Bibi’s war crimes have fueled an explosion in global Antisemitism on the Left, while Donald Trump stokes it from the right. Most of the world, including many Jews; don’t distinguish between Zionism as a mutated political philosophy from Judaism, the religion. Now the American material and financial support of the Israeli war machine is deeply hurting President Joe Biden’s re-election bid. The US has enabled Israel since it supplanted Great Britain and France as Israel’s protectors after the failed 1956 Suez invasion. The unwillingness of the US to divorce itself from Israel, and many Jews to divorce Judaism from Zionism, is strengthening Antisemitism. It is also inadvertently helping Trump’s bid to re-take the presidency.

Antisemitism has been a social disease for about 2,024 years, if not longer. In the wake of Trump’s presidency and metastasizing political movement, it is globally stronger and more visible than any time since WWII. His leadership has empowered not only Fascists in the US, but authoritarian dictators and movement globally. Most destructive is how Trump and Bibi have cross-promoted one another’s quest for fascist dictatorships.

At the same time, Jewish Americans have been subjected to the “Great Replacement” Conspiracy Theory. Some on the MAGA far right have adopted it. At Charlottesville, pro-Trump Neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not Replace us.”

As Juan Cole wrote recently, “In 2021, [Rep. Elise] Stefanik began taking up the talking points of the Great Replacement Theory. It holds that wealthy Jewish businessmen are bringing in immigrants from the Global South to replace white workers, since the immigrants will work more cheaply. Stefanik perhaps did not utter the phrase, but she appealed to all the dog whistles of this odious theory. Marianna Sotomayor noted last year at the Washington Post that Stefanik put out campaign ads saying, “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION . . . Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” Guess who the “radical Democrats” might be, to which she refers? Could they possibly be people such as, oh, I don’t know, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and other Jewish American legislators who have worked for immigration reform?”

Antisemitism has also become a 3^rd Rail in American politics, with many elected officials intimidated from weighing in either way. That’s the case in the City of Oakland, where I live. The Mayor’s Office, City Administrator, HR Division and City Council members have all ignored a week’s worth of inquiries, requesting to discuss the visible rise of Antisemitism in City government and the Oakland Unified School District. Dozens of Jewish families have withdrawn their children in response to hostility. Some people on the fringe left, including public employees in Oakland are arguing that, “the October 7 attack was a ‘false flag’ staged by Israel – likely with help from the Americans — to justify genocide in Gaza.” This is a gross characterization born out of willful ignorance.

The new Antisemitism from the left may actually be more dangerous than the traditional, garden-variety brand, embraced by the far-far right. October 7 denial is more dangerous than Holocaust denial, which has fueled Antisemitism on the extreme right for decades. Cyber-Well, a non-profit devoted to countering Antisemitism online cautioned, “Whereas Holocaust denial at its height was limited to fringe academic circles and extremist hate groups who gained a limited following through traditional media, conferences, and papers, today social media platforms provide an algorithmically enhanced stage to disseminate the Antisemitic narrative of October 7 denial directly into the mainstream from a select few influential accounts.” The denialist POV is ignorant about some very important things: 1.) Hamas is NOT Islam and indeed committed atrocious war crimes that violate Islam’s Shari’a code. 2.) Zionism is NOT Judaism, but a mutant ideology that strayed far from its secular, agrarian ideals under a series of corrupt politicians. The Gaza War crimes are afoul of Halacha (Jewish law), as Hamas is of Shari’a.

Democracy Now! “New Film Examines American Jews’ Growing Rejection of Israel’s Occupation”

Counterintuitively, the compulsion for unquestioned American support for Israel is now driven more by US Evangelicals than Jews, as more Jews turn away from Zionism. To many Jews, the Temple Sunday School myth that Israel MUST be a central focus of Judaism is invalid. Since October 7, more Jews than ever have stopped supporting Israel. Anti-zionism, as the concept has evolved, does not mean dismantling the State of Israel, but demanding a Palestinian State alongside it. Zionism began as a non-nationalist, secular agrarian movement, without any rhetoric about Jewish Nationalism or fulfilling Biblical prophecy.

October 7 denialism is not so different from January 6 denialism. One promotes and advocates violence against the US government, and the other violently marginalizes a vital sector of the American population – Jews in this case. The ugliness of this false narrative resulted in an atmosphere of unfettered anti-Jewish sentiments, clothed in objections to Israel.

I’ve openly taken Israel to task for its gross war crimes since the late 1970’s, and I have formally dissociated myself from Zionism. So I am making this critique from a progressive POV.

Reasonable objectors were shouted down and verbally abused at a recent City Council meeting.

The “false flag” promoted by leftists denies some very obvious war crimes, which have been well-documented in Hamas and Israeli videos, plus independent media outlets. As for validating the horrors inflicted on Israeli women, it’s been well documented, but is somehow ignored even by groups devoted to protecting women. Oakland and all municipalities in the Bay Area make it a priority to protect women, promote women’s safety and services. We can expect city employees to show the same concern for Jewish lives. Decrying the atrocities of the Gaza campaign and standing for Palestinian rights are worthy causes that are cheapened by denying the basic facts of the horrific terrorist attack launched by Hamas militants on October 7.

( Otherwords.org ) – Jewish communities across the country have been targeted with violence or harassment as anti-semitic hate crimes reach record levels.

In late January, a man tossed a Molotov cocktail — a firebomb — into the entrance of a New Jersey synagogue in the middle of the night.

In early February, a man walked into a San Francisco synagogue firing blank shots from a gun during a religious gathering. And in the suburbs of Atlanta that same week, Jewish families found flyers with antisemitic images and messages littering their driveways.

These terrifying incidents are only a fraction of a disturbing trend in American culture. That trend is especially visible on the far right, whose anti-semitism is now louder, bolder, and more aggressive than it’s been in most of our lifetimes .

At times like these, all of us need to be better neighbors to each other. This got me thinking about an experience I had 15 years ago as a city council member in Ithaca, New York.

A local rabbi approached me then and explained that in traditional Jewish communities, certain types of work and activities — like carrying objects outside the home — are prohibited on the Sabbath.

Tradition accommodates this restriction by creating a larger area called an eruv: a space that defines home as several houses and streets within a community. The boundaries of the eruv are designated by markers around the neighborhood, often attached to utility poles and wires.

The eruv symbolically enlarges the home, so the necessities of faith and of daily life can coexist.

For years, the rabbi said, the Jewish community had asked to put up eruv markers in parts of Ithaca, but the city council hadn’t responded. I was happy to help and even happier that we got it done. But there was some pushback from some of my colleagues, who opposed what they called “catering” to a religious community.

That deeply saddened me then and now. Here’s why.

Whether your views align with the right or the left, many of us are clear that antisemitism among white supremacists, militant extremists, Christian nationalists, and other bigots poses a deadly threat to all of us.

That has been true for a long time — it’s one reason Black, Jewish, and progressive communities were such strong allies to each other during the civil rights era. But for a variety of cultural and political reasons, I now worry these alliances are fraying. When good people are not aligned in opposition, tolerance for division and evil becomes commonplace.

Think of Nick Fuentes, the far-right activist who grabbed headlines for his dinner with Donald Trump and Ye (formerly known as Kanye West). Fuentes and Ye have openly praised Adolf Hitler. Not long ago, this would have been unthinkable in public life.

The way to combat the rising tide of hate and fragmented solidarity is with a strong, progressive, multiracial coalition. All of us must come together to dismantle the forces behind the divide-and-conquer agendas intended to harm Jewish and Black people, along with immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, and indeed most communities in one way or another.

In other words, like the eruv, our communities need to symbolically enlarge our home.

I’m reminded of a quote by Rabbi Leonard Beerman: “We need those who have the courage to be ashamed, who have the muscle to care. And more than caring, we need those who will preserve and cultivate an enduring vision of the good, who will maintain a vision of the future as a permanent possibility in the present.”

Our real and symbolic home should be with each other, where we are united by our shared humanity and where hate by any name is excluded. Let’s make that space, and welcome each other in.

 

Svante Myrick

Svante Myrick is the president of People for the American Way and a former mayor of Ithaca, New York.

Via Otherwords.org

I learned about Anne Frank from my mother and grandma, and read parts of her Diary when I was about the same age as she had been when she was murdered. The Holocaust documentary shows how her family’s backstory illustrates the “slow creep” of Fascism, which I view as a mischaracterization. In the context of history, it happened in a flash, after a creeping build-up that accelerated after the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Hearing accounts of Anne Frank from survivor Susan Helsinrath Warsinger, we learned that Anne was brighter, more thoughtful and more mischievous than most girls her age. We found out that her father owned a successful business in Berlin, and moved his family to Amsterdam as he recognized the growing threat in Germany. The Netherlands seemed like a safe place until Hitler stormed all of Europe. Borders shifted rapidly during this period, as refugees’ sought safe havens that became more ever more elusive.

The United States did not form such a haven for Jews in the age of the Holocaust. The American State Department was run by a WASPY clique of anti-Semitic bigots. Their prejudices were enforced by the residual economic pressures of the Great Depression, which fed the existing xenophobia towards all immigrants, but Jews in particular because so many of them would have fled to the U.S. if they could have. It was argued that with 25 percent unemployment, letting in large numbers of immigrants would produce riots in the streets by workers afraid for what few jobs were available to them, but it is hard to disentangle this convenient narrative from the anti-Semitic prejudices of those who most often offered it.

Sadly, the anti-Semitism that infected the State Department was never extinguished in the U.S. It has been nurtured back into prominence by Donald Trump and his followers, as has brazen racism toward other groups.

Watching the excavation by Burns, Novick and Botstein of the slow creep of an unbalanced far right in Germany reminded me vividly of what we have seen happen in the United States over the past half-decade. The Fascism of Trump’s political movement has taken over the Republican Party, and threatens to destroy the Republic. The MAGA denial of the results of the 2020 Election and its determination to rig future elections are undeniable, sinister dynamics. Their canonization of Trump leaves them with no respect for democratic outcomes. He has fueled their fears of the Great Replacement Theory and anti-Semitism in America, while trying to insult Jews into supporting him. The farther Jews become removed from the Holocaust, the greater is our tendency to euphemize and sugar-coat bad news, and even to be enticed into far-right politics. Jews who cater to Trump are a mystifying lot, ignorant as to how they contribute to our own demise by supporting him. Consider:

The basis of Hitler’s persecution was that Jews were a “race,” to be extinguished. The idea that Jews are a single race is refuted by the differences in ancestry between Ashkenazi Jews, mostly from Europe, and Sephardic Jews from North Africa and the Middle East. Trump declared Judaism to be a race, in a 2019 Executive Order. His pretext was that Jews were being persecuted on college campuses by pro-Palestinian activists. At the time, he condescended to American Jews saying, “You’re brutal killers; you’re not nice people, but you have to vote for me; you have no choice . . .” Yet this blood libel did not dissuade right-wing American Jews from supporting him.

This week, he upped the ante saying, “No President has done more for Israel than I have. Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith . . . , U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel — Before it is too late!” The dramatic teachings from the Burns documentary illustrate this sort of rhetoric is no trifling matter.

Trump has exploited decades of white nationalist frustrations and taken the Republican party to the outer fringes of the far-far right. His followers now appear to view the outcomes of the Civil War and WWII as objectionable, as witnessed by their unapologetic racism and growing allegiance to right-wing dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban in Hungary. That CPAC held their conference in Hungary speaks volumes about the Republican mindset under Trump.

Trump’s insidiousness lies in the fact that his movement is gaining strength without him. As part of the America First coalition, there are 299 Republican candidates for federal, state and local offices, who deny the results of the 2020 Election. Their goal is to rig elections, restore Trump to power and stack every level of government with people friendly to their agenda. The fall of Liz Cheney and rise of Marjorie Taylor Greene underlines the extent of the threat.

People can no more be a little bit fascist than women can be a little bit pregnant. The parallels of our present dysfunction to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here are haunting. Donald Trump is a real-life Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. MAGA fulfills Lewis’s prophecy, depicted in his novel, of the League of Forgotten Men, while the army Trump commanded to storm the capital is the realization of Lewis’s Minute Men, a paramilitary force intervening in politics. His followers’ intent is to delegitimize any election results they don’t like and to take over every level of government. It IS happening here, and it must be stopped to prevent Civil War II, or the breakup of the United States.

Other organizations arose in reaction to this tragedy, and have organized Torah studies, musical tributes, and service projects including blood drives and collections for food banks. That the Tree of Life complex also hosts two other congregations impacted by the tragedy, Dor Hadash and New Light Congregation, speaks to the unusual inclusivity of the Pittsburgh Jewish community. It was my pleasure to live there for three years, and attend services at Tree of Life. So it’s personal.

An ugly irony is that the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA also occurs this week. This is a right-wing demonstration of solidarity with the organizers of the deadly 2017 rally, who are defendants in Federal civil trials for inviting and staging these criminal acts. Nine plaintiffs injured in 2017 are suing 14 men and 10 groups that sponsored the rally, for violating their civil rights. The Civil complaint is in play because there was no federal or state effort to hold them accountable for criminal action, while Donald Trump was president. The defendants fecklessly argue that their actions constituted “free speech,” and that violent acts were self-defense. This is yet another Republican effort to hijack the concept of “free speech” protections, and twist into a counterintuitive, wrongful application.

It occurs in the wake of Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson pushing his own “replacement theory,” arguing that the “Democratic Party” (a dog whistle for Jewish Americans) is “trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters, from the third world.” His objection is that naturalized Americans are “diluting” the electoral power of “conservative” white voters. Carlson claimed, “The power that I have as an American, guaranteed at birth, is one man, one vote. And they are diluting it.” No Tucker, the Electoral College dilutes the votes of California and New York, but ALL votes count as one regardless of the voters’ skin color or birthplace. Perhaps Carlson wants non-white votes to count as three-fifths, which was the original Electoral College intent, to appease white plantation owners. And non-white people also have natural rights “guaranteed at birth.”

Those murders were a consequence of former President Donald Trump’s hyper-partisan divisiveness. Anti-Semitism comes in two forms these days: From the left there is a misunderstanding of the distinction between Judaism the religion; and Zionism, the political ideology, which has morphed into a brand of nationalism. Right-wing leaders in the US and Israel have promoted nationalism as a call to arms against “the other.” The unholy alliance between former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and former president Trump resulted in exclusionary, toxic elements becoming a central part of their political ideology in both countries. Both men poisoned their political systems to an extent that makes it difficult to repair.

The Tree of Life killer was not interested in history or confused about Judaism and Zionism. He just hated Jews, motivated by one of Trump’s “Big Lies” – that the Jews were “funding” the caravan of poor people on an Exodus from Central America through the venerable Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS). He represents a continuation of the anti-Semitism that arose in during the Crusades, and included 1000 years of brutal pogroms, murderous sprees, and expropriation of property and art throughout Europe, into the late 19^th Century. At times, Muslims protected Jews from the Christian invaders, and had a period of strong collaboration centered in Southern Spain and North Africa around the time of Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides). He collaborated with noted Islamic philosopher ibn Rushd, and built on the teachings ibn Sina (Avecina), with whom he shares credit as a forbear of modern medicine. Church-sponsored and Roman oppression made allies of Muslims and Jews at various times throughout history.

The victims were all vulnerable, and many were elderly. 97 year-old Rose Mallinger was known for endless volunteer contributions, including preparing breakfast for the congregation. Cecil and David Rosenthal were mentally disabled brothers, who lived in a group home and showed up every Saturday. The lives of Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Jerry Rabinowitz, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger also mattered. All except the Rosenthal brothers were senior citizens, and all were killed while at prayer, in a state of rest and repose.

Trump had the audacity to make an unwanted appearance at the scene three days later, defying requests from Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto and Allegheny County Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald to stay away. He inflamed and exacerbated the trauma, by making a phony show of care and condolence. To some, it was like a murderer showing up at a victim’s funeral to say, “Oh this is horrible; why all this senseless hate,” which he stoked and fueled. He further inflamed the situation by arguing that it illustrated a need for easier availability of guns, as he did with the Sandy Hook massacre.

Trump’s presidency was characterized by disingenuous acts that served to both 1.) Placate (or con) right-wing Jews into believing his support for all of Netanyahu’s excesses showed an affinity for Judaism, and 2.) Issue code words to Jew-hating Nazis to come out and act out with the same comments. They add up to a campaign of “Trojan anti-Semitism” and included:

–Declaring Judaism to be a nationality, in direct conflict with our spiritual and cultural history.

-Falsely declaring that Democrats are disloyal to Israel, ignoring the maxim that “friends don’t let friends commit suicide.”

-The destructive Abraham Accords, which created “peace” between Israel and countries it never had a war with, while dismissing Palestinian claims. By writing Palestinians out of the equation, he sowed the seeds for another generation of conflict.

-His open support for the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and his profane equivocation of “very fine people on both sides.”

-Recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was a sop to right-wing Jews and an incendiary gesture to Palestinians and the rest of the world. It was also a sop to the Evangelical community. Trump said last year, “We moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem . . . That’s for the Evangelicals.” So he’s playing to the “Apocalypse Soon” crowd.

Despite this open Republican embrace of Jew-hating, race-baiting Fascism, some Jewish Republican elected officials continue to support his agenda, and ongoing effort to overturn the 2020 Election. Elected officials such as Rep. David Kustoff (R-TN) have contributed to the toxicity, AND our implicit demise by turning a blind eye to the most visceral threat to free exercise of religion and voting rights in our history. They have aided and abetted these crimes. Under Trump’s presidency, anti-Semitic violence and expressions have rose at an unprecedented rate in the US. This is not an accident, and Jewish Republicans who dismiss the connection reflect an unhealthy brand of myopia and denial.

To Trump and Republican leadership, the 11 murder victims were statistics, and fodder for political opportunity. But they were all good Jews with families, careers and vital, interesting lives. Each had his or her own unique Soul Print:

“Healing 10/27” spawned a consortium of other organizations that offer support, counseling and healing therapies: 2 for Seder, Squirrel Hill Stands Against Gun Violence and Love Like the Boys. The latter is dedicated to the memories of victims David and Cecil Rosenthal,” inseparable brothers known for their innocent kind-hearted nature.” Their tribute page on Facebook notes:

“We can’t make sense of the events at the Tree of Life but we can choose how we react to them:

React with love.

Offer a smile.

Reach out to those in need.

Treat the next person in line.

Lend a helping hand.

Include someone new.

Live cheerfully.

Trust others.

Don’t wait for happiness. Create it.

Let’s show we are stronger than hate.

Live like the Rosenthal’s.

Love like the boys.”

—–

Donations can be made to the Tree of Life Synagogue here.

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CBS Pittsburgh: “Commemoration Planned For Tree Of Life”

Esfandiari writes, that Iran’s clerical Leader recently said,

“There are enemies from among both genies and human beings, and they help one another. The security services of many countries work together against us . . . His website later interviewed a cleric,Ayatollah Ahmad Abedi, “to clarify” the unsettling comments made by Iran’s supreme leader.But Abedi, who was introduced as a professor at seminaries and universities, not only confirmed Khamenei’s odd claim but even went a step further by accusing Israeli intelligence services of using sorcery.“The Jews, in particular the Zionists, pursue metaphysical matters to a large extent. Their intelligence service, Mossad, undoubtedly does such things,” Abedi was quoted as saying by Khamenei.ir.”

Embed from Getty Images
Genie figurine from the film ‘Aladdin’ in Adventureland park at Disneyland Paris in Marne-la-Vallee. AFP PHOTO / BERTRAND GUAY (Photo credit should read BERTRAND GUAY/AFP via Getty Images)

You will say that the idea of powerful Jewish sorcerers deploying big blue genies (djinn or jinn) in the Israeli spy agency Mossad working to thwart Iran combines in itself the ultimate in both ignorant supersition and anti-Semitism (in this scenario, what couldn’t be blamed on Jews?) You will say that the Republican Party is right to criticize Iran’s Islamic Republic because the ayatollahs will never admit that their favored candidate did not win elections. And you will say that no prominent American politician would ever speak this way.

Eric Hananoki of Media Matters has discovered another of, you guessed it, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Facebook posts. Greene was endorsed for Congress by Trump and the Republican Party.

Remember she is kind of my boss, what with having been placed by Kevin McCarthy and the Republican leadership on the House Education Committee, which oversees funding for higher education.

She wrote that the 2018 California wildfires were caused not by utility company P&G’s carelessness nor by the climate crisis, but by a P&G scheme funded by the Rothschild banking family to beam down solar energy from a space satellite, which missed its mark:

“If they are beaming the suns energy back to Earth, I’m sure they wouldn’t ever miss a transmitter receiving station right??!! I mean mistakes are never made when anything new is invented. What would that look like anyway? A laser beam or light beam coming down to Earth I guess. Could that cause a fire? Hmmm, I don’t know. I hope not! That wouldn’t look so good for PG&E, Rothschild Inc, Solaren or Jerry Brown who sure does seem fond of PG&E.”

Originally posted to Flickr by Derek Curry at https://flickr.com/photos/38138329@N00/49083646. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

P&G did toy with such a scheme, but it has never come to fruition, and the Rothschilds had nothing to do with it. A Jewish space laser.

Hananoki notes that during the 2020 campaign, “the National Republican Congressional Committee added her to its “Young Guns” fundraising and recruitment program.”

Young guns. House minority Republican leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, Ca., falsely said that she was given her committee assignments only after she renounced her crazy QAnon conspiracy theories, which she has not in fact done. McCarthy was being buddy buddy with Trump on Thursday in Florida, after he sent thousands of Greenes to invade the Capitol with an eye toward hanging Mike Pence.

Greene has also embraced the “substitution” theory that Jewish bankers and investors are arranging for mass Muslim immigration to Europe so as to replace troublesome white workers.

This “substitution” theory drove the gunman who killed 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue. Trump and his officials whipped up such fears by demonizing immigrants and Muslims.

Greene is an equal opportunity hater– Jews, Muslims, anybody with a different background than her own.

Esfandiari says that people in Tehran are complaining that their clerical leaders are insufficiently educated and that they need more people in government with a university degree.

The bad news is that Marjorie Taylor Greene has a four-year degree in Business Administration from the University of Georgia.

It isn’t just ignorance that is the problem, but a sickness in the soul.

——

Bonus Video:

The Rational National: “Marjorie Taylor Greene Thought A Space Laser Caused California Wildfire”

In December 2019, four people were shot dead at a kosher market in New Jersey, a horrific knife attack was perpetrated at a rabbi’s home in a New York suburb, and antisemitic graffiti was daubed on a synagogue and several shops in north London.

Despite what many might think, antisemitism is not confined to history. But to combat antisemitism and other forms of xenophobia, we must learn about and from the past. This year marks 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz and Holocaust education is as important as ever and it is essential that we get it right.

One particularly effective method of passing on knowledge and experience to the younger generation has been the involvement of survivors. A 2016 report from the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education highlighted the value school students placed on hearing a survivor speak. Of the roughly 8,000 students surveyed, 89% agreed or strongly agreed that hearing a survivor speak had made the Holocaust feel more real and 82% agreed it had helped their understanding of how or why the Holocaust took place.

We may not be able to truly fathom the systematic persecution and murder of six million people. But the power of hearing a survivor speak is that through empathy and identification we might gain some sense of what it meant for those millions of individuals. Put simply, we relate to people more than we relate to facts and figures.

There are a number of survivors still willing to contribute to Holocaust education. But their numbers are dwindling, so it’s important that we consider what form Holocaust education might take in the future while we are still able to consult and draw on the vast experience of these witnesses.

Preserving testimonies

Organisations with a commitment to Holocaust education have begun to address this issue in different ways. In the US, the Shoah Foundation is developing its New Dimensions in Testimony in a collaboration with the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies.

This project records testimony in a format that allows visitors to ask questions of the survivor and to have them answered. A similar project is being led by the UK’s National Holocaust Centre and Museum (NHCM).

The Forever Project enables visitors to listen to a testimony given by a life-sized digital projection of a survivor. The listener can ask questions about that testimony and the projection will offer an answer by drawing on a digital database of prerecorded responses.

Alongside these new technologies, educators will continue to use the many forms of testimony that have been recorded in books, films, plays and video interviews. Recording testimony in different media (including digital forms) allows the survivor’s story to be told to larger audiences and beyond their lifespan. But it also means that the testimony is fixed at the point of recording.

Even in the conversational formats envisioned by the Shoah Foundation and NHCM, the witness will not be able to draw connections between past and present. They won’t be able to comment on how the memory of the Holocaust can inform our response to contemporary events. A testimony recorded in 2020 cannot explain the relevance of this history for listeners in 30 years time.

The children of survivors

A group who are uniquely positioned to explain that relevance are the children of Holocaust survivors. The second generation cannot tell us what it was like to experience persecution and genocide firsthand. But they can tell us about the experiences of their parents and, importantly, about what it was like growing up as the child of a survivor.

Drawing on personal and family memories, the second generation can explain why remembering and learning from the Holocaust still matters. They can ground that explanation in the context of what is happening in the world today. Holocaust educator Noemie Lopian does this in a blog post.

Lopian, like many other members of the second generation, has long been active in ensuring that the Holocaust is not forgotten, including translating her father’s testimony. Others have spoken at events alongside their parents.

But it’s not as straightforward as replacing the testimony of survivors with the accounts of their children. There are numerous ethical and practical challenges that need to be addressed if we decide this is a way forward.

Teachers I have spoken to are concerned that students connect less intensively to a second-generation speaker than to a survivor. We also need to ensure that a second-generation speaker understands that they can give an account of their parents’ lives, but that they are not a mouthpiece for them. This means that the second generation can describe what happened to their parents, but not what it felt like.

On the other hand, they can explain how it felt to be the child of a survivor and the way the legacy of the Holocaust is passed down through generations. For all these reasons, second generation testimony should only be used alongside (recorded) survivor testimony and not in its place.

On Holocaust Memorial Day 2020, a set of school teaching resources called Using Testimony in the Classroom are launching. I produced these materials with the support of the NHCM, the Holocaust Educational Trust, Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, teachers and Gary Mills. The resources offer guidance and lesson ideas for the use of mediated testimony in different formats and offer preliminary thoughts on how the second generation might continue to contribute to Holocaust education.

Holocaust education is a cornerstone of teaching against prejudice and discrimination. Survivors have used their own experience to make sure we never forget and we need to work together to ensure that their voices continue to be heard.

Sara Jones, Professor of Modern Languages and German Studies, University of Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

———

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

AFP: “The last survivors of Auschwitz — 75 years later | AFP”

Americans recently observed the first anniversary of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which 11 were killed and six wounded.

A year earlier, white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted the slogan, “Jews shall not replace us.”

Synagogues around the country have also been defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti. Last month, during the Jewish High Holy Days, a swastika and the word “Trump” were spray-painted on the steps of the law school at Yale University, where I teach.

This is not the first time that hate speech and violence against Jews and other racial and religious minorities have flared in the U.S. Recent events mirror the situation in the early 20th century, when white Christian nationalists in the United States demonized immigrants and treated Jews as a danger to the nation.

Then, as now, people on all sides of these disputes invoked the American ideal of religious freedom. As I show in my book “Religious Freedom,” while some Americans used this constitutional protection to justify a politics of exclusion, others drew a widening circle of inclusion.

The politics of exclusion

At the turn of the 20th century, white Christian nationalists saw Jews and other religious outsiders as threats to the nation and used religious freedom as a weapon against them.

In 1892, writing for an anti-Semitic publication “Sound the Tocsin of Alarm,” Orville Jones, a lawyer and Methodist layman from Missouri, warned that the Jew had a “persistent determination… to practice fraud, extortion, and especially usury.”

He went on to add that “the Jew” was now recruiting others to join “his crime against civilization.”

Jones was on the extreme end, to be sure, but Jews at the time experienced serious discrimination on both racial and religious grounds. Jewish merchants were brutally assaulted in Mississippi in the 1890s and violent attacks occurred across the country in subsequent decades. Many universities limited Jewish enrollment, while some institutions banned Jews altogether.

Congress implemented strict immigration quotas in the 1920s, in an effort to keep Jews and other racially defined minorities out of the country. Jewish immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe, were treated as a distinct race and increasingly excluded from the privileges of whiteness in American life.

This might seem to be a blatant violation of religious freedom. But white Christian nationalists like Orville Jones used this very ideal to justify exclusionary and sometimes violent policies against Jews and other minority groups. They claimed that Jews posed a direct threat to American freedom.

“Again the Sons of the Republic are called upon,” he wrote, “to fight the initial battle of the world’s hope for civil and religious liberty.” This struggle had to be waged against what he called the “sneaking cowardly cruel indirect power” of the Jew.

He and others like him believed they were fighting for the religious freedom of America’s white Christian majority.

The call for inclusion

American Jews fought back, using this same ideal of religious freedom to counter discrimination and violence.

Most Americans in the early 20th century, even those who were inclined to support Jewish rights, viewed Jews as a distinct race. As I show in my book, the Federal Council of Churches tackled the problem of anti-Semitism in the early 1920s with the expressed goal of ending “racial antipathies” and creating a new “spirit of brotherhood” in American life.

Americans at this time did not think of race simply as a matter of skin color, and even Jews sometimes spoke of themselves as a separate race. They celebrated the historical achievements of the Hebrew race or nation.

At the same time, American Jews had for generations insisted that the American promise of religious freedom must also apply to them.

Oscar Straus, for example, who served as treasury secretary under President Theodore Roosevelt, was an amateur historian who located the intellectual foundations of religious freedom in the Hebrew Bible. He even named his son Roger Williams Straus after Rhode Island’s colonial champion of this freedom.

The younger Straus, a successful businessman in New York, was also a strong proponent of religious freedom. He took on a leading role in the National Conference of Christians and Jews , which fought Nazi anti-Semitism in the 1930s through public events that featured Protestants, Catholics and Jews speaking on topics of common interest.

Together they argued for religious freedom and toleration as the best defense against bigotry and violence. They also identified Judaism as a religion to be respected and given the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. In so doing, they were fighting the anti-Semitic portrayal of Jews as an inferior race who were inherently disloyal to the United States and its ideals.

As Nazi armies moved across Europe, Straus’ book “Religious Liberty and Democracy” issued a desperate plea for unity against the anti-religious totalitarianism of the world.

One effect of all this was to redefine Jewish communal identity in religious terms. For American Jews, and eventually for most other Americans as well, being Jewish was increasingly a matter of religion more than it was about racial or national difference.

Because Jews were no longer considered a separate race, those who appeared white could now gain the privileges of whiteness in American life.

The ambivalent promise of religious freedom

After World War II Judaism was accepted as an integral part of a new American religious triad – Protestant, Catholic and Jew. In his 1955 book, sociologist Will Herberg argued that these three faiths now shaped what it meant to be religious in America and defined who could be considered a real American.

But as I argue in my book, this tri-faith celebration of American religious freedom could also obscure the ongoing problem of racism in American life.

One African American commentator wrote in 1933 that while the “nice liberals” of the National Conference of Christians and Jews may have been tackling the bigotries of religion, their discussion groups never included a “Negro.” And they were strangely silent on “the worst intolerance of all: color prejudice.”

Atheists and other religious minorities – such as Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and practitioners of Indigenous traditions – also remained on the margins of this culturally reconfigured “American.”

Religious freedom is a powerful tool that can expand the bounds of who and what counts as religious. At the same time, my research has taught me that appeals for religious freedom can be exclusionary, often in unintended ways. We cannot allow white Christian nationalists to define its limits.

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Tisa Wenger, Associate Professor of American Religious History, Yale University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

The Origins Of Anti-Semitism In America | AJ+

Squirrel Hill is one of the few Jewish communities outside of New York and Chicago that actually has “street life.” That is a bustling neighborhood, mainly along Murray Avenue, with many Jewish owned businesses catering to Jews (delis, bakeries, green grocers, bookstores, and one of the country’s BEST JCC’s!). The vibe in Squirrel Hill draws people from all over the city of all races and ethnicities. I sometimes shared tables with black folks from the East Liberty neighborhood, who were happy to be in a “safer” place for the evening. Pittsburgh is one of the country’s most vital, diverse, beautiful and interesting cities. I was honored to present a blues and jazz show on WYEP-FM, a great public radio station.

The massacre at Tree of Life is tragic and disturbing on every level. Most notably, the thought of aging Jewish people going to the synagogue, and being murdered. Don’t try to tell me this is not political; don’t try to tell me this was not inspired by Trump’s reckless and incendiary rhetoric. And don’t try to tell me this is not the time to blame anyone. Trump has used his campaign rallies to rile up his unwashed masses to commit violent crimes against members of the media, people of color, Jews and other others. The assassin was motivated by one of Trump’s “Big Lies” – that the Jews were “funding” the caravan of poor people on an Exodus from Central America through the venerable Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS). So we have an act of WHITE, American-bred terrorism, inflicted on a minority religion, borne out of the stupidity of an ignorant man, who is too dumb to understand that nothing Trump says is true. And we have a political culture, held hostage by the NRA and a minority party through voter suppression, gerrymandering and dirty tricks by multiple Secretaries of State.

As a “progressive” Southerner, I learned that the last Battle of the Civil War occurred in Oxford, MS in 1962, when James Meredith enrolled in graduate school at Ole Miss. Governor Ross Barnett gave a speech at halftime of the Ole Miss-Alabama football game that sounded like a Klan rally.. The rhetoric of Barnett and Alabama Gov. George Wallace was frightening to hear, even on a car radio. Trump has resurrected that spirit of “evil otherness” at his every rally and speech. His supporters seem dissatisfied with the results of both the Civil War and WWII.

Historically, anti-Semitism has been a province of brutal right wing governments, and failing political movements needing a scapegoat. That ugly dynamic never abated, and in recent years has led into a dramatic increase in anti-Jewish violence in the United States. Just as lynchings rose dramatically under the justice department of Woodrow Wilson, acts of anti-Semitism have spiked under Donald Trump. Trump’s rabble rousing against all immigrants directs much of its focus on Jews for the historical alliance with black people dating to the Civil Rights Movement, Jewish support of immigration-welfare groups, and the growing opposition to Trump among Jews.

Now comes a less nativists, yet more primitive version of anti-Semitism from the left. Many Millennial leftist leaders fail to distinguish between Judaism the religion, and Zionism the political ideology. This is particularly frightening as many leftist leaders blame all Jews for the sins of Zionism. Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are not the problem here. Nor is British MP Jeremy Corbyn. They are convenient scapegoats for the far-far right brand of anti-Semitism. Advocating for Palestinian rights is not an act of anti-Semitism. Many Jewish people do so, and remain devoted to Israel. Many Israelis find their government as objectionable as Americans do Trump. As a result, the wide net of the Boycott-Divest-Sanction (BDS) movement punishes some of the wrong people. Some BDS advocates target only businesses operating in the occupied territories, among other nuanced applications. To its credit, BDS does challenge the Israeli agenda.

The most visible manifestations of all three Semitic religions are the most violent, twisted and obtuse. This includes Christian leaders who sanction the gross corruption and hypocrisy of Trump, those radical Muslims who advocate violence against non-believers, and Israelis, “as the beacon of the Jewish people,” committing atrocities against PalestiniansThe “Not in Our Name” movement represents Jews divesting themselves of Israel’s brutal agenda in the Palestinian territories.

It is clear that many people use their objections to Zionism as a disguise for what really IS anti-Semitism. We can never let that pass. But while left-wingers may say stupid things based on faulty perceptions, and make dumb proclamations at rallies, ONLY the right-wing brand has generated acts of murderous violence. A synagogue in Poway, California was the scene of a similar event, motivated by similar dynamics just six months later. Both assassins were motivated by rhetorical garbage posted on right-wing websites, and not a misunderstanding of Zionism and Judaism. A study by the Anti-Defamation League revealed that 49 of the 50 extremist murders in 2018 were committed by far-right wing actors, as opposed to leftist sympathizers. It’s white Americans killing Jews, not brown-skinned Muslims from abroad!

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Translation in English: Penny Sandford & Wiesje Wijngaarden

On 18 December 1944 my mother, my sister, my little brother and I were deported to a Japanese internment camp for Jews. By sending him a postcard my mother wanted to notify my father, who had been interned in a men’s camp somewhere far away. The camp we were in and where we had spent a year, was the women’s camp Kramat, right in the centre of Old Batavia. Batavia, now called Jakarta, was then the capital city of the Dutch colony of the Dutch East Indies. Since 1942 the archipelago had been occupied by Japan, which was steadily conquering all countries around the Pacific Ocean. Immediately following the invasion the Japanese had begun sending the Dutch people to internment camps – separating the men from the women and children. Machine guns guarded us night and day, and each morning and evening roll calls were taken. Escape would have been pointless anyway, as our white skins would have given us away immediately among the Indonesians, persons of mixed Indonesian/Dutch origin, Chinese and Japanese people. The reason why we had to leave this time was our Jewish blood, my mother had explained to us.

The writing on the postcard:
From: Mrs A.H.Wertheim-Gijse Weenink, Dutch, number 5971, Java C.R. (= district I, Batavia and its surroundings)
To: Professor Mr W.F. Wertheim, number 40997, under it, in a different handwriting than my mother’s: Djawa (= Indonesian for Java) C.Q. (= district II, all other areas on West Java)
On the right a Japanese stamp: postcard
Japanese stamp in red: Approved by the censors of the POW (Prisoner Of War) camps on Java Above it a Japanese stamp saying: Mail from the POW (Prisoner Of War) camps on Java
The Roman III, which was obviously added by the authorities, could be a code.

My mother’s text (after the war she wrote Tangerang 1945 in red pencil at the top of the page):

Wishing you a very happy New Year
The children are in excellent health and are always helpful to the adults
Annemarijke and Hugo are growing up fast and you are always in our thoughts.
It is very pleasant here, too, and there are lots of friends of mine
Hugo playing with Ronnie
Lessons to the children – except for music – continuing
I will be delighted to receive a message from you
A thousand fond embraces
Hetty

It was still dark when we arrived at the Gate and saw some twenty people standing beside a truck, its engine roaring. The three of us had been brought here by close friends of our mother’s, as she herself was in the camp hospital and had to be moved on a stretcher. While the Japanese were nervously beckoning everyone to climb into the back, people were hurriedly exchanging goodbyes with those staying behind and arranging their luggage. We, the children, were lifted up and handed over to people already in the truck. Our mother, fortunately, was allowed to sit beside the driver.

The grown-ups made room for me on the outer edge, so that I could watch the world outside. Cars, bicycle taxis and horse-drawn carriages passed or continued to drive beside us. There were flowering beds bordering clean streets and grand white houses. Wherever I looked I saw colourfully dressed people moving about, as if there was nothing out of the ordinary.

We stopped at Mangarai train station where still more people were standing around waiting on the platform, Jewish people from other camps as it turned out. A girl with a bandaged leg was sitting down on the ground – her name was Naomi and she was to become my best friend in the new camp. The train was pitch dark and most people were crammed onto the luggage piled between the wooden benches along the sides. Our mother luckily had a seat, her injured leg on a suitcase. The small town of Tangerang is only fifty kilometres north-west of Batavia, but the journey took hours because the trains were constantly being shunted or brought to a standstill, while the shutters remained closed. It grew hotter and hotter and furious quarrels kept breaking out.

Then someone tried to open a shutter. The guards immediately started hammering at the shutters with their rifle butts, splintering one wooden slat. We took turns peeping through that crack, and my brother was told to pee through it when the bucket that had been supplied for the purpose was overflowing.

This railway transport had been announced a couple of months before, on 4 September 1944. The Kramat Command had issued an order that all internees whose veins contained even as much as a single drop of Jewish blood, had to be registered so they could be trucked to a separate camp. Japan, as we all know, was an ally of Nazi Germany, and from the very beginning there was a chance that the Japanese occupation forces would get dragged into their anti- Jewish ideology. One had to be alert, for disaster would seep in bit by bit. Earlier, even prior to entering the camp, our mother had recognised a couple of warning signs, a radio speech which contained a negative description of Jews, or a certain German visitor to Batavia, Dr. Wohltat, whom she knew to be a fanatical Nazi.

When the order came through she was scared to death, and lay awake many a night. She wasn’t Jewish herself, but our father was. So her children’s veins contained quite a few drops of Jewish blood. Yet she strongly hesitated whether or not she should have us registered. Experience had taught us that it was dangerous to ignore Japanese orders – brutal beatings and solitary confinement might ensue. But any deportation and the uncertainty of a new, unfamiliar camp involved serious risks. In this case there was yet another danger.

If she registered our names, the possibility would arise that she, being non-Jewish, would have to stay in the Kramat camp, whereas we would be sent to the Jewish camp without her. The Japanese had no scruples taking children away from their mothers, as we had witnessed quite a few times. Periodically, they sent all boys upon their tenth birthday to one or other men’s camp. That was the age the Japanese considered them to be adults and to be able to make women pregnant, which had to be avoided at all cost. Our ages at that time were between eight and eleven.

My father was somewhere far away in a men’s camp, and we didn’t even know whether he was alive or not, let alone whether he had had himself registered as a Jew. Twice a year the men and the women were allowed to write postcards to their spouses in Indonesian from their respective camps, but these seldom arrived, or, if they did, months later. And suppose he had had himself registered, then it depended on the accuracy of the Japanese administration, and whether our camp Command knew about it or not.

After endlessly racking her brains and nightly conversations with her close friends, my mother decided she didn’t want to take the risk and hit upon an ingenious solution: she went to have herself registered as Jewish. This way we could at least stay together and, if necessary, go to the Jewish camp together. This also meant the elimination of an additional risk, the risk of betrayal by fellow internees. After all, every Dutchman would recognise the name of Wertheim as a familiar Jewish name. The Japanese themselves probably didn’t know, but the possibility that an internee would accidentally let slip information could not be ruled out. Solidarity was strong, and people helped each other as much as they could. But living in crammed quarters, starvation, cruel punishments and a sense of hopelessness led to tense situations in which latent prejudices might easily surface, including anti-Semitic ones.

When we arrived at Tangerang Station it turned out we had to walk to the prison, which was kilometres away. And so, in the heat of day, we marched, a long line of thin, shabbily dressed prisoners, barefoot – we had been shoeless for ages – flanked by armed soldiers. We saw how the local population was watching us – most of them with a worried look on their faces, but one or two people couldn’t suppress a contented smile. It wasn’t until much later that we understood how transportations of this kind helped raise the people’s hope that, one day, they would finally be rid of those who had ruled their country for centuries. They knew that the Dutch were locked up and locked in for years, but what was happening there was invisible behind the fences, made of tight woven bamboo mats streaked with barbed wire. The frequent dragging of prisoners from one camp to the other however, spread over the archipelago there were hundreds, you didn’t have to be Jewish for that.

For us children the journey was particularly arduous because besides carrying our own luggage we also had to lug our mother’s, as she was being transported in a lorry together with the other sick people. A Japanese guard was kind enough to take care of my sister’s small violin. Her reaction was one of fear for she thought he might pinch it. However, she soon saw he handled it with great care, meanwhile triumphantly checking around to see whether his fellow guards noticed him. But then a person of higher rank ordered him to return it to my sister.

The Tangerang camp, established in the former juvenile detention centre, was quite different from the camp we had just left behind. Gloomy grey buildings with high halls along covered porticoes and a pungent stench everywhere. Long rows of holes in the ground served as toilets with supports for your feet, where all the gunk collected due to a lack of water. Every hall had rows of two-tier wooden bunk beds to accommodate eighty people. We were assigned the lower beds and diagonally across from us were Mrs Abram and her young boys Ronnie and Ido whom we knew from before the war.

The daily roll calls here didn’t take place outside in a centrally located open field but in the porticoes outside our dormitories. Upon hearing the wooden gong you had to stand in rows of five immediately and bow as soon as the Japanese walked by. A few days after our arrival the gong suddenly sounded at midday. And as we were standing to attention a stretcher with a small body covered from head to toe by a sheet was carried past us. It turned out to be the little girl from the dormitory next to ours who had collapsed during the journey here. The previous night we had heard her mother anxiously calling out that she couldn’t wake her daughter for the roll call.

When the six months had passed since my mother had been allowed to send her last postcard to my father, she wanted to notify him that we were now in a Jewish camp. Note 2). Everyone always wrote these postcards with the utmost care. They had to be written in Malay, later called Bahassa Indonesia, only a strictly limited number of words was allowed, and the trick was to include as much information as you could without being found out by the censors. And if you used but one word of Dutch you ran an even greater risk that your card would not arrive. And to think that most Dutch women knew just about enough Malay to be able to order their servants about and go shopping in the Pasar. Our mother’s Malay reading, writing and speaking skills, however, were excellent so she was able to help a great many fellow prisoners.

In writing this postcard she had yet another complication to deal with. After all, she didn’t know whether my father had registered in his camp as a Jew and if that was not the case, she should not betray him. Miraculously this postcard not only reached my father – albeit months later -, it also survived until today Note 3). Funnily enough the first time she uses the word anak (=child), she doesn’t use the symbol for square (2) – which in the Indonesian language indicates the plural – but instead she writes the number 3. This is how he knew all was well with the three of us and in the following sentence she managed to win a word by joining the names of my sister and me, Marijke and Anne-Ruth to Annemarijke.

Where my mother wrote Hugo main dengan Ronnie (Hugo is playing with Ronnie) she wanted to let him know that we were in a Jewish camp. He had to be alerted to the fact that she did mention a friend of Hugo’s but no friends of my sister’s and mine, whereas she was known to always share her attention meticulously between her three children. She also wanted him to wonder why – out of all his friends – she should have chosen Ronnie Abram. There used to be a few Jewish families in Batavia, but it was common knowledge that the Abrams upheld Jewish traditions.

When she told us about this after the war, she thought that – for safety’s sake – she had added to those two little boys playing: in the play pen. But when, after her death, we finally discovered the postcard and read the text, we found that her memory had played her false. She had hoped he would understand there was something odd about the play pen for by that time the two boys were already eight – too old to play in a pen. And of course play pen had to stand for prison.

Preceding the sentence about the playing boys she had dropped a few more hints in her text. She wrote Disini djoega senang dan banjak sobat (It is pleasant here too and there are many friends of mine). From the words here too he could deduce that we had moved to another camp, and that her mention of Ronnie’s name immediately after these words was no coincidence either. Finally she had hoped he would understand from the many friends she had found here that this was a Jewish women’s camp for he knew that many of her friends were Jewish. In hindsight this was, of course, asking quite a lot!

After the war it turned out that he had indeed got the message that we had been transported to another camp, but not that it was a Jewish camp. Together with three of his friends who were also Jewish, he had decided not to sign up when the order came through. They hoped that their being Jewish could remain a secret for the Japanese and indeed it did. That they had dared to do this was certainly due to the fact that men, without their children around them, were in a position to take greater risks. In their case there was an additional reason why the chance of being sent off to another camp was small. For in their own camp there was a Jewish barrack block which the prisoners called ‘Tel Aviv’. But, unlike the Jewish men who had registered and consequently had ended up in that barrack block, my father and his friends had been swayed by the thought that one should not provide the Japanese with more information than was strictly necessary. And in any case you should not give them details they might use to treat you differently from the other internees.

After the war we often spoke about the inhuman choice our mother was faced with, our transportation to Tangerang and her postcard to my father. On such occasions my mother would always hasten to add that her desire to show solidarity with him being a Jew had also played a role in her decision, at which he would give a shy little smile. He himself would also have been desperate if he had had to weigh all those threats and risks, especially the possibility of losing your children, so he considered her solution inventive and loving. However, if they had had the opportunity to think things over together, his decision might still have veered towards not registering. He estimated that the chance of our Jewish blood being found out would be slightly smaller than the dangers involved in transportation and an unknown camp. And he, more so than she, was convinced that you should disclose as little as possible to whatever oppressor or occupier. They always were in complete agreement, however, that talking with the benefit of hindsight is always easy.

Note 1) It was a fascinating process for my sister Marijke The-Wertheim, my brother Hugo Wertheim and me to weigh the details of our sometimes slightly differing memories and to arrive at a mutual picture.

Note 2) Many thanks to Joss Wibisono for the Indonesian translation of the postcard and to Ethan Mark for the Japanese.

Note 3) The postcard is carefully preserved in the archives of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.

Via Groene.nl by author’s permission