Dachau Revisited?

After many months, a stark but timely realization just struck me that I'd like to share:

This past chanukah, I had a strange but meaningful encounter which I wrote about in a previous post.

It was one of the evenings midweek in which we hadn’t scheduled a public lighting, but which I nevertheless come each day to kindle the kerosene lights of the giant menorah on the Town Common in Shrewsbury, MA.

This time, a man walked over to me and asked: “Are you the rabbi who lights this?”

I said “Yes,” and he said, “I’d like to give you something important” and ran to his car.

He came back with this. A small clear-lucite box with a small rock glued to a miniature pedestal.

"This rock is from Dachau," he explained. "My grandfather helped liberate it in 1945. I went there several years ago to see it for myself. Please accept this rock as a keepsake. We want people to have them so that no one ever forget what happened there."

Lots of thoughts passed my mind that evening when I kindled the menorah that evening holding a rock from Dachau.

I penned a little write-up that was published on Aish and elsewhere.

However, the significance of this fortuitous encounter and the eerie keepsake from the Holocaust continued to haunt me throughout the entire past year.

Why does G-d want me to possess a rock from Dachau? Why is it important for me, a Chabad emissary and rabbi in 2019/2020, to be in possession of this memento?

What am I to learn from this little rock the bore witness to untold crimes against humanity and the destruction of my people?

In recent weeks and months, it all became painfully evident to me.

You see, we are witnessing an onslaught of epic proportions, an attack against Judaism and the Jewish people, unprecedented here in the United States of America.

It has begun almost innocuously, in the name of public health. Flatten the curve, we were told. Help the hospitals have enough spaces and ventilators for those who need.

Fair enough.

But the months droned on, and the lockdowns continued.

Before we knew it, the government is in complete control of our schools, our synagogues, our mikvas.

Individual rights no longer matter. We are now property of the state, obliged to do its bidding without question.

Our two-year-olds are masked and muzzled. Our five-year-olds are forced into solitary confinement. Schools are shut down at a whim. Jewish communities are singled out with threats of summons, arrests, or worse.

Mayors shut down Jewish schools as punitive measures to punish Jewish neighborhoods for not complying with mask policy.

Jews are publicly accused of spreading disease.

Police try to shut down Simchas Beis Hashoeiva and other public celebrations.

But the worst is yet to come.

Everyone knows what’s just beyond the horizon….

Forced vaccinations.

That’s right, an untested first-of-its-kind modified RNA vaccine that alters the human genome.

Everyone knows the inevitable… that government is using the so-called pandemic as a pretense to force this dubious vaccine on the population.

In advance, states have already eliminated religious exemption so that no one can avoid it.

Medical tyranny is the new world order, and we are all its subjects.

And now I look up at that little rock on my book shelf.

The Rock from Dachau reminding me to never forget.

As our prophets foretold:

אבן מקיר תזעק. For the stone shall cry out from the wall. (Habbakuk 2:11)

Dachau also started as a public health initiative.

Political dissidents, communists and others, were all identified as a threat to the greater good of Germany. Hence Dachau was created.

Jews were declared a public health threat. So it made sense to deport them to Dachau.

Humans were beaten, tortured, gassed, used as human experiments, all for the sake of a greater good, for public wellbeing.

Fur ehre sicherheit, Germans were told.

Jews were banned from the public in the name of public health.

They were banned from schools and stores because they allegedly carried disease. Asymptomatic transmission, of course.

They ordered into cattle cars in the name of public health.

They were ordered into what they were told were public showers, in the name of hygiene. Of course, these were really gas chambers…

And in the name of public health, they were gassed and incinerated.

And of course, it all started with the Jews, but it never ends with the Jews. Many millions of people lost their lives. So much carnage. Untold suffering. Utter destruction.

Now I finally understood why G-d wanted me to have a keepsake from Dachau, the very first concentration camp opened exactly 88 years ago.

This little rock bears witness to the abuses of my ancestors. To the victims of tyranny.

Don’t let this happen again, it begs me to heed its cry.

We cannot remain silent now as individual rights are brazenly trampled in the name of “public health” once again.

We must not be reduced to faceless droid, dehumanized, depersonalized.

We must not submit to these shameful attempts to subjugate us.

We must not submit to the so-called new-world-order.

Don’t fall for the fancy name. It’s not a “new-world-order.”

It’s old-world. It was already achieved… in Dachau.

We cannot allow this sick-world order to be set into motion once more.

Say no to their orders.

Time to take back our country.

Say no to covid and covid policies.

Say YES to freedom, human dignity, and individual rights.

Say YES to First Amendment Rights.

And the we can truly say that we never forgot.