Murders of Jewish Women, Men, and Children--Then and Now

Nazis hurried to murder more Jews as armies arrived to liberate camps.

Today is Yom HaShoah, Israel's Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day.

Most southern Californians will not give a thought today to the slaughter of six million Jews during World War II in Nazi Germany.

Yet the Holocaust lives on among us.

One skirmish in the ongoing war against Jews occurred last Saturday when a 60-year-old woman in Poway CA was killed for being in a synagogue on the last day of Passover.  Poway is a community along Interstate 15 just north of San Diego and south of Escondido.

Another drama unfolded in a Los Angeles federal courtroom when Judge John F. Walter ruled that the painting of Paris owned by Lilly Cassirer in Berlin in the 1940s now rightfully belongs to a museum in Spain.  The Nazi government of Germany took the painting from Lilly "in exchange for an exit visa out of Berlin," explains an editorial in the Los Angeles Times today. 

That exchange saved Lilly from deportation and murder in a gas chamber.  She survived, and her granddaughter lives in La Mesa, a little closer to San Diego than Poway.  The Cassirer family has been fighting for twenty years to reclaim the painting worth $30 or more. 

Sunset at Yad VaShem, January 15, 2019

Thank you to the editorial board of the LA Times for demanding justice for the family of a Holocaust survivor and publishing this stand on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Judge Walter wrote that the museum should return the painting but that he could not require it to "comply with its moral commitments."  If not Judge Walter, who?

"The museum could offer to pay the family in order to keep the painting," the editorial concludes.  "But refusing to recognize any obligation to Cassirer’s heirs is shameful."

Israel's Holocaust Museum

Thus the atrocities of the Nazis continue in southern California today, along with surfing and traffic jams and millions of people just living their lives. 

The right to life is stolen from Jews, and a painting once stolen is not returned. 

The People of Israel Live On in Story and Song

Hana Szenes, poet turned paratrooper,
captured and killed by Nazis, 1944

When I went to my Hebrew class tonight, the instructor spoke about tomorrow being Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.  

It's on the 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, the day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.  This year Nisan 27 falls on May 2.

On January 27 I had observed International Holocaust Remembrance Day, set up by the UN to mark the deaths of 6 million Jews and 11 million others.  I learned that European nations remember the Holocaust on various days, often related to the liberation of specific concentration camps.  

But somehow this year's Israeli day to remember martyrs and military heroes had escaped my attention until I arrived for class, and then I felt slammed in the face with memories.  

I had visited Israel for the first time this past January.  Twice I walked through Yad VaShem, Israel's holocaust museum, an emotionally taxing experience.  In the bookstore there I bought five books of survivor stories.  

Afterward I spent two months reading those survivor stories and one book centered on the diary of a girl who didn't survive, Rutka Laskier, "the Polish Anne Frank."  I had already read the survivor stories of Eva Brown and Eli Wiezel, as well as the diary of Anne Frank, of course.  

Thus I have been immersed in the poignant accounts of entire families uprooted and moved first to ghettoes, then to concentration camps, and finally to extermination camps.  (The National Socialist Party in Germany had this bizarre plan to eradicate an entire race of people.)

While parents, grandparents, and siblings were sent to the gas chamber, anyone young enough and strong enough to work in slave labor camps had a chance to save his or her life.  Others managed to evade the round-ups for transportation to camps, and still others actually escaped from camps, even from Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Our normal class routine was set aside as we discussed people killed by the Nazis and ways that Israelis and others remember them now, some seventy years later. All of Israel observes a few moments of silence at 10 am, followed by the laying of a wreath at Yad VaShem.  In Poland at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, a March of the Living is held each year on this day.

Aliza Klainman, my Hebrew teacher, briefly told her own parents' stories.  Both are survivors.  Her father was in a labor camp while her mother was in Auschwitz-Birkenau.  

Then we watched Israeli Holocaust survivors, their children, and their grandchildren singing Am Yisrael Chai "The people of Israel live--Yes, I'm still alive" last year for Holocaust Remembrance Day.  A group called Koolulam brought these 600 people together for this recording.  After reading so much about the Holocaust, it's very moving to see these faces, old and young, of Jewish people who have survived.

Alive, alive, alive
Yes, I'm still alive!
This is the song which grandfather
Sang yesterday to father
And today I [sing].
I'm still alive, alive, alive
The people of Israel live
This is the song which grandfather
Sang yesterday to father
And today I [sing]!

Chai, chai, chai
Ken, ani od chai!
Ze hashir shesaba
Shar etmol l'aba -
V'hayom ani.
Ani od chai, chai, chai
Am Yisrael chai
Ze hashir shesaba
Shar etmol l'aba
V'hayom ani.

We also watched Ofra Haza, a well-known Israeli singer, perform "Eli, Eli." via YouTube.

This recording is from the Shecunat Hatikva Workshop Album "Atik Noshan" released in 1977. It is one of Ofra's best renditions of this classic song. It really talks to your neshama [soul]. The Hungarian poet and paratrooper Hana Senesh wrote this song in Hebrew in her secret diary on 1942 right before she went on a military mission to attack Germany. She was captured and executed in 1944. In Hebrew :
Eli, Eli Shelo yigamer le'olam: Hachol vehayam Rishrush shel hamayim Berak hashamayim Tefilat ha'adam. In English :
My God, My God May these things never end: The sand and the sea The rustle of the water The lightning in the sky Human prayer.

Anti-Semitism in Poway

Ruger AR-15 for sale -- semi-automatic rifle

I am disgusted to know that a young man went out to hunt and kill Jews with a semi-automatic rifle on Shabbat, the last day of Passover, in Poway, CA.  

I am embarrassed that he was part of a tiny right-wing splinter group of a Christian church.  These nuts split off from the Presbyterian Church-USA in the 1930s, and the PCUSA is a mainline denomination of which I'm a member. 

I grieve for the death of Lori Gilbert Kaye.

I am heartened to read the words of Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein in the New York Times on Monday.  He must have been writing on the day after the shooting.  Where did he get the strength and presence of mind to do that?  

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/opinion/rabbi-chabad-poway-antisemitism.html

What a great move by the NYT to invite Rabbi Goldstein to write a commentary for the opinion and editorial pages.  My husband, John Arthur, pointed out to me the quick-thinking of some editor to offer this platform to the wounded rabbi.  John used to work as front-page editor for the Los Angeles Times.

To kill anyone--Christian, Muslim, Jewish--in a house of worship is horrific.  It breaks every human value, every minimum level of behavior we teach our kids.  

• Share your toys--your space--your city and country.
• Show respect for those who disagree with you.
• Treat others the way you would like to be treated.

To be shot for being Jewish or Christian or Muslim or black or white should have stopped years ago.

Thank you to the wise editors of the NYT, and thank you to Rabbi Goldstein for these words:

 "I pray that my missing finger serves as a constant reminder to me. A reminder that every single human being is created in the image of God; a reminder that I am part of a people that has survived the worst destruction and will always endure..."

Thank you to the Creator that the attacker's gun jammed leaving fifty bullets unused, and thank you to the two men who rushed toward the shooter to stop him.

One blood-curdling aspect of the shooting is that the 19-year-old shooter was raised in an Orthodox Presbyterian Church-- a small evangelical denomination founded to counter liberalism in mainline Presbyterianism,  as the Washington Post describes it in a report by Julie Zauzmer that appeared today, May 1.  My friends in a Hebrew class I take at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles alerted me to reports of this connection of the shooter to a Presbyterian church.

Let me tell you some other things about the Orthodox Presbyterian Church:

• The OPC does not ordain women as pastors, elders, or even deacons--though the PCUSA has had women pastors for over sixty years.
• They are anti-gay--whereas the mainline PCUSA ordains gay pastors.
• They are anti-abortion--they don't want women to have legal access to ending a pregnancy.
• They have only 270 churches in the US and some 30,000 members--whereas the PCUSA has over 10,000 congregations and 1.7 million members.  

An anti-Semitic shooter like this would have to come from one of these screwball splinter groups of right-wing Christians if he was going to be associated with any church at all.

However, the roots of anti-Semitism are evident in the New Testament.  In the first and second centuries, groups of Jews who followed Jesus and those who didn't were bitter rivals.  The Jesus-following Jews started converting Gentiles, and the new converts started blaming all Jews for the death of Jesus.  As time passed, many Christians tried to overlook the central fact that Jesus himself was a Jew.  These are the roots of anti-Semitism, pogroms, and the Holocaust.

And in fact, tomorrow, May 2, is Yom HaShoah--Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day in Israel for the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis.  (The UN observes Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, and European countries observe various days, often related to the liberation of a concentration camp.)

For a sketch of the rise of anti-Semitism currently in the US and elsewhere, see this article in Vox by Zack Beauchamp.  

It's going to take a long time to overcome all these hatreds, but there's one thing we can do now, as New Zealand has done: Ban the sale of semi-automatic rifles in the US. 

If we keep selling these machine guns, we will keep burying their victims.