Opinions

Legal immigrants have provided much to our country, and I support such immigration. The illegal immigrants pouring over our national border create sympathy but are in violation of the integrity of our immigration laws.

Someone named Ben Sales (JTA reporter) advocates protests at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and promotes his ideas beginning on page 1 of the KC Jewish Chronicle of July 18, 2019. Sales encourages various misdirected individuals to join in protests against ICE. Does Sales address all immigrants or only those who enter illegally?

Here’s the rundown on alleged ICE arrests 2017/2018, compiled from Fox News:

Assault — 99,207

Larceny — 40,596

Burglary — 25,499

Sexual assault — 10,468

Robbery — 11,177

Kidnapping — 4,112

Homicides — 3,914

Meanwhile the Democrats in the House of Representatives are playing their political games. The problem at the southern border could be resolved if the Democrats in the House of Representatives would serve the best interests of America rather than those of their political party.

David S. Jacobs, MD

Overland Park, Kansas

Donald Trump and his father restricted and kept black Americans from purchasing or renting office space and/or condos in their developments. With this knowledge, how can anyone of the Jewish faith vote for him for president in the 2020 elections? 

Marvin Fremerman

Springfield, Missouri

I knew Mark Talisman, who passed away July 11. When he directed the Washington Action Office for the Council of Jewish Federations of North America, he visited Kansas City and was a guest in my home. It was then that I first heard his comment about being a short person. He said that when he first arrived in Washington, he was 6 foot 2. “Washington wears you down,” he said.

Talisman was quick witted and highly intelligent. He was so very devoted to the Jewish people. Mark held key positions related to Congress, including conducting orientation sessions for new congressmen. There was nobody like him. He can never be replaced. May he rest in peace.

Sol Koenigsberg

Overland Park, Kansas

Former Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, now U.S. Ambassador at large for International Religious Freedom, has started to expand his terrifying agenda on a global scale. At a State Department summit on religious freedom last week he gave the opening speech, heralding the start of a global religious rights movement.

We should be clear — the religious rights that Brownback proposes to protect are not our rights. As governor of Kansas, Brownback revoked former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’s executive order protecting state workers from being fired on the basis of sexual orientation. He consistently signed legislation that would limit a woman’s federally-protected right to access appropriate reproductive health care, including comprehensive sex education and contraception.

Sam Brownback — and his co-conspirator Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — are seeking to promulgate an evangelical religious right agenda under the seemingly benign term “religious rights.” This agenda seeks to limit equal rights for people in the LGBT community, limit women’s access to information and health care, and create a society — here in America and abroad — that is modelled after the evangelical Christian view of religion and morality.

As Jews, we must recognize that this agenda will start by infringing on the rights of women and the LGBT community. Next will be Muslims. Then us.  We should not be fooled.

Martha Gershun

Fairway, Kansas

Lee Levin is an icon of the community. Huddled in his cave on the extreme right of the political spectrum, he sends messages that attempt to unsettle the perspective of the general community. In his latest salvo, he has imagined a world distorted by the immigration at the southern border. He seems to argue that people who seek to enter the country have no skills, will make no contribution to the American way and will be content to survive on the charity of others. He contends that the rest of us support ourselves.

The only problem with his colorful tale is that there is no truth to it.

The would be immigrants will prove, as have their predecessors, that they will work and contribute to this country in many ways, including the enrichment of a diverse culture.

His depiction of an independent citizenry is inaccurate. Let me provide just two examples.

I have worked since I was 14 and have been for more than a decade the recipient of Social Security and Medicare benefits. While I contributed to the funds that support these programs, my contribution is long used up. My benefits now come from the contributions of millions of other Americans who work to maintain the system.

My family, and all of us, are protected by a police force. Yet all the local taxes that I pay will not provide the salary of a single law enforcement officer. But all of us contribute to make this protection available for everyone.

These are just two instances that demonstrate how the system works for all of us. And this also demonstrates that we do live up to the vision of Emma Lazarus engraved upon the Statue of Liberty. That vision is not available for amendment.

Joel Pelofsky

Kansas City, Missouri 

Kaddish.com by Nathan Englander.(Alfred Knopf. 2019)

When Larry’s Orthodox father passes away, his religious sister Dina insists that he take on the responsibility of saying Kaddish for the year to come. Larry, however, has ceased to be religious. He doesn’t want to attend daily minyans for a year, so he trolls the internet until he happens on a website called “kaddish.com” where he can hire Orthodox scholar Chemi to recite the Kaddish for his father. 

What happens next is that Larry recovers his orthodoxy and becomes a rabbi and a teacher in a religious school in New York. He marries Mira, an Orthodox woman, has two children, and life is going along well until he become involved with a troubled student Gavriel, who is suffering the recent loss of his own father. To help Gavriel, Larry, now known as Shuli, tries to locate Kaddish.com online. He receives no responses to his inquiries, so he takes a leave of absence from his job and flies to Israel to find the organization. 

There in Jerusalem, Shuli cannot locate the organization, but he finds a small Yeshiva and eventually discovers the mysterious Chemi, who is now a rich man making money from the Kaddish requests which he does not fulfill. How Shuli solves all the problems is the finale of the novel. Englander’s focus on the need for Kaddish is not the first time he focuses on the issue. In his first collection of short stories, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” his story “The Twenty-Seventh Man” describes a group of Russian Jewish authors who are about to be murdered by Stalin, one of whom is concerned about who will be left to say Kaddish. His latest novel is another way to look at the need for Kaddish and is well worth the time.

Andrea Kempf is a retired librarian and an award winning book reviewer.

Lee Levin’s article “Allegory of the Southern Border” (July 11) is deeply offensive and misleading and serves as a unique window into the minds of those who are OK with the Trump administration’s horrific mistreatment of immigrant children and adults at the border. He helps me understand the lies people tell themselves that underpin this point of view.

Were Mr. Levin’s parents or grandparents or great-grandparents immigrants? If so, in what way is the arrival of the “many men screaming and pounding on my door” any different from the arrival of his own family, or ours, seeking safety and a better life? His own have been in the “house” longer. That is all.

This “house” does not belong to any individual. And we share a collective responsibility for the well-being of those who arrive here after we do. That responsibility comes with the privilege of citizenship.

Mr. Levin, no one is going to die if immigrants are treated humanely and with compassion at the border.

Real children are already dying there — it is no allegory.

The true risk is that more children and adults will suffer and die each day if we fail to address this crisis. Our country’s ideals will die with them.

Sarah Fremerman Aptilon

Overland Park, Kansas

I have had two visits for rehab at Village Shalom due to a couple of automobile accidents. Both times my rehabilitation was most successful and turned out to be a positive experience.

The first one was a few years ago. I immediately saw that one of my cousins was at Village Shalom. We had coincidentally been in the hospital about 60 years ago at the same time. At that time when he visited my room, I got him laughing and because he had just had an appendectomy, it caused him a lot of pain. I never saw him again during his hospital stay. During my recent stay at Village Shalom he and I spent most every day together amid the wonderful courtesy and treatment of the staff.

Well, a couple of years later my car and I were disabled once again. I was back at Village Shalom. A good friend was there and we had an enjoyable and humorous time. It seemed like we were back at camp. Again the care was very superior.

I’ve had occasion to visit a number of similar facilities and there really is no comparison with the attitude of the staff and the overall warmth and caring you find at Village Shalom. I feel very lucky that it is here and available.

The welcome news of the remodeling and new construction gave Shirley and me an opportunity to participate in the fundraising. We have been very proud of Village Shalom. The fact that it serves the entire community so well is an additional reason for our personal giving.

My brother Charles has been very involved with Village Shalom from the start, establishing a monthly and annual employee recognition program, as well as being responsible for an exceptional staff lounge, recognizing the value of the loyalty and unexcelled service provided to its residents.

We have been so fortunate with the leadership of Matt Lewis. Matt and his entire team keep Village Shalom as the outstanding place that it is.

I hope you will consider this an opportunity to help create these important new improvements.

The following is a fictional account. But in our country today, it absolutely could happen.

The other night I was awakened by the sound of many men screaming and pounding on my door, demanding entrance. I was badly frightened — I had no idea who any of them were. 

A rear window broke and others started pouring in. They had come all at once, in a caravan of about two dozen. I called 911. The police came. They arrested ME!

“This is insane!” I raged. “They were breaking and entering! They are criminals!” Nothing I said mattered.

I was hauled before a judge, who wore a “Bernie for President” lapel button. “The police report says,” he stated sternly, “that your premises are like a concentration camp. The facilities are grossly inadequate. The building code does not permit so many. What can you be thinking, to be so inhumane?”

“But this caravan descended on me out of nowhere! I could not have possibly accommodated all of them!”

“Tough,” he responded. “That’s your problem. And the police report says that one-third of them are ill. 

You must get them medical attention at your expense.”

“My expense?” I sputtered. “I pay thousands of dollars a year for health insurance and have co-pays and deductibles. You’re saying I must give them health care for free, while 

I can barely afford health care for my own family?”

“You’ve got that right, buddy.”

“I have a homeless brother. An aunt that needs skilled nursing care. A son who can’t afford his own health insurance. Just how long do I have to fully support these non-citizen criminals?

“They are utterly unskilled. Chances are you are going to have to pay for their welfare indefinitely.”

“But,” I protested, “I’m already over my head in debt.”

“So what?” the judge sneered. “And let me add, in all my years on the bench I have never encountered a defendant as monstrously inhumane as you.”

I hung my head in chastened shame. When I got back home, I learned my brother had died, uncared for, in his cardboard box in San Francisco.

Lee Levin is the author of five historical novels and a lifelong conservative.

Regarding Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comparing the border situation to Nazi concentration camps, she may or may not have said this on purpose to push our buttons. She just got millions of dollars of free publicity and her followers love it.

Rep. Cheney of Wyoming begged Ocasio-Cortez to “spend just a few minutes learning” the history of the World War II genocide, tweeting that “6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”

Ocasio-Cortez shot back at Cheney minutes after her posting:

”Hey Rep. Cheney, since you’re so eager to ‘educate me,’ I’m curious: What do YOU call building mass camps of people being detained without a trial? How would you dress up DHS’s mass separation of thousands of children at the border from their parents?”

Cortez knows how to manipulate the press. She is neither stupid nor naive. This was the wrong issue to attack her on and she is using the uproar to her own advantage. There had been ghettos before. There had been internment camps and concentration camps. There were concentration camps starting in 1933. But Nazi Germany doesn’t turn to a systematic mass murder really until 1941.

Concentration camps were not a Nazi invention. Anna Lind-Guzik writes “in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, various imperial forces — including the British and Germans in their African colonies, the Spanish in the Caribbean, and Americans in the West — engaged in the practice of rounding up civilians into concentration camps as a tactic to suppress indigenous guerrilla warfare. By isolating the civilian population, fighters had fewer places to hide. Large populations of mostly women and children were held in terrible, quasi-permanent conditions, without trial, and died en masse from disease, malnutrition, and exposure.”

The term itself comes from reconcentración, a Spanish policy deployed against Cubans in the 1890s, which was then reused by the British during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902.

Using the term “concentration camp” to describe the indefinite detention without trial of thousands of civilians in inhumane conditions — under armed guard and without adequate provisions or medical care — is indeed a false comparison. However as human beings the Holocaust should have taught the world an important lesson about speaking out for humanity when humans are ill-treated. In memory of the 6 million Jews who perished because they were considered less than human, AS A CHILD OF SURVIVORS OF AUSCHWITZ, I will not accept my government treating migrants, especially children, like animals. CALL IT ANY NAME YOU WANT, IT IS MORALLY WRONG. Lock up those who have criminal records or send them back to their country of origin.

The term “never again” should be a lesson which Judaism teaches to the world.

Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg

Edison, New Jersey