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“Examining the reasons why the Nazis enabled a half-million Jews to
survive while they coldbloodedly slaughtered six million others leads to
a myriad of ironies. Only a generation before the Holocaust, the nucleus
of this group of surviving Jews – the Jews in mixed marriages – had been
perceived by their fellow Jews as being the greatest threat to the
continued existence of German Jewry. Interestingly enough, that same
concern about intermarriages, albeit from the opposite perspective, was
first expressed by German Christian church leaders as early as the
eleventh century. With contemporary figures for intermarriage in the
United States estimated at 40 percent, some American Jewish leaders have
a similar fear. Orthodox Rabbi Naftali Halbertam of Brooklyn’s World
Jewish Genealogy Organization, in a January 1984 open letter, wrote
“intermarriage has done to Our People [sic] the same damage our enemies
sought to inflict four decades ago.” That same month, a news report
placed current European intermarriages even higher – at 50 percent!<12>
12. Michael Wolfson, an Israeli-born professor of history in Hamburg,
West Germany, is the source of the European statistic. The _Jewish News_
(Detroit), 20 January 1984, p.12. (Abrams, 21)
Work Cited
Abrams, Alan. Special Treatment. Secaucus, N.J: Lyle Stuart Inc., 1985
Last-Modified: 1999/11/26
