“[The Western Wall] is a place that memorializes what happened during the Holocaust,” said Pastor Mark Holick, the spokesman for the anti-abortion project. “Since Roe v. Wade,” he said, referring to the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that struck down state bans on abortion, “60 million baby boys and girls have been murdered, and that is a holocaust unprecedented in the history of mankind.”
For the past 20 years, Wichita has served as ground zero for the national abortion wars, which reached a crescendo in 2009 when late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was gunned down in his Lutheran church.
Members of Wichita’s tiny Jewish community reached by the Forward by phone seemed largely unaware of the project. But the idea of using the Western Wall — the sole remaining section of the retaining wall that surrounded the Jewish Second Temple — to symbolize the Holocaust struck some as odd. “I have never seen it as a place that you go to remember the Holocaust,” said Dale Marcus, a retired psychologist and a member of Ahavath-Achim Hebrew Congregation, a nondenominational traditional synagogue in Wichita. “It has nothing to do with abortion.”
Others took issue with what they saw as an appropriation of Jewish history. “People are talking about it in a very dismissive, funny way,” said Rabbi Michael Davis of Congregation Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue. Davis, one of the few Jews aware of the project, said, “I see it as another example of a non-Jewish group taking a Jewish symbol and reinterpreting it for their own private use and thereby b*stardizing it.”
