Dear Editor:
RE: Graffiti at synagogue investigated as hate crime, Oct. 13.
I would like to say a few things from someone whose father was Jewish but whose mother was Christian. The incident happened on Oct. 5 which, this year, marks the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur. Something similar took place at the synagogue in Kitchener around the same time, so this wasn’t an isolated incident.
What I would like the broader community to understand is that this is the tip of the iceberg – if you open your eyes and ears you will see anti-Semitism all around you, perhaps in not so blatant a display, but in some people’s attitudes and, dare I say, in Church doctrine.
I was an occasional teacher with a local Catholic school board for 10 years where I came to understand how the Jews have been labelled “Christ-killers” over the centuries. In one classroom I taught in, there were pictures up on the wall that students had drawn as part of an assignment with another teacher, in which Jews were presented as the people who stoned Jesus, who betrayed Jesus, who turned Jesus over to the authorities, who asked Pontius Pilate to crucify Jesus and who refused to believe that he was the messiah.
It was quite shocking to me. To my mind, this was nothing more than a type of hate propaganda. But this is how Jews are depicted in the gospels and these portrayals are reinforced every Easter and in, at least some, religious school classrooms.
I want Christians to understand that the gospels were written many decades after Jesus’ death by people who had no firsthand knowledge of the events of his life.
It was expedient for the authors to blame the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus rather than Pontius Pilate, because the authors needed to convince early Christians that they were now the true believers of God and not the Jews.
Hitler didn’t invent anti-Semitism. He only gave people permission to hate Jews for other reasons. If you look at the reasons why Jews are deprecated, there is always an agenda full of deceit and propaganda and that is self-serving.
What I don’t understand is how a person or institution can say they love Jesus (who was Jewish) and then deprecate Jews. It makes no sense to me. For the love of God or for the love of humanity, let’s stop hating one another.
As the sign I have seen on so many people’s lawn says, “Hate has no home here.” I want to believe it.
Barbara Cooper,
East Garafraxa