A Tale of Love: Michael Weisser and Larry Trapp

"In 1991, the Grand Dragon of the Nebraska Ku Klux Klan mailed a Jewish family death threats and told them their days were numbered. The father's only response was to start calling the man back and leaving him kind messages.

His name is Michael Weisser. He is a cantor - a singer who leads his congregation in prayer at a synagogue. He and his wife Julie have just moved their family to Lincoln, Nebraska, to serve a new community. They are unpacking boxes. They are making plans.

Then the packages begin arriving.

Hate literature. Anti-Semitic pamphlets. Neo-Nazi flyers. Arriving at their home address, which means the sender knows exactly where the Weissers live. Then the phone calls start. The voice doesn't introduce itself. It doesn't need to.

"You'll be sorry you ever moved to Nebraska," the message says. "Your days are numbered."

The calls are coming from Larry Trapp - the Grand Dragon of the Nebraska Ku Klux Klan, one of the most active white supremacist organizers in the Midwest. Trapp also operates a local hate hotline broadcasting recorded anti-Black and anti-Semitic messages to anyone who dials in. He has spent more than 20 years building a life around organized hatred and has threatened multiple minority communities across Nebraska in the same year alone.

He is, by every measure, a man entirely committed to the worst version of himself.

What Weisser decides.

Most people in Michael Weisser's position call the police. Some move. Some lock the door and go quiet and hope it stops.

Weisser calls Trapp back.

Not to confront him. Not to match the anger with anger. He leaves a message on Trapp's answering machine, steady and plain: "Larry, I just wanted you to know that you must be a very unhappy man. There's a lot of love out there for you if you want it."

He calls again a few days later. Another message, "Larry, why do you have to live this way? It doesn't have to be like this."

No response. Weisser calls again. And again. Over the next 3 weeks, he leaves message after message - not accusations, not arguments, just a human voice on the other end of the line, refusing to be an enemy.

One day, Trapp picks up.

He is furious. He tells Weisser to stop calling. He uses language designed to end the conversation through shock. Weisser doesn't flinch. He says, calmly, "I know you're very sick, Larry. I thought maybe you needed a ride to the doctor sometime."

There is a long pause.

"How do you know I'm sick?"

What Weisser knows.

By this point, Weisser has learned what Trapp's few acquaintances already know. Larry Trapp is 44 years old. He has diabetes so severe that both his legs have been amputated. He is going blind from the same disease. He lives completely alone in a small apartment in Lincoln. He cannot drive. He rarely leaves. He has almost no one in his life - just the network of hate that has given him purpose and identity for more than 2 decades.

Here's what quietly changes the shape of this story, the man who has been sending a Jewish family death threats is, himself, a man in profound and worsening isolation. He is not a powerful figure behind a fortress wall. He is a sick, dying man alone in a dirty apartment, and no one in the world is offering him anything except the ideology that told him his loneliness was someone else's fault.

Michael Weisser sees this. And he decides it matters.

He and Julie show up at Trapp's door unannounced. They bring a homemade dinner.

November 1991. Larry Trapp's apartment.

Trapp opens the door and sees a Jewish man and his wife standing in the hallway with food.

He lets them in.

The apartment walls are covered in KKK materials, swastika flags, and neo-Nazi literature - the full physical landscape of a life built around hatred. The Weissers sit down. They don't debate him. They don't argue doctrine or history. They share a meal with a man who told them their days were numbered, and they treat him like a human being who still has time left.

Larry Trapp starts to cry. He cannot stop.

Before the evening ends, he tells the Weissers he wants out. He asks them to help him take the symbols off his walls. He calls his KKK contacts that same night and resigns. He makes it official and permanent.

He is done.

What followed.

Over the next several months, Larry Trapp converts to Judaism - the religion of the family he had targeted. He meets individually with members of the minority communities he had threatened and asks each of them for forgiveness, face to face. He is welcomed into the Weissers' synagogue by a congregation he once would have treated as enemies.

Then his health collapses.

The Weissers move him into their home. All 3 of their children grow up sitting across the breakfast table from a man who once mailed their family death threats. They care for him. They stay with him.

Larry Trapp dies in September 1992 - less than 1 year after that first dinner. He dies in a Jewish home, tended to by a Jewish family, after spending his final months trying to undo 20 years of harm 1 conversation at a time.

Kathryn Watterson told the full story in her 1995 book Not by the Sword. It remains in print.

Weisser was asked many times why he did it. His answer never changed, he saw a suffering man underneath the hatred, and he thought someone had to say so.

That is all it took. 1 phone call. A few weeks of messages. A pot of food. And the refusal - stubborn, patient, absolute - to become what hatred wanted him to become.

Share this with someone who needs a reminder that the most disruptive thing you can do in the face of hate is refuse to give it an enemy - because a cantor with a telephone and a casserole dish changed a man the whole world had written off."

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Let this story reach more hearts.....

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~Astonishing