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It Can Happen Anywhere

It Can Happen Anywhere

Last updated on: December 30, 2019 at 10:08 am by Rebecca Bratten Weiss

It Can Happen Anywhere 2019-12-30T10:08:13-04:00 Rebecca Bratten Weiss

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

by guest writer Gregory Eran Gronbacher

I find myself a bit surprised writing this. Most of the time, I dismiss anti-semitism as “marginal” – sad, but not commonplace.

2019 has demonstrated that anti-semitic violence isn’t marginal, and is, becoming, horrifically, common.

This weekend’s stabbing attack at a Monsey, New York Rabbi’s house, the recent killings at a New Jersey Jewish Deli, or earlier attacks at a Pittsburgh Synagogue, abruptly shatter illusions of safety and easy security. Europe is experiencing the same, with near-weekly attacks on Jews in France, Great Britain, and Germany.

My Temple (synagogue) here in western Michigan – spent the last year installing a host of safety measures, and consulting with local and other law enforcement.

Our synagogue has been recently vandalized with pro-Nazi-White Supremacist posters and graffiti. This vandalism wasn’t “kids” – our local and state police have traced the threats to active White Supremacist groups in the area.

My point is not to complain. It’s simply to say – THIS IS REAL.

I’ve posted Jewish theology on various blogs. I get the occasional death threat, but I don’t take it seriously.

The other day, I received this email:

“When the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion were first discovered, Freemasons and Zionist Jews everywhere screamed and complained that these 24 Protocols are a hoax, a forgery, even a blood taint against the Jews. But then came the brutal and barbaric Communist Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and its captive republics, led by covert Masonic Jews—Lenin, Trotsky, Kaganovich, and others. The cruel and sinister crimes of the crypto Jew revolutionaries seemed to have jumped off the pages of the Protocols. The Red Terror, with its torturous massacres of innocent people, its monstrous gulag concentration camps, and the setting up of a Jewish dictatorship, also followed the agenda of the Protocols as did the persecution everywhere of Christians and churches. The entire world witnessed horrors that were unquestionably a direct result of the heinous prescriptions laid out earlier in the Protocols. To this day, almost a century later, the sweep of history has proven the Protocols to be genuine, authentic, and a real-life rendering of the most tragic events that have bedeviled mankind. One nation after another has suffered, and now the Zionist psychopaths have targeted the United States and Western Europe. The Protocols continue to ring true and sound the alarm. If we close our eyes and ears and fail to heed this alarm, we will surely find ourselves in great peril. Our very survival depends on our unmasking the agenda set forth in the Protocols of the Zionist and Masonic elite for a Big Brother Police State and a New World Order.”

Obviously, the assertions are insane and incorrect. After digging around a little, researching the email, talking to other Jewish bloggers, we’ve come to be fairly certain the guy sending it is a Ph.D. theology prof at a “respectable” Protestant seminary.

His second email had several videos telling me how George Soros worked for the Nazis and sent 50,000 Jews to their death at concentration camps.

Soros is Jewish, and was 14 years old when the Second World War ended.

My email “friend” then went on to tell me that Soros wants to do the same to all “Bible believing Christians” so to keep them from Jesus.

Again, my point is not to complain. Christians are killed and persecuted around the world – DAILY. As I write this, an active shooter killed two members of a church in Texas. The world has gone mad. Violence isn’t limited to just Jews.

I get it.

I just don’t want anyone to think this is “marginal” or “rare.”

It can happen anywhere.

One Friday night, last fall, I was asked to give an older woman from Temple a ride home, she lived near me. I had heard she was a Holocaust survivor, but one doesn’t just bring up such matters in polite conversation.

When we turned off into her subdivision, and after much small talk, she asked me “Do you want to know about the Shoah?” I nodded and pulled the car over.

She went on to tell me how her family had managed not to be deported for many years. And in the last year of the war, when she was a young child, her family was deported to a concentration camp.

She then, calmly, without much emotion, told me how she and her family were unloaded from the train after a 20 hour ride with no food or heat or ability to sit.

Most of her family did not survive.

She survived.

I was speechless, softly crying.

She then said:

“you know what was the worst part? Being betrayed by your friends, and knowing the SS guards only 7 years earlier were good, educated, Christian gentlemen, your neighbors.”

She got out of the car and turned to me and said, “Dear, it can happen anywhere. Remember that.”

image is the author’s own

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