By Sarah Seltzer July 17, 2012

Naomi Zeveloff has a story in this week’s Forward about a full-size replica of the Western Wall in the works in Wichita, Kansas targeted towards women who have had abortions.

An anti-abortion group, the Word of Life Church, is proposing to build this multimillion dollar “National Pro-Life Memorial and International Life Center” in the same city where abortion provider Dr. George Tiller lived and was gunned down by an anti-choice terrorist.

Included as a central aspect of the memorial, should it be built, will be a garden of crosses to represent what leaders call the “Holocaust” and “genocide” of the unborn, in addition to the replica of the wall. Pro-choice website RH Reality Check sees the memorial’s plans as part of a dangerous “my pro-life is bigger than your pro-life culture” which fosters extremism.

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This plan is problematic, even offensive in so, so, so many ways. First of all, if any memorial gets built in Wichita it should be for Dr. Tiller who was a friend to women and a deeply compassionate provider.

Secondly, this is yet another example of Jewish culture, symbols and suffering being appropriated by right-wing American Christians. This has been a tactic of the “pro-life” movement for years — they can’t get enough of the abortion-equals-Holocaust analogy, and even the Anti-Defamation League, no great enemy of the Christian right-wing, has said to a few politicians, “ix-nay on the Holocaust-hay comparisons.”

For many Jews, the Western Wall is the living testament to centuries of Jewish suffering and exile. It’s deeply specific and personal, not a symbol to be appropriated. As feminist blogger “Angry Maiden” wrote recently, given that Jewish law isn’t anti-abortion, this “co-option [is] a gross misappropriation of a religious artifact and an affront to Judaism as a whole.”

She also has some stinging words for the state of actual children’s health in Kansas while this posturing and co-opting takes place.

Governor Brownback signed into law a new tax bill that raises taxes on the poorest 20 percent of Kansas residents, and saw his state drop to 40th in the country for infant mortality rates.

I have to wonder what the Women of the Wall would think.

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