The Desecration of Jewish Graves 2017 Now and 1950 Then
We have been sickened to our stomachs by the news that the graves of our dead have been defiled in the past few weeks in St. Louis and Philadelphia.
Those who hate us take out their pitiable rage against those who can never come back to avenge them.
Thus it was, in 1950, in Germany, when the remnants of the Nazis, afraid to take action against their American occupiers, took out their grievances against the Jewish dead. My father ,as the Chief Rabbi of Hesse ( Frankfurt region) to the lead in arousing the American and German governments to take action to safeguard the cemeteries.
The following news clip from a German newspaper and a Reuters news release described the events and the response of the American High Commissioner and the new head of Germany, Konrad Adenauer,
The case had been dismissed by police as the work of juvenile pranksters. However, as the Reuters report shows, my father blasted the police for failing to reveal that several of the youngsters involved were sons of former members of the Nazi party, including some of the original Brownshirt members from the founding years, The vandalism coincided with an ongoing court case against a Nazi sympathizer.
My father caused an uproar in Germany when he announced that the Jewish community would exhume all the dead from their historic graves and rebury them in Israel, where they could be properly watched. That threat resulted in increased security at Jewish gravesites.
We are still the prime victims of the longest racial hatred in human history.
With all the due concern for all other minority groups in America and in Europe, Jews are still the prime target. Only in the middle east ( except for Israel) is there no Jewish problem--after all, all Jews were expelled 60 to 70 years ago!
(Source -Documents of Rabbi William( Wilhelm) Weinberg archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn502232)
