Ben Stern was separated from his family in his native Poland and narrowly escaped the horrors of the Holocaust before settling in the Chicago area, where in the late 1970s he led the fight against a proposed march by neo-Nazis in Skokie.
The Nazis’ proposal formed the basis of a major U.S. free speech case, but the group ultimately decided not to march in the heavily Jewish suburb.
For the rest of his life, Stern continued speaking out against hate and intolerance.
“His presence not only carried forward all the history that he and his family had gone through during (World War II), but also the commitment to make sure that such a fate never met any human being, including Jews, including any of the issues of racial injustice and the intolerance that (has become) dominant in American politics,” said Rabbi Menachem Creditor, the former rabbi of a synagogue that Stern attended in Northern California.
Stern, 102, died of heart failure on Feb. 28 at his home in Berkeley, California, said his daughter Charlene. He had been a Berkeley resident since 2008, and prior to that had lived in Skokie and Northbrook.
Born Bendet Sztern in Warsaw, Stern moved with his family to Mogielnica, Poland, where he attended school. When the 1939 German invasion of Poland plunged the European continent into what would become World War II, Stern went to a ghetto in Mogielnica and then, the following year, to the Warsaw Ghetto, where his father perished.
Stern was deported to the Madjanek concentration camp. His mother and a brother were moved to the Treblinka concentration camp, where they died. The Nazis eventually moved Stern to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald. He encountered unspeakable horrors that he recounted in his 2022 memoir, “Near Normal Man,” which later was turned into a 30-minute documentary.
Emaciated and weakened, Stern survived a death march toward Austria long enough to be liberated by U.S. forces at the end of the war.
In all, Stern survived two ghettos, nine concentration camps and two death marches.
After the war, Stern could find no family members in any displaced persons camp. However, he did meet his future wife, Helen. They were married in 1945 and moved to the U.S. the following year.
The couple settled on Chicago’s South Side, where Stern learned carpentry and worked full time as a carpenter for five years. He later went into the business of coin-operated laundromats, ultimately owning about a dozen around Chicago.
In 1977, when the Sterns were living in Skokie, a Chicago-based group of neo-Nazis known as the National Socialist Party of America applied to hold a rally in the suburb, which was home to a large number of Holocaust survivors. The group’s racist demonstrations in protest of racially changing neighborhoods in Chicago had met resistance, with the city fighting back by demanding a steep insurance fee.
The neo-Nazis then focused on Chicago-area suburbs. While other suburbs ignored the group, Skokie attempted to ban a proposed march, a move that the the American Civil Liberties Union opposed on free-speech grounds.
Stern began gathering signatures to oppose the march and worked to organize a counterdemonstration of Jews and Christians. The legal case ultimately made its way to the Illinois Supreme Court and then to the U.S. Supreme Court, whose ruling in effect allowed the neo-Nazis to march.
However, Skokie officials made clear that they would not be able to guarantee the safety of the Neo-Nazis, who chose to march in Chicago instead.
Ira Glasser, the national director of the ACLU from 1978 until 2001, was the head of the New York Civil Liberties Union in 1977 and was not involved in the national ACLU’s support of the neo-Nazis in the Skokie matter. However, Glasser wholeheartedly agreed with the national ACLU’s decision to support the neo-Nazis’ right to march.
Years later, Glasser and Stern struck up a friendship through Stern’s daughter. The two men met at Glasser’s home in California, where, Glasser recalls, Stern told him that “we’re not going to agree, but we’re going to be friends.”
“After a long discussion, I think it’s fair to say that neither of us budged on our position for an inch, but I think he understood why we had to take that case and how terrible for free speech it would be everywhere — including in the South, and with civil rights marches — if we hadn’t taken the case,” Glasser said.
“But he was just passionate and articulate about the anguish (the proposed march) brought him, in the town where he lived all these years later, to see people with swastikas in the streets,” Glasser said. “All that was valid and true and unassailable. He never conceded anything, but his only interest was in communicating his anguish, which he did, very movingly and passionately.”
Stern and Glasser eventually appeared together on several panels, including one at the University of Chicago Law School, to discuss the documentary about Stern’s life. Glasser also attended Stern’s 100th birthday party in California.
“We had kind of a late-in-life, unlikely and unpredictable bonding across the anguish of all that disagreement, and I think it’s fair to say that we became good friends,” Glasser said. “The more I was involved in it, the better I understood why we had to take the case.
“But trying to contemplate what a guy like him went through, being arrested when he was 17 and spending time in seven concentration camps and being 75 pounds when he was liberated and having dysentery and losing his entire family and then resurrecting himself into a new life in a new place and then all those years later, there’s somebody on the sidewalks where you live with a swastika? It’s literally unimaginable.”
Stern retired in 2007, and the following year he and his wife moved to Berkeley. In California, Stern spoke at a rally against white supremacy in 2017 and again at a 2019 rally in San Francisco protesting family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Stern’s wife of 73 years, Helen, died in 2018. Survivors include another daughter, Susan; a son, Norman; seven grandchildren; nine great-grandchildren; and a half-brother, Shalom Provisor.
Services were held.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
