, has endeavored
to raise awareness of the world peace movement by presenting Japanese temple
bells in sixteen countries around the world, including several each in Japan
and the United States.
International Peace Day is not the only commemoration dedicated
to the promotion of peace around the world.
In 1967 Pope Paul VI, inspired by his predecessor John XXIII’s
encyclical Pacem in terris, proclaimed
“World Day of Peace” as a feast day of the Roman Catholic calendar on January
1, a date it shares with another Roman Catholic feast day, the Solemnity of
Mary Holy Mother of God.
However, perhaps the best-known, and certainly the most
widely-observed, commemoration of world peace is tied forever to the “war to
end all wars”. On November 11, 1918, at
the eleventh hour – 11 a.m. – the armistice
negotiated on a rail-siding in the Forest of Compiègne took effect, ending the First World War on the western
front.
In the United States, by proclamation of Pres. Wilson, the
commemoration of November 11 was originally known as “Armistice Day”. From 1938, by Act of Congress, the day was officially
dedicated “to the cause of world peace”.
After the Korean War, the act was amended to rename the day “Veterans
Day”, signifying, in the words of President Eisenhower’s official proclamation
that year, “homage to the veterans of all [American] wars who have contributed
so much to the preservation of this Nation”.
Since that time, the focus of the commemoration has tended to rest on the
specifically military “sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly”,
replacing - if not quite eclipsing - the hope for universal world peace which
was prominent in the early decades of Armistice Day observance in the U.S.
Conversely, in many countries formerly part of the British
empire, “Remembrance Day” is a generally-observed occasion, marked by the
wearing of red lapel poppies by all generations and walks of life, and by a
minute of silence at the stroke of 11:00.
According to the Manchester
Guardian, the very first minute of silence, on 11 November 1919, brought
the city to a reverential halt:
The tram cars glided
into stillness, motors ceased to cough and fume, and stopped dead…Someone took
off his hat, and with a nervous hesitancy the rest of the men bowed their heads
also. Here and there an old soldier could be detected slipping unconsciously
into the posture of 'attention'. An elderly woman, not far away, wiped her
eyes, and the man beside her looked white and stern. Everyone stood very still…The
hush deepened. It had spread over the whole city and become so pronounced as to
impress one with a sense of audibility. It was a silence which was almost pain
... And the spirit of memory brooded over it all.
Today, students and public servants crossing the lawns of
Queen’s Park and the University of Toronto Student Union, to whom the First
World War is a matter of family stories and grainy old photos, slow their pace
in the name of peace, until the minute’s silence is finally broken by the
carillon of the bells of Soldier’s Tower.
Even London’s Heathrow Airport adjusts its arrivals and departures
before and after 11:00 each year on Remembrance Sunday, in order to preserve
the silence.
Among continental European countries peace commemorations
are, unsurprisingly, often connected in one way or another with the traumatic
events of the first half of the 20th century. In France and Belgium, the November 11th
Armistice is commemorated annually both as a day of hope for future peace and
in memory of the human cost of the two world wars, and in both countries the
role of military forces are highlighted in a way similar to the United
States. Italy follows in the same
tradition, with a focus on military service, except that its “Giorno
dell'Unità Nazionale e delle Forze Armate” is held on November 4, the day of the end of fighting on the Alpine
front, rather than November 11th.
In Germany, Volkstrauertag,
the Day of National Mourning, is dedicated both to German military casualties
and also to victims of violent oppression, is marked by a solemn address from the
ceremonial head of state to the Bundestag, followed by the singing of the
national anthem and I hatt‘ einen Kamaraden, the German
equivalent of “Last Post“ or “Taps“. Instead
of the date of the 1918 Armistice, still a sensitive and contentious memory to
many Germans, Volkstrauertag is observed on the second Sunday before Advent, in
mid-November.
GlobalPittsburgh Immigrant Entrepreneur Celebration and Award Ceremony is at the Rivers Club on December 14, 2016
The Immigrant Entrepreneur Celebration will take place on
the evening of Wednesday, December 14, 2016 at the Rivers Club. Mayor William
Peduto has been invited to speak at the event. "I'd like to thank
GlobalPittsburgh for creating this opportunity to celebrate and recognize
immigrants as valuable contributors to the economic and cultural landscape of
our city”, said Mayor Peduto. “Our
history is rooted in the contributions of immigrants and our future is based on
the innovation the next generation of immigrants will bring”.
This new annual event will showcase the wide range of
enterprises and services in the Pittsburgh region provided by immigrant
entrepreneurs. “We are excited to recognize the achievements of some of the
many entrepreneurs who have enriched our region with their talents and
tenacity,” said John W. Hindman, GlobalPittsburgh Board
Chairman. “We are a region that was built on the hard work and
innovation of immigrants and that continues to this day thanks to newer
generations of immigrant entrepreneurs.”
From a pool of
ninety people suggested by friends, family and colleagues, forty individuals
have been nominated for six awards.
Reflecting the truly global origins of new Pittsburghers, the forty
nominees represent every continent and all the major sectors of the city’s
economy. The evening will begin with a
reception in honor of several new Pittsburghers who have made notable
contributions to the city’s life, followed by dinner and the presentation of
the awards.
Since 1959, GlobalPittsburgh has developed a network of valuable
local and worldwide resources for the Pittsburgh region through its work with
federally-funded international professional and educational exchanges.
GlobalPittsburgh depends on the support of more than 500 annual members,
volunteers, and citizen diplomats who help to connect visiting leaders and
students to the community.
To learn more about registering to attend the Immigrant
Entrepreneur Celebration, please contact Nadya Kessler at nkessler@globalpittsburgh.org or
call 412.392.4513.
For more information about GlobalPittsburgh programs, please visit www.globalpittsburgh.org, call 412.392.4513, or email info@globalpittsburgh.org.
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Black and Gold - With a Red Stripe
Coordinator, Study Pittsburgh Initiative
From its earliest days, Pittsburgh’s “Black and Gold” colors have had a line of red running between them: the red stripe of the Schwarz-Rot-Gold national flag of Germany. People like Alethea Wieland, Suzi Pegg, and the city’s German honorary consul Paul Overby (not to mention that most redoubtable of the city’s marketing tools, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra!) are trying to paint that red stripe in the Pittsburgh Black and Gold as bright and wide as possible by encouraging economic links between Pittsburgh and Germany. And they have met with remarkable success: 77 German firms employ more than 10,000 people in the Pittsburgh region and the number is steadily climbing. But that presence rests on a German connection to Pittsburgh which extends almost to the earliest origins of the city; even in the 1760s a handful of “Pennsylvania Dutch” German settlers and traders lived in the vicinity of Fort Pitt, and in the first US census of 1790, half of the twenty-seven heads of families recorded as living in "Pittsburgh Town" bore German surnames.
Moreover, one of the most important figures in the
early days of the steel industry, basis of the city's prosperity for more
than 150 years, was a German immigrant, Dr. Peter Shoenberger.
Shoenberger was born in Hannover in 1782, the son of Johan George Schoenberger
(Peter dropped the "c"), who himself came from the village of Ober
Mossau in the county of Erbach, one of the many micro-principalities of the Holy Roman
Empire. Having arrived in Philadelphia in 1785, by the time of the father's
death in 1815 the family lived in Huntingdon County where Shoenberger’s uncle,
also called Peter, had founded the town of Petersburg, a mountain-valley
village whose setting must have reminded the Schoenbergers of their Odenwald Heimat.
While studying medicine in the Lancaster practice
of Dr. Samuel Fahnestock, the younger Peter Shoenberger was involved in the
iron industry in Huntingdon County as early as 1817, when he built an ironworks
there eventually called the Juniata Iron Mill.
(Shoenberger’s union of medicine and entrepreneurial technology may have
seemed less unusual in his time than now: Dr. Fahnestock, his medical mentor,
also happened to be the inventor of the first soda machine, patented in 1819).
In 1824 Shoenberger moved to Pittsburgh and soon
afterwards built the city’s first rolling mill, the Juniata Iron and Steel Works,
on the left bank of the Allegheny River between 11th and 16th
Streets, complimented by 1830 with a warehouse on Wood St. Having formed a partnership in the late 1840s
with another early pioneer of steel manufacture (and his namesake), Thomas Shoenberger
Blair, he eventually united his Huntingdon and Pittsburgh operations under the
title of the Shoenberger Steel Company.
Shoenberger had business interests in several other firms as well, among
them Johnstown’s Cambria Iron Company, of which he was co-founder and president
By the time of his death in 1854, Shoenberger was
known as the “Iron King” of Pennsylvania and one of the wealthiest men in the
commonwealth. Apart from his extensive
business interests in the steel industry, he invested in stagecoaches and
canals across the state and was one of Pennsylvania’s largest landowners with more
than 100,000 acres of timber, ore and limestone. He built a mansion near Highland Park and helped
to found both Lutheran and Episcopalian churches in Pittsburgh.
The experience of later generations of German
immigrants arriving in Pittsburgh was very different. At the same time that
Peter Shoenberger was establishing the foundation of a steel business which
made him a leading figure in the city, Michael Friedrich Radke, eventually and
briefly his employee, was facing an uncertain future in the Prussia of King
Friedrich Wilhelm III. The son of a farmer whose village, near the Baltic port
of Stettin (Szczecin), had been burned to the ground in the wars of Napoleon,
Radke found work as a distiller, conscript soldier in a Prussian infantry
regiment and finally, after moving to Berlin, gardener at the royal park of the
Tiergarten in charge “of the flower
beds near the goldfish pond and the Floraplatz”.
The reasons which made Radke decide to emigrate might
well have been familiar to Shoenberger’s father Johan sixty years earlier:
I worked day and night and walked in many places, spent many a sleepless
night, and the money I earned there was scarcely enough to feed my family. At
the same time I saw thousands emigrate to different parts of the world, to
America and Australia. When thinking about it more closely, I realized that all
of these emigrations were nothing more than the fault of the poverty that
progressed with gigantic steps. And so within me, too, rose the thought to
emigrate!
Leaving
from the North Sea port of Bremerhaven in the first days of March 1848, just in
time to hear rumors of revolution in France before their ship sailed, the Radke
family endured a two-month voyage in a vessel packed with 226 emigrants. Finally reaching Baltimore on May 1st,
Radke learned “to my horror and astonishment” that the revolution had spread
“all over Germany”, and that in his former home of Berlin, “such terrible
things happened on the 18th and 19th of March, 1848, that many thousands of
people lost their lives”. The street
fighting which claimed so many lives had begun when the army attempted to
disperse a mass demonstration in the Tiergarten, his former place of employment:
“I said”, writes Radke, “God be thanked that I'm not there”.
After
another lengthy and wearying journey by rail, canal boat, and finally “Stimmboth” (i.e. steamboat), the family
arrived in Pittsburgh in mid-May, whereupon Radke “immediately rented an
apartment and bought the necessary furniture, but I didn't have any work until
the 3rd of July” when he was hired on at the Schoenberger steel mill, at the
weekly salary of $4.50. Like many new
arrivals to the city who found work in the mills, even after a life inured to
hardship and manual labor, the demands of heavy industry in its first era could
be shocking: “it was heavy hard work, work such as I had never done before”.
Nor was it a certain route to prosperity: “every month I had to pay $4.50 rent.
I worked in the Schoeneberg [sic] Steelmill until the 15th of November, 1849,
but with my daily work and earnings I was unable to save anything because both
rent and food cost too much”.
After
seventeen months’ work in his fellow countryman Shoenberger’s employ, Radke had
had enough: “since I couldn't make any progress in Pittsburgh, I decided to
choose something else, and that is farming. So on the 15th of November, 1849, I
traveled from Pittsburgh to the state of Indiana…There I rented land, and there
I lived after all better and made better progress.”
What,
after such a long and difficult journey, must have been for the Radke family a
disappointing – perhaps bitterly disappointing – experience of life
in Pittsburgh was certainly not unique. At the industrial
revolution’s ground zero in the 19th century, life was harsh for Pittsburgh’s
immigrant workforce. Fortunately, while working conditions are generally a
great deal better than Michael Radke encountered in the steel mills of the
1840s, the enormous potential for prosperity which steel represented for
Pittsburgh then has been renewed in the lively emerging-technology, medical and
educational sectors of the local economy. And just
as fortunately, the German link in Pittsburgh’s past, reflected in the two
very different experiences of Peter Shoenberger and Michael Radke, remains just
as strong today, with the promise of growth and benefits to share between our
Black-Gold city and the country of the Black-Red-Gold flag which has
contributed so much to Pittsburgh’s story.
Sources:
Homer T. Rosenberger, "Migrations of the
Pennsylvania Germans to Western Pennsylvania, Pt. II", Western Pennsylvania Historical
Magazine, v. 54, no. 1 (1971), 58-76.
Quentin R. Skrabec, Jr, The
World’s Richest Neighborhood: How Pittsburgh’s East Enders Forged American Industry
(Algora: New York, 2010).
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Win two Delta tickets to Europe at GlobalPittsburgh International Barbecue on June 25!
GlobalPittsburgh will host its second annual International
Barbecue on June 25 at Bayardstown Social Club. We are keeping the admission
minimal (only $5 for members and $7 for non-members until May 31) to encourage
more people to come celebrate the diverse cultures in the Pittsburgh
region. At the event, we will be selling chances to win 2 round-trip airline tickets
to any destination served by Delta in Europe!
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| Gail Shrott, Director of International Leaders Program, GlobalPittsburgh, Bill Hennessey (winner of 2 Delta tickets), and John Hindman, GlobalPittsburgh's Chairman of the Board at our International Barbecue last year |
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