Who put out the video? How should the community respond? And how accurately does the simmering rage and bitterness reflect the truth? (Photos: Reuven Schwartz)

When Martin Niemoller wrote his famous anti-Nazi poem, “First They Came…” he never would have dreamed that it would be hijacked seven decades later as a subtle form of incitement against the Jewish People. But that seems to be happening today, as a group calling itself Rise Up Ocean County (RUOC) is using his well-known words to advance its agenda against the Jewish community of Lakewood, New Jersey.

Niemoller’s poem, which begins, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out…” laments that he did not speak up forcefully when the Nazis came for the socialists, the trade unionists, and the Jews, only to find himself falling victim as well. That sentiment is reinterpreted in a video clip featured on the RUOC web page, only this time the “good people of Ocean County” are portrayed as the unfortunate victims of the growing and thriving Orthodox Jewish community of Lakewood.

“This is classic Holocaust inversion,” says Rabbi Meyer H. May, executive director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, referring to a tactic whereby anti-Semites portray Jews (and often the State of Israel) as the new Nazis. It’s a particularly insidious method of turning the tables on the Jewish community, he says, framing the Jews to appear as the oppressors and interlopers. “These are old, tired, anti-Semitic allusions easily understood by those who hate Jews.”

It’s no secret that the Lakewood Orthodox community is growing exponentially. What began in 1943, with 14 students at Beth Medrash Govoha under the leadership of Rav Aharon Kotler, has grown today into an epicenter of Jewish life in the United States. As of 2017, the local population included 102,682 residents, an increase of about 10,000 since 2010, making Lakewood the fastest growing municipality in the state of New Jersey. Lakewood has also spawned a number of newer Orthodox communities in the neighboring townships of Jackson, Toms River, Brick, and Howell.

The RUOC website is cleverly designed to suggest that its primary concern is with “quality of life” issues and not the growth of the Jewish population in the area. Rabbi Moshe Zev Weisberg, a longtime member of the Lakewood Vaad, says, “I have to give them credit. It’s really insidious but it’s also really brilliant. They took the playbook from the Nazis. You demonize the Jews because of the economy and the traffic and the overbuilding. It’s pretty sophisticated.”

But the videos on the site make it quite clear who is being targeted. Especially disturbing are the images on a video titled “Impact of Lakewood Population Projections” that shows yeshivah school children behind the gates of their schoolyard interacting with the videographer while a narrator laments that the school district is responsible for funding bus service for 117,000 of Lakewood’s private school children. The video ends ominously with the words, “Lakewood will be the epicenter of quality of life in Ocean County, or it will lead to its destruction.”

As unsettling as the website is, community leaders are more concerned about a related Facebook page that has already gathered 4,300 “likes” and some very worrisome comments.

“The Facebook page,” says Rabbi May, “is bringing out all the anti-Semites who are happy to respond and climb on the bandwagon.”

(Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 746)