Psalm 121, verse 4 says, “Indeed, He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” Jeremiah 4:23, 25a says, "I looked on the earth, and behold, it was formless and void; And to the heavens, and they had no light.... I looked, and behold, there was no man." We cannot avoid talking about the Holocaust or Shoah, in Hebrew.

There are many today who say it didn’t happen. They say that the pictures are faked. They are trying to rewrite history books. They are called revisionists and they even include many politicians amongst them. Be wary of what they say. No event in human history has been as massively researched and documented as the Holocaust. There are thousands of books on it. You can visit the death camps in Germany and Poland. There are films. There are survivors, even here in Omaha, Nebraska. If you do not believe that man is capable of doing this then you have a lot to learn about human beings. It happened. I lost some of my family in it. I watched my grandmother talk to her relatives who survived. I saw the numbers tattooed on their arms. It happened and it continues to happen. Three million dead in the Killing Fields of Cambodia; thousands killed just recently in Rwanda and before that in Bosnia due to Ethnic cleansing. We genocided 75% of the American Indian population our selves in the 1800s. Can it happen again? You betcha. Can it happen here? You bet. It almost did in the 1930s. The American Nazi party was very powerful during the depression. Hate mongers filled the radio airwaves like Father Coughlin who actually had fifteen percent of the population behind him. Eleven million people were murdered in the Holocaust; six million of them were Jewish.

How long, O LORD? Wilt Thou forget me forever? How long wilt Thou hide Thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, Having sorrow in my heart all the day? How long will my enemy be exalted over me? All your enemies Have opened their mouths wide against you; They hiss and gnash their teeth. They say, "We have swallowed her up! Surely this is the day for which we waited; We have reached it, we have seen it."

Psalm 44, verses 8 to 23, “In God we have boasted all day long, And we will give thanks to Thy name forever. Selah. Yet Thou hast rejected us and brought us to dishonor, And dost not go out with our armies. Thou dost cause us to turn back from the adversary; And those who hate us have taken spoil for themselves. Thou dost give us as sheep to be eaten, And hast scattered us among the nations. Thou dost sell Thy people cheaply, And hast not profited by their sale. Thou dost make us a reproach to our neighbors, A scoffing and a derision to those around us. Thou dost make us a byword among the nations, A laughingstock among the peoples. All day long my dishonor is before me, And my humiliation has overwhelmed me, Because of the voice of him who reproaches and reviles, Because of the presence of the enemy and the avenger. All this has come upon us, but we have not forgotten Thee, And we have not dealt falsely with Thy covenant. Our heart has not turned back, And our steps have not deviated from Thy way, Yet Thou hast crushed us in a place of jackals, And covered us with the shadow of death. If we had forgotten the name of our God, Or extended our hands to a strange god; Would not God find this out? For He knows the secrets of the heart. But for Thy sake we are killed all day long; We are considered as sheep to be slaughtered. Arouse Thyself, why dost Thou sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not reject us forever."

Adolph Hitler, who was never ex-communicated from the Catholic Church, wrote “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle) while sitting in prison in 1922. He wrote, “Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the almighty creator. By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” “I shall have gallows erected, in Munich for example in the Marienplatz, as many as traffic permits. Then the Jews will be hanged, one after another, and they will stay hanging until they stink. As soon as one is untied, the next will take its place, and that will go on until the last Jew in Munich is obliterated.. Exactly the same thing will happen in the other cities until Germany is cleansed of its last Jew.”

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of their basic rights. Hitler opened Dachau seven weeks after he took power. More than 200,000 Jews had already fled. The murder of a Nazi diplomat in Paris by a young Jew gave the excuse for Kristalnacht, the night of broken glass in November, 1938. Synagogues were burned, Jewish businesses were destroyed, 20,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Jews now had to wear a yellow star of David on their chest. This was done previously 700 years earlier by the Church.

When Poland and Russia were invaded, the Nazis sent out groups known as Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads, who would round up all the Jews in small towns and the countryside and shoot them and bury them in mass graves. Babi Yar in Russia is the most famous with about 200,000 dead in it. They also would load Jews in trucks and poison them with carbon monoxide. Both methods were inefficient and costly and took a long time. A poison gas called Zyklon B was developed which would kill people in a matter of minutes. All they had to do was breathe it. In January, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Security police presented his plan for the destruction of Jewry.

Slovakian Archbishop Kametko said to Rabbi Dov Baer Weissmandl who asked the archbishop to plead with Josef Tisso, head of the Slovakian government to spare Slovkia's Jews in 1942. "It is not just a matter of deportation. You will not die there of hunger and disease. They will slaughter all of you there, old and young alike, women and children, at once- it is the punishment you deserve for the death of our Lord and Redeemer, Jesus Christ. You have only one solution. Come over to our religion and I will work to annul this decree." Prior to the archbishop's cold and cruel comments, Rabbi Weissmandl had been unaware of the existence of gas chambers, and so had expressed concern at the deportation's effects on children, women and old people. In the fall of 1944, the rabbi was sent to a temporary camp, along with his family and hundreds of other Jews, prior to being deported to Auschwitz. Weissmandl escaped and made his way to the home of a high church official, whom he begged to intercede with Tisso. My request was curtly refused with the words: "This being a Sunday, it is a holy day for us. Neither I nor Father Tisso occupy ourselves, with profane matters on this day."

When Weissmandl asked the man how he could regard the blood of infants and children as "profane matters," the priest answered: "There is no innocent blood of Jewish children in the world. This is the punishment that has been awaiting you because of that sin (deicide)." Thus, some two thousand years after a false quote was attributed to a group of first century Jews, in Matthew 27:25, His (Jesus) blood be on your heads and the heads of your children - several highly positioned church officials concluded that G-d had sent Adolf Hitler to fulfill this New Testament curse.

With several heartening exceptions, the future Pope John XXIII among them, the Vatican remained quite untouched by the Jews' fate. However, it seems that it also did little to help Anti-Nazi Catholic priests who were sent to concentration camps. When the war ended, however, several highly placed Vatican officials helped large numbers of Nazis to escape to South America and elsewhere. They included Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka death camp, who had supervised the gassing of one million Jews. Professor Alan Davies, a minister of the United Church of Canada, said at a 1974 symposium on the Holocaust, " I would like some gifted artist to paint a crucifix scene portraying Jesus as an Auschwitz Jew, including the yellow badge Jude on his body, against the barbed wire of the death camp... The painful truth about the reactions of Christians during the Holocaust might raise the question, in radical form, as to whether it is morally possible to remain a Christian at all."

Elie Wiesel, in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era wrote " As a child I was afraid of the Church to the point of changing sidewalks when I came near a church. In my town, the fear was justified. Not only because of what I inherited - our collective memory - but also because of the simple fact that twice a year, at Easter and Christmas, Jewish schoolchildren would be beaten up by their Christian neighbors. Yes, as a child I lived in fear. A symbol of love and compassion to Christians, the cross has become an instrument of torment and terror to be used against Jews. I say this with neither hate nor anger. I say this because it is true. Born in suffering, Christianity became a source and pretext of suffering to others.