^{Rabbi Menachem Margolin. Credit: EJA}

Polish President Karol Nawrocki welcomed the European Jewish Association (EJA) delegation to Poland on Monday evening in an official letter read by State Secretary Wojciech Kolarski at the Hilton Hotel. 

Nawrocki noted the thematic link between Kristallnacht, the Nazi state-sponsored wave of terror unleashed against Jews 83 years ago this November, and EJA’s effort to raise alarm bells against a shockingly new vitriol against the Jews. He invited the rabbis, activists, and reporters present to become “contemporary witnesses to the Hell of the Holocaust”. He suggested that, when standing in the Auschwitz Museum, “we don’t need words, objects have replaced them.”

The ground on which Auschwitz stands retains water, I was told during a media seminar there a week ago. In winter, it freezes, and in summer, it thaws. This means that the earth beneath it shifts ever so slowly, unlike the solid Jerusalem rock on which Yad Vashem was erected in 1957.  

To maintain the wooden barracks in Auschwitz, the piles of shoes and suitcases looted from its mostly Jewish victims, to maintain the toothbrushes of the murdered from crumbling to dust, constant work is required. Scientists, curators, and scholars are needed to preserve the objects the Polish leader spoke of, and a will to understand them is required.

It is this will that, according to EJA Chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin, Europe now lacks.

^{Rabbi Daniel Walker; former British PM Boris Johnson; Rabbi Menachem Margolin. Credit: Credit: EJA}

The October 7 Hamas attack, and the unprecedented level of hatred experienced by European Jews during the two year-long war Israel waged to repel terrorists who murdered civilians, raped women in a so-called “act of resistance” and kidnapped elderly people and children – came to heed tragically last month in Manchester when a shooter screamed at the gathered synagogue worshippers “These are killing our kids” – and opened fire.

Rabbi Daniel Walker of Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, where the terror attack took place, told the audience that the words the attacker used are the language of genocide, as they brand all the Jews in the world as child murderers.

Tearful, Walker shared how his daughter now goes to school behind locked gates guarded by men with guns. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who sat next to Rabbi Walker, said that a “false equivalence between Hamas and Israel was allowed to be drawn” in the UK and lambasted such thinking as “total nonsense.” During a press conference, the British politician described antisemitism as “a virus that came out of the floorboards of Europe’s Middle Ages.”

“Hate is based on lies, so it is important to speak out against these lies today,” said Johnson.

“The right might use terms like ‘Cultural Marxist’, some on the left and more people on the right would use ‘Globalist’, and ‘Zionist’ would be used on the left – all these words are code words for ‘Jew’,” Professor Christer Mattesson told The Jerusalem Post.

“We measure the wrong antisemitism correctly and so misinform you, the public, as well as policy makers,” he added.

What he discovered was that the same people who would balk at making negative statements about Jews, this is the old antisemitism which became the wrong one to measure, would accept them today without batting an eyelid if the negativity is directed at ‘Zionists’ or ‘Israelis.’ In such a way, he told the Post, people who regard themselves as anti-racists “hide their hatred of Jews even from themselves.”

Unlike Mattesson, who studied thousands of people residing in the UK, the US, and Sweden, Rawan Osman grew up in Lebanon and was taught from childhood that ‘Jew’, ‘Zionist’, and ‘Israeli’ all mean the same thing, and a bad thing at that.

When she and other children watched Superbook, an 1980s animated television series aired by Middle East Television, which served both Israel and Lebanon, the adults would “freak out” over this shared viewing experience—the possible connection—with Israeli kids across the border.

“I hated Jews, Zionists, and Israelis – all interchangeable terms – and was one of the useful idiots who admired Hezbollah,” she shared with the audience during a panel focused on Arab and Muslim voices that support Israel and the Jews.

“In my country, antisemitism is a crime,” said political strategist Amjad Taha about the UAE. When Rabbi Zvi Kogan was kidnapped and murdered last November in the UAE, that country’s security forces went all the way to Turkey to arrest his murderers and bring them to justice.

“They were executed,” Taha told the stunned audience members. “Why? Because we do not tolerate antisemitism.”

^{Amjad Taha. Credit: EJA}

Taha lauded the Abraham Peace accords and noted that, after October 7, the Israeli embassy in the UAE did not close for a moment. He also pointedly remarked that, in the UAE, the Qatari-funded Al Jazeera channel is banned, and Islamic Brotherhood-alleged charity organizations are not allowed to operate.

“People may like or dislike US President Donald Trump,” said Genesis 10 CEO Harley Lippman, “but he is doing more to fight antisemitism than any president.”

Lippman, who advised several American leaders, lauded Trump for taking on US Ivy League schools for the raging hatred against ‘Zionists’, ‘Jews’, and ‘Israelis’ on their campuses. He also discussed with the audience how he thinks US Jews differ from Jews in pre-Hitler Europe.

“American Jews today experience antisemitism, but we are organized, have money and power, and we use them,” he argued.

Lippman said it in Krakow, where the Jagiellonian University was built in the 14th century on land taken from the Jewish community, in a city that imposed an ‘Ink Tax’ on its Jews. This means every student had a right to grab any Jew he happened to chance upon and demand money to so-called buy ink with – usually the coins were to buy a pint of beer. But he also said it in a country that had its share of wealthy, successful, and powerful Jews too – from Polish-Jewish uprising hero Berek Joselewicz to the hit pre-war singer Adam Aston.

“All these people who love Trump now forget how much he is loved by the Neo-Nazis and people on the extreme right,” film director Henry Nevison, who attended the event, told the Post. “What do you think he is giving them?”

During the media seminar in Auschwitz, an American reporter shared that in her hometown, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent with a Swastika tattooed on his body in a visible location was documented several times.  

“Jews are afraid to live in Europe”, Rabbi Margolin told the audience.

“We need planned, funded, and state-provided security. The time is now. If we do it, we will not only save Jewish life in Europe, we will save a part of its soul.”

Source: The Jerusalem Post