But the Lord is with me like a terrifying warrior;
therefore my persecutors will stumble,
and they will not prevail.
They will be greatly shamed,
for they will not succeed.
Their eternal dishonor
will never be forgotten.
O Lord of hosts, you test the righteous;
you see the heart and the mind;
let me see your retribution upon them,
for to you I have committed my cause.
Sing to the Lord;
praise the Lord!
For he has delivered the life of the needy
from the hands of evildoers.
Jeremiah 20:11-13
STORY
Moric Mermelstein was born Sept. 25, 1926, in Mukachevo, a thriving Jewish community nestled in the Carpathian Mountains in what was then Czechoslovakia. After the Munich Agreement of 1938, Mukachevo was annexed to Hungary. Today it belongs to Ukraine.
Mermelstein was 17 years old when he and his family were arrested soon after Germany occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. He was taken to Auschwitz along with his father, a winemaker; his mother, a homemaker; and all of his siblings. His sisters were initially selected for work but refused to leave their mother’s side and were sent to the gas chambers with her. His father and brother perished at a subcamp of Auschwitz.
Before the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet army on Jan. 27, 1945, Mermelstein was subjected to a death march. Describing that ordeal he shared, “To keep going I took a pair of shoes off a warm corpse, a recent shooting victim on the wayside whose body hadn’t frozen yet.” He was later taken to Buchenwald in Germany, where he was ill with typhus and weighed 68 pounds, according to the article. U.S. forces entered Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. Years later he related, “Finally, finally, I was liberated, but purely in the physical sense of the word. I will never feel liberated until peace will come among man.”
He immigrated to the United States in 1946, changing his first name to Melvin. He settled first in New York, where he had several relatives, and served stateside in Army intelligence before moving to California. There he founded a business that manufactured wooden pallets.
Before he parted from his father, “I made a promise to him in the camp that I would tell what happened if I did survive.” Which he did over the decades, until his death in 2022.
Mermelstein returned to Auschwitz for the first of many times in 1967, embarking on a years-long effort to build a collection of artifacts of the Holocaust including concentration camp uniforms, barbed wire, hair from victims, poison-gas pellets, and ashes from the crematoria. He built a small museum, founded the Auschwitz Study Foundation, and offered his testimony to students and others.
The Institute for Historical Review was founded by Willis Carto, once described by the Anti-Defamation League as “perhaps the leading anti-Semite in the United States.” The institute sought to challenge the extent and even the fact of the Holocaust, an event that deniers and revisionists depict – in defiance of survivor testimony, overwhelming evidence collected in the aftermath of World War II and the decades since, and the consensus of historians around the world – as a fiction created to engender sympathy for Jews and the state of Israel.
The group had a penchant for provocation, and in 1979, at its inaugural Revisionist Convention, it publicly offered a reward of $50,000 to any person who “could prove that the Nazis operated gas-chambers to exterminate Jews during World War II.” To generate greater publicity, the group sent contest entry forms to survivors who had testified publicly about their experience. One of them was Mermelstein, who had denounced the institute in letters to various newspapers. A letter to Mermelstein read, “If we do not hear from you, we will be obliged to draw our own conclusions and publicize this fact to the mass media.”
Organizations, including the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, urged him not to respond, arguing that dignifying the contest with a reply would only help attract the media attention that the deniers craved. The Auschwitz survivor, however, considered himself “duty-bound” to challenge the group and the ideology it represented. He argued, “I watched my mother and sisters being led to the gas chambers, and they tell me it was a hoax. They are hate-mongers, Jew-haters. I’m going to get them if I have to spend the rest of my life doing it.”
With the counsel of William John Cox, a public-interest lawyer who took the case on a pro-bono basis, Mermelstein charted a strategy that ultimately led them to court. He accepted the institute’s challenge, submitting for the contest an account of his experience at Auschwitz, a copy of his 1979 memoir, By Bread Alone: The Story of A-4685, and claimed the $50,000.
When the institute failed to pay, he sued the group and related defendants for the $50,000 in prize money and $17 million in damages, alleging libel, breach of contract, intentional infliction of emotional distress and – perhaps most consequential – “injurious denial of established fact.”
On the last point, Judge Thomas T. Johnson of the Los Angeles Superior Court, delivered Mermelstein a major victory in 1981, when he took what is known in legal parlance as “judicial notice” of the gassing of Jews at Auschwitz – essentially declaring that the Holocaust is an indisputable fact, one that requires no evidence to be presented in court.
Regarding the verdict, Mermelstein said at the time, “They caved in. Not only that, but we proved they cannot get away with taking such a barbaric event as I have been through and turn it into a dagger to hurt me with.” He went on to say, “Money was never the thing in my mind in the first place.” His interest, instead, was memory.
Regarding the need to speak the truth, Mermelstein declared, “No feeling human being in his right mind would try to prove that this didn’t happen. This is like digging up the dead and kicking them around – and the dead include my mother and two sisters.”
In 1991, Mr. Mermelstein was portrayed by actor Leonard Nimoy in a TV-film dramatization of his story titled Never Forget.
DEVOTION
We must be bold to speak out for social justice. We must be forthright in our pronouncements. We cannot be compromising. We must be certain our words are on the side of truth.
Jeremiah, like many of the prophets of Israel, had a daunting task. He had to announce God’s judgment on a wayward people. He had to confront rabbis with their apostasy. He had to challenge political leaders with their wicked endeavors.
Such was the case when Jeremiah had to confront Pashhur. This man was the chief governor in the house of the Lord. He persecuted Jeremiah for his message of God’s impending judgment upon a disobedient nation of “stiff-necked and would not listen to my words.”
Angry at this message and disregarding the authority of a spokesperson chosen by God, he put the prophet in “the stocks” by the “house of Yahweh” in the “gate of Benjamin.” When released, Jeremiah pronounced Divine judgment on him and the people, announcing captivity by the Babylonians, and an exile’s death to Pashhur, whose name Jeremiah changed from its meaning “Prosperity Everywhere,” to a new name, playing off his original name, to “Terror on every side.”
The calling of Jeremiah is our calling. Jeremiah’s message is our message. Jeremiah’s persecution will be our persecution. We may not be put in “stocks,” though we will be ridiculed. And as Jeremiah wasn’t taken seriously, neither will we; though, we are commanded to be persistent in our calling to be a prophet to a godless society.
Alistair Begg, born on May 22, 1952, is the senior pastor of Parkside Church, a nondenominational church in Cleveland, Ohio. It is a position he has held since 1983. He is the voice behind the Truth For Life Christian radio preaching and teaching ministry, which broadcasts his sermons weekly to stations across North America through 1,800 radio outlets. He is also the author of several books.
He was a vanguard of the conservative Christian movement, until he was expelled in January 2024 for a single piece of advice that he offered. During a promotional interview for a book last fall, Begg recounted talking to a woman whose grandchild was getting married to someone who was transgender. Begg, who opposes same-sex weddings, suggested she go to the wedding and bring a gift. By doing so, she would show her love for her grandchild – even though she did not approve of the wedding. In the interview the evangelical pastor said, “Your love for them may catch them off guard, but your absence will simply reinforce the fact that they said, ‘These people are what I always thought: judgmental, critical, unprepared to countenance anything.’” He added that Christians will have to take risks in order to show love to those around them.
Begg’s comments set off a firestorm among some of his fans and supporters – in particular those in conservative Calvinists and other evangelical communities. It was believed that he gave a salient blessing to a transgender marriage. All of his scheduled speaking engagements were cancelled. His books were denounced. And leaders of the evangelical community condemned him as a false prophet. The American Family Radio (AFR), an evangelical broadcasting network, dropped Truth For Life, to which he had been associated with for decades. Walker Wildmon, vice president of the American Family Association, said, “The goal of the call was reconciliation, but reconciliation with truth.” He added that Begg refused to back down from his comments, which Wildmon compared to a dad offering to drive his alcoholic child to a bar.
The point is, in my opinion, Alistair Begg did speak the truth. And I must salute him for being steadfast in his position, as demonstrated in a sermon that followed the incident.
That advice, he said in a sermon, was based on Jesus’ command for Christians to love even those they disagree with or disapprove of, saying, “Jesus said you are supposed to love your enemies,” drawing on a series of Bible texts to claim that Christians should show compassion – and not condemnation – for those who have gone astray. During the sermon he drew from the New Testament parable of the prodigal son, which emphasizes forgiveness over judgment, and the parable of the good Samaritan, which emphasizes compassion over claims of holiness. Both stories, he said, showed the power of God’s grace. He also drew from a story Jesus told of a shepherd who had 100 sheep and lost one of them, and left the 99 behind to find the one that was lost.
Begg warned his congregation about Christians who seem unwilling to show grace or forgiveness to others, telling his congregation to be wary of pastors who are eager to loudly condemn sinners. Begg said he was thinking with his “grandfatherly hat” when he gave that advice, hoping to help that grandmother show God’s love. “All I was thinking about was how can I help this grandmother,” Begg said, adding that he didn’t want her to lose her grandchild.
He went on to say, to a different person in different circumstances, he might have given different advice.
Though he has no plan to repent of his advice, no matter what happens on social media. He also intoned that he was glad his advice to this grandmother, rather than his other sermons about sexuality, had gone viral, summarizing, “Because If I’ve got to go down on the side of one or the other, I’ll go down on this side, I’ll go down on the side of compassion.”
The Christian prophets that we are – requires us to be bold and uncompromising when the truth is preached.