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UN Holocaust event hides origins of Israeli-made wine served at ceremony

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The origins of an Israeli-made bottle of wine were erased at a recent U.N. event in memory of the Holocaust.

By David Isaac, World Israel News

Israeli-made wine served at a U.N. Holocaust memorial event had its Golan Heights origins blacked out by pen or marker, revealed first by human rights scholar Professor Anne Bayefsky and later reported by The Washington Free Beacon.

Austria and Norway sponsored the U.N. event, which was specifically meant to honor the memory of Jewish child Ruth Maier, who was murdered in Auschwitz.

Members of Human Rights Voices, a group for whom Bayefsky serves as president, attended the event and noticed a bottle of Hermon wine with the words “Golan Heights Winery” notably crossed out to make them illegible.

On Jan. 30, Bayefsky tweeted side-by-side pictures of the censored label with the original label.

“Left, original Israeli wine bottle. Right, “Golan Heights” blanked out on bottle served at UN #Holocaust event sponsored by #Austria & #Norway. Encouraging Jew-hatred today is how UN marks Jew-hatred of yesterday”

“The incident reveals the duplicity of U.N. Holocaust events that use and abuse the memory of Jewish dead decades ago to erase the reality of Jews under attack today,” Bayefsky said, according to the Free Beacon. “And to erase the truth that — thanks to Israel — Jewish children are saved by a Golan that is used for creativity, commerce and beauty, instead of deadly modern anti-Semitism.”

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The Austrian Mission to the U.N. told the Free Beacon in an official statement, “This was a well-received event. Blotting out the geographical denomination was a clear mistake by an individual member of the mission for which we apologize.”

The Free Beacon reports that the Norwegian Permanent Mission to the U.N. and the Holocaust and U.N. Outreach Programme did not respond to requests for comment.

“In 2005, the U.N. General Assembly created a day to remember the Holocaust on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp,” Bayefsky said. “It did so as a consolation prize for the failure by the General Assembly in the preceding years to adopt a proposed resolution dedicated to combating anti-Semitism.”

“Despite the fact that the U.N. was erected on the ashes of the Jewish people, and despite tens of thousands of U.N. resolutions on umpteen human rights subjects over the years, the General Assembly has still never adopted a resolution specifically devoted to anti-Semitism. On the contrary, disseminating anti-Semitism is a U.N. calling card,” she said.

“As part of the 2019 U.N. commemoration, the U.N. Missions of Austria and Norway—the two countries responsible for the persecution and murder of Jewish child Ruth Maier in the Auschwitz concentration camp—sponsored an exhibition telling her story,” Bayefsky said.

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“Wine was served at the exhibit opening. The wine was produced by the award-winning ‘Golan Heights Winery,’ founded in 1983. But in the minds of U.N. staff, or the U.N. missions of Austria and Norway — countries that routinely vote in favor of a panoply of anti-Israel U.N. resolutions — the identity of the wine was deemed offensive and the words ‘Golan Heights Winery’ were specifically blacked out with a marker on each bottle.”

“The Golan Heights is a plateau that was used by Syria to kill the Jews living in the area below, and to attempt to annihilate Israel altogether, until Israel took control of it in self-defense during the 1967 war,” she said. “More recently, Syrians have fled from the brutality of their own government to the Golan for treatment by Israeli doctors.”