On September 10, a mere eight days ago, in an interview on KCTV Ms. How do I know? Just ask Gwyneth Barbara of Fairway, Kansas. While first it may be people from our southern border, unless we and our neighbors publicly draw a line and stand up for the strangers living among us, it could easily one day be us in this sanctuary. We learn from the easy way the Nazi government revoked the citizenship of German Jews, that one day it could be us. We have surpassed the sin of xenophobia and moved to the sin of hating the stranger, the one who is different that lives among us. When I read last week that our government started revoking the citizenship of Americans born in Texas, stripping the citizenship of people who were legally naturalized, and established a “Denaturalization Taskforce,” I felt a hot poker pierce my heart and soul. A year later, long after I was home, he finally got his passport which sat in a drawer unused until the day he died. Before the interview he had to obtain sworn and notarized affidavits from his two older half-sisters, Lil and Mae, and others who had known him throughout his life to swear that he was in fact the Nathan Rosenfeld who arrived in America at the age of six months, and that he had never become a citizen of another country. Thankfully our Rabbi reached out to our Congressman who arranged another interview for my father. I will never forget the pain in his voice and on his face when he told me what happened that day. The Government, after 58 years of living in America, 18 of which were in the military, declared he was not an American citizen. The reason? He had been naturalized on his father’s papers and not on his own. In the spring of 1971, taking his birth certificate and his naturalization papers, he applied for his first passport. My father, who had never left the United States except under the auspices of the United States military, decided to visit me in Israel. In the fall of 1971 I spent a semester in Israel.
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