Tue, Nov 17, 2020 11:09 p.m.
AOF: I forget if I’ve previously sent this out. Something just reminded me of it ...
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
Hyperventilating Jewish Ninnies
By An Old Friend
Tue, Nov 17, 2020 11:09 p.m.
Tue, Nov 17, 2020 11:09 p.m.
N.S.: In 1995-1996, I had a column in a free weekly, community newspaper in Far Rockaway, Queens. At the time, a young, Jewish Harvard history professor named Daniel Jonah Goldhagen had a best-seller out, in which he maintained that the eternal German soul was a Nazi.
Meanwhile, a movie had been released, based on Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Mother Night, about an American (Nick Nolte) who lives in Weimar and Nazi Germany, who becomes an apparent traitor, delivering radio addresses in support of Hitler, against “Franklin Delano Rosenfeld.” (Anti-Semites actually called FDR that, at the time!) In reality, he’s an American agent who delivers coded messages to the Allies in his addresses. However, only one man knows the truth, and he has been sworn to silence. (Actually, two men knew, but one died on April 12, 1945.)
Without getting preachy, the novel is about identity, loyalty, and love.
A local Orthodox rabbi responded with a letter of complaint, which my editor published in the next week’s paper, accusing me of being a “rabid anti-Semite.”
Bye, bye, column.
http://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2017/01/a-diminished-thing-holocaust.html
Mormon ritual is no threat to Jews
By Jeff JacobyGLOBE COLUMNIST
FEBRUARY 29, 2012
IN A COLUMN many years ago, I described how I once attempted to chart a family tree. Most of my father’s family had been killed in Auschwitz, and my efforts to trace their genealogy left me, I wrote, with a family tree that “has stumps where branches ought to be”' and “gets narrower, not wider, as it grows.”
A woman phoned me the morning that column appeared. She said she was a Mormon, and wanted to add the names of my father's massacred relatives — the column had mentioned about 18 of them by name — to the Mormon Church’s vast genealogical archives. I told her that I certainly had no objection. Indeed, I was grateful for any gesture that might help preserve some remembrance of these family members whose lives had been so cruelly cut short.
At the time I knew nothing about “baptism by proxy,” the ritual that Mormons believe gives even souls in the afterlife a chance to accept their faith and thus enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only later did I learn that some Mormons, eager to save the souls of dead Jews, had taken to submitting the names of Holocaust victims for posthumous baptism.
The discovery didn’t trouble me at all. In Judaism, conversion after death is a concept without meaning; no after-the-fact rites in this world can possibly change the Jewishness of the men, women, children, and babies whom the Nazis, in their obsessive hatred, singled out for extermination. I found the Mormons’ belief eccentric, not offensive. By my lights, their efforts to make salvation available to millions of deceased strangers were ineffectual. But plainly they were sincere, and intended as a kindness.
Other Jews, however, were offended. There was a commotion over the issue in the 1990s, and in response the Mormon Church formally barred proxy baptism for Jewish Holocaust victims. As a rule the ban is respected, but there are occasional violations of church policy, and the issue is back in the news following reports that Anne Frank, who died at 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was recently baptized by proxy at a Mormon temple in the Dominican Republic. Relatives of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and the parents of the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal were also submitted for proxy baptisms.
So now there’s a whole new commotion, with some prominent Jewish voices once again loudly expressing indignation.
“Holocaust victims were killed solely because they were Jews,” fumes Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.” And here comes the Mormon Church taking away their Jewishness. It’s like killing them twice.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, pronouncing itself “outraged,”' declares that the latest proxy baptisms “make a mockery”' of Jewish-Mormon relations. Wiesel himself insists that Mitt Romney, as “the most famous and important Mormon in the country,”' has a moral obligation to tell his church: “Stop it.”
But if anyone should be told to “stop it,” it’s men like Foxman and Wiesel, whose reactions to this issue have been unworthy and unfair.
For one thing, the Mormon Church promptly apologized for the listing of Anne Frank and the others, and firmly reiterated its policy: “Proxy baptisms of Holocaust victims are strictly prohibited.” Leaping to take offense at something the church has unequivocally repudiated is cheap grandstanding.
More odious by far is the accusation that a posthumous “baptism” to which no Jew attaches any credence is tantamount to a second genocide (“It’s like killing them twice”). What an ugly slander. Even to the most zealous Mormon, proxy baptism is simply the offering of a choice — it gives non-Mormons in the afterlife a chance to accept the gospel, should they wish to. You don’t have to buy the theology — I certainly don’t — to recognize that its message is benign.
As a Jew, I am less interested in what other religions teach about the fate of Jews in the next world than in how they affect the fate of Jews in this world. Rafael Medoff, a scholar of America’s response to the Holocaust, notes that Mormon leaders were outspoken supporters of efforts to rescue Jews from Nazi Europe at a time when many mainstream Christians [and Jewish leader Rabbi Stephen Wise] were silent. For example, Utah Senator William King — among the most renowned Mormons of his day — strongly backed legislation that could have saved Anne Frank and her family.
Outraged by proxy baptisms? Count me out. As my stunted family tree attests, the Jewish people have very real, very dangerous enemies. Mormons undergoing peaceful rituals in their own temples aren’t on the list.
Religions are like a game show to some extent--"Let's Make a Deal"--the one I have in mind.I didn't realize it until just now,while reading the commentary that compared the Mormon and Jewish faiths.The religious leaders seem to look around,see what the others are offering and up the ante on their religion's rewards(both in this and the afterlife)to attract members.
ReplyDelete(None of this even includes the socialist/commie government,which attempts to replace religion with their own rules of living(abortion on demand,globalism,obedience to the system,government "taking care" of all your needs--at a reduced standard of living of course).
But back to Let's Make a Deal.
So you start out with the dull religion of your choice(Jewish?--which offers sacrifice and guilt).Do you want to trade that in for what's behind door number 1--the Muslim religion--which offers you 72 afterlife virgins upon killing yourself for Allah.Do you keep the religion you have--or trade it in?
But WAIT...
We have another curtain--the Mormon religion,which offers you an afterlife chance to convert to get to heaven.
There's door #2,Hinduism and Buddhism,which offers reincarnation to lure you in.
Then there's the ever fluctuating Catholic religion which once forbade everything,including eating meat on Fridays(during Lent),divorce--and not so long ago,the Church was 200% opposed to homosexuality(except when the priests did it to altar boys).To entice you to choose Catholicism--we'll drop all those objections--IF you'll join US and send in a donation every week.
It's all about money and donations it seems,isn't it?
The "Big Deal of the Day" however,is reserved for those in charge--who live lives of affluence off the money of their followers,while they get ZONKED.
--GRA
"'Franklin Delano Rosenfeld.' (Anti-Semites actually called FDR that, at the time!) "
ReplyDeleteFranklin Delano Joozevelt too.
." I found the Mormons’ belief eccentric, not offensive. "
ReplyDeleteI would suggest all religions have eccentricities.