Coverage of the events surrounding Holocaust Day in Israel and Europe…Is there meaning in remembering the Shoah today?…What about today’s youth?…Plus…more on the Jewish calendar…And…Jews following the ways of the goyim…
All this and MORE…

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Symbol for eternity…

Never Again!

Holocaust Rememberance Day: 60 Years Since the Slaughter of Six Million Jews in Europe

When We Say “Never Again”, in order to guarantee it, We Must Say, “Never Forget”!!!

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Holocaust Martyrs’ Rememberance Day 2005

REMEMBER, NEVER Forget…NEVER AGAIN!!!

Yad Vashem–Jerusalem, Israel

Israel’s President Moshe Katsav:The Wounds of the Jewish People will NEVER heal”

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon:“We will NEVER AGAIN be caught unprepared. NEVER AGAIN!!!”

One out of Three Americans DO NOT KNOW that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust

Only 70% of the people of Poland DO NOT KNOW that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust

Only 45% of the people of Sweden DO NOT KNOW that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust

Only 11% of Americans believe that anti-Semitism is a serious problem

Looks like there is a lot more than NHL hockey players and tasty meatballs coming out of the Swedish city of Malmo…
It’s especially disturbing to see a country that helped SAVE Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust now ignorantly comparing the Jewish State to those self-same Nazis. It is very difficult for me to discern where the line is between just good (bad) old-fashioned ant-Semitism that has been with us for eternity, and mere ignorance of the reality on the ground in the Middle East. I guess the naive in me, believing in the inherent good of man, so WANTS to believe that the hatred cannot really run so deep…just give them the facts, and they will see the light!!
Unfortunately, reality does NOT seem to bear this out, at least in my experience…

Sweden: A new hotbed of hatred?


With the repugnantly named – and deliberately so – Israeli Apartheid Week behind us, it feels particularly correct to have taken a commentary pass on the annual hate-fest, since media focus is clearly one of the event’s objectives.

Reprinted from Thestar.com Rosie DiManno

This is always a difficult decision, whether to rise to the bait or leave those inclined to foment venom to their crude business, which is so palpably not as claimed – legitimate discussion of Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories, some of which are notoriously anti-productive in getting a political resolution back on track. To wit: Last week’s ill-timed, embarrassing and quite harmful announcement, with U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden on the ground to hopefully kick-start “proximity talks,” of new settlement housing plans in contested East Jerusalem.

Yet ignoring the zealous fringe runs the risk of allowing odious cant, unchallenged, to take root in the fertile, manure-enriched low ground where the shoots of anti-Semitism thrive. That’s what has happened widely in Europe, where both the right and left fringe have so contaminated the centre on the issue of Israel that frightened Jews are aghast at the naked anti-Semitism now passing for acceptable criticism of the Jewish state.

This alarming phenomenon has recently been exposed in, of all places, the Swedish city of Malmo, heretofore known mostly as an incubator of NHL hockey players and an urban backdrop in the Kurt Wallander detective novels of Henning Mankell.

Sweden, for the love of God, has a history of offering sanctuary to European Jews during the Holocaust – as it has also, in recent decades, to Muslims fleeing conflict in Arab nations. It is the birthplace of Raoul Wallenberg, who helped save tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis. It has strong laws against Holocaust denial and defamation of minorities.

Yet it is also the country where the largest-circulation newspaper published a scandalously misleading report accusing the Israeli military of killing Palestinians to harvest their human organs – a modern-day repetition of the historical blood libel all too familiar to Jews. It is a country where the vice-chair for the Social Democratic Women in southern Sweden felt free to prattle: “I think Gaza is comparable to the Warsaw Ghetto … I’m surprised that Israel … can do the exact same things the Nazis did.”

Really? The exact same thing?

Here is the left-wing mayor of Malmo, Ilmar Reepalu, well-known for his outspoken pro-Palestinian bias, responding last month to a reporter’s straightforward question about whether he would state clearly that the city does not accept anti-Semitism: “We don’t accept anti-Semitism or Zionism. They (both) are extremists who want to set themselves over other groups and believe those others are worth less.”

Yes, the mayor of the third-largest city in Sweden blithely yoked anti-Semitism and Zionism as equally reprehensible – that would be Zionism, as the movement that brought forth Israel as a state; and Zionism, which the United Nations belatedly apologized for linking with racism by rescinding a shameful 1975 General Assembly resolution to that effect.

Reepalu added that Jews “have the possibility to affect the way they are seen by society” – a patently snide insinuation that Jews are responsible for the violence directed against them in such places as Malmo for their failure to denounce Israeli policies toward Palestinians, as if Jews the world over are to blame and thus rendering themselves targets. Would anybody claim that the diaspora of Muslims is responsible for the seething anti-Semitism of Hamas or Hezbollah and their charters calling for the outright elimination of Israel?

Malmo is a city of nearly 300,000 people. It has a tiny minority of 1,200 Jews. About a quarter of Malmo’s residents are immigrants, roughly 20 per cent of them Muslim, mostly of Arab origin. Hate crimes against Jews have spiked – 80 in 2009 reported to police, with cemeteries and synagogues desecrated, children taunted and at least 30 observant families moving to Israel in the last year to get away from harassment, according to recent stories in The Wall Street Journal and The Sunday Telegraph in London.

“I never thought I would see this hatred again in my lifetime, not in Sweden anyway,” Judith Popinski, a Holocaust survivor who arrived in Malmo 65 years ago, told the Telegraph.

When the issue of Jews now fleeing Malmo was raised with Reepalu, the mayor claimed: “There haven’t been any attacks on Jewish people, and if Jews from the city want to move to Israel, that is not a matter for Malmo.”

Interestingly, and significantly, Malmo’s Jews don’t blame Muslims for their predicament. It is fellow Swedes, not Arab immigrants, who are primarily making them feel unwanted and targeted – just as homegrown Christian and secular Swedes were behind a rock-throwing counter-demonstration against a pro-Israel rally last year, and the quarantining, under city council orders, of a Davis Cup tennis match between Israel and Sweden. A Stop the Match campaign, coalescing around Israel’s action in the Gaza war, successfully forced the best-of-five series (which Israel won) to be held in a near-empty stadium, with thousands of anti-Israel protesters turning violent outside the venue anyway. A Swedish appeals court just upheld the conviction and six-month prison sentence of one of those rioters.

Sweden’s players and the country’s tennis federation were furious at the council, which had banned spectators claiming the city couldn’t guarantee security. “It’s an unfortunate consequence of individual politicians trying to score political points,” said the federation chairman. “We thought the decision (by Malmo) was irresponsible and we still think so.”

Crowed Olof Holmberg, spokesman for Stop the Match: “We concluded that Malmo is Gaza. We were all Palestinians at the stadium.”

Mayor Reepalu made it quite clear he would have preferred if the matches were not played at all, a kind of sports disinvestment.

This is what happens when the demonization of Israel – Israelis, Jews – enters the populist mainstream, an asp at the breast of democracies that uphold, quite properly, the principles of free speech and freedom of assembly.

Righteous hate-mongers claim the win.

Jews, especially Israeli Jews, are often criticized for living in the past as “victims”..for not “moving on”.
Well, the past seems to have a way of repeating itself on into the present, and, most likely, the future, as well..
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it..”-Santana

Holocaust monument in Poland vandalized


WARSAW, Poland — Vandals sprayed anti-Semitic graffiti on Holocaust memorials at a former Nazi concentration camp in Poland, desecration that authorities discovered Saturday and are investigating.

Reprinted from The Courier of Montgomery County

Words including “Jude Raus” — German for “Jew Out” — and “Hitler Good!” in English, were found in red paint Saturday on a large monument at the former Plaszow camp near Krakow. A smaller memorial plaque was also painted with a swastika and “Jude Raus.”

The vandalism was discovered a day before a planned memorial march marking the 67th anniversary of the liquidation of Krakow’s ghetto.