Prof. David Turner

David Turner is a private practice psychotherapist. He was born in New York City in 1939, six months after Kristallnacht and six months before Germany invaded Poland signaling the beginning of what would become known as the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. In the year-and-half before Auschwitz the Einsatzgruppen, German paramilitary SS battalions, murdered one-and-a-half-million Jews by bullet and gas. Beginning in 1942 Auschwitz and the other extermination centers adopted modern...See more

David Turner is a private practice psychotherapist. He was born in New York City in 1939, six months after Kristallnacht and six months before Germany invaded Poland signaling the beginning of what would become known as the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. In the year-and-half before Auschwitz the Einsatzgruppen, German paramilitary SS battalions, murdered one-and-a-half-million Jews by bullet and gas. Beginning in 1942 Auschwitz and the other extermination centers adopted modern industrial processes to rationalize murder making it more efficient, and impersonal. Of the more than six million Jews murdered between 1939 and 1945, more than one million were children. Had the parents and grandparents of Jews surviving today not left Europe before Hitler's party was elected to govern Germany in 1932; Had Germany won the war Roosevelt and Churchill thought possible in 1943; had Hitler admirers Henry Ford or Charles Lindbergh chose to run against Roosevelt in the 1940 election he might have been defeated and America would almost certainly remained neutral. And would the United States have refused a Hitler offer to join Germany in a crusade against "godless" Russia and what was described as its "Judeo-Bolshevik" regime? David Turner lived in Israel in the early 1960's. In the early 1980's he served as regional director for Jewish National Fund in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, the largest Jewish community outside of Israel. In this capacity, he lectured at dozens of synagogues regarding antisemitism, the Holocaust, Zionism, and Israel. In 1983 he Created JUDAC, Jews United to Defend the Auschwitz Cemetery and joined by forty-nine regional rabbis sent a protest to the pope to remove the convent from the grounds of the universal symbol of the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. In 1984, in response to a request by the jailed Jonathan Pollard, David agreed to organize a grassroots effort, Justice for the Pollards. As Pollard's representative, he traveled the United States and Israel and inspired Israel's Knesset and the Chief Rabbinate to deliver letters to President Reagan requesting freedom for the Pollards. For David Turner, Auschwitz is ever present, Jewish survival a life-long preoccupation. He considers all Jews alive today survivors of the failed mid-20th century Holocaust, an effort only partially successful. As the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem that effort remains precedent, a continuing threat to future Jewish survival. See less