Well said from a Rabbi
OPEN LETTER TO PROTESTER
To the person who showed up outside Park East Synagogue last night chanting to "globalize the intifada" , and saying "de@th to the IDF".
I will not appeal to your moral sensibilities.
I will not tell you this is a synagogue that was home to the most Holocaust survivors in New York, about the children who go through the synagogue door, about the people who find meaning and community within its sacred walls.
You probably knew all that before you showed up, and you still showed up.
It probably felt good and empowering for you to stand there and shout at us.
Here is what I will bring to your attention.
To the Brownshirts who went from being bitterly unemployed to standing with a uniform and a group outside of Jewish stores in Berlin in the 1930s, it probably also felt very good. They went from being lonely economically and socially broken individuals, to a place of belonging and power.
Here's what those Brownshirts enjoyed less.
Just 10 years after they stood outside of those Jewish stores in Berlin, they were freezing and starving for months outside the gates of Stalingrad. Most of them did not make it out alive. They froze or starved to death.
Just 10 years after those rallies in Munich and Nuremberg, they were laying at the feet of British soldiers in the deserts of North Africa.
Antisemitism is a sweet poison pill; it feels good at the moment and the price comes only later.
This kind of chaos, hate, and incility will affect us first, but the consequences for a society that allows such hate, are disintegration the kind of which we have seen in World War II.
