Romanian police were investigating vandalism at the childhood home of Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, which was painted with anti-Semitic graffiti.

Wiesel, an activist and writer, was born in the northwestern Romanian town of Sighetu Marmatiei. His family was deported to Auschwitz, where his mother and one of his sisters died. Wiesel and his father were later taken to Buchenwald, where his father died.

Wiesel survived to become an academic, a writer and political activist. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

His house in Sighetu Marmatiei, a protected building, was vandalised with anti-Semitic graffiti written in red paint on Friday night.

“At present, a police investigation is ongoing to identify the authors and press criminal charges,” the county council said in a statement. “There are surveillance cameras in the area and the images will be analysed by the police, who already have a ring of suspects.”

The Israeli embassy thanked local authorities for promptly removing the messages and said it hoped those responsible would be punished as soon as possible.

According to a 2004 report by a commission headed by Wiesel, between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews and thousands of Roma were killed by civilian and military authorities in Romania and areas they controlled during the war.

Romania was an ally of Nazi Germany until August 1944, when it changed sides. Much of the Jewish property seized during the war was later nationalised by the communist dictatorship that followed.

Romania has only in recent years begun to come to terms with its role in the extermination of Jews, admitting for the first time in 2003 that it took part. Sensitivity towards the Holocaust and knowledge of it remain patchy.

Enquiry into the Direction of the Campaign Needs to be Undertaken by the Conservatives

It took Jeremy Corbyn some time to ensure that he set out an Inquiry into Antisemitism which will be headed up by Shami Chakraborty. The Inquiry is needed given the charges of antisemitism that should be looked into and given the fact that the Labour Party has a proud history of tackling racism. (For those who believe that antisemitism is not racism, let us put this bizarre argument to bed, it is racism and legally seen as such).

But there are questions to be asked of the campaign of Zac Goldsmith and let us not forget that towards the end of the campaign, the theme consistently put out was the link between extremism and Sadiq Khan. Some within the Conservative Party must have known that this would be read negatively within Muslim communities at a time when many Muslims are tired of their communities being framed solely through the lens of extremism. This was also expressly stated by Baroness Warsi in tweets that she put out.

These impacts would therefore have been known, but someone in the campaign made the decision to run on the extremism narrative and to push it through repetitively. Who was that individual or individuals is the question to be asked? How could this have been the main theme of Zac Goldsmith’s campaign is another question to be asked? Who authorised the campaign and who agreed to it? These are legitimate questions to be asked.

If we are to have a London united, then the public also need answers to these questions. In fact, over 1 million Londoners voted for Sadiq Khan. At the very least 1 million people would surely like an answer to these questions. We hope that the Conservative Party does show transparency and order an Inquiry into what went so disastrously wrong with the campaign that they had to resort to the lowest common denominator – innuendos about how the Labour candidate met someone over 10 years ago who was extreme and by default must have tendencies towards extremists. This is the narrative that was weaved and it was a toxic narrative. It is a narrative that has been soundly rejected by Londoners. However, now the questions must be asked about the Conservative campaign.

The post Labour Did the Right Thing on AntiSemitism, Now the Conservatives Must on Islamophobia appeared first on TELL MAMA.

After the national debate on Antisemitism, the Labour Party has set up a working group to stamp down on Antisemitism, which is to be warmly welcomed. Antisemitism, like other forms of hatred and prejudice, must be tackled and tackled with vigour.

Yet,there is also a unique nature to Antisemitism that we should acknowledge. We also need to be aware of the deep scar of the Holocaust and the over-riding spiritual, religious and cultural trauma that it has caused and will continue to shape feelings and fears within Jewish communities for well over another hundred years. This must be taken into account and reactions also need to be seen through this lens.

European Jewry was, in a mechanised fashion, virtually wiped off the face of the continent and through that lens, we must always understand and empathise with the gut like reaction to Antisemitic discourse that takes place within Jewish communities. However, this does not mean that the policies of the State of Israel cannot be scrutinised and objected to. The latter is legitimate political discourse and there is no getting away from that fact.

Yet, over the last few days, the wider public may have got the impression that Muslims and Jews are completely at odds with each other over Israel and Palestine. As though it is the only thing that shapes relationships between both communities. This has been the impression that many beyond these two communities have got and the furore over the last two days may have further consolidated these positions. However, this is not the full picture.

Work between Muslim and Jewish communities has yielded much that is positive to both communities and to our country. Let  us be clear. Interfaith, conflict resolution, cohesion and integration work between both communities has meant that investment has been injected into local communities in our country. It has ensured the safety and security of both communities and of wider communities. It has ensured that the United Kingdom is seen as a beacon of hope globally of how communities can and do work together. And it has given strength to both communities to reach out and to take on extremist and bigoted groups, for the safety of these communities and our nation.

Much of this is not talked about or mentioned in the headlines. Much of this is not even recognised, but the reality is that it happens every day and goes without notice, yet we all feel the benefits.

Let us therefore remember that even in the darkest of moments, Jewish and Muslim communities hold a candle of hope for a better future. There are others within and beyond these communities who will try and snuff out that light, but they will not be successful. Nor should we let their voices be the enduring ones in the public space. We simply cannot allow them to shape our collective futures.

The post Let us Not Forget That There is Much That Binds Muslims and Jews appeared first on TELL MAMA.

Ken Livingstone’s comments on Hitler and Zionism created a justified outrage. His comments divorce the realities of Hitler’s antisemtism and Nazi violence.

Hitler opposed the creation of a Jewish state in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf. Hitler’s antisemitic outlook owes in part to the writings of Henry Ford and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. His commitment to the conspiracy of a Jewish plot to rule the world prevented him from entertaining the idea of a single Jewish state. This became a meaningful way for the Nazis to dehumanize Jewish communities.

Hitler obsession with the racist conspiracy of global Jewish influence germinated in Vienna. This grew in the 1920s when party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg introduced him to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Nazi Party had already published copies of the text in 1919. And by 1939, the party had published at least 23 versions of the text.

So Livingstone’s point that Hitler “was supporting Zionism” is wrong. Nor did Israel exist in 1932. The conflation between Zionism, Israel and Hitler only serves to cause deep upset. Livingstone’s comment also divorces the complexities of Jewish thought in this era. Removed from the historical context of growing antisemitic violence and discrimination, he caricatures Zionism. This caricature suggests that it shares similar genocidal and racist proclivities. And it also infers that Jews were complicit in their own destruction. Not only are the statements antisemitic but devoid of empathy.

It’s possible that Livingstone alluded to The Haavara (Ha’avarah) Agreement of 1933. This plan would allow German Jews to emigrate to Palestine and keep some of the value of their property in Germany. Negotiations proved controversial in many Jewish circles. The Nazis saw this as a means to undermine the solidarity of Jewish boycotts of German goods. It had little to do with a desire to resettle German Jews.

Researching this agreement also brings up a number of racist conspiracy theories. It also, rather bizarrely trended on Twitter for a short time yesterday. Proclivities towards this thinking in some confirms Barkun’s theory of ‘stigmatized knowledge‘. In short, stigmatized knowledge presents information that mainstream institutions have not validated.

The agreement did allow some wealthy German Jews to emigrate. But as Y’faat Weiss noted:

“The  agreement  did  not  improve  the  living  conditions  of  the  Jews  left  behind,  and  the  number  of  such  Jews  who  actually  emigrated  to  Israel  indirectly  because  of  the  agreement  is  in  doubt. In  view of the peculiar demographic structure of Polish Jewry, such an agreement could not have met the needs of the Jewish rank and file in this country.”

Nor was the agreement signed until August 25, 1933. Hitler’s rise to power made antisemitic violence a state-sanctioned policy. On March 11, 1933, the SA (Sturm Abteilung) militia attacked Jewish-owned shops. Antisemitic violence erupted nationwide. In that same month, the Nazis had erected Dachau concentration camp. Within its first year alone, the Nazis had incarcerated almost five thousand political enemies.

Nor was Hitler a benign force in this period. He signed the order to murder Fritz Gerlich, editor of the anti-Nazi newspaper, Der Gerade Weg, in Dachau in 1934.

The Enabling Act allowed Hitler to rule by decree. He then called for national boycott of Jewish businesses. When not met with SA violence, Jewish shop owners found their shop windows painted with the Star of David and other slogans.

On April 7, 1933, the Nazis purged German Jews from the civil service. Jewish doctors and dentists could no longer work in public health schemes. Teachers were fired. Lawyers could no longer work for the state. A few weeks later and the Nazis had banned kosher traditions.

The Nazis introduced quota systems to limit education for Jewish children in state schools.

In May of 1933, the Nazis held a series of public book burnings. This included texts written by Jewish authors and political enemies. Months later and Jewish academics were purged from teaching positions at universities.

All this violence and discrimination came before the signing of the Ha’avara agreement on August 25, 1933. The antisemitic climate in Nazi Germany increased with each passing month and year.

The Nazis made clear in in 1937 that a single Jewish state would prove detrimental. A memo from German General Consulate in Palestine said:

“The formation of a Jewish state… is not in Germany’s interest because a (Jewish) Palestinian state would create additional national power bases for international Jewry such as for example the Vatican State for political Catholicism or Moscow for the Communists. Therefore, there is a German interest in strengthening the Arabs as a counter weight against such possible power growth of the Jews.”

 

It’s true that some in the Nazi party did seek to deport Jews out of Europe in 1940. But crucially, as Ken Livingstone forgot to mention, was never adopted as policy. The idea went against the fundamental tenets of Hitler’s antisemitism.

Hitler wanted a genocidal response to what he saw as a global Jewish pursuit of power. He wrote that Jews were “a pestilence, a spiritual pestilence, worse than the Black Death.”

It’s why the Nazis and their collaborators had murdered nearly two out of every three European Jews by 1945.

In his magnum opus Life and Fate, the writer Vasily Grossman understood the varieties of antisemitism:

“Anti-Semitism is also an expression of a lack of talent, an inability to win a contest on equal terms – in science or in commerce, in craftsmanship or painting. States look to the imaginary intrigue of world Jewry for explanations of their own failure.

At the same time anti-Semitism is an expression of the lack of consciousness of the masses, of their inability to understand the true reasons for their sufferings. Ignorant people blame the Jews for their troubles when they should blame the social structure or the State itself. Anti-Semitism is also, of course, a measure of the religious prejudices smouldering in the lower levels of society.”

Ken Livingstone would do well to read Grossman, learn his history and not attack historical memory through the lens of antisemitic falsehoods.

The post Why Ken Livingstone is wrong about Hitler and Zionism appeared first on Religious Reader.

A mayoral candidate in the upcoming Bucharest election had denied Romania’s complicity in the Holocaust in a 1994 news article.

Marian Munteanu now of the National Liberal Party (PNL), had founded the ultra-Christian and nationalist Movement for Romania (Mişcarea pentru România) in 1991. The accusations surfaced in their newspaper ‘Mişcarea’ in June 1994. The party foleded in 1996 as Munteanu pursued other interests.

He denied that Romania had experienced an anti-Jewish Holocaust and the 400,000 deaths were no more than a ‘deeply flawed assessment’.

Much of Romania’s Holocaust denial concerns the actions of Nazi collaborator General Ion Antonescu. His antisemitism is, however, without question. In a 1941 session of the Council of Ministers he said: “I give the mob complete license to massacre [the Jews]. I will withdraw to my fortress, and after the slaughter, I will restore order.”

Antonescu ordered pogroms and the closure of all ‘Jewish communist cafes’. The repressive regime had proved one of Hitler’s most consistent allies during the Second World War. General Antonescu had met with Hitler in 1943 to reassure him of Romania’s unconditional support.

Romania and other Axis allies were part of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Odessa, a city in the Ukraine, was home to 180,000 Jews – around a third of the population. Before Romanian occupation, around half of Odessa’s Jewish population had fled.

On October 22, 1941, an explosion at Romania’s military headquarters in Odessa had left 67 dead, including the Romanian military commandant.

This provided the pretext for genocide. Troops had shot dead many of the 19,000 Jews rounded up near the habour areas. Others were doused with petrol and burned alive.

Romanian forces took 20,000 Jews to the village of Dalnik. Some Jews were shot. Others found themselves locked into a warehouse which was then set ablaze. Troops shot any fleeing individuals.

The Romanian administration then ordered the surviving Jews into two ghettos. Many died as a result of malnutrition, disease and exposure. In 1942, Romanian authorities deported almost 20,000 Jews from the Odessa ghettos to camps and ghettos in Transnistria, including the Bogdanovka, Domanevka, and Akhmetchetka regions.

Like other European countries, antisemitism had existed in the pre-war years. The fascist Iron Guard found broad political support for their antisemitic violence and propaganda during the 1920s and 1930s.

King Michael of Romania arrested Antonescu in 1944. The former general returned to Romania to face trial in 1946. And he admitted signing the order to massacre Jews in Odessa.

Antonescu believed that “Judaic and Masonic” influences corrupted Romanian life. He built his nationalism on a wave of antisemitism and anti-Roma sentiment. In spite of his public statements after the failure to capture Stalingrad, in private, Antonescu did believe he was at war with Jews.

His regime had overseen the murder of roughly 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma people — more than any other country except Germany.

A firing squad killed Antonescu and three others found guilty of war crimes in 1946.

Attempts to rehabilitate General Antonescu were most pronounced in the 1990s. Iosif Constantin Dragan had used his wealth and ownership of the weekly newspaper Europa to question the Holocaust until his death in 2008. In 1991, articles the Europa weekly denied Romanian complicity in the Holocaust. Europa even gave column space to Romania’s extreme-right.

The fraudulent antisemitic conspiracy ‘Protocol of the Elders of Zion’ was even serialised in the right-wing press. Other magazines published their own Holocaust denial in 1994.

In 2003, Romania’s Ministry of Information denied the existence of the Holocaust. The statement was soon withdrawn. Legislation passed in 2002 meant that Holocaust denial could result in a six year prison sentence. That legislation, however, did little to stop the flow of Holocaust denial literature.

In spite of the overwhelming evidence, Holocaust denial and Romania’s complicity in genocide continued. Part of the problem is collective historical memory. Children were not taught about the Holocaust in schools until 1998. Only in the last decade have secondary-school children been able to take special classes on the Holocaust. Yet it has not addressed the nationalist assumptions embedded in pre-communist Romania.

Legislative amendments passed in 2015 made Holocaust denial illegal. And it also sought to weaken far-right movements who lionize Antonescu and the Iron Guard.

The Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of Holocaust in Romania criticised Munteanu’s views on the Holocaust, according to the Agerpres news website.

Munteanu insists that his quotes were taken out of context.

There’s growing pressure on the PNL to withdraw Marian Munteanu’s candidacy due to his ‘fascist sympathies’.

The post Bucharest mayoral candidate outed as Holocaust denier appeared first on Religious Reader.

Channel 4 commissioned ICM to poll Muslims in Britain on a range of issues from women’s rights to marriage equality.

But did the poll titled “What do British Muslims really think?” answer its own question? Polling British Muslims is a difficult and expensive task. It’s why YouGov avoided the Sun’s now infamous ‘1 in 5 Muslims’ poll.

ICM’s researchers picked 138 random Local Super Output Areas where Muslims make up at least 20 per cent of the population. This skewed the findings to areas with relative social deprivation. It also over-represented certain ethnic groups. Yet it still captured 51 per cent of the total Muslim population.

Of the 1,081 Muslims polled, 55 per cent were Pakistani. British Asians/Asians totaled 83 per cent of the polling data. Data from the last census revealed that British Asian/Asians totaled 67.6 per cent of Muslims in England and Wales.

The poll included just 11 Arabs and 16 white Muslims who account for 6.6 per cent and 7.8 per cent of Muslims in England and Wales.

Despite methodological issues it remains a serious poll.

As with previous surveys – Muslims identify with Britain at a higher rate than the national average. They also expressed greater attachment t0 their local areas. A vast majority believe that Britain was a good place for Muslims to live in, and 78 per cent said they would like to integrate into British life on certain topics.

Nearly a quarter supported the idea of sharia law operating in parts of Britain above British law. Yet what defines sharia law remains ambigious and open to interpretation. But as Dr Imam Mamadou Bocoum notes: ‘Shariah means a road that leads into Spring Water, which is nothing but to live in peace and harmony. Amongst the principles of the Shariah is to preserve and protect life, intellect, property, honour, lineage, and religion‘.

There was little support among the Muslims polled to establish a caliphate. Support for ISIS polled at just 3 per cent. Few blamed the police or government for girls travelling to Syria.

More than a third of Muslims polled would report individuals who they suspected of seeking to participate in terrorism abroad to police. A figure that stands above the control sample of 30 per cent. Nearly half would attempt to dissuade the individual.

On the subject of extremism, 47 per cent agreed that Muslims need to do more to tackle extremism. The data reveals that a vast majority of Muslims look to the government to tackle Islamophobia and fund special projects to help communities root out the causes of violent extremism.

Islamophobia is a concern in this context, even when 73 per cent thought that religious harassment was not a problem in their local area. Individuals may of course experience less discrimination within their own ethnic and faith communities. Or in a public setting disclose their experiences to strangers. Research also points to the fact that hate crimes increase in areas of deprivation.

The wider public had also expressed a wider concern for Islamophobia than the Muslims polled. Nor do we know what language the interviews were conducted in. So it’s possible that individuals may not understand a question that pertains to religious prejudice.

There was also an overwhelming desire to empower young Muslims and women in the decisions that affect them. And many felt that better leadership in Muslim communities would help address the causes of violent extremism. Just one in 10 sought information on current affairs from mullahs at mosques. And a fifth never attend their local mosques. But 72 per cent felt that their local mosque did represent their views.

The most popular choice for television news was BBC 1, and a vast majority got their news from social media accounts. Yet again, the BBC remained the most popular source for news online.

Discussions of attitudes towards homosexuality dictated a majority of media coverage. The poll found that 52 per cent dsaid they disagreed with homosexuality being legal in Britain, compared with 5 per cent among the public at large who disagreed.

For British-born Muslims, 27 per cent agreed that homosexuality should be legal. Almost a third said neither/nor and 38 per cent disagreed. But that figure requires a caveat since the total figure in the weighted and unweighted sample is below 500 people. Muslims born outside of Britain were more likely to disagree that homosexuality should be legal (a net disagreement of 68 per cent in a sample of 601 or 609 when factored against weighted and unweighted bases).

On the topic of gay marriage and allowing a homosexual person to teach, the data reveals slight differences between Muslims born in the UK and abroad. But the above caveat still applies.

Despite a proclivity towards antisemitic tropes, British Muslims were not hostile towards Jewish communities. ICM asked the control and Muslim samples to measure their feelings towards faith and non-faith groups on a thermometer. Oddly, views towards Sikhs were missing from the data. The control group survey were more likely to agree that antisemitism was a problem. Yet 44 per cent of the Muslim survey and 46 per cent of the control group did not consider antisemitism a problem in Britain today.

The control survey were far more likely to disagree (51 per cent) with the statement ‘Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust’. Yet 18 per cent did agree with the statement, compared to 34 per cent in the Muslim survey.

Confusion about deaths in the Holocaust in the Muslim survey may owe to ignorance, not antisemitism. As 55 per cent did not know the true figure. Just 14 people agreed that it was a myth perpetuated by Jewish people. The control group was not asked this question so it’s hard to make a direct comparison.

Muslims surveyed overwhemingly had also rejected the right of individuals to publish pictures of the prophet Muhammad. But 12 per cent stated that it would depend on the nature of the pictures. Responses in the control group were more in favour of publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. A fifth of non-Muslims who rejected this position were Christian.

Opinions in the control group sample were even more divided when it came to the question of publishing cartoons that mock the prophet Muhammad. Fourty four per cent said publications should not have this right  – and that included 32 per cent of non-religious people and 50 per cent of Christians. A measure of support from Christians may owe to a sense of Abrahamic solidarity or the UK’s own historic and abolished blasphemy laws.

Linda Woodhead, Professor of Sociology of Religion at Lancaster University, surveyed different faith groups in 2013. It found a variety of liberal and conservative views towards topics like abortion and homosexuality.

ICM also asked how often Muslims had mixed socially with non-Muslims in the past year. Again, what defines this social interaction remains open to interpretation. It was rare for Muslims to have had no social mixing outside of the home. Nor are social interactions defined by the boundaries of a person’s home. That applies to Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Yet the data does show that at least a fifth did host and visit non-Muslims friends at least once a week, and 17 per cent welcomed non-Muslims into their homes on a daily basis.

Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, who will present the Channel 4 documentary What British Muslims Really Think tomorrow evening, made a problematic statement on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Phillips stated that: “What we also found is that there is a correspondence between this desire to live separately and sympathy for terrorism. People who want to live separately are about twice as likely to say that they have sympathy for terrorist acts.” Yet the data reveals that just 40 people expressed sympathy for terrorist acts. Nor was there any effort to extrapolate the meaning from a vague term, as sympathy does not always mean edorsement. Phillips is overstating the opinions of a tiny proportion in the data set.

That rhetoric can also suggest that religiosity and support for terrorism are somehow linked, a point that misunderstands the nature of radicalisation.

ICM asked some wide ranging, probing and sensationalistic questions; but to suggest it captures the breadth of Muslim opinion is not quite accurate.

The post What do Muslims in Britain actually think? appeared first on Religious Reader.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the divisive myth-making of the far-right and the growing hostility towards Muslims,refugees, Jewish communities and other minorities.

His remarks at a General Assembly meeting marked the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on March 21.

This growing hostility and violence is ‘manifested most directly in anti-refugee, anti-migrant and, in particular, anti-Muslim bigotry, attacks and violence’.

As moderate parties harden their positions and far-right parties sow division. The Secretary-General’s grave tone bore the weight of Europe’s violent history. As the anti-refugee rhetoric mirrored ‘the darkest chapters of the last century’.

Ban Ki-moon spoke a universal and pluralistic truth: that ‘an assault on one minority community is an attack on all’. And that requires us to speak out against antisemitism, anti-Muslim bigotry and other forms of hate.

This year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination also focuses on the challenges and achievements of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action.

The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action promised a robust response to racism. Ratified in 2001, the framework raised concerns about growing antisemitism and Islamophobia. Point 150 “Calls upon States, in opposing all forms of racism, to recognize the need to counter anti-Semitism, anti-Arabism and Islamophobia world-wide, and urges all States to take effective measures to prevent the emergence of movements based on racism and discriminatory ideas concerning these communities”.

Yet, fifteen years later, and for the UK at least, both forms of bigotry remain growing concerns. The same problems emerge in France and Germany.

A plan of action put focus on a victim-orientated approach to tackling racism. Years earlier and the Macpherson Report redefined how police in the UK investigate hate crimes following the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. Victim perception would dictate how police investigate hate crimes.

The Durban Declaration is not without criticism. Three human rights experts said “very little progress has been made in tackling racism, afrophobia, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”.

Mutuma Ruteere; the Chair-Rapporteur of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, and Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism; Mireille Fanon Mendes-France; and the Chairperson of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, José Francisco Cali Tzay cautioned against media and political scapegoating of minorities.

The experts also highlighted the under-reporting of racist hate crime and the need for tough policing responses. Another recommendation highlighted the need for reliable data collection in order to track the effectiveness of acti-racism action plans.

The post UN Secretary-General condemns rising anti-Muslim and anti-refugee bigotry appeared first on Religious Reader.

Pope Francis will visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in July, as part of World Youth Day.

This trip coincides with his five day trip to Poland, arriving on July 27 and departing July 31.

Pope John Paul II, himself Polish, became the first pope to visit the camp. Benedict XVI visited in 2006.

The US Holocaust Museum estimates that the SS had murdered at least 960,000 of the 1.1m Jews deported to the camp. Of the 23,000 Romani, the Nazis murdered 21,000. Other victims included 15,000 Poles, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war. And 10-15,000 members of other nationalities perished (including Czechs, Yugoslavs, Germans, Austrians and French).

On June 7, 1979, Pope John II made a five-hour visit to the camp. He prayed before a stone crucifix in memory of the Catholic priest Maksymilian Kolbe, prisoner number 16670, who the SS murdered in 1941.

Kolbe volunteered to die, so Franciszek Gajowniczek, a father of five might live. Gajowniczek, the Polish army sargeant had been chosen to die in an Auschwitz dungeon called the “hunger bunker,” after a prisoner had escaped.

Kolbe pleaded, ‘I want to take the place of this man. He has a wife and a family. I have no one. I am a Catholic priest.’ He and ten others were then marched away, stripped naked and starved.  To console the others, Kolbe consoled the condemned men with prayers and hymns. Kolbe and three others had survived for ten days. Then a doctor arrived and killed them with injections of carbolic acid. In 1982, the Catholic church canonised Kolbe. Gajowniczek had survived the war and died in 1995 aged 95.

John Paul also remembered the life of Edith Stein, a German-Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism. A Carmelite Sister Benedicta of the Cross, she died like many others in the gas chambers of the camp. The Catholic church beatified her in 1987, which confused and upset Jewish groups as Edith Stein died because she was Jewish, not a Catholic nun.

On Auschwitz, Pope John Paul II described it as, “A place built on hatred and on contempt for man in the name of a crazed ideology. A place built on cruelty.’ He came to ‘kneel on this Golgotha of the modern world, on these tombs, largely nameless like the great tomb of the Unknown Soldier”.

The 1979 visit came fourteen years after the Second Vatican Council of 1965 declared that Jewish communities were not responsible for the death of Christ.

A test of this Jewish-Catholic reconciliation took place in 1993. Carmelite nuns had lived in a convent converted from a building used by the Nazis to store Zkylon B gas. It had caused tensions between Jewish and Catholic communities since 1987. A deal between cardinals and leaders of Jewish organisations had agreed to move the convent away from the camp.

In 1989, Avraham Weiss, a New York City rabbi, had broken into the convent in protest at their failure to abide by the agreement. Pope John Paul II wrote to the convent, asking the nuns to re-locate helped diffuse tensions.

In a 2006 visit, Pope Benedict XVI echoed the words of his predocessor. In his address he said, “All these inscriptions speak of human grief, they give us a glimpse of the cynicism of that regime which treated men and women as material objects, and failed to see them as persons embodying the image of God”.

The German-born pope made it a personal mission to visit the camp during his papacy, having first visited in 1979 as Archbishop of Munich-Freising.

In a speech he said, “In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can only be a dread silence – a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?“

Benedict faced criticism for dealing with this historical trauma through a theological, not emotional lens. Perhaps this disassociation owed to his own role in World War II. He had served as an antiaircraft unit but deserted and found himself inside an American prisoner of war.

The BBC’s Adam Easton remarked that Benedict offered no apology for the role of ordinary Germans, nor did he make a direct reference to antisemitism.

Pope Francis will also attend a mass there to celebrate the 1050th anniversary of the introduction of Christianity to Poland.

The post Pope Francis to visit Auschwitz death camp in July appeared first on Religious Reader.

The year is 1933 and Hitler’s rise to power is imminent. Days earlier and the Nazis had exploited the burning of the Reichstag, home of the German parliament, for votes.

Armed security forces patrolled public buildings. On the streets,  Sturmabteilung (SA) ‘brown shirts’ had their violence legitimised by decree. Political violence and intimidation, however, did not grant Hitler his parliamentary majority. The March 5 elections gave the Nazi Party 43.9 per cent of the vote and 288 parliament seats out 647.

On March 10, 1933, Dr Michael Siegel visited a Munich police station on behalf a client. Dr Siegel was one of roughly 4,000 Jewish lawyers in Germany. They held senior positions in the court system, bar association and justice ministry. In 1933, racist laws pushed saw many lose their jobs. The indignity of this discrimination was was compounded by further arrests and violence.

Dr Siegel had entered a Munich police station on behalf of Max Uhlfelder, the Jewish owner of a large city-centre store. Nazi Party members had taken positions of office in Munich a day earlier. Heinrich Himmler, the SS commander, now commanded the Police Authority. The Swastika flew atop public buildings. Nazi paramilitaries had smashed Mr Uhlhelder’s shop windows and deported him to Dachau concentration camp.

Instead of listening to Dr Siegel’s complaint, the police assaulted him. SA ‘brown shirts’ had perforated Dr Siegel’s eardrum. The force of their punches had broken several teeth. They had cut his trousers from the knee down.

Dr Siegel was then made to walk the streets of Munich bloody and barefooted. Surrounded by ranks of SA paramilitaries, Dr Siegel wore a sign that read: “I will never again complain to the police”.

Some debate the actual wording of the sign. Dr Siegel had told his children that it read: “Ich bin Jude aber ich will mich nie mehr bei der Polizei Beschweren”(I am a Jew but I will never again complain to the Police).

Heinrich Sanden, the photojournalist who immortalised this humiliation, disagreed. Dr Siegel soon became an international symbol of the antisemitic persecution in Germany. He did not learn of the photo until the 1970s.

Despite the growing climate of antisemitic violence and discrimination, Dr Siegel and his family remained in Munich. He had passport revoked in 1934 and reinstated in 1935. Local farmers warned Dr Spiegel about the impending Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938. He fled to Luxembourg and returned some weeks later, only to lose his legal license. Few Germans protested this flagrant discrimination.

At the start of 1939, the Siegel family left their home and found other accommodation. Their new ground floor served as an emergency synagogue,  the Nazis had razed the city’s main synagogue. Dr Siegel’s 18-year-old son Peter and 14-year-old daughter Beate soon emigrated to England.

Dr Siegel and his wife Mathilde sought asylum in Peru but were rejected. In a remarkable stroke of luck, a student teaching Dr Siegel Spanish was a nephew of the Peruvian Minister of the Interior.

The arduous road to Peru began in 1940. They travelled through Lithuania, Siberia, Russia and Japan before arriving in Peru. Dr Siegel took up work in a Lima bookstore. In the post-war years, he worked to establish an embassy for the Federal Republic of Germany in Peru’s capital, Lima. He soon became the Rabbi of the German-Jewish community in Lima. By 1953, Dr Siegel could again practise law in Germany, despite the geographical difference.

Dr Siegel helped German Jewish refugees in Peru and other parts of Latin America.

In 1971, at the age of 89, he received the Grand Cross of Merit of the German Republic ‘in recognition of his exceptional services to the state and people’. He accepted the award on behalf of all German Jews in Lima.

In spite of his growing age, Dr Siegel never stopped pursuing restitution cases. He died in 1979 at the age of 96.

Dr Siegel never forgot the ordeal he faced in Munich. In  a 1987 article, The Association of Jewish Refugees retold the story of Dr Siegel’s life and journey to Peru.

The authors, H.P. Sinclair and M.B. Green, wrote that Dr Michael Siegel had one thought in his mind: ‘I shall survive you all’. And he did. But according to Sinclair and Green, he bore no grudge against the German people. For he had known “too many decent ones for that“.

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Nationalists marched in Kaunas, a city east of Lithuania’s capitol of Vilnius, to celebrate alleged Nazi collaborators.

Members of defendinghistory.com – a website dedicated to exposing extremism in Lithuania monitored the 16 February march.

The Union of Nationalist Youth of Lithuania organised the march to fall on the anniversary of Lithuania’s declaration of independence in 1918.

Under the banner “We Know Our Nation’s Heroes”were pictures of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, Jonas Noreika, Povilas Plechavičius, Kazys Škirpa, Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejas, and Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. Individuals accused of direct complicity in the Holocaust or fighting alongside Nazi forces.

The Soviet Union invaded Lithuania in 1940. And within two months had annexed the country. A year later and Lithuania had absorbed Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi tyranny in Poland. This swelled Lithuania’s Jewish population to 250,000 (10 per cent of the population).

Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis formed a provisional government after Nazi Germany had expelled the Soviets. Nazi Germany had banned the preferred choice of Kazys Skirpa from returning to Lithuania. It lasted for six weeks. Some accuse it of it complicity with the invading Nazi forces. Others would argue that it attempted in vein to restore statehood.

The provisional government had welcomed the Nazi vision for a ‘new Europe’. And its staunch anti-Bolshevism.

Journalist Vidmantas Valiušaitis, however, sought to draw a line between the actions of the provisional government and that of the Lithuanian Activist Front. The antisemitic elements of the latter had denounced Lithuanian Jews as ‘traitors’. And might have been behind the paroxysms of antisemitic violence that began before the arrival of Nazi Germany.

The efficiency of Nazi genocide in Lithuania owes in part to complicity. Lithuanian auxiliaries worked with Einsatzgruppen units to eradicate most Jews in rural Lithuania in August 1941. More than 30,000 of Vilna’s Jews died in Ponar, a wooded area outside the city.

By November of that year, the Nazis had murdered most of the Jews in ghettos of the larger cities. Of the remaining 40,000 or so Jews resided in ghettos. Overcrowding, food shortages, and outbreaks of disease were products of inhumane living conditions.

In response to mass murderer, resistance movements grew across the existing ghettos. In Vilna, Abba Kovner (1918-1988) urged Jews to rise up and fight at a meeting of Zionist youth groups on 1 January 1942. Kovner argued with passion that  “the only reply to the murderer is revolt!” Within weeks of this speech, Zionist youth leaders and Communists formed the Fareynegte Partizaner Organizatsye (United Partisan Organization; FPO).

The FPO had a number of aims: to inspire Jews outside of Vilna to use armed resistance, carry out sabotage and unite resistance groups. Their successes included destroying a German military train and smuggling weapons into the ghetto. They also managed to send emissaries into the Warsaw and Bialystok ghettos to warn them of the genocide.

In 1943, the Nazis cracked down on FPO activities. German police officials threatened to liquidate the Vilna ghetto and its 20,000 inhabitants if they failed to hand over FPO leader Yitzhak Wittenberg. Armed groups within the ghetto had freed Wittenberg from custody but he later turned himself in in light of the group’s decision. He would then take his own life in German custody.

The liquidation of smaller ghettos in other parts of Lithuania took a matter of days to complete. In Švenčionys, in northeastern Lithuania, it took the Nazis and ‘patriot’ collaborators just two days to murder 8,000 Jews. Nazi collaborators saved ammo by smashing the heads of children into trees. Some say the violence had left its own scars upon the trees.

A survivor of this liquidation, Zhenja Gurevich, recalled boarding a train to Kovno. When it arrived at the killing fields of Ponar, many Jews fled into the forests. Gurevich did not escape capture and soon found herself in the Vilna ghetto.

Following the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943, the Nazis became more aware of armed resistance in the ghettos. In response, the authority over Lithuania’s ghettos switched to the SS. On 21 June 1943, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler had ordered the liquidation of all ghettos in the Reichskommissariat Ostland. The Ostland was a German civil administration that covered the Baltic states and western Belorussia.

Nazi forces began deporting Jews from the Vilna ghetto to Estonia. Estonian security forces assisted in the arrests and deportations. The FPO gathered around 100 armed members to resist. Some had escaped and reentered the ghetto hoping to inspire a mass revolt that did not arrive. As the spectre of liquidation drew near, their leader Abba Kovner and others escaped. They later joined Soviet partisan missions to liberate Vilna in 1944.

If the complicity of others underpinned genocide, what of Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis? He did sign an order to build a concentration camp and establish a ghetto in Kaunas. Others maintain he was a staunch anti-Nazi upon leaving the provisional government. According to BNS, four members of that provisional government ended up in concentration camps.

In 2012, the deep trauma of the Holocaust re-entered the Lithuanian political debate. The then government had set aside 30,000 litas ($11,000) for the burial and repatriation of Brazaitis. Former Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius had defended this move in spite of understandable outrage from Jewish voices. Kubilius cited a 1975 investigation from US Immigration that absolved Brazaitis of pro-Nazi complicity. A number of liberal intellectuals had condemned Kubilius’s plan.

Up to 95 per cent of Lithuania’s Jews died as a result of the Holocaust. Their Jewish culture, including its own unique dialect of the Yiddish language, was almost lost to the winds of history. Crushed by the racist, antisemitic totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and its complicit allies.

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