It is now over 100 years since my great-grandfather and my grandfather left Bessarabia on the heels of one of first full-scale Russian pogroms aimed directly at the thriving Jewish community there. The Romanovs, fabulously wealthy patrons of the arts, educated in the ways of the world, knew precisely what they were doing when on Easter they had priests in their Russian Orthodox Churches preach the lies of hatred to the masses, telling them Jews had killed Christian children so they could use their blood in matzah for Passover. What a preposterous idea!
With Russia’s devastating losses in the Russo-Japanese War, the Romanovs feeling lies about killing Christian kids weren’t enough to do the job, they targeted more Jews with the concocted screed, “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” figuring such actions would shore up the Romanov’s reigns on power. Their plan didn’t work. Sure, stirring up anti-Semitism worked, but killing Jews wasn’t enough. Soon the killing spread and the Romanovs couldn’t contain it. Eventually the masses shot all the Romanovs and buried them in shallow graves.
One of the many paradoxes of the story is how Lenin used Karl Marx, the rabbi’s son’s rulebook to found a fair and balanced nation, one that would be generous to all the poor. And thus, the U.S.S.R. was founded.
Marx, however, had written his Communist Manifesto about how to convert the massive wealth of nations into fair and generous societies. Marx didn’t have a plan for a place like Russia that by that time had few rich families to rob. In the end, some 70 years later, the Russian Marxists, who were no better than the Romanovs, were crushed under their own greedy, anti-Semitic weight. Sure, by the time the U.S.S.R. fell, it had already allowed millions of Jewish Refuseniks to leave for America and Israel, but by then, the Communist oligarchy had done its damage. The country was in shambles and was desperatedly seeking a more workable model, something more along the lines of what had been working so well for America and Israel.
It is a striking paradox how, now, 100 years after the start of the Czars organized pogroms, and nearly as long since the rise of Hitler, that no matter how many times anti-Semitism is proven to be a useless and destructive tool, that it is still alive and well, being used now to full effect by the oil-rich nations in the Middle East.
All those nations received their independence right around the same time Israel received hers. After allying themselves with Hitler and losing against us in World War II, the Arabs gladly traded defeat for sovereignty and oil. They were given everything they could have dreamed for. In exchange, all they had to agree on, which they willingly agreed on, was to let the Jews have a slice of Palestine for themselves.
For a while there it seemed dead Jews could do no wrong.
Then, the moment everything was signed on the dotted lines, the Arabs converged from all sides on the Jews to “push them into the sea.” Those were their words. The words of one of their “holy men.”
And now, according to highly placed holier than thou Muslims like the president of Iran, it seems there was no Holocaust. And Jews just make all this stuff up as a pretense so we can have the audacity to actually defend ourselves against regimes such as Ahmadinejad’s. How could it be that the majority of Jews who survived the past century, now safely ensconced in the Jewish State of Israel, are again under attack and anti-Semites around the world are doing all they can to make sure Jews don’t dare to ensure their survival.
In the future, should world organizations, such the the United Nations, choose to rid the world of anti-Semitism instead of fomenting anti-Semitism, that would be nice. In the meantime, we Jews need to document everything those hell-bent on destroying Israel and the Jews say and do, so after we act as we must, incontrovertible evidence can be used forever to show people why we had to act as we did.
