Political Quotes

“Mr. President, days before he died, Frederick Knefler composed a letter of instruction to be read once he was gone. There was, he wrote, to be no memorial service or expensive coffin. His funeral should be private and simple, attended only by a handful of fellow Hoosier veterans. When it was lowered into the ground, his body should be wrapped in an American flag. Republics such as ours are uncommon. It is of great value for us, its citizens, to recall our blessings, and it is our heroes who provide that reminder. Although he was born an ocean away from America, Frederick Knefler dedicated his life to defending those blessings. He was one of those heroes. As a contemporary remarked after his death, ``No descendent of a Mayflower Pilgrim was ever more wholly or intensely American than he.'' As we mark Veterans Day, his story is worth sharing. He was a Jewish immigrant; one of the soldiers who saved our Union; a private citizen who spent his final days building a still-inspiring monument to their example. Before he ever set foot in America, though, as a teenager, he had already fought in a civil war, the Hungarian Revolution. Its failure and the sorry state of liberty across Europe inspired Knefler to look elsewhere for freedom. He found it across the Atlantic. He and his family arrived in New York and then settled in Indiana in 1850. There, they were among the earliest members of the Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation, the city's first and today its oldest synagogue family.…”