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(VIDEO) Ahmadinejad Comments On The Holocaust And 9/11
Showing posts with label Holocaust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Holocaust. Show all posts
(VIDEO) Iranian Website Displays Antisemitic Cartoons About The Holocaust
A video which was posted to YouTube on Thursday by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) depicts some disturbing anti-Semitic cartoons about the Holocaust which have been displayed on an Iranian website.
One of the cartoons shows a gas chamber into which Jews are depicted entering one by one. Above the chamber is a counter which counts the number of Jews who have entered the chamber, until it reaches six million – the number of Jews killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. After the counter reaches the six million mark, the Jews who remain alive are seen cheering.
The clip then goes on to show a Jewish person as he approaches what appears to be an automated banking machine. He is shown to withdraw six million dollars from the machine, at which point it is revealed that the machine is in fact a “Holocaust Memorial.” The purpose of this cartoon is to criticize the world for its acceptance to pay restitution to the Jewish people over the Holocaust.
A third cartoon depicts Nazi leader Adolf Hitler as he ponders which mustache to wear, finally deciding on one that looks like a Star of David.
Also shown is one cartoon which depicts Europe as a cow, and the Holocaust as a means of milking money from the Europeans.
The cartoons are in line with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hateful view of Israel, the Jewish people, and the Holocaust. Ahmadinejad, who constantly calls to wipe Israel off the map, has many times publicly denied that the Holocaust occurred.
In one such speech, Ahmadinejad said the Holocaust was “exaggerated” as a pretext to “expand the domination of the victors, particularly the US and Britain, in the international arena.” He also said that “the illegitimate Zionist regime is an outcome of the Holocaust,” stating that while many millions of people died during World War II, the Jews used the Holocaust as a way of massacring indigenous Arabs, evicting them, and establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.
On another occasion, Ahmadinejad, who slammed Israel for defending itself against terror attacks originating in Gaza, said that “the real Holocaust was in Palestine.” (source)
One of the cartoons shows a gas chamber into which Jews are depicted entering one by one. Above the chamber is a counter which counts the number of Jews who have entered the chamber, until it reaches six million – the number of Jews killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. After the counter reaches the six million mark, the Jews who remain alive are seen cheering.
The clip then goes on to show a Jewish person as he approaches what appears to be an automated banking machine. He is shown to withdraw six million dollars from the machine, at which point it is revealed that the machine is in fact a “Holocaust Memorial.” The purpose of this cartoon is to criticize the world for its acceptance to pay restitution to the Jewish people over the Holocaust.
A third cartoon depicts Nazi leader Adolf Hitler as he ponders which mustache to wear, finally deciding on one that looks like a Star of David.
Also shown is one cartoon which depicts Europe as a cow, and the Holocaust as a means of milking money from the Europeans.
The cartoons are in line with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hateful view of Israel, the Jewish people, and the Holocaust. Ahmadinejad, who constantly calls to wipe Israel off the map, has many times publicly denied that the Holocaust occurred.
In one such speech, Ahmadinejad said the Holocaust was “exaggerated” as a pretext to “expand the domination of the victors, particularly the US and Britain, in the international arena.” He also said that “the illegitimate Zionist regime is an outcome of the Holocaust,” stating that while many millions of people died during World War II, the Jews used the Holocaust as a way of massacring indigenous Arabs, evicting them, and establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.
On another occasion, Ahmadinejad, who slammed Israel for defending itself against terror attacks originating in Gaza, said that “the real Holocaust was in Palestine.” (source)
(NEWS) Yad Vashem Has Identified 4 Million Holocaust Victims
"Yad Vashem says it has identified two-thirds of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in the last decade has added about 1.4 million names to its central database of Shoah victims’ names, bringing the total number of names registered to about 4 million, according to a statement released Tuesday.
“One of Yad Vashem’s central missions since its foundation, the recovery of each and every victim’s name and personal story, has resulted in relentless efforts to restore the names and identities of as many of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices as possible,” said Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev. “We will continue our efforts to recover the unknown names, and by harnessing technology in the service of memory, we are able to share their names with the world.”
In 2004, Yad Vashem launched the central database of Shoah victims’ names onto its website with 3 million names. Names are recovered via Pages of Testimony, special forms filled out in memory of the victims by those who remember them, and by combing archival lists and documentation for names.
Of the 4 million names now known, some 2.2 million come from Pages of Testimony and the remainder from various archival sources and postwar commemoration projects.
Israel Protests Gaza Rockets to U.N.
Israel has filed a complaint in the United Nations over rocket attacks from Gaza.
In a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Security Council President Susan Rice, Meron Reuben, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, called on the body to “send a clear and resolute message that these attacks are unacceptable.”
The letter, dated Tuesday, was sent several hours after a rocket fired from Gaza landed several yards from a kindergarten in session in a western Negev kibbutz, wounding a 14-year-old girl on her way to school. Israel responded to the attack later in the day with an airstrike on what it called a Hamas terror center in Gaza.
At least 13 rockets from Gaza have been fired on southern Israel since Sunday.
“The incidents of the past several days are part of an escalation of terrorist attacks emanating from Gaza that target Israeli civilians, towns, and military personnel,” the letter said.
Later it said, “In response to such attacks, Israel has exercised and will continue to exercise its right to self-defense.”
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat on Wednesday told Israel Radio that the Palestinian Authority fears a full-blown Israeli attack on Gaza, saying that “Military solutions such as these won’t accomplish a thing and would only complicate the situation.”
Israeli Panel Approves Heritage Site Renovations
An Israeli government committee approved the $25 million renovation of 16 national heritage projects and sites.
The Ministerial Committee on the National Heritage, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on Tuesday approved the renovation of the sites—among the 150 sites and initiatives included in the “Plan for Renovating and Strengthening National Heritage Sites and Assets” approved in February—at a cost of $25 million. The plan caused some controversy when two West Bank biblical sites, Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs, were added to the list.
Included on the list of the approved renovations is Independence Hall in Tel Aviv.
The committee meeting Tuesday was held at the Ben Tzvi Institute in Jerusalem, home to the wooden cabin used by the second president of the State of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, another site on the list.
“The heritage project is one that we owe ourselves, our children and future generations,” Netanyahu said." (source)
Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in the last decade has added about 1.4 million names to its central database of Shoah victims’ names, bringing the total number of names registered to about 4 million, according to a statement released Tuesday.
“One of Yad Vashem’s central missions since its foundation, the recovery of each and every victim’s name and personal story, has resulted in relentless efforts to restore the names and identities of as many of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices as possible,” said Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev. “We will continue our efforts to recover the unknown names, and by harnessing technology in the service of memory, we are able to share their names with the world.”
In 2004, Yad Vashem launched the central database of Shoah victims’ names onto its website with 3 million names. Names are recovered via Pages of Testimony, special forms filled out in memory of the victims by those who remember them, and by combing archival lists and documentation for names.
Of the 4 million names now known, some 2.2 million come from Pages of Testimony and the remainder from various archival sources and postwar commemoration projects.
Israel Protests Gaza Rockets to U.N.
Israel has filed a complaint in the United Nations over rocket attacks from Gaza.
In a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Security Council President Susan Rice, Meron Reuben, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, called on the body to “send a clear and resolute message that these attacks are unacceptable.”
The letter, dated Tuesday, was sent several hours after a rocket fired from Gaza landed several yards from a kindergarten in session in a western Negev kibbutz, wounding a 14-year-old girl on her way to school. Israel responded to the attack later in the day with an airstrike on what it called a Hamas terror center in Gaza.
At least 13 rockets from Gaza have been fired on southern Israel since Sunday.
“The incidents of the past several days are part of an escalation of terrorist attacks emanating from Gaza that target Israeli civilians, towns, and military personnel,” the letter said.
Later it said, “In response to such attacks, Israel has exercised and will continue to exercise its right to self-defense.”
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat on Wednesday told Israel Radio that the Palestinian Authority fears a full-blown Israeli attack on Gaza, saying that “Military solutions such as these won’t accomplish a thing and would only complicate the situation.”
Israeli Panel Approves Heritage Site Renovations
An Israeli government committee approved the $25 million renovation of 16 national heritage projects and sites.
The Ministerial Committee on the National Heritage, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on Tuesday approved the renovation of the sites—among the 150 sites and initiatives included in the “Plan for Renovating and Strengthening National Heritage Sites and Assets” approved in February—at a cost of $25 million. The plan caused some controversy when two West Bank biblical sites, Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs, were added to the list.
Included on the list of the approved renovations is Independence Hall in Tel Aviv.
The committee meeting Tuesday was held at the Ben Tzvi Institute in Jerusalem, home to the wooden cabin used by the second president of the State of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, another site on the list.
“The heritage project is one that we owe ourselves, our children and future generations,” Netanyahu said." (source)
(NEWS) Kissinger: Gassing Jews Would Not Be A US Problem
"'If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern,' then-US sec. of state tells Nixon on 1973 tape.
Henry Kissinger is heard saying the genocide of Soviet Jews would not be an American problem on newly released tapes chronicling President Nixon’s obsession with disparaging Jews and other minorities.
Kissinger’s remarks come after a meeting between the two men and former prime minister Golda Meir on March 1, 1973, in which Meir pleads for US pressure on the Soviet Union to release its Jews."
Henry Kissinger is heard saying the genocide of Soviet Jews would not be an American problem on newly released tapes chronicling President Nixon’s obsession with disparaging Jews and other minorities.
Kissinger’s remarks come after a meeting between the two men and former prime minister Golda Meir on March 1, 1973, in which Meir pleads for US pressure on the Soviet Union to release its Jews."
(NEWS) Holocaust-Denying Bishop Threatened With Expulsion
"Bishop Richard Williamson hired a lawyer linked to neo-Nazis, claimed Jews were not gassed during World War II.
A Catholic bishop who denied the Holocaust is facing expulsion from his traditionalist order for hiring a lawyer linked to the neo-Nazi movement.
The Society of St. Pius X said it ordered Bishop Richard Williamson to fire the lawyer, who was to represent him in an appeal next week of a German incitement conviction for saying in a TV interview that he didn't believe Jews were gassed during World War II."
Related Article:
A Catholic bishop who denied the Holocaust is facing expulsion from his traditionalist order for hiring a lawyer linked to the neo-Nazi movement.
The Society of St. Pius X said it ordered Bishop Richard Williamson to fire the lawyer, who was to represent him in an appeal next week of a German incitement conviction for saying in a TV interview that he didn't believe Jews were gassed during World War II."
Related Article:
(NEWS) Third Most-Wanted Nazi Suspect Dies Before Trial
"It's 'incredibly frustrating' that Samuel Kunz died before trial, says Wiesenthal Center's Efraim Zuroff.
A court in Germany says the world's third most-wanted Nazi suspect has died before he could be brought to trial.
Bonn's state court said in a statement Monday that 89-year-old Samuel Kunz died November 18."
A court in Germany says the world's third most-wanted Nazi suspect has died before he could be brought to trial.
Bonn's state court said in a statement Monday that 89-year-old Samuel Kunz died November 18."
(NEWS) In The Name Of The Mother: Ashes Go To Treblinka Holocaust Camp
"It was Lucy Werber's final wish: To have her ashes taken to Poland and sprinkled at the death camp that killed her family.
Alex Werber calmly strode toward a patch of black stones, pulled up his sleeves and opened a plastic bag to dump out its contents.
'Goodbye, mom,' he said, scattering her ashes at the former site of the Treblinka death camp in Poland, where the Nazis murdered 875,000 Jews during World War II."
Alex Werber calmly strode toward a patch of black stones, pulled up his sleeves and opened a plastic bag to dump out its contents.
'Goodbye, mom,' he said, scattering her ashes at the former site of the Treblinka death camp in Poland, where the Nazis murdered 875,000 Jews during World War II."
(NEWS) Son Of Holocaust Survivors Has Bar Mitzvah At 62
"Rabbi Shmuel Reich, of the Chabad Jewish enrichment Center in Clearwater Fl. recently made a Bar Mitzvah to a Jew who lost 8 brothers and sisters in the holocaust, and never had a Bar Mitzvah.
For over a year and half Rabbi Reich has been going to the flea markets every Sunday to find local Jews who cannot be found anywhere else. In Florida flea markets are very popular due to the warm weather. During this time he has made over 25 Bar mitzvah`s at the local Flea Markets.
In this case, he drove 30 minutes to a small local flea market for the purpose of finding Jews, but after an hour and a half of searching, he could not find any. Just as he was about to leave, someone tapped him on his shoulder and said 'shalom Aleichem Reb yid, ir redt idish?' His name was Morris S. (Moshe ben Chaim), he was born in 1948 in a 'Displaced Persons' camp in Germany, to his parents, only 3 years after the Holocaust. His parents lost 8 out of 10 of their children in the concentration camps. The 2 oldest sons survived the camps; they were 13 and 14 years old in 1945, and all of the 8 younger kids were killed. His parents were born in Poland and Austria, but moved to Hamburg, Germany in the early 30`s for business.
After spending 3 years in the 'D.P.' camps, they moved with their 3 sons to New Jersey, however they were too heartbroken to ever get involved in the Jewish community, therefore Morris never had a Bar Mitzvah at all. In their home they only spoke Yiddish, thus Morris is fluent in Yiddish till today. He was drafted to the Vietnam war, and he insisted on going to the Marines. He recounted how he had a whole argument with his parents – all in Yiddish – whether or not he should go to the marines; his parents said no, he said yes.
He was injured in combat, and so he became a disabled vet. Therefore he sells at the local Flea Market to generate some extra cash. His ex-wife wasn’t Jewish, though he called his son David Noson, and his daughter Malka Sheina on the name of his older brother and only sister who were killed in the camps. May they all return with Techiyas Hameisim NOW!" (source)
For over a year and half Rabbi Reich has been going to the flea markets every Sunday to find local Jews who cannot be found anywhere else. In Florida flea markets are very popular due to the warm weather. During this time he has made over 25 Bar mitzvah`s at the local Flea Markets.
After spending 3 years in the 'D.P.' camps, they moved with their 3 sons to New Jersey, however they were too heartbroken to ever get involved in the Jewish community, therefore Morris never had a Bar Mitzvah at all. In their home they only spoke Yiddish, thus Morris is fluent in Yiddish till today. He was drafted to the Vietnam war, and he insisted on going to the Marines. He recounted how he had a whole argument with his parents – all in Yiddish – whether or not he should go to the marines; his parents said no, he said yes.
He was injured in combat, and so he became a disabled vet. Therefore he sells at the local Flea Market to generate some extra cash. His ex-wife wasn’t Jewish, though he called his son David Noson, and his daughter Malka Sheina on the name of his older brother and only sister who were killed in the camps. May they all return with Techiyas Hameisim NOW!" (source)
(NEWS) Malvina Burstein, 97, Helped Save 1,500 Fellow Jews During WWII
"Malvina Burstein, 97, who helped obtain identification papers that she hoped would save 1,500 fellow Jews in Budapest during World War II, died Oct. 18 at the Ring House retirement community in Rockville. She had dysphagia, a swallowing disorder.
Mrs. Burstein's home town of Trebisov, Czechoslovakia, fell under Nazi occupation early in the war. After closing her millinery shop and hiding for a year in a basement, Malvin Grunfeld, as she was then known, fled to Budapest in 1942 and hid under a false identity.
'A Jew could exist in Hungary at that time,' she told The Washington Post in 1981. 'I had illegal papers and no visa, but I got along. You had to keep well-dressed, look clean and neat, with nail polish and everything.'
She said that every day she saw Jews being beaten and knocked to the pavement. Bodies were strewn in the street.
Knowing it was dangerous, she yearned for company and met other Jews weekly at a local park. She said one man in the group came up with the idea to protect other Jews in hiding by phoning the Hungarian national printing office for 500 identification cards that would allow the Jews to pass as gentile.
The man called the printing office claiming to be a factory owner in need of work papers and Mrs. Burstein pretended to be the assistant going to pick them up.
In The Post interview, she said no one questioned her. She said she made two more trips, obtaining 1,000 more cards, and gave them to others to distribute.
After the war, she found no one she knew back in Trebisov. She managed to find her way to New York, where a brother had been living for years.
She moved to the Washington region in 1951 and not long after met her future husband, Max Burstein. He died in 1988 after 36 years of marriage. Survivors include two daughters and three grandchildren.
She was a longtime Silver Spring resident. Her memberships included the old Temple Israel in Silver Spring, Hadassah and the National Council of Jewish Women.
In 1981, with the help of the American Jewish Congress, Mrs. Burstein and her family flew to Israel hoping to find some of the 1,500 Jews she tried to save in Hungary.
'My friends say most of those people, the 1,500, got out of Hungary and came to Israel,' she told The Post. 'I didn't see them when I was there, but you can imagine how I felt to know that they are alive.'" (source)
Mrs. Burstein's home town of Trebisov, Czechoslovakia, fell under Nazi occupation early in the war. After closing her millinery shop and hiding for a year in a basement, Malvin Grunfeld, as she was then known, fled to Budapest in 1942 and hid under a false identity.
'A Jew could exist in Hungary at that time,' she told The Washington Post in 1981. 'I had illegal papers and no visa, but I got along. You had to keep well-dressed, look clean and neat, with nail polish and everything.'
She said that every day she saw Jews being beaten and knocked to the pavement. Bodies were strewn in the street.
Knowing it was dangerous, she yearned for company and met other Jews weekly at a local park. She said one man in the group came up with the idea to protect other Jews in hiding by phoning the Hungarian national printing office for 500 identification cards that would allow the Jews to pass as gentile.
The man called the printing office claiming to be a factory owner in need of work papers and Mrs. Burstein pretended to be the assistant going to pick them up.
In The Post interview, she said no one questioned her. She said she made two more trips, obtaining 1,000 more cards, and gave them to others to distribute.
After the war, she found no one she knew back in Trebisov. She managed to find her way to New York, where a brother had been living for years.
She moved to the Washington region in 1951 and not long after met her future husband, Max Burstein. He died in 1988 after 36 years of marriage. Survivors include two daughters and three grandchildren.
She was a longtime Silver Spring resident. Her memberships included the old Temple Israel in Silver Spring, Hadassah and the National Council of Jewish Women.
In 1981, with the help of the American Jewish Congress, Mrs. Burstein and her family flew to Israel hoping to find some of the 1,500 Jews she tried to save in Hungary.
'My friends say most of those people, the 1,500, got out of Hungary and came to Israel,' she told The Post. 'I didn't see them when I was there, but you can imagine how I felt to know that they are alive.'" (source)
(NEWS) Survey: 23% Of Israelis Forgive Germany For Holocaust
"70% of Israelis do not forgive, 7% unsure; Center for Academic Studies notes that the older the respondents, the more they agreed to forgive.
Just under a quarter of Israelis forgive Germany for Nazi crimes, according to a new survey released Sunday by the Center for Academic Studies.
The Center examines the extent of Israeli society's forgiveness toward past events."
Just under a quarter of Israelis forgive Germany for Nazi crimes, according to a new survey released Sunday by the Center for Academic Studies.
The Center examines the extent of Israeli society's forgiveness toward past events."
(BLOG) Holocaust - ‘Let The Jewish People Know We Fought’
"Most Israelis are ignorant of the fact that 1.5 million Jews fought Hitler and Nazism during World War II.
Red Army veteran Shalom Scopas defies his 85 years as he dashes about the mini-museum of World War II memorabilia he has created in the basement of his Holon home. His bright blue eyes sparking with pride, he points out rows of medals, sepia snapshots of himself as a dashing young man in his smart Soviet uniform, and letters of gratitude from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and former president Vladimir Putin.
Scopas is one of half a million Soviet Jews who joined the Red Army to fight against the Nazis. Forty percent of these Jewish recruits died in battle, the highest percentage of all the USSR’s ethnic groups.
Soviet Jews were not the only ones to join the fight against the Nazis. One and a half million Jews from all over the world fought in World War II, including 150,000 women. A quarter million of these Jewish fighters fell in battle.
'Yet most Israelis, especially young people, don’t know that so many Jews stood up and fought Hitler and Nazism,' says Scopas. 'It’s very sad.'
Scopas was born in 1925 in Panevezys, one of the largest centers of Jewish life in Lithuania. The Baltic state was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940 and a year later by the Nazis.
As the German forces approached Panevezys in June 1941, panic gripped the town. Scopas’s mother told him to flee to Russia with his older brother, Hillel.
The 16-year-old managed to hitch a ride out of Panevezys on a Red Army truck, but Hillel didn’t make it.
It was the last time Scopas was to see his family. Four days later, the Nazis entered Panevezys. Lithuanian Nazi collaborators murdered Rochel Leah and sons Hillel, Shimon and Avraham on August 28, 1941.
By 1943, Panevezys’s Jewish community had been obliterated. Scopas reached Russia and in 1942 joined the Red Army.
'I was Jewish. I wanted to fight the Nazis,' he says, switching from Hebrew to Russian as his memories take him back in time. Scopas was assigned to the razvedchiki, specially trained troops who went behind enemy lines to capture what the Russians dubbed yazyki ('tongues') – German soldiers who were pumped for information about enemy plans.
'We were sent out on undercover missions,' Scopas relates. 'One day we went to bring back ‘tongues’ from a German military hospital in the forest. We captured several Germans. One of the captive officers lit a cigarette.
I said in Yiddish: ‘Put it out, the smoke will give away our position. He refused... I killed him on the spot.
'I had to. I still have nightmares. It was terrible. War is awful, a terrible thing.'
On January 12, 1945, Scopas went behind enemy lines for what would be his last retrieval mission.
'When we went out, I carried a medal, ‘For Courage’, in my breast pocket. We attacked a line of Nazis in the forest. In the fighting, we lost three comrades. Then the enemy lobbed a grenade at me from close range. I woke up days later in hospital covered in wounds. The doctor said if it hadn’t been for that medal over my heart, I’d have been a goner for sure.
'A piece of the medal was missing where shrapnel hit it! It saved my life.'
The Red Army’s Jewish soldiers knew nothing about the death camps until the end of the war. 'When we found out, it was terrible. We were in shock. Horrified. We wept and wept,' Scopas remembers.
Scopas made aliya in 1959, fleeing rampant anti- Semitism in the USSR. Despite his many decorations and the honor he has received in Russia and Israel for his wartime bravery, the traumas of war have not left him.
'I am disabled. I still feel trauma, sometimes depression,' he admits. 'War is cruel and terrible.'
Brig.-Gen. (ret.) Zvi Kan-Tor, who over the past decade has pushed forward plans for a dedicated museum to commemorate Jewish fighters like Scopas, describes the extent of the global Jewish contribution to the war as 'enormous.' Jews fought in the ranks of the Allied Forces, in underground movements, as partisans and in the ghettos themselves, in every single battle in Europe, North Africa and the Far East, on land, air and sea.
'THE BIGGEST army that fought against the Nazis was the Jews. No other nation on earth provided so many soldiers,' explains Kan-Tor. Yet the fact that so many Jewish soldiers enlisted to fight against Nazism, or fought as partisans has thus far been overlooked in Israeli and Jewish history.
'In Israel people are not aware of the extent of Jewish heroism in World War II,' stresses Kan-Tor. 'It’s a historical injustice.'
To shed light on this neglected chapter of Jewish history, Kan-Tor and a team of other World War II experts and veterans have revealed plans for a museum dedicated to the subject, The Museum of the Jewish Soldier in World War II.
Why is this museum being created only now, 62 years after the State of Israel was founded? 'There is a deficit in our education,' believes Kan-Tor.
'In the first years of the State of Israel, the country faced tremendous difficulties. The trauma of World War II, then the War of Independence, financial troubles, international pressures. Huge waves of aliya brought Jews from all over the world. At the same time, Israel needed to build a new nation, a new country.'
To do this, Israel needed Israeli heroes, says Kan-Tor.
'We grew up on our own heroes, from the Lehi, the Hagana and the Irgun Zva’i Leumi. It’s painful to say it, but those from poor, old broken Europe were not heroes then,' he continues sadly. 'At that time, even Shoah survivors were not heroes.' This sounds unthinkable to contemporary Israeli ears.
But the young Jewish state was determined to build a strong national identity that would enable it to rise from the ashes of World War II – and fight its own wars.
As the years passed, Israeli Jews were forced to come to terms with the enormity of the Shoah.
'In 1961 came a watershed: the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Everyone heard what happened in that trial, and suddenly, people started to talk,' says Kan-Tor. 'We realized, we understood that Shoah survivors had so much to tell us.'
In 1953, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, was established by government decree. In the 1960s, a permanent museum to honor and remember the six million who perished was created in Jerusalem.
With the 1980s came another turning point: the fall of the Iron Curtain opened up Eastern Europe to outside visitors.
'Now we could visit Poland,' says Kan-Tor. 'We saw the camps. We knew those who we thought victims were really heroes.'
THE DISINTEGRATION of the USSR in 1989 opened the gates for hundreds of thousands of Jews from former Soviet countries to make aliya. Now Israelis saw another side to the events of World War II.
'We saw Russian olim wearing medals,' remembers Kan-Tor. 'They brought with them new customs like Veterans’ Days. We heard Russians talking about the Great Patriotic War. Here were Jews who fought against the Nazis.'
The Jewish soldiers had a unique role in the war, says Dr. Tamar Ketko, a World War II expert and curator of the new museum. 'They had a double identity. They were recruited as Soviet, American or British soldiers but they also fought as Jews.'
As more became known about the extent of the Jewish contribution in World War II, ideas started to germinate about commemorating the Jewish fighters. Like all ideas, it started out small – a single room at the Armored Corps Memorial in Latrun.
To properly commemorate the incredible history of Jewish heroism in World War II, a 2,000-square-meter site has been earmarked for a dedicated museum at the Armored Corps Memorial.
Led by Kan-Tor, the museum project is supported by Dr. Tamar Ketko, architects Zalman Enav and Haim Dotan, and museum designers from the Orpan Group.
Separate wings are planned for each of the armies in which Jews fought, plus the partisans and ghetto fighters.
Through maps, movies, photos, displays of uniforms and medals, and most importantly via the personal stories of individual fighters, Kan-Tor hopes visitors will be able to glimpse the amazing courage of the one and a half million Jews who helped defeat Nazism.
Kan-Tor says the Museum of the Jewish Soldier in World War II has received government backing.
Ariel Sharon’s government initially agreed to the museum in 2002. More recently, the cause has been championed by Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of Israel Beiteinu and now foreign minister, who insisted on funding for the museum being a condition of the coalition agreement he signed with former prime minister Ehud Olmert in 2006.
However, while the government has agreed to provide up to $16 million in matched funds, it has still to issue a building permit to construct the museum at Latrun, Kan-Tor says. The delay is because the land earmarked for the museum is on the border of Judea and Samaria, disputed West Bank territory. The building permit is being coordinated via the Ministry of Defense Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) and the Israeli Civil Administration, the governing body operating in Judea and Samaria.
'The Armored Corps Memorial is currently in the process of regulating the contracts required to build the museum in conjunction with the Israeli Civil Administration,' said a COGAT spokesperson in a statement in response to a query by Metro.
'Upon completion of the contractual agreement, the conditions for issuing building permits will be negotiated in accordance with the criteria established by the Israeli Civil Administration’s planning office.'
REGARDLESS OF this delay, the museum has received widespread support from Jewish World War II veterans in Israel. Among those championing it is Dr. Yitzhak Arad, the former director-general of Yad Vashem and an internationally renowned World War II historian.
A teenager during the war, Arad joined the fight against the Nazis as a partisan in the forests of Lithuania.
Born Yitzhak Rudnicki on November 11, 1926, in Swieciany, Lithuania, Arad moved to Warsaw as a child with his family. The Rudnickis were ardent Zionists.
When World War II broke out in 1939, Arad was just 13.
'I celebrated my bar mitzva under German occupation,' he remembers. 'In December 1939, my 15-yearold sister Rachel and I returned to Swieciany. Our parents did not make it. They were both killed.'
Swieciany’s 3,000 Jews comprised just over half the town’s population. During 1940, Lithuania’s Jewish population swelled to 250,000 as refugees fled Nazioccupied Poland. But the Baltic country was not the safe haven many hoped to find. In June 1941, Nazi forces occupied Lithuania and the mass murder of Jews began.
'At the end of September 1941, the Nazis rounded up Jews and forced them into a remote military barracks,' relates Arad.
The night before, continues Arad, he and a small group of Jewish teens – including his sister Rachel – escaped to Belarus. That decision saved their lives. On October 9, 1941, a total of 3,726 Jews – 1,169 men, 1,840 women, and 717 children – were murdered in the Poligon barracks near Swieciany. With shocking coldness, these numbers are precisely recorded in an official Nazi document.
'If I hadn’t escaped, that list would have read 1,170 men,' adds Arad.
Refuge in Belarus was short-lived; when the Nazis started killing Jews there too, Arad returned to Swieciany and lived in the ghetto.
'I and around 10 others were rounded up and taken out of the ghetto,' says Arad. 'I thought we were going to be shot because we didn’t have [ghetto] registration papers, but they took us to a weapons store. They made us clean the weapons.
'When the German officer showing us round went outside to smoke, I shoved a rifle down my sweater. I’d had an idea of creating a partisan group and freeing the Jews. I had to work all day with that gun – I didn’t know if I would be searched and caught. But when they took us back to the ghetto that night, I managed to get through without being detected.'
The boys’ daring theft of weapons from under the noses of the Nazis continued.
'We stole many weapons,' says Arad with pride. 'In 1943, we escaped from the ghetto to the forest. We were 22 boys and three or four girls.' Arad’s teenage sister Rachel also became a partisan fighter.
Partisan life in the forest was harsh. 'The partisans could not have survived without the help of the local people,' Arad acknowledges. 'To live, we had to take food from local villages. It was very tough. This was a war of life and death, of our survival or theirs. We eventually met up with some Soviet partisans. They weren’t Jewish, but we joined with them.'
Arad, nicknamed 'Tolka' by his fellow partisans, carried out daring resistance activities from their forest hideout.
'The Germans were building a railway to reach Leningrad. We put explosives on the line to blow it up. We worked in winter when it was terribly cold. I myself blew up 16 Nazi echelons,' describes Arad.
'In the summer of 1944, we met up with troops from the Red Army and I fought with them until the end of the war.'
When the war ended, Arad decided there was only one place for him to go.
'All my life I wanted to go to Israel,' he says. 'At the end of the war, I escaped and went to Poland. From there, via the Bricha [illegal Jewish immigrant movement] I reached Bratislava, then Austria and Italy. I arrived in Israel on the small boat Hanna Szenes on Christmas night, 1945. I immediately joined the Palmah against the British and fought in the War of Independence.'
Arad’s career in the IDF was stratospheric. He reached the rank of brigadier-general, and was appointed chief education officer. In 1972, he retired from the army, but his working life and contribution to the Jewish people were far from over.
'I became director-general of Yad Vashem in 1972 because I felt an obligation to dedicate the second half of my life to those murdered in the Shoah,' he says.
Since his retirement from Yad Vashem, Arad has concentrated on his academic career and published widely on the Shoah and World War II. His 2009 book The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, won the National Jewish Book Award. His latest tome, Under the Shadow of the Red Banner, is a history of the half-million Soviet Jews who fought in the Red Army.
Arad stresses the importance of the Museum of the Jewish Soldier in commemorating and teaching about the Jewish people’s role in defeating Nazism.
'When we talk about the Shoah, there has been an emphasis on the six million victims,' he explains. 'I feel it is very important to teach children that the Jewish people also have a share in the victory against Nazism.'
Although it has yet to receive a government permit to build at Latrun, the association has launched a campaign to raise funds for the museum.
According to Alan Gold, who is leading fund-raising efforts on behalf of the association, the campaign’s goal is the $16 million required to construct the museum.
A fund-raising and PR expert originally from the UK, Gold is concentrating initial fund-raising and awareness- raising efforts in English-speaking countries and among Israel’s Anglo community.
'I believe people will want to donate to a museum commemorating the 1.5 million Jews who fought against Nazism,' says Gold.
'Also, we are appealing for people to give testimonies about family members and friends who fought in the war.'
The museum is not for Israel alone, adds Gold. 'It’s about the unity of the Jewish people,' he believes.
At home in Holon, Shalom Scopas has created a memorial for his beloved mother Rochel Leah and three brothers murdered in the Shoah. On this warm October morning, sunlight floods through the window, illuminating a photograph of this beautiful Jewish woman and devoted mother.
'I live with them here. Every day,' says Scopas quietly.
'And now I’m giving my story [to the museum] so that generations to come will know the Jewish people stood up and fought the Nazis.'
To find out more about how you can help with fund-raising for the Museum of the Jewish Soldier in World War II, contact Alan Gold at +972-8-922-4764 or at veteran@jwmww2.com If you, a relative or friend fought against Nazism in World War II, please visit www.jwmww2.org and enter the details on the museum’s database." (source)
Red Army veteran Shalom Scopas defies his 85 years as he dashes about the mini-museum of World War II memorabilia he has created in the basement of his Holon home. His bright blue eyes sparking with pride, he points out rows of medals, sepia snapshots of himself as a dashing young man in his smart Soviet uniform, and letters of gratitude from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and former president Vladimir Putin.
Scopas is one of half a million Soviet Jews who joined the Red Army to fight against the Nazis. Forty percent of these Jewish recruits died in battle, the highest percentage of all the USSR’s ethnic groups.
Soviet Jews were not the only ones to join the fight against the Nazis. One and a half million Jews from all over the world fought in World War II, including 150,000 women. A quarter million of these Jewish fighters fell in battle.
'Yet most Israelis, especially young people, don’t know that so many Jews stood up and fought Hitler and Nazism,' says Scopas. 'It’s very sad.'
Scopas was born in 1925 in Panevezys, one of the largest centers of Jewish life in Lithuania. The Baltic state was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940 and a year later by the Nazis.
As the German forces approached Panevezys in June 1941, panic gripped the town. Scopas’s mother told him to flee to Russia with his older brother, Hillel.
The 16-year-old managed to hitch a ride out of Panevezys on a Red Army truck, but Hillel didn’t make it.
It was the last time Scopas was to see his family. Four days later, the Nazis entered Panevezys. Lithuanian Nazi collaborators murdered Rochel Leah and sons Hillel, Shimon and Avraham on August 28, 1941.
By 1943, Panevezys’s Jewish community had been obliterated. Scopas reached Russia and in 1942 joined the Red Army.
'I was Jewish. I wanted to fight the Nazis,' he says, switching from Hebrew to Russian as his memories take him back in time. Scopas was assigned to the razvedchiki, specially trained troops who went behind enemy lines to capture what the Russians dubbed yazyki ('tongues') – German soldiers who were pumped for information about enemy plans.
'We were sent out on undercover missions,' Scopas relates. 'One day we went to bring back ‘tongues’ from a German military hospital in the forest. We captured several Germans. One of the captive officers lit a cigarette.
I said in Yiddish: ‘Put it out, the smoke will give away our position. He refused... I killed him on the spot.
'I had to. I still have nightmares. It was terrible. War is awful, a terrible thing.'
On January 12, 1945, Scopas went behind enemy lines for what would be his last retrieval mission.
'When we went out, I carried a medal, ‘For Courage’, in my breast pocket. We attacked a line of Nazis in the forest. In the fighting, we lost three comrades. Then the enemy lobbed a grenade at me from close range. I woke up days later in hospital covered in wounds. The doctor said if it hadn’t been for that medal over my heart, I’d have been a goner for sure.
'A piece of the medal was missing where shrapnel hit it! It saved my life.'
The Red Army’s Jewish soldiers knew nothing about the death camps until the end of the war. 'When we found out, it was terrible. We were in shock. Horrified. We wept and wept,' Scopas remembers.
Scopas made aliya in 1959, fleeing rampant anti- Semitism in the USSR. Despite his many decorations and the honor he has received in Russia and Israel for his wartime bravery, the traumas of war have not left him.
'I am disabled. I still feel trauma, sometimes depression,' he admits. 'War is cruel and terrible.'
Brig.-Gen. (ret.) Zvi Kan-Tor, who over the past decade has pushed forward plans for a dedicated museum to commemorate Jewish fighters like Scopas, describes the extent of the global Jewish contribution to the war as 'enormous.' Jews fought in the ranks of the Allied Forces, in underground movements, as partisans and in the ghettos themselves, in every single battle in Europe, North Africa and the Far East, on land, air and sea.
'THE BIGGEST army that fought against the Nazis was the Jews. No other nation on earth provided so many soldiers,' explains Kan-Tor. Yet the fact that so many Jewish soldiers enlisted to fight against Nazism, or fought as partisans has thus far been overlooked in Israeli and Jewish history.
'In Israel people are not aware of the extent of Jewish heroism in World War II,' stresses Kan-Tor. 'It’s a historical injustice.'
To shed light on this neglected chapter of Jewish history, Kan-Tor and a team of other World War II experts and veterans have revealed plans for a museum dedicated to the subject, The Museum of the Jewish Soldier in World War II.
Why is this museum being created only now, 62 years after the State of Israel was founded? 'There is a deficit in our education,' believes Kan-Tor.
'In the first years of the State of Israel, the country faced tremendous difficulties. The trauma of World War II, then the War of Independence, financial troubles, international pressures. Huge waves of aliya brought Jews from all over the world. At the same time, Israel needed to build a new nation, a new country.'
To do this, Israel needed Israeli heroes, says Kan-Tor.
'We grew up on our own heroes, from the Lehi, the Hagana and the Irgun Zva’i Leumi. It’s painful to say it, but those from poor, old broken Europe were not heroes then,' he continues sadly. 'At that time, even Shoah survivors were not heroes.' This sounds unthinkable to contemporary Israeli ears.
But the young Jewish state was determined to build a strong national identity that would enable it to rise from the ashes of World War II – and fight its own wars.
As the years passed, Israeli Jews were forced to come to terms with the enormity of the Shoah.
'In 1961 came a watershed: the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Everyone heard what happened in that trial, and suddenly, people started to talk,' says Kan-Tor. 'We realized, we understood that Shoah survivors had so much to tell us.'
In 1953, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, was established by government decree. In the 1960s, a permanent museum to honor and remember the six million who perished was created in Jerusalem.
With the 1980s came another turning point: the fall of the Iron Curtain opened up Eastern Europe to outside visitors.
'Now we could visit Poland,' says Kan-Tor. 'We saw the camps. We knew those who we thought victims were really heroes.'
THE DISINTEGRATION of the USSR in 1989 opened the gates for hundreds of thousands of Jews from former Soviet countries to make aliya. Now Israelis saw another side to the events of World War II.
'We saw Russian olim wearing medals,' remembers Kan-Tor. 'They brought with them new customs like Veterans’ Days. We heard Russians talking about the Great Patriotic War. Here were Jews who fought against the Nazis.'
The Jewish soldiers had a unique role in the war, says Dr. Tamar Ketko, a World War II expert and curator of the new museum. 'They had a double identity. They were recruited as Soviet, American or British soldiers but they also fought as Jews.'
As more became known about the extent of the Jewish contribution in World War II, ideas started to germinate about commemorating the Jewish fighters. Like all ideas, it started out small – a single room at the Armored Corps Memorial in Latrun.
To properly commemorate the incredible history of Jewish heroism in World War II, a 2,000-square-meter site has been earmarked for a dedicated museum at the Armored Corps Memorial.
Led by Kan-Tor, the museum project is supported by Dr. Tamar Ketko, architects Zalman Enav and Haim Dotan, and museum designers from the Orpan Group.
Separate wings are planned for each of the armies in which Jews fought, plus the partisans and ghetto fighters.
Through maps, movies, photos, displays of uniforms and medals, and most importantly via the personal stories of individual fighters, Kan-Tor hopes visitors will be able to glimpse the amazing courage of the one and a half million Jews who helped defeat Nazism.
Kan-Tor says the Museum of the Jewish Soldier in World War II has received government backing.
Ariel Sharon’s government initially agreed to the museum in 2002. More recently, the cause has been championed by Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of Israel Beiteinu and now foreign minister, who insisted on funding for the museum being a condition of the coalition agreement he signed with former prime minister Ehud Olmert in 2006.
However, while the government has agreed to provide up to $16 million in matched funds, it has still to issue a building permit to construct the museum at Latrun, Kan-Tor says. The delay is because the land earmarked for the museum is on the border of Judea and Samaria, disputed West Bank territory. The building permit is being coordinated via the Ministry of Defense Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) and the Israeli Civil Administration, the governing body operating in Judea and Samaria.
'The Armored Corps Memorial is currently in the process of regulating the contracts required to build the museum in conjunction with the Israeli Civil Administration,' said a COGAT spokesperson in a statement in response to a query by Metro.
'Upon completion of the contractual agreement, the conditions for issuing building permits will be negotiated in accordance with the criteria established by the Israeli Civil Administration’s planning office.'
REGARDLESS OF this delay, the museum has received widespread support from Jewish World War II veterans in Israel. Among those championing it is Dr. Yitzhak Arad, the former director-general of Yad Vashem and an internationally renowned World War II historian.
A teenager during the war, Arad joined the fight against the Nazis as a partisan in the forests of Lithuania.
Born Yitzhak Rudnicki on November 11, 1926, in Swieciany, Lithuania, Arad moved to Warsaw as a child with his family. The Rudnickis were ardent Zionists.
When World War II broke out in 1939, Arad was just 13.
'I celebrated my bar mitzva under German occupation,' he remembers. 'In December 1939, my 15-yearold sister Rachel and I returned to Swieciany. Our parents did not make it. They were both killed.'
Swieciany’s 3,000 Jews comprised just over half the town’s population. During 1940, Lithuania’s Jewish population swelled to 250,000 as refugees fled Nazioccupied Poland. But the Baltic country was not the safe haven many hoped to find. In June 1941, Nazi forces occupied Lithuania and the mass murder of Jews began.
'At the end of September 1941, the Nazis rounded up Jews and forced them into a remote military barracks,' relates Arad.
The night before, continues Arad, he and a small group of Jewish teens – including his sister Rachel – escaped to Belarus. That decision saved their lives. On October 9, 1941, a total of 3,726 Jews – 1,169 men, 1,840 women, and 717 children – were murdered in the Poligon barracks near Swieciany. With shocking coldness, these numbers are precisely recorded in an official Nazi document.
'If I hadn’t escaped, that list would have read 1,170 men,' adds Arad.
Refuge in Belarus was short-lived; when the Nazis started killing Jews there too, Arad returned to Swieciany and lived in the ghetto.
'I and around 10 others were rounded up and taken out of the ghetto,' says Arad. 'I thought we were going to be shot because we didn’t have [ghetto] registration papers, but they took us to a weapons store. They made us clean the weapons.
'When the German officer showing us round went outside to smoke, I shoved a rifle down my sweater. I’d had an idea of creating a partisan group and freeing the Jews. I had to work all day with that gun – I didn’t know if I would be searched and caught. But when they took us back to the ghetto that night, I managed to get through without being detected.'
The boys’ daring theft of weapons from under the noses of the Nazis continued.
'We stole many weapons,' says Arad with pride. 'In 1943, we escaped from the ghetto to the forest. We were 22 boys and three or four girls.' Arad’s teenage sister Rachel also became a partisan fighter.
Partisan life in the forest was harsh. 'The partisans could not have survived without the help of the local people,' Arad acknowledges. 'To live, we had to take food from local villages. It was very tough. This was a war of life and death, of our survival or theirs. We eventually met up with some Soviet partisans. They weren’t Jewish, but we joined with them.'
Arad, nicknamed 'Tolka' by his fellow partisans, carried out daring resistance activities from their forest hideout.
'The Germans were building a railway to reach Leningrad. We put explosives on the line to blow it up. We worked in winter when it was terribly cold. I myself blew up 16 Nazi echelons,' describes Arad.
'In the summer of 1944, we met up with troops from the Red Army and I fought with them until the end of the war.'
When the war ended, Arad decided there was only one place for him to go.
'All my life I wanted to go to Israel,' he says. 'At the end of the war, I escaped and went to Poland. From there, via the Bricha [illegal Jewish immigrant movement] I reached Bratislava, then Austria and Italy. I arrived in Israel on the small boat Hanna Szenes on Christmas night, 1945. I immediately joined the Palmah against the British and fought in the War of Independence.'
Arad’s career in the IDF was stratospheric. He reached the rank of brigadier-general, and was appointed chief education officer. In 1972, he retired from the army, but his working life and contribution to the Jewish people were far from over.
'I became director-general of Yad Vashem in 1972 because I felt an obligation to dedicate the second half of my life to those murdered in the Shoah,' he says.
Since his retirement from Yad Vashem, Arad has concentrated on his academic career and published widely on the Shoah and World War II. His 2009 book The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, won the National Jewish Book Award. His latest tome, Under the Shadow of the Red Banner, is a history of the half-million Soviet Jews who fought in the Red Army.
Arad stresses the importance of the Museum of the Jewish Soldier in commemorating and teaching about the Jewish people’s role in defeating Nazism.
'When we talk about the Shoah, there has been an emphasis on the six million victims,' he explains. 'I feel it is very important to teach children that the Jewish people also have a share in the victory against Nazism.'
Although it has yet to receive a government permit to build at Latrun, the association has launched a campaign to raise funds for the museum.
According to Alan Gold, who is leading fund-raising efforts on behalf of the association, the campaign’s goal is the $16 million required to construct the museum.
A fund-raising and PR expert originally from the UK, Gold is concentrating initial fund-raising and awareness- raising efforts in English-speaking countries and among Israel’s Anglo community.
'I believe people will want to donate to a museum commemorating the 1.5 million Jews who fought against Nazism,' says Gold.
'Also, we are appealing for people to give testimonies about family members and friends who fought in the war.'
The museum is not for Israel alone, adds Gold. 'It’s about the unity of the Jewish people,' he believes.
At home in Holon, Shalom Scopas has created a memorial for his beloved mother Rochel Leah and three brothers murdered in the Shoah. On this warm October morning, sunlight floods through the window, illuminating a photograph of this beautiful Jewish woman and devoted mother.
'I live with them here. Every day,' says Scopas quietly.
'And now I’m giving my story [to the museum] so that generations to come will know the Jewish people stood up and fought the Nazis.'
To find out more about how you can help with fund-raising for the Museum of the Jewish Soldier in World War II, contact Alan Gold at +972-8-922-4764 or at veteran@jwmww2.com If you, a relative or friend fought against Nazism in World War II, please visit www.jwmww2.org and enter the details on the museum’s database." (source)
(NEWS) Holocaust-Denying Bishop Hires Neo-Nazi Lawyer Ahead Of Germany Trial
"Richard Williamson, planned to stand trial over questioning the scope of the Holocaust, hires member of far-right NPD part after previous lawyer pulled out the case.
British Bishop Richard Williamson has appointed a radical right-wing lawyer to defend him in a German trial over his denial of scope of the Holocaust, Spiegel news magazine reported Saturday.
The lawyer, Wolfram Nahrath, is a member of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), the magazine wrote. He also led the Viking Youth, a neo-Nazi organization modeled on the Hitler Youth, until it was banned in 1994."
Related Article:
British Bishop Richard Williamson has appointed a radical right-wing lawyer to defend him in a German trial over his denial of scope of the Holocaust, Spiegel news magazine reported Saturday.
The lawyer, Wolfram Nahrath, is a member of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), the magazine wrote. He also led the Viking Youth, a neo-Nazi organization modeled on the Hitler Youth, until it was banned in 1994."
Related Article:
(NEWS) Kristallnacht Memorial Stolen
"Thieves made off with a 750 kilogram Kristallnacht monument from the Jewish cemetery in Cologne.
The theft occurred Sunday night, Ha'aretz reported on Friday, and the local Jewish community is offering a 4,000 Euro reward for information leading to its retrieval.
The monument, representing religious objects rescued during the night of Nazi-spurred violence and looting in 1938, stood about nine feet high.
The theft took place days after commemorations of Kristallnacht, or the night of broken glass -- named for the Jewish shops that were destroyed during the attacks." (source)
The theft occurred Sunday night, Ha'aretz reported on Friday, and the local Jewish community is offering a 4,000 Euro reward for information leading to its retrieval.
The monument, representing religious objects rescued during the night of Nazi-spurred violence and looting in 1938, stood about nine feet high.
The theft took place days after commemorations of Kristallnacht, or the night of broken glass -- named for the Jewish shops that were destroyed during the attacks." (source)
(NEWS) Gerda Weissman Klein, Holocaust Survivor, Receives Freedom Medal
"A Holocaust survivor who teaches children the value of citizenship is among those who will be honored by President Obama with a Medal of Freedom.
Gerda Weissman Klein, who survived the notorious death march at the end of the war designed by Nazis to keep Jews from being rescued, recently founded Citizenship Counts, 'an organization that teaches students to cherish the value of their American citizenship,' the White House said in a statement Wednesday. 'Klein has spoken to audiences of all ages and faith around the world about the value of freedom and has dedicated her life to promoting tolerance and understanding among all people,' the statement said."
Gerda Weissman Klein, who survived the notorious death march at the end of the war designed by Nazis to keep Jews from being rescued, recently founded Citizenship Counts, 'an organization that teaches students to cherish the value of their American citizenship,' the White House said in a statement Wednesday. 'Klein has spoken to audiences of all ages and faith around the world about the value of freedom and has dedicated her life to promoting tolerance and understanding among all people,' the statement said."
(NEWS) French Rail Co. Apologizes For Collaborating With Nazis
"'SNCF was part of Nazi plan – it carried the trains of deportees to the French border with Germany,' chairman tells Jewish community leaders in US.
The head of state-owned French railway company SNCF made an unprecedented show of regret on Sunday for the company’s responsibility in sending some 76,000 Jews in France to Nazi death camps.
The apology came as part of a bid to assuage American and Jewish community reticence about working with a company that notoriously collaborated with Nazi
occupiers."
The head of state-owned French railway company SNCF made an unprecedented show of regret on Sunday for the company’s responsibility in sending some 76,000 Jews in France to Nazi death camps.
The apology came as part of a bid to assuage American and Jewish community reticence about working with a company that notoriously collaborated with Nazi
occupiers."
(NEWS) Holocaust Survivor Shares Her Story With Norwood Students
Video below: "Picking three students and asking them to stand, Marika Barnett said matter-of-factly, 'If this classroom represented the Jewish children of Nazi-occupied Europe, then these four of us,' gesturing to herself and the teens, 'stayed alive. The rest of you are dead. In Hungary it was even worse.'
Barnett, 76, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, shared pieces of her story on Thursday, Oct. 28, to students at Norwood’s South Area Solomon Schechter Day School and visiting teens from the German International School in Boston.
The Day of Learning focused on Swedish diplomat and businessman Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews during World War II, including Barnett’s parents.
Walking among the students, Barnett, a Stow resident, described the harrowing 10 months she spent in and out of hiding when she was 10 years old, after the Germans occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. Before that, her family lived in Budapest as second-class citizens, were denied their civil rights and discriminated against, but the mass deportation and extermination of the Jews had not yet begun there.
Barnett said on March 19, 1944, her parents’ 'only goal was to save my life.'
The students listened as Barnett vividly described her wartime childhood.
'Immediately (my parents) looked for a Christian family' with whom to hide her, she said. She recalled how her parents had always told her to tell the truth but, she said, 'now I had to lie about everything.'
Eventually, the Christian family felt it was too dangerous to hide her, kept her parents’ money, and she returned to her family.
Her tale twisted between rising hopes and constant fear.
Barnett said although her mother and father came from Orthodox backgrounds, she, her mother and two aunts decided to study to become Catholics in order to save their lives.
Part of the crowd gasped as Barnett told them the day decreed for their Baptism was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, one of the Jewish High Holy Days. Some of the German school students that were in the audience were unfamiliar with the holiday, so Barnett explained its importance and why it was too difficult to make such a fundamental change on such an important day.
'So we learned all that for nothing,' she said, adding she didn’t understand why the Catholic hierarchy had decided to choose that day of all days to convert them 'in such a humiliating way.'
Most of the Hungarian Jews ended up in the Auschwitz concentration camp. By May 14, 1944, all of her parents’ relatives were already on the trains heading to their deaths, she said.
Barnett took a deep breath as she paced near the podium, describing the way Jews were segregated at the camps: If you were too old, too young, a mother with a baby, disabled, etc., you went straight to the gas chamber.
'Almost immediately, almost 100 percent (of my family) were directed to the gas chamber,' she said, her voice straining.
At that time, Barnett said, all the convents in Hungary were hiding Jewish children.
On Oct. 12, 1944, in another desperate act to save her life, her parents put her into a convent.
On Oct. 15 the Hungarian Nazi party took over the government. By then the only Jews left in the country were living in Budapest – the rest had already been taken to concentration camps. In the last few months of the war, the Hungarian Nazis took 18,000 Jews to the shores of the Danube and shot and killed them.
Touching her forehead she said, 'I knew (my parents) were in danger. I had nightmares in the convent.'
She was 'absolutely convinced' that she’d get news they were dead.
Holding up four fingers and walking around the desks, she said she later found out her parents were taken away four times to be killed, but each time managed to escape.
And that is when Wallenberg entered her parents’ lives.
Explaining that Wallenberg had a fair complexion while her father’s was dark, she said as her parents were lined up to be taken either to the Danube or to the trains, 'Wallenberg saw my father and he pointed to him … and he said (to a Hungarian Nazi), ‘oh, this is my cousin,’’’ as the audience chuckled. When Wallenberg saw her mother and two aunts clinging to her father, he said, 'this is my family. And he was so convincing.'
'Through the rest of (our) lives, we would only refer to (Wallenberg) as cousin Raoul,' she said as the crowd softly laughed in a moment of levity during the unrelentingly sad story.
In the meantime she studied the catechism at the convent and was converted on Dec. 11, 1944.
With forcefulness she said, 'that was the first and last time in my life I was ever brainwashed. Never again.
'I feel terrible about it. I know I had nothing to do about it. I wish – there was out of 100 children only one boy (who) resisted them … all of us went like sheep to (be) baptized. … I never (forgave) myself for allowing that to happen.'
The mother superior gave her a card afterward saying she was baptized on Dec. 11, 1944, as a 10-year-old. Ironically, she said, that card was 'a dead giveaway that I am a Jew. … I mean, who else would have a paper like that?'
Barnett said she never understood why, if the nuns and priests wanted to save their lives, they didn’t forge Baptism records from when they were born. 'That would have saved my life … but their purpose was to convert us.'
Just one day after she was converted, on Dec. 12, 1944, her father came to get her after he saw Jewish kids being taken away from another convent.
Because of the numerous times she had to move and abandon all of her belongings, she told the students she now she refers to herself as a packrat.
Soon after leaving the convent, Hungarian Nazis came to their home and marched them at gunpoint through the streets to an office building she recognized as being near where her father worked.
As they entered the building, she saw an SS officer. Her father, a Hungarian Nazi and Hungarian soldier then gathered together, poured brandy, lifted their glasses and said 'L’chaim.'
Some of the teachers in the audience who knew Hebrew laughed, since 'L’chaim' is a celebratory Hebrew toast.
SS Officer Kurt Becher saved 1,000 Jews for money. However, SS Sgt. Ganzner, whose first name Barnett didn’t know, stayed with Barnett’s family, got none of the money, yet protected them from the Hungarian Nazis every day until he was killed.
On Jan. 18, 1945, they were liberated when the Russians came, but that was not where her story ended. However, she only had limited time to tell her tale and asked the kids if they had any questions.
A boy from the German school raised his hand and asked when things started getting better and she replied, 'Never. Under communism – never.'
Another student timidly asked, 'Were you scared the whole entire time?'
'Very, very,' she said. 'What scared me the most … (was) the secrecy. (My) parents were whispering sometimes among themselves and it killed me,' she said while shaking her first, 'because I knew whatever they whispered, it would affect me. And that was the worst part – the secrecy.'
When another student asked her what she would say to Wallenberg if he were still alive, she said, 'Thank you, cousin.'
Barnett snuck over the boarder from Hungary to Austria at age 22 and came to the U.S. in 1957 while her parents stayed behind. She has lived and worked across this country and has two sons. Barnett is now an avid writer, photographer and member of a child survivor group. Thirty child survivors, including Barnett, contributed to the book, 'Remember Us: A Collection of Memories from Hungarian Hidden Children of the Holocaust.'
The Day of Learning was made possible through collaboration between the Brookline-based Facing History and Ourselves’ Jewish Education Program and Solomon Schechter. Facing History and Ourselves received a $1 million grant from the nonprofit Jim Joseph Foundation to bring the program to eight Jewish day schools, four in Boston and four in Los Angeles.
Barnett will present Wallenberg (posthumously) with the 2nd Annual Righteous Among Nations Award on Tuesday, Nov. 16, and Dr. Janos Beer, one of Wallenberg’s aides, will accept the award on his behalf. The award is given by the Israel Arbeiter Gallery of Understanding on the campus of the South Area Solomon Schechter Day School in Norwood. The keynote speaker will be Alan M. Dershowitz, lawyer, author and Felix Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard Law School. Space is limited and advance reservations are required. Tickets range from $10-$250. For details and reservations, call 1-781-769-9400, e-mail djoiner@sassds.org or visit www.sassds.org. Holocaust survivors are invited to attend at no cost, however, advance reservations are required." (source)
Barnett, 76, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, shared pieces of her story on Thursday, Oct. 28, to students at Norwood’s South Area Solomon Schechter Day School and visiting teens from the German International School in Boston.
The Day of Learning focused on Swedish diplomat and businessman Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews during World War II, including Barnett’s parents.
Walking among the students, Barnett, a Stow resident, described the harrowing 10 months she spent in and out of hiding when she was 10 years old, after the Germans occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. Before that, her family lived in Budapest as second-class citizens, were denied their civil rights and discriminated against, but the mass deportation and extermination of the Jews had not yet begun there.
Barnett said on March 19, 1944, her parents’ 'only goal was to save my life.'
The students listened as Barnett vividly described her wartime childhood.
'Immediately (my parents) looked for a Christian family' with whom to hide her, she said. She recalled how her parents had always told her to tell the truth but, she said, 'now I had to lie about everything.'
Eventually, the Christian family felt it was too dangerous to hide her, kept her parents’ money, and she returned to her family.
Her tale twisted between rising hopes and constant fear.
Barnett said although her mother and father came from Orthodox backgrounds, she, her mother and two aunts decided to study to become Catholics in order to save their lives.
Part of the crowd gasped as Barnett told them the day decreed for their Baptism was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, one of the Jewish High Holy Days. Some of the German school students that were in the audience were unfamiliar with the holiday, so Barnett explained its importance and why it was too difficult to make such a fundamental change on such an important day.
'So we learned all that for nothing,' she said, adding she didn’t understand why the Catholic hierarchy had decided to choose that day of all days to convert them 'in such a humiliating way.'
Most of the Hungarian Jews ended up in the Auschwitz concentration camp. By May 14, 1944, all of her parents’ relatives were already on the trains heading to their deaths, she said.
Barnett took a deep breath as she paced near the podium, describing the way Jews were segregated at the camps: If you were too old, too young, a mother with a baby, disabled, etc., you went straight to the gas chamber.
'Almost immediately, almost 100 percent (of my family) were directed to the gas chamber,' she said, her voice straining.
At that time, Barnett said, all the convents in Hungary were hiding Jewish children.
On Oct. 12, 1944, in another desperate act to save her life, her parents put her into a convent.
On Oct. 15 the Hungarian Nazi party took over the government. By then the only Jews left in the country were living in Budapest – the rest had already been taken to concentration camps. In the last few months of the war, the Hungarian Nazis took 18,000 Jews to the shores of the Danube and shot and killed them.
Touching her forehead she said, 'I knew (my parents) were in danger. I had nightmares in the convent.'
She was 'absolutely convinced' that she’d get news they were dead.
Holding up four fingers and walking around the desks, she said she later found out her parents were taken away four times to be killed, but each time managed to escape.
And that is when Wallenberg entered her parents’ lives.
Explaining that Wallenberg had a fair complexion while her father’s was dark, she said as her parents were lined up to be taken either to the Danube or to the trains, 'Wallenberg saw my father and he pointed to him … and he said (to a Hungarian Nazi), ‘oh, this is my cousin,’’’ as the audience chuckled. When Wallenberg saw her mother and two aunts clinging to her father, he said, 'this is my family. And he was so convincing.'
'Through the rest of (our) lives, we would only refer to (Wallenberg) as cousin Raoul,' she said as the crowd softly laughed in a moment of levity during the unrelentingly sad story.
In the meantime she studied the catechism at the convent and was converted on Dec. 11, 1944.
With forcefulness she said, 'that was the first and last time in my life I was ever brainwashed. Never again.
'I feel terrible about it. I know I had nothing to do about it. I wish – there was out of 100 children only one boy (who) resisted them … all of us went like sheep to (be) baptized. … I never (forgave) myself for allowing that to happen.'
The mother superior gave her a card afterward saying she was baptized on Dec. 11, 1944, as a 10-year-old. Ironically, she said, that card was 'a dead giveaway that I am a Jew. … I mean, who else would have a paper like that?'
Barnett said she never understood why, if the nuns and priests wanted to save their lives, they didn’t forge Baptism records from when they were born. 'That would have saved my life … but their purpose was to convert us.'
Just one day after she was converted, on Dec. 12, 1944, her father came to get her after he saw Jewish kids being taken away from another convent.
Because of the numerous times she had to move and abandon all of her belongings, she told the students she now she refers to herself as a packrat.
Soon after leaving the convent, Hungarian Nazis came to their home and marched them at gunpoint through the streets to an office building she recognized as being near where her father worked.
As they entered the building, she saw an SS officer. Her father, a Hungarian Nazi and Hungarian soldier then gathered together, poured brandy, lifted their glasses and said 'L’chaim.'
Some of the teachers in the audience who knew Hebrew laughed, since 'L’chaim' is a celebratory Hebrew toast.
SS Officer Kurt Becher saved 1,000 Jews for money. However, SS Sgt. Ganzner, whose first name Barnett didn’t know, stayed with Barnett’s family, got none of the money, yet protected them from the Hungarian Nazis every day until he was killed.
On Jan. 18, 1945, they were liberated when the Russians came, but that was not where her story ended. However, she only had limited time to tell her tale and asked the kids if they had any questions.
A boy from the German school raised his hand and asked when things started getting better and she replied, 'Never. Under communism – never.'
Another student timidly asked, 'Were you scared the whole entire time?'
'Very, very,' she said. 'What scared me the most … (was) the secrecy. (My) parents were whispering sometimes among themselves and it killed me,' she said while shaking her first, 'because I knew whatever they whispered, it would affect me. And that was the worst part – the secrecy.'
When another student asked her what she would say to Wallenberg if he were still alive, she said, 'Thank you, cousin.'
Barnett snuck over the boarder from Hungary to Austria at age 22 and came to the U.S. in 1957 while her parents stayed behind. She has lived and worked across this country and has two sons. Barnett is now an avid writer, photographer and member of a child survivor group. Thirty child survivors, including Barnett, contributed to the book, 'Remember Us: A Collection of Memories from Hungarian Hidden Children of the Holocaust.'
The Day of Learning was made possible through collaboration between the Brookline-based Facing History and Ourselves’ Jewish Education Program and Solomon Schechter. Facing History and Ourselves received a $1 million grant from the nonprofit Jim Joseph Foundation to bring the program to eight Jewish day schools, four in Boston and four in Los Angeles.
Barnett will present Wallenberg (posthumously) with the 2nd Annual Righteous Among Nations Award on Tuesday, Nov. 16, and Dr. Janos Beer, one of Wallenberg’s aides, will accept the award on his behalf. The award is given by the Israel Arbeiter Gallery of Understanding on the campus of the South Area Solomon Schechter Day School in Norwood. The keynote speaker will be Alan M. Dershowitz, lawyer, author and Felix Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard Law School. Space is limited and advance reservations are required. Tickets range from $10-$250. For details and reservations, call 1-781-769-9400, e-mail djoiner@sassds.org or visit www.sassds.org. Holocaust survivors are invited to attend at no cost, however, advance reservations are required." (source)
(NEWS) Holocaust Survivor Reunites With Protector’s Kin
"Video below: Tuesday night marked 72 years since the horror of Kristallnacht or 'night of broken glass.' German Jews were systematically rounded up and sent to be tortured and killed in concentration camps.
For Holocaust survivor Ernest Michel, the images of Kristallnacht are still all too vivid. His family and friends were killed that night in 1938 and shipped to Auschwitz. Michel also expected to die, but he didn’t, CBS 2′s Rob Morrison reported.
'I survived by a miracle,' Michel said.
Michel said his job — falsifying death certificates — kept him alive. The Nazis did not want a record of their systematic executions and forced him to invent causes of death. He remembers two in particular — 'weak of body' and 'heart attack.'
'I had to write nobody died of being gassed in Auschwitz,' Michel recounted.
Michel was chosen for the job by a fellow prisoner — not a Jew but a Communist — who noticed his fine penmanship. Michel credits that man with saving his life.
'He took me to the next room and said ‘ look you can stay here overnight.’ Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of you. You won’t be sent up the chimney,' Michel said.
Decades later, there was another extraordinary twist to Michel’s story when the great nephew of the man who saved him reached out after reading his memoirs and recognizing the story of his uncle.
Now bonded, Dr. Peter Kurz — the Mayor of Mannheim, Germany — and Michel share a message of harmony.
Mannheim was the very city where Michel experienced Kristallnacht. And today, the men say their friendship is proof that good can come from evil." (source)
For Holocaust survivor Ernest Michel, the images of Kristallnacht are still all too vivid. His family and friends were killed that night in 1938 and shipped to Auschwitz. Michel also expected to die, but he didn’t, CBS 2′s Rob Morrison reported.
'I survived by a miracle,' Michel said.
Michel said his job — falsifying death certificates — kept him alive. The Nazis did not want a record of their systematic executions and forced him to invent causes of death. He remembers two in particular — 'weak of body' and 'heart attack.'
'I had to write nobody died of being gassed in Auschwitz,' Michel recounted.
Michel was chosen for the job by a fellow prisoner — not a Jew but a Communist — who noticed his fine penmanship. Michel credits that man with saving his life.
'He took me to the next room and said ‘ look you can stay here overnight.’ Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of you. You won’t be sent up the chimney,' Michel said.
Decades later, there was another extraordinary twist to Michel’s story when the great nephew of the man who saved him reached out after reading his memoirs and recognizing the story of his uncle.
Now bonded, Dr. Peter Kurz — the Mayor of Mannheim, Germany — and Michel share a message of harmony.
Mannheim was the very city where Michel experienced Kristallnacht. And today, the men say their friendship is proof that good can come from evil." (source)
(BLOG) Masters Thesis: Jews Use Holocaust To Justify Their Inherent Racism!
"An anti-Zionist Jew named Jennifer Peto, who is heavily involved in the 'Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid' in Toronto, has written her masters thesis on the topic 'The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education.'
As one might be able to guess from the title, it is 112 pages of pure rubbish.
Here's her abstract:"
As one might be able to guess from the title, it is 112 pages of pure rubbish.
Here's her abstract:"
(BLOG) Auschwitz: Because Hearing Is Not Seeing
"200 London students make a wrenching Auschwitz visit, sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Trust. Our reporter went with them.
I am sitting on a plane at Luton Airport, staring at the tarmac.
It’s a cool, crisp autumn morning as the ground crew makes its final preparations, oblivious to the nature of our trip; seemingly it’s a planeload of people heading off on vacation, to be reunited with family or to seal a business deal. In fact, I’m with a group of 200 high school students from across London on a unique visit to the death camps at Auschwitz.
The one-day visit is part of the Holocaust Educational Trust’s flagship 'Lessons from Auschwitz' program, now in its 12th year. In all, the London- based trust has taken more than 10,000 students, teachers, parliamentarians and dignitaries from across the UK to Auschwitz. Based on the premise that 'hearing is not like seeing,' the aim is to increase knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust, educate and intimate the extent of what can happen if prejudice and racism go unchecked.
The success of the program has led the British government to recognize its impact and huge importance – in 2005 the government pledged £1.5 million for the program and in the last several years, the Scottish government and Welsh Assembly vowed support to allow for the participation of Scottish and Welsh high school students."
I am sitting on a plane at Luton Airport, staring at the tarmac.
It’s a cool, crisp autumn morning as the ground crew makes its final preparations, oblivious to the nature of our trip; seemingly it’s a planeload of people heading off on vacation, to be reunited with family or to seal a business deal. In fact, I’m with a group of 200 high school students from across London on a unique visit to the death camps at Auschwitz.
The one-day visit is part of the Holocaust Educational Trust’s flagship 'Lessons from Auschwitz' program, now in its 12th year. In all, the London- based trust has taken more than 10,000 students, teachers, parliamentarians and dignitaries from across the UK to Auschwitz. Based on the premise that 'hearing is not like seeing,' the aim is to increase knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust, educate and intimate the extent of what can happen if prejudice and racism go unchecked.
The success of the program has led the British government to recognize its impact and huge importance – in 2005 the government pledged £1.5 million for the program and in the last several years, the Scottish government and Welsh Assembly vowed support to allow for the participation of Scottish and Welsh high school students."
(BLOG) Should Academic Free Speech Accommodate Holocaust Denial?
"By Richard L. Cravatts: If you scratch a Holocaust denier long enough, you may reveal an anti-Semite, but not always. You will, however, probably find someone like the morally repellant Kaukab Siddique, a Pakistani-born, tenured associate professor of English and journalism at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, who seemingly puts great faith in conspiratorial dramas in which a crafty and all-powerful enemy—in this case, Jews—weaves an oft-repeated claim that six million of their people were exterminated just to elicit the world's sympathy and promote Zionism and the creation of Israel.
Siddique has been embroiled in an intellectual firestorm, largely of his own making, since his paroxysms of hatred toward Israel were exposed in a video taken during his appearance at a Labor Day rally in Washington and posted by The Investigative Project and reported on by the Christian Broadcasting Network.
In vitriol-laced language that unfortunately is not at all uncommon these days from the professoriate and many of their impressionable, like-minded students, Siddique was filmed crying out to the crowd at the September 3 event: 'I say to the Muslims, ‘Dear brothers and sisters, unite and rise up against this hydra-headed monster which calls itself Zionism.’' More troublesome than this spectral horror of creeping, pernicious Zionism was Siddique’s exhortation to the receptive audience that Zionism itself was an aggressive, dangerous ideology that must be extirpated. 'Each one of us is their target and we must stand united to defeat, to destroy, to dismantle Israel,' he said, 'if possible by peaceful means.' [Italics mine]
This grotesque anti-Israelism, of course, frequently animates the thinking of broad swathes of the West’s intelligentsia, who, obsessed with Third World victimism and a virtual cult of Palestinianism, think nothing of calling for the destruction—by boycott, divestment, de-legitimization, even armed resistance—of Israel, a sovereign nation, American ally, and the single democracy in the Middle East.
But Siddique, it has been revealed since this recent furor began, has an even more pernicious intellectual defect which calls into question, not only his academic credibility, but his very qualifications to hold tenure at a university at all. Because linked to his invidious attitudes about Zionism, Israel, and Jews, Siddique also plays a leadership role in Jamaat al-Muslimeen (JAM), a 'radical separatist Islamist' group based in Baltimore that focuses its limited intellectual resources on spewing forth anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and engaging in Holocaust denial. At an August meeting of this inspirational group, for instance, Siddique spoke to the rapt attendees and touched on the same theme of his that was revealed in the D.C. rally, namely, the treachery of Jews and the boundlessness of their power. 'We're under the grip of a Jewish Zionist power structure in this country,' he told the audience, and further suggested that one reason Jews were able to obscure the sins of Israel and exploit the Holocaust for material and emotional gain was due to the existence of the dreaded 'Zionist-controlled media.'
When asked about his D.C. rants concerning Zionism and Israel, Siddique was quick to assert, as many crypto anti-Semites are, that he, of course, harbored no enmity towards Jews, only towards pernicious Zionists and their brutal, illegitimate, rogue nation, Israel. In fact, he has previously asserted that JAM is 'not against the Jews as a collective,' and the only reason 'we are against the Jews [is] because they have usurped Palestine and they take interest on loans and have built up the exploitative economic structure,' collectively blaming Jews for being rapacious thieves who not only stole Palestinian lands for economic gain, but then used those ill-gotten gains to further manipulate the world economy—a well-worn anti-Semitic trope.
It is one thing for a tenured professor at a modern university to have negative attitudes towards Jews and Israel. It is altogether a more serious matter when a member of the professoriate, as is the case with Siddique, thinks that his academic free speech gives him moral cover to delve into the intellectual netherworld of conspiracies, historical distortions, and full-blown Holocaust denial. In a now widely-circulated email thread on the crackpot conspiracy-theory web site Rense.com, for example, Siddique revealed that his world view creates conspiracies as a way of explaining the unfolding of historical events; his is a pessimistic and frantic outlook, famously characterized by historian Richard Hofstadter as 'the paranoid style' of politics, which shifts responsibility from the self to sinister, omnipotent others—typically and historically the Jews.
Thus, in his incoherent ramblings on the site, he suggested that the Nazis were not actually that harmful to European Jewry, a point he attempted to prove by grotesquely and cruelly suggesting that '[t]he German behavior was so good that Elie Wiesel (the arch holocaust propagandist) left Auschwitz WITH the retreating Germans when the Russians advanced towards the camp.'
And besides, Siddique continued, was it not the Jews’ own propensity for ill-doing that brought on justifiable Nazi anti-Semitic inclinations? In Siddique’s feverish imagination, those negative feelings did not, at any rate, amount to a genocide of a whole people. 'The Jews,' he wrote, 'as in America today, controlled the entire economy. German leaders made powerful speeches against Jews but that does not amount to holocaust [sic].'
In fact, Siddique concluded, the 'Holocaust is a hoax,' so those who still speak about it should 'Get over it!', since there 'is not even ONE document proving the holocaust [sic],' an assertion that might come as a surprise to the archivists at the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Memorial, as one example, which owns some 51 million pages of documents and 121 million images cataloguing the exact Nazi atrocities Siddique denies ever occurred.
And then in a particularly odious bit of moral relativism, Siddique commits the intellectual parlor trick of grafting onto Israel the Nazi-like crimes he has just finished asserting never happened, again maligning Jews for their perceived omnipotence and power, and Israelis for their crimes against the innocent Palestinians. 'Notice that Jews wiped out entire PALESTINIAN villages,' he wrote, contrasting this behavior from that of Hitler, 'but failed to hide the atrocities in spite of their control of the media.' Even worse, Israel’s brutal occupation and militancy continues to oppress the Muslim world and then accuse the victims of the crimes Zionist themselves perpetrate. 'In Palestine,' Siddique wrote, 'we Muslims can see how you Jews operate. You kill, rape, destroy, build your cities on our villages and then use your media to label us as terrorists.'
If the victim status of Israel—and by extension, all Jews—can be diminished by exposing the lie of the Holocaust, which is what deniers dedicate themselves to achieving, Palestinians become the more aggrieved victim, a people victimized by former victims, the Jews, who spread the lie of their own suffering for material ends. It is not without irony, of course, that while Siddique, not to mention many other anti-Israelites in the West, wants to rob Jews of the piece of dismal history that brought about the extermination of six million of their people, they are eager to regularly repeat the vile comparison they draw between the perceived behavior and shared values of the Jewish state and the Nazi regime. How better to cause the greatest hurt and to speak the gravest criticism than to deny or minimize on one hand that the Nazi atrocities and slaughter ever took place, and then to suggest, that if they did, the people reborn of that fire have descended morally to the same moral level as their former tormenters?
Does it matter if a tenured professor expresses personal opinions, no matter how odious and controversial, and are they not acceptable under the notion of academic free speech? Well, yes and no. With great regularity, academic imbecility and fraudulent scholarship has been substituted for reasoned inquiry on our campuses, and, observes Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, 'academic freedom is meant to protect scholarship, not replace it.' Nor does 'free speech ... absolve anyone from professional incompetence,' Rubin says,' which is the heart of the matter in a conversation about Professor Siddique and his qualification to be part of a community of scholars where certain ideas and theories simply do not deserve nor warrant academic discourse.
More seriously, Siddique’s chronic Holocaust denial, his calls for the destruction of Israel, and his demonization of Zionism, Israel, and world Jewry should be of enormous concern to Lincoln University officials. Far from being 'a concerted act by the extreme right wing aligned with Israel to destroy someone who spoke out against them,' as Siddique himself characterized the reaction to his odious opinions, his ideas have to be understood as blatantly anti-Semitic, and expressive of raw Jew-hatred, regardless of his own attempt to excuse it as mere criticism of Israel.
In fact, if one applies the working definition of contemporary anti-Semitism, produced in 2005 by the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), to Siddique’s core ideologies and attitudes, the anti-Semitic nature of his speech and thought is quite clear. EUMC’s definition, specifically, describes behavior as anti-Semitic when an individual makes 'mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective;' denies 'the fact, scope, . . . or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany . . . during World War II;' and accuses 'the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust,' all of which animate Siddique’s lurid writing and speaking.
Even absent Siddique’s moronic denials of the Holocaust, his obsession with and criticism of the perceived power of Jews in controlling the media, manipulating U.S. public policy to further the interests of Israel, having involvement in the attacks on 9/11, not to mention his characterizations of Jews as being treacherous, underhanded, duplicitous, and avaricious—all of these notions, when put into speech or writing, not only rise to the level of what has been deemed anti-Semitism under the EUMC guidelines, but should be of grave concern to administrators at Lincoln, a historically black university which receives significant state funding from Pennsylvania.
Putting aside the fact that Lincoln’s own code of conduct forbids 'any conduct or behavior that is disrespectful, absurd and rude,' and despite the fact that the university has now distanced itself from comments and beliefs Siddique expressed publicly but outside of the campus walls, there should be universal denunciation of the professor’s whole belief system, riddled as it is with the darkest and most vile of pathologies and hatreds. Tenure comes with some clear responsibilities, not the least of which is to be an intellectual and moral partner with the academic community with which one has made a professional contract. Saying that is acceptable for a professor to harbor delusional, primitive attitudes about the Holocaust and Jews as long as he only utters his calumnies off campus and not as part of his teaching in the classroom is disingenuous at best, and a craven way that university officials try to excuse the inexcusable in some of their tenured intellectual brats.
This case also exposes a startling double standard that is currently prevalent in academia when it comes to who may say what about whom. Either because they are feckless or want to coddle perceived protected student minority groups in the name of diversity, university administrations are morally inconsistent when taking a stand against what they consider 'hate speech,' believing, mistakenly, that only harsh expression against victim groups needs to be moderated. When other groups―whites, Christians, Republicans, heterosexual males, Jews, for example―are the object of offensive speech, no protection is deemed to be necessary.
Lawrence Summers, for example, lost the presidency of Harvard for merely suggesting out loud at a closed lecture that the reason women had traditionally not excelled in science and math might be due to genetic differences in the sexes. That is a theory that feminists found repugnant and unacceptable to even utter, but it is certainly not as fantastical or delusional as suggesting that the Holocaust is a fable. And more relevant is Lincoln’s own reaction, or lack thereof, to Siddique’s anti-Zionist invective at the rally and the subsequent revelations about his Holocaust-denying hobby. Was it not for the waves of criticism coming from Pennsylvania officials, Jewish groups, and others, Siddique’s behavior would have continued without comment, and no introspection from the university community would likely have occurred at all.
Imagine for a moment that it was discovered that a tenured professor at Lincoln was 'outed' as being a white nationalist, and his postings were sprinkled on the pages of a hate site such as Stormfront.org in which he railed, as visitors to that odious site do, against the dangers of non-whites to white culture, the harm that non-whites do to society through criminality, high birthrates, and low morals, and the overall superiority of the white race to other, lower forms of human existence. Would any member of the Lincoln community care whether or not that professor brought those vile attitudes into his classroom or merely expressed them off campus? Would they say that he had a right to express that type of noxious attitude safely under the umbrella of academic free speech? Could any sentient observer contend that a tenured professor who delved into the perverse intellectual netherworld of neo-Nazism and white supremacism could somehow return to the cocoon of a campus and separate his other life from the person he is when he stands in front of students, helping young minds to thoughtfully explore human thought and achievement?
The answer obviously is that anyone who expressed such feelings in the academic community would be immediately and thoroughly shunned, that his or her actions and speech would be labeled for what they clearly were—repugnant hate speech that has no place on a campus. And when an offense is made to members of one of academia’s favored victim groups, the response is immediate, widespread, and thunderous in its self-righteousness.
Consider what happened at the University of California, San Diego, this March, for example, where the entire campus underwent collective apoplexy over some incendiary racial slurs made by students, not a tenured faculty member, involved in an off-campus fraternity party, the racially-insensitive 'Compton Cookout,' and the discovery of a noose and a roughly-fashioned Ku Klux Klan hood on campus—all of which helped stoke tensions and inflame rage at the perceived racism.
Members of UC San Diego’s Black Student Union wasted no time in drafting a six-page memo for school officials (who eagerly embraced them), in which they itemized a veritable encyclopedia of demands by which, it was felt, the racist climate could be modified. Cries of 'institutionalized racism' and a 'toxic environment' at UCSD were heard. Because the BSU felt that African Americans were being 'racially demoralized,' those demands included, among others, establishing ethnic studies programs, a 'rewrite the Student Code of Conduct,' presumably meaning a speech code that would proscribe certain speech deemed inappropriate by the code’s creators, and, ominously, a mandatory 'diversity sensitivity requirement for every undergraduate student.'
While calling for further investigation into the specific incidents that had sparked the outrage, and promising to identify and punish the perpetrators, embarrassed school officials also met with angry minority students, promised to increase efforts at diversity, pledged more minority faculty hiring and student enrollment, set up psychological counseling facilities, met with community leaders and state officials, and even flew in Berkeley’s law school dean, Christopher Edley, to help arbitrate the situation.
But at Lincoln University, when a tenured professor demonizes Jews, delegitimizes Israel, accuses Zionists and Israelis of treachery, theft, brutality, and pure evil, and calls for the Muslim world to rise up and destroy the Jewish state by any means necessary, the reaction is grotesquely understated. In fact, the final moral call by Lincoln’s administration is that, while Siddique’s views are not in keeping with the university’s sensibilities, at least he keeps his morally-imbecilic views and ideology safely outside the campus walls where, presumably, they cannot infect the minds of students within.
Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, director of the Program in Publishing & Digital Media at Boston University, just finished a book, Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews." (source)
Siddique has been embroiled in an intellectual firestorm, largely of his own making, since his paroxysms of hatred toward Israel were exposed in a video taken during his appearance at a Labor Day rally in Washington and posted by The Investigative Project and reported on by the Christian Broadcasting Network.
In vitriol-laced language that unfortunately is not at all uncommon these days from the professoriate and many of their impressionable, like-minded students, Siddique was filmed crying out to the crowd at the September 3 event: 'I say to the Muslims, ‘Dear brothers and sisters, unite and rise up against this hydra-headed monster which calls itself Zionism.’' More troublesome than this spectral horror of creeping, pernicious Zionism was Siddique’s exhortation to the receptive audience that Zionism itself was an aggressive, dangerous ideology that must be extirpated. 'Each one of us is their target and we must stand united to defeat, to destroy, to dismantle Israel,' he said, 'if possible by peaceful means.' [Italics mine]
This grotesque anti-Israelism, of course, frequently animates the thinking of broad swathes of the West’s intelligentsia, who, obsessed with Third World victimism and a virtual cult of Palestinianism, think nothing of calling for the destruction—by boycott, divestment, de-legitimization, even armed resistance—of Israel, a sovereign nation, American ally, and the single democracy in the Middle East.
But Siddique, it has been revealed since this recent furor began, has an even more pernicious intellectual defect which calls into question, not only his academic credibility, but his very qualifications to hold tenure at a university at all. Because linked to his invidious attitudes about Zionism, Israel, and Jews, Siddique also plays a leadership role in Jamaat al-Muslimeen (JAM), a 'radical separatist Islamist' group based in Baltimore that focuses its limited intellectual resources on spewing forth anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and engaging in Holocaust denial. At an August meeting of this inspirational group, for instance, Siddique spoke to the rapt attendees and touched on the same theme of his that was revealed in the D.C. rally, namely, the treachery of Jews and the boundlessness of their power. 'We're under the grip of a Jewish Zionist power structure in this country,' he told the audience, and further suggested that one reason Jews were able to obscure the sins of Israel and exploit the Holocaust for material and emotional gain was due to the existence of the dreaded 'Zionist-controlled media.'
When asked about his D.C. rants concerning Zionism and Israel, Siddique was quick to assert, as many crypto anti-Semites are, that he, of course, harbored no enmity towards Jews, only towards pernicious Zionists and their brutal, illegitimate, rogue nation, Israel. In fact, he has previously asserted that JAM is 'not against the Jews as a collective,' and the only reason 'we are against the Jews [is] because they have usurped Palestine and they take interest on loans and have built up the exploitative economic structure,' collectively blaming Jews for being rapacious thieves who not only stole Palestinian lands for economic gain, but then used those ill-gotten gains to further manipulate the world economy—a well-worn anti-Semitic trope.
It is one thing for a tenured professor at a modern university to have negative attitudes towards Jews and Israel. It is altogether a more serious matter when a member of the professoriate, as is the case with Siddique, thinks that his academic free speech gives him moral cover to delve into the intellectual netherworld of conspiracies, historical distortions, and full-blown Holocaust denial. In a now widely-circulated email thread on the crackpot conspiracy-theory web site Rense.com, for example, Siddique revealed that his world view creates conspiracies as a way of explaining the unfolding of historical events; his is a pessimistic and frantic outlook, famously characterized by historian Richard Hofstadter as 'the paranoid style' of politics, which shifts responsibility from the self to sinister, omnipotent others—typically and historically the Jews.
Thus, in his incoherent ramblings on the site, he suggested that the Nazis were not actually that harmful to European Jewry, a point he attempted to prove by grotesquely and cruelly suggesting that '[t]he German behavior was so good that Elie Wiesel (the arch holocaust propagandist) left Auschwitz WITH the retreating Germans when the Russians advanced towards the camp.'
And besides, Siddique continued, was it not the Jews’ own propensity for ill-doing that brought on justifiable Nazi anti-Semitic inclinations? In Siddique’s feverish imagination, those negative feelings did not, at any rate, amount to a genocide of a whole people. 'The Jews,' he wrote, 'as in America today, controlled the entire economy. German leaders made powerful speeches against Jews but that does not amount to holocaust [sic].'
In fact, Siddique concluded, the 'Holocaust is a hoax,' so those who still speak about it should 'Get over it!', since there 'is not even ONE document proving the holocaust [sic],' an assertion that might come as a surprise to the archivists at the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Memorial, as one example, which owns some 51 million pages of documents and 121 million images cataloguing the exact Nazi atrocities Siddique denies ever occurred.
And then in a particularly odious bit of moral relativism, Siddique commits the intellectual parlor trick of grafting onto Israel the Nazi-like crimes he has just finished asserting never happened, again maligning Jews for their perceived omnipotence and power, and Israelis for their crimes against the innocent Palestinians. 'Notice that Jews wiped out entire PALESTINIAN villages,' he wrote, contrasting this behavior from that of Hitler, 'but failed to hide the atrocities in spite of their control of the media.' Even worse, Israel’s brutal occupation and militancy continues to oppress the Muslim world and then accuse the victims of the crimes Zionist themselves perpetrate. 'In Palestine,' Siddique wrote, 'we Muslims can see how you Jews operate. You kill, rape, destroy, build your cities on our villages and then use your media to label us as terrorists.'
If the victim status of Israel—and by extension, all Jews—can be diminished by exposing the lie of the Holocaust, which is what deniers dedicate themselves to achieving, Palestinians become the more aggrieved victim, a people victimized by former victims, the Jews, who spread the lie of their own suffering for material ends. It is not without irony, of course, that while Siddique, not to mention many other anti-Israelites in the West, wants to rob Jews of the piece of dismal history that brought about the extermination of six million of their people, they are eager to regularly repeat the vile comparison they draw between the perceived behavior and shared values of the Jewish state and the Nazi regime. How better to cause the greatest hurt and to speak the gravest criticism than to deny or minimize on one hand that the Nazi atrocities and slaughter ever took place, and then to suggest, that if they did, the people reborn of that fire have descended morally to the same moral level as their former tormenters?
Does it matter if a tenured professor expresses personal opinions, no matter how odious and controversial, and are they not acceptable under the notion of academic free speech? Well, yes and no. With great regularity, academic imbecility and fraudulent scholarship has been substituted for reasoned inquiry on our campuses, and, observes Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, 'academic freedom is meant to protect scholarship, not replace it.' Nor does 'free speech ... absolve anyone from professional incompetence,' Rubin says,' which is the heart of the matter in a conversation about Professor Siddique and his qualification to be part of a community of scholars where certain ideas and theories simply do not deserve nor warrant academic discourse.
More seriously, Siddique’s chronic Holocaust denial, his calls for the destruction of Israel, and his demonization of Zionism, Israel, and world Jewry should be of enormous concern to Lincoln University officials. Far from being 'a concerted act by the extreme right wing aligned with Israel to destroy someone who spoke out against them,' as Siddique himself characterized the reaction to his odious opinions, his ideas have to be understood as blatantly anti-Semitic, and expressive of raw Jew-hatred, regardless of his own attempt to excuse it as mere criticism of Israel.
In fact, if one applies the working definition of contemporary anti-Semitism, produced in 2005 by the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), to Siddique’s core ideologies and attitudes, the anti-Semitic nature of his speech and thought is quite clear. EUMC’s definition, specifically, describes behavior as anti-Semitic when an individual makes 'mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective;' denies 'the fact, scope, . . . or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany . . . during World War II;' and accuses 'the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust,' all of which animate Siddique’s lurid writing and speaking.
Even absent Siddique’s moronic denials of the Holocaust, his obsession with and criticism of the perceived power of Jews in controlling the media, manipulating U.S. public policy to further the interests of Israel, having involvement in the attacks on 9/11, not to mention his characterizations of Jews as being treacherous, underhanded, duplicitous, and avaricious—all of these notions, when put into speech or writing, not only rise to the level of what has been deemed anti-Semitism under the EUMC guidelines, but should be of grave concern to administrators at Lincoln, a historically black university which receives significant state funding from Pennsylvania.
Putting aside the fact that Lincoln’s own code of conduct forbids 'any conduct or behavior that is disrespectful, absurd and rude,' and despite the fact that the university has now distanced itself from comments and beliefs Siddique expressed publicly but outside of the campus walls, there should be universal denunciation of the professor’s whole belief system, riddled as it is with the darkest and most vile of pathologies and hatreds. Tenure comes with some clear responsibilities, not the least of which is to be an intellectual and moral partner with the academic community with which one has made a professional contract. Saying that is acceptable for a professor to harbor delusional, primitive attitudes about the Holocaust and Jews as long as he only utters his calumnies off campus and not as part of his teaching in the classroom is disingenuous at best, and a craven way that university officials try to excuse the inexcusable in some of their tenured intellectual brats.
This case also exposes a startling double standard that is currently prevalent in academia when it comes to who may say what about whom. Either because they are feckless or want to coddle perceived protected student minority groups in the name of diversity, university administrations are morally inconsistent when taking a stand against what they consider 'hate speech,' believing, mistakenly, that only harsh expression against victim groups needs to be moderated. When other groups―whites, Christians, Republicans, heterosexual males, Jews, for example―are the object of offensive speech, no protection is deemed to be necessary.
Lawrence Summers, for example, lost the presidency of Harvard for merely suggesting out loud at a closed lecture that the reason women had traditionally not excelled in science and math might be due to genetic differences in the sexes. That is a theory that feminists found repugnant and unacceptable to even utter, but it is certainly not as fantastical or delusional as suggesting that the Holocaust is a fable. And more relevant is Lincoln’s own reaction, or lack thereof, to Siddique’s anti-Zionist invective at the rally and the subsequent revelations about his Holocaust-denying hobby. Was it not for the waves of criticism coming from Pennsylvania officials, Jewish groups, and others, Siddique’s behavior would have continued without comment, and no introspection from the university community would likely have occurred at all.
Imagine for a moment that it was discovered that a tenured professor at Lincoln was 'outed' as being a white nationalist, and his postings were sprinkled on the pages of a hate site such as Stormfront.org in which he railed, as visitors to that odious site do, against the dangers of non-whites to white culture, the harm that non-whites do to society through criminality, high birthrates, and low morals, and the overall superiority of the white race to other, lower forms of human existence. Would any member of the Lincoln community care whether or not that professor brought those vile attitudes into his classroom or merely expressed them off campus? Would they say that he had a right to express that type of noxious attitude safely under the umbrella of academic free speech? Could any sentient observer contend that a tenured professor who delved into the perverse intellectual netherworld of neo-Nazism and white supremacism could somehow return to the cocoon of a campus and separate his other life from the person he is when he stands in front of students, helping young minds to thoughtfully explore human thought and achievement?
The answer obviously is that anyone who expressed such feelings in the academic community would be immediately and thoroughly shunned, that his or her actions and speech would be labeled for what they clearly were—repugnant hate speech that has no place on a campus. And when an offense is made to members of one of academia’s favored victim groups, the response is immediate, widespread, and thunderous in its self-righteousness.
Consider what happened at the University of California, San Diego, this March, for example, where the entire campus underwent collective apoplexy over some incendiary racial slurs made by students, not a tenured faculty member, involved in an off-campus fraternity party, the racially-insensitive 'Compton Cookout,' and the discovery of a noose and a roughly-fashioned Ku Klux Klan hood on campus—all of which helped stoke tensions and inflame rage at the perceived racism.
Members of UC San Diego’s Black Student Union wasted no time in drafting a six-page memo for school officials (who eagerly embraced them), in which they itemized a veritable encyclopedia of demands by which, it was felt, the racist climate could be modified. Cries of 'institutionalized racism' and a 'toxic environment' at UCSD were heard. Because the BSU felt that African Americans were being 'racially demoralized,' those demands included, among others, establishing ethnic studies programs, a 'rewrite the Student Code of Conduct,' presumably meaning a speech code that would proscribe certain speech deemed inappropriate by the code’s creators, and, ominously, a mandatory 'diversity sensitivity requirement for every undergraduate student.'
While calling for further investigation into the specific incidents that had sparked the outrage, and promising to identify and punish the perpetrators, embarrassed school officials also met with angry minority students, promised to increase efforts at diversity, pledged more minority faculty hiring and student enrollment, set up psychological counseling facilities, met with community leaders and state officials, and even flew in Berkeley’s law school dean, Christopher Edley, to help arbitrate the situation.
But at Lincoln University, when a tenured professor demonizes Jews, delegitimizes Israel, accuses Zionists and Israelis of treachery, theft, brutality, and pure evil, and calls for the Muslim world to rise up and destroy the Jewish state by any means necessary, the reaction is grotesquely understated. In fact, the final moral call by Lincoln’s administration is that, while Siddique’s views are not in keeping with the university’s sensibilities, at least he keeps his morally-imbecilic views and ideology safely outside the campus walls where, presumably, they cannot infect the minds of students within.
Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, director of the Program in Publishing & Digital Media at Boston University, just finished a book, Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews." (source)
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