Jewish Group Responds With Facts to Hate Talk
Irving Shapiro, 62, said the level of anti-Semitism that he has felt in the past year is second only to his years spent in German concentration camps four decades ago.
The main difference today, said the Gering, Neb., resident, is that Jews are speaking out against anti-Semitic views and people are beginning to listen.
Since April, Shapiro said, anti-Jewish literature has been circulated in the Scottsbluff - Gering area, which has about 22,000 residents. About 15 families in the area are Jewish.
The literature says Jewish forces in the Federal Reserve Bank are increasing the national debt and creating problems for farmers, businessmen and laborers.
One Christian minister and a few residents have repudiated those opinions and voiced discontent over discrimination and bigotry against minority groups.
Visit Praised
The most recent batch of literature was found Saturday on windshields of cars parked outside a Scottsbluff discount store. Other leaflets were previously found in area restaurants and on the fairgrounds, Shapiro said.
Shapiro's daughter, Marlene Shapiro-Zimmerman, praised a visit to the Scottsbluff - Gering area last weekend by a retired Omaha rabbi and two members of the Omaha-based Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith
She said the visit was a positive start toward gaining support from other local religious groups against alleged discrimination of Jews.
"There was such a wonderful, fantastic feeling there when the rabbi talked solidarity," she said. "I have never had that growing up because I was too much alone. For the first time I realized Levi, my 3-year-old son, could have the feeling of being part of something."
Rabbi Sidney Brooks, rabbi emeritus at Temple Israel, and Sheldon Filger, director of the Anti-Defamation League, addressed members of the community.
Their speeches attracted a total of about 600 people.
Motivated
"All of us there together, people from different denominations.
It was just a fabulous feeling for me," Mrs. Shapiro-Zimmerman said, "like we're all in this together."
She said she was frightened when the first anti-Jewish literature surfaced in her hometown.
"But it's motivated me into action more than anything else. That has been good; it's been positive."
She said she and other Jews in the area will stress education in schools and churches.
"So Christians may realize the pain and hurt we are feeling," she said. "At first we weren't very vocal about our religion. We just kept thinking it (discrimination) would go away. But finally we realized it's not going to.
"I feel people aren't out to slight us personally by their disinterest. I just don't feel they realize the impact it has on the Jewish community and the possibility of something violent happening.
"If people don't know any better, if they've never met a person who was Jewish or never were taught anything about Judaism, why wouldn't they believe what they would read off of those crummy sheets?
So now we're talking about who we are."
