Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on January 29, 2020

Jonathan A. Greenblatt, Opinion contributor Published 7:00 a.m. ET Jan. 26, 2020 | Updated 1:23 p.m. ET Jan. 26, 2020

A 'Holocaust Revisionism' group promotes a 'Holocaust Deprogramming Course' to counter 'Holo-brainwashing.' This is anti-Semitism, not misinformation.

Since the world first learned of the genocide that unfolded in concentration camps across Europe during World War II, there hasbeen much progress toward ensuring the lessons of the Holocaust are not easily forgotten.

As we mark the 75thanniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, theres solace in the fact that world leaders, the United Nations and European governmentscontinue to honor the memory of the 6 million Jews and millions of others who perished. Along with videotaped survivor testimonies and Holocaust education in schools, this goesa long way toward ensuring that the message of Never Again will continue to resonate into the future.

But theres also reason for concern. At a time when anti-Semitism is risingand when public awareness of the Holocaustis waning, we cannot let our guard down and assume the world wont forget. Recent trends suggest that theres much work to be done, both in terms of promoting greater awareness and in guarding against denialism.

The ready availability of Holocaust denial on social media remains one of the most pressing problems.

With a staggering 2.45 billion monthly active users worldwide, Facebook is the largest and most established offender. Facebooks policies still do not specify Holocaust denial to be hate.

This, despite thecontroversy in 2018after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg suggested that Holocaust denial while abhorrent to him was nevertheless an opinion, not outright hate speech, and therefore not prohibited content. Facebook doubled down on this approach when, in announcing the change to its policy prohibiting white nationalism in March 2019, it reaffirmed that Holocaust denial was a form of misinformation.

The entrance to Auschwitz concentration camp in Oswiecim, Poland.(Photo: Pawel Sawicki/Auschwitz Memorial and Museum via epa-EFE)

This means that even if you report Holocaust denial on Facebook, and even if it is determined by Facebook to be Holocaust denial, it will not be taken down for violating Facebooks policies. You can easily locate pages from notorious Holocaust denial groups on Facebook with just a few clicks. For instance, a group called "Holocaust Revisionism," withover 1,900 members, includes posts promoting a "Holocaust Deprogramming Course" which claims it will free readers from a lifetime of Holo-brainwashing. To Facebook, this is merely misinformation.

Lets be clear:Holocaust denialis nothing more than anti-Semitism. It is an attempt to deny the Jewish people their history, one of many tactics used by bigots in the long-running campaign to delegitimize the Jewish people.Deniers claim that the Holocaust never happened, or that some much smaller number of Jews did diebut primarily from diseases.They also claim that accounts of the Holocaust are merely propaganda generated by Jews for their own benefit. Denialismis often used by some of the worlds foremost anti-Semites among them former Ku Klux Klan wizardDavid Duke, Iranian Supreme LeaderAli Khameneiand 2018 congressional candidateArthur Jonesto foment hate against Jews.

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Holocaust denial and related forms of anti-Semitism are easily available to anyone with an internet connection. According to law enforcement, more thana month before a machete-wielding man stabbed five people at a Hanukkah party in Monsey, New York, heused an online search engine for the query, Why did Hitler hate the Jews?Giventhe well-documented proliferation of anti-Semitism on social mediaand on the internet in general, one would assume he found plenty of confirmation of his alleged biases.

Some popular social media platforms recently have taken steps to mitigate the impact of Holocaust denial. On Jan. 8, TikTok released a new set of community guidelines thatbannedHolocaust denial and conspiracy theories. LastJune, YouTube changed itspolicyto ban videos promoting Holocaust denial, white supremacy and harmful conspiracy theories. These are welcome developments.

Even so, the question remains: With the countless videos and other types of content being shared on these social platforms and others, how does anyone enforce or police this effectively?

Other platforms are struggling with this, too. It was recently brought to the attention of Spotify, the music streaming service,that a cursory search of its playlists for Anne Frank found playlists with disturbing titles such as getting gassed with Anne Frank.Spotify says it isin the process of removingthose offensive playlists.

Online retailer Amazon has struggled to deal with retailers hawking questionable Nazi-glorifying merchandise such as Auschwitz Holocaust Christmas ornaments. Anda recent Anti-Defamation Leaguesurvey found that almost 1in 10 Americans who play online multiplayer gamesare exposedto discussions about Holocaust denial.

Tree of Life anniversary: American Jews see rising anti-Semitism

Addressing these problems will take a concerted effort by the tech industry. For that to happen, though, there needs to be a full recognition of a basic reality: Holocaust denial is anti-Semitismand therefore hate speech. Unfortunately, Facebook, the largest social media platformon the planet, just cant seem to get there.

At a time when online hate speech and white supremacy is demonstrably leading to violent acts witness Pittsburgh, Poway, El Paso, Christchurch, Jersey City, Monsey and Halle, Germanyit is imperative that the history of the Holocaust is preserved and respected.

Social media companies can play a unique role in helping preserve that history by adopting policies that explicitly forbid Holocaust denial. In light of the wave of anti-Semitic violence that has plagued our country over the past year, its time for these companies to step up.

Jonathan A. Greenblatt is CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League. Follow him on Twitter:@JGreenblattADL

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Facebook should ban Holocaust denial to mark 75th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation - USA TODAY

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Posted By admin on January 29, 2020

Benjamin Netanyahu is not one for expressing gratitude to fellow politicians, unless its to President Donald Trump and other fellow strongmen. So his tweet on Thursday thanking the retired Likud minister Silvan Shalom for having led the diplomatic campaign at the United Nations to establish International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 15 years ago, was an anomaly. But Netanyahu indeed had reason to be thankful.

This year, that commemoration day was an opportunity to invite dozens of high-level delegations to Israel including the presidents of Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine and for Netanyahu to present his own grim and self-serving conclusions from the Jews tragedy. It also created an annual global event around the Holocaust that is much bigger than him or any other politician.

It may be taken for granted now that such a day exists, but it wasnt at all simple 15 years ago. Every word in the UN resolution establishing International Holocaust Remembrance Day was hotly debated. The number of times the word Jews would be mentioned was an issue, as was the attention other nations who had suffered during World War II and genocides at other times would receive.

To win Russian support, the date January 27 was chosenthe liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945 so they could highlight the Red Armys role as liberators. Great care was taken to court the Arab and other Muslim members of the UN, so they would not be seen as refusing to commemorate the Holocaust. Eventually, most of them voted in favor. A few, including Iran, abstained.

Over the years there have been political controversies over the day especially in Britain, one of the countries where the government endorsed it as a national remembrance day as well. For a number of years, the Muslim Council of Great Britain refused to take part and far-left politicians, including Jeremy Corbyn, tried to get it renamed Genocide Memorial Day, removing the unique mention of the Jewish victims.

And in recent years, Poland and Russia have fought for their own special status. The Poles want Auschwitz to stand as a symbol of their national suffering, at least equal to that of the Jews, and Polands nationalist government has even passed legislation to try to establish a convenient historical narrative. The Russians want their role as liberators to obscure the fact that, for the first two years of World War II, they partnered with Nazi Germany in dismembering Poland.

But for the most part, these political and diplomatic disputes are background music. Fifteen years since its inauguration, International Holocaust Remembrance Day is now a regular fixture both on the international diplomatic and the national political calendars of many nations. No other genocide or global tragedy has this level of recognition. No other event that took place in the tumultuous 20th century is marked as widely.

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As Jews, we see it as only just that the nearly successful plan to industrially exterminate our nation from the face of an entire continent should be recognized in this fashion and serve as a warning for all mankind. But it is far from simple or natural that has become the case. And just a couple of decades ago, it would have been almost unimaginable.

Marking the Holocaust as an event with lasting and wide-reaching implications for the entire world is now almost a matter of consensus. There is regular hand-wringing over surveys in various countries that show various proportions of the local populations are now unaware of how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and other key details. That is the wrong way of looking at it.

The fact a calamity that befell one nation is taught in the history books of other nations, and that they annually mark it and have museums and monuments dedicated to it even if they do not have a direct connection to it, is singular.

The Holocaust is a global brand. So successful that even the Hebrew word for it, Shoah, is widely in use by those who know no other word of Hebrew. Nations around the world that want to have their genocides recognized and commemorated look to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington for guidance and their stamp of approval. It really should not be taken for granted.

In the decades after the end of World War II, there was little desire outside Israel and Jewish communities to give the Holocaust special attention. Every country had its own priorities. If they were on the side of the victorious nations, it was the bravery of their own armed forces; in Britain and Russia, the suffering of their own civilians as well. For the nations that had been under Nazi occupation, there was no eagerness to accord the Jews special attention. And then, of course, for the members of the Axis, guilt, blame and rehabilitation of reputations took precedence over the Jews.

And then there was politics. Recognizing that there had been something different and uniquely evil about the extermination of the Jews would have repercussions, receive pushback and trigger revisionism.

The Soviet Union, which saw the war as part of an ideological struggle, wanted the Jews subsumed into the category of victims of fascism. As anti-imperialism became the prevailing orthodoxy in wide swaths of political and academic thought, competing genocides and racisms began jostling for space in the victimhood sweepstakes. And of course, there were those who feared that giving too much attention to the Jews genocide would strengthen the Jewish claim to a sovereign state in their ancient homeland. Hence attempts on both the left and right to either deny the Holocaust, downplay its uniqueness or, as a last resort, portray the Israelis as latter-day Nazis and accuse the Jews of not having learned from the Holocaust.

Seventy-five years since the liberation of Auschwitz, its time not just to learn from the Holocaust but to learn from how the Holocaust has been commemorated. If the grandiose international events of the last few days prove anything, it is that those who tried to deny and downplay the Shoah have failed spectacularly.

The fact it is now being commemorated so widely is a rare positive sign of how Western civilization has developed in recent decades. The efforts of survivors to bear witness, of historians and educators to research and publicize, of both independent Nazi-hunters and, at different periods, some governments to track down the perpetrators, have all combined to produce a body of commemoration that can never again be denied.

It is important not to take this for granted, because the success of fixing the Holocausts memory in global consciousness does not mean that its legacy still cannot be abused. This year, the leaders of Israel, Russia and Poland have all to varying degrees abused this legacy, co-opting it to serve their political agenda. But they are unlikely to succeed in obscuring history.

Vladimir Putins bullying wont make the world forget the perfidy of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, or the fact that the Red Army may have liberated Eastern Europe from Nazi Germany but also enforced decades of communist dictatorship. Polands ruling Law and Justice party wont succeed in whitewashing the pogroms and collaboration of Polish citizens against their Jewish neighbors. And Netanyahu will ultimately fail in his attempts at expropriating the Holocaust to serve as justification for his policies.

All the individuals, organizations and governments who combined together to create a lasting monument have created something stronger than the politicians.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day has become testament to the survivors success not only in rebuilding their lives, but in recording their stories, and the stories of those who were murdered, for posterity. Soon they will not be with us anymore, but they have finally won. No politician can take it away from them.

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How the survivors won and Holocaust denial, and the politicians, lost - Haaretz

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Posted By admin on January 29, 2020

What is Holocaust denial?

The answer to this question may seem obvious to Haaretz readers and to the impressive roster of world leaders gathering at Yad Vashem this week for the Fifth World Holocaust Forum, marking 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz.

Holocaust denial is a vile assault on the memory of the six million Jews murdered by Nazi Germany and its accomplices, a depraved twisting of the anti-Semitic knife. We must be unstinting in our efforts to keep the memory of our lost relatives - and the historical record - alive.

But beyond that, the question of what Holocaust denial really means, and where the boundaries of denial start and stop, is not so clear. In a world where social media platforms are willing facilitators of the notion that historical truth is just not that important, propagandists and conspiracy theorists from across the political spectrum latch on to the Holocaust to make political capital for themselves.

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How social media has helped Holocaust denial morph from a neo-Nazi lie to an a ubiquitous, and accepted,internet meme becomes clear when contrasting how the European Court of Human Rights has approached Holocaust denial, and how social media titan Facebook has.

The Court is part of an extensive framework of institutions and conventions carefully constructed by the nations of post-Holocaust Europe to try to prevent the return of the totalitarianism that brought about a genocide on their soil.

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In a significant ruling last October, the Court found that Holocaust-denying German politician Udo Pastrs, the former Chair of the far right NPD, had lost his protected right to free speech when he "intentionally stated untruths in order to defame the Jews and the persecution that they had suffered" by contradicting "established historical facts" in relation to the Holocaust.

This ruling upheld the values of the post-war West European order that Holocaust denial was originally intended to subvert.

Denial began as a far right project to rehabilitate Nazism by erasing its greatest crime from the worlds collective memory. Persuade people that the Holocaust never happened, so their thinking went, and Nazism and fascism become just another ideology: brutal and uncompromising, perhaps, but no more so than communism and its variants. This approach had the added anti-Semitic bonus of arguing that the entire world and Germans and Palestinians specifically were the victims of a gigantic Jewish hoax.

The heyday of this movement was the 1980s and 1990s, when its leading figures were authors and academics like David Irving and Robert Faurisson. Irving was, for a while, one of Britains best-known historians of World War Two; Faurisson was a university professor who was defended by Noam Chomsky when his denial writings came to light.

With a surge in far-right activity and support across Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was genuine fear that Holocaust denial might build into a significant force. But today, Irving is discredited, Faurisson is dead, and the latest generation of neo-Nazi Jew-haters prefer to celebrate the Holocaust than to deny it.

Instead, the new promoters of Holocaust denial are the social media platforms and tech companies that have done more than any far right propagandist to undermine the notion of historical truth and to challenge the assumptions of liberal democracy.

Denial has found a new home as one amongst many conspiracy theories; another opportunity for online hucksters in YouTube videos and Facebook groups to persuade the gullible and the ignorant. As such it has greater appeal across the political spectrum than it ever did, reaching people who would never think of themselves as neo-Nazis or anti-Semites.

Facebook persistently contendsthat it will not remove Holocaust denial posts from its platform unless deniers also incite hate or violence against Jews. According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Holocaust denial is just people "getting it wrong." The idea that Holocaust denial, by definition, incites hate against Jews holds no sway with the worlds largest social network.

Social media is, of course, a global network, and awareness of even the basic facts of the Holocaust varies alarmingly from country to country. A CNN poll in 2018 found that a fifth of French adults under the age of 34 had never heard of the Holocaust, compared to just five per cent in Germany. Another 2018 poll found that 31 per cent of adults in the United States thought two million Jews or fewer were killed.

Outside of Europe and the Americas knowledge of the Holocaust drops even further. According to an Anti-Defamation League poll of 102 countries in 2014, most people in the Middle East, north and sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia had not heard of the Holocaust, and of those who had, substantial proportions in each country thought it was either exaggerated or a complete myth.

This is fertile soil for todays revisionists, relativisers and minimizers of the Holocaust. The claim that Israel behaves just like Nazi Germany and that Palestinians, rather than Jews, are Nazisms most enduring victims, is ubiquitous on the anti-Israel left. It is mirrored on the right by the idea that, just as Jews suffered under Nazism, so Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and others suffered under communism; combined with a determined effort to erase examples of local collaboration in the extermination of their Jewish populations from these countries own national narratives.

Neither of these approaches - emerging from the anti-Israel left and the hard nationalist right - denies that the Holocaust happened and both recognize it as a terrible crime. Rather than denial, they have developed their own mythology to harness the Holocausts unrivalled moral weight for their own political projects.

If you believe that the Jews exploit the Holocaust for their own particular ends, it makes sense to try to do the same for yourself. And if you see Holocaust commemoration as a vehicle for Jewish power and privilege, what betterway to undercut that "power" is there than an interpretation of the Holocaust thatreframes it asyour own victimhood story, while transferring some of the blame onto the Jews themselves?

This leads to the grotesque situation of the former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone insisting that Hitler was "supporting Zionism" in the 1930s because it fits his leftist anti-Zionism, to bolster his characterization of Israel as morally illegitimate; while George Soros, who survived the Holocaust as a child, is accused by his right-wing critics of having actually collaborated with the Nazis.

Both claims are nonsense: but in this post-truth, identity-driven politics, where people choose their own facts and ignorance is no barrier to the assertion of expertise, why risk a formal charge of "Holocaust denier" when you can twist six million victims into whatever shape you want, and then adopt that "Holocaust" as your own.

Dr Dave Rich is Director of Policy for the Community Security Trust, an Associate Research Fellow at the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck, University of London, and author of The Left's Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Antisemitism (Birkbeck, 2018). Twitter: @daverich1

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Holocaust denial has gone global. And it's all thanks to Facebook - Haaretz

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Posted By admin on January 29, 2020

I travel a lot, because Im curious and love to fly. My recent visit to Krakow was nothing but a distortion of the victims of the Holocaust, but also Oskar Schindler.

Poland has in recent years elected a far-right, Catholic, populist government whose main goals seems to be to forbid abortions, denying any refugees entrance (in direct violation with the Geneva convention) and re-shaping the Polish historical narrative. Just to name a few things which is a disgrace to most people.

My visit to Krakow was for personal reasons, but they have a really nice old city, the old Jewish quarters, cheap food and drinks and not to mention somekind of majestic castle overlooking most of Krakow. There is an old synagogue and there is a more functional one actually doing service. There are no mosques in Krakow, but there is a lot of churches. They also seem to have very few visible social issues, but if you start to scratch the surface you notice that the Krakowian police arrest homeless people and drop them off in an industrial area outside the city. Mind you Krakow has to look nice for all the tourists.

Anyways, I suppose a viable amount of you readers has been to Krakow, mostly in order to remember the past and never let it happen again. I biked my way out to theSchindler factory. Or to be exactFabryka Oskara Schindlera Emalja. Once standing in line, purchased my tickets and entered I was a bit stunned. Overwhelmed. Surprised. Disappointed. Angry.

First of all Oskar Schindler is a person that bears the honorable title Righteous among the nations, second of all thousands of slave-workers worked there mostly jews but alsogypsies, homosexuals and people not fitting in to the nazi-german narrative. Many died during the hardships both in the factory and in the nearby later erectedKonzentrationslager Plaszow.

The former grounds of the factory, or lets call it a slave labour camp. Whatever it was, its not what it is now. My shock and awe came when I realized this has nothing to do with commemorating those slave workers or Mr. Schindler. Instead the poles has since many years turned it into a museum of polish resistance against the Nazi-german occupation. While such a museum is of a great historical significance why did they choose to build it in the oldEmaljenwarenfabrik? For me this didnt make sense at all, while in the meantime I was basically stepping on floor that slave-workers had been suffering upon while reading about how brave the Poles were during the occupation.

This becomes a distortion of truth and I think its just what the ultra right wing government in Poland wants to. It wants to celebrate its heroes and hide its dark past dont forget what many Polish resistance groups did against jews or others in a bad spot.

But the biggest distortion of truth came later for me. The next day I decided to bike toKonzentrationslager Plaszow I wasnt expecting anything to be left there or be able to see any remnants and remember in silence. So what is KZ Plaszow today? Its an empty heep of land filled with high grass, if you are a bit imaginative you might be able to notice ditches where executions took place but thats about it. I parked my bike and started wandering around the area, I found an old Soviet era monument to those who died and survived Plaszow. But not a single word from the Polish government, not a sign nothing. Nada.

Oh, by the way there is some sort of a small industrial factory on some of the grounds now producing refined fuel for farming machines. And a lot of signs of NO ENTRY to that place. Which is totally irrelevant for my visit anyway.

I walked back to my bi-cycle and started chugging my very sun-heated water and relaxed a bit in the shadow. Just trying to process everything, trying to learn something and imagine how it must have been there during the winters KZ Plaszow is kind on top of plateau and it was windy.

Suddenly, out of the middle of nowhere I saw a car racing towards me like a rally car with blue lights on top. Yeah it was the police.Dzien dobry they said, while stepping out of the car and realizing I dont speak a word of polish and their english was not exactly top notch. Anyways after some google translating the whole KZ Plaszow is a closed off area no one is allowed to enter and god forbid if you take pictures there or just like me sitting under a tree in the shadow and contemplating.

I wasnt too keen on getting arrested for trespassing in Poland, so I apologized in every language I could and biked away. The police car followed me all the way to the entry road and then taking off. Note that there is no sign that you are not allowed to enter.

So what does this tell the world? What does it tell us? What does it tell to the Polish people?

In my opinion it tells the story of a country who is guilty of countless of pogroms. It tells the story of a Poland who wants to hide its past while building its own Polish hero narrative. It tells the story of what an ultra right-wing populist government can do in order to hide the truth. Think about it today more than ever every vote counts and what world do you want your children to see and learn about when they grow up?

Hello!I'm Jonas and lives close to the arctic circle in Sweden, for the past decade I've been travelling, studying and working in various fields (I've been around the world 6 times). While the arctic circle might sound far away let me tell you it is! Therefore - I will also provide you with funny cultural clashes between probably the northernmost Israeli in the world and the local inhabitants.Have a great day!

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The Polish Holocaust Denial in Krakow | Jonas Amir Kadah | The - The Times of Israel

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Posted By admin on January 29, 2020

Its now 75 years since Soviet troops liberated the notorious death camp at Auschwitz and the vast majority of Holocaust survivors are no longer with us. The impact of continuing to research the Holocaust can, therefore, not be underestimated. The further away we move from the events and the more first-hand witnesses we lose, the more disconnected we feel, both individually and as a society.

As an archaeologist, I have experienced first hand how using a measured, scientific approach to the investigation of these atrocities can help to answer questions, heal communities, bring closure and allow for a more balanced approach to the representation of the subject.

The presentation of rigorously researched scientific evidence to support the known (and sometimes forgotten) history, has become ever more important at a time when this is being challenged by misinformation, competing narratives and populist movements.

As is the case for most British people, what I knew about the Holocaust was originally limited to what I had learned during secondary education and through my exposure to the subject in the media. I did not study the Holocaust at degree level or make a determined effort to develop a greater awareness. Now, through my work in the field of Holocaust archaeology I know different.

For my generation growing up in an age when the internet was just emerging, the information on the Holocaust was limited to academic research disseminated through school and traditional media. Todays students have access to an unmanageable amount of material and the choice to search without restriction. But this access does not guarantee increased awareness or knowledge.

Recent surveys have suggested that one in 20 people in the UK dont believe the Holocaust happened, while one-third of people from seven surveyed European countries know little or nothing about these events.

Additionally, a study of English secondary schools found that few students could accurately describe the events of the Holocaust, even though this is a compulsory part of the curriculum. This is a worrying trend for future generations.

Traditionally, Holocaust education has centred on historical sources and testimony from survivors. But as these statistics show new and innovative methods of collecting and presenting these facts are required to engage and, crucially, generate an awareness in people to ensure that these events are not forgotten or become rewritten. The use of an archaeological approach to research and present the Holocaust is therefore relevant and timely.

Our knowledge of the Holocaust tends to focus on the main camps rather than the tens of thousands of more diverse Holocaust sites across Europe. Many of these remain unprotected, understudied and known only to comparatively few people. Each of these sites contains individual stories which, when told, can illustrate direct relevance to our contemporary society.

The practice of Holocaust archaeology, uses desk-based archival research, satellite imagery, aerial photographs, remote sensing, topographic survey and geophysical techniques to identify destroyed camps, lost killing sites and hidden mass graves. Importantly, these techniques avoid excavation that would disturb human remains, a practice which is forbidden under Jewish Law. Staffordshire Universitys Centre of Archaeology, of which I am a member, has worked at more than 40 sites across Europe.

To provide an example, several killing sites and mass graves that were regarded as lost and under immediate threat have recently been identified by our team using these innovative archaeological methods. Sites in Rohatyn and across the regions of Vinnytsia and Zhytomir in the Ukraine, now have protected status and newly dedicated memorials to the victims.

Collected data can be visualised in a multitude of innovative ways with the primary objective being digital preservation, simplicity of access and increased awareness to a wide audience.

During my time on these projects, I have personally seen and been subject to the unequivocal evidence of the true scale of the Holocaust. I have experienced the profound effects of being presented with the graves and the remains of the victims and have seen the positive effects of presenting the evidence of the research to the public.

My experiences have been viewed through the eyes of someone who knew our modern history and was aware of the scale and effect of war but I had no direct involvement in it. My archaeological background, however, meant I was more familiar with our ancient past than the generation that preceded me.

Working in this field, the effect on me has been thought-provoking and life-affirming. Put simply, I am more appreciative of the everyday opportunities and freedoms of life. I have been able to see the victims as individuals, whose lives and aspirations were cut short and whose memory should not be so easily manipulated or forgotten.

Many of these experiences would have been made all the more difficult without the collective support of my colleagues. The discussion that follows the analysis of victim testimonies, historic photographs and archaeological fieldwork is an important part of processing the raw reality of the Holocaust.

My work in this field has taken me to more than 15 sites across Europe, from Norway, Germany, the Czech Republic, Croatia to Poland and the Ukraine. It is evident that governmental and personal responses to the recognition and presentation of these sites vary in each nation. Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism is ever-present in the UK and across Europe more generally and this is even more apparent at these sites. It is partly as a response to these continued pressures that these research projects are undertaken.

There have, on many occasions, been causes to be pessimistic about human nature. I have encountered Jewish memorials that have been used for target practice, cemetery sites that have been historically and recently desecrated, and denial and hostility by local residents.

Distressingly, there have been several sites that have been looted, resulting in human remains, clothing and belongings being scattered across the surface, perhaps due to the misguided belief that mass graves contain items of value. These encounters highlight the fact that indifference and prejudices, but also social inequalities, are still prevalent.

Thankfully, positive events and achievements outweigh the bad. The grateful thanks of relatives, religious leaders and heritage groups, the raising of awareness within communities, schools and the media, and the identification of the exact boundaries of mass graves and camp buildings resulting in protection and memorialisation, are the successes to hold on to.

These projects also lead to the re-interment of remains. And, at sites that were erased by the Nazis, we were able to provide physical evidence relating to the nature of incarceration and extermination.

I am grateful to be in a position to continue to tell the story and get recognition for the sites that have been disturbed or neglected for decades. Helping to tell the stories of these lost individuals is especially important at a time when intolerance and indifference is becoming an accepted part of society.

The scale and extent of the devastation of the Holocaust means there is still much work to be done, especially given the current challenges of continued prejudice and misinformation.

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Holocaust archaeology: uncovering vital evidence to prove the deniers wrong - The Conversation UK

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Posted By admin on January 29, 2020

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz. The date is now consecrated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, as the world vowed never to allow murderous anti-Semitism to recur. Yet 75 years later, attacking Jews has once again become socially acceptable in many countries across the left-right ideological spectrum, and among different groups that blame Jews for their grievances and oppression.

The recent eruptions of anti-Semitism in America have awakened us to a prejudice that has long resided, in quiet ways and in many forms, in this country. And the part of it that now disguises itself as anti-Zionism hatred of the Jewish state that was established in the wake of the Holocaust as a refuge for Jews has even seemed, to some, virtuous, a sentiment they believe puts them in humanitys moral vanguard.

And anti-Semitism has returned, in part, because the general publics knowledge about the Holocaust of what exactly it was, who exactly was murdered in it, how many were killed, and how anti-Semitism spawned it has diminished. For a time, that knowledge discredited anti-Semitism and those who indulged in it. But the passing of survivors who experienced the Holocaust and could testify to it, the denial and minimization of the Holocaust, and the hijacking of the word itself to advance numerous other causes, great and small, all combined to diminish its memory. The horrifying knowledge of where anti-Semitism can lead has been, in large measure, lost in a miasma of forgetting, ignorance, denial, confusion, appropriation, and obfuscation.

As a former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, many of whose uncles, aunts, and cousins, and a grandmother, were murdered in the Holocaust; as a professor who has taught a generation of students about the memory of the Holocaust; as a psychiatrist who is well aware of humanitys repertoire of hatred and brutality; as a professor of international affairs; and as a student of Jewish history who is deeply aware of the many times masses of Jews were murdered or expelled simply because they were Jews, I watch anti-Semitisms global resurgence, so soon after the Holocaust, with alarm and foreboding. Could murderous anti-Semitism, on a large scale, resume in our time? Could never again, vowed so solemnly and so repeatedly after the Holocaust, revert to yet again?

What motivates anti-Semitism? For two millennia, the prejudice has fulfilled needs psychological, theological, national, and social that have multiplied and mutated:

Why were Jews the group that was most regularly identified, in the lands and communities theyve inhabited, as fulfilling one or more of these needs? The most likely reasons are historical and psychological: When Jews were first identified as fulfilling some of these needs, they were branded as villains. Over time, that branding was repeatedly reinforced so that Jews became the usual suspects the group that immediately came to mind when a new need arose to find explanatory villains.

So why the resurgence of anti-Semitism today?

Anti-Semitism is useful in the current moment in both Europe and America. For some on the right, it can fulfill the need for a national, religious, or ethnic agenda. And for some on the left, it can fulfill the need to establish virtue, particularly when its connected with anti-Zionism.

In Arab and Muslim lands, anti-Semitism is often expressed as both hatred of Jews and hatred of Israel, and is very frequently bolstered by Holocaust denial. Delegitimizing the Jewish state can serve as a means to reverse the humiliation, degradation, and oppression of Muslims.

In Eastern Europe, right-wing, nationalist parties have taken control, often rewriting Holocaust history, and often with the support of groups that are strongly anti-Semitic and have adopted Nazi slogans and agendas. In Western Europe, anti-Semitism is found among right-wing forces; within political parties on the left, especially in Britain; and among elements of the Muslim community.

But for now, the democracies of Western Europe are strong enough to withstand the pressure. And in America, the episodes of anti-Semitic speech and violence, though theyve greatly proliferated in the past few years, have begun to mobilize communities and governmental agencies to protect Jews from violence. This wont stop anti-Semitisms continuing growth, but it will control it. Despite a long history of bias at many levels, from academia to boardrooms, Jews in America have established themselves during the past century in every sphere of American life, and the American tradition of tolerance will remain far more powerful than its manifestations of prejudice.

So although Jews face ongoing violence, it is not of a level that will, in the foreseeable future, result in massive death. In Europe and the United States, there might be limited outbursts. Should Iran develop nuclear weapons, it could, in a moment of irrationality, launch them to try to obliterate the Jewish state, which its leaders repeatedly have vowed to destroy and which is home to nearly half of the worlds Jews; but Irans fear that it could be devastated in return by a nuclear-armed Israel would almost surely keep such a cataclysmic possibility in check. In short, despite the rise in worldwide anti-Semitism, a repeat of the Holocaust major mass murder is, though possible, unlikely in the foreseeable future.

As we mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I wish I could be more upbeat than that. But Im not. Im a physician. I know that one can manage a chronic disease, one can treat it, one can often prevent its complications, but one can rarely cure it and one cant ever be sure that it wont become, at some point, catastrophic.

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75 years after Auschwitz, anti-Semitism is on the rise - Brookings Institution

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Posted By admin on January 29, 2020

The 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz comes at a time when populism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism are again on the rise. The duty to remember the Holocaust is threatened both by its political instrumentalization, and by the natural human proclivity to forget the past or become indifferent to the suffering of others.

PARIS The 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army is an occasion marked by angst as well as sadness. Anti-Semitism is back with a vengeance around the world, as if the lessons of the Holocaust had evaporated with time or, even worse, had never been fully integrated into our collective consciousness.

This unprecedented crime, perpetrated by one of the most advanced and cultivated societies on Earth, was the most extreme example of the horrors humans can inflict on one another. When pushed by a combination of fear and hatred, people can become monsters.

The current resurgence of populism and nationalism makes it all the more important to commemorate the victims of Auschwitz. But, 75 years on, the duty to remember is doubly threatened: by the political instrumentalization of the Holocaust, and by the natural human proclivity to forget the past or become indifferent to the suffering of others.

More than ever, we are witnessing what could be called the geopolitics of Holocaust memory. Five years ago, in 2015, the only commemoration of the camps liberation took place in situ at Auschwitz, under the aegis of the Polish government. (In the immediate aftermath of Russias seizure of Crimea, Russian President Vladimir Putin was not invited to address the gathering.) This year, however, there has been a competition between two commemorations: one in Jerusalem at the behest of the Israeli government and the European Jewish Congress, and the other, sought by the Polish government, at Auschwitz.

Poland, where the horror took place, sent no delegate to the Jerusalem ceremony, after its president, Andrzej Duda, refused to attend. Duda had not been invited to speak at the event, whereas Putin, French President Emmanuel Macron, his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and Britains Prince Charles were.

Having to choose between Russia and Poland, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu did not hesitate even though Russia now considers World War II to have started in 1941 instead of 1939, when the Soviet Union seized Polish territory under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. Polands increasingly nationalistic treatment of history in recent years also no doubt influenced Netanyahus decision.

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The Jerusalem commemoration represented an undeniable diplomatic victory for Israel. Not since the 1995 funeral of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had so many world leaders gathered in the city. But the event also constituted a success for Russia, with Putins presence confirming his countrys new indispensable status in the Middle East.

With the passage of time, the real heroes of the Auschwitz commemorations are becoming ever fewer. But they are in no position to resist this instrumentalization of their suffering.

Of course, instrumentalizing the memory of the Holocaust is nothing new. During the Cold War, Eastern and Central Europes communist regimes emphasized the crimes that had been committed by fascists against anti-fascist patriots, thereby relativizing or even denying the Jewish origin of the overwhelming majority of the victims. Today, with the rise of populism, any sort of criticisms of local populations, or of their complicity in the crimes committed by Nazi Germany, have become punishable offenses starting in Poland.

This approach shows no respect for historical truth and often contradicts it. It suits people who also have suffered deeply, but do not want to confront their responsibility for the suffering of others. Since Netanyahu has been prime minister, the instrumentalization of the memory of the Holocaust has played a central role in Israeli diplomacy as well, while the Iranian regime, with its repeated calls for Israels destruction, seems to be doing its best to encourage such a stance.

The memory of the past is threatened not only by its instrumentalization, but also by a powerful combination of ignorance and forgetfulness, not to mention the Holocaust-denial camp. One-fifth of young people in France under the age of 24 have no idea what the Holocaust was. And the ignorance of some feeds the fear of others: polls indicate that 34% of French Jews feel threatened in their country.

Tackling this problem is above all a question of education. But there is a broader issue as well, namely the contrast among young people between their legitimate preoccupation with the planet and their lack of interest in politics. The young climate activist Greta Thunberg, for example, has helped to mobilize millions of people. But how can we convince them that ecological awareness is not a substitute for concern about freedom and democracy, but rather complementary to it?

The memory of the Holocaust should be seen as a kind of ultimate bulwark against the politics of hatred at a time when democracy and its institutions are being eroded. But it is not easy to defend the principle of never again when social networks are spreading so much atavism and ignorance.

Immediately before the Jerusalem events, I was in Berlin, the city where the Final Solution was conceived. When the rebuilding of the Stadtschloss (city palace) is complete, it will house the Humboldt Forum, a cultural center named in honor of brothers Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who embodied the Enlightenment spirit. It has taken 75 years to erase the physical traces of Hitlers genocidal folly. Is that the time it also takes to forget the lessons of history?

I have recently been wondering what my father, prisoner number 159721 at Auschwitz, would have made of these 75th anniversary commemorations. He probably would have felt pride at not being forgotten, and sadness at how the Holocaust has become an event to be spun for political gain in a world that has learned virtually nothing.

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The Geopolitics of Holocaust Memory | by Dominique Moisi - Project Syndicate

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Posted By admin on January 29, 2020

In 2011, a Polish historian, Jan Grabowski, published an explosive account of the actions of Polish citizens during the Holocaust, focusing on the community of Dabrowa Tarnowska, where Jewish Poles were hunted down and murdered by their Polish neighbours.

The book provoked a firestorm in his native country and almost a decade later Grabowski - a history professor at the University of Ottawa - remains embroiled in legal challenges.

In 2018 he sued the Polish League Against Defamation for libel, after it accused him of exaggerating the number of Jews that were killed by Poles during the Nazi occupation.

Polands right-wing Law and Justice Party has long leveraged what critics have called the politics of memory in its attempt to attract a nationalist base.

At the centre of this argument has been that it was the Nazis that murdered three million Polish Jews during World War II, not the Poles. That Poles were victims of the Holocaust, not perpetrators.

In March 2018, the country passed a law that made it a crime to falsely accuse the Polish nation of war crimes committed by Nazi Germany, explicitly outlawing use of the term Polish death camps when referring to concentration camps located in occupied Poland.

Historians like Grabowski refer to the attempt to rewrite what occurred during World War Two as Holocaust distortion, and argue that it is more dangerous than outright Holocaust denial.

Its major selling point is that it delivers the message what people want to hear: the Holocaust happened, but my nation, group, tribe, had nothing to do with it, he said.

Grabowski puts the number of Jews killed by Poles - or denounced or delivered to the Germans and later killed by the Nazis - at as many as 200,000. Jerusalem based Holocaust research centre Yad Vashem puts the number at between 130,000 and 180,000. All the numbers are, of course, rough estimates.

Grabowski is not the first Polish historian to challenge this narrative. In Poland in 2001, a ground-breaking book by historian Jan T Gross - titled Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland' - alleges the murder of 340 Polish Jews by local villagers, who, Gross states, locked men, women and children in a barn and burned them alive.

It is not that Poles were not also involved in saving Jews during the Holocaust: almost 7,000 are recognised by Yad Vashem as among the Righteous Among the Nations for their efforts to save Jews during the Holocaust, the largest number of any other nation. But Grabowski contends that atrocities were also committed by Poles against Jews.

In my work, I stress that the plan of the genocide was a German one but without local enablers and facilitators the Germans would not have been as efficient as they were, says Grabowski. This part of the story has never been told, in the Polish context, and we historians of the Shoah owe it to the victims and to the present readers alike.

Poland is not alone in having to come to terms with what happened during the Nazi occupation of eastern Europe - and the role of its soldiers, citizens and officials in it.

Of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, the vast majority - over 5.7m, according to Yad Vashem - were killed outside Germanys borders. That includes 1.1m in the Soviet Union, 569,000 in Hungary and a staggering 3m in Poland, where some of the Nazis most infamous death camps - Auschwitz-Birkenau among them - were located.

Yad Vashem estimates that half of Jews killed in the Holocaust died in extermination camps run by the SS, while at least a quarter were shot by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen - mobile death squads - as well as their accomplices, SS brigades, police formations, units and soldiers.

That at least some of these accomplices were not German but local residents of countries occupied by the Nazis is uncomfortable - but it is nevertheless a fact, says Yad Vashem.

In all stages of the murder many non-German civilians voluntarily participated in the killing operations, it said.

For many nations, the question of culpability has been a difficult pill to swallow. After 1945, much of eastern Europe was subsumed by the Soviet Union, which discouraged focus on the Nazi genocide as uniquely Jewish tragedy. It was only when the Berlin Wall fell that historians were able to gauge the true scale of the atrocities committed in Eastern Europe.

It was 2004 before Romania recognised that its soldiers had been involved in the deportation and murder of Jews - supervised by the Nazi SS - during WW2.

The terrible tragedy of the Holocaust was possible due to the complicity of top state institutionssecret services, army, police, et cetera, President Ion Iliescu said at the time.

There is [...] no excuse for those who cynically and cold-bloodedly sent their fellow citizens to death, who discriminated, humiliated, and excluded them from society.

It was 2014 before the Hungarian government - via its ambassador to the UN - took responsibility for the mass deportations of Jews to death camps in 1944, carried out by Hungarian officers supervised by the Nazi SS.

Others, like Poland and Lithuania - where 95% of the countrys 250,000-strong Jewish community was wiped out during the Holocaust - have been more reluctant to do so.

Writing this week in Politico, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, argued that rather than being perpetrators in Nazi crimes during World War Two, Poles created underground organisations to help Jews and many were sent to death for doing so. Renewed attempts to paint Poland as a perpetrator, rather than a victim, cant be tolerated, he wrote.

In Lithuania, a government lawmaker in the ruling party announced last month that he is drafting legislation that will declare that neither Lithuanias government nor its citizens were involved in the Holocaust. The government has also been active in canonising nationalist leaders that Jewish groups claim are linked to WW2-era atrocities.

Lithuanias Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, who fought the Soviets from 1945 until his execution in 1952 has been branded a national hero by the present government, but the Simon Wiesenthal Centre says he was head of a vigilante gang that persecuted Jews.

World War II leader Juozas Ambrazevicius was reburied in a ceremony in Kaunas. Ambrazevicius, who went to the US after the war, has been linked to the deaths of thousands of Jews and the ceremony led to criticism from Lithuania's Jewish community.

Lithuanian and Polish government spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment by Euronews last week.

In 2016, a memoir by Rta Vanagait entitled Our People provoked a debate about the extent to which Lithuanians were complicit in the murder of Jews. Vanagaite found out that her grandfather, a civil servant, drew up a list of 11 undesirables - all of them Jews - that were later executed. Her aunts husband was a chief of police during the Nazi occupation.

What has further complicated the landscape for historians like Gross, Vanagait and Grabowski working in the field has been recent statements by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been engaged in a very public spat with eastern European leaders about the role of Poland in particular in the outbreak of World War II.

In recent weeks, Putin has thrown gasoline on the fire in his repeated claims that Poland was responsible for World War II and helped the Germans deport Jews.

Polands President Andrzej Duda last week boycotted a ceremony to mark the liberation of the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz because he was refused permission to speak by the organisers. Duda had argued that he should have the right to reply to Putin

Putins comments come after the European Parliament passed a resolution blaming the Nazi-Soviet pact - the 1939 agreement between Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin to carve up Poland and the Baltic states between them - for the outbreak of the war.

Putin counters that the Soviet Union had little choice to sign an accord with the Nazis after repeated efforts by Britain and France to appease Hitler during the 1930s, including the Munich Accords in 1938 that allowed the Nazis to annex Czechoslovakia.

In 1941, Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the USSR, bringing the Soviets into the war. Despite early Nazi gains, the Red Army eventually turned the tide of the conflict, liberating most of eastern Europe and eventually invading and occupying Berlin.

But Putin says that European leaders want to shift the blame for unleashing World War II from the Nazis to Communists in an effort to sideline Russia.

The involvement of Russia in the debate, says Grabowski, has made life even more difficult for historians not willing to peddle the government narrative about World War II.

Anyone who writes anything critical is accused of being a Russian agent. he says.

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The history of the Holocaust is being re-written - and historians are fighting back - Euronews

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Posted By admin on January 29, 2020

President Reuven Rivlin addressed the Bundestag, German parliament, on Wednesday morning, to speak about the resurgence of antisemitism and the recently released peace plan of US President Donald Trump. Speaking at a special session of the Bundestag in memory of the victims of Nazism, the presidents speech marked the culmination of a week of Holocaust remembrance services. Rivlin spoke at the Fifth World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem last week and addressed Holocaust survivors at a commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on Monday. Rivlin began his speech by reciting the Jewish memorial prayer of Yizkor. It was a powerful moment, in a building where Hitler once stood and declared the end of world Jewry.Germany, the place where the Final Solution was envisaged, took upon itself the responsibility to defend nationalist-liberal values when they are being eroded by waves of populism, Rivlin said. If Germany fails trying to prevent the disaster, others everywhere are likely to fail.German governments have invested in an unprecedented way in remembrance and memorial, in fighting Holocaust denial and in educating the next generations, the president said, as he commended Germany on its role in the modern world and its determination to fight modern antisemitism and to continue educating future generations. Israel and Germany walk together, with tension and with courage, between past and present, between the obligation to remember and never to forget.The president also spoke about Trumps Deal of the Century, which was released on Tuesday, warning that trust needs to be built between the two sides in order to secure a lasting peace.We must build confidence between us. The future of the Middle East and the integration of Israel in the region hinges on building this trust, Rivlin stated.The strength of the State of Israel makes us, in the view of many around the world, into Goliath and the Palestinians into David. We are not David and they are not Goliath. [And] we are not Goliath and they are not David, Rivlin stated. Israels strength and might over the years was and is the key to peace, not an obstacle to peace.Rivlin followed German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to the podium. The German president said, I wish I could say with conviction we have learned from the past. But how can I say that? How can I say that when wearing a kippah is dangerous? Or when Jews put their menorahs away when someone comes round to read the gas meter?Let us stand up to the old evil forces. Let us withstand the seduction of authoritarianism, Steinmeier said. We want to show Israel and the world that our country is doing justice to the trust bestowed upon us again. So that what can happen, will not happen.Rivlin and Steinmeier also visited a Jewish school in Berlin together on Tuesday. At the Moses Mendelssohn Jewish High School, Rivlin told students that building connections between different people from all over the world is the most important thing in order to build an inclusive society.

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Reuven Rivlin: Israel and Germany walk together between past and present - The Jerusalem Post

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Posted By admin on January 29, 2020

With Holocaust denial and antisemitism on the rise, it is more important than ever that we remember monsters can seem terrifyingly normal, writes Alex Cole-Hamilton.

Monsters are real. They may wear business suits or military uniforms, but they have walked among us. We see the evidence of their works in the bleaker chapters of human history and this week, on Holocaust Memorial Day, we marked the darkest chapter of all.

We remember the persecution and mechanised slaughter of 17 million people, more than a third Jewish. Entire communities, huge segments of entire races and any of those the Nazis found to be deviant or defective were rounded up and shipped to camps like Auschwitz and Belsen to be murdered.

This outrageous regime was only made possible with the blind capitulation of thousands of otherwise normal people. Of this, Italian writer and holocaust survivor Primo Levi said: Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.

The Nazis were successful at mass murder because they desensitised and normalised it. They inured every level of government and military to atrocity with endless layers of bureaucracy that reduced millions of lives to lines in a ledger book, transport manifests and piles of unclaimed belongings.

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We must always remember

Hannah Arendt described this as the banality of evil when she covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Sitting across from this little grey man in court, the architect of the final solution, Arendt described Eichmann as being terribly and terrifyingly normal.

It is that realisation, that horrific acts can be committed by humdrum men that for me represents the most powerful warning of the Holocaust. Monsters are real and we need to keep reminding ourselves of that.

As the Holocaust begins to move out of living memory, it is incumbent on all of us to keep that memory alive and to pass it on to our children and theirs to come. Recent research shows how imperative that is. According to a poll reported by BBC News, one in 20 UK adults believe the Holocaust didnt happen, a full eighth of the population believe it has been exaggerated.

I have written before about the incident last year when I spent some time in hospital and the man in the bed opposite volunteered his belief that the Holocaust was all a hoax. In the argument that followed, he revealed that the basis for his position was rooted in videos hed seen on YouTube.

Stronger than the sword is my soul

Challenging antisemitism and Holocaust denial falls to each of us. We have seen the grim evidence of its revival in the rise of casual antisemitism in UK politics and in two mass shootings in crowded synagogues last year alone. This isnt going away. Hate still blooms against the Jewish people and many of those others persecuted by the Nazis. We must do everything we can to stamp it out.

In the study of the Holocausts gruesome history, we come to the names of its perpetrators before we come to the names of its victims and survivors. Perhaps that is because the names of those who perished are so innumerable, their stories too heartbreaking. But the preservation of their memory is the most important thing we can do.

The fact that we are here, living amongst many of the communities that the Holocaust sought to extinguish is evidence that the Nazis failed. That human spirit prevailed over evil.

I was reminded of this when, on a parliamentary visit to Strasbourg in 2017, I stopped at the Synagogue de Paix which is built on the site of the Gestapo headquarters of Western Europe. Above the front door is a legend written in French and in Hebrew: Stronger than the sword is my soul.

Alex Cole-Hamilton is the Lib Dem MSP for Edinburgh Western.

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Rising antisemitism shows we must remember the banality of evil that led to Holocaust Alex Cole-Hamilton - Scotland on Sunday

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