Already at a young age I experienced inexplicable Jew hatred. At the age of 8, Charlie, a red headed Irish boy, was my best friend. One day I encountered Charlie’s grandfather visiting his family; he asked me if I was Catholic. I had reddish brown hair and freckles. I told him I was Jewish and he threw me out of the house and I never again played with my friend Charlie.
I think that anti-Semitism, Jew hatred, is fed to too many people in their mother’s milk; if not, there is no sensible explanation for this sentiment.
My earliest memory of Jew hatred was when I was about 5 years old. My parents, Holocaust survivors who barely spoke English, lived in an apartment they rented. It was July 4, America’s Independence Day; I was playing with small sparklers when the landlord decided to call my parents by dirty names and told us we must vacate the next day.
In my early 20s, while attending Yeshiva University, I rented a room in an apartment in an Irish neighborhood nearby school. Each time I got off the bus to go to what I then considered to be my home, teenagers would call me names, such as “kike.” One day I had enough; I approached the oldest teenager and knocked him off his bike. That was the end of the name calling. A Jewish display of strength is inevitably a Jew hatred deterrence.
Coming home from graduate school on the subway, a bunch of obvious hoodlums were coming to harass me. Thank G-d the subway train came just in time.
When I taught at Rutgers University, as a Jew I was harassed and threatened. Though I reported this behavior, the Jewish organizations were silent. I am assuming their disenfranchised Jew mentality won them over. The fear of standing up for your [Jewish] dignity is the downfall of many Jews. Standing strong to Jew hatred is especially needed after and because of the long history of Jew hatred the Jewish nation so much experienced.
I was born in a displaced person’s camp in Regensberg, Germany, the only child of parents who survived the atrocities of the Holocaust. I attended public school, and came to study at Yeshiva University as a product of a Hebrew school. At YU I earned my doctorate and ordination. My Jewish pride has been the light of my life and no Jew hatred will take it away from me. I will fight it with every bone in my body.
I want to extend a special thank you to Kehilath Israel Synagogue and to those who truly inspired me: Rabbi Maurice Solomon, Cantor Benjamin Solomon and Alan Greenberg, all of blessed memory.
Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg
Edison, New Jersey
