Tsunami or Not?
Back in the middle-ages Jews survived the black plague, that killed
almost a third of the European continent’s population, and estimated
75-200 million people in Eurasia. But not the Jews. Because of their adherence to hygiene while many of their neighbors, whose hygiene was pitiful, fell to the epidemic, the Jews survived. Hand washing, before eating, after the toilet, upon rising from bed, was a Jewish thing dictated by the rabbis. The result was pogroms across Europe as the Jews were blamed for causing the plague by witchcraft or well-poisoning. By
1351 there had been 350 incidents of anti-Jewish pogroms and 60 major and 150 minor Jewish communities had been exterminated. (The surviving
Jews migrated eastward to Poland and Lithuania.)
Back in the 1930s and 1940s, two famous Catholic priests incited their congregants with anti-Semitic rants. One in the USA and one in Poland. The former, Father Charles Coughlin, a Canadian-American Roman Catholic priest based near Detroit, known as the ‘radio priest,’ used his weekly radio program to roil his listeners to near apoplexy. One of the most influential men in the US at the time, he also had his own newspaper espousing the same anti-Semitic, anti-Communist and isolationist views. His audience reached millions and was a key factor in FDR’s reluctance to join the British in their fight against Nazi Germany. He was forced off the air in 1939 because of his pro-fascist and anti-Semitic rants. The Japanese, military allies of the Nazis, broke FDR’s resolve when they bombed Pearl Harbor leaving the beleaguered president no choice but to go to war.
The second was Cardinal August Hlond, Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw in 1946. The war was over. Poland was in chaos. Armed militias roamed the countryside. In a 1936 pastoral letter, Cardinal August Hlond called Jewish people ‘the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism, and subversion,’ but also prohibited attacks on Jews. After the war, The Soviet Union was moving into Poland and many of the newly installed government officials were Jewish communists. Cardinal Hlond was virulently opposed to godless communism as were some of the largest armed militias. The result was the Kielce Massacre where over 40 Jews were murdered in a “pogrom” on July 4, 1946, by a mob and nearly a hundred injured. Hlond never addressed the pogrom. (https://vimeo.com/ondemand/rescuetraineng)
That pogrom and others sent Jews who had survived the Holocaust fleeing Poland for to the West, many to Israel.(https://vimeo.com/ondemand/tomanheroorthief)
Last Wednesday, according to the Time of Israel, Rick Wiles, the anti-Semitic Florida pastor who previously said that the effort to impeach US President Trump was a “Jew coup,” and would “kill millions of Christians” went on his TruNews website and blamed the spread of coronavirus in synagogues as a punishment of the Jewish people for opposing Jesus.
Sounding like Father Coughlin, Pastor Wiles said, “The people who are going into the synagogue are coming out of the synagogue with the virus,” Wiles said. “It’s spreading in Israel through the synagogues. God is spreading it in your synagogues! You are under judgment because you oppose his son, Jesus Christ. That is why you have a plague in your synagogues. Repent and believe on the name of Jesus Christ, and the plague will stop.” He also mistakenly claimed the CODVID-19 started at the AIPAC conference in early March even though the first outbreaks were in Washington state.
In New Jersey, according to the JTA, “A New Jersey man sent Facebook messages to Gov. Phil Murphy and others threatening to harm Orthodox Jews for violating state coronavirus restrictions.” The man, Anthony Lodespoto, 43, or Howell, NJ, was charged with making “terrorist threats during a state of emergency.” He allegedly used “Facebook’s direct messaging feature to threaten the Jewish community of Lakewood,” saying he would take a baseball bat and punish the offenders. Lakewood, an ultra-orthodox enclave, like New York Cities Borough Park and neighboring Crown Heights has seen a sharp rise of confirmed CODVID-19 cases.
Blaming Jews, as we see, is nothing new. Neither are pogroms. Nor massacres. Admiral Dr. Anne Schuchat, who is Jewish, (and consulted on “Contagion” with Debra Winger and Matt Damon) is deputy director of the CDC (Center for Disease Control). She said in an interview that people should fear “the virus” not “the foreign.” She said, “It’s important in the pandemic to avoid stigmatizing any one group — travelers, immigrants, some populations in our community, anyone in this situation. The virus does not discriminate. We need to work together to tackle it.”
But there is some basis to the claims that Jews are spreading the virus, at least in Israel. (nearly 4,500 infected, 15 deaths, nearly 80 serious cases.) Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel have been flagrantly ignoring the requests for self-quarantine, small group gatherings limited to no more than ten, and keeping a two-meter distance one from the other.
According to an Israel TV report, nearly half of those hospitalized in Israel with the virus are ultra-orthodox. When the leaders of the the ultra-orthodox community were first approached by the Israeli government to tell their followers to follow the Ministry of Health’s rules, they waved away the advice. “God will protect us if we learn Torah,” said the Goan HaDor (Genius of the generation) Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, a leader of the Lithuanian Haredi (ultra-orthodox) community.
Today, however, the hard-line Eda Haredit told their ultra-orthodox followers to follow the health ministry’s rules or commit a ‘big sin.’ The notice was published as a poster since the ultra-orthodox supposedly have no tv, do not listen to the radio, have no internet and have limited access to apps on their mobile phones. News is word-of-mouth or posters on the wall.
“New York City’s orthodox communities are at the center of the outbreak (13% of all confirmed cases) with thousands of cases reported and a growing number of deaths,” according to Ynetnews.com. “Almost every Haredi home has a least one family member sick with the virus.” Many communities have ignored rules to self-distance. A disproportionate number of orthodox Jews are infected in Great Britain. (5% of fatalities but only 0.3% of British citizens.) The majority of orthodox Jews in Strasbourg are reportedly ill while in Belgium, with a large Haredi population, 85% are expected to contract the disease with 17,000 requiring hospitalization, 550 to perish.
USA’s official medical expert Dr. Anthony Fauci stated the mortality rate in the USA might reach between 200,000-300,000. Pundits speculate that it is only a matter of time before anti-Semitic rants become more prevalent.
The great depression, and Hitler’s solution to Germany’s problem, at least expel the Jews, brought Father Coughlin to a vast audience. One only hopes that in these trying times the Jewish people are not made a scapegoat once again for the ills of the pandemic. If the economy teeters and falls, one analyst said, there’s no telling who is going to take the blame. It won’t be the first time, said another analyst, that Jews were blamed, persecuted, and eventually expelled, citing as far back as Babylon, the dispersion after the destruction of the Second Temple, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the pogroms in England in 1190,(150 killed) the pogroms during the black plague, all the way up to the Nazis, and beyond. A long history with dark chapters.
The solution is to forestall the spread of the virus, find a cure, and a vaccine. Jews are usually at the forefront of these discoveries. What we need is another Dr. Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine, a Jewish scientist, who discovered the vaccine for both cholera and the bubonic plague. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=268U0Odzcsg.
In the feature film “Contagion” it was Dr. Ian Sussman (Elliot Gould) who bucked bureaucracy and found the vaccine to stop the pandemic. Let’s hope another Sussman or Haffkine shows up, soon.
Once this crisis if over, said an observer, things will go back to normal.
Back in the 1930s and 1940s, two famous Catholic priests incited their congregants with anti-Semitic rants. One in the USA and one in Poland. The former, Father Charles Coughlin, a Canadian-American Roman Catholic priest based near Detroit, known as the ‘radio priest,’ used his weekly radio program to roil his listeners to near apoplexy. One of the most influential men in the US at the time, he also had his own newspaper espousing the same anti-Semitic, anti-Communist and isolationist views. His audience reached millions and was a key factor in FDR’s reluctance to join the British in their fight against Nazi Germany. He was forced off the air in 1939 because of his pro-fascist and anti-Semitic rants. The Japanese, military allies of the Nazis, broke FDR’s resolve when they bombed Pearl Harbor leaving the beleaguered president no choice but to go to war.
The second was Cardinal August Hlond, Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw in 1946. The war was over. Poland was in chaos. Armed militias roamed the countryside. In a 1936 pastoral letter, Cardinal August Hlond called Jewish people ‘the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism, and subversion,’ but also prohibited attacks on Jews. After the war, The Soviet Union was moving into Poland and many of the newly installed government officials were Jewish communists. Cardinal Hlond was virulently opposed to godless communism as were some of the largest armed militias. The result was the Kielce Massacre where over 40 Jews were murdered in a “pogrom” on July 4, 1946, by a mob and nearly a hundred injured. Hlond never addressed the pogrom. (https://vimeo.com/ondemand/rescuetraineng)
That pogrom and others sent Jews who had survived the Holocaust fleeing Poland for to the West, many to Israel.(https://vimeo.com/ondemand/tomanheroorthief)
Last Wednesday, according to the Time of Israel, Rick Wiles, the anti-Semitic Florida pastor who previously said that the effort to impeach US President Trump was a “Jew coup,” and would “kill millions of Christians” went on his TruNews website and blamed the spread of coronavirus in synagogues as a punishment of the Jewish people for opposing Jesus.
Sounding like Father Coughlin, Pastor Wiles said, “The people who are going into the synagogue are coming out of the synagogue with the virus,” Wiles said. “It’s spreading in Israel through the synagogues. God is spreading it in your synagogues! You are under judgment because you oppose his son, Jesus Christ. That is why you have a plague in your synagogues. Repent and believe on the name of Jesus Christ, and the plague will stop.” He also mistakenly claimed the CODVID-19 started at the AIPAC conference in early March even though the first outbreaks were in Washington state.
In New Jersey, according to the JTA, “A New Jersey man sent Facebook messages to Gov. Phil Murphy and others threatening to harm Orthodox Jews for violating state coronavirus restrictions.” The man, Anthony Lodespoto, 43, or Howell, NJ, was charged with making “terrorist threats during a state of emergency.” He allegedly used “Facebook’s direct messaging feature to threaten the Jewish community of Lakewood,” saying he would take a baseball bat and punish the offenders. Lakewood, an ultra-orthodox enclave, like New York Cities Borough Park and neighboring Crown Heights has seen a sharp rise of confirmed CODVID-19 cases.
Blaming Jews, as we see, is nothing new. Neither are pogroms. Nor massacres. Admiral Dr. Anne Schuchat, who is Jewish, (and consulted on “Contagion” with Debra Winger and Matt Damon) is deputy director of the CDC (Center for Disease Control). She said in an interview that people should fear “the virus” not “the foreign.” She said, “It’s important in the pandemic to avoid stigmatizing any one group — travelers, immigrants, some populations in our community, anyone in this situation. The virus does not discriminate. We need to work together to tackle it.”
But there is some basis to the claims that Jews are spreading the virus, at least in Israel. (nearly 4,500 infected, 15 deaths, nearly 80 serious cases.) Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel have been flagrantly ignoring the requests for self-quarantine, small group gatherings limited to no more than ten, and keeping a two-meter distance one from the other.
According to an Israel TV report, nearly half of those hospitalized in Israel with the virus are ultra-orthodox. When the leaders of the the ultra-orthodox community were first approached by the Israeli government to tell their followers to follow the Ministry of Health’s rules, they waved away the advice. “God will protect us if we learn Torah,” said the Goan HaDor (Genius of the generation) Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, a leader of the Lithuanian Haredi (ultra-orthodox) community.
Today, however, the hard-line Eda Haredit told their ultra-orthodox followers to follow the health ministry’s rules or commit a ‘big sin.’ The notice was published as a poster since the ultra-orthodox supposedly have no tv, do not listen to the radio, have no internet and have limited access to apps on their mobile phones. News is word-of-mouth or posters on the wall.
“New York City’s orthodox communities are at the center of the outbreak (13% of all confirmed cases) with thousands of cases reported and a growing number of deaths,” according to Ynetnews.com. “Almost every Haredi home has a least one family member sick with the virus.” Many communities have ignored rules to self-distance. A disproportionate number of orthodox Jews are infected in Great Britain. (5% of fatalities but only 0.3% of British citizens.) The majority of orthodox Jews in Strasbourg are reportedly ill while in Belgium, with a large Haredi population, 85% are expected to contract the disease with 17,000 requiring hospitalization, 550 to perish.
USA’s official medical expert Dr. Anthony Fauci stated the mortality rate in the USA might reach between 200,000-300,000. Pundits speculate that it is only a matter of time before anti-Semitic rants become more prevalent.
The great depression, and Hitler’s solution to Germany’s problem, at least expel the Jews, brought Father Coughlin to a vast audience. One only hopes that in these trying times the Jewish people are not made a scapegoat once again for the ills of the pandemic. If the economy teeters and falls, one analyst said, there’s no telling who is going to take the blame. It won’t be the first time, said another analyst, that Jews were blamed, persecuted, and eventually expelled, citing as far back as Babylon, the dispersion after the destruction of the Second Temple, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the pogroms in England in 1190,(150 killed) the pogroms during the black plague, all the way up to the Nazis, and beyond. A long history with dark chapters.
The solution is to forestall the spread of the virus, find a cure, and a vaccine. Jews are usually at the forefront of these discoveries. What we need is another Dr. Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine, a Jewish scientist, who discovered the vaccine for both cholera and the bubonic plague. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=268U0Odzcsg.
In the feature film “Contagion” it was Dr. Ian Sussman (Elliot Gould) who bucked bureaucracy and found the vaccine to stop the pandemic. Let’s hope another Sussman or Haffkine shows up, soon.
Once this crisis if over, said an observer, things will go back to normal.
