Soon after my family arrived in America my saintly father built a yeshiva. One night, hoodlums set the Holy Ark in the yeshiva on fire. Quickly we rushed to the scene. The police were there waiting for us, ready to lend a helping hand.
A neighbor had saved the Torah scrolls but my father kept sifting through the ashes. Tears were running down his cheeks. It was a cold winter night but he would not give up. He kept looking, the police standing by his side. Suddenly we heard my father cry out in Yiddish, “I found it!”
There in his trembling hands he held the sacred tefillin that had belonged to grandfathers and great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers stretching back many generations. Those tefillin made it through Bergen Belsen and now they had survived a fire set by hoodlums in New York. And throughout my father’s painstakingly long search the benevolent officers of the NYPD never abandoned him.
Many years later my beloved husband became the chaplain of the Nassau County Police Department. This allowed me to get know the members of the force personally. In honor of my husband the annual police dinner was held in a glatt kosher place. The officers loved and revered him.
When tragedy struck us and my husband fell gravely ill, the police commissioner came to visit him at Sloan Kettering. He was a pious Catholic, a very kind and gentle man. When it was time for him to leave I accompanied him to the elevator and tears began streaming down his face.
“Rebbetzin,” he said, “I always wondered what the meaning of G-d was but since I met your husband I know. G-d comes from the word ‘goodness’ and your husband walks with that goodness reflected in his eyes, in his gentle words, in his loving, warm ways. I will be forever grateful for having had the privilege to know him.”
When my husband was called to the Next World, a spectacular police procession was arranged for the funeral with helicopters overhead. All this for a Jewish chaplain.
Some years ago I was invited to address American troops at Fort Hood, the country’s largest military installation. Following my talk, some of the officers approached me and asked if I would deliver the same message to members of their families. They wanted their children to know about the Holocaust. I readily agreed. It would be my honor, I told them.
And so a short while later I was back at Fort Hood, speaking not only to the soldiers but to their beautiful families as well. An eight-year-old girl stood up, saluted, and in the sweetest voice said, “Rebbetzin, Ma’am, may I ask a question?”
“Of course, dear,” I responded.
“Why didn’t you call the police to help you?”
“What an American question!” I exclaimed. “How can I explain to you, my sweet child, that at that time and in that place the police were as brutal as the Nazi murderers? So there was no one for us to call.
“But I do understand where you are coming from. You’re an American child, a daughter of a country we Jewish people call ‘medina shel chesed’ – the country of loving kindness.’ A country where not only societal and cultural values are a reflection of chesed but where law enforcement authorities, who in many parts world are associated with meanness and cruelty, are kind and compassionate and ever ready to help and protect.”
I could share with you a thousand more stories about our wonderful police. How, I ask, can it be that intelligent people abuse the police, trash them, and hold them up as targets for killing? Don’t people understand that if our courageous police were to disappear from the scene, our society would in the blink of an eye become a lawless jungle?