Lederman: What the Israeli flag debacle at Auschwitz really says about this moment

2025/08/09 Leave a comment

Good observation:

…Mr. Bartyzel did not answer my question about whether this has happened before. Have unauthorized Israeli flags entered the site previously by people marching in? Has anyone been forced to return their flags to their vehicles and then enter without them? Has such an order been given before Israel became the global pariah it is now? If so, I missed the global outrage.

Today, the Jewish community is on high alert, frightened that antisemitism is lurking around every corner. Here in Canada, B’nai Brith reports that antisemitism has reached “perilous, record-setting heights.” The same thing is happening in the U.S., the U.K., around the world. 

In the midst of this, it is easy for Jews to assume antisemitic intent. While this is often true, it is not always the case. We need to be thoughtful in each circumstance. 

That said, if there is a spot where the consequences of antisemitism can be felt viscerally, it is at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the absolute worst happened.

I visited the site in 1998 during the March of the Living, with family members including my mother, who survived Birkenau. It was a difficult day for her, but she drew comfort from not just her own descendants, but from seeing so many young Jews from around the world – and the sea of Israeli flags. They were a symbol of what rose from all she had lost: her parents, her little brother, her home, every single possession, her freedom, her youth, her education, her health, her life as she had known it.

Nobody should have to experience such staggering losses. Nobody.

Source: What the Israeli flag debacle at Auschwitz really says about this moment

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Islamic leaders make ‘groundbreaking’ visit to Auschwitz

2020/01/24 Leave a comment

Significant:

Muslim religious leaders joined members of a U.S. Jewish group at Auschwitz on Thursday for what organizers described as “the most senior Islamic leadership delegation” to visit the site of a Nazi German death camp.

The interfaith visit came four days before the 75th anniversary of the camp’s Jan. 27, 1945, liberation by Soviet forces and as world leaders gathered in Jerusalem to commemorate the Holocaust.

The secretary general of the Muslim World League, Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, and the CEO of the American Jewish Committee, David Harris, led the tour to the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial in Poland. The Nazis operated extermination and concentration camps in Poland when Germany occupied the country during World War II.

The American Jewish Committee said that Al-Issa, who is based in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, led a delegation of 62 Muslims, including 25 prominent religious leaders, from some 28 countries during the “groundbreaking” visit. At one point, they prayed with their heads pressed on the ground at Birkenau, the largest part of the camp and the most notorious site of Germany’s mass murder of European Jews.

The AJC delegation included members of the organization, among them children of Holocaust survivors.

“To be here, among the children of Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish and Islamic communities, is both a sacred duty and a profound honor,” Al-Issa said. “The unconscionable crimes to which we bear witness today are truly crimes against humanity. That is to say, a violation of us all, an affront to all of God’s children.”

Auschwitz was the most notorious in a system of death and concentration camps that Nazi Germany operated on territory it occupied across Europe. In all, 1.1 million people were killed there, most of them Jews from across the continent.

The visit comes as Saudi Arabia works to be seen abroad as a moderate and modernizing country following decades of adherence to a hard-line interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism. The Muslim World League, under al-Issa’s leadership, has embraced the effort.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s strategy to modernize the kingdom is aimed in part at attracting greater foreign investment and fostering a national Saudi identity that is not founded solely on conservative religious values.

Al-Issa’s outreach to Jewish organizations also coincides with a broader alignment of interests and ties emerging between the Arab Gulf states and Israel, which share a common foe in Iran.

On Friday, members of the delegation will visit the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and attend Muslim and Jewish religious services there.

Source: Islamic leaders make ‘groundbreaking’ visit to Auschwitz

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Preserving the Ghastly Inventory of Auschwitz – NYTimes.com

2015/04/18 Leave a comment

Fascinating account of the challenges in preserving Auschwitz as authentically as possible:

To visit Auschwitz is to find an unfathomable but strangely familiar place. After so many photographs and movies, books and personal testimonies, it is tempting to think of it as a movie-set death camp, the product of a gruesome cinematic imagination, and not the real thing.

Alas, it is the real thing.

That is why, since its creation in 2009, the foundation that raises money to maintain the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau has had a guiding philosophy: “To preserve authenticity.” The idea is to keep the place intact, exactly as it was when the Nazis retreated before the Soviet Army arrived in January 1945 to liberate the camp, an event that resonates on Holocaust Remembrance Day, on Thursday.

It is a moral stance with specific curatorial challenges. It means restoring the crumbling brick barracks where Jews and some others were interned without rebuilding those barracks, lest they take on the appearance of a historical replica. It means reinforcing the moss-covered pile of rubble that is the gas chamber at Birkenau, the extermination camp a few miles away, a structure that the Nazis blew up in their retreat. It means protecting that rubble from water seeping in from the adjacent ponds where the ashes of the dead were dumped.

And it means deploying conservators to preserve an inventory that includes more than a ton of human hair; 110,000 shoes; 3,800 suitcases; 470 prostheses and orthopedic braces; more than 88 pounds of eyeglasses; hundreds of empty canisters of Zyklon B poison pellets; patented metal piping and showerheads for the gas chambers; hundreds of hairbrushes and toothbrushes; 379 striped uniforms; 246 prayer shawls; more than 12,000 pots and pans carried by Jews who believed that they were simply bound for resettlement; and some 750 feet of SS documents — hygiene records, telegrams, architectural blueprints and other evidence of the bureaucracy of genocide — as well as thousands of memoirs by survivors.

The job can be harrowing and heartbreaking, but it is often performed out of a sense of responsibility.

“We are doing something against the initial idea of the Nazis who built this camp,” said Anna Lopuska, 31, who is overseeing a long-term master plan for the site’s conservation. “They didn’t want it to last. We’re making it last.”

The strategy, she said, is “minimum intervention.” The point is to preserve the objects and buildings, not beautify them. Every year, as more survivors die, the work becomes more important. “Within 20 years, there will be only these objects speaking for this place,” she said.

The conservators are walking a less-trodden path in restoration. “We have more experience preserving a cathedral than the remains of an extermination camp,” said Piotr Cywinski, who turns 43 on Thursday and is the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which runs the site. Auschwitz, he said, “is the last place where you can still effectively take the measure of the spatial organization of the progression of the Shoah.”

Preserving the Ghastly Inventory of Auschwitz – NYTimes.com.

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Sikh MP Tim Uppal says there is ‘so much we can learn’ from the Holocaust

2015/01/29 Leave a comment

Interesting profile on Uppal’s interest and connection to Holocaust awareness and remembrance, and says something about Canadian multiculturalism to have a Sikh Canadian lead the Canadian delegation:

Holocaust remembrance is not a faith-based cause, Mr. Uppal said.

“I was doing something as a Canadian, this is something that affects us all,” he said.

“It wasn’t because of anything of my own faith, but this is something that I felt was important to us all as Canadians.”

‘This is something that affects us all’

Mr. Uppal has become a fixture on the Jewish community lecture circuit, addressing crowds ranging from the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee to groups of teens about to depart on March of the Living trips.

He said he hopes to one day expose his own children, now six, four and two, to the story of what happened to the 11 million people who fell victim to the Nazi government’s racist policies.

“It’s so important that we pass on this history to future generations,” he said.

For Mr. Uppal, the issue of racism also hits closer to home.

Sikh MP Tim Uppal says there is ‘so much we can learn’ from the Holocaust

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