Personal encounters with the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
One thing you have to give Hamas, Hezbollah and the ayatollahs credit for: they are totally commited. Their credo, fixed in writing and repeated orally an infinite number of times, is: The State of Israel must go! And once and for all. The current battle cry of countless demonstrators in the squares of this world expresses it somewhat differently: “From the River to the Sea” – Make Palestine “Judenrein” (no Jew left) from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This cry is just a variant of a hate tirade that mobs in Russian Polish, German and French cities have chanted through the centuries: “Juda verrecke!” (Juda perish).
The State of Israel has existed for 75 years. Anti-Semitism, however, goes back 3000 years further. In Egypt, the children of Jacob were reduced to slave labor. In the 4th century B.C., by order of the Persian government, all Jews were to be killed in a single day. Shortly after the turn of time, the Romans put almost an end to the small people. The historian Flavius Josephus puts the number of dead in the Jewish war at over one million people.
When, on November 9, 1938, in my home town Wiesbaden the three synagogues were reduced to rubble and Jewish shop windows were smashed in the Reichskristallnacht, the event was almost like a public festival. All these crimes took place before the eyes of the German and world public. The holocaust was not only the work of Hitler, but the result of a tremendous diligence of hundreds of thousands of Germans who, as train drivers, policemen, SA members, secretaries and informers, pursued only one goal: the final solution of Jewry. I was about 20 years old when a Wiesbaden resident told me: “When the Jews were taken away from our houses, we stood behind the curtains. We knew!”
If Iran could enrich the uranium a little more, the revolutinary guards sure would like to throw the bomb quickly. Probably on Tel Aviv. Hoping not to irradiate the Temple Mount as well. Perhaps the enemies of Abraham would even succeed in wiping out the only Western democracy among the many Arab dictatorships. Anyone who believes that the great kingdom of peace will then dawn in the Middle East is probably not very familiar with history. Of course, the open and hidden pogroms against Judaism continued. Worldwide, sometimes more sometimes less. Often controlled by corrupt governments that like to direct the frustration of the masses to a small minority, namely the Jews. There’s not much new under the sun, unfortunately. Because the hatred for the Jews is passed on from mother to daughter with her mother’s milk. And handed down from grandpa to his grandson. Even in elementary school in the 1960s, I heard in the schoolyard that the Jews themselves were to blame for their misfortune.
After all, it was the Jews who brought the plague, cholera and the Black Death to Europe. And didn’t the Jews poison our wells, kill our children, and cause “Black Friday” on October 29, 1929? The fact that all of these accusations were factually false hardly stopped anyone from continuing to spread these lies.
Each of us should take a closer look – beyond the current criticism of Israel – at anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, there are a sufficient number of concentration camps in Germany: Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, KZ-Oranienburg… A trip to Ausschwitz in Poland or even to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem should fill German visitors in particular with a deep sense of shame.
But what points of intersection I myself have had with Judaism in the course of 63 years. Here is a brief summary.
In middle school, Elisabeth Soldan sat at my school desk for a few months. I remember her as a quiet girl. She was an excellent violin player and had a fine, modest manner. As a Jew, she was exempt from religious education. At some point we lost sight of each other.
As a student at U.S. universities, especially Harvard University, many of my fellow students and professors were Jewish. Quite a few of them had lost a large part of their ancestors in German concentration camps. They treated me mostly neutrally, some even friendly, and only one of them hostile.
From 1991 to 1993, I worked as a resident at Yale University in New Haven. My mentor was Prof. Irvin Modlin. I don’t think I’ve met a person with a higher IQ before or since. He was a member of the advisory committee for the award of the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Small in stature but a mental giant. His research team contributed over 60 scientific papers to the global discourse year after year. In addition to medical literature, he read several books of fiction each week. His father had taught Talmud years before in Cape Town. Professor Modlin directed me to the Jewish professor Isidore Segal in South Africa. He supervised my clinical trials in Johannesburg. Even today, I remember our conversations together about beauty, music, faith and the question of God.
When my wife Tina and I returned to Germany in 1995, Prof. Modlin’s letter of recomendation opened the doors to the three university hospitals in Berlin at the time: both Charité, Benjamin Franklin and Virchow offered me employment contracts.
In 2009, the foundation of the Diospi Suyana dental clinic was on the agenda. Through a contact of Claudia Dräger, I had a long conversation with Stanley Bergman in New York. The American of Jewish faith listened to my standard lecture, which always ends with the cross and the empty tomb of Christ. Delivered with a strong German accent, of course. The CEO of the world’s largest dental company, Henry Schein, arranged for the donation of $200,000 in materials to Diospi Suyana after our meeting. Jewish money for a Christian mission hospital.
On August 31, 2017, the Diospi Suyana Hospital celebrated its tenth anniversary. Due to violent protests by radical unions, the area surrounding the mission hospital was more like a battlefield. Despite personal risks, Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski flew from Lima to Cusco and landed at our site 30 minutes later in a helicopter. Kuczynski himself a Jew knew our German roots. His father had worked as a doctor in Berlin until he had to leave Germany head over heels in 1933 to escape the gas chambers.
In 2018, we fought with the medical establishment to renew our license for Hospital Diospi Suyana. Due to the high degree of popularity and popularity among the people, we unfortunately – for economic motives – have many enviers and enemies. When we were about to close at the end of December of the same year, the Peruvian Minister of Health, Dr. Silvia Pessah, intervened. She had received me earlier in her official residence and patiently internalized the milestones of our mission. Thus, 5 years ago, it was a Jewish woman who ensured the continuity of our Christian hospital in the turmoil of that time.
Just as I myself and our mission are deeply indebted to Judaism, strictly speaking, it is billions of people who benefit from the many scientific breakthroughs made by Jewish scholars. Without the achievements of Jewish scientists, infant mortality would be higher and the life expectancy of most people would be lower. But who of the screamers who shout out in the capitals of this world the demand for the extermination of Israel, but in reality demand the extermination of the 14 million Jews, knows the connections. Because to do that, you would first have to dig out the old history books and start reading.
To those who accuse us of philosemitism in this context, my wife and I have been supporting an Arab children’s home in Bethlehem for over ten years. And that to the best of our ability. /KDJ
