A TRAGIC SUMMER
By Eliyahu Salpeter
Ha’aretz
Sept 4 2007
Israel
It was a bad summer for Holocaust commemoration. In Berlin, poor
construction has led to the disintegration of the huge memorial to
the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. In Russia, a neo-Nazi
film was distributed on the Internet documenting the murder of two
minority members at the foot of a swastika flag. Dozens of Jewish
tombstones in cemeteries throughout the world have been desecrated.
Budapest has not prohibited the activities of the neo-Nazi Hungarian
Guard, which sees itself as the successor to the Arrow Cross that aided
and abetted the Germans in hunting down Jews to send to Auschwitz. The
government of Poland continues to allow the Catholic broadcast
"Radio Mary" that incites anti-Semitism, and Pope Benedict XVI has
even received the priest who heads the station for a photographed
interview at the Vatican.
And in Israel this summer, the memory of the Holocaust was recalled
again and again in vain. Sixty years after the liberation of the
concentration camps, the government determined that the suffering of
those who were saved from the Nazis was worth about NIS 84 a month.
Following public outcry, however, it reversed its decision – but this
was only one of its disgraceful actions, and perhaps not the worst.
Money, however disgraceful the amount, can be negotiated; the gap
between the offer and what’s needed disgraces the maker of the offer
more than the victim.
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The greatest disgrace of all was the attempt to turn orphans,
refugees and partisans who fought the Germans into voters for the
ruling party by declaring them survivors of the extermination camps,
in which their families were killed.
Is the fate of an Auschwitz survivor the same as the fate of the many
thousands who remained alive thanks to righteous gentiles who risked
their lives to hide them? Or the same as the fate of the hundreds
of thousands of Jews who survived thanks to the Soviet government,
who sent them to distant Asian regions out of the German army’s reach?
Is it not a disgrace that the Israeli government, which encouraged
a million Jews from the CIS to come to Israel, now pins the local
social service crisis on the Holocaust, which took place more than 60
years ago? Where are the boundaries of suffering? At the ghetto walls,
the electrified barbed wire or in a convent in occupied France?
And from this subject, we move to Sudan. Jewish organizations
throughout the world, especially in the United States, are at
the forefront of the political and public relations struggle for
the survivors of the genocide in Darfur. Israel, in contrast, is
incarcerating Darfur refugees who have managed to come in through
Sinai. Have Israel’s ministers not heard how the Jews of Europe
desperately tried to enter Western countries from occupied Europe?
Have they forgotten that after the Holocaust we all said "never again"?
Proper treatment of Darfur refugees will not lead to an influx of
tens of thousands of African refugees to Israel. With good will and
moral sensitivity, transit shelters can be established while working
to have the Sudanese refugees accepted by countries that are part
of the wave of censure of Khartoum. Thus, the victims of attempted
genocide can be cared for.
It may be assumed that no one in Israel doubts the importance of good
relations with Ankara, and that Israel must take the Jewish community
of Turkey into consideration. There is also no comparing the murder
of more than half a million Armenians during World War I and the
murder of six million Jews in World War II. However, it seems to be no
coincidence that one of the most moving descriptions of the Armenian
disaster was written between the two world wars by the Jewish author
Franz Werfel. Jewish sensitivity existed before the Holocaust as well;
the State of Israel and Jewish organizations cannot now cling to the
difference between "Holocaust" and "genocide." It certainly makes no
difference to Holocaust deniers.
Dragging the memory of Anne Frank into the (justified) debate in
Israel about benefits for Holocaust survivors has also not added
dignity to it, even if the intentions of MK Ophir Pines-Paz were
good. But much more humiliating was the use MK Yitzhak Cohen made of
the memory of the six million victims in his war against the cremation
of Israelis who have chosen this custom before they passed away. His
statements recalled the sermon of his rabbi and leader, Rabbi Ovadia
Yosef declaring those murdered in the Holocaust as the reincarnation
of the souls of sinners.
And differently, but not by much: On the eve of the new school year
we learned that schools in Petah Tikva refused to accept 80 Ethiopian
children. This, too, is plain racism, in the name of which Jews were
sent to the firing squads and the gas chambers.