Tag Archive for: Holocaust

Remembering the Nazi Inspired 1941 Baghdad Farhud Slaughter

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Reut Cohen chronicled her family’s horrifying experience during The Farhud, Nazi-inspired pogrom in Baghdad on the 1st day of Shavuot, June 1, 1941 in an Iconoclast post about her heritage, “The Farhud and my Family’s Sephardic/Mizrahi Israeli Heritage.”  In our introduction to her post we referenced a 2014 post we did on the 73rd commemoration of the Farhud and referenced an effort to obtain Holocaust benefits for the victims of the Farhud.  We wrote:

edwin black-avatar

Edwin Black

On the occasion of the 73rd commemoration of the Farhud Ha’aretz published an article raising the question of whether it should be considered a Holocaust event, “Lawyers make case for giving Iraqi Jews Holocaust benefits”.    There is ample evidence of Nazi involvement in the coup by Iraqi strongman Ali Rashid al-Gaylani, the Nazi Foreign ministry, and the German Ambassador to Iraq.  Then there was the role of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al Husseini who was living in Baghdad after he was forced by British Palestinian Mandatory authorities to leave given his role in the Arab riots from 1936 to 1939. prior to the occurrence of the Farhud, for sanctuary in Berlin as Hitler’s house guest during WWII.  Edwin Black chronicled the 1941 Baghdad pogrom and both Nazi and Hussein’s involvement in his 2010 book, The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust.

Black published an op ed in today’s edition of The Algemeiner about a special ceremony at the UN Headquarters commemorating the inauguration of International Farhud Day, Remembering Farhud Day and the Arab Pogroms.   The opening stanza of his piece we thought would not be lost of Reut Cohen, Bat Ye’or and other victims of Arab pogroms in Israel and like Cohen and her family in the West:

While I was speaking to the packed room, a woman I did not know, sitting in the front row, slowly shook her tear-stained head in disbelief and muttered softly … barely audible … “I never thought I would hear these words in this building.”

The woman, it turns out, was of Iraqi Jewish ancestry. The building was the iconic United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan, astride the East River. The event was in a hall routinely used by the UN Security Council. The day was June 1, 2015. The occasion was the proclamation of “International Farhud Day” at the UN as a live global event broadcast by UN TV.

Farhud in an Arabic dialect means violent dispossession. The words I spoke that gripped the woman listening described in detail how the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, leader of the Arab community in Mandate Palestine, organized a blood-curdling massacre by Nazi-allied Arabs against Baghdad’s peaceful Jewish community on June 1-2, 1941.The ensuing mass rape, beheading, murder, burning, and looting spree was the first step in a process that throughout the Arab world effectively ended 2,600 years of Jewish existence in those lands. Ultimately, some 850,000 to 900,000 Jews were systemically pauperized and made stateless in a coordinated forced exodus from the Arab world. Many Sephardic Jews consider the 1941 Farhud, which murdered and maimed hundreds, to be their Kristallnacht.

For the past 74 years was this constellation of tragedies commonly known and/or spoken of within the Jewish community. In fact, it took years of highly acrimonious, sometimes public, debate with and pressure on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) ‑‑ only recently successful ‑‑ to even induce the USHMM to recognize either the atrocity that occurred, or the Mufti’s role in the killing, as a Holocaust-era persecution.

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Grand Mufti of Jerusalem al Husseini and SS Chief Heinrich Himmler April 23, 1943.

Black explains why it took 74 years for this commemoration of The Farhud to occur:

First, persecution of Jewish victims in Arab countries did not conform to the established line of study that followed the classic Holocaust definition, as archetypically expressed by the USHMM’s mission statement: “The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945.” Note the pivotal word “European.” This geographic qualifier left out the Jews of Iraq as well as their persecuted coreligionists in North Africa, where some 17 concentration camps were established by Vichy-allied and Nazi influenced Arab regimes.

Second, because the persecution of Jews in Arab lands during WWII and their forced exodus was considered beyond the thematic horizon, the type of well-financed and skilled scholarship that has riveted world attention on the Holocaust in Europe, generally by-passed the Sephardic experience. Certainly, the overwhelming blood and eternal sorrow of the Holocaust genocide was experienced by European Jewry. But their deeply tragic suffering, including that endured by my Polish parents, who survived, does not exclude the examination of other groups. Years of focus on the plight of Gypsies, Jews in Japan, and other persecuted groups proves that. Undeniably, a solid nexus clasps the events of the Middle East, roiling in oil, colonialism, and League of Nations Mandates, to a European theatre brimming with war crimes and military campaigns.

Third, critics say, that many of the leading Jewish newspapers and wire services, now vastly more politicized than they were in the prior decade, did not devote sufficient space and informed knowledge to the topic. Moreover, some these critics suggest that in recent years, the Jewish press seemed to have marginalized the atrocity and its aftermath as a political discussion. “When former Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon was doing his 2012 campaign for Jewish refugees from Arab lands,” asserts Lyn Julius of the British organization HARIF – Association of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, “hardly a day went by when certain Jewish or Israeli newspapers did not politicize the matter, or suggest Israel was exploiting the issue for political gain.”

In that vein, the day before the June 1, 2015, UN event, one prominent Jewish newspaper published an article on the Farhud, which included this observation: “Now, Jewish organizations and the Israeli government deploy it [memory of the Farhud] frequently to support their claims for refugee recognition on behalf of Middle Eastern Jews.” Before the UN ceremony, three different irate members of the audience showed me this article on their tablets, and the consensus of disdain was expressed by one Sephardic gentleman who objected, first quoting the newspaper with derision: “‘Deploy it frequently to support their claims for refugee recognition on behalf of Middle Eastern Jews?’” and then adding, “They would never say such a thing about the European Kristallnacht!” The complainers were equally astonished that this prominent article made no mention of the Mufti of Jerusalem. They felt the complete omission of Husseini’s involvement and the marginalization of their nightmare was typical of the roadblocks they had encountered during their decades-long struggle for recognition of their anguish.

Black noted the poignancy of International Farhud Day recognition:

But on June 1, 2015, yes, 74 inexcusably years late and, yes, not an hour too soon, after waiting for thirty minutes beneath a gaggle of umbrellas in the torrential rain at a narrow admittance gate on First Avenue, and then into a packed hall at the UN, attended by diplomats from several countries, human rights activists of various causes and key Jewish leaders from a communal spectrum, in an event broadcast worldwide live by the UN itself, the stalwarts of Farhud memory gathered to finally make the proclamation of International Farhud Day — and made it loud and clear. In doing so, they made history by simply recognizing history.

All they wanted was to be remembered — to change the headline on their suffering from “the forgotten pogrom” to “the not forgotten pogrom.” All they wanted was to draw back the curtain of their sorrow without an asterisk, without a parenthetical, without a “but also” or a “however” or a political catchphrase to qualify or filter their disconsolation. In short, they wanted to take their place in the annals of misery for the same reason all other Jews gather into that space: so they can help whisper endlessly the words “never again” as a beacon to humanity.

The proclamation for International Farhud Day recognized the key role of the Grand Mufti and Nazi Arab allies who organized and fomented the pogrom:

The official proclamation was read aloud that day to the world: “On behalf of Iraqi Jews everywhere who yearn to commemorate the Farhud, the Holocaust-era massacre by Arab nationalists in coordination with the Nazis, which occurred June 1-2, 1941 in Baghdad, killing hundreds of innocent Jews and brutalizing thousands more, and pillaging their property …. and on behalf of those who recognize that Palestinian Arab leaders, including the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, were central instigators of the violence in Baghdad, along with Iraqi Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gailani and the Golden Square coup plotters … and on behalf of those who yearn to recognize that the Farhud was the first step in the process which resulted in the forced exodus of 850,000 to 900,000 Jewish refugees from centuries of peaceful existence in Arab countries … The organizations and individuals assembled and represented here, this June 1, 2015, in New York City at the United Nations, do hereby proclaim June 1st as International Farhud Day, to recognize and commemorate the Nazi-allied massacre by Arabs, the mass forced exodus that followed, and the 850,000 to 900,000 Jewish refugees from Arab Lands. We recognize this date as a lamented day of history that should not be forgotten.”

We note the signatories and witnesses of the proclamation:

Seven parchment copies were signed by the five key organizers: Rabbi Elie Abadie of Jews for Justice in Arab Lands, Alyza D. Lewin for both the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists and the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, Maurice Shohet of the World Organization of Jews in Iraq, Avi Posnick for StandWithus, and myself as historian. Signing as witness for the proceedings was Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Numerous Jewish and non-Jewish organizations both here and abroad added their voices as co-sponsors, such as Philadelphia-based Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, HARIF – Association of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East in London, the Zionist Federation of Great Britain, and the Babylonian Heritage Society of Israel.

Having interviewed Dr. Daniel Williams of the Israel Allies Foundation Jerusalem Call, we were pleased to note the presence of the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus at the Farhud UN Event:

On behalf of Congressional Israel-Allies Caucus in the House of Representatives, co-chair Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), issued a public statement expressing “deepest solidarity with Iraqi and the Arab world’s Jews. Franks declared, “Today we will change the first of June from a day of a near-forgotten tragedy into International Farhud Day – a day of commemoration – when we call on the entire world to remember the disaster that befell the Arab world’s Jews, and to do justice by them and their descendants.”

Black recognized the active role of the Israeli Permanent Delegation at the UN members of the Foreign Ministry and regional Consul Generals who made arrangements for International Farhud Day at the UN.  His professional feelings as an historian and activist were summer up in this comment:

My end was simply the history. History, when connected to the present, can be a spark plug for the future.

We suspect that Reut Cohen and her family in California must find this UN commemoration abiding, yet saddened by the fate that befell their family and fellow Iraqi Jews during the barbaric Farhud on Shavuot in 1941. They may take comfort that their relatives and hundreds of thousands of other Jews expelled from Arab lands have contributed materially and spiritually to the growth of the third Jewish Commonwealth, The State of Israel.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review. The featured image is of violence in Iraq before the Farhud in 1941. Photo by Etniel Margalit Collection.

An Auschwitz Anniversary

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There was some serious irony when U.S. Secretary of Treasury Jack Lew gathered together with French President Francois Hollande and a Russian delegation led by Sergei Ivanov, Putin’s chief of staff, along with leaders from Germany and Austria to participate in the January 27 ceremony commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 by Russian troops.

I suspect that an entire generation or two born after that year, 70 years ago, may have little or no knowledge of what Auschwitz was. It was a Nazi death camp located in Oswiecim, Poland. Its full name was Auschwitz-Birkenau and it is estimated that one million people, mostly Jews, were killed there.

I say “irony” because Auschwitz-Birkenau was part of a system of six Nazi death camps that included Belzac, Chelmo, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. Each camp was filled with the victims of a widespread anti-Semitism that had existed in Europe for two thousand years, so it was not difficult for the Germans to turn a blind eye or the French and others to provide assistance in rounding up their Jews.

Jews - Nazi starThe camps engaged in large scale murder to fulfil Adolf Hitler’s intention to exterminate every Jew in Europe. In 1933 there had been nine million living in 21 nations that would be occupied during World War II. By 1945, two out of every three European Jews had been killed.

In addition to the Jews, an estimated five million others deemed enemies of the state for political or other reasons such as being Communists, trade unionists, gypsies or homosexuals also died in the camps.

What is rarely acknowledged is that the Europeans of that era were largely educated, had a rich culture of music, literature, and drama, and many were church-goers. In short, you would not have been able to tell them apart from the Europeans of today.

The Nazis wrote the book on the use of terrorism to facilitate their barbaric, murderous theology of death. The Muslims that have moved to Europe have adapted it to their own ends, seeking like the Nazis to become globally dominant. They don’t have death camps—yet—but the widespread and constant slaughter in which they are engaged has a similar feel to it.

In the 1930s those European Jews had few places to which to flee. They were not even that welcome in America where anti-Semitism was widespread. Those that could did emigrate and, again there is irony because several of the German physicists that came to the U.S. were instrumental in the creation of the atomic bomb that ended World War II while others played roles in the Nazi’s defeat during the war. One such emigrant, Albert Einstein, was the first to suggest the creation of the weapon to Franklin Roosevelt.

In response to European anti-Semitism, a movement called Zionism had begun before World War II with the intention of reestablishing Israel as a Jewish state where Jews could be safe. The movement was founded by Theodor Herzl in 1896. Here again there is irony because the movement was dominated by secular Jews who were not motivated by Jewish history or the Torah. What they wanted was to be free of the oppressive antipathy of the nations in which they lived. What they were seeking was emancipation.

By the time World War II occurred they were a force to be recognized in Israel, known at the time as the Palestinian Mandate and run by the British who, as often as not, shared the anti-Semitism that had given life to the Zionist movement. It would take the Holocaust to accelerate the movement of Europe’s surviving Jews to Israel which in 1948 declared its sovereignty and was immediately attacked by the Muslim nations surrounding it.

Fast forward to our times and the Jews of Israel as well as those around the world know one truth. If Iran is permitted to reach a point where it can create its own nuclear weapons and put them on their missiles, Israel will only be minutes away from an extermination that the Iranian leadership and the other Muslim nations of the Middle East have openly called for since Israel came into being and the Islamic Revolution took control of Iran in 1979.

This time, however, the same nuclear weapons that would destroy Israel would also be turned on the United States because the shouts of “Death to America. Death to Israel” are a part of the daily lives of the Iranians, as well as others in the region.

What makes these days so dangerous is that the United States of America is engaged in negotiations with an Iran that has never made a secret of their intention to be a nuclear-armed nation. What makes these days so dangerous is that the President of the United States has barely hidden his own anti-Semitism and animus toward Israel.

One can only pray that seventy years hence some other writer will not be commenting on the second great annihilation of the Jews, literally within the lifetime of people who were alive during the first one. I am one of those people and Auschwitz is not some place that existed a long time ago. It was yesterday.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Auschwitz death camp survivor Jadwiga Bogucka (maiden name Regulska), 89, registered with camp number 86356, holds a picture of herself from 1944 in Warsaw January 12, 2015. Reuters.

Watch “Night Will Fall” about Nazi Atrocities During the Holocaust

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Children who Survived Auschwitz Source AP

Jewish Children liberated at Auschwitz, February 1945. Source : Archives of the US National Holocaust Memorial.

On January 27, 1945 forward units of the 100th Rifle Division of the 1st Ukrainian Front entered the Auschwitz Birkenau death camp precinct liberating several thousand remaining survivors. More than 1.1 million were murdered there by the Nazi SS, 1 million of them Jews. Among the first groups they encountered in the remaining barracks were children, twins, victims of the ‘angel of death, Dr. Josef Mengele’s sadistic medical experiments. The Russian troopers in their white camouflage coats hugged and gave them chocolate. These Jewish children hadn’t felt any humane treatment during their enforced incarceration in Auschwitz.

Earlier in January 1945 the SS blew up the remaining crematoria. An earlier one was destroyed in the lone heroic resistance effort by Jews inside the camp in October 1944 with dynamite secured by Jewish women inmates.  The SS guards assembled more than 60,000 camp inmates  in January 1945 who  sent on a forced death march from which only 12,000 survived.  One of the survivors of that death march was the Nobel Laureate Eli Wiesel who as a youth of 16 was eventually liberated by the US Army at Buchenwald in April 1945. Another Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor was Italian Jewish resistance fighter, chemist and author Primo Levi who received his Nobel award for Literature, posthumously in 2002. Levi fell to his death in his family home in Turin in 1987, some say depressed by the atrocities  he had witnessed. Wiesel’s biographic works about his experience at Auschwitz the forced march and liberation were memorialized in his trilogy Night, Dawn and Day. Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz: if this is a Man was testimony to the Nazi dehumanization and perseverance to survive and return home.

Israelis at Auschwitz-Birkenau Source AP

Israelis at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Source:  AP.

Another 5 million Jews didn’t survive.  They were murdered in unspeakable ways in the einstazgruppen slaughter in Russia, death camps in Germany and occupied Europe.  Their fate in the Final Solution was ratified by the SS at the Wansee Conference in Berlin on January 20, 1942. The objective of the SS Conference was to make Europe judenrein. Among the Six Million European Jews murdered were 1.5 million children. The Jewish children those Russian troops encountered at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 were among the lucky survivors.

Palestinian leads 2015 UN International Holocaust Memorial at Auschwitz Birkenau

Tuesday, January 27, 2015 is the 10th annual UN International Holocaust Memorial Day. Ynet.com  drew attention that this year’s  annual commemoration with be headed by a Palestinian UN official.  Maher Nasser will host the event,  Palestinian to host UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day to be held at the site of the death camps at Auschwitz- Birkenau in Poland.  Nasser was  born in Albrieh, a village near Ramallah. The 25 year UN bureaucrat   held posts in Gaza and  Jerusalem. eHeh HH He  now holds a management position in the UN Department of Public Information.  Ironic  in that the Haj Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, fled to Berlin from Baghdad  following the Farhud, the Nazi-Arab massacre of Jews  in 1941.  The  was welcomed as  Hitler’s house guest during WWII. He  promoted  the genocide of Six Million European Jewish men, women and Children and sponsoring the recruitment of Muslim Waffen SS units in the Balkans.

UN Secretary General Ban-ki Moon will attend.   Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin will lead an Israeli delegation.  Rivlin will speak about the rise of Global Anti-Semitism and the threat of Islamic Jihadism. More than 100 Holocaust and Russian veterans will also attend the ceremonies at Auschwitz. In the Israeli delegation will be former Israeli Foreign Minister Sylvan Shalom  in 2005 proposed the UN commemoration of the Holocaust  to “honor of the six million Jews, 1 million Gypsies, 250,000 disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.”

The Auschwitz-Birkenau UN commemoration of the Holocaust may not be televised. However, on the eve of International Holocaust Memorial Day, January 26th,  at 9:00 PM EST, HBO  will show a documentary on  Nazi atrocities, Night Will Fall.   It is based  on archival footage taken by British military photographers and cinematographers following the liberation of Nazi concentration camp, Bergen –Belsen in April 1945.  Famed Hollywood film director Alfred Hitchcock was briefly involved with the original British documentary in 1945.

Marlow Stern in his Daily Beast review of Night Will Fall, “Inside Alfred Hitchcock’s Lost Holocaust Documentary,” noted how the original project and Hitchock’s involvement came about:

Back in 1945, Sidney Bernstein, the chief of the Psychological Warfare Film Section of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, was commissioned to create the definitive documentary chronicling the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Bernstein’s aim was, in his words, to “prove one day that this had actually happened” and have it serve as “a lesson to all mankind as well as to the Germans.”

He eventually roped in his good pal, Alfred Hitchcock, to serve as the film’s supervising director. But the horrifying and heartbreaking footage of numerous concentration camps, shot by British, American, and Russian World War II soldiers as they were being liberated, became tangled up in a complicated web of politics and artistic rows. A magnificent new HBO documentary pulls back the veil on the making of German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey.

The eye-opening film-on-a-film, Night Will Fall, will premiere January 26 on HBO. It is narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, produced by Stephen Frears and Brett Ratner, and directed by Andre Singer, who serves as president of The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain.  Singer executive producer  of  the documentaries The Act of Killing and Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss. It was done in concert with London’s Imperial War Museum, and took 18 months of poring over thousands of feet of film to trace the making of the unmade epic.

[…]

The British soldiers found tens of thousands of emaciated prisoners inside the camp, many of whom were on the brink of death by starvation. The camera lingers on piles of naked, skeletal corpses stacked several bodies high, as well as line after line of dead children. A total of 30,000 corpses were witnessed by Allied troops, according to the film. Singer managed to track down several British soldiers who were there, and some break down in tears recalling the horrors.

“It’s very difficult to describe,” recalls survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who was 19 when Bergen-Belsen was liberated. “You’ve spent years preparing yourself to die, and you’re still here. Every British soldier looked like a God to us.”

night will fall poster 2Alissa Simon in her August 2014 Variety  review of Night Will fall, reported that,  “rather than wait, the impatient American government commissioned [Hollywood director]  Billy Wilder to use their footage [from German Concentration Camps Factual Survey] . Singer includes an excerpt of Wilder’s short film, Death Mills, intended for German and Austrian audiences, and clips from an interview with Wilder.”

Dorothy Rabinowitz in her Wall Street Journal review of Night Will Fall: Nazi Crimes on Film  explains why the original footage of the British film languished in the vaults of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) after excerpts were shown in the Nuremberg Trial of Nazi leaders:

Still, despite the stellar talents and authority of its creators, the film would be stored, rather than seen. Though its footage would provide some of the most damning testimony presented at the Nuremberg war crimes [trials].  It would be housed, from 1952 on, in the archives of the Imperial War Museum. Then four years ago the IWM undertook the enormous task of restoring and digitizing the documentary, along with the long-missing sixth reel. “Night Will Fall,” a new documentary about the historic film, leaves no question as to the reason it was withheld. Its commentators note that the British government then, whose policy was to bar any flow of European Jews to Palestine, was not eager to present a film that would create a great deal of sympathy for these survivors, as such a film surely would.

These graphic revelations of the Nazi final solution atrocities against millions of Jews and others should be a warning of the primary objective of the Global Jihad movement:  the annihilation of Jews, Christians and minority religions sought by Muslim extremists, following the way of Allah.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

Anti-Semitic Incrementalism Once Again

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As much as I sorely miss my Father, Al Katz, Of Blessed Memory, I know that his heart and spirit, if he were now living, would be broken by today’s hideous course of events, and I ask you, on the Hebrew anniversary of his departing (Tammuz 29), to spend a few moments or hours, if possible, studying the Bible and praying for our beloved Israel and our dear People, suffering acts of anti-Semitism, which has always been personal to me.

Growing up in my Dad’s home, the effects of anti-Semitism were lived and re-lived every day.  We polished our plates clean with spoons at each meal because my Father had starved for seven years in slave labor under Nazi rule.  We had to finish college because my Dad had lost his education and his professional medical future to the Nazi war machine.  “The only thing they cannot take away from you is your education,” he preached through the years to my brother and me.

“You must be better than anyone else – work harder – because you are a Jew,” his motto rings clearly in my head today, as throughout my childhood.  I achieved and over-achieved, making not only straight A’s but often A+’s and sometimes A++’s, thanks to my Dad.

How many times have I heard the way the anti-Semitism grew bigger and inescapable, step-by-step, through incrementalism,… how my dear Grandfather, whom I never was honored to know, was kidnapped on Kristallnacht and returned, brutalized from a Nazi camp, weeks later to his family in abysmal despair?  And now, throughout the world the incrementalism grows until Paris had its own Kristallnacht just days ago – smashing, bombing, and burning the shops and synagogues lovingly made by Jews, including our Holocaust Survivors.

I know anti-Semitism directed at me as well, where I live in Bradenton, Florida, and where I work in nearby Sarasota.  In April 2014, during Passover, my husband and I returned home at night after a difficult and long work day to find our condominium vandalized in daylight, next to the Heritage Village West Association office, sometime between 9:30 AM and 5:20 PM.  Numerous plants had been destroyed and scattered across the sidewalk.  The sprinkler system was severed, and an old, filthy trash can was flung on the lawn.  This act follows years of harassment against us.  We are the only Jews in the HVW condominium complex of 168 units.

In 2009, a Board Director at HVW falsely spread the word that I had been kicked out of every synagogue, numbering 31, in the State of Indiana, where I was born and lived my entire life.   In four years’ time, we have been prohibited from attending Board meetings, which are only held on Saturday mornings during Shabbat, and annual meetings, which have been moved to Shabbat mornings as well.  Our requests for services have been resoundingly ignored or denied, and we are objects of discrimination and ostracism at home.

At work, we have just been informed, on July 23, 2014, that “under no circumstances” are we going to be allowed to renew our office lease for the Jewish non-profit organization we run to support Holocaust Survivors and other elders.  After nearly two years in our office and a new law office moving upstairs months from now, we have been abruptly told that we are no longer wanted as tenants, although our relationship with the owner of the building has been persistently stable and amicable.  The tides of intolerance have hit our home and work, as they have hit the world.

My poor Father should never know that his past is our present and imminent future.

Holocaust Liberator Warns Israel

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On September 30, 1938, William Langfan, a World War II veteran witnessed the catastrophic consequences of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler. In a March 2013 interview Mr. Langfan explains how the Western world, led by President Obama is pressuring Israel to accommodate the HAMAS, which will also have immense catastrophic consequences.

In an almost prescient manner, Mr. Langfan delivers a warning to Israel that has immediate application to the ground offensive going on in Gaza today! Will Israel learn a lesson from a moment in its brutal history as detailed by a soldier who helped liberate the Buchenwald death camp? Time will tell.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/DfFsTyZzc34[/youtube]

“Jews Go Back in the Ovens”, “Nuke Israel”

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Episode II: Operation Protective Edge – An Inside Look: Destroy HAMAS.

On today’s powerful show; Jew-Haters assemble all around the world to preach their “religion of peace,” and sing, “from the river to the sea,” as a marching song to destroy Israel.

We look back at past Jew-hatred and hear loving chants like “Jews go back in the ovens.” Barry Shaw runs into a bomb shelter in Netanya. Dr. Martin Sherman explains why the Israeli military policy is illogical and irresponsible. I have some sober words of advice for Prime Minister Netanyahu.

The United West and Center for Security Policy present Operation Protective Edge An Inside Look: Destroy HAMAS. This will be a daily show providing analysis, commentary, opinion and activism designed to assist Israel in its’ effort to destroy HAMAS. We will feature leading subject-matter experts with live reporting from the war front in Israel.

Downplaying the Holocaust — Sulzberger and the New York Times

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[youtube]http://youtu.be/Q2PQCNQH2lY[/youtube]

I received a link to this video from Dr. Beverly Newman, founder and Director of the Al Katz Center in Sarasota, FL. The Jewish Federation of Sarasota-Manatee in an email to its members stated:

If you watch nothing else about Jewish anti-Semitism, view the attached video. If you do watch it, send it on to others. It puts the anti-Semitism of the present day New York Times in perfect perspective. A classic example of how history ultimately getting the real truth out.

This is the ONE VIDEO you MUST WATCH.

It is a painful exploration of why Jews should despise the NY Times and forever remember how a Jew, the owner of the Times, turned his back on fellow Jews during the darkest days of ww2. The young woman in the video deserves a position of high honor among our people for making this historically accurate video public. Please watch it and send it to your reader lists.

A young Jewish woman of valor reveals the toxic mutation that has been baked into the genes of The New York Times from the very start.

The young woman in the video is Anna Blech, who won first prize at the New York City History Day competition for her research paper, “Downplaying the Holocaust: Arthur Hays Sulzberger and The New York Times.” For this paper, she also was awarded The Eleanor Light Prize from the Hunter College High School Social Studies Department and membership in the Society of Student Historians.

What Anna did not cover in her presentation was Sulzberger’s involvement with the Rockefeller Foundation as a trustee from 1939-1957. For you see it was the Rockefeller Foundation that developed and funded various German eugenics programs, including the one that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

Edwin Black in his book War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race writes, “On January 19, 1904, the Carnegie Institution formally inaugurated what it called the Station for Experimental Evolution of the Carnegie Institution at bucolic Cold Springs Harbor, [New Jersey].” “The undertaking was not merely funded by Carnegie, it was an integral part of the Carnegie Institution itself,” notes Black, “[Carnegie Institute Chairman John] Billings and the Carnegie Institution would now mobilize their prestige and the fortune they controlled to help [Professor Charles] Davenport usher America into an age of a new form of hygiene: racial hygiene. The goal was clear: to eliminate the inadequate and unfit.”

The Eugenics movement was later funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and this funding continued while Sulzberger, a Jew, was a trustee. Black reports, “Prior to World War II, the Nazis practiced eugenics with the open approval of America’s eugenic crusaders. As Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, complained in 1934, ‘Hitler is beating us at our own game.'”

“Eventually,  out of the sight of the world, in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, eugenic doctors like Joseph Mengele would carry on the research begun just years earlier with American financial support including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution,” notes Black.

Black asks, “Will the twenty-first-century successor to the eugenics movement, now known as ‘human engineering,’ employ enough safeguards to ensure that the biological crimes of the twentieth century will never again happen?”

RELATED COLUMN: Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper