Conference taveng::bagels

1182.0. "The Cantor and The Grand Dragon" by POWDML::JULIUS () Fri Mar 06 1992 20:47

The Cantor and the Grand Dragon

The Jewish Advocate, February 21-27, 1992

(printed without permission)

New York (JTA) - Little did the grand dragon of Nebraska's Ku 
Klux Klan know when he called to harass a local cantor that he 
was starting a process that would lead him to shed his hood and 
take up the study of Judaism.

Larry Trapp had been a racist for most of his 42 years when he 
first called and threatened Michael Weisser, cantor and spiritual 
leader of the Lincoln, Neb., Reform temple, last June.

Congregation B'nai Jeshurun's Weisser, active in a community 
anti-racism group, had lived in Lincoln for three years.  He had 
just moved into a new house and was having breakfast one Sunday 
morning when the phone rang.

The caller said, "You'll be sorry you ever moved into (deleted) 
Street, Jew boy," and hung up.

Weisser called the police, had a tap installed on his phone and 
gave his three teenagers keys to the house.

They had never felt the need to lock the doors before.

A few days later, Weisser found a package in his mail - inside 
were racist pamphlets and tracts from the Ku Klux Klan, the 
Aryan Nation and the American Nazi party.

It was then that Weisser thought of Larry Trapp.

Trapp, currently Lincoln's best-known racist, was a familiar sight 
in the pages of the local newspaper for, among other things, 
sending racist literature to nearby Asian and Hispanic 
communities.

Trapp, who is blind and confined to a wheelchair as a result of 
diabetes, was also placing Tom Metzger's infamous White Aryan 
Resistance show "Race and Reason" on public access cable TV.

While discussing the situation with his wife, Weisser decided 
that he had to confront the man who was frightening his family.  
Julie, his wife, suggested that he say something nice to Trapp 
and throw him off guard.

Weisser obtained Trapp's phone number, which was answered by a 
recording on which Trapp ranted against blacks and Jews.

The first time Weisser left a message at the beep, he said, 
"Larry, you're going to be sorry for all this hatred, you're 
going to have to answer to G-d someday.  Larry, you'd better 
think about what you're doing," and hung up.

A week later, Weisser called again and said, "Larry, you would 
have been among the first to be executed by the Nazis, because 
their first laws were against people with physical handicaps.  
You'd better think about how much you love those Nazis," and hung 
up.

Another of the many times Weisser called, beginning in July, he 
said, "Justice is for everybody, Larry."

One day when Weisser called, he found that Trapp had left a 
30-second Bronx cheer on the answering machine.  Weisser left the 
message, "It sounds like the voice of the Master Race to me."

Finally, in October, Trapp picked up the phone when Weisser 
called and asked, angrily, "Why are you calling me?  If you're 
trying to harass me, I'll have you arrested."

Weisser answered, "I'm not trying to harass you.  You don't get 
around very easily and I thought you might need a lift to the 
grocery store."

Instantly, Weisser recalls, all of the belligerence left Trapp's 
voice.  He turned down the offer but said, "Thanks, anyway," and 
asked Weisser not to call him anymore, saying, "This is a 
business phone."

He didn't  call Trapp again for a week or two, and then saw an 
article in the local newspaper.  In it, Trapp said that he had 
informed the cable station that he was pulling "Race and Reason" 
off the air, and that he was rethinking some of his positions.

"That evening, I called him and asked if the piece in the paper 
was true," Weisser recalls, and told Trapp, "If you need some 
help with this change that's going on, I'd be glad to talk to you 
about it."

Trapp responded that he was handling it himself, Weisser says.  
Trapp also said that although he was awaiting sentencing on 
harassment charges, that was not why he was reconsidering some of 
his views.

The day of sentencing arrived, and the next day Weisser saw, on 
the front page of the newspaper, that Larry Trapp had been 
insulting people on the way out of the court-house, calling a 
black newswoman "half-breed" and ranting about the "Jews media."

Weisser felt deceived.  He called Trapp and yelled, "You're 
either the biggest liar in the world or you'd better have a good 
excuse for what happened at the court-house."

According to Weisser, Trapp responded, "I've been saying those 
things for 40 years, but I'm sorry that I said what I said 
yesterday," and promised to apologize to those he'd insulted.

Weisser hung up, astounded.

The next night, Trapp called Weisser at home and said, "I really 
want to get out of what I'm doing and I don't know how," Weisser 
recalls.

Weisser and his wife immediately went to Trapp's home.

Julie wanted to bring him a small gift to make him feel more at 
ease, and brought along a ring of twisted silver that she'd 
gotten her husband a few years before.

The Weissers arrived at Trapp's house and when "we came in, 
without a word being spoken, I shook hands with him, and he 
started crying," says Weisser.

"He took these two Nazi swastika rings off his hand and said, 'I 
want you to take these away from me because they're just symbols 
of hate.'  And Julie gave him the ring we brought."

"It was like a made-for-television movie," Weisser says.

Weisser and his wife talked with Trapp for three or four hours 
that night.  By the time they left, Trapp had given them cartons 
of racist literature, his Nazi flags and his Klan robes.

Since then, Trapp has also given up his two guns, says Weisser:  
a semi-automatic Mac-10 machine gun loaded with 36 rounds of 
ammunition, and a sawed-off 12-gauge Remington shotgun.

Over the last two months, Trapp has written letters of apology to 
people he had offended and publicly apologized to the black, 
Hispanic and Asian communities.

He has spoken to a local Jewish singles' group and addressed a 
recent meeting of the local chapter of the National Association 
for the Advancement of Colored People.

And at a memorial service on the anniversary of 
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, Trapp spoke to an 
overflow crowd of some 300 people at Weisser's temple.

His message, says Weisser, was the need to heed King's lessons.

These days, Trapp, who is too ill to be interviewed, spends time 
listening to an introduction to Judaism on tape, and has said 
publicly that he wants to convert.

What spurred Weisser to reach out with compassion to a man so 
full of hatred?

"I was acting on my Jewish faith," says Weisser.  "The core 
teaching of Judaism is that love, tolerance and seeking justice 
and righteousness are the whole ball of wax.  They're what makes 
Judaism Judaism."