We’re all sympathetic to Holocaust survivors—well, okay, Mahmoud, maybe not you—but could they just relax a little bit? After all, it’s been sixty-four-and-a-half years.
It’s not like the Shoah was that big of a deal, was it? (I think G-d might send a lightning bolt my way for even writing that.)
A newly formed blue-ribbon government committee to combat anti-Semitism is embroiled in a dispute over a discussion of whether to avoid working with survivors of the Holocaust because they are not “objective” and “too emotional” The Jerusalem Post has learned from sources who have access to committee meetings.
That revelation last week, along with statements from Dr. Juliane Wetzel, an academic and member of the government commission, who allegedly said in the meeting that she will not allow herself to be “blackmailed by lobby-groups,” caused turbulence among the committee members.
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Elke Gryglewski, from the House of the Wannsee Conference and one of 10 members on the commission, said in a meeting in early November, that Holocaust survivors are “not objective and too emotional,” according to sources. Asked about the statement, Gryglewski told the Post, “One cannot expect that survivors are objective. We are all not objective…the commission will, of course, continue to work with the Jewish community.”
Professor Arno Lustiger, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and a leading historian in Germany, rejected Gryglewski’s understanding of Holocaust survivors as lacking objectivity. He told the Post last Friday that “I have heard that all my life. That is well known of German historians.”
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While the House offers seminars dealing with anti-Semitism, Gryglewski told the Post that the educational facility of the House conducts no workshops devoted exclusively to hatred of Israel, the most common form of modern anti-Semitism in Germany, according to experts.
Gryglewski said the “‘lobby’ term is very charged” and denied using the expression.
There had been a discussion about the “autonomy of the group,” said Gryglewski.
Wetzel declined to respond to multiple requests for comment. It remains unclear if Wetzel’s purported use of “lobby-groups” refers to non-Jewish and Jewish non-governmental organizations.
However, Wetzel wrote in several e-mails to the commission that she is “appalled” about the disclosures and urged the members to confirm that she did not use the controversial term “lobby-groups.” The term “lobby” is considered to have a pejorative meaning in Germany.
Dr. Charles Small, the head of the Yale University Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism and former Israeli professor, told the Post, “The reported comment pertaining to ‘the lobby’ is at best insensitive. One of the most pernicious stereotypes of the Jewish community - particularly in Germany - is the nefarious conspiratorial power of the Jewish people or so-called ‘lobby.’”
You can take the Nazi out of the Germans, but you can’t take the German out of the Germans.
I’m tempted to write something like “only in Germany could a Holocaust conference and anti-Semitism seminar turn into a pogrom”. But we all know that’s not true. Britain, Sweden, Norway—they’re taking notes.
