“NEVER FORGET” This Week In History

November 11th, 2008 at 06:57pm Pamela Zuker 2145

On Sunday, at a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, warned against complacency in the fight against antisemitism.

On the night of November 9th, 1938, Nazis savagely attacked, raped, and murdered Jews, smashed the windows of their Synagogues, businesses, homes and even orphanages, and then ransacked and torched them. The next morning, during an orgy of unimaginable violence, tens of thousands of Jews were deported to concentration camps.

Nazis announced that the horrors were inflicted in honor of the birthday of German Monk, Martin Luther, admired by Hitler for his malignant hatred of Jews. Born November 10th, 1483, Luther advocated (as did many others) practices that waxed and waned for hundreds of years before and after his lifetime: eliminating Jewish liberties, confiscating their property, destroying their homes, and burning their synagogues.

Hitler had come to power only five years before Kristallnacht. With a venomous contempt for Jews and what he called the “life-denying Ten Commandments” they had introduced to the world, Hitler had already prohibited intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, declared a national boycott of Jewish stores, excluded Jews from working in respected professions, expelled Jewish students from German schools, forced Jews to wear yellow “Jude” stars on their clothing, and revoked the German citizenship of all German Jews.

During these years, many Jews refused to flee, believing German antisemitism would abate. In the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, however, virtually every remaining Jew in Germany attempted to emigrate. Sadly, even after the Nazi atrocities were known to the world, few countries would provide Jews asylum.

• When asked how many Jews his country could accommodate, a high government official in Canada replied, “None is too many.”
• The British, bent on thwarting Zionism (the desire to create a sovereign Jewish State in Israel), imposed a prohibition on Jewish emigration to the Land of Israel, and even refused safe passage to a ship that arrived in British-controlled “Palestine” bursting with Jewish Holocaust refugees. By escorting them back to Germany, the British ensured that when Jews needed their ancestral home the most, it would not be their safe haven.
• As soon as Jewish survivors from Kielce, a small Polish village, returned to their homes, their non-Jewish neighbors murdered every one of them.

That dismal chapter in Jewish history finally cemented in the minds of the world’s Jewry the urgent necessity to return to a world with a sovereign Jewish State.

Romans forcibly expelled the Jews from Eretz Yisroel (the Land of Israel), then called Israel, Judea and Samaria, in 136 C.E., ending over one thousand years of Jewish reign (with several intermittent periods of external rule by conquest), compelling their global dispersion, and inaugurating eighteen centuries of cruel oppression and genocidal persecution. Remarkably, these Jewish “displaced persons” assimilated into other cultures around the world yet still retained their unique religion and identity as a people.

For the first one thousand years of exile, Jews were variously subjected to forced conversions, confiscations of land, money, and personal property, expulsions, slavery, the burning of sacred books, the burning of Synagogues, and being burned alive. Next came prohibitions on the practice of Judaism and frequent massacres, including the slaughter of one-third of the Jews in Northern France and Germany (an accomplishment repeated in Poland in the 1600s).

In the 8th century C.E., while Jews under Christian rule were not faring well, Jews living under Muslim rule enjoyed a “Golden Age.” Allowed to participate in professions such as commerce, mathematics, the sciences, the arts, philosophy, and medicine, Jews were instrumental in translating texts from and into Arabic, Greek and Latin. For hundreds of years, Jews lived in peace by accepting second-class status as “dimam” which prohibited intermarriage, praying audibly, working in certain professions, and wearing certain clothing and colors. Jews were also required to pay punitive taxes and wear distinctive clothing including noisy bells and a yellow badge (the inspiration for the 13th century “badge of shame” European Jews were forced to wear, and culminating in Hitler’s yellow star badge.)

In the 13th century, European Jews were required to wear yellow, cone-shaped dunce-hats called “Judenhuts” (a practice that originated in the 6th century B.C.E. when Jews were forced into Babylonian captivity). Later, horned hats called “pileum cornutum” were substituted, fueling the Christian belief that Jews were children of the devil and hid their horns under their horned hats.

In 1270, all Jews in England – men women and children – were either imprisoned or hanged, and in Germany in the same year, an entire community of Jews was locked in a Synagogue and burned alive on Shabbat. Before the 13th century ended, public torture and hangings became commonplace, building Synagogues was prohibited, and a Papal decree forbade Jews from appearing in public on Good Friday. In the 14th century, adding to the long litany of savagery, indignities and injustices perpetrated against Jews, fanatical European monks organized brutal pogroms during which Jews’ property was seized and they were forced to convert or die.

The same year Christopher Columbus came to the New World, all Jews were expelled from Spain, and the descendants of Jewish converts to Christianity were prohibited from attending university, joining religious orders, holding public office, or entering any of a long list of professions.

The following five hundred years saw Jews repeatedly butchered and expelled across Europe, punctuated by burnings at the stake and public torture. During the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s, Jews there were massacred to complete elimination, and hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered in Russian pogroms in the 19th and 20th centuries. The pogroms that accompanied the Revolution of 1917 alone orphaned more than 300,000 Jewish children.

In the late 1800s, although persecution still existed in Europe, emancipation spread throughout the continent thanks to newly created, tolerant political regimes that offered equality under Napoleonic Law. By 1871, every European country except Russia had emancipated its Jews. (Russia - and later the USSR - continued its long history of unrestrained violence against Jews long into the 20th century.)

Only a few decades later, however, the staggering Jewish genocide during what Jews have come to call the “Shoah” (calamity) of World War II, saw approximately six million Jews sadistically tortured and murdered at the hands of Nazis and their collaborators. At the war’s end, fully one-third of the world’s total Jewish population had been annihilated.

Eighteen hundred twelve years after Rome exiled the Jews from their homes in Eretz Yisroel, and changed the names of the Jewish lands to Palaestinia, descendents of 2nd century Jewish refugees returned home as 20th century Jewish refugees. In the first year of the existence of the State of Israel, roughly 500,000 homeless European Jews emigrated, largely thanks to the founding of the United Jewish Appeal by American Jews as a response to Kristallnacht. Within ten years, the population of Israel had grown to two million. The majority of the Jewish immigrants, including 700,000 refugees from Arab countries, arrived with no possessions.

American Jews are probably the most fortunate of all Jews in the Diaspora. Jews have perhaps been welcomed here more authentically than anywhere else in the world. But particularly in difficult economic times, antisemitism rears its ugly head. Even - or perhaps more accurately, especially - in the world’s most respected international forum, the United Nations, antisemitism is rampant. As a particularly poignant and ludicrous example, at the International Women’s Year Conference in 1975, a resolution denounced Zionism as an enemy of all women (despite women’s equal rights in Israel) but did not denounce sexism because the call for women’s rights was seen as an attack on the Arab-Muslim world.

On November 10th, 1975, the 37th anniversary of Kristallnacht, rather than issuing a statement in memory of the Jewish victims of Nazi savagery, the United Nations passed Resolution 3379 branding Zionism, the reestablishment of a Jewish State in Israel, “a form of racism.” Although renounced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., as “obscene,” it was through this resolution that Jew-hatred was sanitized, repackaged, and propagated globally as politically correct “anti-Zionism.” It took the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had voted in lockstep with Arab nations and other countries with anti-Jewish interests, for the U.N. to officially revoke the resolution, but the damage had been done.

Today, pockets of Jew-hatred persist around the world. While the anti-Jewish, “anti-Zionist” vitriol of most Arab countries (and all Islamic terrorists) is widely known, less well known is antisemitism in places like Lithuania, where Nazis (and their exceptionally accommodating local conspirators) murdered more than 96% of Lithuania’s Jews. Lithuanian efforts still prevail in preventing anti-Jewish war criminals from facing prosecution; and in an astonishing distortion of history, until only months ago Lithuanian prosecutors sought to indict octogenarian Jewish-Lithuanian anti-Nazi war heroes for “war crimes.”

It is likely no coincidence that even today, Lithuanians annually celebrate Uzgavenes, a Catholic festival infused with local bigotry, in which they parade as devils, witches, goats, Roma (gypsies) and Jews, wearing hideous masks with grotesquely exaggerated “Jewish” features and “acting Jewish” by peddling, haggling, and mimicking Jewish speech. Masquerading in any costume is referred to as “going as Jews” and children knock on doors, singing, “We're the little Lithuanian Jews/We want blintzes and coffee/If you don't have blintzes/Give us some of your money.” (In Lithuanian, it apparently rhymes.)

The few remaining Jews in Lithuania keep silent, citing their wish to respect the traditions of others and their aversion to conflict.

Vilnius, called “Vilna” by the Jews who lived there, used to be known as “the Jerusalem of Lithuania” for its centuries-long, distinguished history of Jewish piety and Torah scholarship. Now virtually ethnically-cleansed, it is the capital of Lithuania. In a feat of perverse irony, the EU named Vilnius the “European Capital of Culture for 2009.”

On Sunday, while commemorating the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, German-born Pope Benedict XVI told crowds at the Vatican, "Still today I feel pain over what happened in those tragic events, whose memory must serve to ensure such horrors are never repeated and that we strive, on every level, against all forms of antisemitism and discrimination.”

While Jews in the United States have enjoyed decades of good fortune, we must never forget our history and must never allow the world to forget. As grateful as we are for our integration and acceptance into American culture and society as equal members and committed citizens, insidious antisemitism lingers. Just last month, students at an Illinois middle school instituted “Hit a Jew Day” (after celebrating “Hug a friend Day” and “High Five Day”). Unbelievably, educators told reporters they did not believe it was done with “hate” or “prejudice.”

After the incident, some argued that when history classes were replaced with lessons in “diversity,” tolerance actually declined. If children were taught about Kristallnacht, perhaps there would be no “Hit a Jew Day.”

Jews today have an obligation to every Jew of every generation to ensure that the State of Israel continues to exist.

The haunting mantra, “Never Forget” defines the Jewish people’s role and responsibility to humanity to serve as a reminder of the moral imperative to treat every human being justly and with decency, dignity and compassion.

For more information about how you can help Jews worldwide, contact the United Jewish Appeal at aspenvalleyuja@yahoo.com

Entry Filed under: Religion, Women, United Post