Today, of all days, is Yom HaShoah.
It is the 75th anniversary of the Holocaust’s ending. Commemorations all over the world were held in virtual seclusion.
The solemn day coincides with what is an ominous sign, indeed.
That sign came from a newly released ADL report finding that 63 percent of U.S. Jews say they are less safe than they were a decade ago.
More than half of American Jews have either witnessed or directly experienced anti-Semitism during the past five years.
The survey also found that more than 20 percent of Jews have directly experienced verbal anti-Semitic harassment.
More than 20 percent are affiliated with an institution that has been vandalized or defaced due to anti-Semitism.
Some five percent have experienced physical attacks motivated by anti-Semitism, and 14 percent say they have experienced anti-Semitic harassment online.
Remember “Never Again”? What happened to “Never Again”?
Here’s what concerns me.
As an 11th grade teacher of the Holocaust in studying 1920s and 1930s Europe particularly Germany I’m feeling a little bit like the Jewish family I’ve described to my students, the one who perhaps discounted the anti-Semitism around them or thought it would “go away.”
I admittedly live in a protective bubble. Just about my entire world is inside the Jewish community. I teach at an incredible Jewish day school, my neighborhood is almost entirely Jewish, I shop at the kosher supermarket and have almost completely Jewish friends.
But I have had that feeling when I leave the bubble and travel to different areas and even states, cities and nations, that wearing a baseball cap over my kippah is probably the better decision. Still, so many of my friends who years ago returning from Europe told me of how they would never wear anything but a baseball cap in cities such as Paris, London or Madrid.
In January of 2019, I chaperoned a class trip to Spain. We attended services at a Madrid synagogue. Entering the shul were metal detectors and heavily armed guards.
We are becoming Europe. The kippah, the outwardly Jewish symbols seem now to be more of an exterior threat to our well being.
I look at my grandsons, little boys in knit kippot and payot and I fear that they are going to hear one of these terrible anti-Semitic remarks or see a spray painted symbol of hatred on a shul or school building.
As a grandparent, I fear this more than anything. This country cannot always protect them. And the manhole cover of hatred that the 45th President has kicked open flies in the face of “never again”.
America should be the country of “Never Again”.
I worry that it isn’t necessarily so anymore.
