Holocaust Prevention Day

2 Iyyar 5769

Last Tuesday night and Wednesday morning Jews commemorated those who fell during the Holocaust of World War II. Various events and observances took place through the day, some with a basis in Jewish tradition, such as saying Qaddish, lighting candles, closing some businesses, and memorializing the fallen through story telling, and some without any basis in Jewish tradition, such as standing for a siren and laying wreaths.

It is not my intention to enter the debate over which kinds of observances are appropriate, and which kinds are not.

There is also an ongoing debate as to whether a day of such observances in addition to Fast of the Fifth Month (9 b'Av) and the Fast of the Tenth Month (10 b'Teveth) is even necessary.

It is not my intention to enter this debate either.

It is my intention to address the issue of memorials in general.

Memorials are important. They are important for us as a community to remember and to relive the grieving; they are important for us as community who hopes and prays that Holocausts will not reoccur.

Memorials, however, are not enough. They are not sufficient for our community's healing nor its psychological and spiritual growth; they are not sufficient to prevent the next holocaust. Living memorials, survivors recounting their stories and the stories of those who fell are not enough. Giant memorial buildings, costing millions of dollars are not enough, no matter how many times someone walks through them, and experiences their impressive, educational programs, and some of them are impressive.

But how many Holocaust survivors tell us to lives Jewish lives, and to avoid living a life of assimilation?

How many Holocaust museums have audio-visual presentations deemed at preventing intermarriage?

How many members of such museums' boards believe that these issues are relevant in a Holocaust memorial?

How many members of such museums' boards are married to non-Jews?!What if only 75% of the cost to build U. S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, had actually been used to build it, and the other 25% was used for Holocaust prevention programs? What about 10%? What about even 5%?

What if Holocaust Memorial observances were inserted even more prominently into obervances of the Fasts of the Fifth and Tenth Months, and 27 Nissan was turned into "Holocaust Prevention Day," filled with programs geared toward educating Jews of the importance of marrying only Jews and living a Jewish life, and not an assimilated one?

What if there were Jews besides me who actually believed that there was a need for such a day?

What if there were Jews besides me who can see that a Second Holocaust is already in progress, much like Laban HaArami had intended (Intermarriage),* or like the Helenist Jews had intended (Assimilation)?

What if?

*********

*Genesis Ch. 29-31, Passover Hagadah

Cross-posted on Esser Agaroth.

Eraising the Jews of Europe

No. 75, 1 December 2008 / 4 Kislev 5769

The Destruction of the Memory of Jewish Presence in Eastern Europe;

A Case Study: Former Yugoslavia

Interview with Ivan Ceresnjes

The memory of the large pre-war Jewish presence in Eastern Europe is increasingly being destroyed. Part of this process is intentional; part is because of neglect of Jewish sites, monuments, and memorials.
The successor states of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia provide a good case study of many aspects of the process of memory destruction. This federation's breakup over the past two decades has accelerated processes that are slower elsewhere. This concerns both attempts to change the collective memory of citizens, as well as the physical degradation of Jewish sites, monuments, and memorials.
All successor states are rewriting their histories. The memory of the Holocaust is thus also fragmented according to the national context. In the history of humanity the Holocaust is an unprecedented mega-event. This larger understanding, however, gets lost in societies where no historical research has been undertaken since the Second World War.
Collective memory will change further. Yet monuments and memorials stand while societies change. It is important that the physical Jewish infrastructure is not further degraded and that memorial sites in Jewish locations are well kept. The memorials make local people remember what happened to the Jews. For many, the existence of a Jewish memorial does not allow them to forget the crimes of the past.

Destroying Memory
"The memory of the large pre-war Jewish presence in Eastern Europe is increasingly being destroyed. Part of this process is intentional; part because of neglect of Jewish sites and memorials. To understand the various factors at work, one can best look at the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Its breakup over the past two decades has accelerated processes that are slower elsewhere. This concerns both attempts to change the collective memory of citizens as well as the physical degradation of Jewish sites, monuments, and memorials. Monuments are usually built to commemorate a significant person or event in history, or a period of time. Memorials are usually related to death and destruction. But the distinction between the two sometimes is blurred."
Ivan Ceresnjes was the head of the Jewish community of Bosnia- Herzegovina and a vice-chairman of the Yugoslav Federation of Jewish Communities until his emigration to Israel in 1996. At the Hebrew University's Center for Jewish Art, established in 1979, he documents Jewish infrastructure such as synagogues, ritual buildings, and cemeteries in Eastern Europe. He also maps Holocaust memorials and monuments.

Ceresnjes furthermore assists the U.S. Congressional Commission for Protecting and Preserving American Property Abroad. Despite its name, this commission was created in 1985 for the survey and research of Jewish cemeteries, monuments, and memorials. Almost its entire emphasis is on Eastern Europe, because it is mainly there that this infrastructure is rapidly disappearing.

Ceresnjes remarks: "When people in Eastern Europe see or hear the words 'American property' it has a magic effect on them. Often when one tells that one is Jewish and has come to research the documentation of Jewish monuments, tombstones, and memorials, the reception is unfriendly. However, if you say that you are coming on behalf of the American government you are much better received."

The Role of Collective Memory

Ceresnjes reflects on the role of collective memory in society: "The upsurge of nationalism in Eastern Europe has led to an ideology of memory. In its most extreme form, nationalist ideologues consider that the main role of each generation is to transmit the memories of the previous one to the next.

"This ideological position claims that nations mainly exist to remember their past. In its extreme version the state, society, and economy are largely tools for promoting national memory. Economic growth frees people to spend their time on the recovery of memory. These ideologues say that societies should be dominated by memory-related activities.
"One does not even have to go that far. There is, for instance, the more moderate position that the recovery of memory in Eastern Europe was the essence of national liberation. Indeed, one of Stalin's major crimes was his destruction of national memories."

Ceresnjes comments: "However, focusing exclusively on changing collective memory without linking it to moral judgment remains highly problematic. In this context, attitudes in various countries toward Holocaust memorials need to be assessed. The case of Yugoslavia's successor states illustrates this in many ways."

Politically Correct Memorializing

"Similar to other once-communist countries, in former Yugoslavia memorializing has developed in new directions from the politically correct, general approach of the past. In the communist view the suffering of one group of citizens under Nazi Germany and its allies could not be separated from that of others. People were told that all citizens had suffered from both external and internal enemies.

"Many Europeans collaborated with the Germans. Croatia, for instance, had a murderous nationalist government of Nazi puppets. In most areas of Yugoslavia, members of several specific groups of people were murdered at the same time. It was rare to find a location where only Serbs, only Jews, only Gypsies, or only Croats were killed. Usually it was an ethnic mixture of people that might also have included-according to the local population configuration-Muslims, other enemies of Nazism, as well as fascists.

"After the Holocaust a new form of Jewish memorializing slowly emerged. It took place exclusively within the family at home. The next step was that memorials and monuments were gradually erected in places owned and used by Jews, such as synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. The latter were the more important since very few functioning synagogues remained in Yugoslavia. Putting up a memorial plaque was even considered a kind of protest against the communists because the Soviet Union usually didn't allow it. One would gradually find more memorial plaques or specific monuments, which mainly gave the numbers of Jews killed and listed their names.

"Very slowly in the early 1950s, specific monuments for Jews started to appear in public places as well as memorial plaques on institutions, not specifically connected to Jews. Thus, Jews were given a place in national history.

Memorializing in East European countries is closely connected to nationalism, which had been strongly suppressed under communist rule. The Soviet Union under Stalin had even annihilated a number of nations. Broadly speaking, however, Holocaust memorials were found only in very few places where the Soviet Union and communism ruled."[1]

Fragmentation of Holocaust Memory

"After the demise of communism, the outburst of suppressed nationalism destroyed the Federation of Yugoslavia. Seven independent countries have emerged, each of which rewrites its history. In Bosnia-Herzegovina the situation is even more complex. It is officially one country, but is inhabited by three nations-Muslims, Serbs, and Croats-who are writing their parallel histories that differ from each other in many ways. In this process, each one changes the names of streets and institutions, thus planting the seeds for a new collective memory.

"The memory of the Holocaust is thus also fragmented according to the national context. In the history of humanity, the Holocaust is an unprecedented mega-event. This larger understanding, however, gets lost in societies where no historical research has been undertaken since the Second World War.

"Nations also manipulate the count of victims. The numbers given for people brutally murdered at Jasenovac, a major Croatian concentration camp on the border of that country and Bosnia, vary from 50,000 to 1,200,000, with the most reliable estimate apparently being about 500,000."

Unattended Sites

Ceresnjes observes: "The murder of six million Jews in Europe has not only dramatically affected their families. It also meant that the great majority of Jewish sites in Eastern Europe became unattended. This includes a large number of synagogues, communal buildings, cemeteries, and other places that could become memorials of the former Jewish presence. In some countries the national Jewish community takes care of putting some plaques on buildings that were once synagogues, but this is a rather rare phenomenon.

"Sometimes governments or local authorities mark Jewish places. They frequently do so because they want to catch the attention of the Western world and show that the Jews are part of their history. Often, though, they nurture the memory of the murdered Jews and the communities that disappeared without elaborating on how and why this happened.

"Germany is the one country where a large part of the remnants of the Jewish past is relatively well taken care of. On Kristallnacht, 9-10 November 1938, many synagogues were burned, which was part of the erasure of Jewish presence and memory. Over the past fifteen years we have documented over one thousand rural Jewish synagogues and several thousand Jewish cemeteries in Germany. The overwhelming majority of these are well maintained by the local municipalities.

"In Eastern Europe two major factors are at work regarding Jewish memorials. The first is that usually no specific monuments to murdered Jews were established. The second is that memorial sites where Jews were murdered are being destroyed or disappearing.

"The emergence of suppressed nationalism in the successor states to Yugoslavia has created the desire to rewrite history. This affects the history and memory of the Jews. It is a fairly widespread phenomenon that specific nations try to erase all victims of the Nazis other than those from their own nation. In this process the names of Jewish victims also disappear.
"Sometimes in Serbia, for instance, the names of Jews are maintained next to those of Serbs, while those of victims of all other nationalities are deleted. Furthermore, often monuments throughout Yugoslavia that were damaged during the wars of the 1990s are not being repaired because of a lack of consensus on what should be memorialized on them. Understanding the developments and the current situation requires discussing individual countries."

Serbia

"Before the Second World War there was a strong Jewish community in Serbia. It numbered thirty thousand, of whom six thousand survived. Jews also have an important place in Serbian history. Like the Serbs they were oppressed by the Ottomans. Jews started getting civil rights in the Serbian kingdom, which were only fully granted before the First World War. These were maintained in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which was established in 1919.

"During the Second World War, Serbia was a puppet state ruled nominally by collaborating Serbs but, in actuality, by Germans. Serbs, except in some extreme cases, did not themselves kill Jews. In northern Serbia many local Jews were murdered by Germans and Hungarians. In February 1942 in Novi Sad the Hungarian occupiers gathered Jews and some Serbs, brought them to the middle of the frozen Danube where they had dug a hole in the ice, and killed four thousand people. Elsewhere Serbs gathered Jews and handed them over to the Germans, a crime that is suppressed and forgotten in Serbian history.

"In the Jewish cemetery in Belgrade there is a monument to the Jewish soldiers who fell in the First World War. In almost every Jewish cemetery the dead of that war are remembered. As far as the two Balkan wars are concerned, there is only one monument in Serbia that explicitly mentions the Jews. It is in a public space by the town of Nish near the country's eastern border. It commemorates those who died in the battles against the Bulgarians in the 1913 Second Balkan war. Three sides of the monument have plaques with Serbian names; the fourth has Jewish names. At its bottom is written: 'They fought and died for the homeland.'

"In Nish, about a thousand Jews were butchered to death during the Second World War; only one member of the community survived. The Jewish cemetery in the town dates back to the seventeenth century, but it has been destroyed because Gypsies have settled on it in recent decades. There are other towns in former Yugoslavia where Gypsies have set up their villages on Jewish cemeteries because they know nobody will come to reclaim them. Among these are Djurdjevac in Croatia, Zabalj in Serbia, and Dojran in Macedonia.

"On Serbian monuments to the fallen in the Second World War, Serbs and Jews are presented in various ways such as victims of 'Nazism, Croatian Nazism, European Nazism, German Nazism, Hungarian Nazism,' and so on. When the Serbian nationalist movement began at the end of the 1980s, a new Serbian-Jewish Friendship Society was created that erected some war memorials. It was quite strong during the 1990s but by now has few members left."

Jews Are Again Guilty

"For the Jewish community of former Yugoslavia, inter-ethnic ties of this kind were generally attempts to manipulate and misuse Jews in wider ethnic conflicts in a country that was collapsing and disintegrating. In Croatia there is a Croatian-Jewish society that supported the Croatian fight again Serbian domination. I consider it a major success that in Bosnia-Herzegovina the Jewish community managed not to be dragged into supporting one side or the other.

"Since Serbia lost the recent wars, its history had to be twisted and hence its collective memory as well. Somebody had to be blamed for the loss of Serbian supremacy in Yugoslavia, the defeat in the recent wars, and the outcome of the Kosovo crisis when Serbia was aerially bombarded by the Western powers. These were Serbia's former allies in the fight against Germany during the Second World War.

"One then started to hear in some circles that the Jews had played a major role in Serbia's defeat. Henry Kissinger was a famous American name in Serbia, though he has been out of government for a long time. In the Clinton administration, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, and Defense Secretary William Cohen were all perceived as Jews. Thus, in several Serbian blogs and internet forums one could read that Jews created the crisis in Serbia, organized its bombardment, and were responsible for its defeat."

Bosnia-Herzegovina

"During the Second World War most of what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina belonged to the Croatian puppet state. The exception was part of Herzegovina, which was governed by the Italians until 1943, after which it passed under direct German rule.

"Before the war there were 28,000 Jews in the country, 3,000 of whom survived. Most Jews lived in Sarajevo; all other communities were small. The main war monuments in Sarajevo were built by the communist government. The Jews built one on the grounds of their huge sixteenth-century Sephardic cemetery there. In the war of the mid-1990s, both Bosnian Serbs and Muslims engaged in the battle for Sarajevo trained their artillery on the monument.

"In Travnik, one of the smaller Bosnian communities, a monument to the murdered Jews was created by putting the three oldest tombstones together and making them into a Holocaust memorial in the Jewish cemetery. The head of the Jewish community did not participate in this project, but gave his approval.

"In Banja Luka, the Jewish cemetery was erased to make room for a tennis court. In the general cemetery there is now a small Jewish compound where there is a monument to those Jews who fought in the Second World War as well as those who died in the Holocaust.

"In Mostar, there is a memorial cemetery for partisans who fought against the Germans. In the town's Jewish cemetery there is a modest monument to the Jewish partisans only. There, also a few years ago, the small Jewish community of Mostar erected a monument memorializing the victims of the Holocaust.

"The town of Donji Vakuf is now in the Muslim part of Bosnia. When the original war memorial was built in 1965 it contained the names of the victims of all nationalities. Now it is one of those memorials where only Muslim names remain.
"Sometimes one finds people who go out of their way to preserve Jewish memory. In the town of Brcko on the Sava River in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Jewish cemetery has been destroyed as part of the town's urbanization plan. The Orthodox parish priest requested my permission and rescued four tombstones there that he turned into a Holocaust memorial, which is now located in the Bosnian-Serb cemetery."

Sarajevo

"In Sarajevo, the Jewish community was forced to donate the largest synagogue to the city in 1965. Later it was turned into a cultural center. There a stone menorah (candelabrum) was set up, which indicates that this building had earlier been the town's largest synagogue.

"The major Second World War memorial in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo is in a dilapidated state. Fourteen thousand people murdered in the war are memorialized there. There is an inner section that recalls the Jewish victims specifically, with over seven thousand names. This memorializing of the Jews in the general section, even though there is also a special section for them, is unique in the world.

"The memorial was severely damaged in the war of the mid-1990s as it is adjacent to a fortress. Many letters fell off the memorial because of explosions and, after the war, almost all of them disappeared. In its Holocaust sections only a few stone letters remain from the names of the local Jews who were murdered. If one visits there today and doesn't know what was there originally, one will not recognize that it was a specific monument to the Holocaust. The removed letters are sometimes affixed to crosses, which is an ultimate insult. It shows that the Jewish past is not part of the collective memory.

"The monument is likely to be rebuilt and the Bosnian government is applying for funding internationally. I'm concerned that there will be additions relating to the war of the 1990s and also, insofar as the Second World War is concerned, new political choices about who were the perpetrators and who the victims.

"In the Croatian part of Bosnia-Herzegovina there is only one partisan memorial that also mentions Jews. That area was overwhelmingly pro-Nazi during the war when it belonged to Croatia. Hardly any partisans there were memorialized after the war. Since the fall of communism, these partisans have been seen as enemies because they were communists who killed priests, monks, and other Croats.

"There are about twenty small sites that were either concentration and extermination camps or prisons scattered all over Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia. In none of these are the Jewish victims mentioned specifically. A typical example is a 'small' extermination camp, Kruscica, near Travnik in Bosnia. There three thousand people were killed by the local residents during the two months of its functioning, among them one thousand Jews. The Italian occupation army was located only twenty kilometers from there and, after they complained about the cruelties, the camp was closed.

"Two entire Jewish communities were murdered there yet Jews are not referred to on the Kruscica monument, which only mentions the Serbian and 'communist' victims. The latter usually refers to Muslims. Those now living near the site are the children or grandchildren of the murderers."

Changing Collective Memory

Ceresnjes explains that the Bosnian Muslim authorities want to find a new place for their country in history. "They are creating monuments that are connected solely to Islam. They aim to have the outside world recognize that Bosnia is a purely Islamic region of Europe. One example concerns the ancient market area of the country's capital, Sarajevo. It was burned down after the Second World War by the communist authorities, despite the fact that it had major artistic and historic value.

"For the communists this past had to make place for an area that was indicative of the bright-red-painted future their rule would bring. Twenty-five to thirty years ago the old market area was restored. It is now a center for kitsch where souvenirs and cheap merchandise are sold.

"When I was chairman of the Bosnian Jewish community I claimed that there were Jewish buildings and sites from our five-hundred-year-old history that met the highest criteria of UNESCO's World Heritage List. When I applied for their restoration, the then Bosnian authorities told me that the market complex of Sarajevo had their highest priority.

"The Old Sephardic synagogue of Sarajevo dates from 1567 and was in use until 1941. By then it was the oldest synagogue in the Balkans as all others had either been rebuilt, redone, or destroyed. It took us twenty years to convert it from an empty ruin to the Jewish museum that it now houses.

"In Bosnia a clash of collective memories takes place. Muslim collective memory is different from that of Christians and Jews. History, however, is very different from memory. Until 1991, Bosnia was perhaps the most ethnically mixed society in Europe. Thus not only the telling of history but also collective memory should reflect that fact, even if Bosnian society is now sharply divided along ethnic lines."

Croatia

"Before the war there were twenty-eight thousand Jews in Croatia of whom four thousand survived. Today very few Jews remain in Croatia, most of them living in Zagreb. There are also three small communities on the coast in Split, Dubrovnik, and Rijeka.

"The situation in Croatia is very different from that in many other parts of former Yugoslavia. The Croatians are very well aware that Jasenovac, because of the brutality of the killing, is among the notorious concentration camps of the Second World War. Franjo Tudjman, the first Croatian president after the country broke away from Yugoslavia, falsified history. Against the overstated claim of the Serbs that in Jasenovac 1,200,000 were murdered, he strongly understated the number of victims as 20-50,000. He then claimed that only a few thousand of them were Jews and accused them of having been kapos and responsible for the killings there.

"Tudjman even published this in a book, leading to an outcry among international Jewish organizations. Tudjman then dropped the chapter where it was mentioned, also because he wanted to established relations with Israel.

"In the Serbo-Croatian war of the 1990s the Jewish community of Croatia decided to be politically correct. They issued a number of strong statements against Serbian attacks and the occupation of part of Croatia. Hence, during that war they had an honorable place in Croatian society.

"After it ended the Jews raised the issue of restitution for Jewish assets that had been stolen by Croats during the Second World War. The authorities discreetly warned the Jewish community that they should not make too much noise. If the Jews were to regain factories and other properties, it might lead to many Croats losing their jobs as the new owners could then choose who would work for them. Restitution with support from the outside might spark a reaction in Croatia that could endanger the remaining Jews."

Telling History

"Nowadays history is told more or less correctly in Croatia. Monuments commemorating the Holocaust were not destroyed during the war with Serbia. This, however, is mainly because there were so few to begin with. In Jasenovac in the early 1970s, a monument was built to the victims and it mentioned the Jews as well. It listed Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, Croats, and communists, but only in general as victims of fascism. There were no names and no numbers.

"The word Holocaust has been mentioned there only in the last few years, after the memorial was repaired because of extensive damages it suffered during the war in 1992-1995. The whole concept was then altered and now only numbers are on display, without names and nationalities of the victims. There is no separate memorial for the Jews. The most accurate estimate of Jews murdered in Jasenovac is in the area of twenty-five thousand.

"In recent years Holocaust monuments have been regularly vandalized and covered with graffiti. This is done by neo-Nazis who use the 'U' symbol for the Ustashe movement, which collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. Swastikas are another symbol frequently used in vandalizing memorials. They are also put on other monuments to those murdered by Germans and their allies in the Second World War.

"One sign of change in collective memory is that the Croats are increasingly bringing up the story of the murders in Bleiburg in Austria. After the Second World War the British allowed Tito's army to cross into their zone of Austria. There they slaughtered a mixed group of German allies including Serbian nationalists, members of the Croatian Ustashe, White Guards of Slovenia, Muslim pro-Nazi militias, ethnic Germans, and so on. Among them were also civilians including politicians, peasants, women, and children-almost anyone."

Macedonia

"In Macedonia before the Second World War there were 7,000 Jews. About half of them managed to escape to Albania where they were safe. During the war Macedonia became part of greater Albania; yet it was the Bulgarian government that ruled there. While it protected the Jews in prewar Bulgaria, those in Macedonia were transferred to the Germans who sent them to their death in Treblinka.

"There is a Jewish memorial in all Macedonian towns where there was a Jewish community before the war whose members were murdered, such as Bitola (Monastir), Shtip, Idrizovo, and others. It is usually located where the Jews gathered for deportation or where the synagogue was. There are also plaques at other locales.

"In the capital, Skopje, the Jewish cemetery was almost entirely destroyed by an earthquake in 1966. A very distinguished war memorial was erected in the new section of the Jewish cemetery. There are three memorials for the Jews in the town: at the place where the Jews were gathered for deportation, at the location of the communal buildings, and in the former cemetery."

Other Successor States

"Slovenia was under German rule during the Second World War. The small Slovenian Jewish community numbered 250 before the war. Of these about fifty survived, most of whom had fled to Italy. Many Jews fought in the anti-Nazi partisan units. Toward the end of the war the partisans threw out anyone who didn't have a Slovenian name. The Jews were all Ashkenazi and had German or Hungarian names, and the Slovenian partisans killed most of them.

"Before the war the number of Jews in Montenegro was very small. The country had maintained an anti-Jewish policy over hundreds of years. Already 350 years ago the Orthodox prince-bishop ruler decided that no Jews should live in the country because they were 'Satan's seed.' There were only some Jews who lived in the Catholic areas near the sea.

"During the Second World War the Italians were in control in Montenegro but the Germans were present. Wherever Italians put Jews along with communists in prisons, the Germans would kill them. These were Jews from other parts of Yugoslavia captured in the territory of Montenegro. The estimated number of Jews murdered is about twenty. The main prison, Bogdanov kraj near Cetinje, has no memorial and nobody tends to it. But for the Jews it is a place that should be memorialized.

"In Kosovo there were about 500 Jews before the Second World War, of whom 250 were handed over to the Germans by Kosovar Albanians. There were also a few examples where Kosovars killed Jews, and there was also a Kosovar SS unit. About twenty righteous gentiles helped the other 250 Jews escape to Albania where the Jews were protected.

"After the war, in Kosovo's capital, Pristina, a huge memorial was erected for all victims of Nazism including the partisans and the Jews. When the Serbian-Albanian fighting broke out in Kosovo in 1999, almost all names were removed, also including most of the Albanians who were considered communists. Kosovo is such a tightly knit society that everyone knows who was or wasn't a communist."

The Jew as an Instrument in National Policies

"Jews are instruments in the current politics of the successor states of Yugoslavia. This is part of these states' international positioning. If you visit Bosnia today and say you are a Jew, you will be told that Jews came there five hundred years ago and were embraced. They will add that Muslims and Jews were the best friends in the world. This is a fallacy because Jews were second-class citizens like anyone who was not a Muslim.

"Even worse, when one looks at pictures from 1941 of the looting of Jewish synagogues, shops, and apartments, one sees people wearing a fez. Germans didn't wear fezzes, neither did Croats, only Muslims did.

"When the Republic of Bosnia was established in 1992, only three constituting minorities were given the right to elect members of parliament: Muslims, Serbs, and Croats. There are, however, twenty other minorities in the state such as Poles, Slovenians, Jews, and Gypsies, who are not necessarily happy with this arrangement. They can only be elected if one of the three larger minorities elects them. So, for instance, the present Bosnian foreign minister-a Jew, Sven Alkalay-joined the Muslim government party SBiH (Party for Bosnia and Herzegovina) of Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic.

"In Serbia there was a Jewish deputy prime minister, Zarko Korac (2002-2003). Even under the anti-Semitic President Tudjman in Croatia there were Jewish ministers-Nenad Porges, economy, and Andrija Hebrang, health and social policy-in two successive governments from 1990 to 1998. These are examples of showcasing and one wonders whether these appointees actually do any good for the Jewish community.

"The situation in all these countries is in flux. Questions will increasingly be asked about the erasing of names of other nationals by the various successor states. Collective memory has changed and will change further. Yet monuments, if not harmed or altered, stand while societies change.

"One can only wonder what will be the role of the Jews while new collective memories are developing. For that reason, too, it is important that the physical Jewish infrastructure is not further degraded and that memorial sites in Jewish locations are well kept. The memorials remind local people what happened to the Jews. For many, the existence of a Jewish memorial does not allow them to forget."
Interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld

* * *
Notes

Publication of this issue was made possible in part by the support of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (Rabbi Israel Miller Fund for Shoah Research, Documentation and Education).
[1] See, e.g., Mordechai Altshuler, "Jewish Holocaust Commemoration Activity in the USSR under Stalin," Shoah Research Center, Yad Vashem, www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%205422.pdf.
* * *
Ivan Ceresnjes was the head of the Jewish community of Bosnia-Herzegovina and a vice-chairman of the Yugoslav Federation of Jewish Communities until his emigration to Israel in 1996. During the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina he organized rescue efforts to evacuate Jews and non-Jews and also organized nonsectarian humanitarian relief for citizens of the besieged city and other parts of the country. An architect by profession, he is presently employed by the Center for Jewish Art of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. There he documents Jewish infrastructural objects such as synagogues, ritual buildings, and cemeteries in Eastern Europe. He also maps Holocaust memorials and monuments.

I kept it as a reminder...least anyone forgets

Please... pass this wisdom on
to your Grandchildren...

Holocaust Analogies and Anti-Semitism

Blogmaster's remarks: If someone were to publish cartoons in Israel about Arabs as degrading and inflammatory as those published about Jews by newspapers across the Arab world, the publisher in Israel would be jailed for incitement. This is yet another graphic example of the fundamental differences between the psyche of Jews vs. our Arab neighbors. They preach "hate", we preach "peace"; they revere "death" while we love "life". We give them electricity while they fire rockets at the power plant. What is there not to be understood by the rest of the world about the right and wrong of the conflict between Israel and our neighbors? Our desire for a peaceful solution to this conflict cannot be doubted... we have agreed to give away sizable portions of our land to appease this band of hooligans who only demand more. Now I suggest that it is time that the pendulum swings the other way for a change. We are tired of concessions, we are tired of bombings, and rocket attacks; we are fed up with our citizens being murdered and maimed and quite simply, we are sick and tired of our soldiers dying to keep out terrorists and we are fed up with the terrorists amongst us! It is time we screamed to the tops of our lungs ENOUGH! It is time that we stopped bowing to CondiSleeza Rice, and kissing the collective toucheses of the EU and the UN. It is long overdue that we begin to respond to terrorism and aggression the way any other free and democratic nation would respond. And how is that you ask? I can answer you this way... how do you think any other country would respond if her neighboring country were rocketing their citizens daily? Pretty simple, isn't it?

Holocaust Analogies and Anti-Semitism

The barrage of rocket fire from Gaza and Israel’s military action to stem the attacks on its cities have prompted an outpouring of offensive and bigoted commentary in the Arab press, whose response came in the form of a series of rapid-fire editorial cartoons using swastikas, classical anti-Semitic images and other hateful references to the Holocaust to vilify Israel and portray the Jewish state as an aggressor with genocidal ambitions.

Many of the cartoons are rife with Holocaust imagery and blatant analogies between Israel’s defensive military action and the killing of European Jews during the Holocaust in World War II.

The cartoons feature swastikas and describe the defensive measures Israel has taken as a “Holocaust” in Gaza. Holocaust imagery and direct comparisons to the Holocaust are a common feature of the anti-Semitic cartoons that regularly appear in Arab newspapers across the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world.

The following are selected examples from Arab newspapers:

Al-Ahram weekly, March 6-12, 2008 (Egypt)










Al-Ahram weekly, March 6-12, 2008 (Egypt)












Ash-Shabib, March 5, 2008 (Oman)On the sign:
“Gaza”. the rocket is representing “the resistance.”











Akhbar al-Khalij, March 5, 2008 (Bahrain)
The Israeli soldier is saying to Gaza
(which is biting him): “Oh, my finger.”













arabcartoon.net – Isam Ahmad (PA)












Ad-Dustur, March 5, 2008 (Jordan) In Arabic:
“the only democracy in the Middle East.”













Al-Jazira, March 5, 2008 In Arabic: “Olmert.”

arabcartoon.net – Syria

Al-Watan, March 4, 2008 (Qatar)

Ad-Dustur, March 4, 2008 (Jordan)Israeli soldiers raise the Nazi flag

over the dead bodies of the Palestinians in “Gaza;” the cartoon

mimics the famous photo of U.S. Marines raising the flag at the

battle of Iwo Jima.

Al-Ayyam, March 4, 2008 (Bahraran)

Al-Eqtisadieh, March 4, 2008 (Saudi Arabia)

Al-Khabar, March 4, 2008 (Algeria)The cartoon's headline reads:

"The New Nazism”. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert

is depicted as Adolf Hitler

Al-Ghad, March 3, 2008 (Jordan)

the cartoon’s headline: “Gaza’s Holocaust.”

Al-Khalij, March 2, 2008 (UAE)The cartoon’s headline:

The Zionist Holocaust in Gaza.”

Al-Ghad, March 3, 2008 (Jordan)

the cartoon’s headline: “Gaza’s Holocaust.”

Al-Watan, March 1, 2008 (Oman)

In Arabic: “An Arab Summit.”

Filastin, March 3, 2008 (PA)The cartoon’s headline:

“Israeli Holocaust in Gaza.”

Al-Gumhuriyya, March 3, 2008 (Egypt)

The caption above reads: “The International Legitimacy.”

On the paper, in Arabic: “Gaza’s Holocaust.”

Al-Bayan, March 1, 2008 (U.A.E)

Is "Never Again" Only a dream???

World marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day

28 Jan 2008

On November 1, 2005, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution designating January 27 as International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.











Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority
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Rejecting any denial of the Holocaust as a historical event, either in full or in part, the General Assembly adopted by consensus a resolution (A/RES/60/7) condemning "without reserve" all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief, whenever they occur.

It decided that the United Nations would designate 27 January - the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp - as an annual International Day of Commemoration to honour the victims of the Holocaust, and urged Member States to develop educational programmes to instil the memory of the tragedy in future generations to prevent genocide from occurring again, and requested the United Nations Secretary-General to establish an outreach programme on the "Holocaust and the United Nations", as well as measures to mobilize civil society for Holocaust remembrance and education, in order to help prevent future acts of genocide.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to the Cabinet (27 January): "Today, January 27, the day on which Auschwitz - which is so identified in the world’s consciousness with the Holocaust and the annihilation of the Jews - was liberated, the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Knesset will hold a special discussion tomorrow. Today is also Israel’s Day to Combat Anti-Semitism. The Government of Israel monitors displays of anti-Semitism around the world and the steps necessary to deal with the phenomenon."
A new Yad Vashem exhibit, BESA: A Code of Honor - Muslim Albanians Who Rescued Jews During the Holocaust, Photographer: Norman Gershman, will be displayed at the United Nations Headquarters for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2008.
Children in the Ghetto

"Children in the Ghetto" is a new website about children, written for children. It portrays life during the Holocaust from the viewpoint of children who lived in the ghetto, while attempting to make the complex experience of life in the ghetto as accessible as possible to today’s children.

Along with the description of the hardships of ghetto life, it also presents the courage, steadfastness and creativity involved in the children’s lives. One of the most important messages to be learned is that despite the hardships, there were those who struggled to maintain humanitarian and philanthropic values, care for one another, and continue a cultural and spiritual life.

At the center of this site is an imaginary representation of a street in the ghetto. The site invites children to “move around the street” and “enter” various locations in it. In each of the locations, original exhibits such as video testimonies, photographs, paintings, artifacts etc. are accompanied by interactive and thought-provoking activities.
The site "Children in the Ghetto" is a result of fruitful cooperation between Snunit - a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing online education, established by the Hebrew University and the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem. This site was made possible with the support of the Claims Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

International Youth Congress

Yad Vashem has decided to initiate an International Youth Congress as part of the proceedings marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2008. This conference, gathering youth leaders from across the globe to meet, converse and make the voice of their generation heard on the subject of shaping Holocaust remembrance and its significance for the future, will be held at Yad Vashem.
The three-day congress will bring together students from all around the world in a joint effort to expand their knowledge on Holocaust-related issues, such as the challenges of preserving the memory of the Holocaust in the 21st century which will ultimately enable them to draft a declaration that will strengthen their commitment to Holocaust remembrance and its implications for future generations.

Remarks by Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Livni to the International Youth Congress on International Holocaust Remembrance Day
Mr. Avner Shalev, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate,H E István Hiller, Hungarian Minister of Education and Culture,H.E. Henri Etoundi Essomba, Ambassador of Cameroon and Dean of the Diplomatic Corps,Distinguished members of the Diplomatic Corps, Ladies and Gentlemen,Dear Youth who are with us here today,

To be a Jew is to dream the Shoah, live the Shoah, and die in the Shoah without actually having been there.
To be a Jew is to try to imagine the horror, to stop as the most painful images engulf you, and to know that you are still so far from the pain endured by those who were there.
To be a Jew is wanting to ask the elderly if they were there, and what they went through, and yet fearing to do so.
To be a Jewish mother is to understand, with the birth of a second child, how impossible, how inhuman it would be to have to choose between her two children.
To be a Jewish mother is to look at your children and wonder if they are old enough to care for themselves without you.
To be a Jewish mother is to look at your children and to ask yourself whether the right choice would be to keep them with you or to tell them to leap off the train.
To be an Israeli is to know that you were reborn from the ashes of the victims and that you have a responsibility to the generations to come.
To be an Israeli child is to try to fathom the number six million but never being able to.
To be an Israeli is to live on streets named after entire communities that were wiped out because there are not enough streets to name after each one of the victims.
To be an Israeli is to live in a country that appears strong from the outside but is always aware of the vulnerability of its people.
To be an Israeli girl is to receive, as a Bat Mitzvah gift, the book of poems "There Are No Butterflies Here", written by children of the Theresiendstadt Ghetto, and to understand that these children were just like you, and all they wanted was to play, to live and to love. To be an Israeli teenager is to visit the death camps in Europe, to see the scratch marks on the walls of the gas chambers of those who tried to get out, to see the "showers", the piles of shoes and hair, and never look in they same way again at things that are taken for granted by teenagers in other places.
To be an Israeli mother is to suddenly discover that you have passed on to your children the collective memory and experience of the Holocaust. It is to understand that although you wanted to spare your children the pain so that they would not have to bear the burden that you have carried all your life, as a daughter of the Jewish people you felt the need to pass on this memory so that they and their children and their children's children would remember. And it is to realize that the national cause has overcome your motherly feeling.
To be a Jewish leader in Israel is to ask yourself whether you would have seen the writing on the wall had you been there, and whether you would have made the right decisions at the time.
And it is, above all, to pledge never to forget.

Dear Friends,

There are feelings and experiences which are failed by words the bigger the horror the more difficult it is to pass on the memory of the Holocaust to future generations.
I would like each of you to study the pictures here at Yad Vashem even if you are unable to pass on the magnitude of what you see, I would like to ask you to take only one memory with you, whether a picture of a living skẻleton, or of a pile of human bones, or that of a child, and to pass this image on.

One picture is a world. Each of these pictures screams out the horrors of the Holocaust and holds lives and dreams that vanished.The terror, humiliation, helplessness, yearning for family, waiting for salvation from those who could do nothing to help - All these you should pass on to others, not to cause them pain, but rather to prevent these images from ever becoming a reality again. As soon as people will cease to think that such crimes are possible, and then they will cease to act to prevent them from returning.
Beyond remembrance of those who died, we are faced with an obligation to the future. This obligation rests on the shoulders of leaders, and on the shoulders of every citizen of the free world.

Horrors of such magnitude are the outset the product of a distorted mind of the leader but they are also the product of the Evil in uniform who agreed to execute, and of society that remained silent.

Anyone who has seen the pictures at Yad Vashem, beginning with people perishing in the Ghettos, understands that the writing was on the wall, and there were those who stood by and photographed.

The obligation to identify, to combat and protest against such phenomena is the responsibility of everyone. Decision makers, teachers and citizens whose ability to voice their protest depends on the understanding that his voice will not die, but will be joined by many others.

As of today, you are all part of the voice which gives substance to the words and the promise of: Never again.

This Holocaust will be Different

Blogmaster: The essay below was originally posted last January and is certainly more applicable today than it was when written. It is worth a serious read and serious consideration...

This Holocaust will be Different

Benny Morris, The Jerusalem Post argued that the second holocaust will not be like the first. One bright morning, in five or 10 years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session.

An excerpt:

The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile batteries and Home Front Command units.

The full text:

The second holocaust will not be like the first. The Nazis, of course, industrialized mass murder. But still, the perpetrators had one-on-one contact with the victims. They may have dehumanized them over months and years of appalling debasement and in their minds, before the actual killing. But, still, they were in eye and ear contact, sometimes in tactile contact, with their victims.

The Germans, along with their non-German helpers, had to round up the men, women and children from their houses and drag and beat them through the streets and mow them down in nearby woods or push and pack them into cattle cars and transport them to the camps, where "Work makes free," separate the able-bodied from the completely useless and lure them into "shower" halls and pour in the gas and then take out, or oversee the extraction of, the bodies and prepare the "showers" for the next batch.
The second holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or 10 years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go-ahead.

The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile batteries and Home Front Command units.

With a country the size and shape of Israel (an elongated 20,000 square kilometers), probably four or five hits will suffice: No more Israel. A million or more Israelis in the greater Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem areas will die immediately. Millions will be seriously irradiated. Israel has about seven million inhabitants. No Iranian will see or touch an Israeli. It will be quite impersonal.

Some of the dead will inevitably be Arab - 1.3 million of Israel's citizens are Arab and another 3.5 million Arabs live in the semi-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Haifa have substantial Arab minorities. And there are large Arab concentrations immediately around Jerusalem (in Ramallah-Al Bireh, Bir Zeit, Bethlehem) and outside Haifa. Here, too, many will die, immediately or by and by.

It is doubtful whether such a mass killing of fellow Muslims will trouble Ahmadinejad and the mullahs. The Iranians don't especially like Arabs, especially Sunni Arabs, with whom they have intermittently warred for centuries. And they have a special contempt for the (Sunni) Palestinians who, after all, though initially outnumbering the Jews by more than 10 to 1, failed during the long conflict to prevent them from establishing their state or taking over all of Palestine.

Besides, the Iranian leadership sees the destruction of Israel as a supreme divine command, as a herald of the second coming, and the Muslims dispatched collaterally as so many martyrs in the noble cause. Anyway, the Palestinians, many of them dispersed around the globe, will survive as a people, as will the greater Arab nation of which they are part. And surely, to be rid of the Jewish state, the Arabs should be willing to make some sacrifices. In the cosmic balance sheet, it will be worth the candle.

A QUESTION may nevertheless arise in the Iranian councils: What about Jerusalem? After all, the city contains Islam's third holiest shrines (after Mecca and Medina), Al Aksa Mosque and the Mosque of Omar. But Ali Khamenei, the supreme spiritual leader, and Ahmadinejad most likely would reply much as they would to the wider question regarding the destruction and radioactive pollution of Palestine as a whole: The city, like the land, by God's grace, in 20 or 50 years' time, will recover. And it will be restored to Islam (and the Arabs). And the deeper pollution will have been eradicated.

To judge from Ahmadinejad's continuous reference to Palestine and the need to destroy Israel, and his denial of the first Holocaust, he is a man obsessed. He shares this with the mullahs: All were brought up on the teachings of Khomeini, a prolific anti-Semite who often fulminated against "the Little Satan." To judge from Ahmadinejad's organization of the Holocaust cartoon competition and the Holocaust denial conference, the Iranian president's hatreds are deep (and, of course, shameless).

He is willing to gamble the future of Iran or even of the whole Muslim Middle East in exchange for Israel's destruction. No doubt he believes that Allah, somehow, will protect Iran from an Israeli nuclear response or an American counterstrike. Allah aside, he may well believe that his missiles will so pulverize the Jewish state, knock out its leadership and its land-based nuclear bases, and demoralize or confuse its nuclear-armed submarine commanders that it will be unable to respond. And, with his deep contempt for the weak-kneed West, he is unlikely to take seriously the threat of American nuclear retaliation.

Or he may well take into account a counterstrike and simply, irrationally (to our way of thinking), be willing to pay the price. As his mentor, Khomeini, put it in a speech in Qom in 1980: "We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah... I say, let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant..."
For these worshipers at the cult of death, even the sacrifice of the homeland is acceptable if the outcome is the demise of Israel.

DEPUTY DEFENSE Minister Ephraim Sneh has suggested that Iran doesn't even have to use the Bomb to destroy Israel. Simply, the nuclearization of Iran will so overawe and depress Israelis that they will lose hope and gradually emigrate, and potential foreign investors and immigrants will shy away from the mortally threatened Jewish state. These, together, will bring about its demise.

But my feeling is that Ahmadinejad and his allies lack the patience for such a drawn-out denouement; they seek Israel's annihilation in the here and now, in the immediate future, in their lifetime. They won't want to leave anything up to the vagaries of history.

As with the first, the second holocaust will have been preceded by decades of preparation of hearts and minds, by Iranian and Arab leaders, Western intellectuals and media outlets. Different messages have gone out to different audiences, but all have (objectively) served the same goal, the demonization of Israel. Muslims the world over have been taught: "The Zionists/Jews are the embodiment of evil" and "Israel must be destroyed."

And Westeners, more subtly, were instructed: "Israel is a racist oppressor state" and "Israel, in this age of multiculturalism, is an anachronism and superfluous." Generations of Muslims and at least a generation of Westerners have been brought up on these catechisms.

THE BUILD-UP to the second holocaust (which, incidentally, in the end, will probably claim roughly the same number of lives as the first) has seen an international community fragmented and driven by separate, selfish appetites - Russia and China obsessed with Muslim markets; France with Arab oil - and the United States driven by the debacle in Iraq into a deep isolationism. Iran has been left free to pursue its nuclear destiny and Israel and Iran to face off alone.

But an ultimately isolated Israel will prove unequal to the task, like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an onrushing car. Last summer, led by a party hack of a prime minister and a small-time trade unionist as defense minister, and deploying an army trained for quelling incompetent and poorly armed Palestinian gangs in the occupied territories and overly concerned about both sustaining and inflicting casualties, Israel failed in a 34-day mini-war against a small Iran-backed guerrilla army of Lebanese fundamentalists (albeit highly motivated, well-trained and well-armed). That mini-war thoroughly demoralized the Israeli political and military leaderships.

Since then, the ministers and generals, like their counterparts in the West, have looked on glumly as Hizbullah's patrons have been arming with doomsday weapons. Perversely, the Israeli leaders may even have been happy with Western pressures urging restraint. Most likely they deeply wished to believe Western assurances that somebody, somehow - the UN, G-8 - would pull the radioactive chestnuts out of the fire. There are even those who fell for the outlandish idea that a regime change in Teheran, driven by a reputedly secular middle class, would ultimately stymie the mad mullahs.

But even more to the point, the Iranian program presented an infinitely complex challenge for a country with limited conventional military resources. Taking their cue from the successful IAF destruction of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, the Iranians duplicated and dispersed their facilities and buried them deep underground (and the Iranian targets are about twice as far from Israel as was Baghdad). Taking out the known Iranian facilities with conventional weapons would take an American-size air force working round-the-clock for more than a month.

At best, Israel's air force, commandos and navy could hope to hit only some of the components of the Iranian project. But, in the end, it would remain substantially intact - and the Iranians even more determined (if that were possible) to attain the Bomb as soon as possible. It would also, without doubt, immediately result in a world-embracing Islamist terrorist campaign against Israel (and possibly its Western allies) and, of course, near-universal vilification. Orchestrated by Ahmadinejad, all would clamor that the Iranian program had been geared to peaceful purposes. At best, an Israeli conventional strike could delay the Iranians by a year or two.

IN SHORT order, therefore, the incompetent leadership in Jerusalem would soon confront a doomsday scenario, either after launching their marginally effective conventional offensive or in its stead, of launching a preemptive nuclear strike against the Iranian nuclear program, some of whose components are in or near major cities. Would they have the stomach for this? Would their determination to save Israel extend to preemptively killing millions of Iranians and, in effect, destroying Iran?

This dilemma had long ago been accurately defined by a wise general: Israel's nuclear armory is unusable. It can only be used too early or too late. There will never be a "right" time. Use it "too early," meaning before Iran acquires similar weapons, and Israel will be cast in the role of international pariah, a target of universal Muslim assault, without a friend in the world; "too late" means after the Iranians have struck. What purpose would that serve?

So Israel's leaders will grit their teeth and hope that somehow things will turn out for the best. Perhaps, after acquiring the Bomb, the Iranians will behave "rationally"?

BUT THE Iranians are driven by a higher logic. And they will launch their rockets. And, as with the first Holocaust, the international community will do nothing. It will all be over, for Israel, in a few minutes - not like in the 1940s, when the world had five long years in which to wring its hands and do nothing. After the Shihabs fall, the world will send rescue ships and medical aid for the lightly charred. It will not nuke Iran. For what purpose and at what cost? An American nuclear response would lastingly alienate the whole Muslim world, deepening and universalizing the ongoing clash of civilizations. And, of course, it would not bring Israel back. (Would hanging a serial murderer bring back his victims?)

So what would be the point?

Still, the second holocaust will be different in the sense that Ahmadinejad will not actually see and touch those he so wishes dead (and, one may speculate, this might cause him disappointment as, in his years of service in Iranian death squads in Europe, he may have acquired a taste for actual blood). And, indeed, there will be no scenes like the following, quoted in Daniel Mendelsohn's recent The Lost, A Search for Six of Six Million, in which is described the second Nazi action in Bolechow, Poland, in September 1942:

A terrible episode happened with Mrs. Grynberg. The Ukrainians and Germans, who had broken into her house, found her giving birth. The weeping and entreaties of bystanders didn't help and she was taken from her home in a nightshirt and dragged into the square in front of the town hall.There... she was dragged onto a dumpster in the yard of the town hall with a crowd of Ukrainians present, who cracked jokes and jeered and watched the pain of childbirth and she gave birth to a child. The child was immediately torn from her arms along with its umbilical cord and thrown - It was trampled by the crowd and she was stood on her feet as blood poured out of her with bleeding bits hanging and she stood that way for a few hours by the wall of the town hall, afterwards she went with all the others to the train station where they loaded her into a carriage in a train to Belzec.

In the next holocaust there will be no such heart-rending scenes, of perpetrators and victims mired in blood (though, to judge from pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the physical effects of nuclear explosions can be fairly unpleasant).

But it will be a holocaust nonetheless.

The writer is a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University.
Posted by DoctorZin on January 20, 2007 11:08 AM Pe

SYNAGOGUES BURNED & LOOTED !!!

THE NIGHTS OF NOVEMBER 9 AND 10 –

SYNAGOGUES BURNED & LOOTED !!!

69 YEARS AGO..... NEVER AGAIN!

Kristallnacht

A Jewish Synagogue Burns During Kristallnacht

Almost immediately upon assuming the Chancellorship of Germany, Hitler began promulgating legal actions against Germany's Jews. In 1933, he proclaimed a one-day boycott against Jewish shops, a law was passed against kosher butchering and Jewish children began experiencing restrictions in public schools.

By 1935, the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship. By 1936, Jews were prohibited from participation in parliamentary elections and signs reading "Jews Not Welcome" appeared in many German cities. (Incidentally, these signs were taken down in the late summer in preparation for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin).

In the first half of 1938, numerous laws were passed restricting Jewish economic activity and occupational opportunities. In July, 1938, a law was passed (effective January 1, 1939) requiring all Jews to carry identification cards. On October 28, 17,000 Jews of Polish citizenship, many of whom had been living in Germany for decades, were arrested and relocated across the Polish border. The Polish government refused to admit them so they were interned in "relocation camps" on the Polish frontier.

Among the deportees was Zindel Grynszpan, who had been born in western Poland and had moved to Hanover, where he established a small store, in 1911. On the night of October 27, Zindel Grynszpan and his family were forced out of their home by German police. His store and the family's possessions were confiscated and they were forced to move over the Polish border.

Zindel Grynszpan's seventeen-year-old son, Herschel, was living with an uncle in Paris. When he received news of his family's expulsion, he went to the German embassy in Paris on November 7, intending to assassinate the German Ambassador to France. Upon discovering that the Ambassador was not in the embassy, he settled for a lesser official, Third Secretary Ernst vom Rath. Rath, was critically wounded and died two days later, on November 9.

The assassination provided Goebbels, Hitler's Chief of Propaganda, with the excuse he needed to launch a pogrom against German Jews. Grynszpan's attack was interpreted by Goebbels as a conspiratorial attack by "International Jewry" against the Reich and, symbolically, against the Fuehrer himself. This pogrom has come to be called Kristallnacht, "the Night of Broken Glass."

On the nights of November 9 and 10, gangs of Nazi youth roamed through Jewish neighborhoods breaking windows of Jewish businesses and homes, burning synagogues and looting. In all 101 synagogues were destroyed and almost 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed. 26,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, Jews were physically attacked and beaten and 91 died (Snyder, Louis L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: Paragon House, 1989:201).

The official German position on these events, which were clearly orchestrated by Goebbels, was that they were spontaneous outbursts. The Fuehrer, Goebbels reported to Party officials in Munich, "has decided that such demonstrations are not to be prepared or organized by the party, but so far as they originate spontaneously, they are not to be discouraged either." (Conot, Robert E. Justice at Nuremberg. New York: Harper & Row, 1983:165)

Three days later, on November 12, Goering called a meeting of the top Nazi leadership to assess the damage done during the night and place responsibility for it. Present at the meeting were Goering, Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Walter Funk and other ranking Nazi officials. The intent of this meeting was two-fold: to make the Jews responsible for Kristallnacht and to use the events of the preceding days as a rationale for promulgating a series of antisemitic laws which would, in effect, remove Jews from the German economy. An interpretive transcript of this meeting is provided by Robert Conot, Justice at Nuremberg, New York: Harper and Row, 1983:164-172):

`Gentlemen! Today's meeting is of a decisive nature,' Goering announced. `I have received a letter written on the Fuehrer's orders requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another.'
`Since the problem is mainly an economic one, it is from the economic angle it shall have to be tackled. Because, gentlemen, I have had enough of these demonstrations! They don't harm the Jew but me, who is the final authority for coordinating the German economy. `If today a Jewish shop is destroyed, if goods are thrown into the street, the insurance companies will pay for the damages; and, furthermore, consumer goods belonging to the people are destroyed. If in the future, demonstrations which are necessary occur, then, I pray, that they be directed so as not to hurt us.

`Because it's insane to clean out and burn a Jewish warehouse, then have a German insurance company make good the loss. And the goods which I need desperately, whole bales of clothing and whatnot, are being burned. And I miss them everywhere. I may as well burn the raw materials before they arrive.
`I should not want to leave any doubt, gentlemen, as to the aim of today's meeting. We have not come together merely to talk again, but to make decisions, and I implore competent agencies to take all measures for the elimination of the Jew from the German economy, and to submit them to me.'

It was decided at the meeting that, since Jews were to blame for these events, they be held legally and financially responsible for the damages incurred by the pogrom. Accordingly, a "fine of 1 billion marks was levied for the slaying of Vom Rath, and 6 million marks paid by insurance companies for broken windows was to be given to the state coffers. (Snyder, Louis L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: Paragon House, 1989:201).

Kristallnacht turns out to be a crucial turning point in German policy regarding the Jews and may be considered as the actual beginning of what is now called the Holocaust.

By now it is clear to Hitler and his top advisors that forced immigration of Jews out of the Reich is not a feasible option.
Hitler is already considering the invasion of Poland.
Numerous concentration camps and forced labor camps are already in operation.
The Nuremberg Laws are in place.
The doctrine of lebensraum has emerged as a guiding principle of Hitler's ideology. And,
The passivity of the German people in the face of the events of Kristallnacht made it clear that the Nazis would encounter little opposition -- even from the German churches.

Following the meeting, a wide-ranging set of antisemitic laws were passed which had the clear intent, in Goering's words, of "Aryanizing" the German economy. Over the next two or three months, the following measures were put into effect (cf., Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945. New York:Cambridge, 1991:92-96):

• Jews were required to turn over all precious metals to the government.
• Pensions for Jews dismissed from civil service jobs were arbitrarily reduced.
• Jewish-owned bonds, stocks, jewelry and art works can be alienated only to the German state.
• Jews were physically segregated within German towns.
• A ban on the Jewish ownership of carrier pigeons.
• The suspension of Jewish driver's licenses.
• The confiscation of Jewish-owned radios.
• A curfew to keep Jews of the streets between 9:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. in the summer and 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. in the winter.
• Laws protecting tenants were made non-applicable to Jewish tenants.

One final note on the November 12 meeting is of critical importance. In the meeting, Goering announced, "I have received a letter written on the Fuehrer's orders requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another." The path to the "Final Solution" has now been chosen. And, all the bureaucratic mechanisms for its implementation were now in place.

It should be noted that there is some controversy among Holocaust scholars as to the origin, intent and appropriateness of the term Kristallnacht. The term, after all, was coined by Walter Funk at the November 12 Nazi meeting following the pogrom of November 8-10. The crucial question is whether the term was a Nazi euphemism for an all-out pogrom against German Jews and whether the Nazis used the term in a derisive manner. There is considerable evidence that both of the above questions have an affirmative answer.

Holocaust, and Kristallnacht survivor, Ernest Heppner made the following observation in a June, 1995 exchange of ideas on the Internet Holocaust Discussion List:
...as an eyewitness I was very emotionally involved in this event and its consequences. Like everyone else here in the United States, for some 50 years I called those horrible days and nights Kristallnacht. I changed my mind reluctantly when, during my research, I discovered Goering's intent to use this designation to ridicule this event.

The following sources should be of interest:
"Die Juden in Deutschland 1933-1945", herausgegeben von Wolfgang Benz, Verlag C.H. Beck, Munich 1989, part VI, pages 499-544, Der November- pogrom 1938. The second sentence of this chapter begins: "Der Novem- berpogrom, als "Reichkristallnacht" im Umgangstonverniedlicht..." (The Novemberpogrom was "prettified" in the vernacular as crystal night.")
Chapter 6, titled "Die 'Kristallnacht' als Anfang vom Ende", (crystal night as the beginning of the end) starts: "Man kann den November- pogrom als ein Ritual oeffentlicher Demueting deuten..." (The Novemberpogrom can be explained as a ritual for public humiliation...) The photograph accompanying this chapter it titled: "Vielleicht gab das zersplitterte Glass Anlass zu dem "Spottnamen Reichskristall- nacht". (Perhaps the broken glass was used to ridicule the pogrom).

Also see Arnold Paucker's "The Jews in Germany", Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1986, page 220: "Der Novemberpogrom, euphemistisch 'Kristallnacht' genannt, war der Anfang vom Ende..." (The Novemberpogrom, euphemistically named "Crystal Night" was the beginning of the end.)

There are additional sources, but I hope the above will serve to illustrate the fact that, except for the United States, The November Pogrom appears to be the established term.
Walter Pehle makes the following observation:

It is clear that the term Crystal Night serves to foster a vicious minimalizing of its memory, a discounting of grave reality: such cynical appellations function to reinterpret manslaughter and murder, arson, robbery, plunder, and massive property damage, transforming these into a glistening event marked by sparkle and gleam. Of course, such terms reveal one thing in stark clarity - the lack of any sense of involvement or feeling of sympathy on the part of those who had stuck their heads in the sand before that violent night.

With good reason, knowledgeable commentators urge people to renounce the continued use of "Kristallnacht" and "Reichskristall- nacht" to refer to these events, even if the expressions have become slick and established usage in our language. (Pehle, W. H., 'Editor's Preface' in Pehle, W. H. (ed.) November 1938, From Reichskristall- nacht to Genocide, Berg Publishers Inc., NY, 1991, pp. vii-viii (English edition)
So, it appears, the term "Kristallnacht" or "Crystal Night" was invented by Nazis to mock Jews on that black November night in 1938. It is, therefore, another example of Nazi perversion. There are numerous other examples of this same tendency in the language of the Nazi perpetrators: Sonderbehandlung ("special treatment") for gassing victims, Euthanasie for a policy of mass murder of retarded or physically handicapped patients, "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Makes you Free) over the entrance to Auschwitz. When the Nazis launched their plan to annihilate the remaining Jews in Poland in the fall of 1943, they called it "Erntefest," or Harvest Festival. While this may have been a code word, as Froma Zeitlin has observed, it had the same grim and terrible irony that is reflected in Kristallnacht as in so many other instances of the perverted uses of language in the Third Reich. Perhaps most cynical of all is the use of the term, "Endloesung der Judenfrage" (Final Solution of the Jewish Question), for what is now known as the Holocaust. Goebbels frequently used such terminology to amuse his audiences (usually other Nazi officials) and to further demoralize his victims.

On the other side of this controversy are those who argue that the term should be retained. In the first place, it is the term which has been used now for fifty years and connotes significant meaning to those who study the Holocaust. As Froma Zeitlin (in a message posted to HOLOCAUS Internet Discussion Group in June, 1995) observes:
But I would like to point out that whether or not the name came into existence as a Nazi euphemism or not, the event itself and what it has come to signify has transformed an 'innocent' name into one of unforgettable and dramatic meaning. The term is permanently out of circulation for any other use whatsoever. Can you imagine us now using 'Kristallnacht' to refer to some street riot or another, no matter how extensively the streets were littered with broken glass? Certainly not. Moreover, what disturbed the German populace was less the sight of synagogues burning (fires take place all the time, after all -- it depends on the scale) than of the savage and wasteful vandalism that confronted bystanders everywhere, disrupting the clean and orderly streets (to say nothing of consumer convenience). What was indeed memorable was the sheer quantity of broken glass. A third point was the economic outcome of this massive breakage. Germany didn't produce enough plate glass to repair the damages (synagogues did not have to be replaced -- quite the contrary). The result was twofold: the need to import glass from Belgium (for sorely needed cash) and the outrage of indemnifying the Jewish community to pay for the damages. So the broken glass came to assume yet another outrageous dimension in the wake of the event.

Paul Lawrence Rose, Penn State University, agrees with the retention of the term "Kristallnacht" instead of "pogrom" or some other term and makes the following observation:

Of course, K-nacht was a pogrom of sorts, but it was a German event and more specifically still, a Nazi event. Replacing it with pogrom certainly sets it in the larger context of antisemitic massacres in European history, but it loses the German and Nazi contexts.

And, as Zeitlin observes, the origins of terms do not equal the historical meanings that they accumulate. To have criticized Goering's use of language in 1938 would have been appropriate; however, 1996 the term kristallnacht carries the significance and power it has acquired over the past fifty years.