Admissions against interest

By Dina Kraft

Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM (AP) — An Israeli army officer stood before two sculptures, one depicting Jews trudging toward Nazi slaughter and the other portraying Jewish rebels, proud and muscular.

The officer told young recruits visiting Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, that Israel used to emphasize heroism in remembering the Holocaust but that today the victims of the Nazis who did not fight back are no longer scorned.

As the Jewish state enters a new century, Israel grapples with what to remember. Next week, immediately after Tuesday’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yad Vashem will break ground for a new $25 million museum that will reflect some of the changes in how the story of the Holocaust is being told.

James Young, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst who has written on Holocaust memorials, said the original Yad Vashem, established in 1953, reflected the need of the young embattled state to tell a Holocaust story that would lead to the creation of Israel.

“Now that the state is secure, a new generation is very willing to re-examine founding myths. Other people are coming into view and the plight of other histories is coming to Yad Vashem,” Young said.

[…]

Still, the murder of 6 million Jews during the Nazi occupation of Europe remains a cornerstone of Israeli identity and collective memory. “We don’t need to forget it, but (need to) decide what we want to remember,” said Tom Segev, an Israeli author who wrote about the impact of the Holocaust on Israel.

“We are arguing about what the Holocaust tells us,” Segev said.

Those involved in the museum say Yad Vashem remains devoted to telling the story of the Jewish Holocaust. “It’s a Jewish museum in the Land of Israel,” said Avner Shalev, the director of Yad Vashem.

[…]

AP-NY-04-28-00 1545EDT

By Mark Lavie, Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM (AP) — During the Holocaust, ultra-Orthodox American rabbis focused on saving several hundred Polish Talmudic scholars, ignoring the suffering of millions of other Jews who were eventually murdered by the Nazis, a new book charges.

The rabbis, organized as the Rescue Committee, feared that if the tiny group of scholars and their students were lost, the Jewish religion would vanish with them.

The group’s narrow goal brought it into conflict with mainstream American Jewish groups working to rescue as many Jews as possible and to influence reluctant American politicians to take action, wrote Holocaust historian and Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff.

The book, “The Response of Orthodox Jewry in the United States to the Holocaust,” is being released Tuesday to coincide with Israel’s annual memorial day for the 6 million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust.

Rabbi Menahem Porush, chairman of the Israel branch of Agudat Israel, a worldwide ultra-Orthodox group, said it was only natural for the rabbis to try to rescue those close to them.

“No one has to teach us, who live according to the Torah, the meaning of ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,'” he said.

Zuroff documents how the rabbis funneled scarce funds to scholars already safely in exile so they could maintain full-time Talmud studies, even as other Jews were being killed in death camps.

Menahem Brod of the ultra-Orthodox Habad movement said the refugees needed the money to survive.

According to Zuroff’s book, the Rescue Committee extorted money from mainstream Jewish groups, employed shady practices to transfer funds to Europe and even violated the Jewish Sabbath for its cause.

The Rescue Committee threatened to mount a rival fund-raising drive unless local Jewish federations handed over cash. Some complied, Zuroff wrote, but others refused, arguing that the mainstream rescue campaign would include the scholars anyway.

[…]

PARIS, March 30 (Reuters) — The head of France’s main Jewish religious body is under pressure to resign for writing to a long-time rival: “If Auschwitz had not existed, it is likely you would have invented it,” Jewish sources said on Thursday.

Jean Kahn, president of the Central Israelite Consistory of France, made the comment in an angry letter to Moise Cohen, president of the consistory for the Paris area, they told Reuters.

The consistory was created by Napoleon over 200 years ago to coordinate Jewish religious affairs with the state. Some 76,000 Jews from France died in wartime death camps, mostly Auschwitz.[…]

March 13, 2000 / 6 Adar II, 5760

Jewish World Review [[email protected]]

Debbie Schlussel

www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/schlussel.html

[…]

My mother was born in Mr. Haacke’s country in the 1940’s, in a camp called Bergen Belsen, where my grandparents were prisoners under Hitler, because they were Jewish…

[…]

Holocaust on the block

A new exhibit of artifacts is part of a growing debate over what some say is the commercialization of the tragedy

Vancouver — […]

This exhibition [Fragments, at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre] is occurring at a particularly febrile time in the history of the Holocaust, and not just because of the presence of Joerg Haider’s Freedom Party in the new Austrian government, the libel trial in Britain of Holocaust denier David Irving, or the debate over the merits of the films Life is Beautiful, Mr. Death and Train of Life. The Holocaust — an event which some have deemed to be all but inexpressible in its horror — has been undergoing a kind of commercialization, particularly in the last 15 years. Recently, for example, a postcard written by Anne Frank before the Second World War and her death in a Nazi camp was sold at an auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars to a museum in Los Angeles.

Fifty-five years after the liberation of the death camps, the relative scarcity of these Holocaust objets and the creation of Holocaust memorial centres in cities like Washington, Berlin and Jerusalem have created tremendous pressure for authentication. The Vancouver education centre, for instance, includes a counterfeit Star of David armband in its current exhibition. Roberta Kremer, director of the VHEC, says the armband, found in an antique store in Bellingham, Wash., with other seeming Holocaust “memorabilia,” has been artificially aged, probably with shoe polish. Moreover, authentic Holocaust artifacts are rare and those not in institutions are usually in the possession of survivors or their families.

[…]

Elliot Dlin, a director of The Valley of the Communities, one of the sites at Yad Vashem, who is currently writing a doctoral dissertation at the University of British Columbia, admitted that the quest to acquire Holocaust objets is “on the edge of bad taste…”

[…]

Besides the notebook of Rebecca Teitelbaum, there’s one written by Shia Moser who taught Yiddish in a Polish orphanage in Peterswaldau after the war. “The children had experienced so much tragedy,” he explained. “I thought that their memories should be preserved.” He talked to the children after his classes and recorded what they told him about their families and all that had happened to them.

In December, 1999, Jack Kuper, a Toronto filmmaker, came to the VHEC to research a documentary. There, he found a photograph of the Polish war orphans from Peterswaldau and recognized the place. Then he asked how they had come by the picture. He was told that Shia Moser, who had taught at the orphanage had donated it. Staff at the VHEC were also able to tell him that Moser was alive and living in Vancouver and, though 93-years-old, in good health. Kuper remembered his teacher vividly but had never known what happened to him. A meeting was quickly arranged. It was highly emotional. Moser was astonished by the turn of events. He had never known what happened to any of his orphans either.

Source:

CLAUDIA CORNWALL
Special to The Globe and Mail
February 22, 2000
www.globeandmail.ca/gam/
TopGlobeReview/20000222/TAHOLO.html

Israel Expresses Concern for Talks

By Dina Kraft

Associated Press Writer

Sunday, Feb. 20, 2000; 1:13 p.m. EST

JERUSALEM —- A recent surge of anti–Israel rhetoric in the Arab world prompted Israeli leaders to express concern Sunday for the future of the peace process.

Following a breakdown in peace talks, Arab media has compared Israelis to Nazis and attacked them with imagery conventionally associated with the worst anti-Semitic excesses.

“We have to be concerned about the question of how the Arab world perceives Israel,” Foreign Minister David Levy told Israeli radio. “Is the wave which has arisen today an expression of that hidden thought in the hearts of many people there?”

Prime Minister Ehud Barak referred to the phenomenon in the weekly Cabinet meeting, saying that such “incitement” does not contribute to the peace process.

Peace talks with Syria broke down last month, and talks with the Palestinians foundered this month — in both cases over Israeli territorial concessions.

The breakdown in Syrian talks was followed by an escalation of clashes between Israeli troops and guerrillas in Lebanon, where Syria is the main power.

As the violence escalated, official Syrian media accused Israel of carrying out Nazi-like strikes, and of grossly exaggerating the Holocaust to win international support.

Echoing his Syrian patrons, Lebanese President Emile Lahoud condemned Israeli policies as “crimes inherited from the Nazi school.”

In a country where as much as a third of the Jewish population comprises Holocaust survivors or their descendants, such language cuts deeply into the national psyche — and could hamper Barak’s efforts to garner public support for eventual peace deals.

“From a historic point of view it is horrific, a deception,” Shevah Weiss, a Holocaust survivor and a former speaker of parliament who backs the peace process, said of the comparisons with the Nazis.

“Waves of Hatred,” read the front page headline in Sunday’s Maariv daily over an article that said Barak was “embarrassed” by the outbursts.

The rhetoric could stem, in part, from frustration with the sympathy Israel enjoys in the West because of the Holocaust, when Nazis and their allies in German-occupied Europe murdered 6 million Jews.

The Arabs “have no idea what to do with the fact of the Holocaust and that it gets tremendous sympathy, and have no effective way to deal with it,” said Barry Rubin, a Syria expert at Bar Ilan University.

Israeli anger is exacerbated when such images appear in countries with which it has already signed peace treaties.

A cartoon in the pro-government Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram, depicted Barak standing on an Arab boy to reach an Austrian ballot box, which he is defacing with a swastika.

The suggestion is that Barak’s condemnation of the inclusion of Joerg Haider’s anti-immigrants party in the Austrian coalition is hypocritical, given Israel’s treatment of the Lebanese.

Such images “among those with whom we are at peace, who compare us to Hitler and cheer Haider, suggests that there is something very deeply (wrong) here,” Levy said.

Levy said Israel was also stung by the support Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak expressed for the Lebanese in a high-profile weekend visit, in which he said guerrilla attacks that have killed seven Israeli troops in recent weeks are “a result, not a cause,” of Israel’s presence in Lebanon.

Barak dispatched two of his top advisers to Egypt on Sunday, apparently seeking answers about the Mubarak visit.

The heated rhetoric also traditionally precedes peace moves, said Gerald Steinberg, another Syria expert at Bar Ilan, as a way for Arab leaders to preserve credibility.

“It is a way of … maintaining the Arab honor,” he said.

The Arabs, too, read a lot into Israeli rhetoric. On Sunday, state-run Damascus Radio called on Levy to apologize for saying “the soil of Lebanon will burn” if attacks on Israeli soldiers persist.

Inspector Clouseau of the Yad Vashem Gendarmerie: The Case of the Wily Dictator

By Sam Schulman ([email protected])

Jewish World Review ([email protected])

February 15, 2000

www.jewishworldreview.com/0200/clouseau.html

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT that the Holocaust Establishment had done its worst to trivialize the shoah, put it in competition with other massacres in the victimization marketplace, and make the world loathe the very word, something comes along to make you sit up and take notice.

In last Wednesday’s New York Times, 25 of our great and good, including Elie Wiesel, Emile Fackenheim, Abraham Foxman, and Franklin Littell, put their signatures to a bold appeal to the President of Syria, Hafez al-Assad.

Suppose you were invited to take your place on the list of signatories (which you won’t be. You’re not good enough!). Now, let’s say that writing a check to the Sulzbergers for upwards of 40 grand were to attract the undivided attention of Assad-which it wouldn’t. What would you say to him, if you knew he would read the 300 words you might write?

[…]

But the chance to ask Assad these questions would not be interesting to you if you are a Holocaust professional, like Saul Friedman, Zsusanna Ozsvath, or Michael Berenbaum. What rouses such men and women to take hold of the ends of the earth that the wicked might be shaken out of it? It’s not murder, not terror, not war, but holocaust-denial. President Assad has allowed Tishrun, the official Syrian government newspaper to call the Holocaust “a myth.” And — what’s more — this isn’t the first time! The signatories of the letter are awfully sore at President Assad-so angry that they don’t hesitate to denounce this outrage “in the strongest possible terms.”

Like Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, these worthies appear on the crime scene-so concerned with showing off their competence that they fail to notice another dead body in the closet. Has our obsession with the Holocaust obliterated every other consideration? […]

[…]

I think it’s time to say it aloud: There are things in the world that are worse than denying the Holocaust.

JWR contributor Sam Schulman is deputy editor of Taki’s Top Drawer, appearing in New York Press, and was formerly publisher of Wigwag and a professor of English at Boston University.