Those opposed to mandatory vaccines go too far when they make outrageous Holocaust comparisons – The Topeka Capital-Journal

When I was a law professor at Syracuse University, I became quite good friends with a professor in a different department. He had escaped as a child from Nazi Germany and found his way to Israel, married, had a family and eventually moved to the United States where he was soon employed.

We had many things in common. Although I was — and am — a fairly unobservant Jew, he made a habit of inviting me to join his family for the fist Passover dinner each year. Passover is the Jewish holiday that memorializes the bondage of the Jewish people in Egypt and of their miraculous, divinely aided escape from this bondage.

Jews around the world celebrate Passover in different ways, but for all, it is a time of remembrance and gratitude to God for His help in freeing his people.

My friend’s seder, as the Passover dinner is called, was extraordinarily moving. My friend’s family, including his Rabbi father, had died in the Nazi death camps. Each Passover, he recited the names of all his family members whom the Nazis had murdered. It usually took well over an hour to get through the list.

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When we speak of the Holocaust, we speak of mass murder on a scale that defies the imagination. Millions of Jews , Poles, Russians, Roma, as well as the disabled and gay people, and others were brutally murdered. Whatever one’s political or religious beliefs, the only human reaction to the Holocaust must be one of horror.

The Holocaust should never be used to achieve political goals except to prevent another.

Many Americans refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19. I believe this is a mistake, unless one has religious or medical reasons against vaccination, because by refusing, one puts oneself and others at risk of serious illness or death.

I was educated to believe that medical science, when done properly, is our best defense against disease. I am of the generation that grew up in dire fear of polio. I was lined up at school and given the polio vaccine. And I am glad that I was. I believe that I may very well be alive today because of the polio vaccine.

Unfortunately, there is no point in trying to convince those opposed to mandating the COVID vaccine that they are wrong because, in the United States, mandatory vaccination against COVID, has become a partisan political issue that evokes incredibly heated argument and now divides the country.

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However much one may oppose mandatory vaccination, there must be limits to how one expresses that opposition. To suggest that the government’s or an employer’s attempts to mandate vaccination is the equivalent of the Holocaust and comparable to the Nazi death camps, is frankly outrageous.

To my mind, a person who makes such comparisons dishonors the millions of innocent victims of the Nazi regime dead and perverts history. Regardless of how one feels about the current administration in Washington, regardless of how one feels about mandatory vaccination, there must be limits to the rhetoric one uses.

And so, respectfully, I ask that those who oppose vaccine mandates, recognize that there are some things that should not be said, no matter how angry you may be. I beseech you, do not dishonor the dead.

Mike Hoeflich is a law professor at the University of Kansas Law School.