Survivors, scholars say threat of another Holocaust is not to be ignored
In the US, 58% of Americans believe that something like the Holocaust could happen again. The survey, which was done by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany in 2018, also found that 68% of people believed that antisemitism was prevalent in the United States.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Survivors, scholars say threat of another Holocaust is not to be ignored
During a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in New Jersey last year, German-born Holocaust survivors spoke of their concern about rising antisemitism.
People attend a national gathering to protest antisemitism and the rise of antisemitic attacks in France
(photo credit: GONZALO FUENTES / REUTERS)
Over the past five years, the world has seen record high numbers of antisemitic incidents in the United States and across Europe. Holocaust survivors say verbal and physical attacks against Jews and their property in 2019 are in many ways akin to what they experienced in Germany in the 1930s, which has created a deep-seated fear that another Holocaust is possible.
During a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in New Jersey last year, German-born Holocaust survivors spoke of their concern about rising antisemitism.
Adela Dubovy, who has four grandchildren at various universities, said she is “scared” about the rising antisemitism even in her own retirement home, according to a report by AFP.
“Now I don’t wear my Star of David,” she continued. “I tell my grandkids: don’t wear your kippah in the street. You don’t want to be attacked.”
“It’s now out in the open that it’s okay to pick on the Jews all over again,” Hanna Keselman told attendees. She was born in Germany in 1930 and spent a large part of the war in France and Italy.
“They [antisemites] are very strong, even in colleges,” said Auschwitz survivor Roman Kent.
Polls done on the subject of antisemitism in Austria and the United States have yielded frightening results.
In the US, 58% of Americans believe that something like the Holocaust could happen again.
The survey, which was done by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany in 2018, also found that 68% of people believed that antisemitism was prevalent in the United States.
Seven out of 10 Americans also said that “fewer people seem to care about the Holocaust than they used to.”
The Claims Conference survey also found that nearly a third of all Americans and more than four out of 10 millennials believe that substantially less than six million Jews were killed (two million or fewer) during the Holocaust.
Almost 45% of Americans are also unable to name one of the 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos, “and this percentage is even higher amongst millennials.”
However, 93% of Americans said that “all students should learn about the Holocaust in school.”
In a similar survey done by the Claims Conference in Austria this year, similar results were reported.
More than half (58%) of Austrians said that they believe that something like the Holocaust could happen again in other European countries.
More than a third of Austrian adults – 38%, who are 43% of millennials and Generation Z – believe that National Socialism/Nazism could come to power again.
In general, 27% of respondents believe that Jewish people could face another mass genocide, while 35% were in complete disagreement.
Prof. Judy Baumel Schwartz of the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University said the hatred of Jews didn’t start with the Holocaust.
“Hatred of Jews began a very long time before Hitler,” she told The Jerusalem Post late last year. “Hitler and the Nazi regime brought it to a new extreme that never existed before, which included mass murder of the Jews and sanctions by the government that had never been seen before. Anybody who thought that... there was a Holocaust that took place against the Jewish people 70 years ago and now everything is going to be great forever, then they’re fools.”
Baumel Schwartz explained that “antisemitism metamorphoses generation to generation because everyone needs a scapegoat, and the Jews were the perfect scapegoat because they were different. They were different in the way they dressed, they had all sorts of religious garments that they wore that were a little bit strange, they wouldn’t eat with you, they wouldn’t break bread with you [or] drink your wine, and therefore they were strange. They were different. So that already made them into the ‘ultimate other’.”
Baumel Schwartz said that “on top of that, we have modern antisemitism, which changes its form and includes racial antisemitism, economic antisemitism ‘and the Jews are ruling the world and the Jews only want money,’ etcetera… all this was many centuries before Hitler.”
She made it clear that following the Holocaust and until the 1980s, it wasn’t fashionable to be antisemitic, but this was just a temporary situation and “now Europe has gone back to the way it always was.”
Tags
Who is online
41 visitors
Almost half a century ago I watched Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention in a Detroit Rock Hall sing "It Can't Happen Here". Unfortunately, Frank, times have changed,
A good and timely article. We must never forget and ostracize all who would try make us or desire us to do so.
Any attempt to weaken the Second Amendment increases the odds this can happen,
Maybe so, but I see the Second Amendment as being a double-edged sword.
In fact, I feel the same way about the First Amendment.
[delete]
deleted for context by Charger
deleted for context
Worried about a holocaust against the Jewish people? Then do not ignore the rise of those like Orban in Hungary.
You should try reading before you write. Orban's antisemitism is ignored?
Hungarian Jews ask PM Orban to end 'bad dream' of antisemitism
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban accused Ronald Lauder of having a left-wing political agenda after the World Jewish Congress president demanded that he condemn an anti-Semitic image in a pro-government magazine.
Viktor Orbán’s anti-Semitism problem
Trump’s guest at the White House is no friend to the Jews.
Viktor Orbán and his responsibility for rising antisemitism in Hungary
" Orbán’s responsibility for the rise in anti-Semitism goes back as far as his electoral defeat in 2002, after which he often turned to coded anti-Semitic language, which any far right supporter could understand and with which he hoped to win over extremist voters."
Hungarian Jews ask PM Orban to end 'bad dream' of antisemitism
Hungarian Jews said on Thursday Prime Minister Viktor Orban's billboard campaign against migration and foreign influence, using the image of U. S . financier George Soros, was a proxy for anti-Semitism .
s -hungary-soros- orban - jews -idUSKBN19R24L
And there are more, so are you going to say again that I didn't "SHOW YOU"?
Believe what you want. The rise of the right will not favor.
End the bad dream of anti-Semitism? Orban's government will not deliver. His base will not permit it.
So what does Orban's antisemitism have to do with the Jews in America? If he is as antisemitic as the reports indicate, then he's a harbinger of the concern this seed is indicating. And I've shown you his antisemitism is known and around the world people are pointing it out, not ignoring it. I really can't put your puzzles together, bbl-1.
It is a large world. And hate is rising. It must stop one way or the other.
From your lips to God's ears.
That is absurd. Of course you know that, right?
So you call my wish that God would hear your words and stop the hate is absurd. Then why did you say that hate must stop, and that my obviously agreeing with that is absurd? Isn't it kind of weird to disagree with your own words?
Oh, I just realized that you may have been calling the expression I used absurd, which means you are not familiar with it. Here, educate yourself:
Well, now that I think of past experience with him/her, you could be right. I'd be surprised if he/she admits I was correct with this example, which is typical of such as you describe.