Almost literally as we were going to press this week, we read in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about a new stunt Perry Margoles and some others have pulled to express their displeasure over the sale of Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun’s former Kenwood Blvd. building to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
According to the article, the opponents convened a group of scholars from this country, Israel and Germany to suggest that the former synagogue building, now the Helene Zelazo Center for the Performing Arts, be used to house a “center for German-Jewish study.”
It is hard to determine how seriously to take this event. As far as we know, that building has belonged to UWM, not anybody in the Jewish community, for a couple of years; and it has been more than a year since the last legal challenge to the sale ended. One would think that by now the opponents would have swallowed their disappointment and moved on.
As for the idea of a “center for German-Jewish study” in the former building of the synagogue created by Milwaukee’s first Jews, who came mostly from Germany — it may have intrinsic merit; it certainly couldn’t hurt. But that decision is up to UWM, and there doesn’t seem to be any point in pushing the matter.
What outrages us is a statement at the press conference Monday reportedly made by Prof. Lutz Goetze of the University of Saarbrücken — and confirmed by Prof. Klaus L. Berghahn of UW-Madison, who was there. Goetze actually compared the sale of the building to Nazi Germany’s forcible takeover, desecration and destruction of synagogue buildings.
Berghan, himself a scholar of German-Jewish relations, in a telephone conversation Tuesday said that although Goetze is a respected scholar, this was “a stupid remark … completely out of range,” and we totally agree. The problem is that this sort of thing — evoking the Holocaust — has appeared previously in this controversy.
In October 1999, the synagogue shifted Friday night services to its then-new River Hills building. Sale opponents held a demonstration at Kenwood, and one of their signs said “Our worship is verboten in this synagogue” — using the German word for forbidden as a suggestive link to the Nazis.
These events are symptoms of a major problem. Today too many people can’t resist the urge to grab the Holocaust as a handy image of unambiguous evil. Many of our enemies (when they’re not denying that the Holocaust happened) especially love to do this, striving to paint Israel as Nazi-like whenever they can.
That our enemies soil and cheapen the memory of history’s greatest crime with distortions and lies is bad enough. We and our friends should not be doing it, too, even in the smallest of ways. That not only diminishes the true anguish of those who suffered and died during the Shoah, but our entire Jewish community and people. Save Holocaust comparisons for when truly comparable persecution occurs or threatens.
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