September 14, 2010 | 7:56 am

Dennis Prager’s False Debate

Posted by Dr. Michael Berenbaum

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I am not sure whether I qualify as a progressive, but I may know something about Auschwitz and its controversies and also about museums and their task of memorialization. So permit me to respond to Dennis Prager.

Why is the Auschwitz Convent controversy different than the debate surrounding the Muslim Cultural Center at Ground Zero, which is in reality two blocks away from Ground Zero?

Let us be specific because the question is falsely polemical.

Dr. Prager assuredly knows - but his readers may not know - that Auschwitz was actually three camps in one:

Auschwitz I was a concentration camp;

Auschwitz II was the death camp known as Birkenau; and

Auschwitz III, also known as Buna Monowitz, was a work camp.

For precision’s sake, let us recall that Auschwitz III was actually 50 subcamps that housed two types of prisoner workers: forced laborers, primarily non-Jews from many different European countries, and slave laborers, overwhelmingly Jews who were selected to work when they arrived at Birkenau and consequently were sent to work until they were no longer capable of work. After these Jews could no longer work they were sent over to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the death camp, where they were gassed along with arriving Jews who were not deemed capable or working or whose work was not required. Their living conditions were different and they fate was death – immediate or deferred.

Auschwitz I was the site of Polish - Polish Christian - victimization. Auschwitz II-Birkenau is the death camp, the site at which some 1.1 million Jews, men, women and children, were systematically slaughtered alongside some 20,000 Roma and Sinti, perjoratively known as Gypsies.

For fifty years under Communism there was a deliberate and systematic attempt to obscure, if not to erase, the memory of the victims of Birkenau as Jews.
The remnant of that effort remains in place even twenty years after the dramatic change of regimes and the significant efforts of the Polish government and the directors of the Auschwitz Memorial to change the character of the place and be far more historically accurate.

A visitor to Auschwitz I today will encounter National Exhibitions of several countries, Belgium and France, Italy and Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia among them, yet even after the very helpful changes of the post-communist era, these barracks convey the false impression that the nationals of these countries were murdered because of the were French or Czech, Dutch or Norwegian and not because they were Jews. The Jewish experience at Auschwitz I was segregated – ghettoized - to the Jewish Pavilion, Block 27, which during the Communist era was more often closed than open to the public and will soon be replaced by another exhibition because the current exhibition is deemed even by its admirers as poor and hopelessly outdated.

For a generation, there was barely a mention of Jews at the Memorial in Birkenau, even though Auschwitz II remains the largest Jewish cemetery in the world. This situation was rectified over the past two decades. But still today, the most powerful artifacts that are housed at Auschwitz I, including hair, the soup bowls, the taleisim, false teeth, eyeglasses, prosthesis, suitcases and even the extraordinary model of Crematoria B II of Birkenau, were all taken from Birkenau and displayed in Auschwitz I as if they were found there, as if the killing occurred there, and as if they applied to all prisoners rather than overwhelmingly to Jews. The Stobierski modelof Crematoria B II is shown in the upper floor of a barrack rather than adjacent to the actual destroyed crematoria where the visitor must rely upon a sign to understand what happened at that site.

Even the pavilion recently dedicated to to the Roma and Sinti was constructed in Auschwitz I, though the Gypsy camp was located in Birkenau just adjacent to the Ramp.

Because what visitors see is so powerful and what they see conveys a false impression, ordinary visitors do not grasp the differences between Auschwitz I and Birkenau despite the efforts of well trained guides to tell them otherwise. While 1.3 million people visited Auschwitz I last year, the number of visitors to Birkenau is at best 20% that number.

So let me answer Dr. Prager:

There is a German Peace Center near the Auschwitz camp at roughly the same distance that the Cultural Center will be built from Ground Zero. It has been in place for decades without a murmur from the Jewish community. In fact Jewish groups use the center, sleep there, study there, convene there and eat there. Kosher food will be served on request.

There is a Catholic Cultural Center, built under the leadership of the late much revered Pope John Paul II, situated roughly the same distance that the Cultural Center will be built from Ground Zero.  Jewish groups sleep there, study there, meet there, and eat there. Kosher food is also served there on request.

There is a Roman Catholic convent relocated from just 10 yards away from Birkenau’s fence, not two city blocks, at roughly the same distance as the Cultural Center will be built from the Cultural Center.

Why did Jews oppose the convent?

Because they feared with good reason that some Poles, together with some support from elements within the Roman Catholic Church, especially within the powerful Polish Church, were determined to dejudaize the murders at Birkenau. Communist historians and Polish nationalists falsely claimed that four million people were killed at Auschwitz, two million Jews and two million Poles.

Because they did not differentiate between Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II . They did not know that the Poles are fully justified to regard Auschwitz I as a site of Polish – Polish Christian -martyrdom. So when the convent was described as a convent at Auschwitz, they reacted with outrage. As a talk show host, Dr. Prager knows that calling something the Mosque at Ground Zero is absolutely different that speaking accurately of an Islamic Cultural Center a couple of blocks away.

The Memorial at Ground Zero is being built by a wonderful team of Museum builders led by my distinguished former colleague Alice Greenwald and with the participation of a design team that includes colleagues and former students such as Clifford Chanin and David Layman. They will determine the content of the Memorial and help to shape the experience of the visitor at Ground Zero. I trust them completely. They are skilled, sensitive and wise.

Visitors to Ground Zero will learn who was lost, who perpetrated the crime and why, who came to the rescue of the survivors, and who came together in its aftermath.  Unfortunately, they will not know the legacy of 9/11 because we continue to shape that legacy and all too often to misshape it.

The Cultural Center is being built not at Ground Zero but two blocks away and in New York two blocks away is a very long distance. It is not located at the sacred site of Ground Zero, which will soon house office buildings, shops and restaurants and not just a memorial, but in a rather seedy neighborhood replete with bars and “Gentlemen’s Clubs.” It will neither determine nor impact on the quality of the Memorial or the nature of the visitors’ experience when coming to pay homage at Ground Zero.

In fact, the Cultural Center, like the German Peace Center and the Catholic Center and the Convent, should be regarded as a welcome act of counter-testimony – or dare one say penance – because the killers killed in the name of Islam and therefore, the most important counter-testimony must come from within Islam just as the most important counter-testimony to the Holocaust, the most important acts of penance, came from within Christianity and from the subsequent actions of German and other European leaders.

If Dr. Prager really wanted to put the founders of the Islamic Cultural Center in a bind, he would celebrate its construction as a welcome act of atonement for the murder and violence that were committed in the name of Islam.

As a Conservative – I take him at his word on this matter - Dr. Praeger should understand that basic freedoms are precious, precious but also precarious. Hatred aroused to frenzy can lead to the trampling of Constitutional Rights: in the United States freedom of religion is constitutionally guaranteed and religious institutions have the right to build wherever zoning requirements permit them to build.

Lest we hear a reiteration by Jews of the false claim that Islam is not a religion, permit me to remind Jews that no less a religious authority than Maimonides regarded Islam as a religion – he lived in a Muslim world, read Muslim philosophers and knew the Koran well - and had significantly less theological problems with Islam that he did with Christianity, witness his thirteen principles.

September 8, 2010 | 2:32 pm

The Anti-Americanism of Opposition to the Islamic Center

Posted by Dr. Michael Berenbaum

Each year or so, I teach a seminar in American Jewish History. Early in the semester I read with the students George Washington’s exchange of letter in 1791, two years after the Constitution as written. with the Hebrew Congregation in Newport. The first President of the United States wrote the following:

“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

Let us face it that those who criticize the construction of the Mosque in the neighborhood of Ground Zero are violating an essential American value. The right to religious freedom from regarded from the inception of this country as a natural right, requiring no tolerance for the other. The one requirement that Washington explained was that “they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

We do have the right to demand of all who live in the United States that they demean themselves as good citizens and offer the country their effectual support.

It was unwise and frankly un-American for my friend Abraham Foxman to place ADL in opposition to the creation of the Islamic Cultural Center.

First of all Jews should remember that there was a time when we could not build a synagogue in the very area in question. Secondly, the history of American religion is that religious leaders come to understand that in order to participate in American society, the ultimately have to adopt the American norm of interreligious civility. We all have a stake in the development of “moderate” Moslem leadership, leadership that wants to be effective in American culture and in order to do so speak an American language and not the language of the Islamacists who are pushing for radicalization in the Middle East and elsewhere. And finally, Christianity and Islam have been rivals for more than a millennia. Judaism and Islam are not rivals. Theologically Islam with its belief in one God is far more acceptable to Jews than Christianity and its Trinitarian concepts and for centuries Jews lived far more comfortable in Islamic countries than in Christian ones. We should have stayed out of this fight or merely reaffirmed George Washington’s pledge to the Jews of Newport, his pledge and his insistence people who live under the protection of this government should demean themselves as good citizens.

No Moslem institution in this country will be under greater scrutiny than the cultural center that is about to be constructed and it could become a model of how an American Muslim culture can develop, an institution of healing and education.

Furthermore, Jews have an absolute interest in the development of a more moderate Islam. Israel cannot be at war with all of Islam. Egypt and Jordan have made peace with Israel. Many Moslem countries have economic ties. India has a long Muslim minority and is an important economic partner for Israel. And the list goes on and on.

We are now seeing the slippery slope from opposition to a Muslim Cultural Center to the burning of a Mosque in Tennessee and opposition to their construction elsewhere, to the burning of the Koran and inflaming tensions elsewhere.

Self professed conservatives should be especially horrified to see that there is little enthusiasm among their ideological soul mates to conserve this most basic and more vaunted to American values.

Simply put much of the rhetoric I am hearing is anti-American plain and simple, anti the values that have made America a revered symbol of freedom.

 

 

 

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September 2, 2010 | 11:37 am

The Curious Case of Hitler’s Signed Copy of the Nuremberg Laws

Posted by Dr. Michael Berenbaum

Hitler’s Copy of the Nuremberg Laws

The announcement that the Huntington Library has given its copy of the Nuremberg Laws personally signed by Adolf Hitler to the National Archives raises some interesting questions.

Recall that this document was taken by General George Patton, who was a notorious antisemite, as part of his personal war booty and given to the Huntington Library, which at the time shared his sentiments regarding Jews, where it was stored in a safe for decades and unavailable to the public. Peculiarly, it was not even noted among its archival holdings.

A word of history: Two laws promulgated at the annual Nazi party rally in Nuremberg on September 15, 1935—the Law for the Protection of German Blood and the Reich Citizenship Law—became the centerpiece of Hitler’s anti-Jewish legislation. Those laws, which were soon known throughout the world as the Nuremberg Laws – not to be confused with the post-war Nuremberg Trials—restricted citizenship in the Reich to those of “German or kindred blood.” Only citizens, racial Germans, were entitled to civil and political rights. Jews were merely subjects of the state. In order to “protect German blood and honor,” the marriage of Jews and “citizens of German or related blood” was forbidden. So too were sexual relations between Jews and Aryans. Women under the age of 45 could not work in Jewish households. Jews could not fly the German flag. Categorization had consequences. Definition was the first step toward destruction. Patton took Hitler’s personal signed copy of the Laws, which he found in Hitler’s Munich apartment and for almost three scores years the public did not know that such a document existed.

To the credit of the current staff once the copy was discovered the Huntington lent it to the Skiball Cultural Center, which promptly put it on display. It was shown at the entrance to their small but ever so moving memorial to the Holocaust 6 photographs of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust with a stark inscription “6 of 6 Million.” The Skirball exhibited it adjacent to a mandatory “Emergency Exit” sign, perhaps without quite being aware of the irony: unless Jews found an emergency exit from Europe, they became part of the Six Million, murdered during the Holocaust.

Still questions must be asked:

Why did the Huntington gift this historic document to the National Archives and not maintain it on display at the Skirball?

Why did it not give it to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American national memorial institution dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust?

Why did it not give it to museum dedicated to the Holocaust such as the Los Angeles based Museum or Tolerance, or even to Yad Vashem, the Jewish National Memorial to the Holocaust.

Mind you, in a sense this document is coming home. Patton took the Nuremberg Laws either illegally or inappropriately. All such documents captured by the US military at the end of World War II should have been turned over the Army War Records which are now stored in the National Archives .By giving it over to the National Archives, the Huntington is reuniting the signed copy of the Nuremberg Laws with millions of other documents captured by the US Army in after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Yet the National Archives will not display this document as any of these other institutions would most certainly have. It will be buried among their collections rather than be seen by the public.

I suspect that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will – most certainly it should – request the document on loan for display in the Museum as part of its exhibition on the Nuremberg Laws, but still one wonders why the leaders of the Huntington gave it to the Archives and not a Holocaust institution.

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