Letters to the Editor: February 22, 2019

Letter to the editor:

My name is Ben Beck and I am a Boy Scout in Troop 1818, located in the Alpharetta/ Roswell area. I’m currently working on my communication merit badge and one of the requirements is to write a letter to an editor of a newspaper or magazine. I chose the Atlanta Jewish Times because my dad reads it all the time and because recently, I was verbally hurt by someone saying some anti-Semitic comments on my school bus. My brother has also encountered many direct comments to the fact that he is Jewish.

I just want parents to teach kids what they say can hurt people and some things just shouldn’t be said. I know it is a bad problem in public schools and people need to put negative responses against anti-Semitism. I’ve actually been scared to go to my synagogue ever since the Pittsburgh shooting back in October, even though it is the house of the Lord and physically, because I go there every week for Sunday school, my safe place.

My hope is that by more attention in the media these types of hurtful comments will stop. Thank you for giving me a place to share my thoughts on this.

Sincerely,

Ben Beck, Johns Creek

Letter to the editor:

I found Dave Schechter’s quote of Alfred Uhry to be illuminating. The reference to Eastern European Jews by American Jews as kikes confirms a lot of what my parents told me.

My parents were born in Poland, and my mom survived the Holocaust hidden by a righteous gentile, and my father survived the war in Siberia with a younger brother. The rest of his family was killed in the Treblinka extermination camp. Given that my parents are Eastern European Jews, they would qualify as kikes. Using the German racial laws, since my parents were both 100 percent kike, that makes me 100 percent kike as well.

When it was discovered that my mother and her sister had survived the war, their neighbors were not pleased to see them. Similarly, The Jewish community of America was not particularly welcoming to Holocaust survivors who arrived, because the Jewish survivors were witnesses to both the misdeeds of some of their Polish and Ukrainian neighbors and were witnesses to indifference (at best) of the Jewish community as well. A recent article in the Times of Israel documents the lack of response of the Jewish community to Kristallnacht.

Jewish leaders explicitly called upon Jews not to ask for increased immigration of Jews from Europe. I would like to suggest a very simple reason why the leadership of American Jews did not do more to help the Jews of Europe. They did not want them here. Religious, foreign, accented Jews are not cool, and neither is the obligation to help them. My second hypothesis is that little has changed. Today, Israel is seen as the foreign, accented, dirty kikes by progressive Jews. Thankfully, Israel is strong and doesn’t need the conditional love of progressives. On the other hand, the American Jewish community, where the tenet of abandonment is strong, is being abandoned by the younger generation. There is no way we can compete with the younger generation when the sole metric is “coolness,” and anyone who is not cool is a kike.

The gefilte fish have come home to roost.

Dr. Jack L. Arbiser, Atlanta

Letter to the editor:

In 2000, Israeli reservists who mistakenly entered Ramallah were stabbed, beaten to death and mutilated. In 2011 in Itamar, a 3-year-old boy was stabbed in the heart, and the throat of his 3-month-old sibling was slashed. Last week, a teenage girl walking among trees in the hills of Jerusalem was raped, stabbed to death and mutilated.

The Israeli youth of the IDF are all that stand between us and the monsters who committed these and many, many more hideous outrages which, according to Channel 13’s Oshrat Kotler, are “the result of the occupation.” Ms. Kotler avoids the reality that, as has been insightfully observed, the “Israel/Palestine conflict” is an artificial charade created to provide an excuse for endless attempts to destroy the Jewish state.

Ms. Kotler also avoids these realities, made clear by much-hailed peacemaker Yitzhak Rabin in his last Knesset speech: “We would like this to be an entity which is less than a state, and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority, …We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines. … The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.”

Perhaps Ms. Kotler doesn’t see Yitzhak Rabin as a man who sought both peace and solid security for Israel. She certainly is blind to the fact that the youth of the IDF are all that stand between us and the destruction of Israel and of our people.

Julia Lutch, Davis, Calif.