In Florida, generations of Jews are routinely victimized with absolute impunity.

This is institutional antisemitism passed along from generation to generation of Jew-haters against generations of Jew-victims. In our family, Florida’s intergenerational antisemitism is now in Generation 4 — starting with my Dad, Holocaust Survivor Al Katz, and thereafter passed down to my husband and me, our child, and our four grandchildren.

In 2023, our four Indiana grandchildren, one of whom was still in high school, purportedly disinherited themselves of Al Katz’s bequest to them of hundreds of thousands of dollars, by their signing of a sheet of paper, prepared by the Florida lawyer representing the Manatee County condo association suing them for Al’s condo debts; despite the fact that none of Al’s great-grandchildren was ever an owner of his condo or liable for his debts.

By falsifying official government records, the law firm representing Heritage Village West Condominium Association in collaboration with HVW President, Matthew Schrier, signing under oath, filed a lien against HVW 4102 intending to nullify Al Katz’s warranty deed, stipulating his sole ownership of HVW 4102 since 1984. Put simply, with the stroke of his pen, Matthew Schrier “transferred” on paper 40 years of continuous real property ownership from a Holocaust Survivor to his great-grandchildren with no distributions thereof, threatening them with alleged insurmountable debts unless they would disinherit themselves and agree to HVW’s foreclosure on Al Katz’s condominium and awarding of hundreds of thousands of dollars to HVW’s lawyers.

This slight of hand, of course, is patently illegal except when the hundreds of thousands of dollars belonging to Jews is involved. The Manatee County court avidly approved of the numerous transactions that falsified governmental records; fraudulently foreclosed on Al Katz’s real property at the foreclosure sale held online for two minutes, selling HVW 4102 to HVW at a cost of $100.00; and HVW’s stealing and looting of thousands of Jewish personal property items inside of HVW 4102.

This pattern is the self-same one used in Nazi Germany – to seize Jewish real property and loot all Jewish personal property therein. Even with copious photographic and eyewitness evidence of these felonious grand thefts and antisemitic hate crimes, the supervising court was unmoved to stop the evisceration of Al Katz’s bequests to his Jewish family, preceded by HVW’s decade-long antisemitic campaign against them via threats, extortion, defamation, vandalism, thefts, intimidation, and classic antisemitic accusations.

Likewise, the Manatee County law enforcement and prosecutor’s office have since 2008 refused to take a single action against any of the perpetrators of the well-documented crimes, felonies, and antisemitic hate crimes against our family, such that our reports of crimes receive no case numbers, no investigators assigned, no response at all from the authorities, no indictments, no prosecutions, no fines, and no penalties of any kind ever.

Growing up in KKK Indiana, living in non-Jewish neighborhoods, attending schools from primary through doctoral levels with nearly 100 percent non-Jewish student populations, working with nearly 100 percent non-Jewish staffs and administrators, and living for decades across the street from a Catholic church and immense Catholic schools complex, preschool-grade 12, I have never witnessed the enormity and impenetrability of institutional antisemitism that our family has suffered for decades in South Florida.

No matter the visibility of the crimes inflicted against our family, the perpetrators remain invincible, untouchable. Years ago, Dr. Rich Swier published “Florida’s Capital of Antisemitism“, the status of which crimes against our family has only intensified and solidified many years later. Also intensifying and solidifying are the murders in the self-same City of Bradenton/ Manatee County, now dubbed as “Florida’s Murder Capital 2024“; for antisemitism is a highly-contagious disease creating a climate of hate witnessed and practiced by our youths in gang violence, murders, drug-related crimes, child abuse, and human trafficking, all of which plague this picturesque area on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Rather than being the picture of beauty The Divine One blessed this county to be, it has morphed into a forbidding and foreboding site of hatred run amuck from generation to generation, breeding many children filled with uncontained disillusionment, disgust, distress, and desires to harm themselves, their peers, family members, strangers, community, and society for cheating them out of the decent childhood they deserve.

©2024. Beverly Newman, Ed. D. All rights reserved.