Ghosts of past, present and future issue ominous warnings for Jews
Every Sunday at noon, when many are eating brunch or getting ready for a football game, a room full of chairs awaits in the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Maybe a few dozen people show up, sometimes more, sometimes less. They come to listen to an old person speak.
That old person, one of a small, rotating group, is, at this time of year, a ghost of Christmas past. Someone who made it through the Holocaust.
Through 12 straight Decembers, from 1933 to 1945, Jews in Europe were terrorized, humiliated, dehumanized and stripped of their homes and businesses, eventually herded like cattle, imprisoned in concentration camps, and systematically murdered.
Irene Miller was a ghost of Christmas past at the Holocaust Center last week, part of their Sunday Survivor Talks. Miller is 90 years old. She spoke of her life as a child in Poland, being smuggled out to escape the Nazis, living in frozen fields, drinking snow, eating boiled grass, enduring two years in a Siberian labor camp.
When she was asked why others didn’t help her and her family, she said, “Everyone was so afraid.”
Too afraid to stand up to tyranny.
Too afraid to say “this is wrong.”
Ghosts of Christmas past.
Last week, a man named Hassan Chokr was charged with ethnic intimidation after appearing at a Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, synagogue as children were going to school. He allegedly screamed antisemitic insults at the Jews there, including the kids. On a video that he recorded and later posted, he can be heard yelling “Jew f---” at a young girl and “F--- your synagogue” at adults.
Days later, when Chokr appeared before a judge via computer, the prosecutor read some of the man’s Instagram posts, quoting, “Your Jew tactics will only backfire on you. You have no place on this earth, Jew (expletive), Jew mother(expletives). A storm is coming to wipe you all out of our lives.'”
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