When a group of Nazis proposed to exercise their right to free speech by holding a rally in Skokie, Illinois in 1977, Ben Stern was furious.
A survivor of nine concentration camps, he didn’t understand why Hitler’s acolytes could show in the United States, let alone in his mostly Jewish adopted hometown, where many Holocaust survivors lived.
The idea of holding a Nazi rally in Skokie, a Chicago suburb, was like “being put back in a concentration camp,” Stern told a local TV station at the time.
The possibility of a rally unsettled Skokie for a 12 months and led to a First Amendment confrontation between the village and the Chicago chapter of the National Socialist Party of America, a neo-Nazi group championed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Mr. Stern became an activist, inspired in part by his opposition Lawrence Montrose, his beloved rabbi at Skokie Central Congregation. As Mr. Stern recalls, during Rabbi Montrose’s Yom Kippur sermon in 1977, he told his congregants to “close the shutters, close the lights and let them march” if a rally occurred.
“I jumped up and said, ‘No, rabbi. We are not going to stay at home and close the windows,” Mr. Stern said in the 2016 documentary “Near Normal Man,” produced and directed by his daughter Charlene Stern. “We will not allow them to march here, now, or in America. We will take to the streets and face it. I heard an uproar that the people agreed with me.”
Mr. Stern wrote letters to newspapers. He spoke to newspaper and tv reporters and appeared on Phil Donahue’s talk show. He received death threats and purchased a gun, believing he would wish it to defend himself.
He rented an office in Skokie, where he helped organize an awareness campaign that included sending petitions to churches, synagogues and other Jewish organizations suggesting that the presence of Nazis in full uniforms shouting anti-Semitic slogans ought to be seen as an exception to First Amendment protections. The petitions collected tens of 1000’s of signatures, and copies were delivered to the Illinois Supreme Court.
But in one in all several state and federal decisions in the legal dispute – which ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court – an Illinois state court ruled in 1978 on one in all the problems that were a part of the case: that Nazis had a constitutional right to display swastikas at the proposed rally.
Mr. Stern died on February 28 at his home in Berkeley, California, where he had moved from Northbrook, Illinois. He was 102 years old.
His daughter Charlene announced his death.
Mr. Stern was born Bendit Sztern on September 21, 1921 in Warsaw and moved south together with his Orthodox Jewish family to Mogielnica as a young man. His father, Shimon, studied Torah and Talmud. His mother, Yentl (Provisor) Sztern, ran a general store along with her mother in Mogielnica. There were nine children in his family – six from his parents’ previous marriages and three from their relationship.
A 12 months after the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Mr. Stern and his family were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto. There, his father, maternal grandmother and older brother died of starvation. As Mr. Stern recalls, the day after his father’s burial, he returned to the cemetery and located the grave dug up. Devastated by the sight of his naked father, he covered his body with dirt and left crying.
When the ghetto was cleared, Mr. Stern was deported to the Majdanek camp near Lublin, Poland, and his mother and one in all his brothers were deported to Treblinka, where they died. In 1943, he was transported to Auschwitz, where the smoke from the crematoria was “the smell of a human barbecue,” he told the Indianapolis News in 1978.
In Auschwitz, he was one in all the prisoners of the crew forced to construct a road that was covered with cremation ash.
“Among the ashes we found small bones, ankles and various human body parts,” Mr. Stern said on “Near Normal Man.” Prisoners put them aside and hid them at the top of the working day while reciting Kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer.
In April 1945, after being transferred to Buchenwald, the prisoners were sent on a month-long death march towards Austria in freezing weather. He was one in all the few who survived long enough to be liberated by the American army. He weighed 78 kilos at the time.
After being quarantined, Mr. Stern searched cities and IDP camps for members of the family, but all of them (except an older half-brother who had emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine in the Thirties) had died. However, in the Bergen-Belsen displaced individuals camp, near the concentration camp of the identical name, he met Chaya Kielmanowicz, and 6 weeks later they were married.
In 1946, they emigrated to the United States and settled in Chicago, where Mr. Stern found work as a carpenter. In the Fifties, he opened a laundromat, learned find out how to repair machines, and eventually owned a dozen laundries with various partners. He retired at the age of 85.
In 1977 he faced the specter of Nazis gathering in his midst. It was unbearable for him, for lots of his fellow residents of Skoka, and for local government leaders. The village made various attempts to dam the demonstration, including: forced the Nazi group to pay an insurance bond that may cost them several hundred thousand dollars.
But they failed. In June 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the village’s request for a temporary stay, clearing the way in which for Nazis to show on June 25.
Ira Glasser, who became executive director of the ACLU shortly after the case was decided, said in a telephone interview that the problem was never concerning the Nazi group, but quite about whether the federal government could “prohibit anyone’s free speech on public lands.” He added: “If the First Amendment allowed for stopping Nazis, it would allow the Mississippi White Citizens Council to stop civil rights demonstrations.”
Although Skokie lost the legal battle, the village was spared the Nazi rally. The group moved the event to Chicago, knowing that holding a rally in Skokie would risk a counterdemonstration that Mr. Stern helped plan, which was expected to attract about 50,000 people.
In Chicago, roughly 5,000 demonstrators turned out against the rally. Some chanted “Death, death, death to the Nazis.” According to the Los Angeles Times, the demonstration, which took place in front of the federal constructing, was attended by 29 Nazis and lasted 10 minutes.
“Is that all?” Mr. Stern asked after the rally ended.
A fictionalized version of Skoki’s story was told in 1981 TV movie “Skokie” starring Danny Kaye as a Holocaust survivor who leads the opposition to the demonstrations, and George Dzundza as Frank Collin, leader of the Nazi group.
In addition to his daughter Charlene, Mr. Stern is survived by one other daughter, Susan Stern; son Norman; seven grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. His wife, referred to as Helen, died in 2018.
Stern, who has spoken about his experiences to quite a few groups over time, marched in Berkeley in 2017 against a white supremacist rally that has since been canceled by its organizers.
He was accompanied by three rabbis at the pinnacle of the procession. When he asked to talk, he was helped onto a flatbed truck.
“I’m not alone here with living people,” said Mr. Stern, who was 95 at the timeAccording to KQED Radio“but I see all the people from my past – my family, my friends who didn’t make it.”
“Today,” he added, “you have proven that we stand together against the threat of racism and Nazism.”
