(Editor’s note: Below is the full text of the letter sent by the Rabbinical Association of Greater Kansas City to Kansas State Sen. Steve Fitzgerald on April 23. Fitzgerald is a Republican state senator from Leavenworth, Kansas, and is running for the 2nd District congressional seat being vacated by U.S. Rep. Lynn Jenkins in 2018.)
Dear Sen. Fitzgerald:
It has come to our attention that recently on the floor of the Kansas Senate you once again compared the issue of abortion to the Holocaust. In this instance you compared fetal tissue research to medical experiments performed by Dr. Mengele. Previously, you have compared Planned Parenthood clinics to the concentration camp of Dachau. As rabbis in Kansas and in the Kansas communities of Overland Park, Prairie Village and Topeka, we are writing to express our outrage at your words and to explain to you how offensive this comparison is. We urge you, if you have any regard for the destroyed lives of our family members and the millions of others murdered by the Nazis, to stop using this kind of language.
In the Nazi Holocaust, a government killed millions of men, woman and children because of their ethnic origin and religion. Their sole purpose was the dehumanization and destruction of living, breathing human beings with independent existences whom they saw as inferior life. This was wrong, immoral, evil hatred about which there is no debate. The ideology of the perpetrators, and their power; and the defamation and dehumanization of the victims, all distinguish genocide, as committed during the Holocaust, from abortion. Abortion itself, or scientific experiments on fetal tissue, are not based on ethnic or religious prejudice, are not designed to eliminate the entirety of a subject population, do not use the mechanism of state power, and are not committed on a separate, independent living being.
Senator, your words abuse the memory of the murdered victims of the Nazi regime by using their deaths as a political weapon in our national debate. Or trivialization of their extermination demonstrates disrespect for both the victims and the survivors of the Holocaust. Your political opinions regarding abortion are an entirely separate matter from the wanton destruction of 6 million members of the Jewish community of Europe.
If an abortion provider, or an experimental scientist, or a fellow senator, are comparable to Nazis, then the logical conclusion of this speech is that they must be defeated in the way the Nazis were defeated. Thus, your language goes beyond hyperbolic metaphor into the area of incitement to violence. This make Holocaust comparisons dangerous as well as offensive.
Speaking directly to this subject, Abraham Foxman, former executive director of the Anti-Defamation League, said:
“No Christian who understands Jewish suffering should resort to inappropriate comparisons to the Holocaust to send a message that abortion is wrong. This was one of the most painful chapters in human history. Must the memory of the 6 million and millions of other victims be continually misused and abused by those with another agenda?”
Sen. Fitzgerald, you are quoted as not wishing to insult the Jewish community or the memory of the Holocaust. Yet you have done so repeatedly, without remorse, so your wishes ring hollow. The legality and limits of access to safe abortion in the United States are topics worthy of debate in our healthy democracy. Your comparisons of any supporters of abortion to Nazis, though, stifles this debate and could even incite others to violence. We demand that you cease immediately making these offensive and divisive comparisons to the Holocaust for political purposes, and to find different language to discus abortion, out of respect for the millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust.
We would be prepared to meet with you to discuss these issues in more detail, as well as to provide more education regarding the unique nature of the evil perpetrated in Nazi Germany.
Sincerely,
The Rabbinical Association of Greater Kansas City
