Targeting Jews in D.C.

That’s what happened Wednesday night. More evil. More grave antisemitism.

At an American Jewish Committee event at a Jewish museum, a young couple was murdered (one victim was an Israeli Christian, the other an American Jew, according to reports). The murderer/terrorist/man consumed with hatred and evil reportedly exclaimed “Free Palestine” as he was arrested.

Yaron Lischinsky worked for the Israeli embassy in Washington. He and Sarah Milgrim were apparently about to get engaged.

John also wrote about it immediately here.

And there’s this that needed to be said:

There should be ecumenical outrage in the face of antisemitism. There should be an outpouring of love on our Jewish neighbors.

It’s a less-than-tiny thing, but I’ve recently taken to frequently wearing a bracelet I bought here that has the line from our shared Scripture: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.”

A month or so ago, a Jewish volunteer at a concert venue in D.C. noticed it and thanked me. She told me she’s only once been to Israel, and hopes to get there again, especially now that she’s retired. And she understood instantly the intention behind wearing the prayer: To remind myself and others, and to make a statement about our necessary intolerance for hatred of the Jewish people.

Earlier this year, there was a conference in D.C. about Catholics and antisemitism. I link to it here not because we deserve any credit, but because we maddeningly can never work and speak against this evil enough.

It’s also worth taking a look at what Cardinal Timothy Dolan, just back from Rome and being honored by Becket tonight in New York for his commitment to religious liberty, wrote in March for The Free Press:

The Church’s stance on antisemitism is unequivocal. Our Savior was a faithful Jew killed by the Roman occupiers of Judea. He died for the sins of all mankind. According to our faith, Jesus brought about a New Covenant that exists side-by-side with the Old Covenant between God and the Jewish people. As Pope Saint John Paul II often observed, “God’s covenant with the Jews is unbreakable.”

We also believe that every human life is created in the image of God, regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity. As Pope Saint John Paul II said, “The Church rejects racism in any form as a denial of the image of the Creator inherent in every human being.”

John Paul II’s words do not exist in isolation. In the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, also known as Nostra aetate or In Our Time, that seminal document of the Second Vatican Council, the Church tells us to decry “hatred, persecutions, displays of antisemitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”

In 1986, John Paul II reiterated that statement while visiting the Great Synagogue of Rome. “I repeat,” he said, “ ‘By anyone’.”

Fourteen years later, when he visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem, he left behind this prayer: “God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the Nations: We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant.”

Pope Benedict XVI, John Paul II’s successor, likewise reaffirmed the incompatibility of antisemitism and Christianity.

“The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth. . . . Deep down, those vicious criminals. . .  wanted to kill God,” Benedict XVI said while visiting Auschwitz in 2006.

“By destroying Israel, by the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and replace it with a faith of their own invention,” he added.

May God — humanly, impossibly — console the families of these young people.