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6 HASHALOM August
2016
August 2016
HASHALOM
7
By: Alan M.Dershowitz - Gatestone Institute
By: Ori Lewis - Reuters
AVisit to the Old and New Hells of Europe
Provides a Reminder of Israel’s Importance
Olympics-Kenyan-born runner Chemtai
going the distance for Israel
ISRAEL
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 a 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 mourn them
or to carry their seed to future generations.
From the old Hell, Poland, I traveled to a newHell, 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
ISRAEL
ISRAEL
Supporters of Greece’s fascist Golden Dawn party.
Supporters of Hungary’s fascist Jobbik party.
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.
Professor Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus and
author of Taking the Stand: My Life in the Law. This article first appeared on
Foxnews.com
When Kenyan-born Lonah Chemtai came to Tel Aviv in 2009 to care for
the children of her country’s ambassador to the Jewish state, she never
dreamed that one day she would run for Israel at the Olympics.
Chemtai, a diminutive 27-year-old and a marathon novice, gained Israeli
citizenship earlier this year through her coach, Dan Salpeter, after the
two married in Kenya. They will be in Rio next month but a podium finish
is not expected.
The unassuming athlete’s inclusion in the Israeli team was confirmed only
at the last minute after she was granted Israeli citizenship days before the
deadline for her to be eligible to run for Israel.
It was a momentous day for Chemtai, who described the ceremony at
which she was presented with her documents as “a great occasion”.
“I am very proud (to represent Israel) and I hope to achieve a new
personal best time,” she told Reuters.
Chemtai, who grew up in a village in West Pokot County in western
Kenya, had run shorter distances since her youth and took up the
marathon only after the birth of the couple’s son, Roy, who is 19 months
old.
Despite a current personal best time of two hours, 40 minutes, which is
far slower than the fastest runners, Chemtai’s best is still ahead of her,
said Salpeter.
“A personal best in Rio very much depends on the conditions, which
can change from day to day, so it’s hard to know ... But Lonah still has
tremendous potential to improve greatly over the next 10 years and
even beyond,” Salpeter said.
HUMID HOME CONDITIONS
Running on dirt tracks and roads around fields and citrus groves in Israel’s
agricultural heartland in the centre of the country, where heavy humidity
prevails in summer is hard, Chemtai said. Kenyan conditions are more
suitable.
“I prefer training in Kenya but I have to follow what the coach says,” she
said with a chuckle. “In Kenya there are a lot of (running) partners and
there is high altitude, not like here.”
Chemtai said running the marathon “is not hard” for her, but after Rio
she wants to concentrate on track events and hopes to be able to run in
the 10,000 metres at the Tokyo Games in 2020.
Numbering at least 47 athletes, Israel’s team for Rio is its largest-ever
Olympic delegation.
The Israeli team is hoping to win more than one medal to offset the
disappointment of London 2012, where they left empty-handed.
Israel won its first Olympic medals in Barcelona in 1992 in judo and had at
least one athlete on the podium at every subsequent Games until 2012.