Ben Stern, Holocaust survivor who challenged neo-Nazis, 102
Ben Stern, a Holocaust survivor who endured years in Nazi concentration camps and two death marches before settling in Skokie, Ill., where he helped rally opposition to a planned neo-Nazi demonstration in the late 1970s that produced one of the most explosive cases in First Amendment law, died Feb. 28 at 102.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said his daughter Charlene Stern. Stern had lived for decades in Illinois before moving to California to be closer to his family. He died at his home in Berkeley.
Stern, a Polish-born Jew, lost his parents, his sister and six of his seven brothers in the Holocaust. He evaded selections for the gas chambers at Auschwitz, one of numerous Nazi camps where he was imprisoned, and was marched for weeks without bread before his liberation in 1945.
With no family and no home left in Europe, Stern immigrated to the United States in 1946 with his wife, a fellow survivor he had met in a displaced-persons camp. Despite speaking no English at first, he became a businessman and established a chain of laundromats across Chicago. The couple and their three children eventually settled in the suburb of Skokie, which was home to a large Jewish community and an estimated 6,000 Holocaust survivors.
For those survivors, Skokie was a world away from the one they had left behind. But a specter of the past emerged in 1977 when the National Socialist Party of America, a small group of neo-Nazis led by Frank Collin, announced plans for a rally in Skokie. In a standoff that ultimately landed in the U.S. Supreme Court, Stern was among the activists who set out to stop them.
As the town of Skokie undertook efforts to block the demonstration, the neo-Nazis were represented in court by the American Civil Liberties Union, whose principal lawyer faced death threats for arguing that even speech as abhorrent as that of neo-Nazis must be defended if the First Amendment protection of free speech is to endure.
In making its case, the ACLU noted that some of the measures invoked by Skokie officials to keep out the neo-Nazis, including a provision that demonstrators post sizable insurance bonds, had been used in efforts to stop civil rights protests in the South.
Stern understood the argument but could not abide the sight of a swastika in a public square in America. Nor could he accept the position of those including the rabbi at his synagogue, who advised the congregation to ignore the neo-Nazis and let the moment pass.
Upon hearing his rabbi’s admonition during an observance of the High Holy Days, . Stern recalled, he jumped up before the packed congregation and interrupted the service to declare: “No, Rabbi! We will not stay home and close the windows. We will not let them march. Not here, not now, not in America!”
The neo-Nazis prevailed in their legal proceedings — their speech was protected under the First Amendment, court after court ruled. But they canceled their rally in Skokie, in part because they were faced with the prospect of a massive counter-demonstration organized by Jewish groups and activists including Stern, who had written letters to the editor, appeared on television, gathered petitions and rallied people to their cause.
The neo-Nazis did ultimately gather in Chicago in 1978. But to Stern and those who had fought them with him, the successful effort to drive them from Skokie was a victory on behalf of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Reflecting on “the feeling after 30 years of rising from the ashes to have to face a threat from the Nazis,” Stern said, “I could not believe it, and I wanted to face it head on, not hide and not let it happen.”
Bendit Sztern was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw on Sept. 21, 1921. Both of his parents had been widowed in World War I, and the household included six children from their earlier marriages, as well as Mr. Stern and two other children born to their union. A brother who immigrated in the 1930s to what was then the British mandate of Palestine was Stern’s only sibling still alive at the end of the Holocaust.
On Sept. 1, 1939, weeks before Stern turned 18, Germany invaded Poland, and the continent was soon at war. The following year, Stern and much of his family were confined to the Warsaw ghetto. His grandmother, an older brother and his father were among the thousands of Jews who died in the ghetto amid rampant starvation and disease.
Stern was with his mother and younger brother during a mass deportation in 1942. Amid the chaos, he had no chance to say goodbye as they were loaded onto a cattle car bound for Treblinka, a Nazi killing center in occupied Poland, and he was pushed onto another one headed for Majdanek, a Nazi concentration camp located near Lublin.
In the aftermath of the war, Stern searched displaced-persons camps for members of his family but found none. He met Chaya Kielmanowicz, a survivor from Warsaw, and married her within six weeks of their first encounter. She was “just as lost as I was,” he later observed.