The Murdered of Brisk Reburied

Remains of Holocaust victims laid to rest in Belarus 


MINSK, Belarus — Remains of more than 1,000 Holocaust victims were laid to rest on Wednesday in a Belarusian city on the border with Poland after a mass grave was discovered on a building site earlier this year.

Belarus was home to a large, vibrant Jewish community before World War II, and the discovery of remains of at least 1,214 people in January shocked many still scarred by memories of the Holocaust.

To the dismay of some Jewish leaders, officials stopped short of canceling the building permit on the site where remains of other victims might still be found, instead offering to bury the bones that were initially discovered.

The remains were buried in 120 coffins emblazoned with the Star of David in a ceremony at a cemetery outside town attended by city officials, Jewish community leaders and diplomats.

Among famous Brest natives is late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who won a Nobel Peace Prize with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1978. His father was among those rounded up and killed.

Regina Simonenko, head of the local Jewish community Brisk, criticized authorities for rushing to bury the remains and continue with the building project instead of running DNA tests to establish identities. “We were told that DNA tests are expensive and take a long time,” Simonenko told The Associated Press.

“We’re talking about a large ghetto,” she said. “We’re not sure that there won’t be other burial sites discovered there.”

New York Times story.

Commentary by Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik.


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Reviewing Begin's Decision to Bomb Iraq's Nuclear Facility

...despite the myriad risks, the Israeli cabinet decided to attack.

Why? Above all, because its leaders truly believed that the nuclear program was an imminent existential threat. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin would continue saying, until his last days, that in those years he experienced nightmares of Jewish children dying in a second nuclear holocaust -- one that it was his duty to prevent. And the "Begin doctrine" that he created -- that Israel will not tolerate weapons of mass destruction in the hands of an enemy state -- is alive and well today.

What many international observers dismiss as alarmism was a very real factor in the mind of Begin, a Holocaust survivor who lost both his parents to the war. The same echoing trauma and sense of historical duty is ubiquitous among Israel's top leadership. And it is apparently the prism through which Benjamin Netanyahu sees the world: "It's 1938, and Iran is Germany," the current Israeli prime minister told a conference in 2006. "[Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state."

Nor was the attack on the Iraqi nuclear facility an isolated event. In 2007, Israel again decided to strike a nuclear reactor in defiance of its strongest ally. In the preceding year, U.S. and Israeli intelligence assets had discovered a covert Syrian plutonium reactor being built with North Korean assistance. For long months after its detection, Israel and the United States had intimately cooperated on how to handle its removal. It was only when President George W. Bush told Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that the United States had decided to take the matter to the United Nations, rather than strike itself -- or agree to let Israel strike -- that Jerusalem decided to act, even against an explicit American objection.

In both the Syrian and Iraqi cases, the Israeli government exhausted all other options before resorting to a military strike. Begin launched a sabotage campaign against Iraq's nuclear program in 1979 after his cabinet decided that diplomacy had run its course. Iraqi scientists were assassinated, French technicians were threatened, and containers holding key parts of the reactor were blown up on their way to Iraq. But in January 1981, an internal intelligence committee ruled that sabotage was no longer "sufficient in delaying the program," which lead to the ultimate decision to strike. In 2007, Olmert negotiated with the Americans in the hope that they would do the dirty work for him, and he only directed his military to strike after Bush turned him down.

Nothing indicates that Netanyahu's thinking is any more dovish than that of Begin or Olmert. The Israeli premier is keenly aware of history and knows how small and short-lived the costs to Israel were in the past. He also knows that Israel was later greatly appreciated for the decisive actions it took, that the Israeli Jewish population takes the perceived threat from Iran seriously, and that the "Begin doctrine" is lauded domestically to this day. In an Oct. 15 Knesset speech marking the 40th anniversary of the 1973 war, he said, "There are cases when the thought about the international reaction to a preemptive strike is not equal to taking a strategic hit."

- Uri Sadot
Foreign Policy

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A Passing Reference

Found in a story on a fight in a HaShomer HaTzair kibbutz over relations with Germany:

...He reminded his listeners of how [Abba] Kovner had joined up with the despicable Menachem Begin, and how together they led demonstrations against the German ambassador-designate. If joining up with Satan was wrong, Ephraim asked, how could it be permissible to join with Begin?

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Karpf is Wrong

Anne Karpf from the UK utilized an op-ed of hers in The Guardian, based on an essay in A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity to lambast Menachem Begin in connection with an attack on the term "islamofacism":

It is, perhaps, understandable that Israel invoked the spectre of a Holocaust in the Middle East in the aftermath of the liberation of the concentration camps; but Israeli historians have documented the ways in which, as the country became the dominant military power in the region, successive Israeli prime ministers deployed it as an ideological tool, even as the state demonstrated indifference to real Holocaust survivors in its midst.

No one collapsed the differences between the Nazi genocide and the Middle East conflict more unashamedly than Menachem Begin who, at the height of his country's bombardment of Beirut, sent a telegram to Ronald Reagan declaring that he felt as though he was facing Berlin where Hitler and his henchmen were hiding in a bunker. To which the novelist Amos Oz responded tartly: "Mr Begin, Hitler died 37 years ago ... Again and again ... you reveal to the public eye a strange urge to resuscitate Hitler in order to kill him every day anew in the guise of terrorists."

Of course, what Ms. Karpf is negligent about is what were the historical facts and what was the context.

For example, she seeks to whitewash the Mufti, Arafat's hero, by writing:

But the biggest weapon wielded by those intent on confusing Arabs or Muslims with Nazis is the person of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. In a new book, Icons of Evil, two American academics rehash the charges against the Mufti - that he received funding from the Nazis, met Hitler, sat out much of the war in Berlin, and helped establish a Muslim-Balkan unit in the Waffen-SS. In their inflation of the importance of the Mufti (an inflation deliberately encouraged in Israel by the 1961 Eichmann trial), what such accounts fail to provide is evidence that the Mufti gained any power over Nazi policy. Conversely, plenty of evidence shows he lost almost all his influence over Palestinian Arabs in the period.

There was no inflation here. The Mufti was directly responsible for the deaths of Jews; for broadcasting Nazi propaganda across the Middle East; for promoting violence against Jews while seeking Nazi aid as early as 1933; and by bequeathing Nazi antisemitic parameters to the national struggle of the Arabs of WEretz-Yisrael for decades.

The Mufti tried hard but his failure at causing more deaths and damage should not be used as a mitigating factor.

Menachem Begin viewed, correctly, that Arafat had inherited the Mufti's identification with racial antisemitic hatred of the Jew as a Jew and therefore, it is not the Holocaust that Begin was promoting as a symbol but the very real physical deaths that Arafat was promoting at the time. Oz's remarks about 37 years having passed in connection with Hitler are totally irrelevant.

Haim Lazar''s Diary entries from HaUmmah

Tom Segev's article in Haaretz:

Begin's betrayal

Abba Kovner was a poet and a Mapam party activist who was admired by
many, one reason being his activity as a partisan commander in World War II. In May, 1961, Kovner appeared as one of the witnesses for the prosecution in the Eichmann trial. His testimony left a strong impression and was one of the formative moments in shaping the memory and the legacy of the Holocaust.

But Kovner's testimony also reflected a struggle that was entirely a matter of passions and politics - the struggle over historical glory. The prime minister was David Ben-Gurion; the opposition leader was Menachem Begin. Kovner, as well as Zivia Lubetkin and Yitzhak Zuckerman, were allowed to give the Labor Movement credit for heroism, including the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The role of the Revisionists was
ignored.

During Kovner's testimony, one of the veterans of the Herut movement, Haim Lazar, who was also one of the partisans, was present in the courtroom. Upon his return home he wrote in his diary: "Abba Kovner's testimony, as could have been expected, was a song of praise to himself and his associates. He turned the entire underground into a family-party issue. He did everything: wrote the 'first poster in the world' calling for resistance, organized the underground and headed it, stood at the head of the partisan brigades in the forests and carried out innumerable acts of heroism. And of course - I and I alone." Lazar considered Kovner's testimony a show.

Lazar and Kovner were in the Vilna Ghetto. According to Lazar, the underground organization was prepared for an uprising and was awaiting Kovner's order: "The order was delayed and in the end was not given at all because he, Kovner, had to remain alive for the sake of history."

Lazar made a living as director of the central committee of the Leumit health maintenance organization. He promoted his worldview as a historian: In his books he restored to the right-wingers their part in the nation's glory. His complaints can be found among thousands of diary pages. His daughter, historian Sarah Lazar, is now publishing several of its pages.

The emotional turmoil in Lazar's diary is not directed only against the left, but also against the leader of his party, Menachem Begin: Begin is portrayed as an opportunistic politician, who did not mean what he said even when he spoke about the Holocaust. Lazar says that he also took no interest in efforts to engrave in the Israeli memory the part played by the members of Betar in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising,
because he did not participate in it. Begin left the city a few days after the Nazis invaded Poland in September, 1939, and Lazar never forgave him for that:

"I once again mentioned the fact that all the leaders fled from Poland with the outbreak of the war and left the masses, both those who were organized and ordinary Jews, to the sighs and reversals of fate, without any guidance and advice in those difficult times. I particularly criticized the leaders of the Zionist Revisionists and Betar, who more than anyone else, thanks to the education they received, should have understood the situation thoroughly and remained with their masses of proteges, rather than saving themselves only."

From May, 1942, Begin lived in Palestine. Lazar: "From Palestine nobody tried to reach the ghettos or the camps. This would certainly have encouraged the masses and aroused them to many rebellions." But most of all Lazar is angry about the fact that Begin did not do his utmost to oppose the ties between Israel and Germany. Isaac Remba, the editor of the newspaper Herut, told Lazar that the party leaders had
instructed him to moderate the position of the paper on this issue, because most of the public was not opposed to ties with Germany, and the party leaders were afraid that their position would harm them in the elections. According to Lazar, this was "a group of typical wheeler-dealers who were interested only in seats, honor and enjoying themselves, and self-praise and parasitism, without any exalted background and without any idea and without considering the good of the nation."

It is interesting that the pages from Lazar's diary are appearing in the periodical HaUmma (The Nation) of all places, which is publishing "Misdar Jabotinsky" ("The Jabotinsky Order"). The diary is worth studying. It can confirm a thesis that historian Yehiam Weitz suggests in his new book about the Herut movement ("Hatzad harishon lekes hashilton"; "The First Step to Power: The Herut Movement, 1949-1955,"
published by Yad Ben-Zvi, in Hebrew): Begin's attitude toward the question of ties with Germany was that of a pragmatic politician; as opposed to the impression he tried to create, he did not see it first of all as a moral question. Lazar therefore felt that Begin betrayed his vow to boycott Germany. Weitz says that Lazar is right.