The Columbia Daily Tribune, Columbia, MO
Wednesday May 6, 1998
Editorial - Letters
Promise Keepers a Racist Group
Editor, the Tribune:
As an MU grad, visiting artist and Holocaust educator in Columbia on my third annual lecture tour to Columbia Public Schools, Stephens College and the university for Holocaust Remembrance Week, I’m dismayed that M would consider renting a university facility to an organization that promotes hatred against Jews.
A key mission of The Promise Keepers national movement is to actively seek the conversion of Jews to Christianity. It is degrading and humiliating to Jews to be told, especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust, that our religion is out-of-date and that we must accept Jesus as messiah in order to be righteous, saved and whatever else.
I urge Christian readers of conscience who accept the right of Jews to worship as Jews, and readers of any other faith, to write, phone and e-mail the university’s president and board of curators and ask them to reconsider the invitation to The Promise Keepers.
If the fundamentalist Christians I meet who tell me that all Jews must become Christian love me so much, why the do they seek our demise? And if the Christian fundamentalists were to succeed in converting the worlds Jews, making it “Judenrein”- the Nazi-era term for “Jew-less” – they will have completed the final solution to the Jewish problem.
- K. A. Segan, Seattle