Thank you to Lori Sturdevant for reporting in her Sunday column on the honoring of Rep. Bernie Lieder (DFL-Crookston) at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Rep. Lieder is the last World War II veteran in the Minnesota legislature. As Ms. Sturdevant detailed in her column, Rep. Lieder was a G.I. corporal who fought through northern Germany in 1945, participated in the liberation of labor camps and came across a ghastly scene in which 1,000 slave laborers were burned alive in a barn by Nazis. Rep. Frank Hornstein (DFL-Minneapolis) had the inspired idea of connecting a visit to Yad Vashem by a bi-partisan delegation of Minnesota state legislators touring Israel and the honoring of Rep. Lieder. The JCRC is proud to have assisted Rep. Hornstein in organizing this trip, for which the legislators paid their own way.

The heroism of so many Minnesotans of the "greatest generation" and all those who fought on our side in World War II reminds us of the tremendous sacrifice and human toll of the war against Nazi Germany and the other fascist Axis powers. 7,873 Minnesotans were among the 405,399 Americans who died serving our country in World War II. The United States was the "Arsenal of Democracy." The British stood alone in the desperate days of 1940 on the brink of invasion and possible annihilation. The Soviet Union suffered 20 million war dead in their "Great Patriotic War," including millions of civilian casualties.

For our part, Minnesota's Jewish community in concert with the international Jewish community and good people throughout the world gave their hearts, souls and lives to the Allied cause. For example, an estimated 11,000 American Jews and 142,500 Soviet Jews were killed in World War II. The Jews of the Yishuv (the pre-Israel Jewish community of Palestine), despite the British imposition of the infamous 1939 White Paper which practically ended Jewish immigration to Palestine when it was most needed, wholeheartedly supported the Allies as exemplified by the death in action of British R.A.F. Flight Lt. Michael Weizmann, son of the future first president of Israel.

As American Jews, we are grateful to Rep. Lieder and the millions of other fighting men and women of all the Allied nations who defeated Germany and the Axis powers, thus preserving our American way of life and ending the Holocaust in 1945. Our gratitude, however, does not begin or conclude with the "greatest generation." Each successive generation of America's armed forces, including the current one now serving tour after tour in Iraq and Afghanistan, is deserving of our utmost respect and support. As are their families, who silently worry and lose sleep about the safety of their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and brothers, and parents, and who in too many cases suffer financially and emotionally while their loved ones are serving abroad protecting the freedoms many of us take for granted. As today is Veterans Day, now is an especially appropriate time for reflection and gratitude. Such worthy sentiments, however, should not be reserved just for today and Memorial Day. At the end of each week's Shabbat (Sabbath) services, American Jews recite a prayer calling for the safety and security of American soldiers and we know that other faiths have similar traditions. This is a necessary reminder that their service, like our own lives, is continuous and though our armed forces may be separated from us by thousands of miles, they are still an essential part of our community. On this Veterans Day, for those who are religious and for those who are not, let us all pledge to be more thankful, more grateful, and more humble with respect to our fellow Americans, and their families, who voluntarily place their lives at risk and give up so much so that we can enjoy the bountiful freedom and security of being citizens of the United States of America.