PHOTO: The eternal flame in the Hall of Remembrance at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (Rockne Roll/The Jewish Review)

By ROCKNE ROLL
The Jewish Review
“It’s incomprehensible how human beings can do that to other human beings.”
This sentiment, uttered by Jan Berne at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., was a frequent reaction to what 18 Portlanders saw over the course of three days in the nation’s capital. 
The group, assembled by the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland and Vancouver Avenue First Baptist Church, a historic congregation with a prominent role in the evolution of Portland’s Black community, undertook the two organizations’ second Civil Rights Mission to bear witness to each other’s history and to speak to those in Congress from a place of shared values and priorities. 
While the details of those priorities are as intricate as governing demands, four words from VAFBC parishioner Rosie Johnson as one of her takeaways from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, can summarize their common root, as well as another recurring theme of what the group witnessed. 
“There’s too much hate,” Johnson said.
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The group assembled on the steps of the Holocaust Museum the morning of Tuesday, Feb. 25: VAFBC Pastor J.W. Matt Hennessee, seven church members, five Jewish community members and four professional staff from Federation, including this reporter. The first words they heard, from Diane Saltzman, the museum’s Director of Institutional Stewardship, set the tone for the week. She explained that most of the monuments, memorials, and museums in Washington are celebrations of the triumph of democratic values. 
“We are a counterpoint to that,” she said. 
Indeed, as visitors move through the museum, one of the first displays is a reminder that the primary organizers of the Holocaust were all elected to the Reichstag of the German Republic in a free and fair election in 1932. Established political parties did not take the National Socialist German Workers’ Party seriously, and President Paul von Hindenburg thought he had installed a figure he could easily control when he appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in the early days of 1933. 
Within weeks, the machinery of democracy was disassembled and, as the exhibit’s path wound back down through the building, history’s path to what lay ahead became clear. 
Docent Immanuel Mandel explained that the bricks of the building were selected for their resemblance to the masonry barracks, gas chambers and crematoriums of Auschwitz-Birkenau. He is a survivor of the events he now details for visitors - his time at Bergen-Belsen overlapped briefly with Anne Frank in 1944 before he and others were exchanged by the Germans for shipments of war materials, and he was released into Switzerland.
“The purpose is not my story,” he said, “except as it relates to what you see.”
The story unwound along the path through the building - explanations of the Nazis’ racial classification system and the cultural censorship and political disenfranchisement that enforced it. The system systematically stripped Jews and other groups of their rights - to own businesses, to own property, to vote, to live in places beyond the ghettos. 
Donna Darling, a VAFBC member, recalled the conversations she had with her Jewish husband; Darling said she grew up in Chicago in the kind of impoverished neighborhood that we today call a ghetto. 
“[He] tried to explain to me the ghettos in Germany,” she recalled. “Now I get it.”
Eventually, the Nazis came for Jews’ freedom - beyond a cast replica of the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign from Birkenau was a railroad car, very small by modern standards. Mandel stood inside and recounted how a similar car transported him to Bergen-Belsen. 
“I was in there for nine days,” he said. 
“The moment in the train car, it just overwhelmed me,” Craig Berne said. “Intellectually, I know a lot about that, but I’ve never felt something hit me like that, like I was there.”
As the path wound through the building, banks of windows on two separate floors were inscribed with names. The first was a listing of all the European villages that were affected by the Holocaust. The next were all the given names associated with Holocaust victims. While the VAFBC members of the group absorbed the enormity of it, the groups’ Jews pointed out the places where their families had lived, the names that were shared with their families who had been victims. 
Displays also detailed the American response to events while they were happening - which was minimal. Indeed, alongside enlargements of American newspaper headlines detailing the early stages of Germany’s persecution of Jews was a video showing support for the Third Reich from the pro-Nazi German American Bund and a group that would factor prominently into events the Portland group examined the next day - the Ku Klux Klan.
Past the train car, a diorama explaining the workings of Birkenau’s gas chambers showed how the Nazis, having seemingly taken everything from European Jews, started systematically taking their lives. 
The figures contained within were no more than four inches in height, but the level of detail on their faces showed the confusion as they were ushered into the chambers, the fear as the doors were barred behind them, and the horror as their captors dropped Zyklon-B pellets through the ceiling. 
“This is a model of death in process,” Mandel said of the model.
Earlier, Mandel had pointed to a photograph of those exiting a train car at a death camp as evidence of the victims’ lack of knowledge of what they were heading toward. 
“He pointed to a picture,” Steve Lipman said, “and said ‘look at their shoes.’” 
Even in the low-resolution, black-and-white image, a glossy shine was evident.
“They thought they were going on a trip,” Lipman continued.
The trip for the museum’s visitors ended on the ground floor, moving past a pile of shoes belonging to victims, and a large-scale photograph of the hair shorn from those who had been gassed which was used as mattress stuffing. 
“I never knew about the hair that they used to stuff the mattresses,” Johnson said over dinner with the group, hosted by the Jewish Federations of North America’s Washington office - in their brand-new space on Pennsylvania Avenue - that evening. 
VAFBC member Victoria West was also taken aback by how Holocaust victims were dehumanized after death in that way.
“There’s so many parallels to slavery,” she said. “No human being should be treated as such.” 
Catherine Brown, another church member, was also struck by the corollaries she saw between the events of the Holocaust and her own people’s story. When she took in the rail car at the museum, she thought of the close quarters in ships used to transport enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. When she saw the artifacts and pictures of synagogues vandalized on Kristallnacht, she thought of the Black Wall Street Massacre in which a white mob killed between 75 and 300 people and gutted Black neighborhoods in Tulsa, Okla. in 1921, leaving thousands of Black residents homeless. It is considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history and functionally erased one of the wealthiest Black communities in the country. But it wasn’t just the past that Brown connected with what she saw. 
“What bothered me are the parallels between what we’re seeing in America and what happened during Hitler’s rise,” she said. “I wasn’t concerned before. I’m pushed to the point where I’m more than concerned.”
She wasn’t the only one.
“Seeing the rise of Hitler,” Jan Berne said, “you can kind of see in our own government today. It’s bone-chilling.”
 It was a lot to take in - and more of the same was on tap for the next day.
“Nothing prepared me for what I saw,” Darling said over dinner. “I don’t know how I’m going to survive tomorrow because today, I am heartbroken.”
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While Washington’s Holocaust Museum starts at the top and descends, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which the group visited Wednesday, Feb. 26, worked in reverse. 
While the museum, opened in 2016, appears as a five-story modern architecture edifice, its permanent historical exhibits begin nearly 70 feet below street level. Numbers count backward on the wall of the elevator shaft to 1400 - to the beginnings of mass enslavement of Africans by European colonial powers. 
Pastel, a tour guide at the museum, explained that this kind of slavery was new in history - prior to the 15th Century, slavery was not the primary commercial export from Africa, nor was it a permanent status or based on race. In the 16th Century, when Spain, Britain, France and other colonial nations set their sights over the Atlantic, they took their new institution - the classification of human beings - with them.
“Slavery and freedom,” Pastel explained, “really is an American story. It’s a shared story.”
A total of 12.5 million people were brought from Africa to the Americas in chains - the largest forced migration in human history. Ships that were designed to hold 400 people in close quarters had 600 or more crammed in to boost the operator’s margins. 
“It’s a business,” Pastel said matter-of-factly. “It’s profit. It’s cargo.”
The low ceilings and tight hallways in the early stages of the exhibit emphasize these close quarters.
“The way you start, you feel claustrophobic and dark,” Craig Berne said. “You can hear the water.”
The ceiling opens upward, back toward street level, as the timeline reaches the late 18th Century and the establishment of the United States of America. 
“Liberty was secured by the colonists, who also secured and perpetuated slavery,” Pastel explained. 
Behind her stood a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. President who wrote the Declaration of Independence and eventually encouraged Congress to ban the importation of enslaved people. Behind the statue was a wall of bricks, each inscribed with the name of one of the 600 people Jefferson owned during his lifetime. A placard reads, “The Paradox of Liberty.”
Jefferson’s abolishment of the international slave trade did nothing to improve conditions for enslaved Black people on American shores. 
“It became more brutal, it became more intensive,” Pastel explained.  
But as oppression continued, so did resistance in Black communities - as evidenced by an adjustable wedding ring used by Rev. Alexander Glennie to perform marriage ceremonies for enslaved people, who could not legally marry as the law considered them property.
“This is a good illustration of pushing back,” Pastel said, “Saying, ‘We are married whether you recognize it or not.’”
The inevitable conflict of the Civil War, however, could not be avoided. 
“The war was coming because slavery was still there, there was this tug,” Pastel said. 
The tour was self-guided following the lower-level exhibition, which concluded with the Civil War. Members of the group spread out across the second level, exploring the period from 1865 to 1968, and the final level of the history exhibitions which covered from 1968 until modern times.
Group members again passed through a train car, though this one was a segregated coach car from the Southern Railroad which laid bare the differences in accommodations for Black people and whites in the era of segregation. Beyond it loomed a guard tower from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a property which had been a slave plantation, then farmed using convict labor before becoming one of the most notorious prisons in the United States. Across the concourse from the rail car sat an interactive display modeled on the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., the site of one of the first sit-in demonstrations. Touchscreens walked visitors through how they might respond to the realities of nonviolent civil rights demonstrations. Around the corner were a series of displays detailing the discussions in the Black community of how to best defeat segregation and the steps which broader society took to reenforce the existing, race-based social structure, from minstrel shows and children’s toys based on grotesque caricatures of Black people to the open violence of the KKK. 
Tucked behind the guard tower exhibit lay a memorial to one of the most prominent victims of such violence, Emmett Till. In 1955, Till, then 14 years old, was visiting family in Mississippi when he was abducted, beaten, mutilated, murdered with a gunshot to the head and sunk in the Tallahatchie River. His mother insisted on an open-casket funeral back in his hometown of Chicago, a moment that galvanized the brewing Civil Rights Movement. A hall of displays about Till’s life, death and legacy lead into a display of the same model of casket which lay open now as at his 1955 funeral - no photographs are permitted in this room, perhaps the most sacred space in the entire museum.
“He was such a handsome boy,” Darling commented on seeing an image of the young Till.
The final level below ground depicted the continued struggles, successes and setbacks that have followed since 1968. 
“The year 1968 marked a turning point in the African American freedom movement,” the museum’s website explained. “The struggle for African American liberation took on new dimensions, recognizing that simply ending Jim Crow segregation would not achieve equality and justice.” 1968 was also the year that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. 
“It’s overwhelming,” JFGP Chief Community Relations and Public Affairs Officer Bob Horenstein said upon exiting. “There’s so much.”
That evening, most of the group gathered at a nearby restaurant for dinner and discussion. The conversations diverged in numerous directions. One small cluster compared the different expressions of divine identity between Jewish and Christian traditions. Another small cluster listened as Rev. Dr. Valerie Holmes, a former pastor at VAFBC, recounted the racial abuse she and her son endured driving along Interstate 90 through Montana and Idaho - reminders that what was witnessed at the museum were not relics of the past.
Some other group members, Jewish and Christian alike, bonded across town at the Capital One Center over a shared enthusiasm for the Portland Trail Blazers, who were in town to play the Washington Wizards on what happened to be the Wizards’ Jewish Heritage Night. While none of the Portland attendees paid for the special ticket package that included a reversible bucket hat emblazoned with a Magen David pattern and a Hebrew-language rendition of the Wizards’ logo, they did get to chat briefly with Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, (D-Ore.) and see the Blazers take a 129-121 victory. While Portland’s Shaedon Sharpe scored a career-high 36 points, Deni Avdija, the current Blazer, former Wizard and sole active Israeli player in the NBA, left in the first quarter with a leg injury and did not return.
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“After the last two days, I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach,” Lequila Hobson said upon exiting the African American history museum the day before. “This makes you want to speak to your representatives.”
Just such an opportunity was available as the group, slightly diminished by early departures, reconvened Thursday, Feb. 27 in the lobby of the Cannon House Office Building for the first of five meetings with Portland-area Democratic lawmakers: Sen. Ron Wyden and Reps. Suzanne Bonamici, Janelle Bynum and Andrea Salinas, as well as policy aide from Rep. Maxine Dexter’s office. 
“They were clearly disturbed by what was happening at the executive level, and I think they’re trying to figure out how to raise the alarm when it comes to the way that cuts and layoffs are being made to the federal workforce that are impacting departments that provide essential services. 
Collective priorities in the conversations were the assault on diversity, equity and inclusion programs within government and beyond, the Non-Profit Security Grant Program, discussion of legislation around antisemitism and threats to the continued funding of Medicaid – a particularly urgent point, considering the budget resolution passed in the House of Representatives Tuesday evening while the Portland mission were at dinner. 
“They’re sounding the alarm about what it means for programs like Medicaid and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously known as “food stamps”) and maybe Social Security,” Horenstein said of the officials they talked to. “As they point out, that budget plan cannot be reconciled without cutting those programs.”
Rep. Bynum, the first Black person elected to Congress from Oregon, gathered the Portland group in her still-being-unpacked office and spoke of how her faith guides her approach to policy, a perspective that seemed to resonate strongly with both those who share her Christian faith and those who did not. 
“I always like to say that when we lobby, we do so on the basis of our values, our Jewish values, but in this case, our shared values with the people from the church,” Horenstein said. “To me, when she spoke about faith, part of it sounded like she’s relying on faith because of the climate that we’re in; what else is there to rely on right now? But I also think it’s about values, and we must speak up on the basis of those values.”
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This group came to Washington at a palpable inflection point in American history, to learn about their collective histories. What they found is, perhaps, something more. 
“We’re trying to bridge the gap between diversity, equity and inclusion and creating communities of belonging. We need to work together to ensure that everyone feels a sense of belonging,” Yolanda Savage-Narva, the Vice-President for Racial Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at the Union for Reform Judaism, explained at Tuesday night’s dinner at JFNA’s offices. 
“This,” she went on to say of the group in front of her, “is a model.”
Savage-Narva helped found Operation Understanding DC, which brought together Black and Jewish high school students to go on the same kinds of journeys and do the same kind of community-building work that the Portland cadre she was addressing was assembled for. 
“As a Black Jewish woman from the south, I am the dream and the promise of my ancestors,” she said. 
Earlier that evening, JFNA President and CEO Eric Fingerhut had read Psalm 30 to dedicate the organization’s new meeting space, saying that the Psalms were a shared heritage between Judaism and Christianity. Later, he flipped a few pages ahead to Psalm 133 - “How good it is to be together” - and led the singing in both English and Hebrew. 
The words are attributed to King David, but the sentiment was well shared. 
“Being together,” JCRC Chair Doug Blauer said, “made me feel stronger. Our communities, the more we support each other, the more we thrive.”
Brown thought of words from a kind of king - Dr. King, who said “Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”
“I feel like this gathering,” she explained, “we’re the hope.” 
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JFGP Director of Educational Initiatives and Associate Director of Community Relations Rachel Nelson contributed reporting.