Rabbi David Joslin (Screenshot via Zoom)

KEENE VALLEY — Rabbi David Joslin stood at the chancel in the Keene Valley Congregational Church Sunday, crossing religious lines to deliver what could have been interpreted as a sermon about anti-Jewish sentiment.

“It speaks volumes that a rabbi is speaking on Sunday in a church about antisemitism,” Joslin told the crowd. “That’s, historically, a very rare experience.”

Joslin, of the Temple Beth Israel in Plattsburgh, was one of four people to speak about antisemitism in a discussion moderated by Lake Placid News Columnist Naj Wikoff.

Tom Glaser, a speaker from the Vermont Holocaust Memorial, shared his family’s story of Holocaust survival. Lake Placid Synagogue Board President Sue Semegram talked about the subtle ways that local Jewish people experience antisemitism. And Karen Glass, director of the Keene Valley Library, spoke about the experience of marrying a Jewish man and being questioned by family members about how a mixed-religion marriage could work.

This discussion came as New York continues to top the list of states with the highest volume of reported incidents of antisemitism. Last year, at least 580 antisemitic incidents in New York were recorded by the Anti-Defamation League, a 39% increase over the 416 incidents reported in 2021 and the highest number the ADL has recorded since it began compiling this data in 1979. Antisemitic incidents in New York accounted for more than 15% of all antisemitic incidents in this country last year, according to the ADL.

Since 2002, the majority of antisemitic incidents have been recorded in cities. Reports in the Adirondacks are much more rare, but not nonexistent. The ADL has recorded four antisemitic incidents within the park since 2002. The Adirondacks also has a history of antisemitism, one member of the audience, Phyllis Korn of Schroon Lake, pointed out.

Korn said that when her family moved to the Adirondacks in the 1940s, antisemitism was rife in the hotel and resort communities.

“Many of those resorts had signs when you tried to sign in that said, ‘Hebrews not allowed’ or ‘Hebrews not welcome,'” she said.

Wikoff also noted the history of the Lake Placid Club, a resort around which the modern village of Lake Placid was built. Melville (a.k.a. Melvil) Dewey, the founder of the Lake Placid Club and father of the Dewey Decimal System, has had a controversial legacy for a long time. Under his leadership, the Lake Placid Club barred Jews, people of color, people with tuberculosis and anyone “against whom there is a physical, moral, social or race objection, or who would be unwelcome to even a small minority,” according to “Contested Terrain: A New History of Nature and People in the Adirondacks,” a book written by author, researcher and professor Philip G. Terrie in 2008.

Wikoff said that the school he attended, Northwood School — which was once part of the Lake Placid Club — also had a history of not admitting Jewish students until a headmaster, John Howard, eventually changed that.

“There is that history — it’s a reality, it’s not a pleasant reality, it’s an ugly reality,” Wikoff said. “You don’t grow by pretending it doesn’t exist.”

“In a wonderful community like Lake Placid, we do find antisemitism in very subtle ways,” Semegram said. “Some of the things are said behind our backs, unfortunately. It exists, we know it exists. As such, we’re scared.”

As the president of a synagogue, Semegram said antisemitism is of particular concern when it comes to the safety of its community.

“Every time we’re in our building, we have armed security,” she said.

“I don’t think that antisemitism is something that’s so new,” Semegram added. “Let’s go back to Shakespeare, to ‘The Merchant of Venice.’ It existed as soon as the Jews became Jews. We live with it. It’s part of what makes us as a people so strong in our desire to remain Jews and keep our religion going.”

What can non-Jewish people do to combat antisemitism?

“Be aware of what they say — think before saying something that might be hurtful,” Semegram said.

Semegram added that education is “one of the keys to stopping all hate and bias.”

She suggested that people read a report titled “Antisemitism Uncovered: A Guide to Old Myths in a New Era” by the ADL at https://tinyurl.com/3smnxtuc.

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Survival

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Tom Glaser is the son of two Holocaust survivors, Viktor and Theresie Glaser.

Viktor and Theresie were living in Czechoslovakia when the Germans invaded. The Germans first occupied a province in northern Czechoslovakia in 1938, and then the rest of the country on March 15, 1939.

Tom said that his parents married one month later, hoping that the Germans would not separate families.

Viktor’s cousin urged him to flee the country, but Viktor’s parents didn’t want to leave the life they’d built behind.

“My father would not leave without their parents,” Tom said.

The Nazis took away the freedoms of Jews slowly, over time. More and more economic doors were closed off to Jewish people, making it more difficult to survive and make a living. Viktor was forced to turn to illegal means to make money and he began to smuggle other peoples’ valuables out of the country on trains.

Eventually, he was caught and sent to a Gestapo jail for more than nine months. While he was in jail, the Nazis took not only Viktor’s apartment, but Viktor’s parents’ apartment and business, according to the Vermont Holocaust Memorial website. He was only able to get out of jail because his family bribed authorities.

Sometime after that, all Jews were forced to begin wearing a yellow star and were barred from visiting cafes, movies or other entertainment venues.

Then Germans began to round up all Jewish families.

Viktor’s parents, Theresie’s parents and her brother were selected for transport out of Prague to an unknown location. Viktor and Theresie joined them on the same train.

“All Jewish families had to prepare a list of all of their possessions,” Viktor said in a video clip captured before his death in 2000.

“We had to bring along the list of our possessions and were allowed two pieces of luggage for each person,” he added.

Before they left, Viktor traveled to his birthplace and buried a $100 bill in a small metal container by a tree. Three days before their scheduled departure, all of the Jewish families selected for transport were forced to assemble into one building, which was guarded by armed German soldiers. The families were forced to sign an affidavit giving ownership of all of their possessions to the German state.

“We were put on a train but we did not know where it was going,” Viktor said.

They were packed onto an overcrowded train and transported to a ghetto in Lodz, Poland in 1941.

Upon their arrival, they were forced to stay in a school. They slept on the floor of the school and after about two weeks, German soldiers arrived with big trucks and parked them in front of the school. The soldiers then rounded up all of the small children and babies “and threw them into the trucks from the second and third floor windows,” Viktor said.

“Killing all while their mothers watched and screamed in anguish,” Viktor said.

In the Lodz ghetto, Viktor used to say that they were given very little food, and food that “in normal times you wouldn’t feed it to pigs,” according to Tom.

Tom said the conditions got “worse and worse.” Many died from starvation, typhus, tuberculosis and a variety of other ailments. Not seeing an end to his suffering, one of Tom’s uncles, then 16 years old, volunteered for a transport out of the ghetto to an unknown location, Tom said. Tom’s maternal grandparents went with their teen son because they didn’t want him to go alone.

“They were never heard from again,” Tom said.

On Aug. 18, 1942, Tom’s paternal grandfather died in Lodz. Viktor did not have a casket, and so was forced to bury his father and cover the body with pieces of wood.

On Sept. 8, 1942, there was a “selection,” and Tom’s paternal grandmother was selected and taken, “never to be seen again.”

Viktor and Theresie both became gravely ill, Viktor with jaundice and Theresie with typhus. By 1944, Germans had started to move Jewish families — including Viktor and Theresie — from the Lodz ghetto to the Auschwitz concentration camp aboard cattle cars.

Viktor and Theresie, upon arrival, faced Doctor Josef Mengele, who decided who would live and who would die.

Both of Tom’s parents were chosen to live, but they were separated. Viktor was sent to a total of nine concentration camps altogether, Tom said. Theresie was sent to the Grosse-Rosen camp.

While Viktor was open about the extremely inhumane and violent conditions he lived through during the Holocaust, Theresie never shared what she went through. All the family knew was that she worked in a factory, Tom said.

“She didn’t speak about it,” he said.

On April 30, 1945, American soldiers liberated the camp where Viktor was being held.

“The hardest thing my father would talk about was when American soldiers came to liberate them,” Tom said.

American soliders, shocked to discover the severe starvation of prisoners, immediately gave them all of their food, unaware of something called “refeeding syndrome” — which can cause malnourished people to die when they begin to eat again, according to Tom. Soldiers inadvertently killed many of the prisoners. Viktor somehow knew he shouldn’t immediately eat and was able to survive.

“When he spoke about liberation and those who died, he would always tear up,” Tom said.

Tom’s parents were reunited in Prague after they were liberated. They traveled to Viktor’s hometown and found the money that he had buried by the tree all those years ago and were able to start a new life. They fled Czechoslovakia when the Communist Party came into power and made their way to the United States, where Tom was born.

Tom said he and his family had a wonderful life and made many good memories. They loved to ski and would come to Lake Placid to ski. But the effects of surviving through the Holocaust lingered in a variety of ways. The family would never throw away food, Tom said. And he never knew what he could and couldn’t ask about.

Tom’s mother Theresie died by suicide on Jan. 22, 1969, at the age of 48. A close friend said that although she survived the Holocaust, she was a causality of it, Tom said. Viktor died of Alzheimer’s in Oct. 6, 2000, at the age of 93.

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History

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The history of antisemitism is long and far predates the Nazi regime.

Rabbi Joslin said that it was around 300 BCE — during Greek king Alexander the Great’s siege against Egypt and the east — that anti-Jewish rhetoric, specifically, started to be seen. The Greeks’ way of life was “diametrically opposed” to the Jewish way of life, Joslin said.

Romans later turned “antisemitism into a cottage industry,” singling out Jewish communities and assigning death penalties to Jewish people that were not applied to others, he added.

Antisemitism got an “injection of steroids” with the spread of Christian theology, Joslin said.

“To talk about antisemitism, you have to talk about some inconvenient truths,” he said. “The sad reality is that the church had a tremendous influence on antisemitism.

“Two thousand years ago, we couldn’t have this talk,” Joslin added. “There was no open dialogue.”

Joslin believes that Christianity spread throughout the Roman empire and overtook Judaism in part by suppression, either through theology or violence. Christian leaders sought to differentiate Christianity from Judaism and a trope — that Jewish people are “inferior” because “they killed the Christian god” — was thread into early Christian doctrine, Joslin said. But it wasn’t until later that antisemitism evolved, was politicized and inaccurate conspiracies about Judaism contributed to the blame for a variety of unrelated issues being assigned to Jewish communities.

“This notion of the Jew as the patsy still exists whenever there is a crisis, a catastrophe,” Joslin said.

White supremacy and racist movements in the United States gave Nazis a roadmap for how to “single out a group of people,” according to Joslin. Then came a rise in eugenics and an effort to eliminate the Jews and others deemed undesirable under Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

Overall, the United States has been “really good to Jews,” Joslin said. But he noted that there are examples throughout American history of antisemitism, such as Union General Ulysses S. Grant’s infamous General Order Number 11 during the Civil War, which ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky. President Abraham Lincoln countermanded the order after a public outcry.

“It’s about having a group of people to blame,” Joslin said.

Joslin highlighted two more recent examples: The 2018 terrorist attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where 11 people were murdered and six injured; and the 2019 attack on the Chabad of Poway synagogue north of San Diego, California, where one person was murdered and three others were injured.

“Sometimes, it’s not just rhetoric. It leads to violence. That’s what really scares me as a rabbi in the Jewish world,” Joslin said. “We have to worry about guards, we have to worry about police patrols, we have to worry about watch lists and we have to be concerned about new attendees. … I always, in the back of my mind, have to worry.

“It is a burden to be a Jew some days,” he added.

Joslin said that even Jews can be very critical of the Jewish community, but it comes from love, wanting to grow and wanting to be better.

“There really isn’t anything productive about antisemitism,” he said. “It doesn’t come from love.”

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“Bigger than we can imagine”

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Glass grew up in a small, majority-Catholic town in Wisconsin. As far as she knew, there was no Jewish population. She left when she was 18 years old and fell in love with a man who was Jewish.

Her father told her that a mixed-religion marriage would be very difficult. But neither she, nor her husband, really practiced religion. Many years later, Glass’ son married a woman who grew up Muslim. They, too, faced similar concerns from family members.

“We talk about antisemitism as the things that are happening to Jews, but the other Semitics in our world are Muslims, and they are suffering the same,” Glass said.

“My parents said, ‘Will you still celebrate Christmas?’ Her father said, ‘What will you do? Will you still celebrate Ramadan?'” Glass added. “It was the same questions, it was there. It’s the things that divide us. When you find someone that you can share a life with, that’s not what you are focused on.

“There’s been so many other differences that have separated us. The religion wasn’t it,” she said.

Glass said she wasn’t fully aware of the impacts of antisemitism until living life with her husband.

“It’s bigger than we can imagine, the hate,” she said. “And at the same time, bigger than we can imagine is the love we share with one each other.”