Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on October 18, 2021

LearningLark from United States, CC BY 2.0

In a Yorkshire Live piece entitled 7 great inventions and cool things Jewish people have given to Yorkshire, comes this surprising tidbit:

Fish and chips is as British as it gets, right? Well, it was actually brought into Britain and by extension, Yorkshire by Jewish immigrants.

Jewish immigrant Joseph Malin opened Britains first known fish and chip shop in East London, in 1860.

Sephardic Jews (those of Spanish, Portuguese and North African ancestry) would fry fish in batter and eat it cold on the Sabbath when cooking was forbidden. Malin worked out that it tasted great hot too, especially combined with fried potatoes and his customers agreed.

The most British food there is.created by Jews! Could we call that ironic?

If you are palestinian Arab, you will no doubt call it a cultural appropriation.

Either way, the British should thank us for this inventionand for not making it something else.

A law school graduate, David Lange transitioned from work in the oil and hi-tech industries into fulltime Israel advocacy. He is a respected commentator and Middle East analyst who has often been cited by the mainstream media

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Britain's Iconic Food Fish and Chips Invented By You-Know-Jew

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Posted By admin on October 18, 2021

Britain has a complicated relationship with its fascist past, in that it barely acknowledges it.

Its a source of national pride that the country was, at one point, the only unoccupied nation fighting the Nazis.

Meanwhile, homegrown fascists like the aristocratic former MP Oswald Mosley, who wanted to parade with his small antisemitic army known as Blackshirts around the East End in 1936 were, according to legend, roundly beaten back by Jews who lived there,fellowworking class neighbors, Irish dockers and socialists at the famous Battle of Cable Street.

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And that is just about all we learn about our fascist past.

But Ridley Road, a new television series airing on the BBC, and due to appear on PBS Masterpiece in America later this year, has led to many eyes being opened about an even less well remembered period: Britains postwar antisemitic fascist past,and how the authorities failed to confront it.

Loosely based on a true story, it reveals that even as London was getting into its swing in the early 1960s, fascists were spouting Jew hatred in the middle of Trafalgar Square. And the police did nothing to stop it.

The series focuses on the 62 Group, a secret collective of Jewish anti-fascists. Until now, not even most British Jews had heard of them, let alone known that the work they started continues to keep the nations 300,000-strong Jewish community safe.

These were Jews who not only fought with their fists but infiltrated the fascist high command; utilizing both brain and brawns to stop the fascists openly spouting their Jew hatred and inciting violence as the people who should have kept them safe failed to do so.

The group was born from the 43 Group who had started fighting fascists at home in the immediate postwar period. Astonishingly, Jewish servicemen returned from defeating the Nazis to find fascists on the streets, blaming Britains ills and even the war itself on the Jews. For ten years, the 43 Group adopted a warlike attitude to pushing the far right out of the public square; if the police refused to do it, they would.

When things quietened down, the Jewish organizations, such as the Board of Deputies, the community's umbrella representative body, who had never approved of the Groups 'hooligan' behavior, promised to keep an eye on things. But they wouldn't or couldn't.

Jules Konopinski, whose family had narrowly escaped Germany and the Holocaust, joined the 43 Group as a teenager. He was driving to his work as a handbag designer in June 1962 when he saw a rally being set up in Trafalgar Square. There was a giant banner which read: "Free Britain from Jewish Control."

The rally was the launch event of a new fascist group, the National Socialist Movement, led by a Cambridge-educated teacher called Colin Jordan.

His supporters had already been behind arson attacks on synagogues but very little was known about them. Jordan, who was deemed too Nazi even for many on the far right, was one of several fascists to tap intofears about immigration as Britain opened its doors to immigrant labor from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan to reconstruct its postwar economy.

But his primary target was the Jews whom he and his followers credited with nefarious plans of aiding immigration to replace the white man, a conspiracy theory which has found a new lease of life on today's far right, in the form of the 'great replacement' theory.

That evening, Jules convened a meeting of what was to become the 62 Group. Their first plan after authorities told them the rally was legal was to break it up.

"Once we started looking into this group, we were stunned to find out they even had a big headquarters," he says when we meet at his North London home. "We wanted to stop them being underground and to make sure the press was there; and so were we, in huge numbers."

This rally became a battle between anti fascists and the neo-Nazis; the astonishing real footage is interspersed into the BBC TV drama. And it went on for hours. This was to be just the first in a set of skirmishes for the 62 Group.

Some of the action was purely physical. Barrie Milner, a tough East End kid whod honed his fighting skills at school where he was called a "dirty Yid," was known as "the head-butter," which made for the occasional interesting conversation when he returned to work as a hairdresser bearing scars and bruises after an evening of fighting.

Barrie, 79, who now lives in Herzliya, Israel, speaks to me over the phone about his days in the 62: "Wed seen what the Nazis had done. We knew how low fascism could go, so we had to go low too. Someone had to stop these people from attacking us. We didnt want to be bullied anymore."

Other work was about infiltrating, getting information and making sure the British public knew what was going on.

Gerry Gable, 84, founded the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight during his time with the 62 Group, which is still published. Regarded as one of the most prominent anti-extremists in the country, and a long-term independent advisor to the Metropolitan Police on race hate crime, he was originally one of the groups intelligence officers which often meant supervising some dangerous and illegal work.

"One evening we learned that Jordan was away and we hired a thief to try and break into his office," he recalls as we chat over the phone.

"The thief couldnt get in so we had to try another way. One of our guys was brilliant at climbing so he climbed over three roofs and managed to get in through the window of Jordans office. He bought three bags full of stuff records out with him."

Michael Whine, now the UK governments independent member of the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, was one of the few middle-class members of the group. He was in a Jewish youth movement which was targeted by fascists young children were beaten up at the end of meetings so the elders asked the 62 Group to teach them self-defense.

Michael ended up staying, helping out with surveillance and the occasional fisticuffs. "At that time, Jewish people couldnt look to either the law or the police for proper protection," he tells me. "My experience is that the police were very unsympathetic, even though everyone knew what happened in the Holocaust and how far fascists would go to pursue us."

While the fascists were rarely arrested, many members of the 62 Group ended up in court; their fines were always paid by the group.

Much of the action happened around Hackney's Ridley Road, an area which housed many working-class Jews. The Road itself housed a market and stage area where the fascists would often go to shout their hatred and the 62 Group would go to break up their meetings by grabbing the stage first or heckling the speakers.

Altogether, Jordans group, which was backed by American Nazi Party founding father George Lincoln Rockwell, was behind more than 30 arson attacks on Jewish premises, including a yeshiva which ended up with a 15-year-old boy dying when he jumped out of a window to escape the burning building.

The TV series is based on a book by Jo Bloom who discovered by chance the story of the 62 Group at a funeral. Turning it into a TV series became a passion project for creator Sarah Solemani and producer Nicola Schindler, who are both Jewish. It took them six years to get the funding to make it, and as they got ever closer it could not have seemed more pertinent.

First, many of the fascist cries were about "Taking Back" Britain were reminiscent of the Brexit rhetoric of "Take Back Control." While in America, under Trump, the far Right were emboldened enough to march through the streets chanting "Jews will not replace us" parroting the same tropes as Jordan.

In the UK there was also growing antisemitism from the left in the Corbyn-led Labour Party with members and even elected officials, repeating some of the same conspiracy theories about Jewish control as the fascists. Among the stars of the show is actress Tracy Ann Oberman, who became a prominent voice against Labour antisemitism.

"It is sadly tragic that over the time this show took to make it, it became more and more relevant and not in a comfortable way," says Sarah. "I want the work to be entertaining and also a good watch but also to have some sort of contribution to the conversations that we are having now. I think there may be for us as Brits a difficult element where we have to put a mirror up to ourselves. That can be painful.

"But that also feeds into the point we are in with our culture, whatever our color, to look inside at our own hearts and think about the way we behave.

"Ive written all my characters with empathy; even the Nazis. They were unpacking the problems of that time which were very similar to the problems we have now. I didnt want them to be monstrous automated Nazis I wanted to get behind the psyche and look at how people could be convinced by bad ideas."

The 62 Groups work never completely ended, although the law did gradually catch up. In 1965, the Race Relations Act was passed outlawing discrimination on the grounds of "color, race or ethnic or national origins" and in 1986, racist incitement was criminalized in the Public Order Act.

Searchlight and Gerry Gable continue to monitor fascist activity and cultivate sources in far-right organizations.

At present, they are also investigating the threat of the extreme end of the anti-vaccination movement which, by 'repurposing' yellow stars, has already flirted with Holocaust revisionism. Anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists use vile antisemitic memes to spread Covid misinformation online.

Meanwhile, several of the members of the group formed the Community Security Trust (CST) which even today protects the Jewish community, working closely with the police, training up the security guards outside every synagogue and Jewish school, as well as offering measures such as self defense training and CCTV.

"The introduction of legislation meant fascists could be prosecuted," says Michael, who was one of the CSTs founders. "And to a large extent, we beat the fascists off the street. But, of course, threats are still there. From the 1970s the threat didnt just come from the fascists but from the far Left and people who sympathized with the Palestinian cause. And there are also plenty of lone wolves.

"Jewish school children have been killed in France, while people have been murdered in synagogues in America. The large fascist groups may now be shadows of their former selves, but the threat has simply mutated."

Nicole Lampert is a London-based journalist who has written for the Daily Mail, The Spectator, The Independent and The Sun. Twitter:@nicolelampert

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How Britain is confronting its Jew-hating fascist past - Haaretz

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Posted By admin on October 18, 2021

Israeli politician and human rights activist Natan Sharansky sees several lessons stemming from the Oct. 27 antisemitic attack and its aftermath. Not only was it a horrific example of rising antisemitism in the U.S., but it also demonstrated the ability of Jews from disparate backgrounds to stand in unity as well as the tendency of some to politicize tragedy.

During an Oct. 6 address in Kyiv, Ukraine, to commemorate 80 years since the murder of 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar, and during his recent conversation with the Chronicle, Sharansky recounted an evolution of antisemitic activity and shared his thoughts on Oct. 27.

The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting was a wake-up call for many American Jews, he said, but it also reminded everybody how united the Jewish community of Pittsburgh is. National and international television highlighted the outpouring of love, sympathy and support to the Pittsburgh Jewish community, Sharansky said. Publications and speeches in the aftermath of the attack also showed a deep connection between Jews and the general public, as people of diverse faiths stood together and expressed solidarity, sympathy and a readiness to fight against extremism.

Unfortunately, Oct. 27 also exposed rifts within the Jewish fold, Sharanksy said, including infighting about whether community members should meet with President Donald Trump, and whether Minister of Diaspora Affairs and current Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett should visit Pittsburgh so soon after the attack. The finger-pointing between political camps was both unfortunate and very dangerous.

In earlier generations, antisemitic activity typically unified Jews: The 1840 blood libel in Damascus, the Dreyfus Affair and the Beilis Trial each led to global Jewry standing together. Pittsburgh, however, showed how political questions could create fissures, Sharansky said. I think Pittsburgh emphasized all the good that we can see in America, and the Jewish community, and the Pittsburgh Jewish community, but it also shed light on the challenges in the fight against antisemitism, and how the most obvious and clear cases can be used for political rivalry, he said.

Natan Sharansky. Screenshot by Adam Reinherz

For nearly 50 years, Sharansky has studied, and experienced firsthand, antisemitic activity. As a young man, following his efforts as a refusenik to promote Soviet Jewry, he was convicted of treason and spying on behalf of the United States and sentenced to 13 years of forced labor. At that point in his life, Sharansky thought antisemitism was a direct result of repressive totalitarian regimes, he said. A totalitarian regime needs scapegoats, a totalitarian regime needs external enemies in order to keep its own people under control.

Yet after arriving in Israel in 1986 following an international campaign for his release Sharanskys perception of antisemitism shifted to something of a much broader phenomenon, he said.

Within the free world, antisemitism, as he came to understand, involved delegitimization, demonization and double standards. These three Ds, Sharansky said, were hallmarks of classical antisemitism and antisemitism towards the Jewish state.

He said Jews worldwide are experiencing increased threats from various political camps and ideologies. There is Islamic antisemitism, as espoused by Iranian leadership. From the political left is the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, and insistence that Israel, the Jewish state, has no right to exist by some representatives of the academic world, Sharansky told the Chronicle. Pittsburgh and Toulouse, France where a teacher and three children at a Jewish school were murdered in 2012 are the face of antisemitism on the right.

The attacks in Pittsburgh and Toulouse mobilized Jewish organizations to provide strategic defenses, Sharansky said. While serving as head of the Jewish Agency from June 2009 to August 2018, Sharansky oversaw the creation of the Jewish Agencys Security Assistance Fund, which distributes funding to synagogues, community centers and Jewish schools for use toward bettering security measures.

Oct. 27 likewise served as a warning signal for Jewish Federations and umbrella organizations to intensify the self-protection, or self-defense, of Jewish institutions, Sharansky said.

On March 12, 2021, Jeff Finkelstein, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, announced that Pittsburghs Federation and the Pennsylvania Jewish Coalition had successfully lobbied the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to grant the Pittsburgh Jewish community $1,052,692 more than 20% of a $5 million pool available to all Pennsylvania nonprofits toward specific target hardening of 20 different synagogues and Jewish agencies.

Moving forward, Jews in Pittsburgh, and across the globe, must not only be willing to recognize antisemitic threats emanating from both the left and right, but prioritize Jewish peoplehood and geographical belonging, Sharansky stressed.

It is very important for every Jewish community, and for every Jew in the world to strengthen their connection with the Israel state whatever their political views, whatever disagreements with this government or that government, he said. All of us have a lot of disagreements among ourselves, but it shouldn't stop us from strengthening our bridges between communities and with the state of Israel. The best guarantor of the continuity of Jewish people is the fact that there is a Jewish state. PJC

Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.

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Posted By admin on October 18, 2021

Know It

The Holocaust was a genocide perpetrated by the German Nazi regime against European Jews between 1941-1945. Six million Jews were murdered in death camps, concentration camps, ghettos, killing fields and elsewhere.

In the face of extensive credible evidence volumes of governmental documents, thousands of eyewitness testimonies, firsthand admissions of guilt, photographs, film footage, meticulous written records, museums worth of artifacts, not to mention the remains of the concentration camps, gas chambers and crematoria themselves there are ongoing efforts to distort, disprove and conceal the facts of the Holocaust.

There are those who simply deny the Holocaust ever happened and those who, in a variety of ways, diminish the Holocaust. Holocaust deniers operate on a spectrum, from trivializing the genocide to alleging its falsification.

Implicitly and explicitly, Holocaust deniers argue that this entire chapter of history is an elaborate hoax by Jewish propagandists who simply wanted reparations from Germany, the creation of a Jewish state and a distraction from their own double-dealing.

In a sense, Holocaust denial is as old as the Holocaust itself. Nazi bureaucrats were careful to cover up the Final Solution in bureaucratic language. Jews were not deported but resettled. Ghettos were cordoned off for quarantine. A death march was merely an evacuation.

One notorious instance of Nazi falsification involves Theresienstadt, a transit camp in the former Czechoslovakia that the Nazis pretended was simply a resettlement community. When the International Red Cross demanded to investigate the camps living conditions in 1944, the Nazis forced Jewish prisoners to plant flowers and decorate the barracks. The Nazis even fabricated a promotional film of Theresienstadt, in which prisoners were coerced to perform cheerfulness for the cameras in exchange for food. In reality, more than 30,000 prisoners died in Theresienstadt and nearly 90,000 more were deported to death camps.

In the decades after the Holocaust, a number of pseudo-historians calling themselves revisionists set out to refute the Holocaust. Willis Carto, an American far-right political activist, career white supremacist and antisemite, founded the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) in 1978. Still operating out of California, the so-called Institute convened conferences and published journals which disregarded the most basic standards of historiography in order to paint a picture of the past that minimized or completely denied Jewish experiences of victimhood. Scholars, courts and academic institutions have condemned IHR as a clearinghouse for ahistorical, antisemitic propaganda with links to neo-Nazi organizations.

In addition, the Islamic Republic of Iran has long been a promoter and driver of Holocaust denial as well as Holocaust mockery, and has sponsored conferences and even cartoon contests on the subject and the regime has hosted and feted leading Holocaust deniers.

In its most developed form, Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims Jews around the world knowingly fabricated evidence of their own genocide in order to extract reparations from Germany, gain world sympathy and facilitate the alleged theft of Palestinian land for the creation of Israel. It is founded on the belief that Jews somehow are able to force major institutions governments, Hollywood, the media, academia to promote a lie at the expense of non-Jews.

There have been some important public victories against Holocaust denialism such as the successful defense in an English court by historian Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, and Penguin Books against antisemitic writer David Irving and the charge of libel for exposing his willful distortion of the Holocaust. Indeed, since the 1980s, Holocaust denial has migrated from pseudo-academic journals and conferences to the post-truth world of the Internet. Today, a younger generation of Holocaust deniers is active on social media forums like Facebook and Twitter, alt right websites like the Daily Stormer and the anonymous forums 4Chan and 8kun (the successor to the notorious online forum 8chan after it was forced off the Internet). Moreover, with the passage of time, historical distance from the Holocaust contributes, for some, to disbelief that it occurred. According to a 2019 poll, one in 20 people in Britain do not believe the Holocaust ever happened.

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The Holocaust Didnt Happen - Antisemitism Uncovered

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Posted By admin on October 18, 2021

AUSTIN, Texas Texas Democratic Party Co-Executive Director Hannah Roe Beck issued the following statement on Texas Republicans mandating teaching Holocaust denial in Texas schools:

Because of Texas Republicans law banning education on racism and sexism, Texas teachers are being pushed to add Holocaust denial into their curriculum. Thats beyond disturbing its terrifying. This is an outrage, not only for Jewish communities across our state, but for every single parent sending their kids to school in the morning and worrying about what kinds of attacks theyll face, simply because of who they are.

This is 2021. Yet in Texas, the 21st century looks more and more like a dystopian novel. Were seeing books banned, educators reprimanded for teaching authentic history, and kids deprived of their right to learn about the world theyre growing up in. Texas Republicans are censoring education to pander to rightwing extremists and putting Texas families and kids in danger while they do.

Enough is enough. There is no place for antisemitism in our state, in our laws, or in our classrooms. Theres no place for laws that deny kids the right to learn about how racism impacts their world and their reality especially in a state like ours with a growing diverse population. Texas Democrats will keep working every day to defeat the Republicans who voted for this shameful legislation. I call on Greg Abbott and every Texas Republican lawmaker to mitigate this harm and condemn any law that pushes racism and Holocaust denial in our schools. This is about keeping our kids safe.

###

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BREAKING: Because of Texas Republicans' Education Censorship Law, Holocaust Denial Is Getting Pushed In Texas Classrooms - Texas Democratic Party

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Posted By admin on October 18, 2021

Photo: National Geographic

The National Geographic documentary The Rescue pulls off something almost as far-fetched as its subject matter. It turns a story whose outcome is instantly familiar the search-and-rescue mission to recover 12 young soccer players and their coach who became trapped in a flooded labyrinth of caves in northern Thailand in 2018 into a white-knuckle viewing experience filled with unexpected twists, heartrending drama, and suspense.

Directed by the husband-and-wife duo E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, The Rescue debuted at the Telluride Film Festival early last month, picked up the Peoples Choice Documentary award at the Toronto International Film Festival a few days later, and reached theaters last Friday as an Oscars front-runner. But the NatGeo feature is also notable as the first of several high-profile, Western-backed Thai-cave-rescue projects heading down the production pipeline.

Netflixs as-yet untitled limited series will be presented from the perspective of the Wild Boars soccer team and their coach and executive-produced by Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu. And then theres Ron Howards biographical drama Thirteen Lives, filmed in Australia this spring and starring Colin Farrell, Viggo Mortensen, and Joel Edgerton as, respectively, the cave divers John Volanthen, Richard Rick Stanton, and Dr. Richard Harris, a loose collective of U.K. and Australian hobbyists who materialized as if out of nowhere to spearhead the international efforts involving thousands of people that saved the team.

Chin, a professional mountain climber and skier, and Vasarhelyi shared a 2019 Best Documentary Feature Academy Award for the gravity-defying mountain-climbing documentary Free Solo. They spoke to Vulture via Zoom about their efforts to soothe the real-life cave divers apprehensions about becoming documentary subjects, ultimately persuading them to perform reenactments of their daring rescue in a giant tank inside southwestern Englands Pinewood Studios. The directors detailed the immense difficulty of narrowing an enormous story involving dozens of talking heads into a two-hour feature. We thought that no one like, no one would understand the film, Vasarhelyi says.

Watching the plight of the Wild Boars unfold night after night on the news, I thought I knew this story. And yet its a thousand times stranger, scarier and more surprising than I ever expected. So I have a two-part question: You are known for films about climbing how did you gravitate toward this subject? And how much did you know about the Thai cave rescue before you got involved?E. Chai Vasarhelyi: Like you, we were riveted to the TV. You think back to the summer of 2018, it was the World Cup, it was like the world was falling apart otherwise. And then there was this rescue. We are also the parents of Asian kids, so it was personal. We just chased the story.

There are a lot of feature films that are set to tackle this. Did you need to obtain life rights before shooting yours?EV: The life-rights situation is very strange for us. Like, you dont really own people in nonfiction. Its not really the ethos. But because of the life-rights situation, because of all the Hollywood movies that are being made, it was very simple. One studio owned the children and their families. Another studio owned the life rights of the divers. Wed been tracking this project, and we knew that National Geographic had the rights. And we asked them if we could direct.

One of the thrills of this film is discovering this subculture of cave divers even exists: this odd little group of people who admit they dont play well with others. As documentarians, what was it like to unpack that culture and find out what made them such unlikely heroes?Jimmy Chin: They are great characters. But we related pretty easily to them because of our understanding of a different type of subculture thats also very extreme, has high stakes and extraordinary risks, and draws a certain type of person. So that felt in some ways familiar, which gave us some insight into how to get to the heart of their stories.

Also, most of the divers had seen Free Solo, and they related deeply to that film. So we had some credibility.

Photo: National Geographic

EV: Its also symptomatic of our working relationship, where Jimmy is a professional climber and hes coming from the inside. And Im like, Oh, isnt this fascinating! Why would you ever do that?

JC: I was like, I totally get why they did that!

EV: We hope to make films that are character portraits that allow you to go on this journey and see through someone elses eyes. With these guys, we were interested in How do you become a person who is able to be your best self and make an absolute moral decision? How do you become that generous? Like, Who are these people who do that?

JC: When you have everything to lose.

The film showcases how this group of loners came together to provide a team infrastructure that, in turn, galvanized thousands of other volunteers, who all pitched in to achieve the impossible. Where was your identification in that?JC: The part that really drew us in was just, in a time when the world is so divided and polarized, that this was a moment where people from all over the world, from different countries, different cultures, of different religious and political beliefs, came together because of their common humanity. We thought that was an important reminder of what we are capable of and what we hold in common.

Let me ask you a technical question: There are reenactments featuring the actual cave divers. How did you shoot those scenes?EV: Ideally, we would have shot in Thailand. But there is a pandemic, Rick is turning 60, and it just seemed way too risky for everybody. So we did it in a tank. But I think of it less as reenactments than demonstrations like, the divers teaching us how you actually do this, to experience what they did. Because it was only them and the kids.

JC: Gathering the divers for them to demonstrate served multiple purposes. They showed up in the gear that they used and we were able to see how they prepared, the head space they get into whenever they go cave diving. And being able to film it with them and see how they did it was amazing and important to us because authenticity is super critical for us.

EV: Like, I only could have an inkling of what the weight of the whole situation was like when you see them bind a childs hands behind their back, bind their feet, and submerge the head. The gravity of that! You try as a nonfiction filmmaker to conjure the truth of the situation for audiences. But we didnt understand until we saw them demonstrate it.

On TV, it was presented as this international rescue initiative using top professionals. But here you see its really these weird guys who cobble together this funky equipment for their own purposes, and suddenly theyre using it under these extraordinary circumstances.JC: And its duct-taped together. Youre just like, Oh my God! Its so old looking! We went to visit their homes. Ricks got a kayak in his living room, literally dive equipment everywhere you look. And you know: Theyre lifers. They live and breathe cave diving.

Did any of the divers require extraordinary persuasion to get in the tank?EV: It was hard to understand that we would do right by them. It took a big leap of faith.

Directors E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. Photo: Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images

JC: I work on both sides of the lens; sometimes Im in front of it. I expressed to them my concerns, and I think they really bought into this idea of Well, this is going to be the most authentic way for us to show this if we do it right. They want the details to be right because theyre very detail-oriented people.

Most people know the outcome of this story. What was the trick to building suspense into the narrative? Not only suspense but nail-biting, hanging-by-the-edge-of-your-seat suspense?EV: I mean, we bled. It was like blood on the floor. One, the events transpire over 18 days. The children are only found on the 11th day. And then no one really makes a decision for a long time. And you see the same thing 13 times. And thats not all the narrative challenges you have. There are way too many people. Whos speaking now? Why are they speaking? Well, actually, they played a critical role.

JC: Everybody played a critical role!

EV: We always knew there was too much and always felt this pressure to whittle and whittle: Can we simplify? It was interesting leaning into the details that ended up in it why people are understanding the film because we thought that no one like, no one would understand the film.

Did you and NatGeo ever discuss turning this into a multipart doc?EV: In our really dark moments it would come up. Maybe we could do Shoah. Is this Shoah? Or, like, OJ: Made in America: We could do the six hours.

JC: Our first cut, we were like, Hmmm, theres 900 characters. There are a lot of parallels from the rescue and the making of this movie.

What was the most surprising thing you discovered while making it?EV: There was a lot of speculation about how Saman Kunan died. We were really the only people who spoke extensively to the Thai Navy SEALs, the army, and the divers. Because of the work we did to gain access to the Thai Navy SEALs, I spent a lot of time with his widow. And we uncovered how he died, which wasnt publicly known. The SEALs confirmed, and tell the story in the film, of how he was tasked with dragging these five wetsuits

JC: Hugely buoyant. Hard to move through current.

EV: which was clearly a symptom of miscommunication. All the footage you are seeing, no one else has it.

As we touched on earlier, Hollywood is all over this story, with a number of big projects currently in various stages of preproduction. What do you think it is about the cave rescue that has captured so many filmmakers imaginations? What has gotten under our collective skin?EV: Its one of the great stories of our time. So many different types of people came together with huge obstacles in their way to actually achieve the impossible. And I think, sadly, it has only gained in poignancy through COVID because it reminds us of our common humanity. It really asks the question: How do you be your best self? If we could all be that generous, the world would be a lot smaller. It would be a lot safer.

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How The Rescue Re-enacted the 2018 Thai Cave Rescue With the Divers Who Lived It - Vulture

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Posted By admin on October 18, 2021

In 1921, when he was just six months old, my father was smuggled in a potato sack across international borders. Desperately fleeing antisemitic pogroms in the Ukraine, my grandparents set out on a perilous journey to reach relative safety in Poland. They placed their infant son into the sack and, knowing his cries risked immediate death for them all, muffled his tiny mouth with a cloth, praying they would survive the journey. Upon arrival in Poland, they were relieved to find their precious son alive. Because of their strength of spirit, I am here to tell their story a unique narrative, but representative of the tale of much of European Jewry.

I was tasked with the privilege and tremendous responsibility representing the State of Israel for four years as consul general in New York. In that role, I, too, crossed many international borders, but this time under diplomatic protection with a wave of my Israeli passport. Furthermore, unlike many Jews from across Europe who for generations felt forced to hide their Jewish roots, I was empowered by the words State of Israel in English and Hebrew, together with the menorah, a distinct Jewish symbol, emblazoned both on my diplomatic passport and on my heart.

These two border-crossing stories, astonishing in their differences, are just one illustration of the transformative experiences undergone by the Jewish people in our time. Barely two decades after my grandparents and fathers miraculous escape from murderous antisemites, the world witnessed humanity sink to its lowest depths during the Shoah the systematic murder of two thirds of European Jewry.

I consider myself among the fortunate, cushioned by safety as my immediate ancestors narrowly escaped the Holocaust. I was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and moved to Israel at the age of 15. Yet, wherever I have lived, the legacy of the Shoah was never far from my mind. It was instilled in my memory as I grew up as part of a Jewish minority in Latin America, and later as I became an adult in our Jewish homeland in Israel. The Holocaust is part of the collective Jewish experience, and while Yad Vashem will forever belong to the Jewish people, it also serves as a beacon to the entire world.

As I commence my new position as chairman, I strive to meet this enormous responsibility. During a recent walkabout on Yad Vashems campus on Jerusalems Mount of Remembrance, I was compellingly struck by the final words of Gela Seksztajn, a brilliant Jewish artist from Warsaw who was murdered in Treblinka, at the entrance to the Museum of Holocaust Art:

As I stand on the border between life and death, certain that I will not remain alive, I wish to take leave from my friends and my works. My works I bequeath to the Jewish museum to be built after the war. Farewell, my friends. Farewell, the Jewish people. Never again allow such a catastrophe.

Unfortunately, the mission bequeathed to us by Gela and the other six million Jewish men, women and children murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators is today threatened by the willful manipulation of history and memory, a dangerous phenomenon of late. We must remain wary of those who seek to exploit the events of the Holocaust or rewrite their role in history when they deem it politically expedient to do so. Holocaust distortion and appropriation can take on many forms. In some cases, politicians exaggerate their own nations recalled altruism and wartime moral compass. In international discourse, competing narratives of victimhood are thrust upon one another; in other cases, victims, bystanders, collaborators and perpetrators alike are simplistically painted with the same brush. Such cynical manipulations threaten our quest for a more just world.

I just returned from Kyiv, where I opened an academic conference about the phenomenon of mass shootings during the Holocaust and participated along with the presidents of Israel, Ukraine, Germany and Albania in memorial events organized by the government of Ukraine, in conjunction with the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, currently in development.

Now, 80 years later, I have the vital task of representing the memory of the victims of Babi Yar, as well as all of six million Holocaust victims. It is our Jewish, human and moral duty to remember the men, women and children murdered in the valley of death, and never to let their faces fade away.

It is imperative that wherever the Holocaust is commemorated, especially in places where various forces have sought over the years to erase our memory of the victims, historical truth must be protected forever. Yad Vashem will not allow the memory of the Holocaust to wane; and I hereby redouble our commitment to protect and disseminate the legacy of the Holocaust and its victims for the sake of future generations of the Jewish people, and humanity as a whole.

The writer is chairman of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

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From the Holocaust to Israel: Crossing borders to the Jewish state - The Jerusalem Post

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Posted By admin on October 18, 2021

Browse > Home / News / Shared Commitment: IAF and German Air Force commanders lead flight over Israel

October 18, 2021 by Aryeh Savir - TPS

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Israel experienced a one-of-a-kind flyover in its skies on Sunday when Israeli Air Force Commander (IAF) Major General Amikam Norkin and the German Air Force Commander Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz led the Wings of History joint flyover.

The flyover passed over Jerusalem and the Israeli Knesset and then Tel Aviv. Gerhartz flew in a Eurofighter specially painted with the Israeli and German flags, and Norkin flew in a Baz F-15. The flyover acted as a direct continuation of the historic joint flight that took place last year in Germany, which included a flight over the Dachau concentration camp.

This joint flight passed over the Israeli Knesset, a symbol of our independence and democracy, and illustrates our shared commitment to ensure our future. We will never forget our past, but our heads are held up high as we look forward to the future, said Norkin.

In this region, we face threats from multiple theatres, and this cooperation plays a significant role in ensuring our future here in the State of Israel, he added.

Gerhartz landed in Israel on Sunday for a three-day visit as part of the IAFs Blue Flag international aerial exercise, to deepen the partnership between the militaries and improve cooperation between the forces.

Germany is one of seven air forces participating in the Blue Flag exercise in the Negev, hosted by the IAF.

Prior to the flyover, Norkin and Gerhartz toured the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem together with Uwe Becker, former Mayor of Frankfurt. The commanders lit the eternal flame in the Hall of Remembrance and laid a memorial bouquet in honor of the victims of the Shoah.

It always warms my heart, especially for us in Germany, we have to keep the remembrance of the Shoah alive. Its especially important now, generations later, Gerhartz stated. We still feel the suffering of the Shoahs victims. Our responsibility will not expire, the remembrance must not fade. Deeply moved, I read you our pledge: Never Again.

The IAF has cooperated extensively and developed a strong relationship with the German Air Force. A few months ago, a delegation of 60 IAF deputy squadron commanders was hosted in Germany. Personnel from the German Air Forces Tactical Air Force Wing 31 will visit Israel with their families in the coming months.

Maj. Noam, Head of the Europe and Asia Department in the IAFs International Relations Unit, explained that the German Air Force is our true partner.

Gerhartz held his first visit in office in Israel, which expresses the commitment of both parties to form a relationship, said Maj. Noam. The most notable cooperation between the Israeli and German militaries is the Red Baron squadron, stationed at the IAFs Tel-Nof Air Force Base, which is being trained by the IAF to operate Remotely Piloted Aircraft manufactured by the Israel Aerospace Industries.

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Posted By admin on October 18, 2021

Angela Merkels last trip to Israel as chancellor of Germany this week included visits to a number of important sites. Possibly the most significant destination on her two-day itinerary was Yad Vashem The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.

The German leader has expressed remorse over the Nazi genocide of some six million Jews during World War Two, notably during her address to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in 2008. During the speech, Merkel stated that the Shoah [Holocaust] fills us Germans with shame. I bow to the victims. I bow to all those who helped the survivors.

Merkels visit to the memorial, which is protocol for every world leader who travels to Israel, serves as a reminder of Yad Vashems importance to both Jews and non-Jews alike.

The idea to establish Yad Vashem as an Israeli-based memorial to the Jews murdered during WWII was first proposed during a Jewish National Fund meeting in September 1942. The discussion was prompted by early reports of Jews being perseucted and oppressed in Nazi-occupied countries. At the time, meeting attendees were not fully aware of the full extent of the horrors occurring in Europe.

In the aftermath of the war, the plan for a Holocaust memorial was again discussed at a meeting in London in 1945 that established a provisional board of Zionist leaders. In February 1946, Yad Vashem opened its headquarters in Jerusalem, along with an office in Tel Aviv.

The Yad Vashem Law was passed unanimously by the Knesset in 1953, five years after the state of Israel was created. It formed the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority, and established Yad Vashem as the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre.

The act entrusted Yad Vashem with the responsibility of commemorating, documenting, researching and educating about the Holocaust, with a specific focus on remembering the people, families and places that were lost during the war.

Overall, the goal was to ensure that those who perished would not be forgotten.

The name Yad Vashem, which in English means a memorial and a name, was taken from a biblical verse in the Book of Isaiah: And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name that shall not be cut off. This verse encompasses the mission of Yad Vashem as an institution; that is, to memorialize the victims of the Shoah and safeguard their memory. Along these lines, Yad Vashem created a Hall of Names, in order to record the name of every victim of the Holocaust so that their lives could never be erased from memory.

The Holocaust History Museum is the central feature of the 45-acre Yad Vashem grounds, situated on Har HaZicharon (Mount of Remembrance). The museum was designed by the prominent Israeli architect Moshe Safdie and opened in 2005 after two decades of planning and construction.

The Holocaust History Museum is structured as a long corridor with 10 exhibition rooms, moving chronologically from the beginning of the Nazi rise to power in Germany until the liberation of the death camps and the aftermath of the war, ultimately ending in the Hall of Names. Each room contains numerous artifacts, including personal possessions, political propaganda and testimonies.

Avner Shalev, the former longtime chairman of the museum, wanted the new exhibition to feel less like a depiction of a series of events and more as if visitors were looking into the eyes of the individuals.

Architect Safdie discourages a singular interpretation as to what the structure of the museum symbolizes, urging people instead to derive their own meanings based on what speaks to them personally.

However, the 180 meter-long triangular tunnel that begins narrow and dark and then gradually becomes wider and lighter as the exhibitions progress a result of the prism skylight that runs across the length of the museum for many evokes feelings of hopefulness for the survival of the Jewish people and triumph over the worst genocide in modern human history.

The fact that the exit of the museum leads onto a sweeping view of Jerusalem is also seen by many to embody the future of the Jewish people, along with the idea that the existence of a Jewish state will prevent such atrocities from happening again.

The Childrens Memorial is another evocative exhibit, also designed by Safdie. Located a short walk away from the main museum building, the Childrens Memorial is hollowed out from an underground cavern, creating darkness and lending silence. The only content in the memorial is the single candle in the center of the room. Strikingly, the multitude of mirrors that line the walls makes it appear that there are an infinite number of lights; symbolizing the 1.5 million Jewish children who were murdered in the Holocaust.

In addition to the visual display, visitors hear a subtle undercurrent of sombre music alongside an audio recording that reads out the name, age and country of origin of Jewish children lost during the war.

The Childrens Memorial was proposed and funded by Holocaust survivors Abe and Edita Spiegel, whose two-and-a-half-years-old son Uziel was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp. A stone portrait of Uziel stands at the entrance to the memorial cave, modelled after the only surviving picture that the Spiegels had of their son.

The Yad Vashem Synagogue functions as a place where people can either pray in private to mourn those who have been lost, or participate in a traditional Jewish service. A defining feature of the synagogue is that it contains thirty-one distinct items of Judaica that were preserved and brought from Europe, including four Torah arks. Unlike the vast majority of Judaica from synagogues and homes across Europe, these items were not destroyed. As such, they act as a reminder of the extraordinary will of the Jewish people to survive, to remember and to rebuild, in the words of former museum chairman Shalev.

As part of the Yad Vashem Act of 1953, the museum has a duty to honor the non-Jews who risked their lives to allow Jews to escape Nazi persecution. These people are known as the Righteous Among the Nations, and more than 27,000 have been recognized as such by Yad Vashem.

They are commemorated at Yad Vashem with trees, each one dedicated to a person or organization that helped Jews survive the Holocaust. The trees are planted around the museum complex. Some names are also engraved on the Wall of Honor in the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations. Their names are also available in the Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, which also includes multiple tributes to different groups of people who sacrificed their safety and freedom to help others survive.

The Yad Vashem Archives are the worlds largest collection of documents and artifacts from the Shoah. Because of the ongoing efforts of historians and archivists, the amount of information being unearthed about the lives of Jews trying to survive the Nazis is continuously growing.

The archives house millions of artifacts from the Holocaust, including documents, photographs, written testimonies and physical items. Together, these have contributed to a better understanding of the various ways that people attempted to survive the Holocaust. The archives also allow those who perished to be appropriately memorialized.

A significant portion of the archives has been digitized and can be freely accessed online by the public.

One of Yad Vashems core missions to memoralize the name of every victim of the Holocaust manifested in the creation of the Central Database of Shoah Victims Names. It contains over 4,800,000 names, many of whom were revealed as a result of testimony submitted by friends or family of the victims.

The names are displayed in the final room of the museum, known as the Hall of Names; arguably the most moving section of the museum. The ceiling of the hall is a 10-meter high cone stretching skyward, displaying over 600 pictures and fragments of documents related to victims of the Holocaust. As a result, the display is reflected in the pool of water, creating an atmosphere of reflection and mourning for the people whose names will never be found and cannot be personally included in the memorial.

The Pages of Testimony, which provide information about the victims of the Shoah, line the walls on a series of shelves, some of which are poignantly left empty with the hope that more names will be discovered and added to the database. This way, every victim will one day be memorialized.

The Yad Vashem institution operates the International School for Holocaust Studies to ensure that people all over the world, both Jewish and non-Jewish, can receive a comprehensive education about the Shoah. Yad Vashem is home to the schools Learning Center that enables visitors to interactively explore different historical issues and the moral questions that the Holocaust raises.

Since Yad Vashems inception, it has done ground-breaking work memorializing the victims of the Holocaust, ensuring that such tragedies will never be forgotten or minimized. Standing at the forefront of Holocaust remembrance and education, Yad Vashem represents the power of the Jewish people to survive the worst conditions imaginable while remaining unified and hopeful about the future.

Ruby Kwartz is a Fall 2021 intern at HonestReporting.

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Posted By admin on October 18, 2021

How did The New York Times report on the Nazi genocide of some six million Jews during World War II?

This question is especially pertinent given that the news organization has apparently ignored the current historic rates of antisemitism in the United States. In addition, the NYT recently published a fawning obituary of the mastermind of Irans nuclear program. The newspaper of record highlighted Mohsen Fakhrizadehs love of driving through the countryside.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Republics supreme leader has repeatedly threatened to annihilate Israel, and Fakhrizadeh headed the initiative that could give the mullahs in Tehran the means to actualize their genocidal ambitions.

Related Reading: The Iran Regimes Incitement to Destroy Israel

Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and Americas Most Important Newspaper, a 2005 book by Laurel Leff, took a deep dive into the news outlets coverage of the Shoah. Leff found that articles focusing on the discrimination, deportation and, ultimately, destruction of much of European Jewry made The New York Times front page only 26 times.

In just six of those pieces were Jews identified as the primary victims of Adolf Hitlers final solution.

According to Leffs research, NYT editors went to painstaking lengths to downplay the plight of Jews in Europe. For example, the publication included a story about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that did not even mention Jews. More broadly, Jewish victims of Nazi persecution were often referred to as refugees, or by their nationalities, rather than their religious identity.

As Leff wrote:

You could have read the front page ofThe New York Timesin 1939 and 1940 without knowing that millions of Jews were being sent to Poland, imprisoned in ghettos, and dying of disease and starvation by the tens of thousands. You could have read the front page in 1941 without knowing that the Nazis were machine-gunning hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Soviet Union.

The New York Times reporting, or lack thereof, on the Holocaust as it unfolded had significant ramifications. As a result of its obfuscation, one of the preeminent news outlets of the day effectively cut off readers from learning in real time about the worst genocide in modern human history.

What is less known, however, is that the NYT during Hitlers rise to power discontinued republishing articles from The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), which was often the only source reporting on the tragedies befalling Jews in Europe.

Related Reading: New York Times Ignores Historic Rates of US Antisemitism While Pushing Israel Apartheid Canard

In fact, the JTAs coverage from Nazi-ruled Germany was often dimissed as Jewish anti-Nazi propaganda, JTAs founder, Jacob Landau, conveyed years later.

About 1933 a resistance began to develop in the world press to the acceptance of news involving Jews and others from what was considered a partisan (Jewish) source, Landau wrote.

The New York Times stopped using JTAs content altogether in 1937, with the Associated Press following suit shortly thereafter.

This, even as JTA correspondents were chronicling anti-Jewish legislation, property confiscations, deportations, pogroms and mass murder in Germany, Austria, and, eventually, Nazi-run death camps across Europe.

As Leff notes in her book, even though most of JTAs dozen or so correspondents in Europe were Jewish by the time World War II broke out in 1939, some remained on the continent. And when they could no longer operate inside certain nations, journalists relied on accounts from diplomats, the anti-Nazi underground and Jews evading the German war machine to formulate and communicate a more complete picture of the calamities that were transpiring.

Related Reading: A Memorial And A Name: The Story Of Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum

For example, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, JTA reported on the fate of Jewry in the USSR and Poland and provided the first accounts of the gruesome murder of tens of thousands of Jews in Kiev, which came to be known as the Babi Yar Massacre.

None of this coverage appeared in The New York Times, which was published by Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who blamed Jewish deaths during the Holocaust on Zionism: that is, the movement to establish a Jewish state in Israel.

Unfortunately, The New York Times has seemingly retained its anti-Jewish editorial line. Today, articles appearing in the paper regularly denounce Israel while giving a pass or burying facts related to those who only 75 years after the Holocaust once again seek the Jewish peoples destruction (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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