Showing posts with label #Nazi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #Nazi. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
Divided by Faith, United by War
For full article go to - https://tinyurl.com/y6pm8zan
It is Nazi-occupied
Sarajevo, 1941. A Muslim woman holds the hand of her Jewish friend. She
positions her veil to hide the Star of David on her Jewish friend's sleeve. A
Nazi patrol was approaching. It is a simple, brave act of kindness among
friends. But the story goes much deeper.
The Muslim woman is
named Zejneba Hardaga. Zejneba wasn’t just protecting her friend Rifka Kabilio
on the street - she gave refuge to Rifka, her husband Josef, and their children
in her home.
When the Jewish
family arrived, Zejneba said, “Whatever is ours will be yours. We’ll share
everything like family – feel as if you are in your own home."
Across the street
from the Hardaga house was the Gestapo headquarters and notices were posted
everywhere warning that anyone harboring Jews in their home would be killed.
But this Muslim family risked their lives to protect their Jewish friends.
The Kabilio family
found their way to Italy, but Josef was caught and imprisoned. He escaped and
ran to Zejneba’s home again, where he was given refuge once again. Josef
survived the war, and the entire Kabilio family immigrated to Israel.
Decades later, the
Jewish people would attempt to pay back this remarkable Muslim family. It was
during the Siege of Sarajevo. The city was under attack. Zejneba, her daughter
Aida, and her 10-year old grand-daughter were at great risk. An artillery shell
had landed in Aida’s home. They had to get out.
Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum, knew of the family’s bravery
during the War. Now, they did everything they could to rescue the family. They
even appealed to the President of Bosnia. And it worked! A convoy arranged by
Jewish aid agencies made it through the lines, and took the family to safety.
When Zejneba and her
daughter were asked where they wanted to relocate, they both knew where.
Israel, they said.
In 1994, Zejneba,
her daughter Aida, Aida's husband, and their child were welcomed to Israel. The
Kabilios -- the family they saved -- embraced them. The State of Israel had
paid back its debt — and helped the Hardagas in their own time of need.
Zejneba Hardaga died
within a year of arriving in Israel. but just before she passed Aida told her
mother that she wanted to become a Jew. "That turned out to be one of the
happiest days of my life. She just turned to me, smiled and said: "If you
want to do something, don't talk about it, do it." It was her way of
giving me her blessing."
Aida became Jewish
and changed her name to Sara. She now works at Yad Vashem, where she honors all
those who weren’t fortunate enough to have a friend like Zejneba.
Tuesday, February 4, 2020
"Israel Facts Not Fables"
This past week
in Israel, leaders from around the globe – from Pence to Putin to Prince
Charles – gathered dramatically in Jerusalem to commemorate the Shoah and to
spotlight both the victims and the villains of the Holocaust.
The Nazis were
masters of deception, ingeniously creating a pervasive false reality that
masked their crimes and their central cause – the murder of every Jew on the
planet. Concentration camps were “labor farms,” roundups of Jews and mass
murder were “Aktions,” and death camps were “resettlement centers.” Show camps
like Theresienstadt put a false face on the horror, while signs of “Arbeit
Macht Frei” on the outside gates masked the terror within. Much of the world
was fooled, with disastrous consequences for our loved ones.
And even
today, the Palestinians create a parallel universe made up of smoke and
mirrors, forging a phony history of their own while using every means to erase,
expunge and obliterate our truth: the truth of King David and King Solomon, of
the Temple in Jerusalem and the 3,000-year presence of Jews in our homeland.
Our holy texts affirm without a shred of doubt our legitimate claim to this
land, while they are the authors of the shortest book in history: Ancient Palestinian
Culture and Custom.
YET I wonder: Will the true events of Jewish history remain
fact in the years to come, or will they be turned into fiction? The question is
worth considering, for indeed our accomplishments in the last century boggle
the mind and invite disbelief.
Will
generations to come believe that we could survive the devastating Shoah and
emerge to revive and recreate our ancient land and language?
Could we have
really won a War of Independence against all odds and predictions, and then,
soon after, vanquish seven Arab armies in just six short days?
Could we have
actually taken in millions of immigrants – many of them elderly and
impoverished – and could we have increased our population by 1,000% in just two
generations?!
Could we
possibly have made our tiny nation the hi-tech capital of the world, dramatically
bestowing innovations of all types upon humanity, increasing its quality and
longevity of life?
Will all this
be acknowledged by future generations as fact, or will it be dismissed as
fanciful fairy tales concocted by creative Jewish minds?
There are two
conflicting narratives fiercely competing in the world today. One suggests that
the Jews are an oppressive, malevolent force, robbing the world of
its resources, stealing the property of others and espousing a doctrine of
supremacy and world domination.
The other
affirms that the Jewish people are benevolent, decent, industrious citizens who
hold the moral high ground and bring abundant blessing to every nation in which
they live.
It is our
sacred task, I suggest, to fight passionately for the truth we know to be real,
to dispel the clouds of doubt and defamation that too often swirl around us.
It is an
uphill battle, to be sure, because ignorance is a societal cancer that spreads
exponentially, perverting and polluting even the best and brightest of minds.
We have the obligation to devote
ourselves to separating the facts from the fables and declare, with unabashed
pride: Israel is real.
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
75th Anniversary Of The Liberation Of Auschwitz.
Video Of The Week - Powerful Speech- Auschwitz Liberation After
75 Years- https://tinyurl.com/uf42lv7
For full Article
and videos go to - https://tinyurl.com/uvwfrat by Tom Gross 23-01-2020
There were some important speeches at today’s World
Holocaust Forum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, to mark the 75th anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz.
I attach videos of some of them below. They are short
so you may want to make time to watch them.
If you only have time to watch one, I suggest you watch
the last one, delivered in a heartfelt way without notes by former Israeli
Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau.
Lau was liberated aged 7, in April 1945, by the 89th
Infantry Division of the United States army, having already lost both his
parents in the Holocaust.
He was the only Holocaust survivor speaking today to
the dozens of assembled presidents, prime ministers, kings and princes and in
effect he is speaking for the 6 million. (In fact, research and newly opened
archives since the fall of communism in eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union mean that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust is much closer to 7
million.)
Previous Nazi camps had already been liberated,
starting with Majdanek, freed by the Red Army on July 24, 1944.
But Russian, Polish, French and British officials
didn’t want any public knowledge of the camps to be made, or photos released,
so as (supposedly) not to alarm people, and strict censorship was imposed.
It was only after US forces arrived in Buchenwald on
April 6, 1945 (where Yisrael Lau was imprisoned) and the Supreme Commander of
Allied Forces in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower, visited the camp on April 12, that
he said these “conditions of indescribable horror” must be made public, and he
ordered all censorship of Nazi atrocities lifted.
Later that month, on April 20, 1945, the BBC radio
correspondent Richard Dimbleby accompanying British and Canadian forces into
Belsen, said in his report: “This day when we reached Belsen was the most
horrible day of my life”:
“Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people.
You could not see which was which... The living lay with their heads against
the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated,
aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out
of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had
been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven
mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust
the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the
bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the
most horrible of my life.”
The last of the dozens of Nazi camps to be liberated
was Theresienstadt (Terezin) north of Prague, when Soviet forces arrived on May
8, 1945, over a week after Hitler was dead and Berlin occupied. It could have
been liberated earlier and lives of prisoners would have been saved, but
American forces (on the order of President Roosevelt in agreement with Stalin)
deliberately stopped in Plzen in the west of Czechoslovakia to allow the Red
Army time to move westwards and take over the country.
(Several members of my
own family were imprisoned in Terezin before being killed there or taken on in
packed cattle trains to be murdered in other camps.)
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
Swastika Flag on Gaza Border
A Nazi swastika flag raised on the Israel-Gaza
Strip border, Friday, Aug. 2, 2019.
6-8-2019 - by Algemeiner Staff - https://tinyurl.com/y6jhrcdr
Israel continued on Tuesday to call
out Hamas for the placing last Friday on the Gaza border fence of a Nazi swastika flag by
Palestinian demonstrators.
“When
#Hamas-led rioters in #Gaza raise the #Nazi flag, they expose their true intention
— to annihilate the Jewish State. But Hamas will never have its way,” the
Israeli Foreign Ministry tweeted.
On Monday, it was reported that Hamas had instructed rioters to not use the
swastika “so that the Israeli occupation cannot take advantage of it.”
Elad
Strohmayer — spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC — tweeted
on Tuesday, “Hey #Hamas, I get your concern about your PR but banning Nazi
symbols just won’t do it. As long as you call for the destruction of the Jewish
State, using swastikas is simply you being honest. It’s not the swastika that makes
us think you want to kill all Jews, it’s your charter.”
The
findings of research show that the PA schoolbooks' attitude to Jews, Israel and
peace is based on three fundamentals: De-legitimization, demonization and
indoctrination to violent struggle instead of peace. Based on these
fundamentals, a narrative has been built that presents the conflict in a
distorted manner historically, and does not leave any hope for ending it in a
peaceful coexistence of the two parties involved.
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
A Visit to the Old and New Hells of Europe
by Alan M.
Dershowitz
May 17, 2016
May 17, 2016
For the full article go to: http://tinyurl.com/jpa5q77
I just returned from a week-long journey through Hell!
It began with a visit to the site of the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps in
Poland (built by Nazi Germany during its occupation of the country), as a
participant of the March of the Living, following a conference commemorating
the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg Laws and the 70th anniversary of the
Nuremberg Trials. My week was consumed with recurring evidence of the worst
crime ever perpetrated by human beings on other human beings – the Holocaust.
I traveled from the death camps to several small Polish
towns from which my grandparents emigrated well before the Holocaust, leaving
behind relatives and friends. During the course of my travels, I discovered the
fate of two of my relatives. Hanna Deresiewicz (an original spelling of my
family name) was a 16-year-old girl living in the small town of Pilzno when the
Nazis arrived; she was separated from her siblings and parents. "The
soldiers took several of the most beautiful Jewish girls for sex, and then
killed them. [Among those] taken [was] Hanna Deresiewicz, 16."
I also learned that another Deresiewics, named
Benjamin, survived, though his wife and five children, along with his parents
and siblings were all murdered. He may have been Hanna's father, although I
can't document that. In the book Schindler's Ark, on which the movie
Schindler's List was base, the following account is given: "[The
Commandant of Auschwitz] suspended his 15 year old orderly, Poldek Dereshowitz,
from the ringbolts in his office ..." Although the book is fictionalized
account, it is based on the recollections of an eyewitness. I cannot,
therefore, be sure of the veracity of that episode. But seeing the name
Dereshowitz associated with Auschwitz had an impact on me.
This is not the first time I have visited Nazi death
camps. I was fully familiar with the statistical evidence of how six million
Jews were systematically murdered. I was also familiar with how the Nazi death
machine searched out Jews in the furthest corners of Nazi occupied Europe, even
as far as the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea, and transported them to
Auschwitz to gas them.
I also knew that this was the only time in human history
when people were brought from far distances to camps designed for one purpose only
– to kill every possible Jew they could, find no matter where they lived. And I
knew that because this was part of a planned genocide of the Jewish People, it
was most important to kill every child, woman and man capable of producing
future Jews.
But this visit, during which I learned the fate of
members of my own family, brought the horrors home to me in a manner more
personal than any statistic could provide. I was traveling with my wife and
daughter, and I repeatedly imagined what it must have felt like for the parents
and spouses of the murdered Jews to realize that everything precious to them
was being annihilated, and that there would be no one left to morn them or to
carry their seed to future generations.
From the old Hell, Poland, I traveled to a new Hell,
called Hungary. Budapest is a beautiful city, but it too, provided a hellish
end to its Jewish residents in the final months of the Second World War, when
Hungarian Nazis turned the Blue Danube into a red mass grave. They shot their
Jewish neighbors and dumped their bodies into the Danube River, even as the
Nazis were retreating. And now in modern-day Budapest, I was told of the
resurgence of Nazism among many ordinary Hungarians. An increasingly popular
fascist party, Jobbik, boasts of its anti-Semitism and of its desire to rid
Hungary of its few remaining Jews. The Jobbik party in Hungary also hates
Israel, and everything else that is a manifestation of Jewishness.
I ended my trip meeting with a Jewish man of Greek
background who told me that his grandfather was murdered by the Nazis and that
he was now being targeted by Greek fascists for his outspoken defense of Israel
and the Jewish people. Athens, too, has become a hotbed of Jew-hatred, with is
popular fascist Golden Dawn party.
There was not a moment during my visit to Europe that I
was not reminded of that continent's sordid history with regard to the Jewish
people. Now, many Europeans — the children, grandchildren and
great-grandchildren of those who were complicit in the murder of six million
Jews — have turned against the nation state of the Jewish People with a
vengeance. This time the bigotry emanates mostly from the hard left, but has
the support of many on the new fascist hard right. The British Labour Party is
as rife with hatred of the Jewish People and Jewish Nation as is the Hungarian
fascist Jobbik party.
Once again, European Jews are caught between the extremes
of the Black and the Red. Extremists on both sides seek the demise of Israel,
arguing that there is no place in this world for one state that is overtly
Jewish in its character, despite the universal acceptance of multiple Muslim
and Christian nations. Other Europeans seek to boycott Israel's products, its
professors, and its performers. While still others simply apply a double
standard to its actions — a standard they apply to no other nation, including
their own.
My visit to Europe made one thing unmistakably clear:
if there is any group in the world that needs a safe homeland — a sanctuary
from bigotry and hatred — it is the Jewish people. When Hitler was willing to
expel them from Europe, before deciding to exterminate them, no country — not
even the United States or Canada — would give them asylum. Britain closed the
doors of what is now Israel to them. They had no place to go. So they were
murdered by the Nazis and their willing executioners throughout Europe. There
is no group whose history entitles it to a safe and secure homeland more than
the Jewish people.
For reasons that are difficult to explain, the hatred
of the Jewish people and its nation defies rationality, but it is as real as
the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the emerging fascist parties of
Greece and Hungary. Jews today continue to be scapegoated in many parts of the
world, and their nation state is demonized at the United Nations, on university
campuses, in the media and in legislative assemblies. Following the Holocaust,
there seemed to be an understanding that Jews would no longer be victimized.
Now, less than a century after the Nazis came to power, that moratorium on
Jew-hatred seems to have expired, as the memory of the Holocaust grows dim in
most parts of the world.
My week-long visit to Hell reaffirmed my commitment to
defend Israel's right to exist, to speak out for Israel when it is unfairly
attacked, and to defeat its enemies in the marketplace of ideas. We owe nothing
less to the victims of the worst crime in the history of humanity — a crime
that could not have occurred without the complicity of most of the world. And a
crime that will not recur if there is a strong and secure Israel.
Video of the week - Lebanese Muslim converts to Judaism -
http://tinyurl.com/jt9aj49
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