The Jews have a word for it: tshuvah, meaning “turning” or “repentance.” Tim Zaal is not Jewish, but he embodies the essence of tshuvah.
A former neo-Nazi skinhead with a violent history, Zaal now renounces his past. Under the aegis of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, he frequently speaks to Jewish groups, apologizing for his actions and telling his life story as a cautionary tale about the corrosive dangers of hate.
Last weekend, Zaal spoke to a small audience at Berkeley’s Chabad House, sponsored by Chabad’s student group, The Farbrengen Society.
It was an incongruous sight: the imposing 6-foot-3-inch figure of Zaal, 38, still with shaved head and fearsome jailhouse tattoos, side-by-side with kippah-covered Chabadniks. His first words to the gathering: “I’m no longer a skinhead, so you don’t have to be afraid of me.”
Zaal began his presentation by screening “The Wave,” a simplistic yet powerful after-school TV special from the ’80s based on a real-life 1967 experiment in mob psychology.
In the film, a charismatic high school history teacher seeks to explain the acquiescence of Nazi-era Germans by exhorting students to launch their own “movement.” Things get out of hand, as some unwilling participants are roughed up and scorned. Finally, the teacher reveals the truth to his stunned students, who realize they’d become complicit thugs.
After the film, Zaal recounted his own history, growing up in a working-class neighborhood in L.A. County’s San Gabriel Valley. When his older brother was shot by a black gang and nearly killed, Zaal experienced a profound fear of racial minorities. “That’s where hate comes from,” he said. “It’s a reaction to fear.”
As a teen, Zaal discovered heavy metal, punk rock and racist literature. In time, he met notorious white power leader Tom Metzger, later becoming his bodyguard and chief lieutenant.
Thus began Zaal’s indoctrination into the ideology of the white power movement, which foresees a coming race war, and requires adherents to prepare with paramilitary training and acts of violence.
“We believed we were in ZOG-occupied territory: Zionist Occupied Government.” said Zaal. “Metzger was my new Daddy,”
For years, Zaal “ate, slept, and drank white power,” covering his body with Nazi tattoos, and immersing himself in the movement. In the early ’90s, he was convicted of aggravated assault on an Iranian couple, and sentenced to a year in prison.
Time in jail only fueled his fury. Upon parole, Zaal launched a new group, the Western Hammerskins, which today is a worldwide hate organization. “I wanted to be the next Hitler,” said Zaal.
Once in his 30s, Zaal began to have twinges of conscience, and he started questioning the illogical arguments of his racist theories. Why, for example, should the movement endorse Holocaust revisionism when it was supposedly a good thing to kill Jews?
The kicker came when his then-wife told Zaal if she ever learned that their young son had even one drop of non-white blood in him, she would personally kill the child.”This is Aryan family values,” said Zaal. “The message is pure evil.”
Zaal thus headed down the long road of repentance. He left his wife (a committed racist serving a long prison sentence for her hate crimes), left the movement and started reaching out for help. He began by opening himself up to Judaism and Jews. “My first time in a synagogue was very confusing,” Zaal recounts. He also assumed custody of his son, 10, who he says is a very disturbed boy.
Zaal also warned that the white power movement is growing ever more sophisticated and insidious, eschewing shaved heads and jackboots, preferring now to blend in with mainstream society and recruiting via the Internet.
Audience members were moved by Zaal’s presentation. Said Baruch Goldberg of Berkeley, “I thought it was encouraging that after having gone through that, he could see through the lies and want to do good.”
The admiration ran both ways. Said Zaal to his all-Jewish audience, “People in the movement believe Jews are evil. But I can tell you, they don’t know what they’re missing.”