Month: September 2001

Making Holocaust Hay out of the 9/11 Attacks

Dated:

The Forward, SEPTEMBER 28, 2001

Ashes Adrift in a Gentle Wind

By MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT

Thousands of men and women slaughtered, many of them incinerated, their bodies never to be found. Ashes, the remains of loved ones, friends and neighbors, drifting in a gentle wind for miles. Auschwitz, 1944, or New York City, September 2001? The stench of death making it impossible for anyone in the vicinity ever to claim that he or she was unaware of the carnage. Bergen-Belsen, 1945, or New York City, September 2001? No, there is no comparison. But there are echoes.

On August 4, 1943, on arrival at Auschwitz, my mother was separated from her parents, husband and five-and-a-half year old son. My brother’s last words to her were, “Mommy, are we going to live or die?” My mother had no answer. She was haunted by this memory until her own death four years ago. Like millions of others gassed and burned in the death camps, my grandparents and my brother have no graves. My mother must have wondered, as she walked through the camp, whether the air she was forced to breathe contained her parents’, her child’s or her husband’s ashes.

Zachary Stern, a student at Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan, told his father that he felt that the silver dust gleaming in the sunlight as he and his school mates were being evacuated on September 11 was made up of thousands of souls. In the tons of rubble, ashes and debris that rescue workers have had to walk through for the past two weeks are the remains of victims whose bodies will never be recovered. All New Yorkers have been physically enveloped by the dead and death.

It is only natural to ask how God could have allowed this newest cataclysm to happen. The simple answer is that, like the Holocaust, it was perpetrated by human beings, not by God. Nonetheless, I believe God was at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, just as God was present at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. But God was not in the killers.

God was within every Jewish parent who comforted a child on the way to the gas chambers. God’s spirit was within my mother as she kept 149 Jewish children alive in Bergen-Belsen throughout the winter and early spring of 1945. The divine spark that characterizes true religious faith was within every Jew who helped a fellow inmate in the death camps, just as it was within every non-Jew who defied the Germans by risking death to save a Jew.

Similarly, God was in all the New York City firefighters, police officers and rescue workers who risked or gave their own lives to save others. God was in the heroic passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 who overpowered the terrorists and sacrificed themselves rather than allow the hijackers to reach their target. God was in the man who remained in the World Trade Center with a friend confined to a wheelchair. God was in every victim who made one last telephone call to say, “I love you,” or whose final thoughts were of a husband, a wife, children, a parent or a friend.

On September 11, we witnessed both absolute evil and absolute good. As a nation, we must now make a choice: We can become obsessed with revenge, allowing a justified hatred of the terrorists to poison our own souls, or we can try to reshape the world according to the ideals that the murderers sought to destroy. After the Holocaust, its survivors, while never ceasing to remember and mourn, rebuilt their lives and created new families in a collective act of defiance. During the difficult days and weeks ahead, their example and their ability to overcome the most extreme suffering of all times can serve as a lantern for New Yorkers and all Americans.

Mr. Rosensaft, a partner at the law firm of Ross & Hardies in New York, is the founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.]]

www.forward.com/issues/2001/01.09.28/oped1.html

Observant Jews struggle with WTC victims ID issue

Dated:

By Rachel Zoll, AP Religion Writer

4 Tishri 5762 17:35 Friday September 21, 2001

The effort to identify the thousands of people buried under the rubble of the World Trade Center has raised difficult questions for the guardians of ancient Jewish traditions.

Rescuers fear many bodies will not be found or identified at all, potentially leaving strictly observant Jews without the direct evidence religious law requires to confirm the death of a relative.

The identification is critical for families to complete the mourning process, already disrupted since they can’t meet the requirement to bury their dead within 24 hours.

Proof is also needed to invalidate a Jewish marriage so the surviving spouse can find another husband or wife.

Even in cases where DNA identification can be made, problems remain — some rabbis question the tests’ accuracy and do not accept the results alone as evidence of death.

“The number of individuals who are going to have to be identified by means other than direct identification — that’s unprecedented,” said Rabbi Moshe Krupka of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.

An Israeli police forensics expert has come to New York at the request of Jewish leaders to help oversee the process, Krupka said.

Rabbi Gedaliah Schwartz, chief of the Rabbinical Council of America, will be among those providing guidance on religious law, said his spokesman, Rabbi Joseph Ozarowski.

Schwartz served as an adviser in the recovery effort for SwissAir Flight 111 in 1998 and for other tragedies.

There will be as many opinions as there are rabbis, scholars say.

“We don’t have popes. Any man who is schooled in the law has the chance to look with a different viewpoint,” said Rabbi Saul Aranov of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Canada, where the SwissAir flight crashed.

More than 6,000 people have been reported missing and are feared dead beneath the crumbled Trade Center.

Most Jews will begin the mourning period once New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani begins calling the salvage effort a recovery instead of a rescue mission, indicating all hope is lost.

But that will not solve the need for evidence of death.

Giuliani has acknowledged that the 2,000-degree Fahrenheit (1,100-degree Celsius) fire caused by the explosions of the two planes and the implosion of the 110-story twin towers make it likely some victims will never be recovered.

“In this case, we don’t know what exists under that rubble,” Krupka said. “We don’t know what has been buried, what has been crushed, what has been incinerated.”

Identification is simpler for Roman Catholics, Protestants and Muslims, who generally accept whatever method the medical examiner deems appropriate. More liberal Jews will also accept the government’s ruling.

Orthodox Jews, however, will look to the Talmud. This collection of religious and civil law requires more than one piece of evidence to identify a person who has been disfigured in death, said Rabbi Moshe Tendler, professor of Jewish medical ethics at Yeshiva University.

Rabbis accept dental records and fingerprinting, and many accept DNA testing, but some require other proof as well.

In the SwissAir crash, where minute bits of the bodies of the 229 victims were recovered, some rabbis approved the passenger list as evidence of death, if airline officials marked that the victim had boarded the plane, said Aranov, who helped oversee the process.

Others accepted a personal object, such as a ring or watch, along with the DNA tests, he said.

It is not known how many Jews were killed in the suicide strikes at the Trade Center.

More questions will likely be raised later about what to do with body parts that cannot be identified, since each faith tradition has different rules about burying or cremating human remains.

“We are undertaking the largest effort outside of a war zone for identifying the remains of people through technology and science,” Krupka said. “It’s a terrible time.”

JPost Radio: How do we begin to mourn in the face of a pillar of fire and a cloud of smoke rising heavenward?

Rabbi Daniel Landes, director of the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, spoke with JPost Radio’s Dave Bender about the Halachic implications of the grisly task.

U.S. tied too closely to Israel

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Too close to Israel

Joshua Stein

Letters | The Calgary Herald | September 15, 2001

I used to live two blocks from the World Trade Center, and saw this tragedy coming years ago. Each year that passed, I was thankful and amazed it hadn’t happened yet.

Here’s why: The U.S. should never have tied itself so closely to Israel. As in European countries, U.S. media and politicians should have condemned Israel’s antagonism and unreasonable attitude toward Palestinian concerns.

Reaction to the Jewish Holocaust has created a blind spot. This blind spot has led American astray into foreign political attitudes that are opposite to the very ideals the U.S. was built on.

The best of modern American is about co-existence. It’s about moderation and tolerance.

11-year search gathers relatives

Dated:

By Carmen Duarte, ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Wednesday September 12 05:28 AM EDT

Local — The Arizona Daily Star — updated 5:28 AM ET Sep 12

At age 10, Nadia Larsen asked her father about his family, separated by World War II, because she longed to know her roots.

All he told her was that she came from “blue blood,” but the girl replied that her blood was red.

Larsen, now 46 and part of a reunification effort by the American Red Cross (news — web sites) Holocaust and War Victims Tracing and Information Center, finally understands what her father meant.

The Sabino Canyon-area resident returned last week from Poland, where she met her father’s family, including two half- brothers. Her father, Romuald Dombrowski, came from a wealthy, aristocratic family.

“I finally have a family,” Larsen said Tuesday from her home. “It feels great. I still cry.”

It took 3,000 hours of research on the Internet and the help of the Red Cross war victims center to locate relatives.

Larsen is one of two people in Southern Arizona reunited this year with relatives lost during the Holocaust and the war, said Rebecka Wendling, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross Southern Arizona Chapter.

Since last year, the Baltimore-based center has received 48 new cases from Southern Arizona. Across the nation, the center has reunited nearly 1,000 survivors with their relatives, Wendling said.

Larsen recalled the empty feeling she had as a child growing up in Tel Aviv. Both her parents were World War II refugees.

Her father was placed into the Polish forces under British command. “He was in Iran, Iraq and ended up in Palestine, which later became Israel,” Larsen said.

Her mother, Nina Dombrowski, who is 79, was separated from her family as a teen-ager and put to work on a German farm.

Her parents met through friends in Jerusalem. They married in 1954, and eventually ran a successful steakhouse in Tel Aviv. Larsen’s father died of lung cancer in 1985.

Neither spoke about their family. “I had no grandparents, nieces, nephews and cousins. I had nothing — only my parents, a brother and sister.

Eleven years ago, Larsen, a former businesswoman who speaks five languages and is an interpreter, searched for her mother’s family. She found and met five relatives in Belarus, part of the former Soviet Union.

Two years ago, she began the search for her father’s family.

For Larsen, finding her father’s 18 relatives has made her feel whole. She picked up clues through the British Ministry of Defense in London, where she obtained his military records, including two war medals on behalf of her father.

She learned about her grandparents, Tomasz Adam and Kazimiera Maria Dombrowski, who had three children. She also learned about her father’s first wife and two sons.

Larsen met her aunt and half-brothers through letters. She also met a New Jersey cousin who will visit here next month.

Now, she has 150 photographs and 10 videocassettes. Her family has been introduced to different Polish foods and champagnes.

Larsen is working on learning Polish so she can speak to her relatives in their native tongue.

“I am staying in touch with them. I feel so good,” Larsen said.

Abusing the Holocaust

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(September 11) — Lucy Dawidowicz, the late Holocaust historian, recalled that one day she received a phone call from a young man affiliated with Larry King’s American national talk-radio program. She was asked if she would be prepared to debate Robert Faurisson, a well-known anti-Semite who denies that Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Dawidowicz replied that Faurisson should not be provided a platform for his virulent anti-Semitism.

The young man, puzzled, approached Dawidowicz again. What was the matter with discussing “controversial” matters on the radio? Dawidowicz asked the young man if he “thought that the murder of European Jews was a ‘controversial’ matter?” Had it not been established as a historical fact? “I don’t know,” he answered, “I wasn’t around at the time. I am only 30 years old!”

Far more problematic than such a lapse in historical awareness is the perversion of the Holocaust to such an extent that it is turned against the Jews, as was the case at the United Nations Conference on Racism, and as articulated by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in his brutal statement that the Holocaust does not give the right to Israelis (read: Jews) to carry out another Holocaust against the Palestinians. (Please spare me from the hypocrisy of the African nations which have been committing genocide against each other for years.)

It is not enough that the Louis Farrakhans and the David Irvings of this world spew forth their virulent anti-Semitism by either denying the Holocaust or belittling it, now we have political figures such as Annan leading the fray. Annan, the Finnish foreign minister, and all the Muslim countries have promulgated the disgusting notion that we Israelis are the new Nazis, and the Palestinians the new Jews.

This sort of transference is nothing less than abhorrent. (Not to mention that we are no match for the Arab brutality against each other: Jordan killing 20,000 Palestinians in one week, or Syria killing 5,000 Christians in two days!) But such transference has received its “respectable” cover for years, even in the United States, through a more subtle, but equally distorted interpretation of the Holocaust — and that is the universalization of the tragedy.

In the late 1960s, during the height of the Vietnam War, a number of plays appeared on Broadway by such notable playwrights as Arthur Miller, Peter Weiss and Robert Shaw. In each play, the writer used the Holocaust to illustrate man’s inhumanity to man. During the 1960s, the Holocaust became equal to the napalming of the Vietnamese countryside, persecution against Blacks, Communist baiting, and yes, suppression of Arabs by Israelis. Shaw himself wrote in 1968: “I see Auschwitz as a universal instrument that could have been used by anyone. For that matter, the Jews could have been on the side of the Nazis.”

It is amazing how one can start out with a seemingly logical formula and misapply it so that it becomes venomous drivel. Must the innocent absorb the guilt for some lame social comment about universal guilt and responsibility by an act of introjection in order that the real guilty ones be absolved?

Any theme that holds that “things equal to the same thing are equal to each other” is pure nonsense. If everyone is guilty, then no one is guilty. Such a universal claim perverts any meaningful understanding of the Holocaust and denies the Jewish people a measure of exclusivity in its suffering for the evils of the Nazis and the silence of the world. Such was the case with the exaggerated comparison between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Hitler that US president George Bush Sr. made during the Gulf War.

Few times in history has a single event elicited such diverse public attitudes as has the wanton slaughter of more than six million Jews, as so sickeningly displayed at the UN Conference. The murder of the six million cannot be wholly accounted for either in terms of passion or of madness or of overwhelming and irresistible social forces. But one thing is certain, the Holocaust is an event of such magnitude that its wounds can never be healed.

The best we can do is to never let it fade from our consciousness, and most definitely, never let it be abused beyond recognition.

The capacity to assume the burden of preserving the Holocaust is not always practical. While the moral function of recounting the Holocaust cuts across the different worlds of art, knowledge, reason and history, it must always respect basic truths. The world owes us the memory of the simple fact that the Nazi slaughter of the Jews is objectively the supreme tragic event of modern times.

This must be the prime remembrance of that dark period in history. Anything less than this will surely set the stage for legitimizing another Holocaust against the Jews — disguised as a legitimate political attack on Israel and its policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians.

(The writer is the spokesman for the Rabbis for Human Rights group.)

Source:

The Jerusalem Post

By David J. Forman

September, 11 2001

Rabbi Says Pope Saved More Jews From Holocaust than Schindler

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(CNSNews.com) — A Jewish rabbi has told the annual meeting of an international Catholic organization that “[Pope] Pius XII saved more Jewish lives than any other person, including Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler,” contrary to press accounts over the last several years that claimed Pius XII did little or nothing to prevent the holocaust. Several Jewish organizations have also criticized Pius XII for his alleged failure to act.

Rabbi Dr. David Dalin, a Jewish historian and former professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, made the comments August 23rd while speaking to the international lay Catholic organization Communion and Liberation,

“The Jewish people had no greater friend in the 20th Century [than Pope Pius XII],” he said.

[…]

Source:

By John Rossomando

CNSNews.com Staff Writer

September 04, 2001