A Christian Pastor is Making Up for Past Anti-semitic Prejudice

A Baptist minister who acknowledges an anti-Semitic past has taken a leading role in a new movement among Christian clergy to teach their congregants of the horrors of the Holocaust and the evil of anti-Semitism.

The Rev. Robert L. Hymers Jr. joined nearly 200 Southern California members of the clergy in a meeting last weekend of the newly formed Committee of Concerned Christians. The participants pledged themselves to give at least one sermon a year on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism.

In August 1988, Hymers led protest rallies against the movie “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which he and other evangelical Christians denounced as blasphemous. His chief targets were Lew Wasserman and other Jewish film executives at MCA and Universal Pictures, distributors of the movie.

“These Jewish producers with a lot of money are taking a swipe at our religion,” Hymers had said during a demonstration in front of Wasserman’s home during that period. At the same rally, Hymers orchestrated a bit of street theater in which a character made up as Wasserman lashed a fallen “Jesus Christ” bearing a large cross.

Hymers’ inflammatory behavior and rhetoric was widely denounced by Jewish defense agencies at the time, and a contrite Hymers agreed with his critics during an interview this week.

“I made a terrible mistake. What I did was wrong and I apologize for it,” Hymers, who is pastor of the Fundamentalist Baptist Tabernacle of Hope in downtown Los Angeles, said during a telephone interview.

“Looking back, I don’t know how I could have done it,” he said.

‘HAS BECOME MY RIGHT HAND’

Although acknowledging that he still does not approve of the controversial films, he said, “I shouldn’t have brought in the word ‘Jewish.’ That was like pouring oil on a fire.”

The Committee of Concerned Christians is the outgrowth of a one-man campaign by Ben Friedman, a 67-year-old real estate agent and businessman.

A native New Yorker who lived most of his life in Houston and moved to this area four years ago, Friedman said he has spent 25 years studying Christianity and befriending Christian ministers.

Last June, he sent letters to members of the clergy of all Christian denominations in Southern California, suggesting the idea of an annual sermon on the Holocaust.

More than 400 responded, Friedman said, and a few months ago he met with 18 ministers to lay the groundwork for the group.

One was Hymers, who told Friedman about his earlier “Last Temptation” campaign and offered to leave if Friedman wished. Instead, said Friedman, “Hymers has become my right hand.”

Friedman now plans to extend his campaign across the country. “My goal is to have a sermon on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism at 10,000 churches in the United States every year–forever.

“If there had been something like this in Germany before the war,” he said, “there wouldn’t have been a Holocaust.”