Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, was ushered in at 8 PM Wednesday night at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. The central theme of this year’s (April 19) commemoration is “My Brother’s Keeper—Jewish Solidarity During the Holocaust.”
At the ceremony, attended by Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, six survivors lit torches representing the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust:
Batsheva Dagan, born in Lodz, pretended to be Aryan and worked as a housemaid for a Nazi family until she was turned in. She survived six prisons, the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Death March. Dagan is a child psychologist who educates the young about the Holocaust.
Eliezer Lev-Zion helped rescue 36 children as a member of the Jewish resistance in France. After the war, he worked as a Jewish National Fund forester and managed immigrant absorption centers in Israel.
Anatoly Rubin, born in Minsk, evaded the Nazis but served six years in Soviet labor camps on trumped-up charges that included conspiring to kill Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. He was a Prisoner of Zion until he immigrated to Israel in 1969.
Chasia Vardi escaped into the forests as her companions were lined up at the edge of a pit and subsequently shot by Nazi soldiers. She survived with the help of a Pole later named a Righteous Gentile. Vardi went on to help found Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak.
Artemis Miron of Greece survived Auschwitz and the Death March. She is a tour guide.
Yehuda Widawski, a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz, has been involved since 1978 in restoring the Lodz Jewish cemetery.
YOM HASHOAH, 70 YEARS LATER:
RESISTANCE, DIGNITY, TENACITY
Baruch Cohen
In memory of beloved Malca z’l
It is known that the great Jewish historian Simon Dubnow was taken to his death in Riga. At the time he turned to his fellow Jews and urged them: “Schreibt un Farschreibt”—Write and Record.
This injunction, to record the message for future generations, resonates with a strong, powerful call. Here are other examples of moral resistance and symbolic acts by our people during those years of brutality and terror:
Herman Kruk, an historian who lived in Vilna Ghetto, documented the life of the people until his deportation in 1944. He wrote within a city known as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” because for years Vilna was a spiritual and cultural Jewish center.
Rabbi Leib Geliebter, realizing that his and others’ death was close, left written testimonies, letters and messages for future generations documenting life in Czestochovska and Poland.
Arnold Dagani, a Romanian-Jewish artist deported to Transnistria, was interned in Mihailova, a labor camp, in 1942, along with his wife. In 1943, he and his wife escaped the Bershad ghetto, Transnistria. Dagani recorded the harsh portrayal of beatings and executions in his art.
Pianist Adela Bay, another artist in the ghetto and slave labor camps, used her talent to sustain hope and meaning. Defying hunger, misery and forced labor, Adela and others used inner strength to maintain their humanity and identity. Under conditions of unimaginable hardship, Adela created musical compositions, and wrote poetry.
These are many other examples of Jewish resistance, dignity and tenacity, defying years of crimes, brutality and terrifying conditions.
Never again! The Jewish world, the entire world, must be reminded: Never Again!
Today, the indescribable murders in Toulouse, France, remind us, once again, that hatred for our people continues unabated. We must be on alert. The Iranian president is working to unleash a new, nuclear Holocaust. A Holocaust not only against Israel, but against the entire Middle East and beyond.
We Jews must remind the world: Never Again! “Massada will never fall again!” Am Israel Chai!
(Baruch Cohen is Research Chairman of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research.)
VISIONS OF HORROR—EISENHOWER, BRADLEY AND PATTON
AT OHRDRUF CONCENTRATION CAMP
Jeff Dunetz
The Lid, April 18, 2012
…Holocaust Remembrance Day…is observed on the 27th day of the month of Nisan, which marks the day when Allied troops liberated the first Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany, in 1945.…
On the morning of April 12th, 1945 General Eisenhower met Generals Bradley and Patton at Ohrdruf Concentration Camp [a sub-camp of Buchenwald—Ed.].… They wanted them to see for themselves what they were fighting against. On Yom HaShoah their words are much more moving then anything I could say:
“During the camp inspections with his top commanders Eisenhower said that the atrocities were ‘beyond the American mind to comprehend.’ He ordered that every citizen of the [nearby] town of Gotha personally tour the camp and, after having done so, the mayor and his wife went home and hanged themselves. Later on Ike wrote to [his wife] Mamie, ‘I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world.’ He cabled General Marshall to suggest that he come to Germany and see these camps for himself. He encouraged Marshall to bring Congressmen and journalists with him.… General Eisenhower understood that many people would be unable to comprehend the full scope of this horror. He also understood that any human deeds that were so utterly evil might eventually be challenged or even denied as being literally unbelievable. For these reasons he ordered that all the civilian news media and military combat camera units be required to visit the camps and record their observations in print, pictures and film. As he explained to General Marshall, ‘I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.’”
His prediction proved correct. When some groups, even today, attempt to deny that the Holocaust ever happened they must confront the massive official record, including both written evidence and thousands of pictures, that Eisenhower ordered to be assembled when he saw what the Nazis had done.
General Patton wrote the following in his diary after he toured the Camp: “It was the most appalling sight imaginable. In a shed…was a pile of about 40 completely naked human bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime, not for the purposes of destroying them, but for the purpose of removing the stench. When the shed was full—I presume its capacity to be about 200, the bodies were taken to a pit a mile from the camp where they were buried. The inmates claimed that 3,000 men, who had been either shot in the head or who had died of starvation, had been so buried since the 1st of January, 1945.”
General Omar Bradley said of the atrocities at Ohrdruf: “The smell of death overwhelmed us even before we passed through the stockade.… Emaciated bodies had been flung into shallow graves. Others lay in the streets where they had fallen. Lice crawled over the yellowed skin of their sharp, bony frames.”
May the Memories of those who suffered through the Shoah always be for a blessing. And may we never forget what evil men can do when they are appeased by the rest of the world.
DON’T STRAND THE HOLOCAUST IN HISTORY
Jonathan S. Tobin
Contentions, April 18, 2012
Today, Jews in Israel and around the world will mark Yom HaShoah, the day of remembrance of the Holocaust. For most, it will be a moment of mourning as well as an occasion to ponder the lessons of history and to ask whether humanity has learned anything in the 67 years since the end of the Second World War. But for some on the left, the Holocaust has become a political liability that must be drained of all relevance to the contemporary world.
That’s the gist of yesterday’s editorial in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper that demands that “Netanyahu stop hiding behind Holocaust warnings.” Haaretz, which articulates the opinion of the minority of Israelis who espouse the views of the hard left about the conflict with the Palestinians as well as the potential confrontation with Iran, has come to negatively view any attempt to ground the country’s security policies in the historical experience of the Jewish people. Thus, for them it’s not merely enough to chide the prime minister for what they wrongly believe is the promiscuous use of Holocaust analogies. Instead, their goal, as well as that of others who pay lip service to the idea of proper commemoration of the Six Million who died at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators, is to strand the event in history. Doing so serves their immediate political purpose but, in fact, confounds the entire concept of remembrance of the Holocaust.…
Though the Holocaust has universal significance, its particular meaning relates to what happens when Jews are rendered powerless in the face of powerful foes bent on their destruction. While there are those who wish to discuss it only in the most general terms about bias, the Holocaust was a specific event that happened to a people who had been demonized for 2,000 years and lacked the ability to adequately defend themselves.
Netanyahu is not injecting a political agenda into commemoration of this tragedy. It is actually those who wish to ban mentions of Iran’s nuclear program, the genocidal intent of Hamas and other Islamist terrorists as well as the rising tide of European anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism from the discussion of the Shoah who are distorting the debate.
The notion that Israelis or American Jews are so distracted by fears rooted in the Holocaust that they have ignored other problems or exaggerated the present threats to Jewish existence is rooted in a foolish assumption that Islamist forces who speak of their desire to eradicate Israel don’t mean what they say. Netanyahu isn’t, as Haaretz charges, irresponsibly “feeding the fear” of a second Holocaust to the detriment of his country. He is merely acknowledging the reality that Jewish history has the ability to inform our understanding of today’s conflicts, and that we must act on the conclusions we must draw from the past.…
What we must understand is that any commemoration of the Holocaust that does not speak of the need to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons or of preserving Israel’s security against the threat of Palestinian terrorism is not worthy of the name. Far from there being too much talk about Iran when discussing the Holocaust, there is not enough. Though today’s situation is not akin to that of 1939 when there was no Jewish state ready to defend itself or an America that despite the ambivalence of its president is united in support of Israel, the peril is nonetheless real.
The mere recital of expressions of sorrow for the Six Million is not enough.… Those who weep today about the fate of the Six Million but say nothing about the possibility that the West will not act to stop Iran or seek to discourage Israel from defending its people have learned nothing.
CLAIMS CONFERENCE SELF-AGGRANDIZEMENT
Isi Leibler
Jerusalem Post, April 4, 2012
The management of the Conference on Material Claims against Germany (Claims Conference) is ecstatic after having successfully forced two Israeli journalists to publicly apologize and praise them.
In 2008, Israeli TV aired a program titled Moral Reparations—The Struggle Continues, which bitterly condemned the management of the Claims Conference for refusing to prioritize financial disbursements to ameliorate the desperate plight of aging Holocaust survivors unable to live out their remaining years in dignity.…
The Claims Conference sued the show’s producers Orly Vilnai and Guy Meroz for libel, alleging that the program was “anti-Semitic” and presented “a cruel and distorted calumny.” In order to intimidate future potential critics, they demanded the exorbitant amount of NIS 4 million in damages. Ultimately…a settlement was negotiated for a much smaller amount—NIS 150,000—which it was agreed would be donated to a Holocaust survivor fund chosen by the journalists. In addition, the Claims Conference obtained a written apology praising them for “acting tirelessly on behalf of the Jewish people” and its “unprecedented contribution to assisting Holocaust survivors.”
However, while acknowledging that “in the course of our struggle to correct what we saw as a historical and inhuman injustice…we failed to present the whole picture,” there was no acknowledgement by the journalists of any specific factual error in their film. Moreover, as part of the settlement, Vilnai and Meroz insisted on including a sentence stating that “the frustrating gap between the desire to help Holocaust survivors which is shared by the entire Jewish people, and the actual condition of Holocaust survivors requires criticism—on occasion harsh if deserved—directed at those who set policy in this area, as well as of those who implement it, since this is a sacred task.”
The Claims Conference management is now exploiting this settlement as a means of diverting attention from the legitimate criticisms and increasing anger directed against them over recent years.… In order to attempt to balance the equation, I would challenge Chairman Julius Berman and his Chief Executive Officer to respond to the following issues which continue to concern Jews throughout the world:
1. In view of the pitiful state of the diminishing number of ailing survivors, many of whom…cannot even afford to pay for basic food, fuel and medical expenses: a) Has there been an independent review of the existing allocations provided toward major charitable causes like hospitals and Israeli infrastructure which do not directly benefit survivors? Has consideration been given to prioritizing funds from these projects toward survivors? b)Will the Claims Conference consider temporarily freezing allocations to all non-survivor related funds in order to at least partially improve the [sometimes] catastrophic living conditions of these…people?
2. In February 2010, it was revealed that there had been a massive theft of funds specifically earmarked by the German government for Holocaust survivors. The Claims Conference initially specified that the amount stolen was $350,000. But later it was reported that the theft was in excess of the staggering sum of $50 million. Last November Der Spiegel stated the sum had reached $57 million!
It was subsequently disclosed that six corrupt Claims Conference officials, including senior employees working out of their own New York head office, had been looting these funds for over 15 years—under the very noses of the highly paid senior executives. Repeated warnings that a single part-time internal comptroller was absurdly insufficient for an organization handling billions of dollars were ignored until it was too late.…
It is inconceivable that any normal private or public institution would refuse to accept accountability and fail to demand resignations or at least censure of management after such a massive fraud has been perpetrated on their watch. The public is entitled to demand that the management reveal the precise quantity of funds stolen and advise as to whether there is any intention of introducing a genuinely independent forensic audit to review the entire organization.…
3. The Board of Deputies of British Jews commissioned an independent review (the Gruder Report) following complaints from Holocaust victims that the Claims Conference lacked “transparency and accountability” and had behaved unethically in the sale of Jewish German properties. The report was highly critical of the Claims Conference’s moral conduct, suggesting that reprehensible efforts had been implemented to prevent heirs from recovering property stolen from their families. The matter was raised at the last annual board meeting—and dismissed by the chairman, who treated the request to review the situation with utter contempt. Is this the last word on this matter?
4. Is it acceptable for the largest charitable institution in the Jewish world, which has been responsible for the disbursement of over $80 billion of restitution funds, to continue to be headed by the same elected officers for over a decade, notwithstanding complaints that the chairman has inordinate powers and runs the organization like a personal fiefdom?
5. The board, which meets annually and whose directors have great difficulty comprehending the complexity of the allocation of funds, has rarely, if ever, rejected a recommendation from the allocations committee and effectively serves as a rubber stamp for the management.
This situation is exacerbated by potential conflicts of interest of directors whose organizations receive funding from the Claims Conference. Is it not now imperative to set up an independent committee to review the entire procedure of allocations in order to ascertain what can be done to ameliorate the tragic plight of the survivors—the greatest scandal of our time in the Jewish world?… What is needed is not self-aggrandizement, but genuine soul searching and, even at this late hour, fulfilling the obligation to consider drastic initiatives to overcome the scandalous suffering of elderly Holocaust survivors living in penury.
