Brilliantly written letter

Hi, my name is Stanley Brechner, and I joined this group about a year ago after exploring my roots on both sides of my father's family who came from Sadagura. And I have kept mainly silent, as most, while opening countless e-mails about this lost family and this lost heritage and, of course, gravestones, always gravestones.
However, at the same time, I work in the arts and have been actively producing a documentary on the Holocaust from the perspective of religion: the old religion of Christianity and the new religion of Communism (those Jews who 'converted' to Communism and sat by silently as Pope Stalin signed a treaty with Hitler in 1939). At the same time, while it was never the original focus of the film and is itself for me enormously unappetizing, it also became about the relative apathy of Jews around the world on behalf of their Romanian, Bukovinian and Galician co-religionists (among many others), meaning the very same people we are all so assidiously trying to 'connect' to. This inactivity, unfortunately, was particularly strong by the American Jews, of which I am one. Some Americans were 'irked' at being forced into the spotlight and worried that protests on behalf of European Jews would result in 'American antisemitism.' Others simply felt those Jews 'over there' were all Bolshevi!
 ks and had made their own bed. Some, like the editors of the NY Times, were appalled at the idea that Jews were Zionists and talked openly about a Jewish state, a ridiculous notion because: why should Jews 'stand out' or 'particularize.' It embarassed them and didn't fit 'the program.' The result is, as some Nazis testified to at the Nuremburg trials, they were completely surprised at how easy it was to demonize, deport and murder 6 million, including close to 1 million Jewish children, thousands of whom came from Czernowitz and its environs. While Romania lost about 1/2 of its Jews, the Bukovina area was 'particularly' devastated.
And that comes to my point. Here we are a group that spends time talking about gravestones, yet some are 'irked' about talking about an Israel under siege. It doesn't fit their political agenda while interested in 'connecting' with the past of Bukovina. Some are 'irked' about talking about the same antisemitism that is at the heart why many search for a heritage taken from us. Czernowitz cemeteries where gravestones and ancestors cannot be found because many of these ancestors aren't even buried. I find it extraordinary appalling.
My grandparents and great-grandparents were forced to flee Sadagura with nothing on their backs in 1889 after living in the area for three hundred years, working as craftsmen. They were the victims of a slew of virulent antisemitic laws passed between 1869 and 1880 as well as pogroms. I am here to talk about it because, by chance, they fled to America while many others could not. That is the essence of my connection to Sadagura and this group, not some gravestone. The gravestones are living history, a living testament to the past and the future.
To those 'irked' at Lucca's e-mail and attachment (which aside from its content is brilliantly written), let me say as delicately as I can: go screw yourselves. Bravo to you Lucca! On to more gravestone lists.
Best, Stanley Brechner

 
Received on 2004-02-10 15:31:58