Luke Ford

Cleveland Jewish News: When Donald J. Trump announced a proposal for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until the country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” criticism poured in.
The condemnation came swiftly from his fellow candidates, from national organizations – and from local rabbis.
One example was Rabbi Richard A. Block, senior rabbi at The Temple-Tifereth Israel in Beachwood and Cleveland, who took to Facebook with strong feelings about the New York business magnate’s proposal.
“In a political season when a leading presidential candidate advocates the exclusion of Muslims from our country, we understand anew the importance of the Torah’s commandments to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ and to ‘love the stranger,’ and of Hillel’s teaching that ‘what is hateful to you, do not do to another. That is the whole Torah. All the rest is commentary. Go and learn,’” Block wrote. “How many radicals will (Trump) inspire to commit mass murder? If we remain silent in the face of Trump’s despicable proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., we become complicit in it.”
For Rabbi Rosette Barron Haim, also of The Temple-Tifereth Israel, Trump’s proposal hit home – as in her family’s ancestral home in Turkey, where her family had many Muslim friends.
“I’m just very much aware that not all Muslims feel the same way about any given issue really,” Haim said. “It’s never good to lump all people, all minorities into any one category. I think that’s as true for Muslims as it is for people of Jewish background. That’s what they did in the countries where they wanted to persecute the Jews was that they made a generalization from an experience with perhaps just a few people and made policy that way.”
…Block said Jews might be extra sensitive to Trump’s proposal, recalling how Jews attempting to flee Nazism were kept out of the United States, including the famed case of the MS St. Louis, a ship with nearly 1,000 refugees forced to turn back toward Europe.
“I believe that the Jewish people’s experience with bigotry, persecution and rejection should stimulate special sensitivity to discrimination against other minorities,” Block wrote in an email. “We still recall with bitterness that the doors of the world were shut in the face of Jews attempting to flee Nazism. The vast majority of American Jews are the descendants of immigrants. The Torah reminds us more than 30 times that we were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
It’s hard to find a parallel for Trump’s proposal in American history – a time when an entire race or religious group was denied entry into the United States.
Certainly, Jewish refugees from Europe during World War II were denied entry due to a “nativist movement tinged with hysteria about hidden spies,” according to Jay Geller, Samuel Rosenthal Professor of Judaic Studies at Case Western Reserve University. Geller noted “active anti-Semitism” in the State Department and that officials had “carte blanche” to refuse German Jews. In that case, however, there were already quotas in place from the Immigration Act of 1924, which aided American efforts to prevent immigration of undesirables.
“America at that point simply needed to admit far more German Jews than the law stipulated they could and there was no widespread movement among non-Jewish-Americans to revise the quota or make an exception,” Geller said.
The idea of keeping out a seemingly dangerous minority then is not new. Still, his proposal is fairly unique in American history.
As a result, it’s also difficult to imagine how it would work. How would American authorities be able to figure out if someone was Muslim?
“The very first thing I thought was how would border control in this country even know who’s Muslim,” Geller said.
Geller said that the Germans solved that problem by putting a big red “J” on the passport of Jewish citizens, allowing other European countries like Switzerland to easily deny them. Most countries, however, including the United States, don’t put religion on one’s passport.
“I think the important thing is to remember that they’re all human beings,” Haim said. “We’re all human beings.”

REPORT:

“It speaks of the broader problem that our country always has to fight against and that is ignorance, hatred and xenophobia,” said Rabbi Victor Urecki, longtime rabbi and spiritual leader with the B’nai Jacob Synagogue in Charleston.

“He is speaking to a group of people — and it’s a small group of people, but they’re very vocal — that find the stranger is a person to be hated. That’s not the America that I grew up in.”

Urecki was a guest on Tuesday’s MetroNews “Talkline” a day after attending a community meeting involving Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders at the Islamic Center of West Virginia, located in Kanawha County, that was organized to dispel myths about Islam.

Hundreds of people attended the Monday night event.

“The Muslim community has been speaking out. Unfortunately, they do not have a lot of traction in the media because it’s a softer voice, but they do speak out,” Urecki said of efforts to push back against anti-Muslim rhetoric that has intensified in the wake of the San Bernardino, California terrorist attack that left 14 people dead and more than 20 injured.

On Monday, FBI investigators confirmed Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the two shooters who opened fire last Wednesday at San Bernardino’s Inland Regional Center, had been radicalized “for quite some time” and were possibly ISIS sympathizers.

Urecki said he understands very well that the U.S. has its enemies.

“There are people that are an enemy, not just to the American way of life, but immigrants which include Muslims who want to be part of the American experience,” he said.

However, “The overwhelming number of Muslims are not here to damage this country.”

As a Jew, Urecki said he’s bothered by the statements now being made about Muslims. “The same statements that are being said about Muslims were being said about Jews in America in the 1930s,” he said.

Urecki was born in Argentina and moved to the U.S. in 1965.

His father grew up in Argentina, one of the few sanctuary countries for Jewish people fleeing from Poland in 1938. At that time, the United States was not an option. Urecki sees parallels to what Syrian refugees seeking refuge are now facing.

Trump has called for the ban on Muslims entering the U.S. until, “our country’s representatives can figure out what’s going on,” according to a campaign statement. He’d previously proposed surveillance at mosques and the creation of a database of Muslims living in the U.S.

Rabbi Aaron Panken writes for HuffPo: “With Donald Trump’s suggestion of banning all Muslims from entering the United States, people of good conscience must raise the alarm. This was not some insignificant hate-monger speaking to a limited band of fanatics — as presidential candidates speak, they define the essential boundaries of what is reasonable discourse in America. The dangerous and irresponsible speech we now hear coming from Mr. Trump has the potential to foster hatred, ignite violence and cause irreparable harm to individuals and our nation at large. When a candidate’s speech veers into such unconstitutional, un-American territory as proposing a religious litmus test for entering our country, the core values of America are in jeopardy.”

I don’t recall many of America’s founding fathers talking about the importance of having lots of Muslims in the country.

The rabbi is scared that Donald Trump is expanding the Overton Window and making it possible for Americans to discuss publicly things the rabbi wants forbidden, such as noticing that different groups tend on average to behave in different ways.