Legendary Laker Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, recently spoke out loudly and forcefully, against the pervasive anti-Semitism in Hollywood and professional sports. His condemnation through refreshing is not surprising.
You might say it runs in the family.
On April 11, 1945, the American third army smashed through the gates of the infamous concentration camp known as Buchenwald. The horrors of what they found there shocked soldier and general alike.
Gen. Eisenhower, knowing that one day there would be those who would attempt to deny those horrors ever took place, made the local German population participate in the burial of the thousands of murdered men, women, and children, whose bodies lay exposed throughout the camp.
One of those American liberators was Ferdinand L. Alcindor. As a black man who knew personally the experience of discrimination and hate, he was profoundly moved.
Seeing a little Jewish boy standing between the survivors, he hoisted him up, and held him high above the heads of the Germans standing there.
“Look at this sweet kid” he hollered, “he isn’t even eight yet. This was your enemy, he threatened the Third Reich. He is the one against whom you waged war, and murdered millions like him.”
Ferdinand never forgot what he witnessed. On his deathbed, he asked his son to travel to Israel and track down that little boy he had hoisted above his strong shoulders all those years ago. A promise his son would keep in 2011.
Ferdinand’s son was born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr., though you know him as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, that little Jewish boy who survived Buchenwald, would grow up to become the Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Yisroel Meir Lau.
