The Vatican has made the unprecedented move of beatifying an entire Polish family for their “gesture of hospitality and care” in sheltering Jewish people during the Second World War.

The family-of-nine — a married couple and their small children — were murdered by the Nazis in 1944 after they were apparently betrayed.

Speaking during a Mass in the village of Markowa, in southeastern Poland, papal envoy Cardinal Marcello Semeraro read out the Latin formula of the beatification of the Ulma family signed last month by Pope Francis.

Cardinal Semeraro noted that for their “gesture of hospitality and care, of mercy” the Ulmas “paid the highest price of martyrdom”.

A contemporary painting representing Jozef and a pregnant Wiktoria Ulma with their children was revealed near the altar, and a procession brought relics taken from their grave to the altar.

It is the first time that an entire family has been beatified.

Speaking to the public from a window in St Peter’s Square at the Vatican, Pope Francis said the Ulmas “represented a ray of light in the darkness” of the war and should be a model for everyone in “doing good and in the service of those in need”.

The pope then invited the crowd below to applaud the family, and he clapped his hands.

Those gathered in Markowa watched Francis’ address on giant screens placed by the altar.

Last year, Francis pronounced the deeply Catholic Ulma family, including the child that Wiktoria Ulma was pregnant with, martyrs for the faith.

The Ulmas were killed at home by German Nazi troops and by Nazi-controlled local police in the early hours of March 24 1944, together with the eight Jews they were hiding at their home, after they were apparently betrayed.

Jozef Ulma, 44, was a farmer, Catholic activist and amateur photographer who documented family and village life. He lived with his 31-year-old wife Wiktoria; their daughters Stanislawa, seven; Barbara, six; Maria, 18 months; and sons Wladyslaw, five; Franciszek, three; and Antoni, two.

With them were killed 70-year-old Saul Goldman with his sons Baruch, Mechel, Joachim and Mojzesz, along with Golda Grunfeld and her sister Lea Didner with her young daughter Reszla, according to Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, which has documented the Ulmas’ story.

Polish president Andrzej Duda along with the ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, as well as Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, attended the celebration in Markowa, and thousands of pilgrims came from across Poland to take part.

In Poland, the Ulma family is a symbol of the bravery of thousands of Poles who took the utmost risk while helping Jews.

By the occupying Nazis’ decree, any assistance to Jews was punished with summary execution.

Poland was the first country to be invaded by Nazi Germany, on September 1 1939. Some six million of its citizens were killed during the war, half of them Jews.

“We stand with you in solidarity and sorrow.

Wherever we are in the world, whatever our faith and beliefs, we stand together with you as pilgrims on this earth, as fellow human beings striving to do what is compassionate and just, hoping to share with our loved ones, friends and fellow citizens the privileges and responsibilities of life.

We have no place for racism, hatred and supremacism.

We are appalled and disgusted at the premeditated racist murder of Muslim people, made even more brutal, blasphemous, hurtful and despicable because it was carried out in the sacred precincts of prayer, during the peaceful hour of worship.

We mourn the victims alongside you, children, teenagers, healers and teachers, heroes who tried to save others, people from different parts of the world, contributing to the civic life of Christchurch and New Zealand.

Our hearts are with the bereaved. Our prayers are with the wounded and traumatised, and with all those striving to heal and support them. Our anguished thoughts are with all whose family members are still missing.

We feel for Muslim communities across the world.

The oneness of God and the fellowship of our common humanity unite us. We must stand as surety for each other in times of threat and danger. We must act collectively against all forms of hatred and bigotry. We must foster friendship and understanding between us and all people. We must work together for the safety and good of all life everywhere.”

Written in sorrow

Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg

Senior Rabbi, Masorti Judaism

Leaders of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) have been rebuked for belittling the significance of the Nazis and criticizing a Holocaust memorial, but this has not stopped a small group of Jews from throwing their support behind the party.

On Sunday they formed Jews in the AfD, a political group based in the western city of Wiesbaden that seeks to foster support for the party, which says Islam is not compatible with the German constitution.

“We are not a religious organisation, we are a political organisation,” Jews in the AfD leader Wolfgang Fuhl told reporters at the inauguration ceremony, sitting on a podium with fellow Jews including a few wearing the Jewish skullcap.

He said people wishing to join had to meet two requirements: membership in the AfD and ethnic or religious association with the Jewish faith. Twenty people signed up at Sunday’s meeting.

The AfD entered the German parliament for the first time in an election last year, drawing support from a broad array of voters angry with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to welcome almost a million, mainly Muslim asylum seekers.

Its success drew immediate expressions of concern from Israeli officials and Jewish groups in Europe and the United States.

German politicians in June rebuked AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland after he said that Hitler and the Nazis “are just bird shit in 1,000 years of successful German history.”

And Bjoern Hoecke, the AfD’s leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, triggered anger last year after he told supporters that Berlin’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was a “memorial of shame” and that history books should be rewritten to focus more on German victims.

But Jews for AfD leader Fuhl dismissed those concerns on Sunday, saying the AfD was the most pro-Israel party in Germany, not least because it supports the Jewish state’s right to have all of Jerusalem as its capital.

‘PRO-ISRAEL’

“The AfD is an exceptionally pro-Israel party, supposedly the most pro-Israel party in the Bundestag,” Fuhl said, referring to the lower house of parliament in which the AfD is the third-largest party.

Palestinians, with broad international backing, seek East Jerusalem as the capital of a state they want to establish in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Israel regards all of the city, including the eastern sector it captured in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed, as its “eternal and indivisible capital”.

Germany, home to an estimated 200,000 Jews, has built a reputation in recent decades as a tolerant, safe place for Jews to live. The rise of the AfD has alarmed the community.

Anti-Semitic crimes reported to the police rose 4 percent to 681 in the first eight months of 2017 against the same period last year, with an overwhelming majority of incidents linked to far-right extremism. The real number is probably much higher.

Members of Jews in the AfD appear unmoved by those figures.

When asked by a journalist what he would say to people who might call him a “Nazi Jew,” Bernhard Krauskopf said speaking in English: “I tell them that ‘you are talking to a Jewish-German person whose father lost more than 50 people in Nazi death camps, you should be a little bit more intelligent not to talk such nonsense.'”

Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said he was sceptical.

“It doesn’t go together for me,” he told Reuters. “In the end, I have to assume that these are people who simply have not recognised the true ulterior motive, also the goals of this more than right-wing populist party.”

He added: “I think that there are some who think, ‘The AFD is a party that today predominantly campaigns against or targets refugees, migrants, Muslims’. However, I consider it completely wrong to put Muslims under general suspicion. And the formula ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ does not work.'”

Britain’s former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has called Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn an anti-Semite and said comments about Zionists he made five years ago were the most offensive by a senior UK politician in half a century.

Labour has been battling accusations of anti-Semitism for months, and Corbyn has previously apologised for what he has described as “pockets” of anti-Semitism in his party.

Sacks, who was Britain’s Chief Rabbi from 1991 to 2013, accused Corbyn of having “given support to racists, terrorists and dealers of hate who want to kill Jews and remove Israel from the map”.

He said Corbyn had depicted a group of British citizens as “essentially alien” when it was revealed last week he said in 2013 that British Zionists “don’t understand English irony” despite “having lived in this country for a very long time”.

“When he implies that, however long they have lived here, Jews are not fully British, he is using the language of classic pre-war European anti-Semitism,” Sacks told the New Statesman political magazine.

“Now, within living memory of the Holocaust, and while Jews are being murdered elsewhere in Europe for being Jews, we have an anti-Semite as the leader of the Labour party and Her Majesty’s opposition. That is why Jews feel so threatened by Mr Corbyn and those who support him.”

Labour said in a statement there is no place for anti-Semitism in their party and that they are committed to rebuilding trust with the Jewish community.

Some opinion polls put Labour ahead or level with Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservatives, meaning he is a potential British leader, although the next election is not due until 2022.

Sacks compared Corbyn’s comments to the infamous “Rivers of blood” speech by Enoch Powell in 1968 in which the then-Conservative shadow cabinet member warned of the dangers of immigration. His speech is widely regarded as one of the most divisive made by a modern British politician.

Labour dismissed the comparison with Powell as “absurd and offensive”.

Since unexpectedly becoming Labour leader in 2015 after decades spent on the left-wing fringes of the party, Corbyn has repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to anti-Semitic comments in the party and among groups he supports.

Corbyn has responded to protests by meeting Jewish community leaders, reassuring Jewish people they are welcome in the party.

In his 2013 speech to a meeting convened by the Palestinian Return Centre, Corbyn spoke about the importance of history and of how necessary it was for people to understand the origins of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

He said Zionists had “two problems” – firstly, that they do not study history and, secondly, they do not understand English irony.

After the emergence of footage, Labour asserted that Corbyn had been referring to a “group of pro-Israel activists” and had not been singling out Jewish people as a whole.

Under tight security at Africa’s oldest synagogue, Jewish pilgrims on Wednesday staged their biggest religious ceremony in Tunisia since a 2011 revolution undermined security in the North African country.

Mainly Muslim Tunisia is home to one of North Africa’s largest Jewish communities. Though they now number less than 2,000 people, Jews have lived in Tunisia since Roman times.

In 2011, after the uprising that toppled former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali the annual celebration was cancelled, and in following years only a few hundred attended, fearing attacks by hardline Islamists.

This year, revellers chanted and danced in a two-day pilgrimage to the El Ghriba synagogue at the popular tourist island resort of Djerba 500 km (310 miles) south of Tunis.

“The security situation is excellent here and this has encouraged us to come back … Today we feel safer in Tunisia than in Paris,” Isabel Guez, a Jewish visitor from Paris, told Reuters.

“This celebration is a great opportunity for approchement between Muslims, Jews and other religions and an opportunity to call for peace and love across the world,” she added.

Some 5,000 pilgrims attended, organisers said, a significant increase on 2,000 last year. Tunisia has not seen a major militant attack since scores of foreigners were killed in two strikes claimed by Islamic State in 2015.

Hundreds of pilgrims prayed, lit candles and wrote wishes on eggs. Others celebrated by sipping glasses of boukha, a liqueur made from figs.

In 2002 militants linked to al Qaeda attacked the synagogue with a truck bomb killing 21 Western tourists.

Authorities took no chances this time with hundreds of police, soldiers and members of anti-terror units patrolling streets. Checkpoints were set up around the synagogue.

“With the good security situation now, the number of visitors exceeds 5,000 from Israel, Russia and Europe,” said Perez Trabelsi, the head of the Jewish community in Djerba.

The El Ghriba synagogue, home to most of Tunisia’s Jews, is built on the site of a Jewish temple that is believed to date back almost 1,900 years.

A second Austrian student fraternity has a songbook containing anti-Semitic lyrics making fun of the Holocaust and insulting Jews, a newspaper said on Tuesday, three weeks after it exposed a similar case that forced a far-right politician to quit.

The earlier case reported by Falter prompted the resignation of a prominent member of the anti-Islam Freedom Party (FPO), which became the junior partner in conservative Chancellor Christian Kurz’s government in December following elections.

Austria is the only western European country to have a far-right party in government.

Last month, left-wing weekly Falter reported on anti-Semitic lyrics in a songbook published by a student fraternity in Lower Austria, the province surrounding Vienna. That fraternity’s deputy leader was the FPO’s top candidate in an election for the regional parliament there, Udo Landbauer.

Landbauer eventually stepped down over the affair. After initially refusing to sack him, the party later said it was setting up a committee of historians that would examine its past and that of right-wing fraternities like Landbauer’s, which are often close to the FPO but not formally part of it.

On Tuesday, Falter reported that another fraternity, Bruna Sudetia based in Vienna, had a similar songbook, and that the head of that group is on the staff of FPO Infrastructure Minister Norbert Hofer.

The staffer, Herwig Goetschober, who works on social media, was not immediately available for comment. A spokesman for Hofer said Goetschober was sick but denied knowing of the lyrics published by Falter, adding that his songbook had a different content and layout.

“He has no knowledge of this other songbook. He also does not know who produced it,” the spokesman said.

The FPO says it has abandoned its neo-Nazi past and rejects anti-Semitism. It now focuses its criticism on Islam and even openly courts Jewish voters.

But the main group representing Austria’s tiny Jewish community, the IKG, says the FPO has done too little to address the long-standing anti-Semitism within its ranks. It sees fraternities as a breeding ground for the problem.

The IKG has also questioned whether the FPO’s historical commission will get to the bottom of anti-Semitism within fraternities. Many senior political party figures belong to a fraternity but the FPO has said it cannot force those organisations to cooperate with the commission.

“If it is true that the FPO cannot control the fraternities, then that probably confirms that fraternity members control the FPO,” IKG chief Oskar Deutsch told ORF radio at the weekend.

Germany’s lower house of parliament on Thursday voted to step up efforts to combat anti-Semitism and called for the creation of a new government post to oversee the issue, backed by an independent panel of experts.

The proposal was jointly introduced and backed by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), the pro-business Free Democrats and the Greens.

The far-right Alternative for Germany party also voted for the measure, while the radical Left party voted against, citing what it called substantive deficiencies in the proposal.

The voice vote, which lays the groundwork for a spate of legislative initiatives during this session of parliament, was welcomed widely by Jewish groups.

Volker Kauder, head of the conservatives in parliament, spoke in favour of the proposal given Germany’s Nazi past and the murder of 6 million Jews during the Third Reich.

“We have a particular responsibility to ensure that anti-Semitism does not continue to grow in our country,” he said during the parliamentary debate.

Kauder also vowed to examine whether Germany could ban the burning of Israeli flags, following incidents in December during protests against a U.S. decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Anti-Semitism remains a hugely sensitive issue in Germany more than 70 years after the end of the Nazi-era Holocaust.

Jewish and civil rights groups have long called for the appointment of a special commissioner to address growing anti-Semitism, which they say has been fuelled by right-wing populism and the arrival of many migrants from mostly Muslim countries.

The Central Council of Jews welcomed the vote, calling it an important signal that their concerns were being addressed.

“The fight against anti-Semitism is all of our responsibility,” the group said in a statement. “The respectful treatment of minorities is part of the core values of our democracy.”

Josef Schuster, the group’s president, called for increased efforts to include anti-bias training in integration courses for migrants, but explicitly rejected any effort to instrumentalise the issue to discriminate against Muslims or others.

Jewish groups last month called for legal changes and increased enforcement to crack down on anti-Semitic acts following the burning of Jewish symbols and Israeli flags.

The proposal calls for the creation of a new commissioner post to coordinate efforts to tackle anti-Semitism by the federal government, states and civil society.

It foresees the creation of an independent advisory panel with Jewish and non-Jewish experts from academic, education and other sectors, as well as a federal-state commission.

The proposal also calls for improved gathering of statistics on anti-Semitic incidents, tighter laws banning Holocaust denial on the internet and consequences for the immigration status of foreign citizens who incite hatred.

]]> 7050 https://www.faith-matters.org/holocaust-museum-united-states-accepts-righteous-muslims-exhibition-boards/ Wed, 30 Nov 2016 00:51:59 +0000 https://faith-matters.org/?p=6232

We are pleased to announce that the Role of Righteous Muslims exhibition boards that Faith Matters put together as part of an educational drive for civil society organisations and schools, has been accepted by a Holocaust Museum in the United States.

The posters depict stories of Muslims who saved Jews in the Holocaust and the educational boards will be placed within the Holocaust Museum in the United States to ensure that people reflect on such stories and on the personal drives that led some Muslims to save the lives of Jews that they had lived, worked with or known.

We are pleased to add to the collection and exhibition of the museum in the United States and we would be happy to donate a further set to any Holocaust educational centre who thinks that they can add value to learning around the Holocaust. It is vital that all communities be exposed to learning about the greatest catastrophe to befit Jewish and other communities in modern history and how communities can be castigated and dehumanised within a short space of time.

It’s seventy-eight years since the Night of Broken Glass, when Goebbels unleashed upon the Jews of Germany the full of violence of Nazi hate. Though he described the subsequent horrors as the unpremeditated and spontaneous expression of the Kochende Volkseele, the boiling public mood, the smashing, burning and killing were co-ordinated across Germany and beyond. Nor was the timing incidental. It’s widely thought that the failure that summer of the rest of the world to increase their quotas for refugees from Nazism gave Goebbels a moral victory, enabling him to claim that nobody else wanted the Jews either, and gave Hitler the green light to act against them as he pleased.

I was in Frankfurt yesterday, where the Jewish Museum hosts an annual evening of study on the day before Kristallnacht. This subject was the rabbis of Frankfurt who fled the Nazis, and their legacy, focussing on my grandfather and his close colleagues. I re-visited his testimony of those terrible years. I read how he preached of his pride in the appellation ‘Israel’ after the Nazis forced all Jews to add it to their name. I stood where the great Boerneplatz Synagogue was burnt to a ruin. My grandfather was outside, summoned by the Gestapo. My father’s uncle’s family were inside; they lived in a flat adjacent to the lady’s gallery. He was arrested and taken to Buchenwald. His pregnant wife and their four children were hastily taken away by relatives, haunted by the sight of the blackened cupola, now visible through the burnt-out doors, of the great house of prayer. The baby died at birth.

Outside, many thousands of memorial tiles line the walls of the ancient Jewish cemetery.
I was shown pictures of the 1930’s, a Sabena aeroplane like that on which my family escaped, the airfield at Croydon where they landed – the very part of London where refugee children have now been arriving.

I sat at length with the director of the Jewish Museum discussing Frankfurt’s Jewish legacy: Ludwig Boerne, ‘the father of modern journalism’, born in the Judengasse, exiled, like Heinrich Heine, to Paris; and Samson Raphael Hirsch the great neo-orthodox rabbi who taught that ‘love your neighbour’ means seeking the same rights and opportunities for every citizen as you want for yourself, irrespective of religion or race. He taught, too, that the moment you abrogate in any way the rights of the stranger, or make the rights we owe each other conditional on any other attributes than the very fact of being human, created in the image of God, you re-open the gates to ‘all the horror of the slavery in Egypt’.

On the train home I passed through the Ardennes, the landscape of Hitler’s bitter last offensive, mercifully thwarted by Allied courage. The route went not far east of the terrible graveyards of the First World War, which we remember this Sunday on Armistice Day.
I followed responses to the US elections on twitter. And, not by any means solely for that reason, I feel afraid. I fear for my children; I fear for the earth. The world, it seems, is reverting to tribalism; maybe fear itself is part of the cause. I don’t know where or why this began, or if it is always thus. My next writing deadline is about the anniversary of the attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris.

That is why it is essential to say ‘No’ to racism; ‘No’ to anti-Semitism; ‘No’ to the hatred of Muslims, ‘No’ to the denigration of women.; ‘No’ to xenophobia. That is why we must assert the centrality of the commandments, the very core of faith and humanity, to ‘do justly’, to ‘love compassion’, and never denigrate the image of God in anybody, or act with wanton destruction towards this beautiful world, God’s world, the world of which we must continue to say, conducting ourselves accordingly, ‘And God sees that it is good’.
Jonathan Wittenberg