Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on February 16, 2020

Daniel Meshulam, a 31-year-old tour guide from Tel Aviv, recently had to rub his eyes in disbelief when he saw a picture of Zeev Jabotinsky staring out from one of the anti-Semitic newspapers in his historical collection. What was a picture of the spiritual father of the Likud movement doing in the midst of this Nazi propaganda? When he read the article that accompanied the photograph, he realized that he was holding rare evidence from 80 years ago of how the Third Reich made use of the writings of noted Jews.

Meshulam describes himself as something of a Shoah fanatic. His maternal grandparents survived the Nazi occupation of Poland. The grandfather survived the Czstochowa ghetto. The grandmother survived Auschwitz. His theoretical interest in the Shoah is joined by a practical side. Meshulam collects Holocaust-related items like bills of currency, greeting cards and periodicals with anti-Semitic characteristics that were issued in Nazi Germany. His pride and joy is a collection of dozens of issues of Der Strmer, the infamous weekly that with propaganda and incredible demagoguery sought to spread the notion that Jews are the number one enemy of the Germans and all humankind, as the Yad Vashem website says.

In many places, it is forbidden to trade in items with Nazi characteristics, so you wont find the editions of Der Strmer on Amazon or eBay and hardly ever at public auctions either, says Meshulam. So how did all these copies of the paper find their way to the apartment he rents in Tel Aviv? I contacted collectors abroad, he says, and like other professionals in the field, does not volunteer any further information.

The issue in which the Nazis wrote about Jabotinsky came out in 1943. The papers editors quoted excerpts from Jabotinskys book The Jewish War Front that was published three years earlier. In the book, Jabotinsky called on the nations of the world to add the Jews to the fight against Nazi Germany, as in World War I, when, together with Joseph Trumpeldor, he founded the Jewish Battalions that fought with the British to conquer Palestine from the Turks.

When the Nazis across the border scream aloud or say in a whisper that this is a Jewish war, they are absolutely right, Jabotinsky wrote in the book. His aim was to call on the Allies to be sensitive to the plight of the Jews or, as he put it, to ensure that the Jewish problem is included among the wars objectives. The editors of Der Strmer pounced on this line, took it out of context and used it to prove that the Jews were set on war.

Under the headline, The Jewish War An Admission of Guilt, the article found by Meshulam says: Not only are the Jews the ones who caused war in the past, they are main party responsible for the genocides happening right now. We cite admissions of guilt by the Jews themselves for this. And therefore this is a proven fact that can no longer be denied.

Jabotinsky is described in the article as someone who among world Jewry is almost on a par with Herzl. It goes on to say: Every Jew always boasts of his crimes, but when a leader of such standing openly says that the Jews are to blame for the war and admits this that goes way beyond. And the papers editors added: In what normal people would you hear one of its great leaders admitting so openly and publicly and with such a lack of human sensitivity to responsibility for the killing of millions?

Jabotinsky never saw how the Nazis twisted his words, as he died in New York in 1940 while working to promote his idea of a Jewish army to fight the Nazis. Meshulam will donate the issue of Der Strmer to the Jabotinsky Institute.

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Read more:
When the Nazis twisted Zionist leader's words for propaganda - Haaretz

Category: Zionism
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