Holocaust

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A liberal rabbi's cry: 'We've lost so much. Let us not lose our damn minds ...'

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A liberal rabbi's cry: 'We've lost so much. Let us not lose our damn minds ...'

The graffiti on Cornell University sidewalks was stunning, with messages proclaiming, "Israel is fascist," "Zionism = genocide" and "F*** Israel."

Then antisemitic screeds appeared on the Cornell forum at Greekrank, a multi-campus website about fraternities and sororities. This included threats to the Ivy League school's prominent Jewish community, with detailed references to the Center for Jewish Living.

Among the milder posts was this from a "kill jews" account: "allahu akbar! from the river to the sea, palestine will be free! liberation by any means necessary!" A "jew evil" post added: "if you see a jewish 'person' on campus follow them home and slit their throats. rats need to be eliminated from cornell."

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul met with students, promising that "New York State would do everything possible to find the perpetrator who threatened a mass shooting and antisemitic violence on campus." Then a Cornell student, a former campus safety officer, was arrested and charged in connection with the threats.

This followed waves of international protests and rioting, with the Anti-Defamation League noting that antisemitic activity in America rose 400% after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, compared with the same weeks last year.

The news only seems to get worse whenever Jews venture online, even when digging into their social-media feeds, said Rabbi Sharon Brous, in a viral sermon at her progressive IKAR ("essence") congregation in Los Angeles. If the Holocaust is the "dominant psychic reality of the Jew," it's impossible not to view news reports through "Shoah-colored glasses."

It's hard to tell reality from brutal satire, especially when signs of "genocidal antisemitism" emerge from some of America's most elite institutions, she said.

“This week we entered the upside-down world, when a retrograde, regressive, totalitarian, misogynistic, messianic, terrorist regime became -- for the time being -- the hero of the left," said Brous, in a sermon that opened with a warning that parents might want to take their children out of the sanctuary.

"How could it be? To justify barbarity in the service of decolonization and the liberation of Palestine requires more than an ideological commitment to Palestinian freedom. It demands mental and emotional contortion that render a person fundamentally unable to see the humanity in a Jew. …


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Reuters should correct a correction? Polish rite to beatify family of nine killed by Nazis

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Reuters should correct a correction? Polish rite to beatify family of nine killed by Nazis

Does anyone remember newspaper “corrections”?

Let me explain the concept to younger GetReligion readers. Back in the days of ink-on-paper news, if a news organization made a mistake, the editors used to print an actual correction, noting the error and providing the correct information. Then, early in the online era, they would add a “correction” blurb at the top of a story and then insert a detailed correction at the end (or some variation on these items).

Then some, not all, news organizations simply started correcting mistakes — in the never-ending flow of online copy — without admitting that they made these mistakes in the first place. Thus, savvy news readers began making screenshots of errors they spotted, knowing that this was the only definitive way to prove the error ever existed.

Now, we have something really strange going on in the following Reuters news report: “Catholic Church to beatify Polish family, including new-born baby, killed by Nazis.”

If you follow Catholic Twitter, it appears that there were errors in an earlier version of this story.

Maybe. It’s hard to tell.

Then again, the current version of the story (as I wrote this) appears to contain a clash between two different accounts of this beatification story.

Start here: Note the “including new-born baby” reference in the headline.Then, let’s work through this, starting with the lede from several days ago:

VATICAN CITY, Sept 5 (Reuters) — The Catholic Church is to beatify a Polish family of nine including a new-born baby who died at the hands of the Nazis during World War Two, the Vatican's saint-making department said.


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Plug-In: Listening to the voices of Holocaust survivors -- while we still can

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Plug-In: Listening to the voices of Holocaust survivors -- while we still can

Good morning, my friends!

I’m your Weekend Plug-in columnist, and I need to let you know I’ve checked all my files. I didn’t find any classified documents from that time I toured the White House. Whew!

So let’s dive right into the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith.

What To Know: The Big Story

It’s Jan. 27, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Today’s commemoration marks the 78th anniversary of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The United Nations “urges every member state to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism.”

Telling their stories: Toby Levy, now 89, was one of only 31 survivors in the town of Chodorow — then a part of Poland, now Ukraine.

“Like my father said, ‘God needed witnesses’” to the horror, Levy tells the Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner. “That’s why I don’t say ‘no’ to anybody, as tired as I am,” she says of opportunities to relate her experience.

Like Levy, David Schaecter, 93, knows he is running out of time, Religion News Service’s Yonat Shimron reports:

So this week he agreed to a weeklong recording of his life story using a new technology that will allow future generations to interact with a hologram-style likeness of him.

That story will form the base of an exhibit at Boston’s future Holocaust museum, which is scheduled to open in 2025.


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Plug-In: Why my old school district pulled 41 books from libraries -- including the Bible

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Plug-In: Why my old school district pulled 41 books from libraries -- including the Bible

I don’t remember the Keller Independent School District making national headlines when I was a student here in the 1980s. Even back then, this North Texas community — which began with a railroad extension from Fort Worth in the 1850s — was growing.

But in my time at Keller High School, then the district’s only high school, Keller was still more farm town than burgeoning suburb. We had one grocery store along U.S. 377 and no McDonald’s — I drove to nearby North Richland Hills to flip Quarter Pounders my junior and senior years.

An old gray water tower that proclaimed “Keller: Home of the Indians” greeted visitors to our town, referring to the school mascot. I edited the student newspaper The Wigwam, played sousaphone in the marching band and graduated 23rd in a class of about 300 in 1986. The next year, our former drum major, Michelle Royer, won the Miss USA Pageant — the biggest news I recall from those days.

My parents still live in the area, so I visit frequently and have witnessed Keller’s explosive growth, including multiple exits along Interstate 35.

This week, I’ve watched with interest as the Keller school district’s decision to remove 41 books from its libraries, including the Bible and an illustrated version of “Anne Frank’s Diary,” has made headlines everywhere from the Texas Tribune to the New York Times. What in the world is happening?

Basically this: The national culture wars have come to the local school board. And not just in Keller.

A previous Plug-in highlighted stories by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Emily Brindley and The Tennessean’s Liam Adams on school board candidates campaigning on Christianity and conservatism.

Each of the books pulled in Keller — including the Bible — was challenged by a parent, lawmaker or other community member in the last year, USA Today’s Jeanine Santucci reports.

The Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner points out:

“Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” is an illustrated version of the bestselling classic written by a young Jewish girl in the Netherlands as she and her family hid from Nazi occupation forces. The story ended when the Franks were captured and sent to concentration camps; Anne and her sister Margot died, most likely of typhus, in the Bergen-Belsen camp. Her father Otto survived and published the diary, which had been hidden by his secretary, after the war.


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Stories about Ukrainian Jews? Try a 1,000-year history, the Pale of Settlement and a global diaspora

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Stories about Ukrainian Jews? Try a 1,000-year history, the Pale of Settlement and a global diaspora

In August 1991, I visited Ukraine, then still a captive state within the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics. The USSR was on its last legs and western media pundits, academic experts and gloating politicians predicted its full collapse at any moment.

History was about to explode in risky and unpredictable ways. But that wasn’t my prime concern. I didn’t go there to cover a political revolution.

Rather, I was in Ukraine for two weeks to write about the historic Jewish community of Odessa, the Black Sea port city that was once one of the Russian empire’s Crown Jewels. Sadly, as I write, Odessa faces what’s likely to be a large-scale Russian military assault. Just don’t call it a war in the streets of Moscow.

My employer back then was the Baltimore Jewish Times. The paper sent me to Ukraine because Baltimore and Odessa were “sister cities.” (Meaning the Baltimore Jewish community committed itself to financially assisting Odessa’s then-largely poverty stricken Jews and to rebuilding Jewish community institutions largely destroyed under, first, the Nazis, and then the Soviet. To this day, Baltimore has maintained its commitment.)

The first story I wrote for the Jewish Times ran under the headline, “An Uncertain Future for the Jews of Odessa.” The headline (sorry, but I can’t find a working link to this story) reflected the situation as I experienced it.

One might say that it was also prescient, given the horrific situation there today. The current Russian invasion has reduced “uncertain” to a sad understatement.

My guess is most GetReligion readers have followed the Ukraine crisis closely. If so, I assume you’ve also noted the slew of sidebars about Ukraine’s Jewish population.

Why emphasize this angle when the Ukraine story has so many larger implications? Some historical background will help.

Prior to the start of the current civilian refugee exodus, Ukrainian Jews numbered an estimated 100,000-200,000 individuals, down from nearly a half-million in 1989. That’s quite a spread. But even if the actual number is at the estimate’s low end it still means Ukraine has one of the five largest Jewish communities in Europe.


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Plug-In: 'We have to stop hate' -- Why it's important to keep remembering the Holocaust

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Plug-In: 'We have to stop hate' -- Why it's important to keep remembering the Holocaust

To Anna Salton Eisen and her son, Aaron Eisen, International Holocaust Remembrance Day was personal.

George and Ruth Salton — Anna’s parents and Aaron’s grandparents — survived the Holocaust.

But many of the Eisens’ family members did not.

The United Nations Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that in 2005:

The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 — the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau — as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

On this annual day of commemoration, the UN urges every member state to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism and to develop educational programs to help prevent future genocides.

Last week, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution condemning Holocaust denial and “urging all nations and social media companies ‘to take active measures to combat antisemitism and Holocaust denial or distortion,’” The Associated Press’ Edith M. Lederer reports.

The new resolution sends a strong message, Aaron Eisen said Thursday in an online panel discussion hosted by ReligionUnplugged.com.

“This resolution had a lot of the same language as the resolution in 2005 about Holocaust Remembrance Day — that we need to combat Holocaust denial, teach the Holocaust to future generations to prevent genocide and also commend those places where the Nazi concentration camps have been preserved,” Aaron said.

“It's very important for the future generations to get this education — in the museums, at the camps, through the Arolsen Archives,” he added. “It's a very important day for our family and for all civilization to really take these lessons to heart.”

Anna Eisen, a founding member of Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, where the rabbi and three others were taken hostage recently, echoed her son.


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'Final solution' logic: Was there more to the Wannsee Conference than mere bureaucracy?

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'Final solution' logic: Was there more to the Wannsee Conference than mere bureaucracy?

It’s a blunt New York Times headline about a story that — here is the horror of it all — focused on German bureaucrats doing what governments pay bureaucrats to do, which is plan things.

Read this headline without shuddering: “80 Years Ago the Nazis Planned the ‘Final Solution.’ It Took 90 Minutes.”

Actually, the death squads of the Third Reich were already at work. The following summary material makes that clear:

The host on that January day in 1942 was Reinhard Heydrich, the powerful chief of the security service and the SS, who had been put in charge by Hermann Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man, of a “final solution” and coordinating it with other government departments and ministries.

The men Heydrich invited were senior civil servants and party officials. Most of them were in their 30s, nine of them had law degrees, more than half had Ph.D.s.

When they convened around a table overlooking Lake Wannsee, the genocide was already underway. The deportations of Jews and mass killings in eastern territories had begun the previous fall but the meeting that day laid the groundwork for a machinery of mass murder that would involve the entire state apparatus and ultimately millions of Germans in different roles.

Here is my question and, I will admit, that there is more to it than mere journalism. Is it possible to write about this subject in a way that does not discuss evil with a Big E?

I’ve been thinking about that question ever since I read historian John Toland’s “Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography.” That’s a 1,000-page classic that will earn you some stares as you read it, day after day, on mass transit. The key was that Toland interviewed many, many people who knew Hitler at different stages of his life. Thus, as the 1976Times review put it, the author allowed readers to “draw their own conclusions about what made Hitler as he was, ‘a warped archangel, a hybrid of Prometheus and Lucifer.’ “

In the end, however, Toland was forced to contemplate how a symbolic element of the Holocaust rulebook — “the choice” — was an offense to German efficiency.


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Plug-In: Five key story angles linked to Texas synagogue where hostages were taken

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Plug-In: Five key story angles linked to Texas synagogue where hostages were taken

When I first saw news on social media of a ranting man taking hostages at a Texas synagogue Saturday, I immediately clicked the link to an Associated Press report.

To my shock, I discovered that the standoff involved Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas.

I first wrote about that suburban congregation nearly two decades ago when I covered religion for AP in Dallas.

In 2004, I did a national feature on “frequent-flier rabbis” filling a need at then-fledgling Congregation Beth Israel and other small Jewish congregations across the nation. That same year, I wrote about Anna Salton Eisen, one of the congregation’s founders, and her Holocaust survivor father, George Lucius Salton.

Just this past October — 17 years later — Eisen trusted me to tell her family’s story again. I wrote a follow-up piece for AP on a surprising “reunion” between Eisen and the children of several Holocaust survivors who were in concentration camps together.

“I started this synagogue with two other families and am heartbroken and fearful,” Eisen wrote on Facebook on Saturday. “What has become of the world?”

I shared her status on my page and asked my friends to pray for a peaceful end. I was so relieved when Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker and two other hostages escaped unharmed Saturday night. A fourth hostage was released earlier. The FBI hostage rescue team shot the gunman.


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Thinking with Mark Pinsky: Did Florida museum link Holocaust and George Floyd? (Updated)

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Facts are such awkward things. This is especially true when dealing with complicated, emotional topics linked to religion.

Thus, there is a book by veteran reporter Mark Pinsky of Orlando, Fla., that religion-news specialists — or journalism students who are interested in the beat — needs to have on the shelf near their desks.

No, not “The Gospel According to the Simpsons” — although that’s a winner that I frequently recommend to seminarians interesting in decoding popular culture. In this case, I am referring to “A Jew Among the Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed.” The key to the book is it’s discussion of how people in one faith tradition, or no faith tradition at all, can learn to visit the minds, hearts and souls of other believers. The old-school journalism goal (#DUH) is to do coverage that is accurate, balanced and fair-minded.

It helps, of course, to talk to gatekeepers and shareholders in the group one is attempting to cover.

That leads me to a piece that Pinsky wrote the other day for The Forward that ran with this headline: “After an online ‘onslaught’ over exhibit on racial justice, a Florida Holocaust museum vows not to back down.”

This is one of those sad cases in which quick-strike, advocacy journalism trends seen so often in this digital age — on the left and the right — produced articles that were, at best, incomplete and slanted. In this case, the journalists were on the cultural right. It’s easy to find articles on the cultural left, of course. It’s tragically easy to find examples of this trend in the mainstream press.

Here is the overture of Pinsky’s piece:

In late November, the Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida sparked outrage when it opened its current exhibition, “Uprooting Prejudice: Faces of Change.”

The bilingual exhibit, which runs through Jan. 31, consists of 45 large-format, black-and-white photo portraits. Chicago photographer John Noltner, a native of Minnesota, was inspired to take the shots in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing at and around the site where he died in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.

Noltner offered the temporary exhibit to the Center, which had a hole in its schedule. The exhibit, said the Center’s assistant director Lisa Bachman, was “right in line with our mission.”


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