MINISTER’S REPORT
RSC, October Meeting
Unitarian Church, Davenport

Rev. Roger Butts

First Things First
First, thanks for all you do. It is good to work with you. Your commitment is a model for this church. I hope you enjoy the rest of the calendar year and the coming winter and find lots of good meaning and beauty all around you.
The Schedule.
October 19: What is your costume????
October 26: Celebration Sunday
November 2: With Steve Klein, Election Sermon (This is a long standing tradition in the Unitarian tradition, in which the minister lays out a discourse on what are pressing and important matters that the next administration might consider).
November 9: Kristallnacht (The Apple Story/The apple meal).
November 16: RSC
November 23: ARTS SUNDAY
Interfaith Thanksgiving Service: Edwards Congregational United Church of Christ
November 30: Roger (possibly with Greer Burke Anderson)
December 7: Assocation Sunday with Kathy Bowman
December 14: RSC
December 21: Pageant. Christmas pageant.
December 28: Roger

Music, Harmonia, Tyson, the Choir and our church.
I think Harmonia, the group that sang yesterday at the Matthew Shepard service, gave us a glimpse of what is possible around music. And having small groups lead the congregational singing was I think a nice touch. Hope to see more of that in the future.

Worship Associates.
As you can tell, I have been attempting to use lots of different worship associates. In the past few weeks: Laurie Bertsche, Ashley Klaas.

Equipment.
How is our conversation going along regarding computers, projectors, etc?

Study Leave.
I will be taking study leave, with part of my time in Chicago, in January. I appreciate the congregation’s willingness to honor this important part of the ministry here.

Sabbatical.
I will announce by early January if I am taking a sabbatical next yea.

Thinness.
Someone said to me: Guard yourself against thinness in the services. I appreciated hearing that. I know when I am off and I have suspicions when I am on. The more interaction with worship associates the better the service. The more involvement from Tyson and or Sarah, the better the service. I welcome your thoughts, your suggestions, your idea, your suggested themes, your potential readings (Unless you keep them for your service!!!). I am likely harder on myself than you’d ever be on me, but I do want you to know that I welcome any feedback. I have a commitment to my spiritual practices, and sometimes that helps me to keep a good focus and sometimes things are just too much with me and the service can slip. I’m working on it! I promise.
The six week Reflection Questions.
a. Evaluation. I have come to see that passing out a sheet on Sunday morning for six weeks is not necessarily the best way to proceed. I believe that the next installment I will try to get published as a booklet, and pass out all six weeks at the first Sunday and made available at the next five weeks for those who have not yet received a copy of the booklet.

b. Next installment.
November 30-December 24: Home for the Holidays
Kristallnacht.
November 7-9. Visit beyondkristallnacht.blogspot.com for information.

Darwin’s Birthday. Joseph Leman.
I have spent some time with newcomer Joseph Leman. He is a biology teacher at Augustana and is very interested in liberal religion and Unitarian Universalism in particular. I have asked him to be a point person on the Darwin’s birthday celebration in February. More information to come.

A Love Story

Holocaust survivors tell love story
By MATT SEDENSKY Sunday, October 12, 2008 2:45 PM CDT


NORTH MIAMI BEACH, Fla. - In the beginning, there was a boy, a girl and an apple.

He was a teenager in a concentration camp in Nazi-controlled Germany. She was a bit younger, living free in the village, her family posing as Christians.

Their eyes met through a barbed-wire fence and she wondered what she could do for this handsome young man.She was carrying apples, and decided to throw one over the fence. He caught it and ran away toward the barracks.

And so it began.

As they tell it, they returned the following day and she tossed an apple again. And each day after that, for months, the routine continued. She threw, he caught, and both scurried away.

They never knew one another's name, never uttered a single word, so fearful they'd be spotted by a guard. Until one day he came to the fence and told her he wouldn't be back."I won't see you anymore," she said. "Right, right. Don't come around anymore," he answered.

And so their brief and innocent tryst came to an end. Or so they thought.

Before he was shipped off to a death camp, before the girl with the apples appeared, Herman Rosenblat's life had already changed forever.

His family had been forced from their home into a ghetto. His father fell ill with typhus. They smuggled in a doctor, but there was little he could do to help. The man knew what was coming. He summoned his youngest son. "If you ever get out of this war," Rosenblat remembers him saying, "don't carry a grudge in your heart and tolerate everybody."

Two days later, the father was dead. Herman was just 12.

The family was moved again, this time to a ghetto where he shared a single room with his mother, three brothers, uncle, aunt and four cousins. He and his brothers got working papers and he got a factory job painting stretchers for the Germans.

Eventually, the ghetto was dissolved. As the Poles were ushered out, two lines formed. In one, those with working papers, including Rosenblat and his brothers. In the other, everyone else, including the boys' mother.

Rosenblat went over to his mother. "I want to be with you," he cried. She spoke harshly to him and one of his brothers pulled him away. His heart was broken.
"I was destroyed," Rosenblat remembers. It was the last time he would ever see her.

It was in Schlieben, Germany, that Rosenblat and the girl he later called his angel would meet.

Roma Radziki worked on a nearby farm and the boy caught her eye. And bringing him food _ apples, mostly, but bread, too _ became part of her routine.

"Every day," she says, "every day I went."

Rosenblat says he would secretly eat the apples and never mentioned a word of it to anyone else for fear word would spread and he'd be punished or even killed. When Rosenblat learned he would be moved again _ this time to Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic _ he told the girl he would not return.

Not long after, the Russians rolled in on a tank and liberated Rosenblat's camp. The war was over. She went to nursing school in Israel. He went to London and learned to be an electrician.

Their daily ritual faded from their minds.

"I forgot," she says.

"I forgot about her, too," he recalls.

Rosenblat eventually moved to New York. He was running a television repair shop when a friend phoned him one Sunday afternoon and said he wanted to fix him up with a girl. Rosenblat was unenthusiastic: He didn't like blind dates, he told his friend. He didn't know what she would look like. But finally, he relented.

It went well enough. She was Polish and easygoing. Conversation flowed, and eventually talk turned to their wartime experiences. Rosenblat recited the litany of camps he had been in, and Radziki's ears perked up. She had been in Schlieben, too, hiding from the Nazis.

She spoke of a boy she would visit, of the apples she would bring, how he was sent away.

And then, the words that would change their lives forever: "That was me," he said.

Rosenblat knew he could never leave this woman again. He proposed marriage that very night. She thought he was crazy. Two months later she said yes.

In 1958, they were married at a synagogue in the Bronx _ a world away from their sorrows, more than a decade after they had thought they were separated forever.

It all seems too remarkable to be believed. Rosenblat insists it is all true.

Even after their engagement, the couple kept the story mostly to themselves, telling only those closest to them. Herman says it's because they met at a point in his life he'd rather forget. But eventually, he said, he felt the need to share it with others.

Now, the Rosenblats' story has inspired a children's book, "Angel Girl." And eventually, there are plans to turn it into a film, "The Flower of the Fence." Herman expects to publish his memoirs next year.

Michael Berenbaum, a distinguished Holocaust scholar who has authored a dozen books, has read Rosenblatt's memoir and sees no reason to question it.

"I wasn't born then so I can't say I was an eyewitness. But it's credible," Berenbaum said. "Crazier things have happened."Herman is now 79, and Roma is three years his junior; they celebrated their 50th anniversary this summer. He often tells their story to Jewish and other groups.

He believes the lesson is the very one his father imparted."Not to hate and to love _ that's what I am lecturing about," he said. "Not to hold a grudge and to tolerate everybody, to love people, to be tolerant of people, no matter who they are or what they are.

"The anger of the concentration camps, Herman says, has gone away. He forgave. And his life has been filled with love.

Matthew Shepard October 12 Service

On October 12 at 11 a.m., the Unitarian Church will host a joint service with Metropolitan Community Church Quad Cities to commorate the 10th anniversary of the death of Matthew Shepard. Here is an op/ed that Pastor Rich Hendricks and I wrote about the service. This letter has run in the Quad City Times and the North Scott Press and soon in the Argus/Dispatch.

From Tragedy to Hope

In 1955 African American Emmett Till was brutally murdered in Mississippi in a racist hate crime. As a result of that attack, the civil rights movement was energized and less than ten years later Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1998 gay American Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered in Wyoming in a homophobic hate crime. As a result of that attack, the movement towards full civil rights for God’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (“LGBT”) children was energized. See, for example, www.matthew shepard.org. Yet, 10 years later there is still NO national legislation protecting the civil rights of LGBT persons. And the hate continues.

As recently as this month, three gay men in Des Moines were attacked with thrown bricks amid a torrent of homophobic hate speech. This past July a man shouting insults against “liberals and gays” interrupted a church service at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, killing two adults and wounding seven others.

The Human Rights Campaign website states it best: “All violent crimes are reprehensible. But the damage done by hate crimes cannot be measured solely in terms of physical injury or dollars and cents. Hate crimes rend the fabric of our society and fragment communities because they target a whole group and not just the individual victim. Hate crimes are committed to cause fear to a whole community. A violent hate crime is intended to ‘send a message’ that an individual and ‘their kind’ will not be tolerated, many times leaving the victim and others in their group feeling isolated, vulnerable and unprotected.”

It is time to end homophobic bigotry, hate and violence. It pains us to know, even more so as clergy persons, that homophobic violence often finds its roots in religious-sponsored bigotry and hate. While many Christian preachers publicly espouse anti-gay rhetoric from their pulpits, very few of those same preachers also remind their congregants that Jesus denounced violence of any kind or that Jesus called on his followers to love even their enemies. When churches and individuals fail to speak up for tolerance and against hatred, they leave the world at risk to heinous crimes that should not happen. Churches and individuals have enormous power to make a difference for all that is good and right instead of promoting bigotry and hate.

People have a right to believe what they want about whether LGBT people are included in God’s love. Regardless, all people of good conscience everywhere must speak out against violence and hatred. On Sunday, October 12, 2008, the Metropolitan Community Church of the Quad Cities and the Unitarian Church of the Quad Cities are holding a joint worship service at 11:00 a.m. at the Unitarian Church, 3707 Eastern Avenue in Davenport. The service is in remembrance of the 10th Anniversary of the slaying of Matthew Shepard. The service is entitled “From Tragedy to Hope.”

We invite all who abhor violence and hate to attend the service and for all persons everywhere to spread the word that hate and violence are no longer acceptable behaviors in our land.
Rev. Roger Butts, Unitarian Church, Davenport
Rev. Rich Hendricks, Metropolitan Community Church of the Quad Cities