By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
Randy Neal, Christians United for Israel’s western regional coordinator, worries that the same story he tells at the close of many of the group’s meetings around the country will be a bore. But the group of supporters that filled Seattle Church in mid-April silenced to a hush, then broke into applause in support of its core message to Israel: You are not alone.
As CUFI increases its presence in the Northwest to counter what it sees as a landslide of anti-Israel rhetoric, one of the largest pro-Israel grassroots political member organizations in the country brought Holocaust survivor Irving Roth to Portland and Seattle, attracting Jewish and Christian community members alike.
“You, living up in the greater Seattle area, live in a hotbed of some of the methods and some of the strategies and some of the propaganda that’s being recycled and repeated that really opened the door to the Holocaust being ushered in in the first place,” Neal told the crowd. “This message is meant to suggest the radical notion that Israel has the right to exist. If that issue is going to agitate you, you might want to leave right now.”
CUFI, founded in 2006 by the Texas-based, fifth-generation San Antonio preacher Pastor John Hagee, is now preparing for its sixth “National Night to Honor Israel” event in Washington, D.C., where organizers expect a crowd of 13,000 members and supporters. That kicks off a weekend summit, when CUFI delegates lobby Congress on continued support for the protection and safety of Israel.
“The things Irving is about to touch on are the things that we need to lock arms on to make sure that they don’t get a foothold in our community,” Neal said. “Irving’s message is a warning, because he’s talking about a chapter in history where there are figures, there are leaders, there are organizations trying to make marks on the international stage that would love to see history repeat itself.”
Seated in the audience were Rabbi Jim Mirel, from Temple B’nai Torah in Bellevue, who delivered the invocation, professional vocalist Julie Mirel, who followed with a Hebrew-English song, and Wendy Rosen, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Seattle chapter.
As Roth took to the microphone, the 82-year-old struck a decidedly historical tone, detailing the small, incremental events that, in retrospect, now astonish him, but at the time, only caused confusion.
One day in 1943, said Roth, he was a 14-year-old boy playing with his friends during summer vacation in the park in his hometown of Humenne, Czechoslovakia. The next day, a policeman guarded the entrance, telling him that “Jews and dogs were not allowed.”
When the school year began, Roth showed up on that early fall day with the excitement of a young boy anxious to see his friends and resume his lessons, only to find another policeman forbidding Jews to enter.
“There’s one word that describes the whole process,” Roth said. “Demonization.”
Roth was eventually removed from the school, ousted from his home, and finally forced from his hometown to an unknown destination, he said, all done with the stroke of a pen and a written decree from government officials.
Roth asked aloud several rhetorical and existential questions that often seem to haunt those who survived the Holocaust.
“How is it possible that neighbors, that not only knew what was happening to their next-door neighbors, would participate in this murder?” said Roth. “How is it possible that cultured moral men would do that?”
In May of 1944, Roth and 4,000 Jews from Hungary, where his family had relocated thinking it was safer, were loaded onto a train for what would be a three-day journey to the Auschwitz concentration camp. When they disembarked from the train, guards immediately began yelling and screaming, “Form lines and begin to move,” said Roth.
“And so we begin to move,” he said.
Roth’s aunt’s family and his grandparents were taken to a group shower, where the Nazis deviously concealed from them the reality that they were about to be gassed to death.
“Of the 4,000 that arrived that night on that train,” said Roth, “3,700 were nothing but smoke and ashes 24 hours later.”
As the son of an accountant, a major, and a highly decorated war hero who was honored for his years of dedicated service to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Roth would not be spared from Hitler’s attempt at the so-called “final solution.”
“Twenty-five years later,” said Roth, “his son is put into a cattle car by the Hungarian police, his comrades-in-arms, how is that possible? How is it possible that in the 20th century, man could build machinery and places to murder, for people who lived within their midst for more than 10 centuries?”
Roth would survive imprisonment in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. He was rescued and liberated in April of 1945.
CUFI is now targeting college-aged students with its latest campaign, CUFI on Campus. It has recently hired a national campus organizer to lead the outreach and create a network of chapters on campuses throughout the U.S. CUFI believes this will be a critical strategy in moving toward what it calls a more balanced conversation about Israel on colleges and universities.
“The seemingly politically correct methods, the seemingly nonviolent messages, to delegitimize the Jewish people, to demonize the Jewish people,” said Neal, “the boycott, divestment, sanctions campaign, seems like a harmless campaign, but it serves, very effectively, to delegitimize Israel and the Jewish people. It’s wrong.”