From Wikipedia:Today there are 10's of thousands of people alive today who would not be if Irena and her Żegota resistance members did not save those children.
During the German occupation of Poland, Sendler lived in Warsaw (prior to that, she had lived in Otwock and Tarczyn while working for urban Social Welfare departments). As early as 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, she began aiding Jews. She and her helpers created more than 3,000 false documents to help Jewish families, prior to joining the organized Żegota resistance and the children's division. Helping Jews in German-occupied Poland meant all household members risked death if they were found to be hiding Jews, a punishment far more severe than in other occupied European countries.
In August 1943, Żegota (the Council to Aid Jews) nominated Sendler (known by her nom de guerre: Jolanta) to head its children's section. As an employee of the Social Welfare Department, she had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto to check for signs of typhus, something the Nazis feared would spread beyond the Ghetto. During these visits, she wore a Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish people and so as not to call attention to herself.
She cooperated with others in Warsaw's Municipal Social Services department, and the RGO (Central Welfare Council), a Polish relief organization that was tolerated under German supervision. She and her co-workers organized the smuggling of Jewish children out of the Ghetto. Under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions during a typhus outbreak, Sendler and her co-workers visited the Ghetto and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and trams, sometimes disguising them as packages.
Children were placed with Polish families, the Warsaw orphanage of the Sisters of the Family of Mary, or Roman Catholic convents such as the Little Sister Servants of the Blessed Virgin Mary Conceived Immaculate at Turkowice and Chotomów. Sendler worked closely with Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, a resistance fighter and writer, and with Matylda Getter, a nun and the Mother Provincial of the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary. She rescued about 2,500 Jewish children in different education and care facilities for children in Anin, Białołęka, Chotomów, Międzylesie, Płudy, Sejny, Wilno, and other places. Some children were smuggled to priests in parish rectories. She and her co-workers buried lists of the hidden children in jars in order to keep track of their original and new identities. Żegota assured the children that, when the war was over, they would be returned to Jewish relatives.
In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured, and sentenced to death. Żegota saved her by bribing German guards on the way to her execution. She was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed. For the remainder of the war, she lived in hiding, but continued her work for the Jewish children. After the war, she and her co-workers gathered together all of their records with the names and locations of the hidden Jewish children and gave them to their Żegota colleague Adolf Berman and his staff at the Central Committee of Polish Jews. However, almost all of their parents had been killed at the Treblinka extermination camp or had otherwise gone missing.
A Swedish art gallery in Lund reportedly has cancelled the exhibition of a painting made of Holocaust victims’ ashes.This idiot gallery owner should have decided not to show this piece of drek on his own, not because of outrage by the Jewish community. But giving the fact that these elites have no morals or feelings for others, it is only when the world cries in outrage that the elites will do the right thing.
The gallery owner, Martin Bryder, is quoted as telling Sydsvenskan, a local newspaper, that he decided to pull the exhibition of a painting by Carl Michael von Hausswolff because of protests by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jewish community of Malmo. The Simon Wiesenthal Center called the painting a “desecration” and “abomination.”
The artist told the newspaper that he used ashes that he collected at Majdanek, a Nazi extermination camp in Poland, to paint a monochrome work, featuring vertical brushstrokes in a rectangle “representing the suffering of the victims.”
It has been on display at the Martin Bryder Gallery in Lund since Nov. 10 and has prompted strong reactions from critics and members of the public. An official opening was planned for Dec. 15.
“I think pulling the exhibition was the right decision,” said Shimon Samuels, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s director of international relations. “I would further insist the painting be returned to Majdanek for burial there.”
Source
A Swedish artist has been accused of desecrating the bodies of Jewish Holocaust victims after it emerged that he used ashes taken from the crematoria at Majdanek concentration camp to paint a picture, the British Telegraph reported on Wednesday.I am sure that Salomon Schulman and any other decent human being would feel the same. Von Hausswolff had no right to:
According to the report, the artist, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, mixed the ashes from the infamous Nazi facility with water to compose a small painting of grey streaks. The work now hangs in a gallery in the Swedish city of Lund.
Salomon Schulman, a leading voice in Sweden's Jewish community who lost many relatives to the Holocaust, has condemned the painting as "revolting".
"Who knows," he wrote in a letter to a local newspaper quoted by the Telegraph. "Maybe some of the ashes originated from my relatives. No one knows where they were deported: all my mother's siblings and their children, and my grandparents.
"I will never go to this gallery and it as view the desecration of Jewish bodies," he added. "I am sickened by his work and obsession with necrophilia."
Von Hausswolff took the ashes during a 1989 visit to Majdanek, according to the Telegraph. During its 34 months in operation from 1941 to 1944, the camp claimed around 79,000 lives, the vast majority of them Polish Jews.
The artist said the ashes appeared to "contain the memories and the souls of people: people tormented and murdered by other people in the most viscous war of the 20th Century.”
Despite the scandal surrounding the painting, Martin Bryder, the owner of the Lund gallery, defended the decision to exhibit the work of art.
"Please come to the gallery, see the painting and judge for yourselves whether it's controversial," he said in an interview with the Polish News Agency.
"Schulman has already declared in the papers that he won't come and see it but if he did, perhaps he would have a different opinion,” said Bryder.
Source
Hungary paid tribute Friday to Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews during World War II, in a modest ceremony in Budapest's Holocaust museum marking 100 years since his birth.One hundred years ago G-d sent the soul of an angel to Raoul's parents. That angel saved over 100,000 men, women and children. That angel was murdered by the G-dless Soviets who saw the angel and destroyed it. And yet the Soviets could not destroy the memory of the angel or the great deed he did.
"Evil must be rejected," Zoltan Balog, minister for human resources and social affairs, said at the event in the city where Wallenberg rescued Jews from the Nazi occupiers by issuing them protective passports in the final months of the war.
"Those who knew how to confront hate and who saved lives were perhaps unable to prevent the evil and the destruction, but their memories should be cherished as strongly as possible," Balog said.
Budapest, where Wallenberg was posted in July 1944, was also the city where he was last seen alive on January 17, 1945 as Soviet forces ousted German and pro-Nazi Hungarian troops.
Mystery surrounds his fate but according to the official Soviet account, he died in prison in Moscow in 1947.
The Hungarian government has declared 2012 "Wallenberg Year", but apart from a Swedish travelling exhibit called "To me there's no other choice", which made a brief stop in Budapest earlier this year, there have been few other activities.
Hungary has meanwhile seen a rise in anti-Semitic incidents in recent months, including pig's feet left on a statue of Wallenberg in May, and a Jewish graveyard was vandalised only last month.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban has meanwhile overseen a rehabilitation of sorts for wartime leader Miklos Horthy, a one-time ally of Hitler, with monuments erected in his honour and parks named after him.
The climate in Hungary prompted Nobel peace laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in June to return the country's top honour, slamming what he called the "whitewashing" of the past.
Source
Chiune Sugihara and his wife Yukiko were people of great strength and courage. In fact they should be the model for all diplomatic personal and their families. A thing to remember on this Yom HaShoah.In the course of human existence, many people are tested. Only a few soar as eagles and achieve greatness by simple acts of kindness, thoughtfulness and humanity. This is the story of a man and his wife who, when confronted with evil, obeyed the kindness of their hearts and conscience in defiance of the orders of an indifferent government. These people were Chiune and Yukiko Sugihara who, at the beginning of World War II, by an ultimate act of altruism and self-sacrifice, risked their careers, their livelihood and their future to save the lives of more than 6,000 Jews. This selfless act resulted in the second largest number of Jews rescued from the Nazis.
In March 1939, Japanese Consul-General Chiune Sugihara was sent to Kaunas to open a consulate service. Kaunas was the temporary capital of Lithuania at the time and was strategically situated between Germany and the Soviet Union. After Hitler's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Chiune Sugihara had barely settled down in his new post when Nazi armies invaded Poland and a wave of Jewish refugees streamed into Lithuania. They brought with them chilling tales of German atrocities against the Jewish population. They escaped from Poland without possessions or money, and the local Jewish population did their utmost to help with money, clothing and shelter.
Before the war, the population of Kaunas consisted of 120,000 inhabitants, one forth of which were Jews. Lithuania, at the time, had been an enclave of peace and prosperity for Jews. Most Lithuanian Jews did not fully realize or believe the extent of the Nazi Holocaust that was being perpetrated against the Jews in Poland. The Jewish refugees tried to explain that they were being murdered by the tens of thousands. No one could quite believe them. The Lithuanian Jews continued living normal lives. Things began to change for the very worst on June 15, 1940, when the Soviets invaded Lithuania. It was now too late for the Lithuanian Jews to leave for the East. Ironically, the Soviets would allow Polish Jews to continue to emigrate out of Lithuania through the Soviet Union if they could obtain certain travel documents.
By 1940, most of Western Europe had been conquered by the Nazis, with Britain standing alone. The rest of the free world, with very few exceptions, barred the immigration of Jewish refugees from Poland or anywhere in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Against this terrible backdrop, the Japanese Consul Chiune Sugihara suddenly became the linchpin in a desperate plan for survival. The fate of thousands of families depended on his humanity. The Germans were rapidly advancing east. In July 1940, the Soviet authorities instructed all foreign embassies to leave Kaunas. Almost all left immediately, but Chiune Sugihara requested and received a 20-day extension.
Except for Mr. Jan Zwartendijk, the acting Dutch consul, Chiune Sugihara was now the only foreign consul left in Lithuanania's capital city. They had much work to do.
Now into summer, time was running out for the refugees. Hitler rapidly tightened his net around Eastern Europe. It was then that some of the Polish refugees came up with a plan that offered one last chance for freedom. They discovered that two Dutch colonial islands, Curacao and Dutch Guiana, (now known as Suriname) situated in the Caribbean, did not require formal entrance visas. Furthermore, the honorary Dutch consul, Jan Zwartendijk, told them he had gotten permission to stamp their passports with entrance permits.
There remained one major obstacle. To get to these islands, the refugees needed to pass through the Soviet Union. The Soviet consul, who was sympathetic to the plight of the refugees, agreed to let them pass on one condition: In addition to the Dutch entrance permit, they would also have to obtain a transit visa from the Japanese, as they would have to pass through Japan on their way to the Dutch islands.
On a summer morning in late July 1940, Consul Sempo Sugihara and his family awakened to a crowd of Polish Jewish refugees gathered outside the consulate. Desperate to flee the approaching Nazis, the refugees knew that their only path lay to the east. If Consul Sugihara would grant them Japanese transit visas, they could obtain Soviet exit visas and race to possible freedom. Sempo Sugihara was moved by their plight, but he did not have the authority to issue hundreds of visas without permission from the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo.
Chiune Sugihara wired his government three times for permission to issue visas to the Jewish refugees. Three times he was denied. The Japanese Consul in Tokyo wired:
CONCERNING TRANSIT VISAS REQUESTED PREVIOUSLY STOP ADVISE ABSOLUTELY NOT TO BE ISSUED ANY TRAVELER NOT HOLDING FIRM END VISA WITH GUARANTEED DEPARTURE EX JAPAN STOP NO EXCEPTIONS STOP NO FURTHER INQUIRIES EXPECTED STOP (SIGNED) K TANAKA FOREIGN MINISTRY TOKYOAfter repeatedly receiving negative responses from Tokyo, the Consul discussed the situation with his wife and children. Sugihara had a difficult decision to make. He was a man who was brought up in the strict and traditional discipline of the Japanese. He was a career diplomat, who suddenly had to make a very difficult choice. On one had, he was bound by the traditional obedience he had been taught all his life. On the other hand, he was a samurai who had been told to help those who were in need. He knew that if he defied the orders of his superiors, he might be fired and disgraced, and would probably never work for the Japanese government again. This would result in extreme financial hardship for his family in the future.
Chiune and his wife Yukiko even feared for their lives and the lives of their children, but in the end, could only follow their consciences. The visas would be signed.
For 29 days, from July 31 to August 28, 1940, Mr. and Mrs. Sugihara sat for endless hours writing and signing visas by hand. Hour after hour, day after day, for these three weeks, they wrote and signed visas. They wrote over 300 visas a day, which would normally be one month's worth of work for the consul. Yukiko also helped him register these visas. At the end of the day, she would massage his fatigued hands. He did not even stop to eat. His wife supplied him with sandwiches. Sugihara chose not to lose a minute because people were standing in line in front of his consulate day and night for these visas. When some began climbing the compound wall, he came out to calm them down and assure them that he would do is best to help them all. Hundreds of applicants became thousands as he worked to grant as many visas as possible before being forced to close the consulate and leave Lithuania. Consul Sugihara continued issuing documents from his train window until the moment the train departed Kovno for Berlin on September 1, 1940. And as the train pulled out of the station, Sugihara gave the consul visa stamp to a refugee who was able use it to save even more Jews.
After receiving their visas, the refugees lost no time in getting on trains that took them to Moscow, and then by trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok. From there, most of them continued to Kobe, Japan. They were allowed to stay in Kobe for several months, and were then sent to Shanghai, China. Thousands of Polish Jews with Sugihara visas survived in safety under the benign protection of the Japanese government in Shanghai. As many as six thousand refugees made their way to Japan, China and other countries in the following months. They had escaped the Holocaust. Through a strange twist of history, they owed their lives to a Japanese man and his family. They had become Sugihara Survivors.
Despite his disobedience, his government found Sugihara's vast skills useful for the remainder of the war. But in 1945, the Japanese government unceremoniously dismissed Chiune Sugihara from the diplomatic service. His career as a diplomat was shattered. He had to start his life over. Once a rising star in the Japanese foreign service, Chiune Sugihara could at first only find work as a part-time translator and interpreter. For the last two decades of his life, he worked as a manager for an export company with business in Moscow. This was his fate because he dared to save thousands of human beings from certain death.
The makings of a hero are many and complex, but Sugihara's fateful decision to risk his career may have been influenced by a simple act of kindness from an 11-year-old boy. He lived with his family in Lithuania, and his name was Zalke Jenkins (Solly Ganor).
Solly Ganor was the son of a menshevik refugee from the Russian revolution in the early 1920s. After the Russian revolution the family moved to Kaunas, Lithuania. The family prospered for years before World War II in textile import and export. Young Solly Ganor, concerned about Polish Jews entering Kaunas, gave most of his allowance and savings to the Jewish refugee boards. Having given away all of his money, he went to his aunt Annushka's gourmet food shop in Kaunas. He went there to borrow a Lithuania lit (Lithuanian dollar) to see the latest Laurel and Hardy movie. In his aunt's store he met Japanese Consul Chiune Sugihara. Consul Sugihara overheard the conversation and gave young Solly two shiny lit. Impulsively, the young boy invited the Consul with the kind eyes to his family celebration of the first night of Chanukah 1939.
The surprised and delighted Consul gratefully accepted the young boy's offer, and he and his wife Yukiko attended their first Jewish Chanukah celebration.
Mr. Sugihara commented on the closeness of the Jewish families and how it reminded him of his family, and of similar Japanese festivals. Fifty-four years later, Mrs. Sugihara remembers with delight the cakes and cookies and desserts offered to them during this Jewish festival of lights.
Solly Ganor and his father were soon friends with the Consul-General and they conversed in Russian. Later Solly Ganor and his father witnessed Consul Sugihara in his office calling the Russian officials to get permission to issue visas across the Russian borders. Solly Ganor and his father later received Sugihara visas but were unable to use them because they were Soviet citizens.
Most of the Ganor family were murdered in the Holocaust. Solly's sister Fanny and Aunt Anushka survived the war. Aunt Anushka returned to Lithuania and died in 1969. Fanny married Sam Skutelsky from Riga and eventually settled in the United States. Their son Robert, Solly's only living nephew, now lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Solly and his father spent over two years in the Kaunas ghetto before being deported to the Landsberg-Kaufering outer camps of Dachau in late 1944. They survived the war and moved to Israel. The older Ganor died peacefully in Tel Aviv in 1966.
Ironically, in May 1945, Solly Ganor was liberated by Japanese American soldiers of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, men who had been interned in their own country.
To Solly, the Japanese face has come to symbolize kindness and liberation.
For the last half century people have asked, "Who was Chiune Sugihara?"
They have also asked, "Why did he risk his career, his family fortune, and the lives of his family to issue visas to Jewish refugees in Lithuania?" These are not easy questions to answer, and there may be no single set of answers that will satisfy our curiosity or inquiry.
Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara always did things his own way. He was born on January 1, 1900. He graduated from high school with top marks and his father insisted that he become a medical doctor. But Chiune's dream was to study literature and live abroad. Sugihara attended Tokyo's prestigious Waseda University to study English. He paid for his own education with part-time work as a longshoreman and tutor.
One day he saw an item in the classified ads. The Foreign Ministry was seeking people who wished to study abroad and might be interested in a diplomatic career. He passed the difficult entrance exam and was sent to the Japanese language institute in Harbin, China. He studied Russian and graduated with honors. He also converted to Greek Orthodox Christianity. The cosmopolitan nature of Harbin, China opened his eyes to how diverse and interesting the world was.
He then served with the Japanese-controlled government in Manchuria, in northeastern China. He was later promoted to Vice Minister of the Foreign Affairs Department. He was soon in line to be the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Manchuria.
While in Manchuria he negotiated the purchase of the Russian-owned Manchurian railroad system by the Japanese. This saved the Japanese government millions of dollars, and infuriated the Russians.
Sugihara was disturbed by his government's policy and the cruel treatment of the Chinese by the Japanese government. He resigned his post in protest in 1934.
In 1938 Sugihara was posted to the Japanese diplomatic office in Helsinki, Finland. With World War II looming on the horizon, the Japanese government sent Sugihara to Lithuania to open a one-man consulate in 1939. There he would report on Soviet and German war plans. Six months later, war broke out and the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania. The Soviets ordered all consulates to be closed. It was in this context that Sugihara was confronted with the requests of thousands of Polish Jews fleeing German-occupied Poland.
Sugihara's personal history and temperament may contain the key to why he defied his government's orders and issued the visas. Sugihara favored his mother's personality. He thought of himself as kind and nurturing and artistic. He was interested in foreign ideas, religion, philosophy and language. He wanted to travel the world and see everything there was, and experience the world. He had a strong sense of the value of all human life. His language skills show that he was always interested in learning more about other peoples.
Sugihara was a humble and understated man. He was self-sacrificing, self-effacing and had a very good sense of humor. Yukiko, his wife, said he found it very difficult to discipline the children when they misbehaved. He never lost his temper.
Sugihara was also raised in the strict Japanese code of ethics of a turn-of-the-century samurai family. The cardinal virtues of this society were oya koko (love of the family), kodomo no tamene (for the sake of the children), having gidi and on (duty and responsibility, or obligation to repay a debt), gaman (withholding of emotions on the surface), gambate (internal strength and resourcefulness), and haji no kakete (don't bring shame on the family). These virtues were strongly inculcated by Chiune's middle-class rural samurai family.
It took enormous courage for Sugihara to defy the order of his father to become a doctor, and instead follow his own academic path. It took courage to leave Japan and study overseas. It took a very modern liberal Japanese man to marry a Caucasian woman (his first wife; Yukiko was his second wife) and convert to Christianity. It took even more courage to openly oppose the Japanese military policies of expansion in the 1930s.
Thus Sempo Sugihara was no ordinary Japanese man and may have been no ordinary man. At the time that he and his wife Yukiko thought of the plight of the Jewish refugees, he was haunted by the words of an old samurai maxim: "Even a hunter cannot kill a bird which flies to him for refuge."
Today, more than 50 years after those 29 fateful days in July and August of 1940, there may be more than 40,000 who owe their lives to Chiune and Yukiko Sugihara. Two generations have come after the original Sugihara survivors, all owing their existence to one modest man and his family. After the war, Mr. Sugihara never mentioned or spoke to anyone about his extraordinary deeds. It was not until 1969 that Sugihara was found by a man he had helped save, Mr. Yehoshua Nishri. Soon, hundreds of others whom he had saved came forward and testified to the Yad Vashem (Holocaust Memorial) in Israel about his life saving acts of courage. After gathering testimonies from all over the world, Yad Vashem realized the enormity of this man's self-sacrifice in saving Jews. And so it came to pass that in 1985 he received Israel's highest honor. He was recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" by the Yad Vashem Martyrs Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.
By then a old man near death, he was too ill to travel to Israel. His wife and son received the honor on his behalf. Further, a tree was planted in his name at Yad Vashem, and a park in Jerusalem was named in his honor.
Forty-five years after he signed the visas, Chiune was asked why he did it. He liked to give two reasons: "They were human beings and they needed help," he said. "I'm glad I found the strength to make the decision to give it to them." Sugihara was a religious man and believed in a universal God of all people. He was fond of saying, "I may have to disobey my government, but if I don't I would be disobeying God."
Consul Chiune Sugihara, age 86, died on July 31, 1986. Mrs.Yukiko Sugihara, age 94, passed away on October 8, 2008.
The monumental chestnut tree that cheered Anne Frank while she was in hiding from the Nazis was toppled by wind and heavy rain on Monday.
The once mighty tree, now diseased and rotted through the trunk, snapped about 3 feet (1 meter) above ground and crashed across several gardens. It damaged a brick wall and several sheds, but nearby buildings — including the Anne Frank House museum — escaped unscathed. No one was injured, a museum spokeswoman said.
"Someone yelled, 'It's falling. The tree is falling,' and then you heard it go down," said museum spokeswoman Maatje Mostart. "Luckily no one was hurt."
A global campaign to save the chestnut, widely known as The Anne Frank Tree, was launched in 2007 after city officials deemed it a safety hazard and ordered it felled. The tree was granted a last-minute reprieve after a battle in court.
The 150-year-old tree suffered from fungus and moths that had caused more than half its trunk to rot.
Two years ago city workmen encased the trunk in a steel support system to prevent it from falling, but that failed under windy weather Monday.
The Netherlands' Trees Institute, one of the most prominent supporters of the preservation project, said it was "unpleasantly surprised" by the news of the tree's fall early Monday afternoon.
"On the advice of experts in tree care, it had been calculated that the tree could live several more decades" with the support structure, the institute said in a statement.
"Alas, in the event it seems that nature is stronger."
The institute said it didn't know why the support structure had failed.
Many clones of the tree have been taken, including 11 planted at sites around the United States and 150 at a park in Amsterdam. It is not clear whether a new tree will replace the original one on the same spot, since it rests on property belonging to a neighbor.
The Jewish teenager made several references to the tree in the diary that she kept during the 25 months she remained indoors until her family was arrested in August 1944.
"Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs," she wrote on Feb. 23, 1944. "From my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind."
She also wrote: "As long as this exists, ... and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies — while this lasts I cannot be unhappy."
Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945. Her diary was recovered and published after her death. It has become the most widely read document to emerge from the Holocaust
Rabbi Meir Kahane was born in Brooklyn, NY, on August 1, 1932. His father, Rabbi Charles Kahane, was involved in the Revisionist Zionist movement, and was a close friend of Zev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky. Meir was active in Betar, the militant revisionist youth movement.This letter was written in 1980.
Kahane received a degree in International Law from New York University, and ordination from the Mir Yeshiva in Brooklyn. He edited the Jewish Press, and served as a pulpit rabbi and teacher in New York until the mid-1960s. He also partnered with the government in rallying Jewish support for the Vietnam War.
His life's work, however, started in 1968, when he founded the Jewish Defense League (JDL). Kahane saw many of the poor and elderly Jews living in the inner-city being targeted by criminals; as a result, he set out to change the image of the Jew from "weak and vulnerable" to one of a "mighty fighter, who strikes back fiercely against tyrants." The JDL's controversial methods, which frequently included the threat of, or actual violence, greatly exacerbated the Black-Jewish tension already present in New York City. The JDL also focused on the plight of Soviet Jewry, and coined the phrases "Never again," and "every Jew a .22" to emphasize that Jews would no longer passively ignore the plight of their foreign brethren.
While some saw Kahane's goals as laudable, his actions were often criminal. He spent time in jail after being convicted of conspiring to make bombs.
Kahane and his family moved to Israel in 1971, where he founded the militantly anti-Arab Kach party. The party's platform called for the annexation of all conquered territories and the forcible removal of all Palestinians. Under the auspices of Kach, Kahane continued to lobby for his beliefs in violent ways, and was jailed on several occasions. He was the first Jew in Israel to ever be accused of sedition.
Kahane ran for Knesset and lost in 1976 and 1980, and was finally elected in 1984. His movement continued to grow until, prior to the 1988 Knesset elections, the Kach party was banned from running by a Labor-Likud coalition. The ban was based on an amendment added to Israel's Basic Law that disqualified any candidate whose platform included "incitement to racism." Two years later, Kahane was assassinated in New York City by an Egyptian militant, who was acquitted of the crime on a technicality, but later convicted in relation to the World Trade Center bombing.
During his life, Kahane attempted to spread his message through a variety of forums. He wrote numerous books espousing his opinions; his most famous work, They Must Go, is alternately called a "magnum opus" by Kahane's followers, and compared to Mein Kampf by his detractors. He also founded a seminary in Jerusalem, called the "Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea." The school, which still exists today, attempts to combine a traditional Jewish education with right-wing political activism.
Dear World,
It appears that you are hard to please. I understand that you are upset over us here in Israel. Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset, even angry and outraged. Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset over us. Today, it is the brutal repression of the Palestinians; yesterday, it was Lebanon; before that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the Yom Kippur War campaign. It appears that Jews who triumph, and who therefore, live, upset you most extraordinarily.
Of course, dear world, long before there was an Israel, we the Jewish people upset you. We upset a German people, who elected a Hitler and we upset an Austrian people, who cheered his entry into Vienna and we upset a whole slew of Slavic nations - Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians, Romanians. (Emphasis mine)
And we go back a long, long way in history of world upset. We upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki, who massacred tens of thousands of us in 1648-49; we upset the Crusaders, who on their way to liberate the Holy Land, were so upset at Jews that they slaughtered untold numbers of us. We upset, for centuries, a Roman Catholic Church that did its best to define our relationship through Inquisitions. And we upset the arch-enemy of the church, Martin Luther, who in his call to burn the synagogues and the Jews within them, showed an admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.
It is because we became so upset over upsetting you, dear world, that we decided to leave you - in a manner of speaking - and establish a Jewish State. The reasoning was that living in close contact with you, as resident-strangers in the various countries that comprise you, we upset you, irritate you, and disturb you. What better notion, then, than to leave you and thus love you - and have you love us? And so we decided to come home, to the same homeland from which we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman world that, apparently, we also upset. (Emphasis mine)
Alas, dear world, it appears that you are hard to please. Having left you and your Pogroms and Inquisitions and Crusades and Holocausts, having taken our leave of the general world to live alone in our own little state, we continue to upset you.
You are upset that we repress the Palestinians. You are deeply angered over the fact that we do not give up the lands of 1967, which are clearly the obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Moscow is upset and Washington is upset. The Arabs are upset and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset. (Emphasis mine)
Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel. In 1920, 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede peace between Jews and Arabs. Indeed, there was no Jewish State to upset anybody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians slaughtered hundreds of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron. Indeed, 67 Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron in 1929.
Dear world, why did the Arabs - the Palestinians - massacre 67 Jews in one day in 1929? Could it have been their anger over Israeli aggression in 1967? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in Arab riots in 1936-39? Was it because of Arab upset over 1967? And when you, World, proposed a U.N. Partition Plan in 1947 that would have created a Palestinian State alongside a tiny Israel and the Arabs cried and went to war and killed 6,000 Jews - was that upset stomach caused by the aggression of 1967? And, by the way, dear world, why did we not hear your cry of upset then? (Emphasis mine)
The Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs and stones are part of the same people who - when they had all the territories they now demand be given them for their state - attempted to drive the Jewish State into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same hate, the same cry of "idbah-al-yahud" - "Slaughter the Jews!" that we hear and see today, were seen and heard then. The same people, the same dream - destroy Israel. (Emphasis mine)
What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today - but we should not "repress" them. Dear world, you stood by the Holocaust and you stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war that the Arab League proudly compared to the Mongol massacres. You stood by in 1967 as Nasser, wildly cheered by wild mobs in every Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. And you would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction. (Emphasis mine)
And since we know that the Arabs-Palestinians daily dream of that extinction, we will do everything possible to remain alive in our own land. If that bothers you, dear world, well - think of how many times in the past you bothered us.
In any event, dear world, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less.
