This time, I'd like to
introduce Senator Jon Ossoff,
who was born and raised in
Georgia and serves as our senior
United States Senator.
In 2020, Senator Ossoff,
in addition to being the youngest
Senator elected in 40 years,
was the first Jew elected to
the United States Senate from
the Deep South since 1878.
Senator Ossoff was bar misfit
at the temple in Atlanta,
a congregation which some of
you may or may not be aware of
experience anti-Semitism in
the 1950s when it was bombed.
Today he is still lives in Atlanta
with his wife Alicia and OB GYN
physician and baby daughter Eva Beth.
He is sworn into the United
States Senate on a Tana.
Belonging to Rabbi Jacob Rothschild,
the Atlanta rabbi who served at the
Temple when those white supremacists came
for the rabbi support of civil rights.
Since his historic election,
Senator Ossoff has built bipartisanship
in the Senate to achieve meaningful
results for us in Georgia.
Thank you.
Considering how divided the
United States Senate is,
what a huge effort and undertaking that is.
In his first two years in office,
Senator Ossoff has passed into
law more standalone bills than
any other freshman senator.
He has led many legislative
efforts in the Senate,
including delivering $305,000,000
to help synagogues and other
nonprofits enhance their security.
And passing legislation to secure
justice for victims of unsolved civil
rights era lynchings and murders.
Since taking office and her,
Ossoff has engaged intensively with
key leaders in the Middle East to
build the relationships necessary for.
For effective work toward peace,
security, and stability in Israel,
the Palestinian territories,
and the surrounding region,
the Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote in 2002,
Quote a year and a half into
his national political career,
he is emerging as one of the most
significant voices in Washington on
the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
And quote and then Senator Ossoff is notably.
Against quote spearheaded significant
bipartisan efforts aimed at
pushing conflict resolution and
political settlement forward.
Mentored by civil rights legend,
Congressman John Lewis,
Senator Ossoff previously led a small
business to produce legend investigative
journalism exposing war crimes,
political corruption.
Human trafficking and organized crime and
now serves in the Senate as Chairman of
the Subcommittee on Human Rights where
he investigates human rights violations.
Senator Ossoff,
like so many families in our community,
grew up among family who
survived the Holocaust,
something he and I have in common.
And he works today to combat hate in
the United States Senate through his
work as key members of the Senate
bipartisan task for combating anti-Semitism.
Facing down the threat of a filibuster,
Senator Ossoff took the Senate
floor on March 30th,
2022 to personally force through confirmation
of Georgia's own Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt,
to be Special Envoy to Monitor
and Combat anti-Semitism.
And for that,
thank you.
Good afternoon.
This is such a beautiful sight.
And Reverend Goshorn and the whole family
at Mulberry Street United Methodist Church,
we thank you for your hospitality.
Please join me in sharing our gratitude to
the Reverend and the church for having us.
Rabbi Bahar and the whole
Temple Beth Israel family.
Clearly the people of Macon,
Bibb County and Middle Georgia are with you.
The people of the state
of Georgia are with you.
The American people are with you.
The whole world rallies behind
you after what happened last week.
Mayor Miller, Congressman Bishop.
State Representatives Panitch,
Beverly Walker, Dickey Dove Wilker,
Regional Director of the
American Jewish Committee,
Sheriff David Davis, and your
deputies Please join me in thanking
the sheriff and his deputies
for taking care of us today.
Special Agents at the Federal
Bureau of Investigation,
US Attorney Peter Leary,
Consul General of Israel to Georgia
and the Southeast United States.
My friend Anat Sultan Jadan,
thank you as well for joining us.
In 1941, in Vilnius,
present day Lithuania,
a man named Nathan Krugman was
on his way home from a dance.
He was 18 years old,
like any young man experiencing life,
enjoying life,
imagining possibilities.
When Vilnius came under bombardment
from the German war machine
and at the panicked urging of his mother,
he and his brother got on their
bicycles and tried to follow the
retreating Soviet army as the German
Wehrmacht bore down on the city.
They made it just about to the
outskirts of Minsk before they
realized the situation was far too
dangerous to proceed, and after
having their bikes stolen from them,
they walked and snuck back to Vilnius,
their city, now under Nazi rule,
reunited with his family.
Nathan and his brother joined
them in what of two ghettos
established in Vilnius for the Jews?
There was a big ghetto,
and there was a small ghetto.
It was him and his mother
and father and brother,
his aunt and uncle,
and their son and four other
families packed into two rooms,
the men and the boys.
Going out on daily work details
during which they learned what was happening
to their fellow Jews in the small ghetto
who were being taken by death
squads to the edge of a ravine
on the outside of the city,
forced to kneel together as families.
Shot in the head
and kicked into a ditch
where their fellow Jews
were made to bury them.
In March of 1943,
Nathan was separated from his family.
The Nazis took him and his
father away from his mother,
his brother, his aunt, his uncle.
And his cousin put them on
a train with about 2000 Jews
headed to what is now Estonia,
near the Vivara concentration camp
where he was put to work,
guarded by s s with little food,
frequent beatings,
one layer of striped prison clothing,
he would later recount.
How he'd wake up with his hair
frozen to the barracks wall
in the brutal Baltic winter.
Many died, of course,
under these conditions.
Many were killed.
Those not deemed fit for work,
including children,
had been killed upon arrival.
And Nathan's father?
Was dying of dysentery
Now Nathan had done what he could
to forage and care for his father
for the others who were in the
most acute distress in the camp.
But one day his father took him aside and
explained to him that he was sure to die,
and that young Nathan needed to
do what was necessary to survive.
And that his father would understand.
And so, as the Soviet army
now bore down to the West,
and the Germans were poised to be
expelled from the Baltic states,
Nathan and eighteen others ran.
They dug a bunker deep in the woods.
They foraged at night,
collecting potatoes, collecting fruit.
Setting traps, surviving for
six months before surrendering
to Russian troops in late 1944,
Nathan then spent two years in a
displaced persons camp in Germany before
he realized that perhaps his only move
was to reach out to his family in America.
Now, I should note that
upon returning to Vilnius,
Nathan learned that just two weeks
after he'd been sent to that work camp,
the Nazis had liquidated the big ghetto too.
And his mother and his brother and his
aunt and his uncle and his cousin had all
been slaughtered or sent to death camps.
And out of his family of 70 in Vilnius,
only two had survived him and a cousin would
wound up in the Red Army and been wounded.
So he put an advertisement in the foreword
looking for his family in Peabody, MA,
looking for his aunt named Annie,
a year and a half later.
Having established correspondence
with his American family,
Nathan got his immigration documents and
bordered a ship for the United States.
I tell you this story for a few reasons.
The 1st is that as we react in this
beautiful, united and determined way.
To what happened last weekend,
it's painful, but important to
remember that the swastika is
not merely a symbol of hate.
Hate is an idea or a feeling.
The swastika is a symbol of massacre,
slavery, medical experimentation,
extermination, and genocide.
I also tell you that story because
I mentioned that Nathan made
contact with his aunt Annie,
and it just so happened. That's Annie Ossoff
and she had arrived at Ellis
Island along with my great
grandfather Israel in 1911 and 1913,
and I was sworn into the Senate.
With in my jacket pocket a
copy of the ship's manifests
documenting their arrival,
Fleeing pogroms and anti-Semitism
here in the United States.
And so I know for Middle
Georgia's Jewish community,
these aren't abstractions.
Or ancient stories.
These are the experiences of
beloved family members with
whom we were raised and grew up.
I
also tell you that story because
Nathan's only choice was to come to America.
And just as Israel and Annie,
my great grandfather, my great
grandmother, came to America
seeking a place that promised
tolerance and opportunity regardless
of faith or race or national origin,
just as my own mother,
who is with us here today,
came to America as an immigrant at
23 years old, seeking the same.
America still is and still represents to
the world the values of universality,
of human rights, of tolerance, of love,
of kindness, that are the only antidote
to the forces of hatred and genocide which
have and will throughout human history,
risen and continue to rise and rise again.
There is nothing inevitable about the
defeat of these ideas or these forces.
It requires work. It requires commitment.
It requires argument.
It requires political action.
It requires faith.
It requires exactly what we're
doing here in this space right now.
In fact, what draws so many to America?
Is this
what draws so many to America?
Is the fact that when something happens
like what happened last weekend,
Christians, Protestant, Catholic,
Muslims, Jews, Buddhists,
Hindus, Agnostics, atheists,
folk of all belief or no belief,
people of every race,
every age, every class,
every background will come to a church.
To stand behind a rabbi and a synagogue
and affirm that we love each other,
that we have her back,
that we have her congregations back,
that we are willing not just to put
into word our belief in what America is,
but to put it into deed.
So I'm mostly just here to say thank you.
This right here, right now,
is what makes America great.
This is the community.
This is the community in Macon,
Bibb County and Middle Georgia
saying that we understand and we
believe in and we will fight for
and we are committed to the values
that all are created equal,
that we are out of many one.
And that we are one nation
under God, indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
Thank you so much.