The Great Disappearance, Part IV
What would people do if all the world's Jews vanished over night?
Editor’s Note: Please see Part I, Part II, and Part III of this ongoing satirical fiction series.
Monday, April 3
So It Begins
Nelson was reading accounts of the Pope’s press conference on his phone when it buzzed. It was Father Sullivan.
“Can you come by the school? Quick?”
A few minutes later, he was standing next to Father Sullivan and his vicar, Father Nguyen who had been brought in from Viet Nam to help fill the gap left by the collapse in vocations after the priest abuse scandal that rocked cities throughout the U.S.
They stood together on the sidewalk opposite the driveway into the parking lot of the parochial school affiliated with Sullivan’s parish. A bearded man dressed like a monk was standing in the street holding a sign that said something about Rome being the whore of Babylon. He yelled at the mothers and fathers as they turned into the driveway with their children in the back seat. The children looked at the monk with wide eyes.
“You know anything about this guy?” Father Sullivan said.
“That’s Brother David,” Rev. Nelson said. “A convert to the Russian Orthodox Church who’s made a hobby of harassing Jews. He’s all over social media. Expelled from his community years ago, but he kept the garb.”
“Great,” Fr. Sullivan said derisively. “What did he convert from?”
“He says he was a Jew,” Nelson said.
The trio looked at each other meaningfully.
“Hey, Brother David what are you doing here,” Nelson yelled to the monk from across the driveway as another car drove past. “Now that the Jews are gone, you’re harassing the Catholics? Did the Pope’s speech set you off?”
“The Lord has seen fit to cleanse us of the Jews, and yet Joseph wants them back!” David yelled back. “They are gone, but their malign influence remains.”
“So, the Pope’s Jewish?” Father Sullivan said.
“As are you!” Brother David declared.
“But you weren’t!” Nelson said. “You said all along you were born and raised a Jew, but here you are, in the flesh. The reports state that even converts were taken up. Why not you?”
“I don’t know,” David said testily. “Maybe he left me as a sentinel.”
“You were never a Jew,” Nelson said. “You were grifting all along. You just pretended to be a Jew to add to your shtick!”
A police car pulled up across the street from the school’s parking lot and a woman came out. She approached the clergy. Sergeant Marian Shanahan looked at Brother David ruefully, shook her head.
“I wondered what he was going to do,” she told the trio.
“What do you mean?” Fr. Sullivan said.
“He’s been harassing Jews in Brookline for years,” she said. “He’d stand in the middle of the intersection of Harvard Ave. and Beacon Street calling on Jews to repent. Now he’s here in Brighton.”
“He doesn’t just . . . what is it . . . troll . . . on the Internet?” Father Sullivan asked.
“Oh no. He’s old school. He harasses people in person,” she said, almost impressed.
The group paused for a moment to watch the man in action.
“He seems a little off his game,” the Nelson said. “He showed unmistakable joie de vivre in the videos where he rants about the Jews, but now he seems scared, shook up.”
“So what can we do?” Fr. Sullivan asked the sergeant.
“Not much,” said the sergeant. “He’s not blocking traffic.”
A car drove into the driveway and stopped in front of Brother David. The passenger side window in the back opened and out from the back seat, a carton of orange juice was rocketed at the monk, hitting him squarely on the chest. His beard was soaked. A young girl in the back seat raised her fist in triumph.
“Screw you!” the mother yelled through open winder. “Sorry father!” she mouthed guiltily through the driver’s side window. Her eyes opened wide with shock when she saw the police sergeant. She turned her head, gripped the steering wheel and sped off. Her child would miss school that day.
“Did you see that officer?” Brother David yelled.
“I’m sorry I missed it,” said Shanahan. “What happened?”
“I was assaulted!” he yelled.
“You can come down to the station to file a complaint if you want.”
“There are three clergy standing right next to you!” David said. “They must have seen this outrage.”
“I didn’t see anything,” Nelson said. “Did you Father Sullivan?”
“No, I didn’t,” he said, before turning to his Vicar. “Father Nguyen, did you see anything?” The vicar shook his head.
In a frantic rage, Brother David chased after the car, which was stuck at a light at a nearby intersection, and hit its roof with his sign, prompting sergeant Shanahan run towards him, reaching for her handcuffs as she closed the distance. Brother David was quickly subdued and in the back seat of the cruiser on his way to the local police station. Father Nguyen picked up the abandoned sign and held it upside down.
“Did you see the look on his face in the car,” Nelson asked the two other clergy. They hadn’t.
“He looked almost relieved,” Nelson said. “Like he wanted to be arrested.”
When Nelson got home, he turned on the television. As he flipped through the channels, he saw footage of federation offices being ransacked by masked protesters in New York, Boston and the Bay Area.
Offices of Jewish faculty members were trashed at a number of colleges including Columbia, DePaul and numerous state schools. A coalition of anti-fascist and anti-police activists broke into a synagogue and staged a sit-in in Atlanta. The same thing happened in Portland and Seattle. National Guard Troops stood guard out in front of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
In San Diego, black bloc protesters took the Torah scroll out of its ark, applied bleach to efface the text in a grand ceremony on the front yard of the synagogue and then retreated into the building to write their own manifesto on palimpsest.
“Our chosen time has come,” it began.
They videotaped themselves during the whole thing.
“So it begins,” Reverend Nelson said.
New Sensation
Joshua Walker, the leader of the Boston chapter of the Black Hebrew Israelites, stood on the steps of Rabbi Coen’s house, with several of his most trusted followers standing alongside him. A few were discreetly armed. He had sent emails to the local newspapers and television stations telling them of his intentions to “repatriate” the rabbi’s home and the nearby yeshiva.
“We’re going to return the property to its rightful owner,” the release declared. “In light of their sudden vacancy, it is clear that it was time for the Black Hebrew Israelites to ascend to our place of restoration.”
A crowd of supporters and onlookers had gathered to watch the spectacle. It was cold, but not freezing and there was a steady drizzle of light rain
Walker shouted into a megaphone.
“We are the true possessors of this property!” he said. “We are the heirs of the blessing! This home and the homes nearby are our birthright and have been before they were even built! We are the true remnant of Israel! Now that the imposters have been bidden away, we are here to claim what is ours! Hallelujah and Amen!”
His supporters cheered and stamped their feet.
“We have spied out the promised land, found it empty and we’re moving in!” he said.
“It’s not yours!” an independent black pastor yelled from a nearby grove of trees on the property before walking through the crowd to the front steps.
“You abandon a calling that is yours to claim to claim someone else’s,” he said. “And what about ‘thou shall not steal? You’re a gang of thieves! Here you are trying to move into their homes even before the milk has gone bad in their refrigerators!”
Walker was ready for the challenge.
“You’re departed overlords stole people’s homes in Palestine, so what’s your point?” he said. His supporters smiled. Joshua had come to play, they said.
Another voice in the crowd said, “Look, if you’re Jews then why didn’t you get lifted out with the rest of them?”
“They were imposters,” Walker yelled back. “This is our house,” he said, trying to get a chant going. “This is our house.”
And another challenger declared, “Hey Jew, Go to Palestine!”
There was laughter at that gibe. To Walker’s dismay, the atmosphere started to get ugly. He was used to turning crowds against speakers, not having them turn on him. It was a new sensation.
Walker turned toward the front door and summoned his followers into the house and locked the door behind him.
Video of the confrontation hit all the major networks and flooded social media. White supremacists and other troublemakers responded with a coordinated campaign of shit-posting, broadcasting variations of the message: “We don’t care whether it’s Africa or Palestine. #JustGoBack.”
A popular African American comedian chimed in with a post of his own: “Great Job, Joshua! You confused people but good! Now they can’t decide if they hate you because you’re black or because you’re a Jew!”
News reports indicated that similar events happened in other countries throughout the world. France and Germany were ahead of the curve with officials positioning police cars in front of Jewish synagogues and community centers before people tried to ransack them. Building owners boarded up the front doors and windows of Jewish homes within several hours of the Great Disappearance to prevent efforts to commandeer vacant homes and the items within. They passed emergency laws prohibiting the looting of Jewish centers of life from “unsolicited procurement” (unerwünschte Beschaffung auf Deutsch and approvisionnement non sollicité en Francaise).
A famous satirical magazine in Paris issued a special edition with a cartoon of a synagogue with its doors boarded up and a tumbleweed rolling down the street. Soldiers armed with rifles slouched on the front step playing a game of dice. The headline read, “Mieux vaut tard que jamais!” (“Better Late Than Never!”)
The following morning, Walker and his followers retreated from the Yeshiva and returned to their homes. They never went back.
Part V is coming tomorrow!