Rebirth of hate feared after 'Passion' film
Jews brace for new wave of anti-Semitic sentiment
By Gwen Florio
Denver Post Staff Writer
Post / Kathryn Scott Osler
An anti-Semitic billboard along Colorado Bouldevard concerns two men who gathered for an evening prayer at a Denver synagogue.
It's been two decades since white supremacists murdered a Jewish talk-show host in his Denver driveway; a quarter-century since the Klan marched on an Orthodox synagogue here.
Nonetheless, the Ash Wednesday release of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" makes some in the area's Jewish community wary.
Those fears were heightened Wednesday when the Lovingway United Pentacostal Church posted a billboard along South Colorado Boulevard proclaiming, "Jews killed the Lord Jesus ... Settled."
Denver normally is a remarkably tolerant city, says Evan Zuckerman, associate director for the regional Anti-Defamation League. "We've been fortunate in Colorado that we haven't seen anything horrific" in the years since Alan Berg's murder.
But that doesn't erase history.
"What's been hurtful for centuries is the use of this (Passion) story, this powerful and important story, in a way that causes people not only to dislike but to do violence against the Jews," says Denver ADL executive director Bruce DeBoskey.
The movie's release at the beginning of the Lenten season leading to Easter is a flashpoint.
Europe and Russia were infamous for their Easter Sunday pogroms, when Christian mobs rampaged through Jewish communities.
Rabbi Israel Rosenfeld, who survived Hitler's Auschwitz death camp, said during his childhood in Czechoslovakia's Carpathian region, "when Easter came around, everyone went around beating up Jewish kids. We were all hiding."
And retired Denver attorney Jack Greenwald told of a vacation to England where he visited the town of York, whose Jewish inhabitants were massacred in 1190 after being given the choice of being baptized or killed.
Ancient history? No more so than the events portrayed in Gibson's movie.
"For 2,000 years, four words have fueled Western attitudes: 'The Jews killed Christ,"' DeBoskey says.
Colorado has an uneasy past with racism and anti-Semitism, beginning with the Ku Klux Klan's dominance of state politics in the 1920s, and punctuated by the KKK march in the late 1970s and Berg's 1984 assassination.
To this day, Diane Summers can't shake the childhood memory of white-robed Klansmen marching past her family's house on their way to her Orthodox synagogue in Denver's Hilltop neighborhood.
"It was absolutely frightening," she says. "My mother was freaking out."
"That's not so far in the past. It's not like it was in the 1950s in Alabama," she says.
Summers' synagogue and others around Denver routinely receive police protection during the High Holy Days, she says.
Most anti-Semitism around Denver takes the form of vandalism and harassment, according to the ADL, which tracks such incidents.
In 2002, the last year for which statistics were available, anti-Semitic incidents rose 8 percent nationwide over the previous year, according to the ADL. Colorado, with 35 anti-Semitic incidents, ranked 11th among the 41 states reporting them.
The National Alliance, the country's largest white-supremacist group, has been distributing fliers in Colorado communities, most recently in Boulder.
Although the fliers target black people, the National Alliance "is anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti- black. They're equal-opportunity haters," Zuckerman says.
On its website, the National Alliance offers the furor over the "The Passion of the Christ" as "proof" of Jewish control of the media.
After complaints of anti-Semitism, Gibson reportedly removed the English subtitles from the scene in his movie where, as recounted in Matthew 27:25, the high priest Caiaphas makes his much-debated pronouncement: "His blood be upon us and our children."
DeBoskey fears subtle distinctions, such as removing the phrase, will be lost upon casual viewers. Much as actor Charlton Heston is forever linked with the 1956 film "The Ten Commandments," DeBoskey says, "This movie being made today will shape cultural images, cultural views, cultural attitudes for decades to come."
He says that would be a shame, particularly in the United States, which has been largely free from widespread violent anti-Semitism.
"There is a history of acceptance and tolerance and diversity in America that is unparalleled in the world," he says.
Rabbi Rosenfeld, now of Denver, says that when he arrived in the United States after the end of World War II, "I never felt any barbs or any slighting remarks about my Jewishness. I definitely feel this is the greatest blessing."
And Greenwald says decades ago, when he told his Catholic supervisor that he could not work his post office job on Friday nights because of his Sabbath observance, the man was impressed by the level of his faith and readily adjusted his schedule.
"It's rare for a lawyer to be speechless," Greenwald says, "but I can tell you this: That for about 40 years ... I had only one bad deal in all those years." That time, he says, he felt remarks about Israel's treatment of Palestinians crossed the line into anti-Semitism.
Summers says, the Klan march aside, her life as an Orthodox Jew in Denver has been largely problem-free. In fact, when her son was seeking a hockey league that wouldn't require him to play Saturday games, he found a home in the Shaka Inner City Edge Youth Hockey program. Other players were curious about her son's yarmulke and the tzitzis fringes on his shirt, but once explanations were over, hockey ensued, she says.
DeBoskey says he hopes that sort of tolerance prevails nationwide after the release of "The Passion of the Christ."
"In America," he says, "we can dialogue and argue and disagree. That's the beauty of the freedoms we get here. The rest of the world isn't so lucky."
