A European immigrant Christian pastor haunted by Hitler’s shadow is warning Kansas City of the evils of antisemitism and exhorting people of faith to take part in a solemn “March of Love” in Sarah Milgrim’s memory on Wednesday.

Participants in Overland Park’s March of Love, assembling in the Rosana Square parking lot at 119th and Metcalf (Hobby Lobby, Mardel Christian Bookstore) for the 6:00-7:30 p.m. walk, are strongly encouraged to wear blue and white in “solidarity with the Jewish people here in Kansas City.”

As of Friday, four churches and four ministries were officially on board with the walk, though others are urged to join in. Individuals can register on the March of Love website to help organizers in planning, but it’s not required.

Organizer Pierre Bezençon, whose refined Gallic accent still speaks to his upbringing in the French part of Switzerland, had come to Kansas City in 2018 specifically to pray for Israel at the International House of Prayer in its Israel Mandate.

But after the cold-blooded killings of Milgrim and her fiancé Yaron Lischinsky in Washington, D.C., May 21, the terror attack on Jewish marchers in Boulder, and the precautionary cancellation of a large pro-Israel summit in the Dallas area, Bezençon and his wife knew they had to act.

The couple, who run the God Loves Israel ministry, have timed the Wednesday walk to fall in the traditional 30-day mourning period for Sarah.

“The March of Love is an act of solidarity towards the Jewish people here in Kansas City, the Jewish community here in Kansas City,” Bezençon says in a video promoting the walk. “We want to express our solidarity, our love, our support and we want to show them that they are not alone and we are this fortress, this rampart, for them against antisemitism. …

“We need to be aware that there is an escalation. This escalation is not acceptable. And as [a] European, I’m speaking to you from the bottom of my heart: We have seen this in history. And if the church had stood up towards all the threats, intimidation and evil of Hitler and his Nazi Party, the story would have been written differently.”

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer called on the Nazi-era German church to rise up for its Jewish neighbors, Bezençon is asking the church in Kansas City to stand – and on Wednesday, walk – for their Jewish neighbors here.

“Now is the time to stand up, church,” he says in the short video. “Now is the time to say no, killing Jews in America is not acceptable. It’s not all right. No. We want to stand with them. We want to be this fortress around them, and stand against any attempt of intimidation, fear and also evil acts against them.”

In an interview with The Heartlander, Bezençon emphasizes the walk is not against anyone, but for Sarah and the Jewish community.

“It will be a really prayerful and peaceful march,” he says. “It’s like going to a memorial service; we will be in an attitude of quietness, respect, dignity, honoring the memory of Sarah Milgrim. It’s nothing to do with shouting or protesting. It’s a march, a peaceful and prayerful march.

“It’s not a political statement. It’s really like a spiritual statement.”

An international minister for 35 years, Bezençon’s long walk of his own through the Bible took him inexorably and irreversibly to Israel.

He was a supporter long before today’s bizarre and horrific brand of antisemitism.

“I have been praying for Israel, I mean intensely, since 2002. So yes, Israel has been on my heart.

“Maturing and growing in my understanding of the ways of God, I saw the importance of Israel more and more. And so I started to, of course, pray more. And when you pray more and when you read more, the Bible, then suddenly – or gradually – you have more understanding. That’s what happened to me.”

While Wednesday’s walk will be reverential, security will obviously be heightened, with private guards and the assiduous eye of a supportive Overland Park Police Department, Bezençon says.

“It’s not against anyone. It’s not angry. We do not walk angry,” he says. “It’s because we see our human responsibility. …

“I’m coming from Europe and I have seen the development of threats against Jewish people in a very, very intense way, maybe more than Americans who were on the other side of the pond.”

The German church was either intimidated or indifferent to the rise of antisemitism in the 1930s. That can’t be allowed to happen here, Bezençon says.

“And for me, I don’t want this to happen. I don’t want this to happen.”