Israel Matzav

Where is World Jewry?

I don't know how many of my readers came of age in the 1960's and 1970's. I spent most of the 1970's - particularly my four years at Bir Zeit on the Hudson in the latter part of the decade - attending demonstrations like the one pictured above (which is from the 1960's). I had a yarmulka that said "I am my brother's keepah." I wore a rusting silver bracelet of sorts (which quickly turned green) with the name of Anatoly (now Natan) Sharansky or Yosef Mendelevich on it. And I learned brilliant chants like these:

"Who do we want?"

"Kosygin" (Alexi Kosygin - then the Russian Prime Minister).

"How do we want him?"

"Dead."

And "2, 4, 6, 8, Israel is a Jewish state. 3, 5, 7, 9, there's no such thing as Palestine."

Evelyn Gordon wonders why this generation isn't reacting today like my (and I think her) generation reacted to the peril of Soviet Jewry. Why World Jewry isn't marching like the people in the picture above (and in the Rabbis' protest in front of the White House in 1943) did. Where is everyone?

But as Prof. Shlomo Avineri pointed out this month, even more troubling is the silence of world Jewry on this issue – a stark contrast to its activism over, say, Soviet Jews.

“Through demonstrations outside Soviet embassies, embarrassing questions about freedom of emigration at all news conferences of Soviet leaders in the West, and in dozens of other ways,” Avineri noted, Jewish activists turned the Soviets’ refusal to let Jews emigrate into a burden on the regime. But they haven’t done the same with Iran, even though there’s “no reason why demonstrations should not be held outside Iranian embassies in any place in the world, why Iranian ambassadors should not be accompanied at every appearance or trip by demonstrators carrying placards with ‘Holocaust deniers – out!’”

Partly, this may be due to a widespread sentiment that words matter less than deeds – which explains why Jewish groups have been active in trying to persuade Western governments to take stronger steps against Iran’s nuclear program. Yet ignoring Ahmadinejad’s calls for genocide is a grave mistake, for two reasons.

First, history amply proves that when tyrants declare their intention to slaughter the Jews, they often mean exactly what they say. Hitler, who made his intentions crystal clear in Mein Kampf 14 years before World War II began, is only the most famous example. Nor is this unique to Jews: Most genocides begin with incitement; that’s precisely why incitement to genocide is a prosecutable international crime that has already produced several convictions, especially in connection with the 1994 Rwanda genocide.

But beyond that, Jews worldwide should be concerned with the desensitization effect: By consistently advocating genocide without eliciting any serious condemnatory response, Ahmadinejad is gradually turning “kill the Jews” into acceptable public discourse.

Read it all. And then ask yourself what you've done this week, this month or this year to save the Jewish people.

By the way, the pictures (and I have a couple more downloaded) come from the Jacob Birnbaum Foundation. Jacob Birnbaum was the founder of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, which was one of the leading protest groups on behalf of Soviet Jewry in the US. (I would have got that trivia question wrong - I thought it was Glenn Richter). You can find these pictures and more here.

Labels: Adolph Hitler, Iranian nuclear threat, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mein Kampf, Soviet Jewry

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:49 PM