The following article is from the Aug. 13 edition of the Washington Post. What would Jesus want done?
There is only one road, a few houses and a farm. But the French hamlet La Mort aux Juifs, about 70 miles south of Paris, has attracted international attention. Translated, the hamlet’s name reads, “Death to Jews.” For centuries, nobody really seemed to care about it. This changed Monday, however, when the Jewish Simon Wiesenthal Center sent a letter to France’s interior minister.
The fact that “it was unnoticed during seventy years since the liberation of France from the Nazis [. . .] is most shocking,” the letter signed by the center’s director for international relations, Shimon Samuels, reads. According to the Wiesenthal Center, the name could date to the 11th century, when pogroms led to the expulsion of 110,000 Jews from France in 1306.
Marie-Elizabeth Secretand, the deputy mayor of Courtemaux, which has jurisdiction over the hamlet, does not understand why the name “Death to Jews” has caused a sudden uproar. “It’s ridiculous. This name has always existed,” she told the news agency Agence France-Presse. “Why change a name that goes back to the Middle Ages or even further? We should respect these old names. [. . . ] No one has anything against the Jews, of course.”
No one but the name and everyone who has to say it or think it or has to trod on that history all over again.
Insofar as Christ died for all, no one excluded, insofar as this verse, at minimum gives us glimpse into the heart of God regardless anyone’s response to Christ’s death on the cross, we can surmise that our job is to view every human as loved, sought after, sacrificed for, and desired in God’s forever family.
“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28 (NIV2011)
For more: follow on Twitter @jefflampl
I remember during the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s the world kept saying "Never again" referring to the Holocaust. Well, it is "Again". In the past year, more than 1000 Jews have fled France to Israel because of the persecution now rampant in that nation. Jews in Germany have been warned not to wear their yarmulkes on the street lest they become targets. It is worse now in the Scandinavian countries than it was during the Holocaust.The silence of the world and the church when confronted with open Antisemitism and the genocide of Christians and other groups in the Middle East frightens me as much as the overt persecution. We are to be a voice for those who have no voice, our silence is deafening. My heart is breaking not only for those suffering but for the Body of Christ, our silence makes us complicit in these horrors. May the Lord help us to turn our eyes outward instead of thinking so much of ourselves.
ReplyDeleteThe question is whether the name of the town really means "Death to Jews!" or is meant to signify that "this is where Jews have been killed, lest we forget". I suppose the Simon Wiesenthal Center is deep enough to have researched this, yet I wonder. If we delete all traces of these events in a positive attempt to eliminate anti-Semitism, are we doomed to forget - or even deny - that they occurred?
ReplyDelete