How many concentration camps existed during the Nazi Third Reich?  Several years ago, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.  issued a startling number:  42,500.  This included transit camps, sites of slave labor, and, of course, the six locations established primarily for exterminating Jews and other ‘undesirables’ by the millions:  Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Chelmno, ‎Bełżec‎, ‎and Sobibór‎. 

Today, there are credible reports that as many as a million Uyghurs in China are forcibly detained in concentration-like centers throughout Xinjiang Province in the western part of the country. 

The Allied forces knew about the extermination camps in 1940s Europe. We know about the camps in China today.  The lack of global action in both cases is terrifying for what it says about us as human beings. 

People arriving at a Nazi concentration camp. Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE) | License: https://tinyurl.com/s5b4uwx4

I grew up in a Reform Jewish home and attended a Reform Jewish synagogue.  I heard, over and over, that our purpose is very simple:  it is תיקון עולם, “repair of the world.”  This maxim is simple yet profound, easy yet impossible to achieve.  

But it calls us to action.  Perhaps we can’t free the million detainees ourselves – but we can contact our elected officials.  We can support legislation to penalize Chinese government officials.  We can support Uyghur human rights activists and organizations in the United States advocating for disappeared loved ones and for thousands of others who are used as slave laborers throughout China. 

We can stand up.  In Hebrew, העמידה, “Amidah,” is a prayer said while standing. The word has come to refer to people who are ‘upstanders’ to tyranny, wherever it might occur.   

We urge people to stand up – to stand up for those who are victimized, targeted, who are vulnerable to hate and discrimination, who are treated with less than dignity and respect. 

Last week an avowed racist got out of his SUV, put a brick on the accelerator, and set the car speeding into the home of a multi-racial family in Cold Spring, Minnesota, about an hour from Minneapolis.  The vehicle struck the side of the home, barely missing the room where a child was sleeping. 

Inside the SUV, a teddy bear hung from a noose. 

The alleged perpetrator had been stalking and harassing the family for months. The family took out an order for protection in May; he has been charged with violating that order three times. 

The children were bullied at school, and nothing was done. 

Amidah. Stand up with and for those who are targeted.  Hate starts small and grows. Don’t let it flourish.