By Rabbi Ben Kamin
COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho–While visiting here, I came across the news that out along the plains of Kansas, a grandiose vision of the pro-life movement is taking shape—on the backs of Jewish history and anguish.
Pastor Mark Holick, who speaks for the proposed International Pro-Life Memorial and National Life Center, scheduled for construction in Wichita, likes to make the following assertion: “Since Roe v. Wade, 60 million baby boys and girls have been murdered, and that is a holocaust unprecedented in the history of mankind.” [Roe is the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that ended state bans on abortion.]
We didn’t know that “mankind” are the people who, willingly or not, are impregnated on this earth; we had hoped that history would be calibrated in terms of “humankind;” we thought that by now, the unspeakable, systemic extermination of the Jewish people that transpired in Europe between 1933 and 1945 had earned the singular right to be termed “the Holocaust.” Even the Catholic Church long ago designated this genocide as “the Shoah” (its Hebrew name); any other use of the term amounts to a co-opting of history and a trivialization of the horror that remains unprecedented in human annals.
But the self-righteousness of the pro-life zealots has taken on new levels of impudence. Holick, who has publicly repudiated President Obama as a “Muslim president,” has plans to unabashedly construct a to-scale replica of Jerusalem’s Western Wall, which he anachronistically dubs “the Wailing Wall.” This site will feature, in the verbiage of the Center’s promotional materials, a “mother looking up, grieving for her lost child (Rachel’s Weeping), with the child in the bosom of Jesus.”
We Jews generally enjoy our ability to inspire other communities but not this much. We also have too much respect for Jesus—and for the right of women to choose—so that this entire enterprise in Kansas represents much more effrontery than it does flattery.
The Western Wall (which was renamed such after centuries of being called the Wailing Wall) is the surviving retaining external column of The Temple in Jerusalem. Freed from Jordanian occupation and desecration in 1967, it is the most sacred gathering place in the world for Jewish worshipers, dreamers, lyricists, poets, returning spiritualists, and lost souls. It is the eternal column of Jewish tears and renewal. It has nothing to do with unborn babies and everything to do with Jewish survival and resiliency. It transcends the political agenda of evangelists and all extremists—including right-wing rabbis who share in the prevailing misogyny of the prolife movement.
The six million Jews evaporated by the Nazis and their innumerable collaborators had no choice in the matter. The pro-life movement, which is generally myopic, and in this case historically duplicitous, continues to miss the point: women have the right to choose—let alone the need to recover from rape, incest, and all the things that no God would wish upon them.
Don’t rob the world of yet another freedom and the Jewish people of our hard-earned badges and our begrudged chronicles.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com