Jeanette Friedman

by Jeanette Friedman

A healthy American economy is necessary for a strong Israel. If you think McCain and Palin won’t cause a financial meltdown guess again. Look at what China said about the US and the global economy. We will be finished as a superpower and will not be able to help ourselves, let alone poor little Israel, which is in better financial shape than us.

Our donated dollars are now worth half of what they were a year ago. If McCain gets in, he said he will tax the middle class and give the biggest corporations tax breaks. He voted to deregulate the securities markets and that led directly to the subprime mortgage debacle. Increasingly, the financial blogs are blaming the Jews for this–and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is selling like hot cakes around the world. Imagine how much worse it would be if McCain had his way and Social Security would have been privatized. Antisemitism is up everywhere.

With American dollars worth so much less in Israel and around the world, with no industrial base and no pensions, and with increasing reliance on oil, (which is killing us by affecting our brains and bodies because of pollution in the air and water) we are in deep trouble. At the GOP convention, McCain’s people said they will do away with the Department of Education. What a great future for our children.

McCain whines Obama had no business going to Hollywood and raising money for the campaign. At his fundraiser, Obama said he didn’t feel like celebrating because Hurricane Ike was devastating and the economy is a disaster. He is itching to fix what’s broken.

Obama takes no public monies for his campaign.. McCain took $84 million from the public trough. His wife is a multi-millionaire and he doesn’t know how many houses he owns–but we have to pay for his election, whether we like it or not. McCain’ policies will continue this insanity–not to mention the war, which is costing us $12 billion a month. We will have to hock our existence to the Saudis.

As for Sarah Palin: There’s Troopergate and nepotism, and Palin’s even more heinous act in making rape victims pay for their rape kits–this is made worse when she says she would do away with Roe vs. Wade. That means that rape victims who resort to back alley abortions or knitting needles and Betadyne become criminals and Christianity is legislated constitutionally. In Halakha, the life of the mother comes first, even during delivery–but not in Palin’s world. And GOP policies will not pay for all those unwanted newborns.

Look at youtube for her church views, how the Jews must suffer terrorism because we refuse to accept Jesus as our Messiah. The Rapture seems to be part of her Middle-East strategy. ( And McCain seems to believe it too. Was he really kidding when he described the Rapture to Jon Stewart so long ago?)

What kind of a woman stands over a bloodied dead moose with a hi-powered rifle in her hand and a young child at her side? What kind of a being shoots innocent animals for fun? She didn’t shoot them for food and survival. She gets up in a helicopter and shoots tens of them at a time,

Consider this:

Obama does a two-minute ad about how we need to fix the economy and get off of oil so we don’t rely on foreign countries to keep us going. He doesn’t mention McCain or Palin, because it’s about the economy and becoming an energy independent nation and world leader. It’s about fixing health care and education…

Go to Obama’s website and read about his policies. Look who he uses for his advisors. His vice presidential pick is Joe Biden, dean of the Senate and head of the Senate Foreign Relations committee who knows every world leader. He is respected, loves and understands the Jewish people, and worked hard for peace in Israel. Dennis Ross is Obama’s Middle East person. Read his book “Statecraft” if you want to know how he thinks and how America can recover.

I am voting for Joe Biden and Dennis Ross, and I am sure, Richard Holbrooke (who was instrumental in stopping the genocide in the Balkans). I am voting for a man who knows where to find the right people to get America back on track.

I am not interested in McCain/Palin and four more years of the same or infinitely worse.

Educate yourself. Get the truth. Then vote for a safer, more secure and financially sound America.

Finance C’tee clashes on Holocaust survivor payments
Approval of the payments to Holocaust survivor meant approval of a budget cut.
Adrian Filut 1 Sep 08 18:12
There were heated exchanges in the Knesset Finance Committee today after MKs discovered that the approval of the warrants allowing payments to Holocaust survivors is conditional on the committee approving an across-the-board cut of 6% in ministerial budgets, passed by the government a month ago.

The government approved the 6% cut , which amounts to NIS 760 million, to finance the adding of an extra 1,000 officers to Israel Police, to finance part of the education reform, as well as to fund payments to Holocaust survivors. In other words, the money for survivors was supposed to be financed by the budget cut. Under Knesset regulations, the Knesset Finance Committee cannot decide on a budgetary allocation beyond the limits of the approved budget for 2008, without specifying where the financing will come from.

By Jeanette Friedman

Every now and again, the creation of a permanent Yom HaShoah liturgy becomes an issue some people think should be on the front burner. Some proponents of this universal service feel that is what the Holocaust Survivor Legacy must be and that everyone must have a set prayer program for Yom HaShoah. But that is not the legacy of survivors. The Legacy of the Holocaust Survivors was presented to the Jewish people in June 1981, in Jerusalem, at The Kotel, the Western Wall, in front of 15,000 people. You can read it at www.americangathering.com/legacy/

Nowhere does this legacy mention a Holocaust liturgy—and for good reason. The issue had been debated ad nauseam. The legacy mentions the importance of remembrance—and as the most studied and researched event on planet Earth, the Holocaust will certainly be remembered as a watershed event in history. Getting its lessons across is another story—though no one denies that one of those lessons is the need for tolerance, to see another person’s point of view.

The proponents of this liturgy, some of them secular, are unaware of the pitfalls and impossibilities surrounding their demands, and want to force a liturgy upon the whole of the ultra-Orthodox community in particular. Many feel the ultra-Orthodox do not remember the Holocaust. They are wrong. Most of the ultra-Orthodox in America and Israel happen to be Holocaust survivors and their descendants. I know. I began my life as such a person, in an ultra-Orthodox world. Now I am a post-denominational Jew. Some might call me secular or worse. Some might call me other things, but, in the core of my essence I am a Jew shaped by the Shoah—and Judaism.

I grew up in a Holocaust survivor community in Brooklyn, surrounded by memories of the Shoah in all its forms—from the silent ones, to those who never stopped talking, to those who abused their children, to those who overprotected them and spoiled their kids rotten. I went to Beis Yaakov in Crown Heights and Brownsville. Our teachers were survivors themselves. The Holocaust came up often, but obliquely. A play about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was our senior play in Esther Schoenfeld High School.

Growing up, the ultra-Orthodox people around me echoed the words of their rabbis, who were clueless when it came to coping with theology after the Holocaust. They claimed secular Jews and Reform Jews brought the Holocaust down on the Jews.

After all, how else do you accept a God who murders 1.5 million innocent children who did not sin? You create a punishing God, using Old Testament paternalism and imagery who gets even with the Reform Jews and Zionists. (The Minchas Elazar, Rabbi Chaim Elazar Spira, the Rov of Munkacs (a town now in Ukraine) blamed the Zionists for Hitler—instead of blaming the perpetrators for being people who were evil. The irony is that it was mostly Orthodox Jews who died in the camps. His descendants’ followers live in Borough Park. Those who survived still remember, and so do their children. When it comes to God, many suffer from cognitive dissonance. Better not to go near the subject.

As a descendant and close relative to many of the Hassidic rabbis in power today, I took every opportunity to discuss Holocaust remembrance and Holocaust liturgies with the crème de la crème of Jewish leadership in that world and the Agudah world more than 25 years ago—many of them are child survivors and survivors. And the answer was always the same: Halachically it could not be done. You cannot have a day of mourning in the month of Nissan.

They contend—and they are not wrong according to their tradition—that the liturgy of Tisha B’Av contains what needs to be said, and they give divrei Torah to that effect when reading The Book of Lamentations. Rabbi Halberstam, the old Bobover Rebbe in Brooklyn, was a survivor from Poland/Hungary who wrote a special lamentation and added it to the Book of Lamentations for his congregation. His followers remember, since his descendants have carried on the tradition. Halacha allows additions, not deletions, in liturgy. And in the machzorim and siddurim, it has taken centuries for certain poems commemorating massacres to be included in the “set tradition.”

Other Hassidic and Hareidi groups have their own way of remembering. In order to understand the diversity of Judaism, think of a circle, with a different kind of Jew standing at every nth degree. There are as many Judaisms as there are Jews. Every community creates groups that reflect the values they want to incorporate into their lives. Every siddur is different, every nussach is different. Munkacs is different than Bobov, Satmar is different from Ger, Lubavitch is different from Hareidim, and every yeshiva does its own thing—about every aspect of Jewish life, including the liturgy and remembering the Holocaust.

Depending on who you are, how you were raised, your choices range from the most contemporary and evolving segments of Judaism to the traditional denominations—up to and including Ultra-Orthodoxy in all its forms. Every Jewish denomination and groups within those denominations have points of view about who we are. From the contemporary aspects of Jewish Renewal, Reconstructionism and Reform Judaism to the Conservative movement and Modern Orthodoxy to the ultra-Orthodox, who themselves have groups with very differing points of view.

For those less traditional than the ultra-Orthodox to attempt to force a set liturgy on a set date unto any community and then to say, “This is the legacy of the survivors,” is arrogant and shows a lack of understanding of how the Jewish community operates. Each community does its own thing. In New York City, even ultra-Orthodox Jews have been to Temple Emanuel on Fifth Avenue to attend WAGRO commemorations. One such woman, wearing a sheitel, escaped that ghetto and had a Hasidic brother who died in the uprising. As she sat in a synagogue that looks like a Christian cathedral, she reminded herself that the Torah Scrolls in the Holy Ark were exactly like the Torah Scrolls in the shteibel where she davened every Shabbos.

In Teaneck, NJ, on Yom Hashoah, there is a community ceremony in the high school auditorium. It nominally follows what has become a set liturgy of its own. It’s usually a 90-minute ceremony. Many of the synagogues and schools hold their own ceremonies as well. These generally include a procession, a candle-lighting ceremony, a key note address by a scholar or survivor, the chanting of El Molei Rachamim, the Holocaust Kaddish and the singing of The Partisaner Hymn. Other groups add a reading of specific Psalms or poetry written by someone in the community. These ceremonies take place in every state capitol and in the Rotunda on Capitol Hill. They vary, but one thing is clear. When you look at who attends these events on Yom HaShoah, you will find Jews in black frock coats and Jews in black hats, Jews in black velvet yarmulkes, Jews in kippot srugot, women in sheitels and women in snoods, as well as people who wear no head covering at all. In Israel, when the sirens go off on Yom HaShoah, everyone stops. Everyone.

That is, after all, the point. The enemies of the Jews did not care about a Jew’s denomination, and when it comes to remembering the Holocaust, it is each to his or her own.

Dennis Ross, The Philosopher Prophet

By Jeanette Friedman
(This series combines two interviews: one done on “Bloody Thursday” September 25 1996 and one in January, 2008)

It appears in the April Issue of the Akron Jewish News.

On Thursday, September 25, 1996, a door to a tunnel in Jerusalem was opened, and all hell broke loose. In New York City, 5,000 miles away, Dennis Ross’ life became more complicated than it already had been. Ross, now the Counselor and Ziegler Distinguished fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, was special advisor to the Secretary of State and special U.S. envoy to the Middle East. He was also one of President Bill Clinton’s “unsung heroes,” and a key negotiator in the Middle East peace process. He had to drop what he was doing—speaking at an event atop the World Trade Center—and get to the airport to catch the last plane to DC. He almost missed it.

What was his previous life like? On one typical day, at a vitally important Middle East summit at the White House, he shuttled from the Oval Office, where President Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher were conferring, to the Roosevelt Room, where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan were chatting. After the White House closed down at 4 p.m., for the next 12 hours, Ross shuttled between Blair House, where Netanyahu was staying, to Arafat’s hotel in Northern Virginia. Then he had to prepare for his morning meetings at the State Department. And that was nothing compared to shuttling around to three or four or five or six countries within a day or two. Ross was always sleep-deprived yet functioned at top form.

Life is a great deal quieter these days, and Ross is still on top of his game. When interviewed recently in his Washington Institute office, he confided that not working for the government right now was liberating. “Being the envoy was very demanding work and required sacrifices but it was incredibly purposeful—and I am as committed to the mission now as I was then. I just made two trips out there [the Middle East] in the last two weeks, and still try to affect things. They still hear my voice, and what I write and say is in an effort to influence things, but it’s all indirect. I have no authority or responsibility. When I see leaders, they choose to see me, whereas then, they had to see me. Now they choose to listen instead of having to listen.”

And if asked by the next administration to serve, would he? “I would go back in under the right circumstances. If they ask, yes. Do I plan to? No. But I feel the responsibility, and if I felt I could make a difference I would go back in.”

Ross, who retains his boyish good looks despite locks of gray, is getting much more sleep than he used to. He spent some luxurious time writing, and recently published Statecraft, a book of historical and diplomatic analysis of major events that affect America’s standing in the world. It is at once philosophical and practical. And everyone who has anything to do with conducting foreign policy—from presidential candidates and members of Congress, to every employee at the State Department, up to the Secretary of State, should be reading it. It is a primer for digging the United States out of the quagmire created by the war in Iraq, and how to cope with the unintended consequences.

An eminently readable book, Statecraft is also a personal memoir of sorts, showing how Ross’ diplomatic experiences shaped his thinking. He wrote it, he says, as an important conversation starter in a presidential election year. He bases his observations on his work at the State Department under every administration since Ronald Reagan’s. Unlike some in the State Department, he was much more than a fly on the wall. He was a back channel to diplomats from every country, particularly when the Iron Curtain fell, when the United States needed to build a coalition in order to go to war in the Gulf in 1991 and in dealing with the Balkan wars.

Today we face new challenges. In our conversation in Washington, Ross offers a formula for diplomatic success. “You have to think through your own positions, and that puts you in a better place. Given the trauma of 9/11, normal checks and balances didn’t operate. The administration didn’t think things through. Whoever the next administration is, they have to face these lessons. Be clear and explain, so that it’s clarified in your own head. There has to be accountability. And if your objectives aren’t clear, then neither are your means.”

What accountability can there be when the system of checks and balances, so essentially to American governance, fell apart after 9/11? “Checks and balances didn’t work for a short period of time,” said Ross. “Checks and balances require accountability and Bush never asked for accountability. We have to ask ourselves, ‘What are the means that others have or we have to achieve our global objectives?’ We need to be clear. And we have to remember that you can’t negotiate without trust, and you cannot produce agreements without a culture of accountability.”

The roots of his philosophy as expressed in Statecraft were visible in an interview he granted me on September 25, 1996, a day now known as “Bloody Thursday.” When “Bloody Thursday,” was over, 77 were dead and hundreds were injured in the worst confrontation since the Six Day War. There were tanks in the territories for the first time since 1967. And Dennis Ross was in it up to his eyeballs. And that was the night I first met him, and interviewed him in a NYC taxi, on his way to the airport.

In many ways, not much has changed since then. In 1996, with withdrawal from Hebron six months behind schedule, Arafat was in trouble with his own people because they didn’t like his corruption and the way the Palestinian Authority (PA) treated them. Economically, the Palestinians were desperate because of border closings and curfews. Internally, the democratic process was hardly visible. Hence frustration on two fronts—pressure from within and without. Arafat and Muslim religious leaders used the opportunity to exhort frustrated Palestinians to hold protest marches and strikes against the tunnel opening, The Israelis were frustrated after the bus bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Today, Sharon and Arafat are gone. The Palestinians are still tearing each other apart and using terror in their own neighborhoods and against the Israelis. They Israelis are frustrated by rocket barrages in addition to suicide bombings. And the attempt to bring democracy to the West Bank failed when President George W. Bush pushed for elections. As Ross notes, the push for those elections made for some very strange bedfellows. Sharon and Abu Mazen were against the elections, knowing full well that chaos would result. George Bush? He sided with Hamas, and the Middle East cauldron was set to boil over.

After such a debacle, which he ignored for years, why is Bush suddenly so active in the “peace process?”

Said Ross, “Because Olmert is quite serious about doing the deal. It could have been the other way around. When Hamas took over Gaza, this was kind of epiphany, it meant that Islamists control Gaza, and will likely be the alternative to Abu Mazen and Salam Fayyad if they fail. Israel has a stake in Palestinians who believe in coexistence, and so do we. The bad news is the delivery capacity, the publics (Arabs and Israelis) are disbelieving, the street is skeptical and the bad news is that Bush has no strategy. Salaam Fayyad, [the Palestinian Prime Minister] is trying to create a culture of accountability, and that’s why we all have a stake in his success. That will make peace more possible than it has been.

“But what the Bush administration has carried out to date is more stagecraft than statecraft. They haven’t developed the means to carry out a policy that meets the objective of peace and leads to the two-state solution. Bush is confident there will be a peace treaty because both Abu Mazen and Olmert are serious. For her part, Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, is convinced that Iran creates a common denominator;Arab leaders and Israelis both see the threat from Iran. And because of that, Rice sees a strategic opening: if the US could do something about the Palestinians, it could create a coalition against Iran. That is why she launched an effort.”

Just how much of that Iran threat is real when Ahmadinejad’s allies were defeated in the municipal elections and his economy is tanking because of sanctions?

“The Iranian threat is real because Ahmadinejad is tied to the Revolutionary Guards, and they control the nuclear power plants and research into weapons. They support terrorism throughout the region—Hamas, Hezbollah—and foment violence and terror in Iraq. Every time we would make headway in the Middle East, Iran would push Hamas and Islamic Jihad to terrorist acts, setting us back. Iranian leaders like Khatami (who are relatively pragmatic), from their standpoint, and the mullahs who seek to preserve their power and privilege see the public is alienated and understand that they need to buy them off…so sanctions are a real problem for them.”

**Despite the failures in the Peace Process, way back then, Ross was already applying the diplomatic dynamics that would later be clearly defined in Statecraft.

“We knew,” he told me in 1996, “that [Netanyahu and Arafat] have to have some period where they would be able to have some release, to describe areas where they had their own grievances. And then only in the aftermath of having been able to have that kind of opportunity, do you then begin to look for ways to solve problems. I think they convinced each other that there was a genuine desire to try and work together.

“[Warring parties] have to find a way not to direct a climate of violence against each other. They have to find ways to move forward and create trust. Our [The American] job is to be the facilitator, to get [peace processes] launched and shape an agenda that gets relatively quick results—to help them clarify the issues and, where possible, find ways to produce real results on the ground.”

In that old interview Ross told me, “There is a legacy with this conflict. a legacy of hate, of suspicion, of doubt, of grievance, of fear, and of pain and when you put all those elements of that legacy together, it should not surprise us that we are going to have ups and downs. Those kinds of emotions don’t just disappear overnight.”

Clarifying issues, setting clear objectives, knowing the facts on the ground and dealing with realpolitik, instead of wishful thinking are what he writes about in Statecraft.

Back in the day, Ross often tried to convince Arafat to come to Washington, and sometimes it wasn’t about politics, it was about his health. Now that Arafat is gone, we can ask questions no one dared to ask out loud: Could Arafat ever have transitioned into the role of a statesman, prime minister or mayor—to build his state instead of focusing on the destruction of Israel?

In 2008, in his D.C. office, Ross leans in closer to the listener and recounts two telling anecdotes: “The conflict defined Arafat. If it ended, he would have been finished. I was with him continuously. One day, I was sitting with him, just the two of us, and I told him I was going home for a vacation. He said it must be nice to take a vacation; he hadn’t had one since 1963. When I asked him why he didn’t take one, it became a defining moment. He said, ‘How could I take a vacation from my people?’ And I realized that he believed his own myth and that a peace treaty with him would not be possible.”

When asked about Arafat’s last conversation with President Clinton, on his last day in office, Ross described how Arafat was praising Clinton, who told him, “You made me a failure.”

And then there’s the truly burning question: “Did AIDS kill him?”

“His health was an issue, too. He never wanted to come to the States, to Bethesda, for a medical exam. We would have arranged it so that no one would know, but he didn’t want to do it. We were very concerned. He was sometimes vacant, and had tremors.

“One time I went to see him in Nablus at 8:30 am. Normally we met late in the day or very early in the morning, so this was very unusual. We were eating breakfast and he starts popping pills—by the handful. So I asked him how many pills he takes and he said 45, every morning. And then he even offered me some! I politely declined.

“There were herbals, vitamins, yeast, everything—45 pills. So I asked our doctors if it was possible that his condition was linked to all these medications. Could it be you can have all sorts of reactions to these pills? So who knows what did him in?” (Not everyone who has asked Ross that question knew that the hospital in France, where Arafat died, was the same hospital well-known for being an AIDS treatment center in the 1980s—they famously treated movie star Rock Hudson until his death.)

**Presidents come and go. Secretaries of State come and go. But Dennis Ross prevailed. A baby boomer from San Francisco who did his undergraduate and graduate work at UCLA, his encounters with the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam shaped his perspective. He is committed to peace in the Middle East because it is in his bones. He cannot be other than he is. And he is a realistic optimist.

Ross was born in 1948 to parents of Russian extraction, sandwiched between an older sister and younger brother. “My mother was born in Chicago and grew up in L.A. My father, who died in 1979, was born in Sacramento and grew up in Seattle.

“I had a Jewish identity, but it was in no way religious. But I was certainly aware of anti-Semitism. I grew up in Marin County and there were almost no Jews—my high school had maybe four or five of us in a class of 500. I didn’t experience it directly, but I would hear people say things.

“There’s nothing like having that feeling of being made different by others to create a sense of who you are. I developed a strong Jewish identity, even though I grew up in a household where there wasn’t a lot whole lot of religious identification. I became religious later on. My wife grew up in a religious household and I began to develop more of a religious sense after we met.” (They met during a political campaign in 1970.)

“I describe my characteristics as patience, persistence and having a sense of humor. My wife clearly has patience and she clearly has a sense of humor—but part of it also is that she believes that what I am doing is important. It’s important to her as well.”

Why is he always so passionate about peace in the Middle East?

“I think my passion comes from a sense that this conflict has become highly personalized for me. I know so many people on each side of it, and I see them as individuals. I met their families, I know what they experience. I feel the conflict, in a sense, has been humanized for me.

“And it’s not an abstraction. I have a background of working on the Soviet Union and Russia, and I was always highly analytical about that. I’m analytical about this as well, but the difference is that in Russia I didn’t have the same sense of human association.

“Someone I went to school with, who is still one of my best friends, is an Israeli. I met him and his wife right after the ‘73 war at UCLA. That was when I began getting a sense of the people and their yearnings and aspirations.

“I think that when a conflict becomes humanized for you, you are more aware of the price individuals pay, and you can relate to it. Then you can develop the responsibility to deal with it and you can see it in the larger foreign policy context as well. That’s what creates the marriage between the analytical view and what I would call the passionate view. And the more I spend time on actually trying to help resolve it, one of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that you develop trust with the people with whom you work—on all sides.”

Ross visited Israel for the first time in 1970, as a student tourist. “The Six Day War was one factor that clearly created an interest, but going to Israel cemented that interest. My first trip was for two weeks. I can’t put my finger on one thing—the most impressive thing was the spirit of the coun¬try. When I first started studying Israel I’d say that for every three Israelis there are four political parties. Now I say for every three Israelis there are four cell phones. It’s a measure of how things have changed. But in 1970, going for the first time, the spirit of the country, the sense of com¬munity, grabbed me and had a striking impact on me.”

Ross worked for both the Departments of Defense and State at the same time. In 1982, he was the Deputy Director of Net Assessment in the Pentagon, working on Soviet, Middle Eastern and “broad military balance issues,” and a member of the Policy Planning Staff on Middle Eastern issues at State. From 1984-1986, he served as Executive Director of the Berkeley-Stanford Program on Soviet International Behavior, an academic think tank.

From 1986-88, he was the National Security Council’s Director of Near East and South Asian Affairs. From 1989-1992, he was the Directory of the Policy Planning Staff for the Department of State (rank: Ambassador). Ross spent two months at the Bush White House as the President’s Assistant for Policy Planning. Then he went back to his directorship of the Policy Planning Staff, where he “played a leading role” in formulating and implement¬ing U.S. policy in the Former Soviet Union and the Middle East. He worked with both Lawrence Eagleburger and James Baker on START talks, the Middle East peace process and anything else that needed doing. Baker always had Ross at his side.

Ross became interested in politics when he was still in high school. His mother introduced him to the books of Richard Wright, one of America’s greatest Black writers. By the time he was 15, Ross was involved in his first campaign, a civil rights initiative on the California ballot.

He was a freshman in college when the Six-Day War broke out. It was at the same time Vietnam was on the front burner in the U.S., and that war shaped his foreign policy philoso¬phy. He felt the Vietnam War prevented the Americans from giving the Middle East the attention it needed.

“I looked at Vietnam as a conflict that did not make sense. You couldn’t identify what our interests were, at least in my mind, in a way that was clear. It certainly didn’t justify the cost, and without an unmistakable political objective, you’re not going to have political support within the country.

“I was very much affected by the fact that it didn’t seem to make sense. The nature of our objectives constantly shifted. The enemy was constantly changing—the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong.

“And then, interestingly enough, when I saw the Six-Day War, I thought our interests were directly affected, it was something of vital American concern and we were tied down in Vietnam. From the stand¬point of the logic of our own interests, this didn’t make sense to me, and I wasn’t a pacifist. I wasn’t opposed to the war because I had a sense that war is wrong. I didn’t feel that at all. I felt that if you’re going to commit American power and you’re going to commit American lives, it has to be in the service of something that really matters—and I didn’t see it in Vietnam.

“I also felt that you have to be able to sustain political support, public support, for what you are doing. It shaped my attitudes from that stand¬point. Vietnam was something that was sort of sprung on the American people indirectly, without a context—whereas in the Middle East there is a context.

“The one thing that stayed with me is that if you’re going to commit American power—and I believe that you use American power—the rea¬sons have to be clear. In a world where American power isn’t used, you’re in a world that’s much more dangerous, much less predictable—and eventually you’ll be confronted with a need to use that power in circumstances that are much more costly.”

The words he uttered back in 1996 were prophetic. Here was his view of the Middle East then, and it hasn’t changed much. “The Middle East has been something that has been presented by American presidents going back to Truman as being something in America’s vital interest. So it’s been identified for a long time.

“One set of key interests relates to the commitments we made to Israel. They are solemn and have been repeated so often that they go to the heart of American credibility.

“One set of interests relates to having access to resources, natural resources like oil, at a price that doesn’t create major stress in our economy. One set of interests has to do with the fact that this is a region that is a strategic crossroads. If there is great instability there, it could spread elsewhere.

“The situation between the Shia and the Sunni hasn’t helped. The Saudis see the competition with Iran through a Sunni-Shia prism. You have a kind of competition in the region, and our focus shouldn’t be how to support the authoritarian regimes. We should help build credible alternatives that are not corrupt and that embody social justice, because many of the present regimes benefit the few at the expense of the many, and people are angry.

“We are living in a world that is different than it used to be. The nature of the threats is different then they used to be before. One of the things you develop is a set of rationales and explanations that take account of the different circumstances.”

***Today that interest in “natural resources like oil” is affecting the global economy, creating new superpowers and hiking up the price of a barrel of oil to astronomical heights. That interest in oil is also producing the genocide in Darfur, a consequence of China’s driving need for energy resources. One has to ask if Saudi Arabia, funders of global Islamic religious extremism, is driving global policy.

“I don’t think Saudis are driving Middle East policy but they do have an influence. Before 9/11 King Abdullah wrote to Bush expressing great displeasure for walking away from the peace process. So Bush responded by saying that he favored a two-state solution. But after 9/11 the focus changed, and the administration did not get seriously engaged until very recently.

“What matters more is the need for energy resources, and oil is currently pushing the markets. With climate change as the most serious issue on the global agenda, we need to concentrate on what our objectives are so we can figure out a way to deal with it responsibly.

“Oil is driven by Chinese and Indian demand. But the Saudis do not have the infrastructure to meet that demand… The Saudis aren’t expanding the way they used to, because if people are looking at alternative energy sources, they don’t feel they need to invest. The inability to produce as much oil as is demanded is what is driving up prices, and if the Saudis think people are going to go green they are not going to make that effort. OPEC will expand production only when they see a downturn in demand. And those who invest in alternatives have to know the price of oil isn’t going to drop precipitously.”

These are very complicated issues. Do the vast majority of Americans, who seemed obsessed by weapons of mass distraction like Brittany Spears, come close to understanding it? Is there any hope of changing things?

Ross, of course, is optimistic. “Look at the polls—75% of the American people feel we are headed in the wrong direction and that this administration produced a policy that has wrecked our credibility and standing in the world. The recession we are facing is caused by the combination of the subprime mortgage situation and the gas shortage, and it is a recession that is rocking global markets. Decisions will have to be made.

“When it will boil down to two people in the presidential election, the public will have to make decisions that will radically affect the future. They need to understand that climate change is the number one priority, not just for the planet, but for the security of the country. Climate change will create more failing states that will, in turn, become training grounds for terror, so it’s a national security priority.

“China, which has surpassed the U.S. in the production of greenhouse gases, will not pay attention to us on climate change if we aren’t leading by example. It is hard to change them when we don’t change ourselves. We have to become leaders in order to create moral suasion.

“The other major issue confronting the American people is Iraq, because we have 150 thousand troops stationed there. The challenge will be how to withdraw; it will be how we do it. The irony is that we needed a political surge along with the military surge.

“I argue that we have to do it with leverage, carrot and stick. One of the things we should do, at the local level, is look at who we empower, and say those who cooperate with each other will find that we withdraw where they want us to, when they want us to, and how they want us to; those who don’t cooperate will find we won’t withdraw how they want us to do so and they will lose on military and economic means If we don’t do that, we won’t get the outcome we seek. We will end up with a temporal response. The Iraqis have to hammer things out and we should be there and use our leverage.

“The potential to change exists, but transitions will take a long time, and we face a set of challenges. We will have to make decisions on how we are going to get things done. The key is to have clear priorities and be clear on the objective. In this administration, these objectives were never explained and always assumed. There was more use of the stick than the carrot.”

***Ross anticipated all of this back in 1996 when I asked him if Uncle Sam was the global policeman. Back, he already knew how realpolitik worked and that ideology can take you only so far. Wishing things were different didn’t change them. His words were prophetic.

He said, “You have to be willing to use American power, but you have to use it selectively. You can’t use it in any and all circumstances. And you also have to be prepared to explain. I feel, basically, that if you make an effort to discuss it with the public, they typically will get it. And if you can’t explain it to the public, you have a problem.

“There is an essential need for the U.S. to play a role [in this instance we were discussing Israel and the Palestinians] because we are trusted by both sides. When the par¬ties reach an agreement, they are the ones who have to own the agreement, they are the ones who have to invest in the agreement; they are the ones that have to depend on the agreement. The only way that happens is if the negotiations are direct, not with us as a substitute.

“Having said that, there is no question that we play an indispensable role. It can be by creating an environment to make it easy to proceed, or providing sup¬port or being a go between—where we reinforce, where we clarify what otherwise might be a misunderstanding, where we can focus on issues that need to be addressed. Maybe we can help shape the priorities. All these things come together in terms of having us help sustain this process, and having the parties achieve what they want. As I said, if they didn’t want it, you couldn’t sustain negotiations through the pressures and shocks. Our role in the end is to help them sustain hope.

“There is no question that some¬how, through all sorts of shocks, through all sorts of traumas, the process endured. There is a narrow body of leaders who somehow are committed to it and they ignore the political realities in which they operate. It has endured because the majority of Israelis and the majority in the Arab world do not see war as an acceptable alternative to peace, and they are prepared to pursue it.

“It doesn’t always mean that they are prepared to pursue it no matter what. It doesn’t mean that their concept of how you get to peace are the same, but that’s what you negotiate. What’s important is that they don’t see an acceptable alternative. As long as they maintain a sense of possibility, as long as they have a sense of hope, they will continue to negotiate. This is not a process that can stand still. Because if that happens, you lose the sense of possibility and hope which are really the routes to peace.”

How does one get disparate leaders to negotiate successully?

“There is one principal that guides successful negotiation,” says the expert. “If you don’t develop a relationship with those you are trying to resolve problems with, you’ll never be able to resolve the problems. The problems are not abstract problems that you can deal with in a laboratory. They’re problems that reflect political needs, psychological needs, and you must develop, first and foremost, a sense of trust. Without it, you can’t endure through crises.

“One of the most important things that I witnessed as an observer and a participant was the development of the relationship between the Israelis and Palestinians who negoti¬ated in the Oslo process. They didn’t have an instant relationship, but they developed a relationship through the crucibles of crisis.

“You don’t create these things overnight. And the same was true for me. I didn’t create these relationships overnight, but they developed. Now the more they develop, the more you also feel an obligation to people. You don’t just walk away. For them, this is their whole existence. This is not my whole existence, but by the same token, I understand what they go through and they develop a relationship with me where they count on me for certain things. I can’t say, under those circumstances, ‘Well, you know, it’s your problem and I’m not going to deal with it.’ “

How much of the input is personal and how much is “professional” in such negotiations?

“It’s not an easy thing to separate, because if you want negotiations to work, you’ve got to carve out informal periods. You have to have a formal period, where people act on their instructions and present their positions. They cannot be preempted. But you also have to carve out time away from that because if each side is stuck and all they can do is present a formal position, you’re not going to go anyplace. You have to be able to find where the possible openings are, and you can only explore that informally. You can’t hold anyone accountable in an informal session. You think aloud. You brainstorm. Without it, you cannot produce.”

Is the human factor crucial?

“Maybe it’s just me,” said Ross, “maybe some would say I’m mis¬taken, but I think most of the failings in the literature on bargaining and negotiations are too tied to highly structured negotiations that don’t take account the element of personal trust in those that are negotiating. You’ve got to reach a point in every negotiation where one person can say to the other ‘look, this is what I really can do and this is what I really can’t do.’ And if they don’t have any trust, they’ll never come to the conclusion that that’s for real. That’s part of the bargaining process. You never get anything done until you have the ability to have key people responsible for negotiations able to look into each other’s eyes and know, ‘all right, I’ve taken this as far as I’m going to take it.’

“There is what I often call a ‘hope-fear continuum.’ As long as that continuum tilts towards hope, we will succeed. Because under those circumstances, political leaders can make hard choices and in other circumstances it’s possible to come to an agreement. Our task right now is to work with the parties, find ways to keep hope alive, and to continue to press ahead because there isn’t an acceptable alternative.

“At the end of the day, when I’m asked, ‘what is it that keeps you doing this, what personal characteristics do you have that make it possible?’ I say, I have a lot of patience, (although my kids say I don’t, I do) and I have a sense of humor. I realize those two characteristics, while important, are not nearly as important as the last one. If you don’t have a sense of humor, you might as well go home.

“Sure, I’ve certainly had periods of great frustration. One thing is to let each side know when you are really frustrated. When you’re in tense moments, one of the ways to get through them is by being able to joke. That’s again, the humanization of the negotiating process. You go through a day at the negotiating table, and you can’t spend all your time being serious or arguing. It’s not human. You need to break the ice, to ease the tension. It’s in everyone’s best interests to kid around and joke once in a while. It’s part of the demystifying process.

“You can’t measure it on the basis of one set of conversations. You can’t measure it on what they say or what the words are. We’ll have to see the results, we’ll have to see the deed-words are not a substitute for deeds.”

That was then. Today, Ross says, “Good statecraft requires reality-based, not faith-based assessment. It cannot be based on ideology or what you think you want, you have to deal with facts on the ground. The Bush administration uses a world view informed by ideology detached from reality. If we want to dig ourselves out of the quagmire, whoever is elected as president will have to go back to reality-based assessments. You don’t have to lose your ambition. You can change the reality—but only if you understand it.”

By Jeanette Friedman

Sometimes serious matters cannot be reduced to mere sound bites or black and white. Complicated issues should be examined carefully before an action is taken. One of those things is HR1746, a bill now before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services. This bill, the Holocaust Insurance Accountability Act, will allow survivors to sue insurance companies that are withholding payments on policies dating back to the Holocaust Era. If passed, Congress will essentially disavow the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC) agreement.

Established in 1998, ICHEIC was created as the outcome of an international agreement signed by officials from the United States Department of State, the German government, other European countries, Israel and Jewish organizations. It also involved U.S. state insurance regulators, European insurance companies, and the European Economic Commission. It was chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, whose leadership was sought precisely because of his well-earned ethical standing.

ICHEIC worked with 75 European insurance companies and “partner entities” on a voluntary basis and resolved more than 90,000 claims. As a result of its efforts, $306 million went to 48,000+ Holocaust survivors, their heirs and families of victims, often with little or no documentation to prove their cases. More than $169 million in additional funds was also secured to benefit needy Holocaust survivors worldwide. And when ICHEIC concluded operations in 2007, individual Holocaust survivors who were dissatisfied with the process clearly could pursue legal action against insurance companies.

HR 1746 seeks to abrogate all that ICHEIC accomplished. True, ICHIEC was flawed—as internal conflicts between survivors, diplomats and industry executives persisted throughout the commission’s existence. Nevertheless, ICHEIC did what it could to get funds, and quickly, to as many survivors as possible. (See www.icheic.org for details of the process.)

The key word is quickly. Those who signed the agreement tried to put money into the hands of those who passed agreed upon criteria, into the hands of poor survivors, and to the agencies serving them around the world—from the Americas to Australia, from Israel to the FSU. The idea was to avoid lawsuits—which can take insufferable lengths of time, are prohibitively expensive, and promise little in return. While lawsuits slowly wended their way through the courts, survivors were dying at alarming rates. Impoverished survivors were dying even more quickly than that. In Israel, the former Soviet Union, Florida and New York, there were hundreds of thousands of aging survivors who needed help immediately, not years in the future. ICHEIC got the money to them for the promise of legal peace.

Klaus Scharioth, the German ambassador to the United States, wrote to the late Congressman Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor and chair of the House International Relations committee: “At ICHEIC’s final session on 20 March 2007 there was overall agreement that German insurers have fulfilled all obligations under the ICHEIC trilat¬eral agreement and have therefore deserved permanent and all-embracing legal peace.”

He noted that the German Government acknowledges without qualification Germany’s historical responsibility for the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors. He pointed out there are “signifi¬cant legal hurdles posed by the federal rules [in the U.S. and Germany] of evidence for claims brought in court.” The hurdles didn’t apply to the ICHEIC process, since many claimants did not have to produce documents and other evidence to get claims processed. Scharioth added that in court actions against insurance companies, one could not guarantee success and that voluntary agreements, such as ICHEIC, helped Holocaust survivors whose claims would not stand up in court.

The letter reiterated that “Claimants with sufficient documentation can still file their claims with the insurance companies concerned, as insurers promised to continue processing these claims—and apply ICHEIC standards in their decisions—even after the ICHEIC process has been con¬cluded.”

But HR 1746 demands that insurance companies seeking to do business in the United States reveal all their records from 1933 through 1945. It exacts penalties and damages for those companies failing to comply. The bill mandates the creation of a Holocaust Insurance Registry to be maintained by the federal Archivist. (The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost of creating and maintaining the registry would be tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.)

HR 1746 will hurt Holocaust survivors around the world, as Scharioth explained to Lantos.

“Even if the legislation currently under discussion should clear the way for a few sur¬vivors to win large sums in court, it would certainly jeopardize the possibility of com¬pensating large numbers of Holocaust survivors through voluntary contributions, for example, by industry. Indeed, turning away from the principle of legal peace after voluntary compensation has been paid, would make it much harder to convince indus¬try not only in Germany, but anywhere in the world [to cooperate]…. HR 1746, in our opinion, is contrary to good faith…Negotiation can help Holocaust survi¬vors in a better and more timely manner than litigation ever could. Should HR 1746…become law, it would likely be impossible to enlist the support of any Ger¬man company for similar projects in the future….Hence, HR 1746 would do nothing to improve the lot of the majority of Holocaust survivors, but would at the same time jeopardize future agreements that would really serve to benefit Holocaust survivors in dire need of help….”

Secretary of State Eagleburger, former Deputy Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat and signatories of the trilateral agreements agree. They are concerned that no one will come to the table to negotiate the expansion of categories under which Holocaust survivors receive funding. In short, by reneging on the ICHEIC agreements, by creating a federal agency to become part of the litigious process against agencies that have so far, admittedly begrudgingly, opened their coffers to afford some survivor relief, all the participants in the agreements will no longer be viable partners for any future negotiations.

Considering the history of survivor litigation, the scandals concerning the handling of survivor funds, the news of some attorneys involved in such litigation being convicted of malfeasance, the last thing the U.S. and the Jewish community need is to further such a state of affairs at Holocaust survivors’ expense. Lawsuits, especially class-action suits, can take years to resolve, and then no one sees much money except the lawyers. Do the survivors really have the time?

Survivors in need have to have their needs fulfilled now. If Congress wants to initiate legislation that will cost millions of taxpayer dollars to enforce, why not expend those millions on behalf of Holocaust survivors now? Why not guarantee health care and economic sustenance instead of law suits?

The proponents of this bill say that if you are against this bill, you are against the Holocaust survivors. They paint a picture in black and white. Perhaps the many shades of gray involved here might warrant a closer look.

Paul Shapiro: Mission Impossible, Accomplished
By working to make the ITS files at Bad Arolsen public, Paul Shapiro is midwife to history.

By Jeanette Friedman

Holocaust survivors and their descendants went to Washington in October 2007 to learn about the International Tracing Service (ITS), a long-closed archive housed in Bad Arolsen, Germany, that is finally being made available to Holocaust survivors, their families and researchers. Since 1945, Holocaust documentation has been gathered from around the world and stored at ITS, which is overseen today by an 11-nation governing board—the ITS International Commission. Placed under the aegis of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1955, the files include Nazi war records and displaced persons camp records that contain information on the fates of at least 17 million people victimized or displaced by the Nazis. The records have been tapped to implement postwar restitution and forced labor compensation settlements between survivors and the governments of perpetrator states, but the full extent of the archives was never made public.

For decades, survivors and their descendants requested information from the ITS in order to determine what happened to family members during the war. They often waited years for a response and when they did receive something, in many instances the information was incorrect or incomplete. Survivors were left wondering if they had been told the whole story, and had no way to find out. The backlog of inquiries grew until by 2001/2002 there were over 400,000 of them. All attempts to gain direct access to the files were rebuffed. Protests grew, and with restitution and reparation application deadlines running out, with survivors dying in ever increasing numbers, access to the files became critical.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, joined later by the U.S. Department of State, began a campaign to secure agreement from the 11 countries on the ITS governing board—the ITS International Commission—to make the files public. The final steps in what became a complicated and heated diplomatic process were completed in November 2007. As part of the agreement, digital copies of the entire archive are being delivered to the museum in Washington and to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The first installment of 17.8 million digital document images was received in August 2007. A 50-million-card name file followed in November. The remainder will come through a series of shipments over the next three years, and by 2010, with well over 100 million digital pages in hand, the museum will have a complete copy of the archive. The museum’s mission now is to transform tens of millions of digital images (.tif and .jpg files) into searchable files (.txt, .doc or .pdf files), so that people can easily find the information they want. It’s a complicated process, it may take years, it involves new developing technologies, but it is happening at last.

The man who was a prime mover in getting those digitized files to Holocaust repositories was Paul Shapiro, a quiet fellow, who never really imagined himself in the role of Holocaust activist. But history has a way of shaping people and imbuing them with passion.

**Shapiro was born in Framingham, Mass, the town that put cholesterol testing on the map. Local schools were so overcrowded with baby boomers, that when his parents offered him the chance to attend Phillips Exeter Academy he grabbed it—and built a Jewish congregation there for Jewish students, who until then were required to attend church services as part of their academic training. Shapiro eventually earned Jewish students the right to attend synagogue off campus during Jewish holidays—the result of a public and sometimes vehement confrontation with school authorities.

Exeter led to Harvard.

There, Shapiro studied government and international affairs, particularly the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. They were the main international focus of the day, as America’s opponents in the Cold War. His graduate work was in Eastern Europe history. What he learned above all else is that we need to understand the history of the countries we deal with or we won’t ever understand them diplomatically. There was also a side-effect.

As Shapiro put it: “Once you delve into Eastern Europe, you have to delve into Jewish history, life and culture. It is inescapable. And that brings you to the Holocaust.” And once you confront the Holocaust, as a Jew in America at that time, you had to confront the critical issue of civil rights in America. In 1964, at age 18, he gave a commencement address in the aftermath of the murder of Medgar Evers. Evers, the NAACP’s field representative in Jackson, Mississippi, was shot dead in his driveway in June 1963. “I spoke about the Holocaust and how Jews were murdered with few hands raised to help them. I described the catastrophic consequences. Then I told the Medgar Evers story and asked students to consider what their responsibility is when such actions take place in our country and the response is silence,” Shapiro recalled.

There was dead silence in the auditorium—from parents and students. That was followed by a huge struggle between the headmaster and the board of trustees, about whether or not to publish his remarks. “That told me that there was something powerful and necessary about telling the story of the Holocaust, and that it was essential for people to understand the importance of acting when they witness discrimination, no matter if it is based on religion, race, creed or other prejudice. If we are true to our tradition as Jews, and if we are true to our traditions as Americans, we have an obligation to teach Holocaust history so people can learn from it and gain some enlightenment in the way we treat people—especially people who are different—today. What you learn is that silence empowers those perpetrating the injustice. You can extrapolate this from that: if you stand by when something has to be done, that is simply not good enough.”

When he was finished at Harvard, Columbia University sent him to Romania as a Fulbright scholar—and when his schooling was done, he went to work for the U.S. government as a researcher at United States Information Agency journal, Problems of Communism, the most important publication of its kind in its day.

There he was also asked to do some research for the Department of Justice, to bring evidence in the first successful case brought against a fascist who lied to American immigration authorities to gain entry into the United States. The man in question had unleashed a pogrom in Bucharest, Romania, in 1941. In America he had risen to become the Romanian Orthodox Archbishop of the United States, chairman of the National Council of Churches, and had even opened a session of Congress.

This took place at the time Elizabeth Holtzman, a congresswoman from Flatbush Brooklyn, was arguing for the creation of the Office of Special Investigations, now headed by Eli Rosenbaum. The case against the Romanian cleric was handled in a tiny office at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, however, because some politicians, including in the White House, were reluctant to address the issue.

Having gained experience working in classified Romanian Holocaust archives for the Trifa case, Shapiro began to do research for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—as a volunteer and a part-time researcher on assignment from USIA—in 1989, a few years before the museum opened its doors. It soon became clear to him that this was his passion and that he had found his true métier. In 1997, USIA loaned him to the museum for two years to help develop its Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. When the two years were up, the Museum asked him to stay. He did. The rest is history. Literally.

**Shapiro was appointed director of the Center and designed a program around a large number of research fellowships, programs for faculty who teach the Holocaust at college and universities, publications, research workshops and symposia on difficult subjects in Holocaust studies. One of the most important aspects of the Center’s work was to collect archival material relating to the Holocaust—the basis of all Holocaust research.

“In the roughly 20 years that the museum has been involved in archival collection, we’ve assembled about 40 millions pages of documents from 40 countries, forming the basis of a new generation of Holocaust research and teaching,” he told Lifestyles.

Imagine his reaction when he learned that there were more than 50 million original documents, and 50 million index cards relating to victims of Nazism at Bad Arolsen in Germany and that none of it was available for research.

“As a research scholar, that absolutely grabbed me. There’s no question. But as a human being I was overwhelmed by the tragic fact that much of the Holocaust survivor generation has passed away without knowing what happened to the loved ones they lost and fearing that once they are all gone no one will remember their names, or the names of the loved ones they lost, or the fate they suffered. I felt a moral obligation to bring into the open this massive documentation that tells the stories of millions of people who were lost, degraded or displaced. Success could offer closure to survivors who were there, and for those of us who were not, and all who come after us, the documentation would be a powerful insurance policy against forgetting. Everyone warned me that this would be a fruitless effort. But succeed or fail, I knew that I could not simply walk away from the issue.”

The ITS archives contain millions of pages of documentation covering four huge areas:

1. The concentration camp system, deportations, transports, Gestapo arrests and other forms of incarceration.
2. The forced/slave labor of millions of people, both Jews and non-Jews, who were treated not as human beings, but as assets to be used until they dropped—Arbeit macht frei —literally worked to death.
3. The fate of Holocaust survivors and other displaced persons, and how they were treated by the Nazis and the post-war victors.
4. The manner in which, since the end of the Holocaust, people who needed the information in the documents at Bad Arolsen were served by the 11 governments on the ITS International Commission and ITS’s ICRC administrators.

These ITS archives will literally double the amount of archival material at the museum, and some of the information in those 17 miles of documents will provide answers to questions we have only wondered about up to now: What did the forced and slave labor system look like at the ground level? What factors could affect the decisions made regarding concentration camp prisoners that determined their death or survival? How differentiated was the treatment of DPs by Allied authorities? How did perpetrators and war criminals obtain DP status, allowing them to avoid punishment and come to the United States? Moreover, because the documents were created at the same time and relate to all categories of victims, Jewish and not, the collection offers a powerful opportunity to make comparisons among all the persecuted groups and to learn from that.

The bottom line, says Paul, “is that the documents have multiple levels of importance. They perform a huge memorial function—to know the names and fates of those who disappeared. A memorial function that is so central in Judaism, to remember and speak the names of the departed, can then be fulfilled. But it is just as important for the families of non-Jewish victims to know what happened to those they lost.”

Shapiro also points to the moral obligation that we have to people perceived to be powerless, and that the survivors of genocide are perceived as powerless. That obligation is to tell their story, reassure them it will not be forgotten, and provide them with the information they need to come to some form of closure. Like other scholars, he sees the material as tremendously important from a scholarly research and teaching perspective as well.

Shapiro relates the archive to major problems of our own day as well. “With Holocaust denial on the rise, we have had the blessing of survivors to attest to the reality of the Holocaust. In the future, the original documents, of which there are millions at ITS, will be the truest testimonial and the most authentic witnesses. This collection also demonstrates in the most dramatic way the danger of anti-Semitism, not only for Jews, but for everyone. It is a warning of the need to confront resurgent antisemitism in our own times.”

About 25 percent of the documentation in the Bad Arolsen archives relates to Jews; the rest, to non-Jewish victims of the racial and religious hatred that is unleashed when antisemitism is allowed to become the operating principle of a society. They suffered and died as a result of antisemitism, too. The museum is committed to telling the story of all of the groups victimized by the Nazis and their collaborators. This collection will be of interest and of service to many ethnic communities in the United States that have an interest in this history, including Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, French, Belgians, and all the countries affected by World War II.

**Shapiro first became aware of the Bad Arolsen files when he went to work at the Museum. The leadership of ITS wouldn’t talk to the museum about making the resources available to scholars or anyone else. That intrigued him, and in 2001 he attended the annual meeting of the 11 governments that oversee the ITS.

Despite his plea on behalf of the dwindling survivor population, it became clear to him that neither the governments nor the ICRC had any intention to act seriously on opening the archives. Though survivors and scholars had asked for access to the files, they were repeatedly rebuffed. When the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors wrote them in 2000 and again in 2004, they didn’t bother to respond. Benjamin Meed, President of the American Gathering, threatened to rally 10,000 survivors to protest, but they ignored him and anyone else attempting to change their policies or even obtain information about the holdings. Meed, who passed away last year, never received a response to his letters.

Shapiro traveled to ITS and made repeated requests for lists of its archival holdings, all of which were rejected. But he believed that if he could show people what was in the archives, he could win them over. It had become clear that the systematic withholding of information was part of a strategy to make it impossible for the governments on the ITS board to act. ITS’s on-site leadership, the ICRC, and some members of the board itself maintained a stranglehold on the situation.

Working at the museum gave Shapiro the ability to do things others might not be able to do. Among them was assigning researchers from the museum staff to gather all the information they could possibly find about what was actually in the Bad Arolsen files—by checking the archives in the participating countries that had inventoried what they had sent, and locating in the National Archives an untouched crumbling list of the collections that had been turned over to the Red Cross by the Allied High Command in Germany in 1955. Through the great work done by the museum scholars, they also assembled information on two-thirds of the thousands of collections that had been deposited in Bad Arolsen after 1955.

Shapiro knew that making this information public and describing the situation at ITS to a community of individuals and organizations dedicated to working on the Holocaust would have a dramatic impact. He prepared a “white paper” for the International Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research when it met in Rome in June 2004. The Task Force is an organization of government and non-governmental organizations from 24 countries, all with a Holocaust focus.

The effect was immediate. The Task Force passed three successive unanimous resolutions over a 12-month period—the first such public resolutions in its history—demanding the immediate opening of the files. The resolutions and associated press releases impacted the governments on the ITS board. All were associated with the Task Force, and Shapiro challenged them publicly to explain a situation in one forum they were calling for the immediate opening of the files, while in another they were keeping them locked up tight.

When media attention focused on the story and diplomatic tempers began to rise, the U.S. State Department finally joined the museum’s effort to force action to open the files. Over the following 24 months, the museum was able, in partnership with the State Department, to convince all 11 governments and the ICRC to sign agreements not only to open the archives, but at the museum’s initiative, to allow each country on the ITS board to have a complete digital copy. Agreement came in 2006, and by November 2007 every country had ratified it. The transfer of digital actually began in advance of ratification, in August 2007!

**What is being transferred? Years ago, worried that the paper files that fill six buildings in Bad Arolsen might go up in smoke, ITS began scanning the documents into computer images. The resulting files are not “searchable” for key words or names because they are essentially photographs of the documents, and cannot be “read” by the computer when it is looking for specific words. Normally, software programs called optical character recognition programs can read these photographs of words, and turn them into text files automatically, but only if they have a certain uniformity of language and are clearly typed, not handwritten. Even then, even with the best software, the system isn’t foolproof. Much of the Bad Arolsen documentation is handwritten, in multiple languages, on pieces of paper of dramatically different format, quality, size and color. Many of the words even on typed documents are obscured by stamps, stains and other interference. That means that every .jpg and .tif file will have to be individually looked at, typed in and verified before it can become a searchable file. When you are dealing with tens of millions of documents, that transformation can take years.

Says Shapiro, “Time is of the essence, and survivors have already waited too long. Because software development and digitization will take time, we are reassigning staff members and bringing in new staff and volunteers to help survivors seek out the documents that relate to their families.” The museum hopes to begin responding to survivor requests for information in early January. Initially, searching the archive will require specially trained archivists using custom software to get clues about where to look for information in the actual documents. The museum will send survivors and their families copies of the documents they find. Under new leadership, ITS also is now committed to providing improved service and has agreed to provide copies of documents when it responds to inquiries.

“Finally!” Shapiro concludes. Summing up the museum’s plans, he explains, “This is a two track process. The moral drive to take care of the survivors and their families—which is an immediate need—is track one, and the train is already moving pretty fast. But we are working on improved access tools at the same time, recognizing that they will take time to develop. Over the long term, the research, teaching and memorial uses of the Bad Arolsen archives will contribute to the fulfillment of the mission of the museum, which owes so much—its very existence in fact—to the inspiration and dedication of the survivors themselves.”

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT (#2)
by Robin Morgan
February 2, 2008
New York City

“Goodbye To All That” was my (in)famous 1970 essay breaking free from a politics of accommodation especially affecting women. During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women’s movements, I’ve avoided writing another specific “Goodbye . . .”. But not since the suffrage struggle have two communities — the joint conscience-keepers of this country — been so set in competition, as the contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO) unfurls. So.
Goodbye to the double standard . . .
–Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who’s emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.
–She’s “ambitious” but he shows “fire in the belly.” (Ever had labor pains? )
–When a sexist idiot screamed “Iron my shirt!” at HRC, it was
considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted “Shine my shoes!” at BO, it would’ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint
analyzing our national dishonor.
–Young political Kennedys–Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr.–all
endorsed Hillary. Sen. Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed, pundits would snort “See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him.” (Personally, I’m unimpressed with Caroline’s longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)

Goodbye to the toxic viciousness . . .

- Carl Bernstein’s disgust at Hillary’s “thick ankles.”

- Nixon-trickster Roger Stone’s new Hillary-hating 527 group, “Citizens United Not Timid” (check the capital letters).

- John McCain answering “How do we beat the bitch?” with “Excellent question!” Would he have dared reply similarly to “How do we beat the black bastard?” For shame.
- Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged-and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.

- Goodbye to the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history, > including one with the murderous slogan “If Only Hillary had married > O.J. Instead!” Shame.
- Goodbye to Comedy Central’s “Southpark” featuring a storyline in which terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC’s vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain down into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison.

For shame.
Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny. This is not “Clinton hating,” not “Hillary hating.” This is sociopathic woman-hating. If it were about Jews, we would recognize it instantly as anti-Semitic propaganda; if about race, as KKK poison. Hell, PETA would go ballistic if such vomitous spew were directed at
animals. Where is our sense of outrage-as citizens, voters, Americans?

Goodbye to the news-coverage target-practice . . . The women’s movement and Media Matters wrung an apology from MSNBC’s
Chris Matthews for relentless misogynistic comments
(http://www.womensmediacenter.com/).

But what about NBC’s Tim Russert’s continual sexist asides and his all-white-male panels pontificating on race and gender?
Or CNN’s Tony Harris chuckling at “the chromosome thing” while interviewing a woman from The White House Project? And that’s not even mentioning Fox News.

Goodbye to pretending the black community is entirely male and all women are white . . .

Surprise! Women exist in all opinions, pigmentations, ethnicities,
abilities, sexual preferences, and ages–not only African American and European American but Latina and Native American, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Arab American and-hey, every group, because a group wouldn’t be alive if we hadn’t given birth to it. A few non-racist countries may exist — but sexism is everywhere. No matter how many ways a woman breaks free from other oppressions, she remains a female human being in a world still so patriarchal that it’s the “norm.”

So why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the centuries, even millennia, of struggle that got us this far, as black Americans, women and men, are justly proud of their struggles?

Goodbye to a campaign where he has to pass as white (which whites-especially wealthy ones–adore), while she has to pass as male (which both men and women demanded of her, and then found > unforgivable). If she were black or he were female we wouldn’t be having such problems, and I for one would be in heaven. But at present such a candidate wouldn’t stand a chance-even if she shared Condi Rice’s Bush-defending politics.

I was celebrating the pivotal power at last focused on African
American women deciding on which of two candidates to bestow their vote–until a number of Hillary-supporting black feminists told me they’re being called “race traitors.”

So goodbye to conversations about this nation’s deepest
scar-slavery-which fail to acknowledge that labor -and sexual-slavery exist today in the US and elsewhere on this planet, and the majority of those enslaved are women.

Women have endured sex/race/ethnic/religious hatred, rape and battery, invasion of spirit and flesh, forced pregnancy; being the majority of the poor, the illiterate, the disabled, of refugees, caregivers, the HIV/AIDS afflicted, the powerless. We have survived invisibility, ridicule, religious fundamentalisms, polygamy, teargas, forced feedings, jails, asylums, sati, purdah, female genital mutilation, witch burnings, stonings, and attempted gynocides. We have tried reason, persuasion, reassurances, and being extra-qualified, only to learn it never was about qualifications after all. We know that at this historical moment women experience the world differently from men — though not all the same as one another — and can govern differently, from Elizabeth Tudor to Michele Bachelet and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

We remember when Shirley Chisholm and Patricia Schroeder ran for this high office and barely got past the gate-they showed too much passion, raised too little cash, were joke fodder. Goodbye to all that. (And goodbye to some feminists so famished for a female president they were even willing to abandon women’s rights in backing Elizabeth Dole.)

Goodbye, goodbye to . . .
–blaming anything Bill Clinton does on Hillary (even including his
womanizing like the Kennedy guys–though unlike them, he got reported on). Let’s get real. If he hadn’t campaigned strongly for her everyone would cluck over what that meant. Enough of Bill and Teddy Kennedy locking their alpha male horns while Hillary pays for it.
–an era when parts of the populace feel so disaffected by politics
that a comparative lack of knowledge, experience, and skill is
actually seen as attractive, when celebrity-culture mania now infects our elections so that it’s “cooler” to glow with marquee charisma than to understand the vast global complexities of power on a nuclear, wounded planet.
–the notion that it’s fun to elect a handsome, cocky president who feels he can learn on the job, goodbye to George W. Bush and the destruction brought by his inexperience, ignorance, and arrogance.

Goodbye to the accusation that HRC acts “entitled” when she’s worked intensely at everything she’s done-including being a
nose-to-the-grindstone, first-rate senator from my state.

Goodbye to her being exploited as a Rorschach test by women who reduce her to a blank screen on which they project their own fears, failures, fantasies.

Goodbye to the phrase “polarizing figure” to describe someone who embodies the transitions women have made in the last century and are poised to make in this one. It was the women’s movement that quipped, “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” She heard us, and she has.

Goodbye to some women letting history pass by while wringing their hands, because Hillary isn’t as “likeable” as they’ve been warned they must be, or because she didn’t leave him, couldn’t “control” him, kept her family together and raised a smart, sane daughter. (Think of the blame if Chelsea had ever acted in the alcoholic, neurotic manner of the Bush twins!)

Goodbye to some women pouting because she didn’t bake cookies or she did, sniping because she learned the rules and then bent or broke them.

Grow the hell up. She is not running for Ms.-perfect-pure-queen-icon of the feminist movement. She is running to be President of the United States.

Goodbye to the shocking American ignorance of our own and other countries’ history. Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir rose through party ranks and war, positioning themselves as proto-male leaders. Almost all other female heads of government so far have been related to men of power-granddaughters, daughters, sisters, wives, widows: Gandhi, Bandaranike, Bhutto, Aquino, Chamorro, Wazed, Macapagal-Arroyo, Johnson Sirleaf, Bachelet, Kirchner, and more.

Even in our “land of opportunity,” it’s mostly the first pathway “in” permitted to women: Reps. Doris Matsui and Mary Bono and Sala Burton; Sen. Jean Carnahan . . . far too many to list here.

Goodbye to a misrepresented generational divide . . .

Goodbye to the so-called spontaneous “Obama Girl” flaunting her bikini-clad ass online-then confessing Oh yeah it wasn’t her idea
after all, some guys got her to do it and dictated the clothes, which she said “made me feel like a dork.”

Goodbye to some young women eager to win male approval by showing they’re not feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten the status quo), who can’t identify with a woman candidate because she is unafraid of eeueweeeu yucky power, who fear their boyfriends might look at them funny if they say something good about her. Goodbye to women of any age again feeling unworthy, sulking “what if she’s not electable?” or “maybe it’s post-feminism and whoooosh we’re already
free.”

Let a statement by the magnificent Harriet Tubman stand as
reply. When asked how she managed to save hundreds of enslaved African Americans via the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, she replied bitterly, “I could have saved thousands — if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.”

I’d rather say a joyful Hello to all the glorious young women who do identify with Hillary, and all the brave, smart men-of all ethnicities and any age–who get that it’s in their self-interest, too. She’s better qualified. (D’uh.) She’s a high-profile candidate with an enormous grasp of foreign- and domestic-policy nuance, dedication to detail, ability to absorb staggering insult and personal pain while retaining dignity, resolve, even humor, and keep on keeping on. (Also, yes, dammit, let’s hear it for her connections and funding and party-building background, too. Obama was awfully glad about those when she raised dough and campaigned for him to get to the Senate in the first place.)

I’d rather look forward to what a good president he might make in eight years, when his vision and spirit are seasoned by practical know-how–and he’ll be all of 54. Meanwhile, goodbye to turning him into a shining knight when actually he’s an astute, smooth pol with speechwriters who’ve worked with the Kennedys’ own speechwriter-courtier Ted Sorenson. If it’s only about ringing rhetoric, let speechwriters run. But isn’t it about getting the policies we want enacted?

And goodbye to the ageism . . . How dare anyone unilaterally decide when to turn the page on history, papering over real inequities and suffering constituencies in the promise of a feel-good campaign? How dare anyone claim to unify while dividing, or think that to rouse US youth from torpor it’s useful to triage the single largest demographic in this country’s history: the
boomer generation–the majority of which is female?

Older woman are the one group that doesn’t grow more conservative with age-and we are the generation of radicals who said “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”

Goodbye to going gently into any goodnight any man prescribes for us. We are the women who changed the reality of the United States. And though we never went away, brace yourselves: we’re back!

We are the women who brought this country equal credit, better pay, affirmative action, the concept of a family-focused workplace; the women who established rape-crisis centers and battery shelters, marital-rape and date-rape laws; the women who defended lesbian custody rights, who fought for prison reform, founded the peace and environmental movements; who insisted that medical research include female anatomy, who inspired men to become more nurturing parents, who created women’s studies and Title IX so we all could cheer the WNBA stars and Mia Hamm.

We are the women who reclaimed sexuality from violent pornography, who put child care on the national agenda, who
transformed demographics, artistic expression, language itself. We are the women who forged a worldwide movement. We are the proud successors of women who, though it took more than 50 years, won us the vote.

We are the women who now comprise the majority of US voters.
Hillary said she found her own voice in New Hampshire. There’s not a woman alive who, if she’s honest, doesn’t recognize what she means.

Then HRC got drowned out by campaign experts, Bill, and media’s obsession with All Things Bill.

So listen to her voice:

“For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words. “It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of human rights when woman and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small. It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide along women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own
families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.

“Women’s rights are human rights. Among those rights are the right to speak freely–and the right to be heard.”

That was Hillary Rodham Clinton defying the US State Department and the Chinese Government at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing (the full, stunning speech:

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/hillaryclintonbeijingspeech.htm

And this voice, age 22, in “Commencement Remarks of Hillary D.
Rodham, President of Wellesley College Government Association, Class > of 1969″ (full speech:
http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/Commencement/1969/053169hillary.html

“We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands. . . .
searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living. . . . [for the] integrity, the courage to be whole, living in
relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. . . . Fear is always with us, but we just don’t have time for it.”

She ended with the commitment “to practice, with all the skill of our being: the art of making possible.”

And for decades, she’s been learning how.

So goodbye to Hillary’s second-guessing herself. The real question is deeper than her re-finding her voice. Can we women find ours? Can we do this for ourselves? “Our President, Ourselves!”

Time is short and the contest tightening. We need to rise in furious energy–as we did when courageous Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the US Senate, as we did when desperate Rosie Jiminez was butchered by an illegal abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for trying to break through. We need to win, this time.

Goodbye to supporting HRC tepidly, with ambivalent caveats and
apologetic smiles. Time to volunteer, make phone calls, send emails, donate money, argue, rally, march, shout, vote.

Me? I support Hillary Rodham because she’s the best qualified of all candidates running in both parties. I support her because her progressive politics are as strong as her proven ability to withstand what will be a massive right-wing assault in the general election. I support her because she’s refreshingly thoughtful, and I’m bloodied from eight years of a jolly “uniter” with ejaculatory politics. I needn’t agree with her on every point. I agree with the 97 percent of her positions that are identical with Obama’s-and the few where hers are both more practical and to the left of his (like health care). I support her because she’s already smashed the first-lady stereotype and made history as a fine senator, and because I believe she will continue to make history not only as the first US woman president, but as a great US president.

As for the “woman thing”?

Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman — but because I am.

Robin Morgan
February 2, 2008
New York City

By Jeanette Friedman

If Jews around the world do not want Holocaust history distorted, then perhaps we should examine how we create our own myths—and lay those distorting myths to rest, once and for all. One such myth is particularly egregious, since it deals with Israel and the Holocaust.

A day after the UN Holocaust Commemoration on January 28, 2008, an e-blitz from Barbara Wind, director of the Holocaust Center of the UJCNJ (the Metro-West Federation) contained the following statement:

“ Amb. Dan Gillerman spoke eloquently, saying that if Israel had existed[,] the Holocaust would have been averted. (This will be the theme of our “One School Remembers” exhibit that will be on view Apr 6-May 3.)”

The Israeli diplomatic corps has been promulgating this myth for years—a luxury they can afford with 20-20 hindsight. Shimon Peres made a similar statement when he became the President of Israel a few months ago. These statements fly in the face of reality and don’t help Israeli credibility one iota.

Who can compare the Yishuv with today’s Israel? Eighty years ago, there were approximately 350,000 Jews, many of them refugees from Europe, living in Mandate Palestine, surrounded by millions of hostile Arabs. The Jews bought the land they lived on—until the British stopped them. Many of those Jews, who came in the first wave of pioneers, returned to Europe between the wars because they had nothing to eat. For those who remained, the economy was a disaster, and there were virtually no guns, no army and certainly no planes or tanks to use for self-defense.

There were 17,000,000 Jews in the world when World War II began, most of them in Central and Eastern Europe, and many in Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Egypt. In that war, the Nazis and their collaborators (including the Italians under Mussolini) caused the deaths of almost 60,000,000 people, including our own 6,000,000 Jews.

Could little Israel have stopped the Holocaust? Could she have absorbed 17,000,000 refugees or even 6,000,000? Today’s Israel has capacity, reach and scope that she didn’t have then—and couldn’t imagine having during the days of her birth.

The State of Israel wasn’t even an idea until the late 19th century—so how could its 350,000 Jews have managed to defend themselves against the Axis assault on Mandate Palestine? They couldn’t. Even the British Empire was at serious risk when confronted with the German war machine, and all of Europe practically collapsed like a house of cards within months of the Nazi onslaught. Poland fell in less than a month, Denmark, France, Belgium, Holland and other countries far more powerful than Palestine fell even more swiftly.

When Ben Gurion proposed that the British recruit thousands of Jews in special units in the war against the Nazis, the British rejected the request. Only after the situation deteriorated, and the Germans gained ground, did the British agree to establish the Jewish Brigade [5,000 troops]. And even then, many Zionists refused to fight the Nazis and their collaborators because it meant helping the British.

When France fell in 1940 and the Italians aligned with the Germans, Syria and Lebanon came under the control of Vichy France. The 30,000 Jews in Syria became victims of the same Nazi laws promulgated in Europe. Businesses were Aryanized and Jews were interned in camps. Henri Dentz, the Syrian high commissioner, planned to open concentration camps. Thankfully, in 1941, the British and Free French forces seized control before he could do so. Members of the Palmach—Moshe Dayan [who lost an eye in the campaign], Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon among them, participated in the Allied invasion against Vichy Syria, thus preventing the deportation of the Syrian Jews. (But success still did not allow Jewish entry to Palestine.)

In 1940, Italian planes were stationed in Rhodes. On July 15, they bombed Haifa. Nine days later, another bombing left 50 dead. In September, the Italians invaded Egypt and also bombed Tel Aviv, leaving more than 100 dead and many wounded, with extensive property damage. The Yishuv was already a German target. As an official Jewish state, “Israel” would have attracted a much larger invasion. (For the record, the Jews of Rhodes were deported in 1944.)

In April 1941, the Germans invaded Libya, causing British fear of an impending invasion of Palestine. By the end of May, German General Erwin Rommel reached the Egyptian border and the mighty British Empire retreated. During that same week, the Balkans, Yugoslavia and Greece fell to the Germans. Among the POWS were 1500 British soldiers from the Yishuv. That same month, a Palmach sabotage mission to Vichy Lebanon failed.

On June 10-12, 1941, the Italians returned and bombed Haifa and Tel Aviv. A year later, Rommel crossed Egypt to El Alamein, 60 miles from Alexandria. People were terrified the British would abandon Palestine, leaving it to the Germans—who had already made their deals with the Mufti of Jerusalem to deport the Jews.
When the Germans invaded Russia and headed for the Caucasus, there were fears of an invasion from the north. A state of emergency was declared and plans were made to fortify the Carmel, just in case. Palmach units were sent south toward the border with Egypt and to the sea, to prevent Axis attacks—the equivalent of sending a little Dutch boy to stick his finger in a dyke to stop a flood.

It wasn’t until October 1943, when British General Bernard Montgomery attacked Rommel’s army, that the German threat to Egypt and Palestine ended. That month, the Russian victory at Stalingrad marked the beginning of the fall of Nazi Germany. And that, and only that, stopped the German juggernaut.

So even if there would have been an official state of Israel (which would have been even tinier than it was in 1948, since Trans-Jordan was not an option if the West wanted Arab oil) how would it have possibly absorbed millions upon millions of impoverished Jews who would have flooded the area? With no infrastructure or space or even enough potable water, who would have been able to care for those millions of displaced Jews?

And when all the established countries of Europe, including Russia, couldn’t stop Germany until it self-destructed, do we really believe tiny Israel would have saved six million Jews and prevented the slavery of millions more?

NOT.

Jeanette Friedman is a freelance journalist and editor who founded Second Generation North Jersey in 1979.

David Kranzler, who passed away last week, was a religiously observant Jew who was immersed in the historical role of the Orthodox Jewish community during the Holocaust. While the countries of the world closed their hearts and minds to the destruction of European Jewish life, David was a flee case, a child survivor, who discovered during his extensive research that one group, the Orthodox community, was actively engaged in rescue. It would be an illuminating revelation that would direct his research for the rest of his life.

I first met David when I sought to learn more about the Kastner Transport, the train that transported 1,684 passengers—most of them were held hostage in Bergen-Belsen and released to freedom in Switzerland in December 1944. My mother, a Polish woman, was on that Hungarian train, and so was David’s wife, Judy. Agudath Israel archivist, Rabbi Moishe Kolodny, introduced us, and David and I worked together on some projects, notably The Goldberg Commission Report that reported on the inactivity of the American Jewish community during the Holocaust era. He became a trusted friend, a reliable source and someone who appreciated a good, solid, knock-down, drag-out intellectual battle.

Although David was a diligent and exact researcher, he was nevertheless stubborn, cantankerous and exacting. His long-winded writing style often got in the way of the incredible facts he managed to dig up from archives and interviews, driving a humble editor to distraction and despair. But he admitted when you were right—usually after yelling himself hoarse. On the day of his funeral his wife told me: “There were days he wanted to kill you.” The feeling was entirely mutual—and then she reminded me of his gentle, generous side, like the day he helped me cross Lexington and 68th right after my knee operation, and invited my daughter to his home for Shabbat. David was a special soul.

David’s seminal work was Japanese, Nazis and Jews, a massive work about the refugee community in Shanghai from 1938-1945 and the rescue efforts of Jan Zwartendyk and Chiune Sugihara. Published in 1978 by Yeshiva Univerity Press, it was one of many books that he wrote about the Holocaust that focused on the actions of the Orthodox.

In the early ’80s, as a member of the “Goldberg Commission to Examine the Role of American Jews During the Holocaust,” I read the rough draft of a document he submitted called “Orthodox Ends, UnOrthodox Means.” In painstaking detail, it described the rescue efforts of Rabbi Michael Ber Wiessmandl and Gisi Flieschmann in Slovakia and the Sternbuchs and others in Switzerland, as well as many other attempts to save Jewish lives during the war—along with the constant attempts of the American and Zionist Jewish establishment to thwart those efforts. Like Japanese, Nazis and Jews, the document was a tough read, but buried in the text were nuggets of pure historical gold—

and an indisputable damnation of the American Jewish establishment.

As an editor, I couldn’t help but pull out my blue pencil and start cleaning it up, so I called him and asked him if I could officially work on the document. That’s how we began working together. I contacted a personal friend, Tim Noble, one of the finest editors I have ever known and then the op-ed page editor of The Record in Bergen County, New Jersey, who agreed to do the final vetting. It was tumultuous and noisy work, but we were determined to make this document air-tight, with little wiggle-room.

One reason for this was that David’s degree was in library science, not history, so many mainstream historians treated him with contempt while they “borrowed” his material without giving him due credit. This naturally put him on the defensive and sometimes made things tough. But when the editing of “Orthodox Ends” was done, David gave me a copy of Henry Feingold’s Midrash on American Jewish History. He inscribed it in his own illuminated way and I had it with me when I ran into Feingold at a meeting.

I also had the final draft of “Orthodox Ends” and asked Feingold to read it. He said Kranzler couldn’t write. I said Kranzler could dig and that this document was edited, so he did me a favor and read it. When he was done reading, I handed him Midrash to autograph and under Kranzler’s dedication to me he wrote, “Litvaks never succumb,” and then admitted, though not in writing, that “Orthodox Ends” may well be one of the best documents in the report.

David, you will be missed. You were, indeed, one of the best.

OP-ED

By Jeanette Friedman Published: 11/13/2007

NEW YORK (JTA) — In “Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust,” the catalog that accompanies the exhibit of the same name, the director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust here puts into print the question on everyone’s lips when the survivors were liberated.

“Context is everything,” David Marwell writes. “In trying to understand the study of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, this dictum becomes especially critical. If the reader has any doubts, he or she need only think about the oft-repeated question, ‘Why did the Jews go like sheep to the slaughter?’ ”

Even now, 69 years after Kristallnacht and the beginning of the Holocaust, survivors are still putting to rest the accusations that they went like sheep to their fates. Some children, prompted by the attitudes of non-survivors in their milieu, even asked their survivor parents that question.

As Tom Segev’s “Seventh Million” made clear years ago, and a recent demonstration in the streets of Jerusalem underlined, to those without context Holocaust survivors are dismissed as bars of soap, “sabon.” Worse, many American Jews snidely wondered about the survivors, and some still do, “What did they do in order to survive?”

In the catalog’s final essay, psychologist Eva Fogelman notes that everyone blames the victim. It goes way back to Job: “Who ever perished, being innocent?” But Job’s friends didn’t understand him, and those who don’t understand the variations of Jewish defiance in the Holocaust simply don’t get it. To remain human, to maintain a shred of dignity in the midst of torturous mayhem, was to defy everything for which the Nazis stood.

The definition of resistance wasn’t helped by scholars and pundits who counted only armed resistance and measured success by counting the number of dead Germans killed by Jews.

Earlier this month, to honor the achievements of the distinguished Holocaust scholar Israel Gutman, four stellar academics — Yehuda Bauer, Judy Baumel-Schwartz, Robert Shapiro and David Engel — stood before an audience of about 200 and put Jewish resistance in the Holocaust into context.

Bauer was especially passionate. Amazingly, it was an Israeli who understood that what survivors and the Second Generation years ago called “spiritual resistance” was as important as armed resistance — and often much harder to maintain. The scholars broke it down to talk about women resisters, and religious, political and cultural resistance.

Bauer insisted that these stories of defiance be told and taught, otherwise future generations wouldn’t know how to resist those who try to dehumanize them and those who manipulate them politically.

He is absolutely right. More interesting is that those who grew up in survivor communities were surrounded by heroes who didn’t look or act like heroes at home. Some were short and dumpy, some could never master English or modern Hebrew, and few would talk about their experiences. But walk through the exhibit and you may find your neighbors on the walls and in the videos, or read about them in the catalog.

You realize that you know other heroes who deserve to be up on those walls and in those pages, but there just isn’t enough room. They did everything from observing Judaism, blowing up ammunition trains, producing Yiddish theater and concerts, and surviving under impossible circumstances.

When the museum first opened, the curator at the time, Yitzchak Mais, gave me, the daughter of survivors, a preview.

“Do you know about spiritual resistance?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

I described a tiny piece of cardboard with Hebrew letters shown to me by a survivor in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn years before. The survivor had used it in hiding to teach her little brother the Hebrew alphabet.

“It’s in the showcase on the second floor,” Mais said.

That piece of cardboard is a solid reminder of how tough the survivors still must be. It’s 62 years since the war ended and they still have to defy the powers that be to maintain their dignity as they face disease and death.

Unfortunately, those who owe the survivors the most are those who stole from them, treated them with contempt and appropriated their stories. But the survivors never give up. Our survivors, those who came from “there,” have lots to teach us. They are role models of whom we should be proud. They are not statistics that drain the economy. They are not sabon.

The Jews made their voices heard long ago, in hiding, in the camps, ghettos and forests. They made their voices heard when deniers began crawling out of the woodwork in the 1970s, and they make their voices heard now in their declining years. They demand that we remember. They demand the right to medical care, food and shelter so they can live and die with dignity. It’s a battle they have already fought.

As Marwell so eloquently says, “Just because Jews were powerless does not mean they were passive.”

Not even when they get old.

Jeanette Friedman, a freelance writer and editor, is a founder of the Second Generation movement.