On a Sunday morning in June 1991, Cantor Michael Weisser and his wife, June, were unpacking boxes in their new home, when the phone rang. “You will be sorry you ever moved into 5810 Randolph St., Jew boy,” the voice said, and hung up. Two days later, the Weissers received a manila packet in the mail. “The KKK is watching you, scum,” read the note. Inside were pictures of Adolf Hitler, caricatures of Jews with hooked noses, blacks with gorilla heads, and graphic depictions of dead blacks and Jews. “The Holohoax was nothing compared to what’s going to happen to you,” read one note.

The Weissers called the police, who said it looked like the work of Larry Trapp, the state leader, or “grand dragon,” of the Ku Klux Klan. A Nazi sympathizer, he led a cadre of skinheads and klansmen responsible for terrorizing black, Asian, and Jewish families in Nebraska and nearby Iowa. “He’s dangerous,” the police warned. “We know he makes explosives.” Although confined to a wheelchair because of late-stage diabetes, Trapp, forty-four, was a suspect in firebombings of several African Americans’ homes around Lincoln and was responsible for what he called “Operation Gooks,” the March 1991 bombing of the Indochinese Refugee Assistance Center in Omaha. (He later admitted to these crimes.) And Trapp was planning to blow up the synagogue where Weisser was the spiritual leader.

Trapp lived alone in a drab efficiency apartment. On one wall he kept a giant Nazi flag and a double-life-sized picture of Hitler. Next to these hung his white Ku Klux Klan robe, with its red belt and hood. He kept assault rifles, pistols and shotguns within instant reach for the moment when one of his enemies might come crashing through his door to kill him. In the rear was a secret bunker he’d built for the coming “race wars.”

When Trapp launched a white supremacist TV series on a local public access channel — featuring men and women saluting a burning swastika and firing automatic weapons — Michael Weisser was incensed. He called Trapp’s KKK hotline and left a message on the answering machine. “Larry,” he said, “do you know that the very first laws that Hitler’s Nazi’s passed were against people like yourself who had no legs or who had physical deformities or physical handicaps? Do you realize you would have been among the first to die under Hitler? Why do you love the Nazis so much?” Then he hung up.

Weisser continued the calls to the machine. Then one day Trapp picked up. “What the f— do you want?!” he shouted. “I just want to talk to you,” said Weisser. “You black?” Trapp demanded. “Jewish,” Weisser replied. “Stop harassing me,” said Trapp, who demanded to know why he was calling. Weisser remembered a suggestion of his wife’s. “Well, I was thinking you might need a hand with something, and I wondered if I could help,” Weisser ventured. “I know you’re in a wheelchair and I thought maybe I could take you to the grocery store or something.”

Trapp was too stunned to speak. Then he cleared his throat. “That’s okay,” he said. “That’s nice of you, but I’ve got that covered. Thanks anyway. But don’t call this number anymore.” “I’ll be in touch,” Weisser replied. During a later call, Trapp admitted he was “rethinking a few things.” But then he went back on the radio spewing the same old hatreds. Furious, Weisser picked up the phone. “It’s clear you’re not rethinking anything at all!” After calling Trapp a “liar” and “hypocrite,” Weisser demanded an explanation.

In a surprisingly tremulous voice, Trapp said, “I’m sorry I did that. I’ve been talking like that all my life … I can’t help it … I’ll apologize!” That evening the cantor led his congregation in prayers for the grand dragon.

The next evening, the phone rang at the Weissers’ home. “I want to get out,” Trapp said, “but I don’t know how.” The Weissers offered to go over to Trapp’s that night to “break bread.” Trapp hesitated, then agreed, telling them he lived in apartment number three. When the Weissers entered Trapp’s apartment, he burst into tears and tugged off his swastika rings. Soon all three were crying, then laughing, then hugging.

Trapp resigned from all his racist organizations and wrote apologies to many people he had threatened or abused.

This incredible tale is actually true. Time did an interview with Weisser and Trapp in 1992:

Weisser: I think Larry Trapp has always been a good man, yet he’s had a life that’s been messed up. Until I spoke to Larry Trapp, I’d only had a couple of other experiences with people who are involved in the organizations that Larry was involved with. I never wanted to talk to them; I was afraid of them. The experience of having met and talked with and learning to love Larry Trapp has been eye-opening for me. Larry has helped me realize something about my religion that I’ve taught a lot of people: I am obligated to try to love Larry Trapp — to hate what he stood for, but to love Larry Trapp.

Trapp: I think I was meant to be a Klansman, meant to be a Nazi, meant to do the various things I’ve done so I could learn that they weren’t right, so that maybe, out of my experience, I can help other people change their way of thinking. I think the whole thing was planned out. I really do.

A final note, from this article in Being Jewish magazine.

Over the coming months Larry went through such a complete transformation that the Ku Klux Klan turned to threatening him. He made apologies, he joined the NAACP, spoke in public schools, and was even interviewed in Time magazine with Michael Weisser.

In time, Larry was asked to speak at an interfaith Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. celebration. His words, humbly spoken, revealed a new person. “I wasted the first 40 years of my life and caused harm to other people until I believe God stepped in to give me Cantor Weisser as a messenger, to show me that I could receive love and that I could give love. I have learned we are all the same, no matter whether we’re white people, or Oriental, or black people… we’re one race.”

As Trapp’s illness progressed, he moved into the Weisser home and became known to the Weissers’ three teenage children as “Uncle Larry.” As his heart and kidneys began to fail, Julie quit her nursing job to take care of him.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of his transformation was his conversion to Judaism in the synagogue he had once threatened to bomb. Three months later he passed away in the Weissers’ home, surrounded by his adopted family.

When he died, Michael Weisser and an African-American activist to whom he had once sent hate mail eulogized him.

The story of the Weissers and Larry Trapp has touched many over the years. Kathryn Watterson wrote a book about them called Not by the Sword, and David Roth wrote the song Dragon to Butterfly as a tribute … Here are some of the lyrics from Dragon to Butterfly:

Michael helped Larry back into the house,
And then Michael’s wife Julie helped Larry to bed,
A lifelong diabetic confined to a wheelchair,
He couldn’t do much for himself any more.

So they’d taken him in to unravel the pain,
How his father made fun of him, planting the seed,
And the root of the anger that grew so completely,
Once strangled his heart like a weed.

Larry’s last breath in his bedroom at Michael’s,
Came later that night with his friend at his side,
“Thank you” was all he could whisper,
“For changing a dragon to a butterfly.”

The lessons all of us can learn from the story of Larry Trapp and Julie and Michael Weisser are summed up beautifully in the final paragraph of an editorial that appeared in an Omaha newspaper when Larry passed away:

“Trapp’s life may have balanced out. The good he accomplished may have canceled the years of evil. He gave his fellow man a memorable story of how a hate-filled hardened heart may have been changed by goodness, kindness and love.”