About seventeen years ago my wife and I went with another couple we are friends with to spend a week in Switzerland. There is an Alpine resort village in the Schanfigg Valley called Arosa. Its small and delightful kosher hotel was our destination. It’s known for its lakes, ski slopes and trails. The nearby Obersee Lake has a stunning water display with fountains, lights and music. It is about as perfect example of the beauty of Switzerland that you can imagine.
The first morning we entered the breakfast room. As we took our seats, a middle-aged lady came to collect our order. She was dressed in traditional German dress, the “Drindl,” which consists of a bodice, full skirt, and an apron. Her straw blond hair was braided to complete the full effect.
Our friends had stayed many times before at this hotel and knew this lady who fitted perfectly with the scenery and German flavor of the village. They told us that her name, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Heidi.
What was a surprise was the fact that the lady waiting on table did so without pay! She volunteered to serve the Jewish patrons of the hotel every year during the summer season for free. It was her way of apologizing for what her people had done to us during the Second World War.
If that information surprised me that was nothing to learning the additional fact that she abandons her regular employment and renumeration as a very famous doctor, to express her regret and sorrow for the Holocaust. The memory of the Churban in Europe haunted Heidi. It affected and shamed her. She had to play her small part in making amends.
I doubt, even if you look very hard, you will find many like Heidi today. In fact, Fox news recently reported a chilling piece of information from the place my wife and I recently lived for ten years before making aliyah; Long Island’s, Nassau County.
It came as a shock to read that Long Island, where so many New York Jews live in seeming harmony with their non-Jewish neighbors harbors an emerging antipathy to Jewish residents.
A newly released survey of Long Island residents revealed that a surprising number of respondents expressed skepticism about the need for Holocaust education in public schools.
The poll surveyed roughly 400 residents in Nassau and Suffolk counties. Nearly one-third of respondents said they do not believe the Holocaust should be a mandatory part of school curricula and that Jewish people should “move on.” The survey also found that about 15% of participants either believe the Nazi genocide has been “exaggerated” or preferred not to answer the question.
Conor Cruise O’Brien was an Irish intellectual, journalist, politician and thinker. He used a metaphor in his book, “The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism,” which became famous.
He pointed out that anti-Jewish prejudice never truly vanishes but lies just beneath the surface, ready to reawaken. He sagely observed that “Antisemitism is a very light sleeper.”
If it doesn’t take much to wake it from sleep, hearing antisemitic slogans today being shouted on the streets of New York outside a Synagogue, will have Jew haters wide awake.
The same stirring of the Jew-hating mind is being provoked by broadcasts and newspaper articles across a slew of media from the New York Times (surely America’s most consistent disturber of slumbering Jew-haters) and New York Public Radio. Of course, podcasters like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson broadcast their message at near deafness inducing volumes.
Once the wake-up call has been issued, it spreads with a ferocity and hare-like speed that makes Covid and Hantavirus look like a tortoise and a snail.
It hardly needs a clever metaphor to explain that when the mayor of New York diverts a large proportion of his time talking up the Islamist perspective on the world’s Jewish state, the disease soon develops a virulent nature and becomes an epidemic.
The question now is, at what point does the spread of the disease become so bad that the only solution is to flee.
That is something that I worry about a lot. I loved the ten years when Long Island was my home. I also feel nostalgia for my five years in Flatbush. I have cousins who live in Brooklyn and scores of very dear friends in all of the five Boroughs. I worry that they might make the mistake that so many Jews in the past have made. I worry that they will leave it too late to realize that not only has antisemitism woken; it is simply not going back to sleep.
In my book, “On the Derech: Answers to questions that challenge Jewish minds” I wrote about those kind of Jews from another time and place when Jew-hatred had stirred.
I quoted from a book called, “The Reunion, by Fred Ullman.”
The book is a semi-autobiographical account of its author’s adolescence, in pre-war Germany. It gives a rare glimpse into the lives of a not untypical, non-religious German Jewish family.
“I still remember a violent discussion between my father and a Zionist who had come to collect money for Israel. My father abhorred Zionism. It could only end in endless bloodshed and the Jews would have to fight the whole Arab world. And anyway what had he, a Stuttgarter, to do with Jerusalem? When the Zionist mentioned Hitler; and asked my father if this would not shake his confidence, my father said, “Not in the least. I know my Germany. This is a temporary illness, something like measles, which will pass as soon as the economic situation improves. Do you really think the compatriots of Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Beethoven will fall for this rubbish? How dare you insult the memory of the twelve thousand Jews who died for our country? Fur unsere Heimat?”
Jews like that could simply not accept that the Germany that was had changed and that the change was irreversible. Their eyes were wide shut.
The changes that inevitable accompany an outbreak of antisemitism occur gradually. That gradualness ironically induces sleepiness in the Jews who are threatened by a hatred directed against them that is wide awake.
To all my cousins in Brooklyn and scores of very dear friends in all of the five boroughs and Long Island forgive me if I add to your discomfort. Please keep your eyes wide open and watch developments keenly. Psalm 121 says “The Guardian of Israel (Hashem) neither slumbers nor sleeps.” Nor should we.