When my wife and I visited Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine (formerly Stanislau, Austria), in March 2009, the area rabbi took us on a tour. It was the region where my father’s family came from.

One place the rabbi brought us to was a killing field where Nazis rounded up thousands of Jews and killed them in the same place where we stood 67 years later. As the rabbi got out of the car, I noticed a gun strapped to his belt. He noticed that I had seen the gun and he shrugged his shoulders and said in halting English, “It’s Ukraine.”

I shudder to think that the day is coming when rabbis in the United States have to arm themselves, shrug their shoulders and say, “It’s America.”

Richard Stower

Yarmouth

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