Monday, April 17, 2023
Dani Dayan: The power of human spirit
The central theme of Holocaust Remembrance Day this year is "Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust: Marking 80 Years since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising."Jonathan Tobin: Where Holocaust commemoration succeeded and where it failed
Resistance encompasses a wide range of actions and, contrary to popular belief, does not necessarily involve taking up arms. Jewish resistance during the Holocaust could be a Shabbat Kiddush, staging a play in the ghetto, or even applying a little rouge to the cheeks – any action, simple or complex, that preserved the human spirit in the face of the Nazi German extermination plan that sought to destroy the Jewish people and its culture.
Eighty years later, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising remains a symbol. It was a popular insurrection: While the fighters of the Jewish Fighting Organization and the Jewish Military Union fought the Nazis in the streets of the ghetto, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto barricaded themselves in bunkers and fought for their lives for a whole long month. Many perished in the flames and smoke of the Nazi siege. News of the uprising spread quickly and reached the free world; it became a symbol of the battle of the few against the many, a symbol of the freedom and power of the human spirit.
During the Holocaust, there were other uprisings in the camps and ghettos, while thousands of Jewish partisans fought in the forests of Eastern Europe and were a significant force in the battle against the Germans and they also saved thousands of Jews who fled to the forests. There were many other cases where Jews rescued other Jews, even though they themselves were being pursued.
Other forms of resistance during the Holocaust included documenting the terrible events in secret, forging papers, hiding Jews, operating an education system, maintaining cultural life with performances, art, and underground libraries – all of which were acts of resistance that could not be taken for granted in the horrific reality of persecution and destruction.
These acts of resistance fueled a hope among the Jews, albeit desperate, that they would live to see the end of the war. Although the widespread resistance was not able to save the millions of Jews, its scale and diversity bequeathed a Jewish legacy for generations, symbolizing the power of the human spirit and humanity's fundamental values.
As Elie Wiesel wrote, "The Jewish soul was a target of the enemy. He sought to corrupt it, even as he strove to destroy us physically. But despite his destructive force, despite his corrupting power, the Jewish soul remained beyond his reach."
Contrary to the universalizers, who feared that the Shoah would be marooned in history if it was not enlisted in the laudable cause of making everyone nicer to each other, Jew-hatred is not an ordinary form of prejudice. It is, as the Holocaust and the current campaign against Israel illustrate, a way of organizing intolerance for a political cause. Stripped of this context, Holocaust education becomes just one more anodyne call for civility. As such it not only fails to counter garden-variety bias but actually winds up ignoring actual antisemitism when it appears in the guise of appeals on behalf of “human rights” that deny Jewish rights and the right of Jews to defend themselves.
The popularization of Holocaust education became so embedded in Western culture that it morphed into more of a metaphor about something awful than a specific crime whose purpose was to rid the world of the Jews. The “anyone I don’t like is Hitler” rule even applied to many liberal Jews, who were quick to label American political opponents like former President Donald Trump as the moral equivalent of the Nazis. Some on the right are also willing to play the same game, comparing anything they don’t like to the Holocaust. Such analogies are always wrong even though few on either side of the political aisle are willing to condemn them when they are spread by their allies.
Even many of those who were contributing to the demonization of Israel and using the tropes of traditional antisemitic discourse to do so thought that they, too, were entitled to speak reverently about the Holocaust. Nothing illustrates the absurdity of this trend more than the devotion of a United Nations that is a cesspool of antisemitism to Holocaust memorialization. That Jew-haters like Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) have no shame talking about the need to remember the Shoah is shocking but nevertheless tolerated, even by many Jews who ought to know better. As writer Dara Horn memorably articulated it in the title of her book, People Love Dead Jews. It’s the living ones, especially those who are willing to defend themselves and the sole Jewish state on the planet, who are not so popular.
The attention on Holocaust memorialization also often failed to acknowledge the way Israel and its supporters had become the stand-in for traditional antisemitic scapegoats. Indeed, the resistance, even among some Jews on the left, to the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism centered on its acknowledgement of the way that falsely smearing Israel, especially by accusing it of Nazi-like crimes, had become one of the principal expressions of Jew-hatred in our era.
Those who labored to create and fund all the museums, archives and ceremonies deserve our gratitude. They are important in and of themselves. But it turns out they don’t do much to answer contemporary threats, even when it concerns issues like Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons to create a new Shoah.
The way many Jews view the Holocaust as the sum total of the Jewish experience in a way that ignores or downplays the richness, beauty and joy of our heritage, has had the unintended consequence of undermining communal life. This has also had the effect of legitimizing those who think that remembering the Shoah should have nothing to do with the fight to preserve today’s Jews.
This Yom Hashoah as we honor the victims, we need to remember that the only proper memorial to the Six Million is a thriving Jewish state that was created too late to save them. Now that we’ve ensured that the past is not forgotten, it’s time for Jews to concentrate their efforts on defending live Jews with as much fervor and dedication as was demonstrated on behalf of the memory of the Holocaust.
Daniel Gordis: Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) before there was a state
Tonight, in Israel and throughout the world, begins the observance of Yom HaShoah, technically called Yom Ha-Shoah ve-ha-Gevurah, which roughly translates as Memorial Day for Victims of the Holocaust and their Bravery.
Yom HaShoah has been part of the Jewish calendar for so long that we often forget that it wasn’t always there. It did not even follow immediately after the war. The date was officially selected by the Knesset in 1951, while the law that made the holiday “official” was passed in 1953.
The selection of the date was actually a complicated process. The rabbinate wanted the Knesset to choose the date of the Tenth of Tevet, which was already a general “day of mourning” in the traditional Jewish calendar. But the survivors, understandably, wanted a unique date—so the Knesset chose a date tied to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
That, itself, is significant, as the yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine) and the citizens of early Israel struggled to honor the Holocaust victims, many of whom live today in Israel under the poverty line. In those early days of Israel, the victims were seen as weak and passive, precisely the opposite of the “new Jew” the yishuv was trying to fashion. So the Knesset chose a date tied to resistance, not to death—it fit better with the Jewish narrative Israel was seeking to transmit.
Tommy Lapid, the father of the now central Yair Lapid and a survivor of the Budapest ghetto who ultimately became a well-known Israeli journalist and successful politician, recalled years after he’d come to Israel how veteran members of the yishuv essentially accused the survivors for what they had endured. “‘Why didn’t you fight back?’ they would ask. ‘Why did you go like sheep to the slaughter?’ They were First-Class Jews who took up arms and fought, while we were Second-Class Yids whom the Germans could annihilate without encountering resistance.”
Netanyahu Answers Pointed Questions from NBC’s Chuck Todd on ‘Meet the Press’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat in the hot seat Sunday (April 16) as NBC news anchor Chuck Todd fired pointed questions at him during an interview on “Meet the Press.”Book Review 'Everyday Hate', by Dave Rich
In the interview, the left-leaning NBC anchor exhibited barely disguised contempt and hostility for Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, openly sneering at him at several points.
Netanyahu was urged to hold a “snap election” on the contentious issue of the government’s planned judicial reforms, even though the government – elected last November – was elected by the majority of the country to carry out that overhaul.
The prime minister nevertheless courteously answered all the questions put to him, even smiling a few times.
So much for objective journalism.
Dave Rich began writing his masterful book The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti‑Semitism in 2011 as a doctoral thesis at Birkbeck, University of London, but it was fortuitously published in 2016 during the Labour antisemitism crisis.
Whereas The Left’s Jewish Problem was an academic exploration into the political and intellectual origins of contemporary hostility to Israel and antisemitism in the UK, the latest work by Rich, Director of Policy at the CST, Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism Is Built Into Our World And How You Can Change It, though no less erudite or well-researched, is more personal, and is accessible to readers of various levels of knowledge about the world’s longest hatred.
The book, though short and concise, is nothing if not ambitious. It explains much of the language, ideas and imagery that gave rise to ancient antisemitism, and how those anti-Jewish stereotypes are woven into contemporary rhetoric, culture, literature and politics – knowledge Rich hopes can help construct a revived societal defence against a racism which threatens not just Jews but society as a whole.
In addition to providing a dizzying number of examples of antisemitism his organisation recorded in a mere seven days before he began writing the book, Rich illustrates the scale of the problem by way of statistics. This includes a 2018 EU poll showing that 38% of Jews across 12 countries in Europe avoid going to places in their neighborhood because they don’t feel safe there as a Jew, while 27% of British Jews sometimes choose not to go to a Jewish event or site because they don’t feel safe. Further, in 2022, Jews (though representing less than a half of one percent of the population) were the victims of 22% of all religiously motivated hate crimes in England and Wales.
Also of interest: Though British Muslims, polls show, are 3.5 more likely as the general population to hold hardcore antisemitic attitudes, they – due to their small numbers – aren’t responsible for a significant percentage of the overall number of annual antisemitic incidents; And, that antisemitic attitudes are far more prevalent amongst youngest Britons than the older population.
The rules of antizionism were written in Moscow in the same way that the rules of tennis, boxing and football were written in Victorian England.
— David Hirsh (@DavidHirsh) April 17, 2023
Lots of people played antizionism, but it was made coherent by the antisemitic Stalinists. Others accepted their codification of it.
PMW: The PA and the Holocaust
When it comes to the Holocaust, the Palestinian Authority has a dilemma about which bogus narrative to adopt. On the one hand, the PA denies the Holocaust ever happened, or at the very least, that the numbers of Jews murdered were entirely exaggerated. On the other hand, the PA uses the Holocaust to compare Israel to the Nazis and to accuse Israel of conducting a Holocaust against the Palestinians.‘Anti-racist’ Yale hosts a cheerleader for Jew-killing and racial hatred
Over the years, Palestinian Media Watch has exposed scores of examples of the PA Holocaust denial, distortion and abuse.
One of the most outrageous lies the PA added this year was that Jews were trained by the Nazis in concentration camps to kill “without feeling anything” and that the Germans would deliberately free Jews from the concentration camps and “prepare them” for combat against Arabs in Palestine:
Researcher and author Aziz Al-Asa: “Many of the Jewish fighters during the Nakba (i.e., establishment of Israel, 1948) came from Germany… They were trained to carry out despicable acts of murder here without feeling anything, without using their humanity… Imagine that the Jewish soldiers used to kill and weep loudly… The Zionist movement reached an agreement with the German government that it would take the young people from the [concentration] camps, the young Jews, train them, and prepare them.”
[Official PA TV, Debunking the Zionist Narrative, Feb. 4, 2023]
Statements such as these do not appear in a vacuum. While PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is welcomed around the world as a respected leader, the reality is that Abbas is one of the vilest anti-Semites who blames the Jews for their own murder. Spewing one of the age-old tropes, according to Abbas, Jew hatred, centuries of massacres, and the Holocaust are not due to the Jewish religion but rather “due to their social role that was connected to usury, and banks, and so forth...”:
"Jews who migrated to eastern and western Europe were subjected to massacres by some state every 10 to 15 years from the 11th century until the Holocaust… Why did this happen?...
The hatred of the Jews is not due to their religion, but rather due to their social role… the Jewish problem that was common in all the states of Europe against the Jews was not due to their religion, but rather due to their social role that was connected to usury, and banks, and so forth..."
[Official PA TV, April 30, 2018]
Specifically, on Thursday, April 6, Yale sponsored a talk by Houria Bouteldja on “France and Whiteness.” This is the same Bouteldja who in March 2012, just after radical Islamist Mohammed Merah massacred a Rabbi and three children in Toulouse, France, publicly declared that “Mohammed Merah is me.”A Jewish teacher fights back against CAIR’s persecution
Bouteldja also wrote the 2016 book Whites, Jews, and Us, which, as one reviewer put it, “presents the dismantling of Israel as a priority, praises [ex-Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad for declaring that there are no homosexuals in Iran, and expresses unambiguous antisemitism.” The book assails “the Jew” for “willingness to meld into whiteness, to support his oppressor.” This may explain Bouteldja’s morbidly flippant claim that “killing an Israeli is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed.”
Boudeldja quoted with approval another writer to offer “a decolonial reading of the Nazi genocide,” in which she shockingly blamed the Jews for their near-extermination at the hands of the Nazis. With stunning historical illiteracy, she wrote: “They tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them. ... They absolved it, shut their eyes to it, [and] legitimized it, because until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples. ... They have cultivated that Nazism ... [and hence] are responsible for it.”
Bouteldja’s book also makes clear her hatred toward white people, declaring, “I hate the white good conscience. I curse it.” She defines the white person as: “I am the one who subjugates, pillages, steals, rapes, commits genocide," adding, “Every white person ... must take and steal ... like a gangster, a brute, or a thug.”
She cruelly dismisses the victims of 9/11, the July 7 London subway bombings, and the Charlie Hebdo murders as just dispensable whites: “Bombs explode in the subway. Towers ... collapse like a house of cards. The journalists of a famous magazine are decimated. ... [But] they are all white.”
This is not to argue that Yale should have canceled Bouteldja’s speech, notwithstanding her litany of hatred. She has a right to speak, and Yale has a right to host her. But this is a call to expose Yale’s corrosive double standards and to confront Yale with some important questions.
For example, how can you justify hosting such a hatemonger after having permitted the torrent of public abuse and institutional shaming of Nicholas and Erika Christakis over their innocuous statements?
And why did Yale schedule this antisemitic speaker to appear on the day of the second Passover Seder, which precluded most Jews’ ability to attend and challenge her?
Ironically, just a week earlier, Yale had hosted a talk by Dara Horn, author of the book People Love Dead Jews. Horn, a Jewish novelist, documented the fact that many institutions that commemorate the Holocaust still display substantial bias and hostility toward both Israel and observant Jews.
It seems that Yale, diverse, anti-racist Yale, also loves its dead Jews. The live ones, not so much.
Ibtihaj Muhammad made history as the first hijab-clad athlete on the U.S. Olympic team. But in court papers filed late Tuesday, a New Jersey elementary school teacher says Muhammad is also a liar.NGO Monitor: Belgium Hides Political NGO Funding on Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
In a series of Oct. 2021 social media posts, Muhammad accused veteran schoolteacher Tamar Herman of abusing a seven-year-old Muslim student by “forcibly” pulling off her hijab while “the young student resisted.”
Herman insists this didn’t happen and contacted Muhammad to offer her side of the story. But when Herman texted Muhammad to say her post was “completely false and terribly damaging,” Muhammad ignored her. Now, Muhammad says she had no idea who Herman was, which appears to be false.
The incident generated national attention when the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its New Jersey chapter demanded Herman be fired.
“Our children must be protected from anti-Muslim bigotry and abuse at school,” CAIR’s national office wrote. “The teacher who pulled a second grader’s hijab off in class must be fired immediately.”
School administrators were overwhelmed by the public response. The Investigative Project on Terrorism has seen dozens of social media posts that not only called for Herman to be fired but threatened her physical safety.
Herman hasn’t been allowed back in the classroom since.
IntroductionIndonesian Politician Says He Supports World Beach Games Despite Israeli Participation After Banning Israel From Island
According to Belgian law, the Belgian government must approve a Joint Strategic Framework (JSF) in order to distribute foreign development assistance around the world. JSF documents, formulated jointly by the Belgian NGOs that implement aid programs and approved by the Belgian government, outline common strategies for delivering aid. As described below, they reveal not only details of specific development projects, but also government-endorsed policy goals, including advocacy.
In general, transparency is an essential element of democracy, particularly related to the use of taxpayer funds. Given the use of public money for supposedly non-controversial humanitarian work, and the partnership between NGOs and the Belgian government to execute foreign policy, there is a reasonable expectation that the JSFs would be made public.
Yet, while the Belgian NGO umbrella organization ACODEV has published all of the JSF frameworks for 2022-2026 funding around the world, they refused to release the JSF for the West Bank and Gaza.
The Belgian Government Defends the Secrecy
On March 22, 2023, Belgium Minister for Development Cooperation Caroline Gennez responded to a parliamentary question posed by MP Kathleen Depoorter, stating that “The NGOs themselves decide, on the basis of their autonomy, whether or not the JSF is shared.” Doubling-down on the lack of transparency, Gennez suggested that MP Depoorter approach ACODEV in order to obtain information on the Belgian government’s West Bank and Gaza aid strategy. In other words, the Belgian government has ceded control over this aspect of its foreign policy to NGOs.
Gennez did acknowledge that under the JSF, Belgium will provide €8.7 million to five Belgian NGOs – Broederlijk Delen, Viva Salud, Solsoc, Caritas and Oxfam Novib – to focus on “the right to inclusive and quality education, training and lifelong learning opportunities, the right to health and the improvement of social determinants of health, international law, good governance and the role of civil society. The last priority concerns the right to food and resilient livelihoods in rural areas.”
Crucially, Gennez did not reveal the identities of local Palestinian and Israeli implementing partners for these projects. As NGO Monitor has previously documented, Belgium, via the Belgian organizations, has funded terror-linked Palestinian NGOs (see below).
After originally banning Israeli athletes from competing in Bali, Indonesia, the island’s governor has now expressed support for the 2023 ANOC World Beach Games, which Israel has been invited to participate in, that will be held on the island in August.
Governor Wayan Koster made the announcement after meeting with Indonesian Minister of Youth and Sports Dito Ariotedjo and the chairman of the Indonesian Olympics Committee (KOI) Raja Sapta Oktohari on April 14.
“We talked about how these World Beach Games will run smoothly in line with the Constitution … because there is already an agreement that Bali will be the host,” said Koster.
Indonesia does not have diplomatic relations with Israel.
A week earlier, Koster said he would refuse to allow Israeli athletes from entering the island for the 2023 World Beach Games, the third largest multi-sport event in the world that will take place from Aug. 5-12. He also announced in March that he would ban an Israeli soccer team from competing in Bali in the 2023 FIFA U-20 World Cup. As a result, FIFA stripped Indonesia of hosting the competition, also after protests took place in the country’s capital against Israel’s participation in the World Cup.
1/These popular chants make it very clear: for the anti-Israel movement there's no room for dialogue or coexistence -- only death, violence and destruction. pic.twitter.com/D7yFRFEqtJ
— Canary Mission (@canarymission) April 16, 2023
3/"We don't want zionists here" = calling for the expulsion of the vast majority of American Jews.
— Canary Mission (@canarymission) April 16, 2023
An excellent set of events for antisemites in Scotland.
— habibi (@habibi_uk) April 17, 2023
Stars include the notorious antisemite Tony Greenstein, the extremist Yvonne Ridley, and arch hater Asa Winstanley. Hosted by trade unionists, Quakers, and Augustine Church in Edinburgh. https://t.co/OfV9GPA5E3
1- A Druze citizen of #Israel CAN become PM/president.
— Hussain Abdul-Hussain (@hahussain) April 16, 2023
A Druze citizen of #Lebanon CANNOT become PM/president.
2- A Sunni or a Christian citizen of Israel CAN become PM/president.
A Sunni or Christian citizen of #Iraq CANNOT become PM or president.
=> @HRW, @amnestyus,…
We will just leave this here: https://t.co/HJXKB99zdL https://t.co/Laj7Rfdhep pic.twitter.com/x94U2YCwMG
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) April 17, 2023
I dare Zachary to come to Israel and tell a random Mizrahi Jew that they’re an Arab. It’ll smack the social justice double standards right out of him. https://t.co/NYDiosXVZR
— Blake Flayton (@blakeflayton) April 17, 2023
Update: Berklee School of Music student Fred Felgate has issued an apology. pic.twitter.com/ObOd3zXwns
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) April 16, 2023
How Media Outlets Failed Amid Heightened Tensions During Passover, Ramadan & Easter
The religious festivals of Passover, Easter and Ramadan coincided this year at a time of already heightened tensions in Israel following a spike in terror attacks in recent months.UK Paper Features Gaza Journalist Who Wrote Pro-Terrorist, Antisemitic Social Media Posts
As clashes between Palestinian rioters and Israeli police erupted on the Temple Mount in early April, rocket attacks by terrorists in Gaza and Lebanon threatened to spark another war.
On April 7, Israelis reacted in horror following the news that Palestinian terrorists had murdered Israeli sisters Maia Dee, 20, and Rina Dee, 15, in a shooting attack that also claimed the life of their mother Lucy Dee, 48, when the family’s car was hit by a hail of bullets as they were driving through the northern Jordan Valley.
As flawed coverage spiked online and elsewhere, HonestReporting responded in real time, calling out the worst bias.
Al Jazeera demonstrated its deep-rooted anti-Israel bias in its reportage of the attack on the Dees, including initial stories that referred to the murdered sisters as “settlers” in what could only be viewed as offering tacit justification for their murders, and describing the Palestinian perpetrator as merely aiming at a vehicle:
The Guardian has been scrutinized frequently over its uneven and, at times, outright partisan reportage on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.An overview of BBC website reporting on Pessah rocket attacks
In the last month alone, HonestReporting has called out and complained about numerous pieces published by the left-wing British newspaper, including an “investigation” that simultaneously sought to downplay Palestinian terrorism and conflated the deaths of terrorists with that of their victims, and a story comprising mostly agency copy that had been carefully edited to twist the facts.
Our latest analysis of The Guardian’s Israel-related output has uncovered another disturbing finding: the outlet has worked with a Palestinian journalist with a history of praising terrorists who were behind several horrific terror attacks that killed dozens of innocent Israeli civilians.
Gaza City-based Aseel Mousa was bylined alongside The Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent Bethan McKernan on an April 3 piece, “‘I am proud of my work’: the women pushing boundaries in Gaza,” which tells the story of women seeking employment opportunities in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, which is farcically labeled a “highly conservative Palestinian territory” — an interesting way of describing a place where LGBT+ individuals are jailed and where marital rape is legal.
Mousa, whose work has been featured in the Palestine Chronicle and Electronic Intifada, has posted numerous messages of support for terrorists on her personal social media accounts, such as one in which she described the Gilboa prison escapees as “brave heroes,” and another which said that Arabs should be “liberate[d]” from “Jews.”
Notably – but not surprisingly – over a hundred attacks on civilian targets during a national holiday were not described by the BBC as terrorism in any of its reports. Where the identity of those responsible for the attacks was mentioned, the BBC used the word ‘militants’ and in some of these reports Hamas – which is designated as a terrorist organisation by the UK – was euphemistically referred to as a “Palestinian militant group”.Toronto Star Columnist Rick Salutin Demeans Judaism’s Holiest Site As Merely A Place Where “Some Religious Jews Want To Restore Animal Sacrifice”
Throughout the four days of coverage of attacks from three fronts, BBC audiences saw no reporting from any of the regions targeted and did not hear any personal stories from Israelis who had their Pessah holiday disrupted by Palestinian rocket attacks, not least the family who suffered a direct hit on their home in Sderot.
As we see, much of the BBC’s reporting promotes the notion of linkage between rocket attacks launched from three fronts and earlier events on Temple Mount. However, as noted here previously, BBC reporting on those earlier events completely erased the highly relevant issue of Hamas incitement from the picture presented to its audiences, meaning that they lack understanding of the broader context of what the BBC describes as “tensions” and the factors that link Palestinian rioting on Temple Mount and rocket attacks from three different locations.
In early April, midway through the holiday of Ramadan, and just before the onset of the Passover and Easter holidays, Palestinian riots began in Jerusalem’s Old City. There, as many as 400 Palestinians holed themselves up in the Al Aqsa Mosque, built atop the ancient Temple Mount, where they stockpiled weapons for a showdown with Israeli police.
When Israeli police attempted to make arrests, they were met with an outburst of Palestinian violence. Before long, spurred on by anti-Israel incitement falsely accusing the Jewish State of desecrating the Al Aqsa Mosque, Palestinian terrorism had claimed the lives of four innocent civilians in Israel – an Italian tourist, as well as an Israeli mother and her two daughters, aged 15 and 20, who were gunned down by a Palestinian terrorist as they drove on a highway.
While the violence has since quieted, the riots and ensuing terrorism served as a reminder that when anti-Israel incitement is spread, accusing Israel of false crimes against the Palestinians, it often results in the deaths of innocent Israeli civilians.
It is in that vein that Rick Salutin’s recent April 14 column in the Toronto Star entitled: “Is a potential civil war brewing among Israeli Jews?,” is so irresponsible.
Salutin, a Contributing Columnist for the Toronto Star, grossly understated the Jewish People’s history to their ancient sites when he referred to the Temple Mount as being a place where “some religious Jews want to restore animal sacrifice and from which Muslims traditionally believe Muhammad ascended to heaven.”
In fact, the Temple Mount is the holiest place in the world for Jews because it was where both ancient Jewish Temples were built – the first destroyed by the Babylonian Empire in 586 BCE, and the second destroyed by the Roman Empire in 68/70 CE. These are not beliefs; they are empirical facts supported by copious amounts of historical evidence.
We couldn't agree with you more, @davidmdraiman
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) April 16, 2023
Thank you for using your platform to bring awareness to the dangers of biased media coverage from these outlets. https://t.co/dYM1dhjeuD
Likewise, should NPR be entitled to erase Israel out of apparent convenience?https://t.co/T0r5XXbnNn pic.twitter.com/bOHyDF4AgI
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) April 17, 2023
?? A huge thank you to @elonmusk for calling out Al Jazeera as "government-funded media.”
— Jacob Baime (@JacobBaime) April 17, 2023
Your decisions are vital in combating anti-Jewish hate and promoting transparency on Twitter. Keep leading the way! ????#TruthMatters #StandWithIsrael @IsraelCampus pic.twitter.com/T7lTWGGuuv
New study: Visibly identifiable Jews most targeted by antisemites in West
On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, a new report shows a sharp increase in the number of antisemitic incidents in the United States and other Western countries in 2022, with ultra-Orthodox Jews the main victims of the assaults.Visibly identifiable Jews main target of increasing anti-Semitic attacks
The Annual Report on Antisemitism Worldwide – 2022 was conducted by the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Israel's Tel Aviv University (TAU). It was published in collaboration with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which recorded nearly 3,700 antisemitic incidents in the United States last year, compared to 2,717 in 2021 – a record year in its own right. "Physical attacks, which are usually not premeditated, tend to occur in a small number of areas in major urban centers on the street or on public transportation," it said.
It found that visibly identifiable Jews – particularly Haredim – are the main victims of antisemitic assaults in the West, including beatings, being spat on, and having objects thrown at them. New York City recorded the most assaults of cities worldwide, and London saw the most attacks in Europe.
Meanwhile, there was a decline in the number of attacks in several other countries like France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
"The fight against antisemitism requires targeted policing, prosecution, and education campaigns in the areas where attacks are most prevalent," Professor Uriya Shavit, head of the center at Tel Aviv University, said.
Miami, FL - a Jewish man’s car is graffitied with a swastika and foul language outside the kosher eatery Zak the Baker earlier today. pic.twitter.com/QcQvtel3Df
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) April 16, 2023
Wiesenthal Center urges Moldova to remove antisemite, Nazi monuments
The Simon Wiesenthal Center turned to Moldovan President Maia Sandu with an urgent request to remove two monuments that honor "fanatic Romanian antisemites and Nazi collaborators" and "commemorate events which led to... mass murder" in a letter sent on Sunday.‘Der Jude!’ An Exclusive Glimpse into the World’s Largest Collection of Antisemitic Artifacts
The first monument is a bust that was recently placed in Moldova's capital Chisinau, in the Alley of Classics in Stephan the Great Central Park. It depicts former Romanian Prime Minister Octavian Goga, who in his time enacted laws that deprived a third of the country's Jews of their citizenship and co-founded the National Christian Party, which carried a Swastika in its emblem and carried out antisemitic violence - "a notorious antisemite," according to Zuroff.
The Romanian government recently removed a bust of Goga for the above-mentioned reasons, Zuroff added.
The second monument, which the center's Director of Eastern European Affairs Dr. Efraim Zuroff calls "extremely offensive and insulting," is located in the Valea Morilor Park in Chisinau. It is part of a larger memorial, which commemorates the "liberation" of the Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina regions by the Romanian army, in the process of which 150,000 of the former 205,000 Jews of Bessarabia were murdered.
It was a dreary afternoon on July 30, 1897, when Ernst Bergmann, a German tourist on vacation in the spa town of Marienbad, mailed a postcard to a friend of his named Gustav Conradt, a resident of the city of Danzig in Prussia.‘Holocaust distortion is rising worldwide’
Bergmann reported that he and his wife were responding well to the health treatments they had received at Marienbad’s famous mineral springs, which the well-heeled European bourgeoisie of that time would visit annually, but that the weather was “dreadful; it rains incessantly and it is quite chilly.” Far worse than the damp and cold, however, was the profusion of unsavory visitors to the spa.
“There are thousands of those depicted on this postcard, which isn’t a pleasant sight at all,” Bergmann grumbled. Indeed, the front of the postcard could not have been clearer; under the legend “Greetings from Marienbad” was a caricature of three well-dressed, hook-nosed Jews cloistered together in the street in deep conversation, as though they were hatching a conspiracy.
The European continent has, of course, been transformed almost beyond recognition since Bergmann dispatched his postcard. For one thing, Marienbad is no longer a part of an Austro-Hungarian Empire which ceased to exist over a century ago; now known as Mariánské Lázně, it is located in the Czech Republic. For another, Danzig is now the Polish city of Gdańsk, and has been so since the end of World War II. But what has remained consistent is the presence of the casual, demonizing antisemitism expressed so readily in Bergmann’s greeting to his friend; as anyone who followed the profusion of antisemitic conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 pandemic knows only too well, the postcards bearing images that demean and insult Jews have effectively been digitized for the era of social media.
Holocaust distortion and trivialization and banalization are on the rise around the globe, even as outright denial is relegated to the fringes of society, the head of Yad Vashem says.Ian Thorpe’s push to eliminate bigotry from the world
The remarks come at a time when multiple European countries seek to whitewash their roles in World War II by highlighting the heroes among their countrymen while obscuring or outright denying the actions of collaborators who participated in the murder of six million Jews.
“The good news is that outright Holocaust denial is today marginal,” Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, said in an interview with JNS ahead of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday evening/Tuesday daytime. “No serious person will deny that the Holocaust happened except in lunatic fringes on social media [for example] in Iran or Malaysia.”
“On the other hand, we see a very worrying rise in Holocaust distortion which is no less disturbing,” he added.
Dayan said that multiple governments and groups in European countries are actively promoting an outright “historical fallacy” whereby their countries only helped Jews during the Holocaust while denying their people’s collaboration with Germany.
“They highlight the Righteous Among the Nations while obscuring or denying that there were many more collaborators than righteous,” he said, referring to the honor bestowed by Yad Vashem upon non-Jews who saved Jews at the risk of their own lives.
“This distortion is an affront to the victims,” Dayan said.
Former Olympic swimmer Ian Thorpe has opened up on the bigotry he has faced in his life in a raw and emotional interview with Neil Mitchell, who claims he’s “never heard Ian Thorpe like this before”.Portraits of Hope and Resilience
Thorpe is currently in Poland with educational program on the Holocaust called March of the Living and spoke on his experiences with homophobia and bigotry as an openly gay man.
“If it happens to me, it can happen to anyone else,” Thorpe said.
“No matter how it might seem, this is not a book about the Holocaust,” B.A. Van Sise writes as the opening line of his recently released book, Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust. “This is a story of overcoming.” The book is large and heavy, both in weight and in essence. In it, Van Sise shares the stories—and portraits—of 90 Holocaust survivors.551 Holocaust survivors made aliyah in 2022; 52,513 made aliyah in total
Van Sise began working on what would become Invited to Life while he was a photojournalist at The Village Voice. “I pitched my editor at the time, I said I want to do a photo series exploring the lives of a dozen American refugees who came here after the Second World War,” he said. “I reached out to the Museum of Jewish Heritage to find a dozen survivors. And pretty soon thereafter I had photographed 37. And while I was in the process of this project, my absolutely beloved Village Voice collapsed.”
The director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage reached out to Van Sise and asked if he was interested in using his portraits to do an exhibition on the exterior of the museum. Van Sise agreed. “I didn’t want to have done it for nothing,” he said. After a planned six-month exhibition, Eyewitness: Photographs by B.A. Van Sise stayed up for four years.
During that time, Van Sise moved on to other projects. Then came COVID-19.
“When the pandemic hit, I was absolutely ruined,” said Van Sise. He had been working on travel assignments, and photographing a few weddings a year, so when travel and weddings were put on hold, he started feeling sorry for himself. “I started thinking really obsessively about the survivors that I had met,” said Van Sise. “Not about the experience that they all had, but the fact that these folks had lost everything—more than I could imagine—and they still found a way forward and had forged a future. And I wanted to learn more from them, and share what I learned from them.” And that’s how Invited to Life came to be.
By focusing on the stories of overcoming, finding hope, and redefining what it means to survive, Van Sise hoped to rewrite the narrative many people are used to reading about the Holocaust. “I wanted to explore what happened to these folks after they lost everything, which is a story that most don’t tell,” he said. “They lost their families, and homes. They had to start completely and totally anew, and nobody ever really talks about that. I wanted to explore how they got from these terrible unhappy stories to these very long ever-afters. And if you meet survivors, you know, they’re pretty joyous people. They’re very strong people. I wanted to explore how that happened.”
A total of 52,513 Holocaust survivors from around the world made aliyah to Israel since the establishment of the state, according to data by the Aliyah and Integration Ministry obtained by The Jerusalem Post in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day.Yad Vashem: Torchlighters on Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day 2023
In addition, in 2022, 551 Holocaust survivors made aliyah, mainly due to the war in Ukraine.
According to the ministry’s data, half of the 52,513 Holocaust survivors who made aliyah to Israel, 27,015, immigrated from the former Soviet Union (FSU) and more than half of the Holocaust survivor olim from FSU immigrated from Ukraine.
According to the ministry, since the large wave of aliyah from the FSU, beginning 1989, the year with the most Holocaust survivors olim was 1990, during which 8,593 Holocaust survivors immigrated to Israel, the vast majority of them came from the FSU. During 1990, only one survivor immigrated from Ukraine, 17 from France, 45 from Romania, 14 from Bulgaria, 6 from Poland and one from Venezuela.
The year in which the lowest number of Holocaust survivors immigrated to Israel was 2020: A total of about 150 Holocaust survivors immigrated, mainly from Ukraine, Russia and France. This is probably due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Why did so many Holocaust survivors move to Israel in 2022?
During 2022, mainly due to the war between Russia and Ukraine, 551 Holocaust survivors made aliyah, most of them from Ukraine and Russia but also from France, as well as from Morocco and Germany. One single Holocaust survivor made aliyah in 2022 from countries such as Moldova, Canada, Argentina and Spain.
Of the Holocaust survivors who made aliyah in 2022, 222, were aged 75 to 84, 329 were aged 85 and above. 324 of these survivors were women and 227 were men.
Each year, six Holocaust survivors are chosen to light torches at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins on Monday, April 17, in memory of the six million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust.'Humans of the Holocaust': Exhibit tells stories of survivors, descendants
Robert (Reuven) Bonfil was born in 1937 in Karditsa, in the Thessaly region of Greece. In 1941, Italy occupied Thessaly and the Germans arrived in 1943. Robert and his mother hid in a coal bunker under the house. Later Robert and his parents hid in the home of a Greek Orthodox family in Apidea. When German troops approached the village, they hid in a cabin in the mountains. Robert immigrated with his family to Israel in 1968. He is Professor Emeritus of Medieval and Renaissance Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Efim Gimelshtein was born in 1935 in Minsk in the Soviet Union (Belarus). A month after the German occupation, Efim and his family were imprisoned in the Minsk ghetto. His mother's brother-in-law, Pinchas Dobin, and his sons dug a hiding place under their house next to the Jewish cemetery in the ghetto. In October 1943, when the Germans began to liquidate the Minsk ghetto, 26 people entered the bunker, including Efim, where they sat in almost complete darkness for nine months, suffering from thirst, hunger, weakness and disease. On July 3, 1944, after Minsk was liberated and the group was discovered by Soviet soldiers, only 13 had survived. In 1992, Efim and his wife Rivka immigrated to Israel.
Tova Gutstein was born in Warsaw in 1933. After the establishment of the ghetto in October 1940, Tova would go out of the ghetto through the sewers and beg for food from local Poles or collect produce from the fields. She was outside the ghetto when the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising broke out. She reached the forest and was taken in by partisans. When the partisans went on missions, she would climb into a ditch covered with branches. One day, the partisans did not return and Tova was left alone in the forest until the end of the war. Tova immigrated to Israel in 1948 and became a hospital nurse.
Ben-Zion Raisch was born in 1932 in Cernauti, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine). In July 1941, the Romanians and the Germans occupied Cernauti and the Jews were confined in a ghetto. He would crawl under the ghetto fences and collect sugar beets that would fall from freight wagons in order to survive. Using knitting needles he made from a barbed-wire fence, he and his mother knitted socks, gloves and sweaters for the villagers in exchange for potatoes. In March 1944, the Red Army occupied the area and in January 1946 Ben-Zion arrived in Eretz Israel with his mother. He studied at the Technion and worked at Rafael for many years, where he was involved in the development of electronic warfare.
Malka Rendel was born in 1927 in Nagyecsed, Hungary. In 1944, Malka and her family were deported to Auschwitz in a cattle car, where most of the family did not survive the selection. Months later, as the Red Army approached, Malka and two sisters were forced on a death march to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. They were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where her sisters died. They were thrown through the window onto a pile of corpses. "That memory still haunts me," Malka says. After liberation, Malka boarded a refugee ship to Eretz Israel, but was caught and imprisoned in the British detention camps in Cyprus. After reaching Israel, she became a teacher.
Judith Sohlberg was born in Amsterdam in 1935. In September 1943, Judith and her family were deported to the Westerbork transit camp. Every Tuesday, deportations left for the east and the family was sent to Bergen-Belsen. In April 1945, the family members were put on a train that traveled without a destination and many of the prisoners died on the train before the Red Army arrived. In Switzerland, Judith met Saul, a classmate of hers who had been hidden with Christian farmers in the Netherlands. The two married and immigrated to Israel in 1959.
An elderly man appears in a photo where his head is surrounded by bullets, as if he is swimming in a pool of ammunition. It turns out that this man is actually the last survivor of the Babyn Yar massacre and one of the principal personalities of a new exhibition displaying Holocaust survivors in a humane and creative way.Every victim has a name: New Yad Vashem display inscribes memory of Holocaust victims
This photo of Michael Sidko is part of a new photography exhibition that will open at the German Embassy in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, titled Humans of the Holocaust.
The exhibition tells the extraordinary stories of 40 Holocaust survivors as well as second- and third-generation survivors. The exhibition engages viewers with the human stories behind every photo, and by extension, helps them to imagine the millions of untold stories. Telling the story of the Holocaust for new generations
“I started the Humans of the Holocaust project after I saw a survey conducted by the Claims Conference that revealed that over two-thirds of millennials have never heard of Auschwitz, and that half could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto,” explained Erez Kaganovitz, the photographer. “Those numbers send a shiver down my spine, and I realized that I have to do something in order to better inform and educate people about the universal lessons of the Holocaust.”
Kaganovitz realized that “we have to ignite a great spark of curiosity in those Millennials and Gen Zers when trying to better educate and inform them about the Holocaust,” and that is exactly what he’s trying to do in this project.
The stories that he’s collected are inspiring and optimistic, and they are portrayed in ways that are unexpected and moving.
“It has a global message where you don’t have to be Jewish in order to engage with it,” he said.
“It’s not a ‘classic Holocaust’ project, but rather a project that makes you want to engage with the human story behind it,” he continued. “It’s an optimistic project where you can see how the human spirit can overcome the direst of times.”
Sidko, the last survivor of the Babi Yar massacre, is quoted saying that “over the course of two days on September 29-30, 1941, Nazi Germany’s forces and Ukrainian accomplices massacred 33,771 Jews.” He added that among those massacred “were my infant brother Volodya, my baby sister Clara and my mother. Even though I was only six years old, I still remember every gruesome detail. I wish I didn’t but the sights, sounds and smell of gunpowder still haunt me to this day.”
Dugo Litner, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, was photographed posing with a yellow-colored balloon in the shape of a Jewish star, and the word “Jude” was written on it. Litner became famous in Israel, mainly among youngsters, since they annually celebrate the day he was freed from Auschwitz by eating a falafel, as he has been doing for decades. He is quoted in the exhibition saying that “I am taking ownership of the symbol that turned me into a subhuman and turning it into an optimistic and smiling creation.”
Every Holocaust victim has a name, and at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, a new permanent display seeks to humanize and remember each individual, with a massive book that contains over 4.8 million names.
i24NEWS correspondent Mael Benoliel takes us to the exhibit and introduces us to Ephraim Mol, a survivor of the Holocaust whose parents are inscribed in The Book of Names.
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