To be a free Nation, in our land, the Land of Zion and Jerusalem - by Forest Rain

...Zaïd was survived by his wife and four children and the legacy that waited for the survivors of the death marches and concentration camps to pick up and continue where he left off – creating new Jews, more powerful and alive. Jews whose hearts no longer yearned but now beat as one with the land that gave them their history, where they could create a promise of an independent future for Jewish generations to come – free in our own land, Land of Zion and Jerusalem.

Forest Rain..
Inspiration from Zion..
14 April '18..

Standing on the top of the hill, I looked out at the beautiful land stretched before me.

Suddenly I felt my body vibrating. Looking up, I saw the guardians of Israel thundering across the sky. IAF fighter jets. It was Holocaust Memorial Day and they were practicing for the Independence Day aerial show.

How suitable. How awe-inspiring.

Could those Jews, those downtrodden, dehumanized, beaten, starving and tortured Jews imagine their grandchildren cutting through the heavens, with enough might at their fingertips to make any enemy shake in their boots and grovel for mercy?

And then I remembered a story I once heard from a Holocaust survivor. He had been a small boy when his family was forced on a death march. As a grandfather, living in Israel, on every Holocaust Memorial Day he walks through the streets of Jerusalem and, at the end of his march he eats two portions of steaming hot, golden falafel. Because, he explained, on that March, his mother, desperate to distract her hungry child, told him that in Zion food grows on trees, hot, crispy golden dumplings that anyone can take, whenever they want.

Cold and starving, marching towards death, they were dreaming of Zion…

It is in her honor that this man marches, as he pleases, free in the land of Zion and eats, not one but TWO portions of golden falafel.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Maybe, some day, after many years, ...we will also be remembered

...And should it happen that you, of the two of us should survive...and sometime, some-place, you were to meet my comrades, please tell them what I said, tell them that not for a moment did I doubt that Hitler's Germany would be defeated, not I, nor my comrades...that we are fighting for our people and shall die for them. That we believe that a Jewish State will arise in a struggle with our enemies there in that distant land...

Love of the Land..
First posted 24 April '17..


...On Sunday, April 18, 1943 (13 Nisan), the day before the uprising, Waleski and Leon Rodal were in the ZZW headquarters at Muranowska 7, making last minute preparations. Walewski, who survived the fighting in the ghetto, later recalled Rodal's words:

We will all fall here. Those in battle, weapons in hand, and those as vain victims. But it is important that the memory of our battle will be retained, that the world will know that there was a battle. A tough bloody battle. And should it happen that you, of the two of us should survive...and sometime, some-place, you were to meet my comrades, please tell them what I said, tell them that not for a moment did I doubt that Hitler's Germany would be defeated, not I, nor my comrades...that we are fighting for our people and shall die for them. That we believe that a Jewish State will arise in a struggle with our enemies there in that distant land...

Today you will be remembered, you who returned yet again to rescue those still there

...Today, Rosh Chodesh Iyar, you will be remembered Leon, and how you and your comrades in arms who had escaped the burning ghetto, returned to rescue those still there.

LOTL..
27 April '17..

(While having posted the beginning earlier this week for Yom HaShoah, today is appropriate to complete the story)

The excerpts quoted below come from Flags over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by Moshe Arens. The book is both an outstanding and uniquely accurate account of what transpired, a must read, and one that does justice to all who fought and fell there.

On Sunday, April 18, 1943, the day before the uprising, Walewski and Leon Rodal were in the ZZW headquarters at Muranowska 7, making last-minute preparations. Walewski, who survived the fighting in the ghetto, later recalled Rodal's words:

We will all fall here. Those in battle, weapons in hand, and those as vain victims. But it is important that the memory of our battle will be retained, that the world will know there was a battle. A tough bloody battle. And should it happen that you, of the two of us will survive...and sometime, some-place, you were to meet my comrades, please tell them what I said, tell them that not for a moment did I doubt that Hitler's Germany would be defeated, not I, nor my comrades...that we are fighting for our people and we shall die for them. That we believe a Jewish State will arise in a struggle with our enemies there in that distance land.... During that far-off period of slavery, when the Roman legions trampled almost the entire ancient world, and the whole world kneeled before them, only one small Roman province, Judea, took up arms, rose up to fight for freedom and in defense of the honor of man, against a world of injustice. And that is the reason that Judea is inscribed in the history of man as a symbol of the fight for the spirit of man....Maybe, some day, after many years, when the history of the struggle against the Nazi conquerors is written, we will also be remembered, and, who knows, we will become - like small Judea in its day, which fought mighty Rome - the symbol of man's spirit that cannot be suppressed, whose essence is the fight for freedom, for the right to live, and the right to exist.

By the end of April, with the ghetto reduced to rubble and in flames, the remaining fighters looked to relocate outside, and continue with whatever activities would be possible from there. The surviving ZZW fighters, their commander Pawel Frenkel, and his deputy Leon Rodal, reestablished themselves at at Grzybowska 11, a building outside the ghetto.

Maybe, some day, after many years, ...we will also be remembered

...And should it happen that you, of the two of us should survive...and sometime, some-place, you were to meet my comrades, please tell them what I said, tell them that not for a moment did I doubt that Hitler's Germany would be defeated, not I, nor my comrades...that we are fighting for our people and shall die for them. That we believe that a Jewish State will arise in a struggle with our enemies there in that distant land...

Love of the Land..
24 April '17..


...On Sunday, April 18, 1943 (13 Nisan), the day before the uprising, Waleski and Leon Rodal were in the ZZW headquarters at Muranowska 7, making last minute preparations. Walewski, who survived the fighting in the ghetto, later recalled Rodal's words:

We will all fall here. Those in battle, weapons in hand, and those as vain victims. But it is important that the memory of our battle will be retained, that the world will know that there was a battle. A tough bloody battle. And should it happen that you, of the two of us should survive...and sometime, some-place, you were to meet my comrades, please tell them what I said, tell them that not for a moment did I doubt that Hitler's Germany would be defeated, not I, nor my comrades...that we are fighting for our people and shall die for them. That we believe that a Jewish State will arise in a struggle with our enemies there in that distant land...

Some thoughts concerning the Holocaust, miracles and revenge - by Forest Rain

...The miracle of survival is very personal. 3000 years later, nothing has changed. On Holocaust Memorial Day we ponder the memories of our grandparents. The children and grandchildren of those who were there are also part of the story. The horrors perpetrated against those who were there were a direct attack on us as well. If not for those who—miraculously–survived the Holocaust, we would not be here either.

Forest Rain..
Inspiration from Zion..
23 April '17..

On April 24th Israelis will commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day. This is not the same date as the International Holocaust Memorial Day. This date was chosen to emphasize the place of the Holocaust in the story of the Jewish people.

We do this by first celebrating Passover. One week later, we mark Holocaust Memorial Day. Exactly one week after that is Memorial Day for IDF soldiers and victims of terrorism. The following day is a joyful celebration, Israel’s Independence Day.

This pattern is deliberate. The message is very clear. The exodus from slavery to freedom is an on-going journey. As we acknowledge during the Passover Seder: “In every generation [enemies] rise up against us, to destroy us, and every time God saves us from their hands.”

In other words, our very existence is a miracle.

The Passover story is relevant to our modern experiences. The lessons remain the same. The defiance of those who did not obey Pharaoh was critical but, alone, that would not have been enough to save the Jewish people. The leadership of Moses, alone, would not have been enough to lead the people to freedom. During the Passover Seder, we explain to our children that God rescued us from slavery – the miracles were a personal gift to us. If there is a child who rejects this legacy we are instructed to still teach the Passover story but to explain: “God saved me, me and not you.”

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Hatred, as the passion behind anti-Zionism is unmistakable - by Jonathan Tobin

...So Western and even Jewish figures who fill the airwaves with their sorrow over the fate of the Six Million — whether on January 27th or in the next 24 hours — should spare us their crocodile tears if they are not also prepared to stand up against the anti-Zionist engine of anti-Semitism in our own day. It must be understood that the only proper memorials to the Holocaust are not made of bricks and mortar or measured in condemnations of Hitler but to be found in a willingness to oppose the current war on the Jews. Anything else is an exercise in hypocrisy. Those who wish to demonstrate they truly remember the Holocaust and understand its meaning must redouble their efforts to oppose the anti-Zionists and the BDS crowd as well as the terror movements that continue to seek Jewish bloodshed every day of the year.

Holocaust survivor Robert Tomashof and his daughter
 Rutti Tomashof light a torch during the opening Yom HaShoah
 ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.
(AP Photo/Dan Balilty)

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
04 May '16..

This week the ritual of question time in Britain’s House of Commons revolved around anti-Semitism. Prime Minister David Cameron hammered Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn on the way the loyal opposition in the mother of parliaments has become tainted by its members’ indiscreet comments and actions as well as their embrace of terrorist movements that are advocates of violent Jew hatred. But while the Labour Party has become the main focus of worries about the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe, it is just the tip of the iceberg. In recent years, violence against Jews in France and the marginalization of Jewish communities throughout Western Europe and Scandinavia has become a routine story. When placed beside the growing virus of anti-Semitism emanating from the Middle East as Islamist movements gain traction, what is happening in Europe illustrates a historical trend. It demonstrates that the memory of what happens when Jew hatred is allowed to run amuck has faded.

That’s a sobering thought for any day, but as Israel and the Jewish world prepares to commemorate Yom Hashoah — Holocaust Memorial Day — it is especially troubling to realize that Europe and the world have failed to draw the right conclusions from that tragedy.
It’s not an accident that Israel and the Jews remember the Holocaust on a different date from the rest of the world. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly voted to designate January 27 — the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz as International Holocaust Remembrance Day and that is the date used by the international community for such commemorations. But in Israel and in most Jewish communities, the Jewish state’s decision in 1953 to mark the 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan as Yom HaShoah is respected.

The timing of that date places this memorial in the context of a cycle of days in which Israel remembers its fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism and the country’s independence day. This is crucial because it anchors the Holocaust in modern Jewish history. What happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s demonstrated the consequences both of the growth of Jew hatred and the danger of Jewish powerlessness. The subsequent rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in the ancient homeland of the Jews was not so much a specific response to the Shoah as it was to a pattern of history in which Jews were perpetual victims.

That’s why the juxtaposition of all the platitudes about remembering the Holocaust that emanate from the United Nations and most of the West with Europe’s inability to free itself of that virus is so significant.

(Read Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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The only way to ensure that “Never Again” will mean never again - by Caroline Glick

In the end, the Holocaust raged until the Allied powers won the war. It didn’t have to be that way.

Caroline Glick
Our World/JPost
First Published 02 May '11








In the end, the Holocaust raged until the Allied powers won the war. It didn’t have to be that way. If the Jews had been permitted to leave Europe, the Holocaust could have been averted. But the only place that wanted us wasn’t allowed to take us. The nations of the world closed their gates. Only the Jews in the Land of Israel wanted the Jews of Europe. But the British barred their arrival.

Britain was required by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine to facilitate Jewish immigration to the Jewish national homeland in order to advance the cause of Jewish sovereignty. But legal obligations couldn’t compete with Britain’s belief that its national interests lay with the Arabs. So from 1939 on, the British closed the doors of the Land of Israel to the Jewish people. In so doing, they effectively sealed the fate of six million Jews.

Both the US and Britain were aware of what the Nazis were up to almost from the beginning, but refused to take any effective action to save the Jews. They refused to bomb the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz, or the crematoria at the death camp. They refused to bomb Auschwitz even though Allied pilots were sent on bombing missions five miles away. Likewise, they refused to bomb any of the scores of death camps dotting the landscape of Nazi-occupied Europe.

There were two main reasons that the Allies behaved as they did. First, they were none too fond of Jews. It is not that the Americans or British supported their annihilation, but they weren’t bothered by it sufficiently to do anything to stop it.

Anti-Semitism is not the main reason the Allies did nothing. The main reason was because, love us or hate us, the allies couldn’t figure out why they should care. Dead or alive, Jews weren’t a part of their war plans.

For Britain, the goal of the war was to survive.

For the Americans it was to defend the cause of freedom and pave the way for America’s emergence as leader of the free world. Jewish survival was not considered relevant to achieving these goals, so the Allies stood by as the ghettos were liquidated and the gas chambers began operating at full capacity.

AFTER THE war, world Jewry adopted “Never Again,” as our rallying cry. But “Never Again,” is just a slogan. It fell to the leaders of the Jewish people to conceive the means to prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust.

These leaders came up with two very different strategies for protecting Jews from genocide, and their followers formed separate camps. Whereas in the early years, the separate positions appeared to complement each other, since the 1970s the gulf between them has grown ever wider. Indeed, many of the divisions in world Jewry today originate in this post-Holocaust policy divide.

(Video) Caroline Glick on the Holocaust: Competing Visions of 'Never Again'

CarolineGlick.com..
17 April '15..

(Caroline Glick Update)  I gave the speech below four years ago before Young Israel in Hillcrest, Queens. I posted it on my Facebook page this week ahead of Yom Hashaoah and a viewer reposted it with Hebrew subtitles yesterday. Amazingly, it went viral within moments and several hours later had received more than 50,000 views. Given the level of interest the speech generated in Israel, I have decided to post it here as well.



May we never be helpless again.

Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPdqzFK6-KQ

CarolineGlick.com

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 
.

Those who witness a miracle often do not recognize it, nevertheless...

...Those who witness a miracle often do not recognize it, the sages taught us. We have become accustomed to a natural reality of being a free people in our own land. The sacred time period in which we mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers of Israel and Victims of Terrorism and Independence Day is meant to remind us that our current reality did not come about easily and that we must be grateful for the miracle of our resurrection from the ashes.

Dror Eydar..
Israel Hayom..
16 April '15..

The State of Israel was not founded due to the Holocaust and its right to exist does not depend on the horrors the Jewish people suffered two generations ago. President Reuven Rivlin was right to emphasize this in his speech at the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem on Wednesday night.

The connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel was never severed. There was always a Jewish presence here and several centuries ago the great return of the Jewish people to their homeland began. Israel embodies a promise -- both to past and future generations of Jews. I once asked grandmother Leah whether, during her time in the valley of death at Auschwitz, there was ever a moment when she believed there would be a good ending -- that within five years there would be an independent Jewish state where she could establish a family with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She did not answer me. Rather, she wiped away a tear and went to the kitchen. There, she took from a drawer a package in which there were a large spoon and fork. "These belonged to grandfather Moshe," she said. These were what grandfather ate his meager meals at Mauthausen with. "Pass them on," she commanded us.

Those who witness a miracle often do not recognize it, the sages taught us. We have become accustomed to a natural reality of being a free people in our own land. The sacred time period in which we mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers of Israel and Victims of Terrorism and Independence Day is meant to remind us that our current reality did not come about easily and that we must be grateful for the miracle of our resurrection from the ashes.

"And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children" (Deuteronomy 6:7). There are two main lessons from the Holocaust. The first, which is frequently cited, is, "Never again!" This lesson covers the horror and terror of the Holocaust and its evil executioners, as well as the heroism of the Jewish fighters and the sanctity of the victims.

The second lesson is no less important. The Holocaust marked the Jewish people's divorce from exile. We were called on to return home from endless wandering in foreign lands among peoples who did not want us there.

Holocaust Remembrance Day as a reminder of how much is not being remembered

Our daughter Malki Z"L with her Australian
grandmother (may she be well), Genia Roth. 
Malki's paternal grandparents survived 
the Holocaust, losing almost everything.
Malki herself was murdered in Jerusalem 
by Hamas terrorists, among this generation's
heirs to the Nazi heritage, when she was 15.

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
25 April '5774..

Whatever small hesitations we may have had about a new initiative taken by the IDF's Social Media Unit, in the end we are deeply disturbed by the many ways in which the experience of the Jewish people just a handful of decades ago - within the lifetimes of the parents of us bloggers here at ThisOngoingWar - is increasingly diminished, degraded and denied.

Measures that restore dignity and respect to the victims of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi Germans and their many willing helpers are in our view measures worth taking.

This coming Sunday is marked here in Israel as Holocaust Remembrance Day. In its honour, the IDF has undertaken a campaign:

In a few days(today), we will commemorate the memory of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust and the bravery of all those who stood up against Nazi barbarism. This year, the IDF is putting together a special social media project. With your help, we will pay tribute to Holocaust survivors across various social networks.

With three simple steps, you will be able to contribute to Holocaust remembrance. Post a photo of yourself together with a Holocaust survivor on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram with the hashtag #WeAreHere. Also be sure to include his or her name, age, and place of residence.

We will then create an index of all of the photos you tagged, and build an interactive map according to location. This will contribute to commemorating those who were lost, and produce a dynamic memorial to those who remain across the globe.

Start publishing your images now and on April 27 the IDF will publish the interactive map to show the world that #WeAreHere.

We're fully supportive. We posted this Tweet yesterday - and we're grateful to the many who have retweeted it:

Malki Roth, murdered by Hamas 2001, with beloved grandmother Genia Roth, Auschwitz survivor #WeAreHere and remember

(Continue)

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Check-it out! 

Abbas, Holocaust Commemoration and the embrace of those who shed Jewish blood in our own time

...But courtesies about the events of the 1940s do not outweigh efforts to deny legitimacy to Jewish rights let alone justify the embrace of those who shed Jewish blood in our own time. If Holocaust commemoration has evolved to a point where these factors are unimportant, then perhaps it is time for those of us who have worked so hard to make it part of the fabric of Western culture to rethink the impact of what we have accomplished.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
27 April '14..

Today Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas did as many peace process proponents, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have been imploring him to do. He condemned the Holocaust in terms that are entirely appropriate, saying the Shoah was “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era” and expressing sympathy for the victims. If, as we are informed by the New York Times, this statement is published in the Palestinian media in Arabic in the same phrasing as in the English version for Israelis and the international media, that is progress of a sort, especially coming as it does from the lips of a man who wrote a doctoral thesis centered on the theme that the Holocaust was a “Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that six million Jews were killed.”

The timing of the statement was meant to coincide with the beginning tonight of Yom HaShoah—the day set by the State of Israel and the international Jewish community for Holocaust remembrance. Yet coming as it did only days after Abbas signed a unity agreement with the Hamas terrorist movement that is committed in its charter to not only the destruction of Israel but to the slaughter of its Jewish population, it is hard to view this statement as purely an expression of the evolution of Abbas’s views about the Holocaust. The man who only one day earlier restated his pledge to “never” recognize Israel as a Jewish state—a pledge that would signal that the Palestinians were truly prepared to end their century long war on Zionism—it is easy to understand the less than enthusiastic reaction to Abbas’s words from Israel’s government. But far from being greeted with the cynicism that Abbas might have expected, it was instead Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu who appears to have come out the loser in the exchange with pundits. Abbas’s apologists are lauding the Palestinian for his “outreach” campaign—the Holocaust statement was procured by celebrity interfaith proponent Rabbi Marc Schneir—and blasting Netanyahu for a petty rejection of the Palestinian gesture. Abbas’s words, welcome as they might be, were a clever tactical move and in the viewpoint of much of the international press seemed to outweigh any negative feedback about the Hamas deal.

But this contretemps illustrates something more significant than the success of the Palestinians in distracting the world from what was, in effect, their fourth rejection of an Israeli peace offer, including independence and statehood, in the last 15 years. If the world thinks Abbas’s nice words about the Holocaust are more important than his pact with Hamas or even his personal embrace of the terrorist murderers who shed Jewish blood, then perhaps it is time to start worrying about a trend that appears to elevate Holocaust commemoration over and above any concern for Jews currently alive.

On the eve of Yom Hashoah - Dear Iain,...

Bataween..
Point of No Return..
08 April '13..

On the eve of Yom Hashoah, Israel's Holocaust memorial day, Point of No Return was inspired by the words of a little-known Iraqi-Jewish writer to address the following letter to the celebrated Scottish writer Iain Banks (pictured) who says he supports a cultural boycott of Israel:

Dear Iain,
I was sorry to learn that you have terminal cancer and will probably not be long for this world. It is a matter of deep regret that the world is about to lose a talented writer and a noble human being.
However, I was surprised that the Middle East ranks so high on your list of priorities that directly after you had announced news of your cancer, The Guardian chose to print a piece about your personal boycott of Israel. In it you wrote:

"The particular tragedy of Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people is that nobody seems to have learned anything. Israel itself was brought into being partly as a belated and guilty attempt by the world community to help compensate for its complicity in, or at least its inability to prevent, the catastrophic crime of the Holocaust. Of all people, the Jewish people ought to know how it feels to be persecuted en masse, to be punished collectively and to be treated as less than human. For the Israeli state and the collective of often unlikely bedfellows who support it so unquestioningly throughout the world to pursue and support the inhumane treatment of the Palestinian people – forced so brutally off their land in 1948 and still under attack today – to be so blind to the idea that injustice is injustice, regardless not just on whom it is visited, but by whom as well, is one of the defining iniquities of our age, and powerfully implies a shamingly low upper limit on the extent of our species' moral intelligence.

The solution to the dispossession and persecution of one people can never be to dispossess and persecute another. When we do this, or participate in this, or even just allow this to happen without criticism or resistance, we only help ensure further injustice, oppression, intolerance, cruelty and violence in the future."

We've heard it all before from your fellow boycotters of Israel: scores of trendy opinion-formers, academics and artistes. They actually believe that neat paradox: a persecuted people is now persecuting another. Don't the Jews of all people know any better?

What really pains me is that you will be going to your death without knowing how wrong you have been. Israel is full of people - Jewish people - persecuted simply for being Jews and expelled from land and property they have lived on since time immemorial by Arabs.This is a truth that even Jews from Europe haven't grasped. The Arabs did this barely three years after the monumental tragedy of the Holocaust, in which the Palestinian leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem, among other Arabs, was complicit. The Mufti plotted the extermination of the Jews of the region well before Israel was established. Arabs and radical Muslims have been seeking to destroy the Jewish state ever since.

To illustrate my point, on the eve of Yom Hashoah, when Israel marks the anniversary of the Holocaust, let me quote Aharon, an Iraqi Jew you won't have heard of, who wrote a chapter in a book* you won't have heard of either:

Does Remembering the Holocaust Have Meaning?

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
08 April '13..

In Jewish communities around the world as well as in city halls, state houses and in Washington, people will gather today to remember the Holocaust, as is the custom on Yom HaShoah. This Holocaust Remembrance Day will produce vast amounts of rhetoric urging us to not let the six million victims of the Nazis and their collaborators be forgotten. There will be calls, as there are every year, for vigilance against hatred and intolerance of all kinds seeking to extract a universal message from this specific tragedy. All of this will be well intentioned and much of it will be both heartfelt and appropriate. But the terrible question hanging over all these proceedings remains the same one that should nag at the hearts and the consciences of many of those assembled every year. It is whether the institutionalization of Holocaust remembrance in the last generation has accomplished much other than reinforcing the anodyne conclusion that the Nazis were terrible and that the sufferings of their victims was awful.

To pose this query is not to question the magnitude of the achievement of a generation of survivors, scholars and activists who have worked hard for the past few decades to create museums, programs and a vast body of literature that ought to ensure that the Holocaust is never forgotten. As a result of their efforts, there is little chance that the Shoah will become a mere footnote to World War II or that it will be submerged in the vacuous collective memory of the world as just one more instance of inhumanity. But we need to place that achievement in perspective. In the past two decades there have not only been numerous instances of other genocidal atrocities, be it in Bosnia, Rwanda or Darfur, but an alarming rise of anti-Semitism in the world. There is a need for us to ask just how much the world has learned from the Holocaust, or whether it has learned anything at all. Even more to the point, with threats of genocide being uttered by the leaders of Iran in just the last month against Israel and with a growth in the number of those willing to join or justify hateful campaigns aimed at destroying the Jewish state, understanding the lessons of history now requires a lot more than the lip service that will be paid to the Holocaust today.

It needs to be stated in as succinct a manner as possible that an ocean of tears cried today or any other day about what happened from 1933 to 1945 will not save a single soul from a similar fate if all we’re willing to do is to talk about the past. Historical remembrance is intrinsically worthwhile. But if we are to give any real meaning to our attempts to embed these events in the consciousness of the world, it cannot be done outside of the context of the ongoing campaign to continue a murderous assault on the Jewish people.

(+Video) Saved from the Nazis by the IDF Chief of Staff’s Mother

“I had typhus, and then they threw me onto this mountain of bodies. Your mother, and I have no idea where she got the strength to do this, was the one who pulled me out from all of those bodies and carried me to the British ambulances.”

idfblog.com..
08 April '13..

Esther Friedman was 12 years old when she was deported from Hungary to Auschwitz. When Dr. Josef Mengele took her out of the selection line of prisoners arriving at the camp, her grandmother tried to stop him. “Get out of here, you stupid cow,” Mengele shouted, pushing her grandmother away. After overcoming a series of cruel and morbid medical experiments, Esther managed to escape and began working in a metal factory.

Esther Friedman

She was named by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Museum, as “one of the two thousand,” the only survivor of the 2,000 people transported from Hungary, before she was deported for a second time. This time, she was sent to the Bergen-Belsen camp, where she contracted typhus. “Some of the worst images of my life are from here. There were dead bodies everywhere, they didn’t even try removing them. You couldn’t walk anywhere without stepping on a body,” she explained to Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, who visited her as a part of the project ‘Flower for a Survivor’.

Esther with IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz

The Universalist Holocaust - To kill our future for their better world.

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
07 April '13..

There are two basic human responses to an assault. I will protect myself or I will make the world a better place. The first deals with the risk of an attack. The second with your feelings about the world. The first leaves you better able to cope with an attack. The second makes you feel better about the world that you live in.

The Jewish response to the Holocaust fell into these two categories. Never Again and Teach Tolerance. And the two responses were segmented by population.

Never Again became the credo of Israel and Teach Tolerance became the credo of the Western Diaspora.

There were many Israelis who believed in teaching tolerance and many Western Jews who believed in self-defense, but for the most part the responses were structural because the divide between Nationalists and Universalists predated the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was a transformative event, but only to a degree, the responses to it came out of earlier debates that had been going on for several generations. Before the Holocaust, the pogroms had led to the same fork in the road between a collective struggle for a better world and national self-defense. The current debates about Israel revisit that old argument.

To the Nationalists, the Holocaust was not an unexpected event. Nationalist leaders like Jabotinsky had warned that it was coming. To the Universalists however, it was an inexplicable event because it challenged the entire progressive understanding of history as a march to enlightenment. Violent bigotry was a symptom of reactionary backward thinking, not something that modern countries would engage in. There might be anti-semitism in Berlin, but there wouldn't be mass murder. That was for places like Czarist Russia, but not for the enlightened Soviet Russia or Weimar Germany.

The Holocaust dissolved that mirage of a better world. It was a mugging in broad daylight on the biggest street of the biggest city in the world. Its message was that the world had not changed and that human beings had not magically become better people because Berlin had a subway and phone calls could be made across the Atlantic.

(+Video) Remembering the destruction as rocket from Gaza strikes south of Israel

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
07 April '13..




It's a warm spring night, the start of Israel's annual commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day.

Many restaurants, cafes and entertainment centres are closed. Television programming is geared to the sombre character of the day, and there are memorial services of many different kinds (we just got back from a memorial gathering of friends here in our neighbourhood). A siren will bring the country to a brief thoughtful halt at 10 tomorrow morning.

The near-total destruction of European Jewish life is receding into history even as the last survivors pass on. What is not disappearing is the hatred without which the murder of masses of people because of their creed, their language or their will to national self-determination becomes possible.

There are few Israelis who will react with more than a slightly raised eyebrow this evening at the report of three Palestinian Arab missiles dispatched from the Gaza Strip into Israel earlier this evening, seeking - but thankfully not finding - Jewish or Israeli lives.

To remember, but also how not to remember the Holocaust

Fresnozionism.org..
07 April '13..

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I’m troubled.

History is important, because justice today depends on a correct understanding of yesterday. If your vision of the past is distorted, then your objectives for the future and present actions can be morally wrong, pragmatically futile, or both. If you don’t believe this, think about the consequences of the false Arab and leftist narratives about Israel and ‘Palestine’.

Therefore, understanding what Hitler did to the Jewish people, what historical trends led up to it and how the world responded, is critical for all of us today. There needs to be a Holocaust remembrance Day and it ought to tell its story in detail, over and over to each generation of humanity, and not just to Jews and Europeans.

But certain ways of observing this day make me very uncomfortable.

One is what I call the ‘universal kumbaya Holocaust observance’. The message here is that there are lots of genocides, they are all similar, and we have to try to understand our fellow man in order to prevent them. I went to an event once in which it was said that the real Holocaust encompassed 11 million people — Jews, Gypsies, gays, disabled and mentally ill people, etc. I didn’t understand how they got to 11 million, nor why they stopped there: about 60 million people died as a result of WWII, probably about half of those in the European theater. Estimates range from 10 to 20 million Chinese dead in the conflict with Japan. Perhaps they should have lit 30 candles for the evil done by Hitler, and added another 30 for Imperial Japan?

The trouble with a universalized observance is that it obscures the significance of the specifically Jewish genocide, the fact that the Holocaust was the perfection, made possible by modern technology and careful planning, of the pogrom, the culmination of the hundreds of anti-Jewish murders committed over the centuries simply because the victims were Jews, as the Nazis said, a final pogrom which would, for once and for all, erase the Jews from the world.

And by hiding the meaning of this event in plain sight, as it were, among all the other horrors of war, it also absolves today’s Jews from the responsibility to find their own solution to the specifically Jewish problem of endemic Jew-hatred, which has not gone away.

"Look, look, it's the Jewish flag, ...!"

Amos Regev..
Israel Hayom..
07 April '13..

The Nazi soldiers in their black uniforms could not believe their eyes. On the roof of a building in the Warsaw Ghetto's Muranowski Square, two Jewish youths suddenly appeared. With bullets whizzing around them and beset by relentless rapid-fire shooting and strong winds, they hoisted the blue and white Zionist flag with a Star of David in the middle.

"Look, look, it's the Jewish flag, Muranowski Square is in the hands of the Jews!" an eyewitness shouted. But no one pulled out a camera to capture the moment. There is no photograph for the history books, to be presented alongside the photo of the Soviet flag atop the destroyed Reichstag building or the American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima.

Nor has the event received the attention it warrants in standard narratives of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It did appear in an excellent 2001 American television movie entitled "Uprising."

Only in recent years has the magnitude of that unique moment been understood, thanks to Moshe Arens and his book "Flags over the Warsaw Ghetto" as well as others, mainly members of the revisionist Zionist movement, who have for years been trying to remedy a historical injustice. In their view, the role of fighters from the Jewish Military Union (ZZW) has been underplayed relative to the heroism of fighters from the left-wing Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB). The ZZW fighters were right-wing followers of Ze'ev Jabotinsky.

Israel's Philatelic Service has done right to issue a stamp with a flying flag for the 70th anniversary of the uprising's outbreak. In fact, it was not just a single flag. A Polish flag was also hoisted alongside the Jewish one. Both fluttered in the wind and could be seen from a distance, within the walls of the ghetto and throughout all of Warsaw.

The order to hoist the flag on April 19, 1943, was given by ZZW commanders Pawel Frenkel and his deputy Leon Rodal.

"You see these flags?" Rodal said. "On the face of it their importance is minimal, but in fact they are a highly important symbol ... If only the world could see them and know what is going on here!"

The world did not see them, but the Nazis did.

The only way to ensure that “Never Again” will mean never again.

Caroline Glick..
Our World/JPost..
First published 02 May '11..


In the end, the Holocaust raged until the Allied powers won the war. It didn’t have to be that way. If the Jews had been permitted to leave Europe, the Holocaust could have been averted. But the only place that wanted us wasn’t allowed to take us. The nations of the world closed their gates. Only the Jews in the Land of Israel wanted the Jews of Europe. But the British barred their arrival.

Britain was required by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine to facilitate Jewish immigration to the Jewish national homeland in order to advance the cause of Jewish sovereignty. But legal obligations couldn’t compete with Britain’s belief that its national interests lay with the Arabs. So from 1939 on, the British closed the doors of the Land of Israel to the Jewish people. In so doing, they effectively sealed the fate of six million Jews.

Both the US and Britain were aware of what the Nazis were up to almost from the beginning, but refused to take any effective action to save the Jews. They refused to bomb the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz, or the crematoria at the death camp. They refused to bomb Auschwitz even though Allied pilots were sent on bombing missions five miles away. Likewise, they refused to bomb any of the scores of death camps dotting the landscape of Nazi-occupied Europe.

There were two main reasons that the Allies behaved as they did. First, they were none too fond of Jews. It is not that the Americans or British supported their annihilation, but they weren’t bothered by it sufficiently to do anything to stop it.

Anti-Semitism is not the main reason the Allies did nothing. The main reason was because, love us or hate us, the allies couldn’t figure out why they should care. Dead or alive, Jews weren’t a part of their war plans.

For Britain, the goal of the war was to survive.

For the Americans it was to defend the cause of freedom and pave the way for America’s emergence as leader of the free world. Jewish survival was not considered relevant to achieving these goals, so the Allies stood by as the ghettos were liquidated and the gas chambers began operating at full capacity.

AFTER THE war, world Jewry adopted “Never Again,” as our rallying cry. But “Never Again,” is just a slogan. It fell to the leaders of the Jewish people to conceive the means to prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust.

These leaders came up with two very different strategies for protecting Jews from genocide, and their followers formed separate camps. Whereas in the early years, the separate positions appeared to complement each other, since the 1970s the gulf between them has grown ever wider. Indeed, many of the divisions in world Jewry today originate in this post-Holocaust policy divide.

Catz - The Guardian Exploits Holocaust Survivors to Slander Israel

Sarit Catz..
CAMERA Media Analysis..
27 April '12..


Recently, Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah, was observed and in many Jewish households yellow yarzheit candles cast their eerie glow. In Israel, sirens sounded throughout the country for two minutes. People stopped their cars, halted on the street and in their homes and stood at attention. Ceremonies and services were held throughout Israel, in the United States, and around the world in memory of the six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.

In the United Kingdom on Yom HaShoah, readers of the Guardian were subjected to a grotesque story penned by Jerusalem correspondent Harriet Sherwood, "Holocaust survivors struggling to make ends meet in Israel." The author describes a growing proportion of Israeli survivors "who cannot make ends meet, who struggle with insufficient funds on a daily basis," and implies that Israel neglects them.

In contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told of his recent encounters with Israeli Holocaust survivors in his Yom HaShoah speech:

Yesterday morning, I visited an old-age home for Holocaust survivors. There, I met Idit Yapo, an amazing woman of 104, clear and lucid. Idit fled Germany shortly after Hitler gained power, in 1934.

I met 89-year-old Esther Nadiv, one of Mengele's twins. She was reading a book, Golda Meir's biography, and she told me, with a glint in her eye, she said: "I am so proud, so very proud to be a part of the State of Israel which is in constant development."

I met Hanoch Mandelbaum, an 89-year-old survivor of Bergen-Belsen. Shortly after he came to Israel, as a young carpenter, he helped construct the desk upon which Ben Gurion signed the Declaration of Independence. That is MiSho'a liTkuma -- from holocaust to resurrection.

And I met Elisheva Lehman, an 88 year-old Holocaust survivor from Holland, who was a music teacher. I asked Elisheva if she would play something for us and she did. She enthusiastically played "Am Yisrael Chai" and we all sang together. It was quite emotional.

But the picture of Israel that Sherwood chose to paint was not of a country whose prime minister sings with survivors, but of a nation that ignores them: