A Christmas Miracle for a Jewish Woman
25. dec. 2014
John Feister and Rabbi Abie Ingber skriver bl.a.:
His mother escaped from death in Nazi-occupied Poland on Christmas Eve.
Catholic and Jewish people people are kindred spirits. We worship the same God, and honor God as the creator and sustainer of all life—especially that of our own human family. We both celebrate endless years of God’s saving actions among us. As Pope St. John XXIII famously said upon welcoming Jewish leaders to a meeting, recalling the Genesis story, “I am your brother, Joseph.”
Of course, we all know that this brotherhood and sisterhood has not been observed for most of Christian history. Ours has been a long and horrible story of distrust and finger-pointing, of jealousy, discrimination, and violence against Judaism. The low point of this sad history, we all know, is the Nazi attempt to eliminate Jews completely.
When we two writers first met, we were well aware both of our desire for unity between our traditions, and of all of the obstacles. The rabbi has a story to tell, and a desire to share; the journalist, like many St. Anthony Messengerreaders, has goodwill, but barely knows where to start.
So we’ll start with sharing. We’ll hear the story of Rabbi Ingber’s mother’s harrowing Christmas escape from the Nazis. Then we’ll hear about St. Anthony Messenger’s visit earlier this year, the day after Pope Francis’, to Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s memorial museum to the Jewish victims of the Nazi slaughter. Here our stories, in a sense, intersect.
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