Israeli student trips to Poland have been suspended over disputes on the content of the visits as well as lack of guarantees for student safety.

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 The museum “is blurring moral boundaries and showing a profound disrespect for the dead–and I mean not just Jewish dead, but African dead,” said Distinguished University Professor Thane Rosenbaum.

By Atara Beck, Senior Editor, World Israel News

The Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida, located in Maitland, has launched a new exhibit, “Uprooting Prejudices: Faces of Change,” which includes, as described by the museum on its website, “stunning images and powerful words captured in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, at the scene, by renowned photographer and storyteller John Noltner.”

George Floyd, an African American, died last May during an arrest in Minneapolis, when a white police officer knelt on his neck for over eight minutes. The incident resulted in mass protests across the U.S., including rioting and demands to end police funding.

Famous Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israeli office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel branch, called the exhibit “totally inappropriate.”

“The death of George Floyd is obviously tragic and there’s no question that racism in the United States exists, and African Americans suffer from it. There are cases of police brutality, which should never take place, and the fate of the victims is a tragedy,” Zuroff told World Israel News. “But this is not anything that’s to be compared to the Shoah.

“You’re talking about the police in a democracy, which operates in a democratic way, rule of law. Sometimes it’s violated, and sometimes with tragic results. But this is not the Third Reich in the United States. That’s not what’s going on there. And to juxtapose that to the Shoah is simply totally inappropriate.

“We are facing a very serious problem of universalization when dealing with the Shoah, and this is something that’s very, very important that we fight against,” Zuroff continued.

It is important, he said, “to continue to preserve the accurate account of the Shoah and the fact that the Shoah would never have taken place if not for the Jewish victims. So the problem is the temptation in America in trying to make it relevant.” By doing so, however, “they really, in a sense, distort the history and to some extent alter the lessons…

“So this is a problem. We see in a lot of educational initiatives in the United States, and we have to be on our watch. We have to be careful and do whatever we can to ensure that these false comparisons are not propagated and not disseminated – certainly not in Jewish Holocaust museums.”

American novelist, essayist, and Distinguished University Professor Thane Rosenbaum is the son of two Holocaust survivors. He told World Israel News:

“The museum might believe that it has a broader mission to make the Holocaust relevant to the events of our day.  But what it is doing instead is blurring moral boundaries and showing a profound disrespect for the dead–and I mean not just Jewish dead, but African dead.  Have they hosted Exhibits on the genocides of the Congo and Sudan?  If not, then once again, close your doors, because the George Floyd death, and what it has come to symbolize, is in no way a genocide, and to place it in the museum only serves to trivialize actual mass murder.”

‘A specifically Jewish phenomenon’

The Shoah is a specifically Jewish phenomenon,” Linda Olmert, the daughter of Holocaust survivors and former board member of Yad Vashem for 22 years, said to World Israel News. “The Jews were targeted for universal extermination even if the choices they made included conversion and denial of their Judaism. The American police, no matter what their faults, are not Nazis, and no one could say that they are targeting the Black population for mass extermination.

“To include an exhibit of George Floyd in the Holocaust Museum in Florida is to completely miss the essence of the Shoah and its horrific particularism of the Jewish people as targeted by Nazi Germany. This is in fact nothing less than a false quest for universalism that criminally diminishes the intransigent uncompromising racism towards the Jewish people, and at the same time perpetuates and advances a criminal (willful?) misunderstanding of the permutations of Black racism in America today.”

End Jew Hatred, a grassroots U.S.-based movement,  issued the following statement to World Israel News.

“End Jew Hatred has no position on the Black Lives Matter Movement in general, except that we are inspired by the passion of minority communities organizing to secure justice. However, we strongly question placing a George Floyd exhibit in a Holocaust museum. The type of systemic and genocidal hatred that targets Jews is fundamentally unlike the persecution faced by other minority communities. Jewish spaces should center the Jewish experience.

“One wouldn’t expect to see a Holocaust exhibit at a museum about the African American experience.”

‘Deeply offensive’

“Trauma leads to Jews minimizing our pain to accommodate others. Now this is happening even in an environment explicitly designed to talk about the spilling of innocent Jewish blood during a specific time in our history. Of course, some shared cross-cultural phenomena deserve to be studied together. But when a dedicated Holocaust museum obfuscates the distinct experience of the Jewish community, something is wrong.

“It is deeply offensive to appropriate our persecution to score cheap political points masquerading as ‘intersectionality,’” the statement concludes.

“George Floyd is added to a Holocaust museum? That trivializes and distorts the Holocaust and its six million Jewish victims. And it grotesquely implies that American police are Nazis,” tweeted Ezra Levant of Rebel News.

George Floyd is added to a Holocaust museum? That trivializes and distorts the Holocaust and its six million Jewish victims. And it grotesquely implies that American police are Nazis. pic.twitter.com/zNsG0bqyEe

— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) November 22, 2020

The post ‘Totally inappropriate’: Florida Holocaust center elicits outrage with new George Floyd exhibit appeared first on World Israel News.

Famed Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff lauded authorities for publishing admissions regarding the role of Finnish volunteers in atrocities committed against Jews in World War II.

By Associated Press

An Israeli Holocaust historian praised authorities in Finland on Sunday for publishing a report that concluded Finnish volunteers serving with Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS “very likely” took part in World War II atrocities, including the mass murder of Jews.

Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center lauded the determination of the National Archives of Finland to release the findings even if doing so was “painful and uncomfortable” for Finland.

Zuroff called the decision an “example of unique and exemplary civic courage.”

Finland’s government commissioned the independent 248-page investigative report, which was made public Friday. It said 1,408 Finnish volunteers served with the SS Panzer Division Wiking during 1941-43, most of them 17 to 20-years-old.

“It is very likely that they (Finnish volunteers) participated in the killing of Jews, other civilians and prisoners of war as part of the German SS troops,” said Jussi Nuorteva, director general of the National Archives.

Finnish SS Volunteers Remain Alive

A significant part of the study was based on diaries kept by 76 of the Finnish SS volunteers. Eight of the Finnish SS volunteers are still alive, Nuorteva said.

Finland was invaded by Moscow in November 1939. The fighting in what became known as the Finnish-Soviet Winter War lasted until March 1940, when an overwhelmed and outnumbered Finland agreed to a bitter peace treaty. The small Nordic country lost several territories but maintained its independence.

Isolated from the rest of Europe and afraid of another Soviet attack, Finland entered into an alliance with Germany, receiving weapons and other material help from Berlin.

As part of the pact, Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler insisted that Finland dispatch soldiers to the SS Wiking division, similar to the volunteers it demanded from Nazi-occupied Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and elsewhere.

Finland complied and covertly recruited the first group of 400 SS volunteers to be sent for training in the spring of 1941. The vast majority of them had no ideological sympathies with the Nazi regime, the report said.

Soviet Invasion

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 under Operation Barbarossa, Finnish regular army troops fought independently alongside Wehrmacht soldiers on the northeastern front. In 1941, the Finns advanced in the Karelia region outside Leningrad.

The Finnish soldiers were not under Nazi command, and the country’s leadership was mainly motivated by the desire to take back the territories lost to Moscow.

“At the beginning of the attack (on the Soviet Union), Finns were unaware of the Germans’ goal of eradicating the Jews,” Nuorteva said. “Finns were, above all, interested in fighting against the Soviet Union” due to their brutal experiences in the Winter War and the perceived threat from Moscow.

In this way, “the starting point for Finns’ involvement was different compared to most other countries joining SS foreign volunteers,” he said.

Finnish SS volunteers with the SS Wiking division operated on the eastern front until 1943, entering deep into Ukraine.

‘Difficult Historical Events’

The leading Finnish military historians who undertook the study of the country’s wartime role wrote that the Finnish SS volunteers likely took part in killing Jews and other civilians, as well as witnessed atrocities committed by the Germans.

The volunteers returned to Finland after the Finnish government sensed the tide of the war had turned against the Germans. Many of them then served in the Finnish military until the end of World War II.

A copy of Friday’s report was given to Paula Lehtomaki, a state secretary with the Finnish government, who said it was a valuable contribution to existing research “on difficult and significant historical events” during Finland’s complex World War II history.

“We share the responsibility for ensuring that such atrocities will never be repeated,” said Lehtomaki.

The historical probe was launched following Zuroff’s request in January 2018 to Finnish President Sauli Niinisto.

Finland’s move contrasts with the attitude of some eastern European nations that have sought to diminish their culpability in the Holocaust.

In Poland, the current right-wing government has worked to highlight cases of Poles who acted heroically and saved Jews, as well as the large numbers of Poles who died and suffered during German occupation.

The post Finland admits SS volunteers ‘very likely’ killed Jews in WWII appeared first on World Israel News.

Nazi hunter Dr. Efraim Zuroff took Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to task for praising Lithuanian efforts to commemorate the Holocaust, when Lithuania, according to Zuroff, has done “more than any other country to distort the history of the Holocaust.”

The post WATCH: Nazi hunter refutes Netanyahu’s comments on Lithuanians’ role in Holocaust appeared first on World Israel News.

Germany has refused to take action on a list of eight Nazi war criminals, who are living freely in their homeland. The list was furnished by historian and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, Dr. Efraim Zuroff.

Credit: ILTV

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