May 21st

I found out that I like Cincinnati so much I could barely leave. I was going to 3 places today and I went to 5. So far, St. Louis and Cincinnati are the two cities I could spend a few more days visiting.

First up was the large yellow family house of William Howard Taft, the only man to be elected President and then in “retirement” get the job he always wanted, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, where two of his fellow justices were Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis.

In my travels, I realized that I was in the home city of Hebrew Union College, the United States seminary for reform rabbis. I went through the Skirball Gallery of Jewish history and culture on the campus.

As in Omaha, the old Union Railroad Terminal has been converted into a Museum Center with many exhibits on all levels. I checked out the Cincinnati History Museum, which featured a room-sized model of the city in the 1930’s, an Ohio River steamboat that could be boarded and and a 1800’s riverside street of stores from the early days of the Queen City.

Now here’s the serious stuff. I am sure all of us have seen similarities between the Holocaust and the enslavement of Africans. Let me describe the other two places I visited today and then explain the connections I found.

Just this January, the Holocaust and Humanity Center opened in the Cincinnati Museum Center. It has a solid set of exhibits on all topics before, during and after the Holocaust. Particularly effective was a set of 4 to 6 short interviews with survivors from the Cincinnati area on most of the topics. One woman whose family was fortunate enough to leave Europe in time looked right into the camera and said that her American life started in this building and I realized that she had arrived in Cincinnati by train at the old Union Terminal about 80 years ago. The exhibit that stopped me in my tracks was a three minute film, with modern commentary, that a German soldier took of a killing field in Latvia, with local officials helping and townspeople watching their neighbors get massacred.

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center is also a comprehensive look at the whole North American and Carribean slave trade, plantation life and the struggles of African-Americans before during and after the Civil War. But the emphasis was on the Underground Railroad, because Cincinnati was an active Underground “station”. Also, the Ohio River visible from the building’s balcony windows was the dividing line between slave state Kentucky and potential freedom in Ohio. Recalling my stroll last night over the Roebling Bridge made me appreciate how much action there must have been on that stretch of river.

So, the connections. Jews were taken to Auschwitz and the other death camps in crowded cattle cars, while African slaves sailed to our shores in jam-packed lower steerage compartments. 11 million European Jews were targeted for annihilation by the Nazis (6 million were killed) and just about the same number of captured Africans survived the dreaded “Middle Passage” on these slave ships. Finally, modest numbers of Jews were helped by righteous gentiles, and escaped slaves by the operators of the Underground Railroad. So I ended the day with some hope in the kindness of strangers to refugees from oppression.

The song of the day is the fight song for my late father’s alma mater, The Ohio State University in Columbus. I will visit there tomorrow morning.

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