They might deny COVID-19 exists, then play it down, and eventually blame 5G and Jewish people for the pandemic.

 

Germany’s Anti-vaccination History Is Riddled With Anti-Semitism

Jewish people were blamed for spreading disease, and considered expendable victims.

 

 

Last year, I felt lucky to be an American in Germany. The government carried out a comprehensive public-health response, and for the most part, people wore masks in public. More recently, COVID-19 cases have surged here, with new infections reaching a single-day zenith in late March. Germany has lagged behind the United States and the United Kingdom in vaccination efforts, and German public-health regulators have restricted use of the AstraZeneca vaccine to people over 60, after seven cases of rare cerebral blood clots. Key public-health measures, particularly lockdowns and vaccination, have been divisive. Among some people, even the magnitude of the virus’s infectious threat has been in question.

Over the past year, Germany’s sprawling anti-lockdown movement has brought together a disquieting alliance of ordinary citizens, both left- and right-leaning, and extremists who see the pandemic response as part of a wider conspiracy. In August, nearly 40,000 protesters gathered in my neighborhood to oppose the government’s public-health measures, including the closure of stores and mask mandates. It was unnerving to hear German chants of “Fascism in the guise of health” from my window, and all the more given that the same day, a subgroup of those protesters charged Parliament. In a moment presaging the U.S. Capitol insurrection, 400 German protesters, including a group carrying the Reichsflagge, emblematic of the Nazi regime, rushed past police and reached the building’s stairs. Germany is riddled with QAnon adherents, some of whom are anti-vaccination, and some people are using this pandemic to articulate their anti-Semitic beliefs. They might deny COVID-19 exists, then play it down, and eventually blame 5G and Jewish people for the pandemic. In Bavaria, vaccine skeptics now use messages such as “Vaccination makes you free,” an allusion to “Work makes you free,” a horrific maxim of Nazi concentration camps.

Like the United States, Germany has a thriving anti-vaccination movement, and here it has encompassed conspiracy theorists, left-leaning spiritualists, and the far right. These last ties are the most troubling. In German-speaking lands, anti-science sentiment, right-wing politics, and racism have been entwined since even before Jews were accused of spreading the bubonic plague in the 14th century. These movements illustrate a grim truth: In both the past and the present, anti-science sentiments are inextricably tangled with racial prejudice.

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Anti-vaccine movements are as old as vaccines, the scholar Jonathan M. Berman notes in his book, Anti-vaxxers, and what is striking, according to the author, is that early opponents at the turn of the 18th century believed that vaccination was “a foreign assault on traditional order.” 

But beliefs linking anti-science sentiment and anti-Semitism were already deeply set. During the plague outbreak of 1712 and 1713, for instance, the city of Hamburg initiated public-health measures including forbidding Jews from entering or leaving the city, Philipp Osten, the director of Hamburg’s Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine, told me. By the time cholera emerged in the 19th century, sickening thousands of people in the city within a matter of months, these antiquated ideas had taken on a new form.

 

 READ ENTIRE ARTICLE:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/05/anti-vaccination-germany-anti-semitism/618777/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20210504&silverid=%25%25RECIPIENT_ID%25%25&utm_term=The%20Atlantic%20Daily

" Mi K'Amcha Yisroel" Does Not Include Gross Stupidity! There is no reason and no justification for the victims’ deaths. There is no good that came from their deaths. No lesson for the collective Jewish people. No celestial or cosmic redemption to be earned from their loss. They should be alive.

 

Stop justifying the 45 deaths on Mount Meron!  To The "Divrei Chizuk" Crowd - There Is No Chizuk From This Tragedy!

 

There is no reason and no justification for the victims’ deaths. There is no good that came from their deaths. No lesson for the collective Jewish people.

MOURNERS AT the funeral of Abraham Ambon, one of the victims of the Meron tragedy, where 45 people were crushed to death and about 150 injured, during a Lag Ba’omer mass event.

 My daughter called me before the Sabbath in terrible pain. Beyond trying to process the deaths of religious Jews at Mount Meron on Lag Ba’omer, she was in an argument on a chat group with a woman who said that the deaths had a reason.

It turns out, this woman prophesied, that God sent these 45 men to their deaths in order to teach the rest of us Jews a lesson. God hates the current state of Jewish disunity, of divisions within the community, the political polarization of the State of Israel. So he sent this tragedy as a wake-up call to the rest of us Jews.

 

I should mention that the woman in question – Orthodox-Jewish and religious herself – wrote all this while the bodies had not even been buried. My daughter told me the woman’s comments made her sick. I told her they made me want to puke as well.

 

That was only the beginning. Over the next few days I would read countless media columnists who understood the deaths of 45 haredim in other ways. Some said, in essence, that the haredim had it coming, as they so often flaunt the police and the rules. Forty-five dead. That’ll show ’em. Others said that this just proves that the haredim, who didn’t abide by the rules of the coronavirus, have now learned that self-governance comes with a price.

 

Left unsaid through all this stomach-turning justification for the mass deaths of 45 completely innocent people was that they were parents, husbands and children of many people who loved them, even if those who were justifying their deaths felt nothing but contempt for their lives.

 

It is true that Mount Meron was a turning point in Israeli history. Not because of how many people died. That was shocking and horrible beyond words, a truly unspeakable tragedy. Rather, what made it a turning point was that it was the first time where I actually witnessed the Jewish community trivializing the deaths of fellow Jews with all kinds of blabber and the most insensitive nonsense, with no price being paid on the part of those uttering this garbage.

 

Imagine if someone had written about the Holocaust, “Sure, six million is a terrible price. But it serves them right. They should have known to be Zionists and immigrate to Palestine. Did two thousand years of European antisemitism teach them nothing?” Or if someone had written of the 11 martyred Israeli athletes in Munich, “Truly, a terrible tragedy. But what did they expect returning to Germany just 25 years after the Holocaust?”

 

Let’s at least agree that any columnist writing such things would probably have experienced the most severe censure. But telling 45 ultra-Orthodox Jews that they should have known better than to go to a massive outdoor religious gathering somehow became acceptable, even as the grief-stricken families were scrambling just to bury their loved ones before the Sabbath.

 

SO, IN case it’s not clear, let me be absolutely clear.

 

What happened in Meron was one of the worst tragedies to befall the Jewish people since the Holocaust. It is an unmitigated tragedy.

 

There is no reason and no justification for the victims’ deaths. There is no good that came from their deaths. No lesson for the collective Jewish people. No celestial or cosmic redemption to be earned from their loss. They should be alive.

 

We mourn, along with their families and the entire House of Israel. I am so sorry for their families. The pain must be beyond excruciating. May none of us ever know any such tragedy, God forbid.

 

The fact that there should have been greater police oversight? The fact that the haredim need more civic rules by which their gatherings should be governed? There will be time for all of those investigations and ruminations. They are, of course, necessary and essential. But not now. Not during the shiva. Let the families grieve without our insensitive commentary.

 

ELEVEN YEARS ago I visited Haiti with my daughter Mushki just days after the earthquake that decimated the island and killed hundreds of thousands of people. We brought food and supplies with a Christian relief organization. I witnessed suffering beyond human imagination. The stench of death was quite literally all around us.

 

When I returned, I addressed, in a public speech, the question of why a good God allows the innocent to suffer.

 

I was amazed when an observant Jew approached me to say that the people of Haiti were not innocent, immersed as they are in idol worship.

 

“Surely you don’t mean to say that the morgue filled with the babies that I witnessed, the stench so bad that I was gagging, deserved to die? Or that the discarded bodies I saw being eaten by dogs deserved their fate?” I asked.

 

His response: The people of Haiti as a whole were being punished. A similar sentiment had been voiced at the time by the Rev. Pat Robertson on The 700 Club.

 

I have always been puzzled as to why many religious people enjoy portraying God as executioner-in-chief and are always finding reasons to justify human suffering.

 

The Holocaust produced two camps of Jews. Many decided that the Jews had been punished for intermarriage and wanting to be secular. But others had a much more Jewish response. They rejected any theological justification or self-blame and set to work even harder toward the creation of a Jewish state, where Jews would find refuge and build an army to prevent another genocide.

 

The appropriate response to death is always life. And the Jewish response to suffering is to demand that God put an end to it. The very name “Israel” translates as “He who wrestles with God.” We argue with God over the loss of every innocent human life. We never justify suffering.

 

So many people search for a reason why people die. They want to redeem tragedy by giving it meaning. Suffering ennobles the spirit, they say. It makes you more mature. It helps you focus on what’s important in life.

 

I would argue that suffering has no purpose, no redeeming qualities, and any attempts to infuse it with rich significance are deeply immoral.

 

Of course, suffering can lead ultimately to a positive outcome. The rich man who had contempt for the poor and suddenly goes bankrupt can become more empathetic when he himself struggles. The arrogant executive who treats his subordinates poorly can soften when he is told that he, God forbid, has a challenging health issue.

 

But does it have to come about this way? Is suffering the only way to learn goodness?

 

Jewish values maintain that there is no good that comes from suffering that could not have come through a more blessed means. Some people win the lottery and are so humbled that they dedicate a huge portion to charity. A rock star like Bono becomes rich and famous and consecrates his celebrity to the relief of African poverty.

 

Yes, the Holocaust led directly to the creation of the State of Israel. But there are plenty of nations that came into existence without being preceded by gas chambers.

 

Here is another way that Jewish values are so strongly distinguished from other value systems. Many religions believe that suffering is redemptive. In Christianity, the suffering servant, the crucified Christ, brings atonement for the sins of humankind through his own torment. The message: No suffering, no redemption. Someone has to die so that the sins of mankind are erased.

 

Suffering is therefore extolled in the New Testament. Paul even made suffering an obligation, encouraging the fledgling Christians to “share in suffering like a good soldier of Yoshka”

 

But Judaism, in prophesying a perfect messianic future where there is no death or pain, ultimately rejects the suffering-is-redemptive narrative. Suffering isn’t a blessing; it’s a curse.

 

Jews are obligated to alleviate all human misery. Suffering leaves you bitter rather than blessed, scarred rather than humble. Few endure suffering without serious and lasting trauma. Suffering leads to a tortured spirit and a pessimistic outlook. It scars our psyches and creates a cynical consciousness, devoid and bereft of hope.

 

Suffering causes us to dig out the insincerity in the hearts of our fellows and to be envious of other people’s happiness. If individuals do become better people as a result of their suffering, it is despite the fact that they suffered, not because of it. Ennoblement of character comes through triumph over suffering rather than its endurance.

 

Speak to Holocaust survivors and ask them what they gathered from their suffering, aside from loneliness, heartbreak and outrage. To be sure, they also learned the value of life and the sublime quality of human companionship. But these lessons, this depth, could easily have been learned through life-affirming experiences that do not leave all of one’s relatives as ash.

 

I believe that my parents’ divorce drove me to a deeper appreciation of family and a greater embrace of religion. Yet I know people who have led completely privileged lives and have far deeper philosophies of life than I have, and are even more devoted to their religion than I am. And they have the advantage of not being bitter, cynical or pessimistic the way children of divorce can sometimes be because of the pain of early childhood.

 

Whatever good we as individuals or the world in general receive from suffering can be brought about in a painless, joyful manner. And it behooves people of faiths especially to once and for all cease justifying the death of innocents and instead rush to comfort and aid the survivors.

 

The Meron 45 are sorely missed. May their memory be an unmitigated blessing.

 

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/stop-justifying-the-45-deaths-on-mount-meron-opinion-667115?_ga=2.236590407.793362501.1619991941-1616753860.1607604451&utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Stop+justifying+the+45+deaths+on+Mount+Meron&utm_campaign=May+4%2C+2021+Day&vgo_ee=Jn367jKILnpErXAAhCpdDovy7T5YEJ8ohjC9vauJg30%3D

The Ingrates Blame the State They Do Not Recognize , but Milk it For Every Last Dollar They Can Squeeze Out Of The Government! But those now asking the state and the police to take over at Meron, those now questioning, openly and not-so-openly, their leaders’ wisdom and their community’s ethos of separation, will apply that lesson to other things in the future.

 

After Meron calamity, Haredim question the price of their own autonomy

 

Ultra-Orthodox media figures are calling for a commission of inquiry, and lashing the state for letting their community endanger itself

An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man weeps at a cemetery in Bnei Brak, during the funeral of one of the victims of the Meron crush on April 30, 202

 

The shock of Friday’s catastrophe at Mount Meron is still raw. The graves of the victims, including the children killed in the crush, are still fresh. Yet the debate over what it all means for the country and for Haredi society has already begun.

A few overpowering facts, not least that nearly all the victims were Haredi, are driving an unusual new introspection, and leading the major media outlets of the community to turn against one of its characteristic traits: its longstanding and much-criticized “autonomy” from the Israeli state.

Haredi Israelis are simultaneously part of and apart from broader Israeli society. Making up as much as 12 percent of the Israeli population, the community is not uniform; different sects and subcultures interact in very different ways with the state and with other subgroups. While the “autonomy,” as Israelis often refer to the phenomenon, does not encompass all Haredim, it encompasses enough of the community to be — so growing numbers of Haredim now believe — a serious problem.

One sees the autonomy in studies of Israel’s cash economy that point to mass tax evasion in the Haredi community; in routine clashes with police in parts of Mea Shearim, Beit Shemesh, and other places; in the refusal to take part in national service; in school networks that refuse to teach the basic curriculum taught in non-Haredi schools; and, most recently, in the refusal of many Hasidic sects over the past year to obey pandemic lockdowns.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews gather at the gravesite of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai at Mount Meron in northern Israel on April 29, 2021, as they celebrate the Jewish holiday of Lag B’Omer.

 

It is a community that talks about itself in the language of weakness, always a street scuffle or political squabble away from talk of “decrees,” “persecution,” and “antisemitism.” Proposals for welfare cuts or calls to introduce more math education in their schools are described in Haredi media in terms borrowed from czarist oppression in Eastern Europe.

That rhetoric of weakness and victimhood has a purpose: to cloak or perhaps to justify the opposite reality. As a group, Haredim are not weak. They are powerful enough to constantly expand and defend their separate school systems, to found towns and neighborhoods for their communities, to maintain a kind of self-rule that forces Israeli politicians to literally beg Haredi rabbinic leaders — usually unsuccessfully — to adhere to coronavirus restrictions.

The story of the Meron disaster cannot be divorced from this larger story of Haredi autonomy, from the Haredi habit of establishing facts on the ground that demonstrate their strength and independence, and then crying “persecution” when those steps are challenged.

The strange meaning of ‘spontaneous’

In the two days that have passed since the disaster, investigators and journalists have uncovered a despairingly long litany of warnings from past years about the safety problems at the Meron site. State comptroller reports, police site analyses, dire admonitions by earnest safety officials in Knesset hearings — all fell on deaf ears.

These records reveal that if the Mount Meron site had hosted any other kind of event — a rock concert or a political rally — then police safety regulations would have limited attendance to roughly 15,000 people. Friday’s event saw more than 100,000 in attendance.

Men covered with prayer shawls at Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai’s grave in Meron. October 11, 2017 (David Cohen/ Flash90/ File)

 

They reveal, too, that Israeli officials simply do not believe it is possible to demand such limitations from the Haredi community.

As one former senior cop told the Yedioth Ahronoth daily over the weekend, “If a safety engineer from the police, in their last inspection of the site before the commemoration, would have tried to shutter the Toldot Aharon courtyard [where the disaster occurred] — do you believe that decision would have been enforced? … Not even the chief of police can do that. If someone tries, that’s their last job in the police.”

Haredi political parties, acting at the behest of Haredi religious leaders, would have made sure of it.

As journalist Nadav Eyal noted in his Yedioth Ahronoth column on Sunday, the Meron festival was officially classified by the police as a “spontaneous religious event.” It’s a preposterous term for the gathering. It’s not just that the Lag B’Omer festival takes place in highly non-spontaneous fashion on a known holiday (i.e., Lag B’Omer) but it also constitutes the largest annual religious gathering in the country.

Months of planning go into it. Its many different lots and bonfire ceremonies and musical performances are carefully divvied up among the competing sects and religious endowments that run the pilgrimage.

 

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews celebrate the lighting of a bonfire during celebrations of the Jewish holiday of Lag B’Omer on Mt. Meron in northern Israel on April 29, 2021.

 

The government spends a small fortune each year on stages, grandstands and chartered buses from Haredi towns. And each year, a half-dozen government agencies all try to take credit.

So when police label the event “spontaneous,” they do not mean that it is literally spontaneous. It is a way to acknowledge that the police have no control over the event, that they could not impose attendance caps or infrastructure standards even if legally required to.

On Thursday, hours before the disaster, Interior Minister Aryeh Deri bragged to the Haredi radio station Kol Hai that he had successfully prevented Health Ministry officials from limiting the number of attendees over coronavirus fears. Deri lamented that the professional echelon at the ministry did not grasp that attendees would be protected by the spiritual influence of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, the second-century sage commemorated at the Meron festival.

Shas party head Aryeh Deri casts his vote in the general elections in Jerusalem on March 23, 2021. 

 

“The government clerks don’t understand,” he said. “This is a holy day, and the largest gathering of Jews [each year].” Bad things, he suggested, don’t happen to Jews on religious pilgrimage: “One should trust in Rabbi Shimon in times of distress.”

Even as he bragged of his and the Haredi community’s political power, he then deployed, instinctively, the rhetoric of victimhood. He urged listeners “to pray for the world of Torah and for Judaism, which are in danger. They’re in great danger.”

An end to the autonomy?

Children were crushed to death at Meron. Hardened paramedics wept on television. When cellular networks on the mountain went down, fearful families were reduced to sharing photographs of their missing loved ones on social media in a desperate attempt to make contact. One rescuer described to reporters the moment he had to yell at a tormented colleague to stop trying to resuscitate a child: “It was hopeless, and we had to try to resuscitate others.”

Rescue forces and police at the scene after a mass fatality scene during the celebrations of the Jewish holiday of Lag B’Omer on Mount Meron, in northern Israel on April 30, 2021. 

 

No complaint from secular Israel could make Haredi society question the strange autonomous bubble it had constructed as a cultural defense against the state’s modernizing influence, nor the power of the Haredi rabbis and their courts, whose egos and squabbles had divided the holy site into disconnected courtyards and helped drive Friday’s deadly chaos. But the shattering images from Meron cut through the glib self-assurance and silenced, at least for the moment, any boasts about Haredi self-rule.

And as the confident voices dwindled into shocked silence, other voices came to the fore, cries of angry self-critique that are rarely heard from the mainstream of Haredi society.

The voices all carried a single message: The state’s kowtowing to our leaders has brought this disaster upon us.

A hat at the scene of a deadly crush during the Jewish holiday of Lag B’Omer on Mt. Meron, in northern Israel on April 30, 2021

 

Yossi Elituv, editor of Mishpacha, the largest-circulation Haredi weekly, urged his followers not to focus only on police errors or lack of government oversight.

“Our community also has a duty to learn lessons,” he wrote on Friday. The first lesson: That the state must step in and end the chaos. “Our first and immediate task is to free the mountain from the control of the [religious] endowments…. The state needs to establish a professional authority to run the site….Take the mountain away from the endowments and confer on it the status of the Western Wall, with zero tolerance for rule-breaking.”

On Sunday morning, Elituv followed up with a four-word tweet: “State investigative committee, now!”

Moty Weinstock, an editor at the Haredi weekly Bakehilla, reached the same conclusion.

“Any solution at Meron that amounts to less than bringing order to the entire mountain, canceling the religious endowments and dismantling all the areas designated [to specific sects] will ensure the horrifying images come back,” he declared.

On social media, in other newspapers, including the Hasidic mainstay daily Hamevaser, and in countless media interviews, Haredi Israelis asked the same questions and leveled the same complaints.

Top row (L-R): Menahem Zakbah, Simcha Diskind, Shraga Gestetner, Shimon Matalon; 2nd row (L-R): Moshe Natan Neta Englard, Yehoshua Englard, Yosef David Elhadad, Moshe Mordechai Elhadad; 3rd row (L-R): Haim Seler, Yedidia Hayut, Daniel (Donny) Morris, Nahman Kirshbaum; 4th row (L-R): Abraham Daniel Ambon; Yedidya Fogel, Yisrael Anakvah, Moshe Ben Shalom

 

A community that had convinced itself it could flout the demands of state authorities has suddenly and with growing confidence and earnestness begun to cry out for “order” and “authority,” to demand that the state impose its control, the rabbinic courts’ pride and vanity be damned.

New assumptions

Contrary to its most basic claim about itself, Haredi Judaism is neither rigid nor unchanging. New ideas filter in, old ones are reinterpreted. Scholars of Haredi life speak of profound changes across a broad spectrum of cultural and social mores, from a growing number of Haredim in higher education, in the workforce and in the military to new roles for women and new political loyalties that are collectively driving the community into ever deeper integration with mainstream Israeli society.

Yet change requires one underlying condition: It must happen quietly. Assumptions shift unacknowledged, new practices are treated as old and commonplace.

Take Haredi Zionism as an example. Ten years ago, the Shas party formally declared itself a Zionist party and joined the World Zionist Organization. But the declaration was whispered, not shouted. Today, no Shas voter would believe that until a decade ago the party would not officially call itself Zionist and had avoided joining Zionist institutions.

It’s the same story on the Ashkenazi side. Twenty years ago, Ashkenazi Haredim in Israel refused to acknowledge the ceremonies conducted at military cemeteries on Memorial Day. The military rituals were borrowed from other nations, they complained. Jews must commemorate in their own ancient ways. Then, over the course of the past decade, without fuss or fanfare or explicit acknowledgment of any kind, United Torah Judaism politicians have taken to officiating at those very ceremonies as official representatives of the Israeli government, standing alongside pants-clad female soldiers and laying wreaths at concrete memorials.

Haredi society can change with the times, as long as it does not admit the change aloud.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews wearing prayer shawls gather next to a bonfire, as they take part in prayers next to the grave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai during Lag B’Omer celebrations at Mt. Meron in northern Israel, early Thursday, May 10, 2012

 

In 2018, just after he took part in that year’s Lag B’Omer pilgrimage to Meron, Haredi journalist Aryeh Erlich tweeted his concerns about a certain narrow walkway at the site: “The narrow exit path that leads from the bonfire ceremony of the Toldot Aharon [Hasidic sect] creates a human bottleneck and terrible shoving, to the point of an immediate danger of being crushed. And it’s the only exit…. They must not hold the bonfire at that site again before they open a wide and well-marked exit.”

Erlich’s tweet went viral on Friday, exactly three years too late.

In an interview Sunday with the Tel Aviv-area radio station 103 FM about the disaster he predicted so precisely, Erlich rejected any blame directed at Haredi society for the deaths.

“How can you blame the Haredi public?” he demanded. The Meron pilgrimage “is a tradition that’s been going on for 550 years.”

Then who was to blame? “It’s the police that approve the event. There are clear regulations. No event can take place without a safety officer, a policeman who signs off on it and approves it, and that’s what happened at Meron.”

There’s a “sovereign,” he added. That sovereign “decided to ignore [the danger], chose shoddy improvisation instead, and failed to impose safety standards. The Haredi political parties are victims here; it’s not serious for the police to now say that because of [the Haredi parties] they didn’t do what they were supposed to do. The police are supposed to enforce the law.”

Israeli rescue forces and police at a mass fatality scene during celebrations of the Jewish holiday of Lag B’Oomer on Mt. Meron, in northern Israel on April 30, 2021. 

 

It is a pivot in expectations that by its very denial of Haredi culpability signals the shift away from Haredi autonomy. Erlich couches his critique as a defense of Haredi political leaders. But even here, with the blame directed exclusively at the Israel Police, the argument is the same: The police no longer have the right to ignore safety rules merely because Haredi religious sects demand it. How dare the state risk the lives of its Haredi citizens by allowing Haredi autonomy to trump their safety?

The catastrophe at Meron will not lead any in the community to question other elements of its separate existence, such as its independent school system. Nothing so fundamental will change from a single tragedy.

But those now asking the state and the police to take over at Meron, those now questioning, openly and not-so-openly, their leaders’ wisdom and their community’s ethos of separation, will apply that lesson to other things in the future.

 

https://www.timesofisrael.com/after-meron-calamity-haredim-question-the-price-of-their-own-autonomy/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2021-05-03&utm_medium=email

A Fair Description of the Many Factors Leading up to the Mt. Meron Tragedy!

 

Mount Meron, following a fatal crowd crush during the celebration of the Jewish holiday of Lag B'Omer, April 30, 2021.

 

Lag B’Omer Tragedy 2021

Who’s responsible for the Meron disaster?

No single factor is to blame. A perfect storm of elements simultaneously came together, exposing a system filled with flaws—many of them cultural in nature.

 Israel’s largest religious festival turned into its largest peacetime tragedy late Thursday night, as 45 celebrants were crushed to death, and dozens more were injured, under the feet of fellow worshippers in a horrific stampede at Mount Meron.

The annual Lag B’Omer pilgrimage commemorating the teachings of one of Judaism’s greatest mystics, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, has been marked for centuries by festive music and bonfires. The bonfires symbolize the great spiritual light that his teachings have brought to the world, as well as the souls’ yearning to connect to their Creator. This year, however, awe-inspiring light turned to unthinkable darkness.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for a national day of mourning on Sunday, as the last of those killed were laid to rest. Thousands participated on Friday in blood drives for those receiving emergency medical treatment.

And while a majority of pilgrims were members of Israel’s various Orthodox sects, Israelis from all sectors are attempting to expose the causes of a preventable tragedy.

Yet the simple truth is that no single factor caused the Meron disaster. Rather, a perfect storm of elements simultaneously came together, exposing a system filled with flaws—many of them cultural in nature. The event should open up a period of national reckoning. Whether an honest reckoning will take place—one marked by constructive and unifying measures—will require Israelis to look deep down into their own behavior.

A holy gathering?

A trip to Meron on Lag B’Omer simultaneously reveals some of the best and some of the worst of Israeli society. Commemorating the life and teachings of a great sage, hundreds of thousands converge on the tomb of Bar Yochai, known also by the anacronym “Rashbi.” Pilgrims enjoy Chassidic music. Thousands can be seen reciting psalms, followed by early sunrise prayers.

Just moments before the disaster, tens of thousands of worshippers united in prayer and song—chanting one of Maimonides’s 13 “Principles of Faith,” expressing fervent belief in the coming of a redeemer and a Messianic era.

Despite their staunch religious observance, Orthodox sects have largely angered other sectors of Israel’s public for years. Men refuse compulsory army service. Many opt to study in state-funded learning institutions, rather than work and take on their share of the tax burden. Meanwhile, Orthodox groups hold monopolies on key religious services and operate them in ways that are often viewed as corrupt.

While many of Israel’s Orthodox truly represent a beautiful blend of advanced religious observance within a modern state, that beauty is often marred by those who express a lack of appreciation for individuals and communities with lesser religious observance. As this tragedy has struck at the heart of their own community, it may be time for greater humility on their part.

Social distancing

Not all pilgrims to Meron are strictly Orthodox. For many, the event is simply the largest party of the year and the place to be on Lag B’Omer. Among both worshippers and party-goers, some of the less-pleasant elements of Israeli culture are exposed, including a tendency to crowd and push.

Entry into the tomb of Rashbi is reserved only for the bravest few, who must literally fight their way through throngs to reach the gravestone. The experience is highlighted by sweat, anxiety, intense heat and shortness of breath.

The only struggle greater than the one to reach the tomb is the struggle to leave. With thousands pushing to reach the same space, those who offered their momentary prayers at the gravestone must then fight against the immense tide to find the exit.

Most pilgrims are satisfied to remain outside the small tomb. Yet the same culture of pushiness can be found throughout the festival.

While Israelis locked down throughout much of a tragic year—and donned masks—they refuse, as a rule, to social distance; doing so is simply not part of the Israeli DNA.

Israelis have little awareness of, let alone respect for, other people’s personal space, pandemic or not. This cultural phenomenon is evident in nearly every aspect of Israeli society.

Giving one another a little breathing room not only could relieve much of Israel’s collective anxiety. In the case of the Meron tragedy, honoring personal space would likely have saved lives.

‘Derech eretz kadma l’Torah’

There is a famous Hebrew expression that “the ways of one’s behavior comes before Torah.” Such respect is simply not practiced by many Israeli sectors. Roadsides and parks are sadly littered with garbage. Cities literally employ hundreds of sanitation workers to clean up the trash left all over by Israelis. Israel’s water sources and skies are similarly polluted.

During Lag B’Omer, plastic bottles and garbage are strewn everywhere. Makeshift bathrooms overflow. The sight is completely inconsistent with that of a holy gathering. Cleanup after the festival is a massive undertaking. During the festival, streets become dirty, sticky and wet. In this case, wet and slippery grounds reportedly contributed to the tragic loss of footing that led to people in an incontrollable crowd toppling onto one another.

The lack of respect for the land is a major cultural phenomenon that simply must be corrected and can only be done as part of a well-organized and consistent educational campaign over the course of many years.

Insufficient infrastructure

Bringing hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to Meron is a major logistical undertaking. Nearly every bus in the country is called into action. Thousands of police officers close off roads to private vehicles from miles away to allow for the buses to safely and smoothly enter and exit the site. Thousands of more first-responders are dispatched and onhand.

Still, the site itself is a logistical nightmare. The small town is completely unequipped to handle the throngs of foot traffic. Makeshift bleachers and passageways stand little chance of properly accommodating the crowds. For the Lag B’Omer festival to continue moving forward, serious efforts must be taken to completely renovate the town, build permanent concert facilities and establish safe passageways for pilgrims, as well as for law enforcement and emergency responders.

Mistrust of police

The Israel Police is not generally respected, as such departments are in other countries. And most citizens do not necessarily believe that the police are working to keep them safe.

While police officers go out of their way year after year to facilitate the mega-Lag B’Omer event, eyewitnesses allege that at the moment of the disaster, police had blocked off a main pedestrian artery following a break in the all-night concerts and forcibly directed people towards a narrow, slanted and slippery aluminum-floored artery that led down to a metal staircase.

Further, reports suggest that police just beyond the bottom of the staircase began limiting the flow of pedestrians out, causing a dangerous bottleneck. A formal inquiry will likely reveal that poor police decision-making at the precise spot of the tragedy was a contributing factor, and possibly the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.

It should be noted and applauded that once it became clear that people were injured, police and other rescue personnel acted heroically to stop and control the flow of people, and extricate those hurt as quickly as possible. Sadly, under the pile were dozens of dead bodies.

For the Orthodox sectors, whose mistrust of police is already among the highest of all sectors of Israeli society, the Meron disaster threatens to increase wariness, unless a significant effort is made by all sides to repair perceptions.

Disjointed organization

The Lag B’Omer festival is jointly administered and organized by the Religious Affairs Ministry’s National Center for the Protection of Holy Places, along with local authorities, police and the leadership of several Orthodox Jewish sects. As is the case with many other aspects of Israeli society, the annual operation is based on a system of compromises and outdated precedents meant to balance the interests of groups with varying agendas.

Israeli politics functions largely the same way. The disaster at Meron in many ways reflects the sad state of Israeli governance, with sectoral fights around protecting and destroying a status quo that ultimately fails to appropriately serve collective interests.

A decision had been made by a Netanyahu-led government in 2011 to nationalize control of the festival. Ultimately, Israel’s Supreme Court canceled the government ruling and has refused to rule on the issue since then, leaving a dangerous status quo in place.

Public Security Minister Amir Ohana suggested that he would take upon himself responsibility for the incident but said that “responsibility does not mean blame,” adding that “the disaster that happened this year could have happened any other year.”

Northern District Commander Shimon Lavi similarly accepted responsibility for the disaster and vowed to cooperate fully with a formal inquiry into the disaster.

COVID not to blame

Fanning the flames of an already difficult situation, nearly all Israeli media have been reporting that the Meron festivities proceeded despite recommendations by the Health Ministry that limits be placed on the number of participants at the outdoor event in order to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Throughout the past year, the Israeli press continuously demonized Orthodox Jews for spreading the virus. This is the same press that repeatedly validated the right of left-wing political protesters to gather in the tens of thousands, week in and week out during lockdowns, to challenge Netanyahu’s tenure.

Not everything has to do with coronavirus, however. This disaster was in no way connected to the pandemic or the Health Ministry.

Following a year of darkness and tragedy with thousands dead from coronavirus, spiritual light was seemingly needed more than ever, especially among religious communities who suffered in larger numbers than other sectors of society—mostly due to large families living in close quarters.

More needs to be done to heal the collective wounds of the pandemic. Compassion for those who have suffered both from the pandemic and now in Meron is a good place to start.

A moment for self-reckoning

Ultimately, those who died just outside the tomb of one of Judaism’s greatest sages were trampled under the feet of their fellow Jewish worshippers.

Dozens of families have been struck by a horrific and preventable tragedy. Hundreds more must now live with the permanently embedded memory that they themselves stomped on their fellow Jews—as the sheer momentum of the crowd shoved them forward. Those individuals were fortunate that they, too, did not lose their footing, as had they done so, they may have suffered the same fate as those below them.

Full efforts should be taken to properly and officially evaluate all of the causes of the Meron disaster. Significant money should be invested to correct the defects and develop new and safe infrastructure at Rashbi’s tomb. With proper planning, coordination, and most importantly, cooperation between all sectors, the Lag B’Omer celebration should quickly and safely resume better than ever, and channel the bright spiritual light that all of Israel needs.

On Saturday night, at the Western Wall, worshippers sang together: “Our brothers, the whole house of Israel, who are in distress and captivity, who wander over sea and over land; may God have mercy on them, and bring them from distress to comfort, from darkness to light, from slavery to redemption, now, swiftly, and soon.”

The Lag B’Omer tragedy should make the entire country look inward. The disaster is a reflection of many of the elements of our society that have been exposed in recent years. All sectors need to reflect on what has happened, not just in Meron, but among the entire Jewish nation, and collectively bear the brunt of responsibility.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/whos-responsible-for-the-meron-disaster/?utm_source=The+Daily+Syndicate&utm_campaign=cde5902664-Daily+Syndicate+4-25-21+%28new%29_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8583953730-cde5902664-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D&ct=t%28Daily+Syndicate+4-25-21+%28new%29_COPY_01%29

אתה לא צריך להיות פיזיקאי כדי לדעת שאתה לא יכול להכניס 100,000 אנשים למרחב שיכול להכיל רק 10,000 איש מקסימום------For more than a decade there have been concerns and warnings that the religious site on Mount Meron in northern Israel was not equipped to handle tens of thousands of pilgrims. In 2008 and 2011, reports by the state comptroller at the time warned of the potential for calamity there.

 שוב, הטיפשים בהנהגה מעמידים את חסידיהם בדרך המוות

Israel Mourns After a Religious Festival Turns Into Disaster

There were warnings for years that the venue on Mount Meron, where 45 people died in a stampede, could not handle tens of thousands of pilgrims.

 

Israeli security officials and rescuers carrying the bodies of victims who died during a festival on Mount Meron in northern Israel on Friday.Credit...Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press

JERUSALEM — As Israelis mourned on Friday the 45 people trampled to death during a pilgrimage that drew tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews, questions were already arising about poor planning and possible negligence.

For more than a decade there have been concerns and warnings that the religious site on Mount Meron in northern Israel was not equipped to handle tens of thousands of pilgrims. In 2008 and 2011, reports by the state comptroller at the time warned of the potential for calamity there.

“We will conduct a thorough, serious and deep investigation to ensure such a disaster does not happen again,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged on a visit to the site on Friday. He called for a national day of mourning on Sunday.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews looking at belongings left behind at the site of the crush on Friday.Credit...Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press

Even for a country accustomed to the trauma of wars and terrorist attacks, this counted as one of the worst disasters in Israeli history.

Israel has been wracked by religious-secular tensions, particularly over the last year during the pandemic, amid widespread anger over what many here viewed as a disregard for regulations and displays of autonomy by parts of the ultra-Orthodox community. The disaster early Friday largely united the country in shock and grief, but it also underlined some of the divisions plaguing this society.

Up to 100,000 people were crammed onto the mountain late Thursday, most having arrived on organized buses to celebrate the holiday. The festivities turned to horror about an hour after midnight, when scores of adults and children were crushed and suffocated in an overcrowded, narrow passageway that turned into a death trap, according to witnesses.

The crush occurred after celebrants poured out of one section of the mountainside compound, down some steps and into the passageway, which had a sloping metal floor. Some people at the front fainted or slipped, causing a bottleneck, witnesses said, and setting off what witnesses described as a “human avalanche.”

One of the injured, Chaim Vertheimer, said that the passageway was slippery from spilled water and grape juice.

Continue reading the main story

“For some reason, there was sudden pressure at this point and people stopped. But more people kept coming down,” Mr. Vertheimer told the Hebrew news site Ynet, speaking from his hospital bed. “People were not breathing. I remember hundreds of people screaming ‘I can’t breathe’.”

Another of the injured, Dvir Cohen, said a large number of people were trying to leave at once.

“There was a staircase where the first people tripped and everyone just trampled them. I was in the second row of people,” he said. “People trampled on me, hundreds of them.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the site on Friday.Credit...Pool photo by Ronen Zvulun

Minutes earlier, thousands of men had been bobbing and swaying on the bleachers in time to music. The Israeli authorities had placed no restrictions on the number of attendees, despite warnings by some health officials about the risk of Covid-19 transmission.

Though the sight of so many people gathered together and unmasked may be jarring to most of the world, life in Israel has returned almost to normal in recent weeks after a successful national vaccination drive.

The majority of the adult population is fully vaccinated. But many in the crowds were under the age of 16 and not yet eligible for vaccination.

It was the largest single gathering in Israel since the start of the pandemic.

By Friday afternoon, many of the dead had been identified and families were rushing to bury them before the start of the Sabbath at sundown. According to Israeli news media, at least two of the victims came from the United States and one from Canada.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews attend a ceremony by Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai’s grave on Friday on Mount Meron, Israel.Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times

The compound on Mount Meron includes several large gathering grounds with bleachers and stages, connected by a series of alleyways and paths.

The 2008 comptroller report said that all building additions and changes made to the pilgrimage site had been done without the approval of the local and district planning and building committees.

“There are no grounds for permitting the current situation to continue,” one comptroller report said.

The comptroller’s office said that special danger was posed by the access roads and paths, which “are narrow and not appropriate to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of people who visit the site.” It was along one of those paths where witnesses said the crush of people began.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews gathering at Mount Meron on Thursday.Credit...Jalaa Marey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mount Meron is near the Sea of Galilee and the mystical city of Safed. The annual gathering there comes on a holiday, Lag b’Omer, that is linked in Jewish tradition to the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans in the second century A.D., and for many ultra-Orthodox Jews, it is a highlight of the Hebrew calendar.

But the celebrations were strictly curtailed last year because of the pandemic, with few people allowed to attend.

Large numbers of ultra-Orthodox and traditional Jews make the pilgrimage to the mountain for days of festivities. They light bonfires around the grave site of a second-century sage, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, in the hope that they will receive his blessings on the anniversary of his death.

Despite the warnings that the infrastructure could not safely bear large crowds, one former official, Shlomo Levy, who had chaired the Upper Galilee Regional Council, said he had come under political pressure to cancel a warrant he had issued in 2008 to close the tomb compound because of safety concerns.

Mr. Levy told Kan, Israel’s public radio, that the public security minister at the time told him he was afraid to touch the site and that it was a “hot potato.”

That wariness stems from the disproportionate political power long held by ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel’s coalition system. The ultra-Orthodox have been crucial members of successive Netanyahu-led governing coalitions.

Yossi Elituv, the editor of the ultra-Orthodox Mishpacha magazine, said on Twitter that the ultra-Orthodox community needed “to learn some lessons.” The compound should be taken out of the hands of private religious trusts and associations, he said, and should be run by official state authorities.

Relations between the ultra-Orthodox community and the Israeli mainstream have come under particular strain during the pandemic, as parts of the religious public flouted lockdown regulations and the government and police were often lax in enforcing them.

But in a show of national unity on Friday, Israelis across the nation lined up to donate blood for the injured in response to a call by the emergency services.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/world/middleeast/israel-stampede.html

And now a lesson in Dikduk - Hebrew Grammar....

What's the Reason for Hebrew's Mixed-Up Genders?

Quite a few masculine and feminine Hebrew words, when pluralized, take the form of the opposite gender. Why?

 

From “Angelus Novus” by Paul Klee, 1920.

“All inflected languages have irregularly declined nouns; that’s quite common. But I wonder if in Hebrew there is an idea that is embedded in particular irregularities. For instance, why is so essentially masculine a word as avot [fathers] pluralized in a feminine way, or so essentially feminine a word as nashim [women] pluralized in a masculine way? Is there a reason for this?”

The gender and the plural forms of Hebrew nouns, and the relation between the two things, can indeed be both puzzling and exasperating. The two examples cited demonstrate why. The Hebrew word for “father” is av and the Hebrew word for “woman” is ishah; the Hebrew masculine plural ending is –im and the feminine plural ending is –ot; logically speaking, therefore, “fathers” should be avim and “women” should be ishot. And yet, as Silver observes, it’s exactly the other way around. (The plural transformation of the first syllable of ishah from i- to na- is a different sort of anomaly that will be dealt with further on.) What’s going on? And why is it that these exceptions should occur precisely in words whose meanings actively include maleness and femaleness?

Gender itself can be unpredictable in most or all of the languages of which it is a central feature. (In many languages, such as English, it is of little or no importance.) Why is the sun, le soleil, masculine in French while the moon, la lune, is feminine? It cannot be because there is, to the human mind, something inherently male about the one and female about the other, because in German, die Sonne, the sun, is feminine and der Mond, the moon, is masculine. And although there are formal criteria that may determine the gender of French nouns—most ending with an “e,” like lune, are feminine while most ending with a consonant, like soleil, are masculine—there are plenty of counterexamples, such as feminine mer, sea, and masculine nuage, cloud. In both French and German, the gender of many nouns has no obvious relationship to their meaning, sound, or structure and must simply be learned, whether by the college student or the prattling infant.

Hebrew, which is even more heavily gendered than German or French, since its verbs also come in masculine and feminine forms, is no different in this respect. Although it does, like French and German, exhibit certain regular patterns, the gender of many of its nouns appears to be arbitrary. There is no discernible reason why a word like ḥerev, “sword,” should be feminine while its rhyme-word erev, “evening,” is masculine, or why tsinor, “pipe,” should be masculine when tsipor, “bird,” is feminine. Moreover, Hebrew nouns have an additional complication not found in French or German, which is that their plural forms are gendered, too. Thus, pluralized ḥerev. besides undergoing an internal vowel shift, takes the feminine suffix of –ot, so that “swords” is ḥaravot, while erev takes the masculine suffix of –im and “evenings” is aravim.

Brockelmann’s theory, stripped down here to its barest essentials, is but one; there are others. All have their strengths and weaknesses, their challengers and defenders; all draw their evidence from morphological and grammatical details in half-a-dozen or more Semitic languages, and none enjoys wide scholarly acceptance. Meanwhile, you’ll just have to learn these things by heart. And if you’re wondering what is the plural of the masculine Hebrew noun for “heart,” lev, it happens to be l’vavot.

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/arts-culture/2021/04/whats-the-reason-for-hebrews-mixed-up-genders/?utm_source=Daily%20Newsletter%20Segment&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter%202021-04-28%20%28SrUEwy%29&_ke=eyJrbF9jb21wYW55X2lkIjogIkw4N0NHaCIsICJrbF9lbWFpbCI6ICJjZW9AZGlhbW9uZGNhcmQubmV0In0%3D

Eli Weisel's Family Very Short Memory --- “My father’s faith was a tremendous part of who he was,” Wiesel’s son, Elisha Wiesel, told The Algemeiner. “I hope those attending the various faith-based services at the National Cathedral will remember him as both a passionately proud American and as a man whose faith drove him to champion human rights and the telling of stories that need to be told. Our family is deeply appreciative to the Cathedral for making him part of their institutional consciousness.”

‘A Man Whose Faith Drove Him to Champion Human Rights’: Stone Carving of Elie Wiesel Added to Washington National Cathedral

The stone carving of Elie Wiesel that has been added to at

 Washington National Cathedral.

A stone carving of the late Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel has been added to the Washington National Cathedral’s Human Rights Porch to honor Wiesel’s “legacy as a lifelong human rights defender dedicated to combating indifference and intolerance,” the house of worship announced on Wednesday.

The Human Rights Porch features carvings of historical human rights-defenders, including Mother Teresa, Rosa Parks, Jonathan Daniels and Eleanor Roosevelt. While there are many representations of Jewish biblical figures in the Cathedral,  Wiesel is the first person from the modern-day Jewish community to featured in the house of prayer. The hand-carved sculpture was put in place by the Cathedral’s stonemasons and created with the involvement of the Wiesel family.

“My father’s faith was a tremendous part of who he was,” Wiesel’s son, Elisha Wiesel, told The Algemeiner. “I hope those attending the various faith-based services at the National Cathedral will remember him as both a passionately proud American and as a man whose faith drove him to champion human rights and the telling of stories that need to be told. Our family is deeply appreciative to the Cathedral for making him part of their institutional consciousness.”

The announcement was made in conjunction with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.

A team of US envoys is traveling to the Middle East this week for talks with key allies, a senior...

Born in Romania in 1928, Wiesel was a survivor of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. His father, mother and sister were killed in the camps, and he detailed the horrors of the Holocaust in his autobiographical novel “Night.” He authored 57 books, was a vocal advocate for human rights causes around the world, and served as a professor at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He was the founding chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and received numerous prestigious awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal. He died in 2016 of natural causes.

The Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, dean of Washington National Cathedral, said, “From the depths of cruelty inflicted on him, his family, and so many millions of Jews and others during the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel went on to dedicate his life to the pursuit of human rights, and to heed the lessons of history. We are humbled to welcome his likeness to the Cathedral, and pray that his example and legacy will be a blessing and an inspiration to all who enter.”

“Throughout his life, Elie devoted himself tirelessly to preserving the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and working to ensure that other communities do not suffer the same fate,” said Marion Wiesel, Wiesel’s widow and vice president of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. “Not only does his presence in the National Cathedral memorialize his life and honor his commitment to human rights; it also ensures that new generations will learn from his teachings and carry the lessons of his life forward into the future.”

The Wiesel carving was sculpted by North Carolina artist Chas Fagan, a member of the US Commission on Fine Arts whose other works include the official White House portrait of First Lady Barbara Bush; statues of Ronald Reagan and Billy Graham at the US Capitol; and a statue of Pope John Paul II at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington.

A dedication of the bust will take place in fall 2021 as part of a program the Cathedral will launch — in cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity — to celebrate Wiesel’s legacy.

The cathedral is part of the Episcopal Church but aims to be “a house of prayer for all people and a sacred space for the nation to gather,” it said in a statement.

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What We Believe

We Episcopalians believe in a loving, liberating, and life-giving God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As constituent members of the Anglican Communion in the United States, we are descendants of and partners with the Church of England and the Scottish Episcopal Church, and are part of the third largest group of Christians in the world.

We believe in following the teachings of Jesus Christ, whose life, death, and resurrection saved the world.

We have a legacy of inclusion, aspiring to tell and exemplify God’s love for every human being; women and men serve as bishops, priests, and deacons in our church. Laypeople and clergy cooperate as leaders at all levels of our church. Leadership is a gift from God, and can be expressed by all people in our church, regardless of sexual identity or orientation.

We believe that God loves you – no exceptions.

 

The Role of the Churches in Nazi Germany

Compliance and Confrontation

This article originally appeared in
Dimensions, Vol 12, No 2

Churches throughout Europe were mostly silent while Jews were persecuted, deported and murdered by the Nazis.  Churches, especially those  in Nazi Germany, sought to act, as institutions tend to do, in their own best interests -- narrowly defined, short-sighted interests.

The list of "bystanders" -- those who declined to challenge the Third Reich in any way -- that emerges from any study of the Holocaust is long and depressing. Few organizations, in or outside Nazi Germany, did much to resist Nazism or aid its victims.

[I]t has become abundantly clear that [the Churches'] failure to respond to the horrid events...was not due to ignorance; they knew what was happening. Ultimately, the Churches' lapses during the Nazi era were lapses of vision and determination.

Assisting European Jews was not a high priority of the Allied governments as they sought to defeat Hitler militarily. The courageous acts of individual rescuers and resistance members proved to be the exception, not the norm.

To a great extent, this inertia defined the organized Christian community as well. Churches throughout Europe were mostly silent while Jews were persecuted, deported and murdered. In Nazi Germany in September 1935, there were a few Christians in the Protestant Confessing Church who demanded that their Church take a public stand in defense of the Jews. Their efforts, however, were overruled by Church leaders who wanted to avoid any conflict with the Nazi regime. Internationally, some Church leaders in Europe and North America did condemn the Nazis' measures against the Jews, and there were many debates about how Christians outside Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied territory should best respond to Hitler's brutal policies. These discussions, however, tended to become focused more on secondary strategic considerations -- like maintaining good relations with colleagues in the German Churches -- than on the central humanitarian issues that were really at stake.

 READ MORE:

https://www.adl.org/news/op-ed/role-of-churches-nazi-germany