Roy Exum: Anti-Semitism Is Now Here

  • Wednesday, May 6, 2015
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

To those of the Jewish faith, the celebration of Passover every year is one of freedom. The sacred holidays, held in early April, commemorate the Exodus out of Egypt when Moses led the tribe of Israel from slavery to freedom. I believe it is one of the greatest stories in the Bible. On the other hand, the Jewish people of today are hardly free. Globally, anti-Semitic attacks in 2014 were 40 percent higher than the year before.

So before we Christians shrug and say, “I’m glad it ain’t us,” please know that just before the Holocaust Day of Remembrance this year, when our Jewish leaders gathered in Nashville a couple of weeks ago, some fool full of hatred fired a bullet into the beautiful West End Synagogue.

Luckily, no one was injured, but as the Tennessean newspaper reported, it was a shot that echoed all over Nashville. Hatred is here.

I cannot imagine hating anyone because of the color of their skin, their faith, or their nationality. While the world should have learned a brutal lesson from the Holocaust itself, it is clearly evident senseless prejudice is again on a roll. As Keel Hunt wrote in the Tennessean, “The shooting was a violent crime against a house of worship, faith and prayer. It was a crime against every house.”

The writer talked to Nashville Rabbi Joshua Kullock. “We fully trust the police…I know they are taking care of us,” he said, but he also had a request. “I also think it is important for you to write about what happened…not just the news story, but to shape the conversation about what kind of Nashville (and America) we want. The conversation is how we make the city safe and welcoming at the same time.”

Rabbi Kullock also said “we” – all of us -- must make a choice. “It’s about the world we are building for those that come after us.”

In 1958 – that was 57 years ago – the Jewish Community Center in Nashville was bombed, and shortly after, Rabbi William Silverman’s wife answered the phone to hear a venomous voice of a man claiming to be “a member of the Confederate Union” spew his racist filth, admit the heinous act, and threaten a federal judge. (The judge had declared the schools would be segregated and Rabbi Silverman had supported the decision.)

Almost immediately, then-Governor Frank Clement spoke for every citizen in Tennessee when he countered, “I am shocked and sickened at the thought anyone in Tennessee would commit the sacrilege of wantonly attempting to destroy a building dedicated to the brotherhood of man.”

Around the world today the anti-Semitism is even worse. A study out of Israel’s Tel Aviv University showed an increase of 212 more attacks on Jews between 2013 and 2014. “The overall feeling among many Jewish people is one of living in an intensifying anti-Jewish environment that has become not only insulting and threatening, but outright dangerous, and that they are facing an explosion of hatred towards them as individuals, their communities, and Israel, as a Jewish state.”

This is absolutely crazy! In Holland last year anti-Semitic attacks increased 70 percent. Rabbi Benjamin Jacobs, noting heavier security, said that’s like taking aspirin for a headache. “It’s not solving the problem, it is pushing away the headache. So how do we solve the problem?"

“Education – we should make sure in schools that children get the right education. There are certain schools where we do not talk about the Holocaust anymore and that should not be tolerated,” said Rabbi Jacobs, who lives south of Amsterdam and, a humble man, has endured both verbal and physical abuse in recent years.

In France, where four people were murdered in a kosher supermarket in January, the bigotry is the worst. Two Jews were assaulted by a gang of about 40 thugs in Paris last Friday in a brazen attack at 2:30 in the afternoon so crowds could watch. Another was badly beaten leaving a synagogue last Saturday.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls just announced a $125 million action plan to halt the hatred. “Racism, anti-Semitism, hatred of Muslims, foreigners, homophobia are increasing in an unbearable manner,” he said, noting anti-Muslim attacks had increased six time more in the first three months of this year compared to last. Jewish attacks have doubled in the last year.

What is worse is that last year a whopping 7,000 Jews emigrated from France to Israel and hundreds of other French-speaking Jews are fleeing to Quebec rather than learning a new language. “It’s all about safety,” said one official. “When you see armed policemen and soldiers with machine guns at Jewish schools and synagogues it only heightens the sense of insecurity.”

Not long ago I read a wonderful adaptation of a speech FBI Director James B. Comey made at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum where he revealed it is now a requirement of every agent to visit the museum and fully understand what it represents. “It was the most horrific display in world history of inhumanity, one that simply defies words and challenges meaning.”

And the most frightening thing about it? The director said, “Good people helped murder millions…our very humanity made us capable of, even susceptible to, surrendering our individual moral authority to a group where it was hijacked by evil…they convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do. That’s what people do. And that should truly frighten us.”

Maybe that is what frightens me the most. How could 40 people in Paris, who may go to church and may have kids and may be “good people,” join in a ruthless mob to batter two 20-year-olds because they were wearing yarmulkes? And why would anyone become so twisted as to fire a bullet into a Nashville synagogue?

* * *

Martin Niemoller was a Lutheran pastor in Germany who was an early supporter of Adolph Hitler but when Hitler insisted on the supremacy of the state over religion, Niemoller became the leader of a group of clergy who opposed the Nazi regime. In 1937 the pastor was placed in a concentration camp and was finally released from infamous Dachau when the Allies freed him in 1945. This is the poem he then wrote:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

* * *

Anti-Semitism is here. Here we must stop it.

royexum@aol.com

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