Israeli Nazis

"My grandmother's name was Erna Patra Hitler "

It’s said that the “truth will set you free,” but when an intrepid Israeli reporter browbeat Dr. Daniel Brown* (*Name has been changed.) into going public five years ago, the aftermath was traumatic. “I had always been open about my identity with both my family and friends,” he recalls,“ and no one had ever been less than supportive and warm. But this particular Israeli newspaper misrepresented its agenda to me. I didn’t know that it intended to publicize or sensationalize my interview the way it ultimately did. The story was printed in the weekend edition of the paper, and all daylong on Thursday and erev Shabbat radio commercials continually blasted every fifteen minutes: Hitler’s nephew’s grandson— right here in Israel—and a Jew! The repercussions left my family shaken.”

Brown’s sons—enrolled in a Modern Orthodox yeshivah in Jerusalem—were spat upon by several of their classmates and called “Nazis.” A handful of neighbors studiously avoided Brown when they encountered him on the street. And in shul the Shabbat after the story aired, a number of social acquaintances who normally greeted him with hearty handshakes turned the other way. “To these people, who had known me as Jewish for twenty-five years, I had become—overnight—a pariah,” says Brown. “I thought I was sharing a valuable lesson with others :that the past can be recreated and that a person always has the opportunity to change. But actually, it was I who was taught the lesson: Some people will never let you change.” (Not surprisingly Brown wanted to use a pseudonym in this article.)

Still, the incident becoming a litmus test for the varieties of human behavior, the responses were not uniformly negative. “In the same shul that Shabbat, I was also the recipient of a clearly symbolic act of acceptance,” says Brown. “I was given the first aliyah. This told me in no uncertain terms that the majority of the shul members regarded me as a full Jew and an accepted member of the community. Sadly, however, the decency of the majority didn’t nullify the crude conduct of the minority. We were badly wounded by what happened.

“Now I understand why most of my counterparts hide their identities,” says Brown. “Many Israelis are uneasy about our genealogy; they don’t know how to react or what to do with us. More