Holocaust remembrance organizations issued a joint call on Wednesday to prevent repeated comparisons between Nazis and certain elements in Israel. A number of political figures have recently compared other political figures in Israel to the Nazis, including protest leader Shema Bressler, who said, "It is forbidden to talk to Nazis – Jews or non-Jews," and later apologized for her remarks.
The organizations that signed the letter are Yad Vashem, Amech, the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, Massuah, Yad Mordechai Massuah Museum of Resurrection, Beit Terezin, Kiddush Hashem Archives, Shem Olam International Center for Holocaust Remembrance, Nir Galim House of Testimony and the Ivschutz-Haifa Institute for Holocaust Studies.
Shikma Bressler, in Kaplan, Photo: Gideon Markowitz
"We, the undersigned, Jewish and Israeli organizations engaged in commemorating the Holocaust and assisting its survivors, express our strong opposition to the direct comparison heard from right and left between elements of the Jewish people and the State of Israel and their actions and the Nazis and the Holocaust," the organizations began their letter.
They added: "A person who publicly expresses his opposition to the political views of certain citizens, by wishing for their deaths and sympathizing with the murder of Jews from various exiles by the Nazis, thereby joins the worst of our enemies. A person who seeks to defend democracy and claims that a Nazi regime is being created here does not distinguish between a weighty constitutional debate and the statement that there is a political camp in Israel that wants to murder tens of millions of people."
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"In organizations, a person who criticizes the obscene racism that is seen and heard in our places, and compares it to Nazism, does not distinguish between different degrees of evil, between wrongful harassment of any person and Auschwitz. We stand for the values set forth in the Declaration of Independence. The significance of the Holocaust for our generation includes both a commitment to the existence of the Jewish people and its heritage and to the existence of the State of Israel, a strong belief in the value of human life, its dignity and equality, and adherence to the democratic regime. On the basis of these values, we believe that comparisons of the kind we have mentioned have no place in Israeli public life."
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