In the spring of 1933, just months after Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, Rabbi Louis Levitsky of Wilkes-Barre, PA stood before the West Side Women’s Club and warned:

“Hitler is not a Jewish problem,” Levitsky told the group. “Hitler is a world problem. The attack on the Jews is a danger signal to the rest of the world that a new and active menace to the world’s peace has arisen.”

Across Pennsylvania’s Coal Region, Jewish communities – many descended from families who had fled European pogroms – were already organizing mass meetings, writing newspaper columns, and sending money across the Atlantic to strangers in Germany.

They did all this in the depths of the Great Depression, while the anthracite industry collapsed around them, and they saw clearly what much of the world would take six more years to grasp.

Read the full story – my latest piece for RealClear Pennsylvania

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