Our Jewish Roots?

Reports that hardly find a place in our newspapers were moving the public in Israel around the turn of the millennium. It is about the history of the Old Testament, which often contradicts archaeological findings. In the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz, which is considered to be prestigious, the scientific results of a century of excavations are laid out: There had been neither an arch-father Abraham nor any exodus from Egypt. There is no trace of the conquest of the “Holy Land” by Joshua, and Jericho had long since been destroyed at the time in question. The kings David and Salomon were perhaps small tribal princes, if they existed at all. All stories about the creation of the people of Israel and the division into twelve tribes are national legends.[1]

Prof. Seev Herzog from Tel Aviv University further stated:[2]

“The biblical era never took place. After 70 years of excavations, archaeologists have come to the conclusion that none of this is true.”

And Rabbi Elmar Berger in a lecture at Leiden University on “Prophecy, Zionism and the state of Israel”:[3]

“But the present State of Israel has no right whatsoever to invoke the fulfillment of the divine plan for a messianic time. It is the purest blood-and-soil demagogy. Neither this people nor this land are holy, they do not deserve any spiritual privilege of this world.”

We can also read in issue 7 of the series On the Trail of the Parashah:[4]

“Were the Hebrews really enslaved in Egypt? The stay of the Hebrews is not documented anywhere in Egyptian sources; the name Josséf is not mentioned; the ten plagues, even the three-day darkness and the death of the firstborn are not recorded in the annals, and there is no mention of an exodus en masse, or of the entire cavalry perishing in the parting of the sea. As regrettable as it is for the Jews, these events never took place and are nothing but a beautiful legend.”

While “historical revisionism” is increasingly criminalized in Germany, it is apparently celebrating a happy birthday in Israel:[5]

“This development has already been anticipated by academics: Revisionist historians have been relentlessly clearing away one taboo after another for years, gradually erasing the legend of the victorious David against ever-emerging Goliaths, questioning the comfortable but false image of Israel as the stronghold of the children of light against the Arab monopoly of darkness.”

“Especially on the Israeli side, the official view of history has recently been criticized by Jewish historians. On the basis of newly accessible sources, these ‘new historians’ have developed theses that contradict the hitherto cherished founding history of their state.”[6]

However, in Israel, too, a corresponding law has stood in the way of Holocaust revisionism since 1981.[7] When one considers that during the Eichmann trial fifteen Israelis came forward to testify for the defense,[8] it becomes clear what revisionist potential is perhaps being kept under wraps here as well, as Prof. Yehuda Bauer himself once wrote:[9]

“Poles and Jews alike are supplying those who deny the Holocaust with the best possible arguments.”

Curiously, Moshe Zimmermann from the Koebner Institute at the University of Jerusalem was recently accused of “Shoa denial,” because he criticized the educational practice applied to Jewish children in Hebron, and compared the education to racism with the educational work of the Hitler Youth.[10]

Back to the basics and the five books of Moses, meaning the Torah:[11]

“Around the year 95 AD, the Jewish writer Josephus wrote in his apologetic work Contra Apionem (I, 7f.) that the Jews had long possessed a number of books to which they dared not add anything, from which they dared not take anything away, and to which they dared not change anything. It was natural for all of them from childhood to find God’s instructions in these books, and therefore to hold on to them, even to die joyfully for them if necessary. Because not everyone was allowed to write history among the Jews, but only the prophets, who described the past according to the divine inspiration given to them and the present from their own precise knowledge, there were not, as among other peoples, countless contradictory books, but only a few, and these were completely reliable.”

The Holy Scriptures of the Jews were supposedly kept in the so-called Ark of the Covenant (Deuteronomy 31:26). However, no one was allowed to look inside. Only under King Solomon (if he existed, see above) was the Ark of the Covenant (“supposedly” must always be added) opened, and behold, “There was nothing in the ark except the two stone tablets that Moses had placed in it at Horeb [i.e. Mount Sinai], where the Lord made a covenant with Israelites after they came out of Egypt.” (1 Kings 8:9). The ark itself and its contents later disappeared completely. Jeremiah hid it in an unknown cave and sealed the entrance. For several centuries, the “law of God” was lost. After returning from 70 years of exile by the rivers of Babylon, the Jewish priest Ezra saw the need for a law:

“Your law is burnt, therefore no man knows the things that You have done.”

He therefore committed himself:

“To write all things that have happened in the world from the beginning, all things that have been written in Your law, so that people may find Your way.”

We learn more from the above-mentioned standard work on the origin of the OT:[12]

“The alleged author Ezra asks in prayer before his rapture who should instruct the people in the future; God’s law had been burned, so that no one knew the deeds that God had done and that he still wanted to do. At his request, Ezra is given the Holy Spirit by drinking a cup of fire-like water, and dictates 94 books to five men for forty days in accordance with divine command. The first 24 of them are published for general use, while the remaining 70 (the Apocalypses) are reserved for the wise men.”

Firewater did not go down well with the Natives in America either; it contributed to their decline. For the ancient Hebrews, on the other hand, it apparently fired up their imagination to such an extent that many still draw on it today. Otto von Habsburg, for example, wrote during a visit to Israel that he never failed to point out his own Jewish roots:[13]

“If Judaism had produced nothing other than the Old Testament, we would have to give it the greatest credit. This book not only contains fundamental divine revelations such as the story of creation, it is also the first school of our thinking and the starting point of our development.”

This is an outright suppression of thousands of years of cultural development, and an acceptance of all the historical falsifications over the past 2000 years. Incidentally, the House of Habsburg is also associated with the title of King of Jerusalem – and also that of Duke of Auschwitz.[14]

According to the latest research, it seems certain that ancient Europe was a homogeneous cultural area long before the Roman expansion, which was consigned to the memory hole first by Roman and then by Roman-Christian historiography. The dating goes back as far as 7300 years![15] We are talking about the time when Hannes Stein said that people slurped grain soups and drank beer.[16] It’s always the same: Benjamin Disraeli once replied to a British parliamentarian:[17]

“Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the very honored gentleman were desolate primitives on an unknown island, mine served as priests in Solomon’s temple.”

Israel’s former ambassador to Germany, Avi Primor, a secular diplomat, also demonstrated “a longing for a glorious history faithful to the Bible, even if it goes back thousands of years […]”, as he writes in his second book Europe, Israel and the Middle East.[18]

The Israeli philosopher Jeshajahu Leibowitz, who died in 1994, let us know in his book titled Conversations about God and the World:[19]

“Ultimately, we are all children of Noah, whose characteristic trait was – to be drunk.”

But did Noah even exist? After all, we are supposed to be committed to the Noahide laws. And Ezra, the actual founder of Judaism, was mentioned at the turn of the last century in a German encyclopedia as follows: [20]

“Jewish priest and scribe, restorer of the Jewish state. Favored and equipped by King Artaxerxes Longimanus, he moved from Persia to Palestine in 458 BC at the head of 1500 families in order to help the decaying colony of Zerubabel in Jerusalem and to purify the people according to the priestly Mosaic legal system. The pagans were stripped of all rights, the foreign women expelled; a permanent synagogue service was established, the center of which was the reading and explanation of the law edited, if not actually written [!] by E.[zra], and finally a special class of scribes was established for the purpose of interpreting and applying the latter. E.[zra] is to be regarded as the actual creator of Judaism in the narrower sense.”

The short book titled Great Shock – The Bible Not God’s Word! by Erich and Mathilde Ludendorff is also worth reading on the whole subject,[21] since the basics are even being discussed in Israel today. A living German author, Erich Glagau, has picked up the subject again in his books Cruel Bible[22] and Horror of Horrors! I Once Believed.[23] The now deceased contributor to the daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Johannes Gross once commented on this as follows: [24]

“Someone goes to a lot of trouble to prove: the Bible is an inhumane book. Indeed, has it ever been believed otherwise than that the Bible is divine and not a human model work?”

The Jewish laws – 613 of them, after all – were “easy to understand and not overly difficult to follow.”[25] It doesn’t seem to be quite that easy, however; according to one tradition, the Messiah is said to appear immediately if only all Jews observed two consecutive Shabbats.

Walter Benjamin wrote in his famous work Passages:[26]

“It may well be that the continuity of tradition is an illusion. But then, it is the continuity of this illusion of continuity that creates continuity within it.”

What captivating logic! You have to read this sentence several times to savor the elegance of this higher nonsense. The words of Ezer Weizmann cannot be recalled often enough:[27]

“We are a people of words and hope. We have created no empires, built no castles and palaces. We have only put words together. We have piled up layers of ideas, built houses of memories and dreamed towers of longing.”

At the beginning of this century, Walther Rathenau confided the following insight to “unwritten texts”:[28]

“The soul phenomenon of the Jewish people is religious madness. It broke out during the hundred-year period of fear of the Assyrian battles under the paroxystic single phenomenon of prophecy. It kept the people alive during the Babylonian Captivity, which was a forerunner of the Diaspora. These two terrible periods boiled down the strange people, so to speak, and made them insoluble.”

At the same time, the Jewish psychiatrist William Hirsch of New York published an extensive work on the connection between religion and civilization or culture, in which he explains the stories of the prophets as a result of paranoia:[29]

“When we consider the tremendous influence that the mental illnesses of some ancient Jews who lived four thousand years ago had on the entire civilized world, one would like to throw up one’s hands and despair of the human mind. […] But Moses’ madness reached its climax when he led the Israelites to Mount Sinai and there received the ‘laws’ directly from ‘God’. […] Moreover, we cannot possibly see in Moses the ‘wise lawgiver’ that he is now known as in the world. The laws and customs that were given to the people at Mount Sinai are partly taken from Egyptian customs, partly they are as absurd and ridiculous as they could only be in an insane brain. […] That an entire people was led around by the nose for half a century by this one mentally ill man and even downright mistreated, that for several millennia these delusions and illusions were taken for revelations from God, – is wonderful enough. But the fact that today, despite all scientific achievements, despite our ‘enlightened’ age, people still believe in this madness as something divine, and teach it as such in schools, would be truly hilarious if it were not so tragic! […] There is something tremendously tragic in having to admit that for millennia mankind has elevated the symptoms of illness of a few mentally ill Jews to its highest ideal. This is a terribly tragic fate. More tragic than anything that has ever affected mankind. – And of all religious doctrines, it is Christianity that has wreaked the most cruel and devastating havoc among mankind. It is not too much to say that civilization was held back in its development for more than a full millennium by the Christian religion.”

Friedrich Nietzsche also warned:[30]

“What are we to expect from the aftermath of a religion which, in the centuries of its foundation, played that outrageous philological farce about the Old Testament: I mean the attempt to pull the Old Testament out from under the Jews by claiming that it contained nothing but Christian teachings and belonged to the Christians as the true people of Israel, while the Jews had only usurped it. And then, they fell into a rage of interpretation and insinuation that could not possibly have been done with a good conscience: no matter how much the Jewish scholars protested, everywhere in the Old Testament Christ and only Christ should be mentioned. […] Has anyone who claimed this ever believed it?”

In 1927, a dissertation by Ludwig Trigyes titled “On mental and nervous illnesses and infirmities among the Jews” was published in Frankfurt on Main.[31] The Jewish Encyclopaedia (Jüdische Lexikon) published in the same year quotes from it as follows:

“The peculiarity of the Jewish psyche allows, even if only hypothetically, some conclusions to be drawn as to the connection between it and the frequency of some diseases and symptoms.”

However, by now we have been living with at times radical biblical criticism for over two hundred years:[32]

“Modern Pentateuch criticism begins in the 18th century and comes to full fruition in the 19th century. The tradition of Mosaic authorship and, at least relative, literary uniformity is rapidly losing weight, though it may still occasionally find a prominent exponent.”

But already some 450 years earlier, Martin Luther already came to this realization in the last years of his life:[33]

“Yes, I hold that there is more wisdom and teaching of good works in three fables of Aesop, in half of Cato, in several comedies of Terentius, than is found in the books of all Talmudists and rabbis, and than may fall into the hearts of all Jews.”

Because they show Jews in an unfavorable light, Luther’s late works are now banned in Sweden – after 450 years![34] Gerd Lüdemann also provides information about The Unholy in the Holy Scriptures: The Other Side of the Bible in a book with the exact title.[35]

Now that the Old Testament roots are no longer really credible and are even being discussed in the so-called “Holy Land”, it is now called In the beginning was Auschwitz, according to a book title by Frank Stern,[36] an invention that is, after all, legally protected. Reinhold Oberlercher recognized it quite correctly as what it is:[37]

“The Auschwitz

faith is the first real world religion spanning the globe. It has forced the traditional world churches into open submission by publicly recognizing its articles of faith.”

From the Jewish side, Christianity and Islam are repeatedly referred to as daughter religions of Judaism, which is not wrong. One of these exponents is Prof. Dr. Daniel Krochmalnik from the University of Jewish Studies in Heidelberg. He draws a wide arc to show us our future:[38]

“Maimonides [1135-1204] recognizes the historical reason for the present [sic!?] suffering of Israel in the envy of having been chosen and in the competition to supplant the two monotheistic daughter religions, which in his eyes are nothing but bad copies, counterfeits of Judaism. […] Like Paul, Maimonides also sees the calamity of the Jews as a means to the salvation of the world.[39] However, for Paul it is a religious suffering, while for Maimonides it is a worldly one. According to Paul, he stages a misstep by the Jews in order to lure the envious nations, who want to oust the chosen people, into the covenant. In doing so, he in turn makes the ousted Jews envious and thus lures them back into the covenant that now encompasses all of humanity (Romans 10:19; 11:14). God works with the lower emotions such as envy, jealousy and glee. He triggers a mutual displacement competition for divine privileges, which ultimately brings happiness to everyone involved. According to Maimonides, God’s cunning […] consists conversely in the fact that he uses the salvation monopolism and exclusivism of the competing daughter religions to lead mankind, as it were with an invisible hand, to the true religion of Israel, and finally to reveal the missteps of the false religions of the Christians and Muslims. – The philosopher Joseph Schelling spoke of the divine irony that the first will be last. So it is in the direction of Paul. In Maimonides’ play there is a double irony in this divine comedy: the supposedly last have always remained the first. And so there is also a double glee: the supposedly first, who have always boasted of their pre-eminence, are ultimately the last. But without deception, the world could not be seduced into true worship.”

Joshua O. Haberman, Vienna-born rabbi emeritus of the Washington Hebrew Congregation, America’s largest Jewish community, expresses a similar opinion:[40]

“The 2000-year development of Christian-Jewish relations can be characterized by the sentence in Psalms 118:22: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become a cornerstone.’ After centuries of disdain, crackdown, insult, hostility, humiliation, deprivation of rights and persecution, which culminated in the Holocaust, the Church under Pope John XXIII made a radical turnaround that made a new Jewish-Christian relationship possible. The Church finally realized that it is fundamentally Jewish, meaning rooted in Judaism, and that its own legitimacy depends on its connection with Judaism and the Jews. The stone that the builders rejected has become a cornerstone. […] Six conditions for the new relationship between Christianity and Judaism: ‘A full and public admission of Christian complicity in the Holocaust,’ ‘the cessation of all Christian attempts to convert Jews,’ ‘a purging of the Christian liturgy of anti-Jewish expressions and a historically accurate interpretation of anti-Jewish passages in the New Testament,’ ‘the recognition of attempts to bring about mutual understanding in the theology and ethics of both religions,’ and ‘the establishment of official Jewish-Christian working communities in every country, city and town.’ […] I believe that Jewish-Christian relations in the future will be strongly influenced by the incredibly rapid development of Jewish-Christian intermarriage. […] Christians are no longer our enemies, but our partners in the fight against pagan movements that are not only fighting Jewish and Christian theology, but also undermining the moral foundations of the Western world. […] Today’s Pope is no John XXIII, but he has continued and even extended the new direction of Christianity in relation to Judaism and the Jews, with his first visit to the Jewish Temple in Rome, his recognition of the State of Israel and with many public statements.”

As a newly elected member of the Presidium of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Salomon Korn stated:[41]

“It just so happens that Judaism is the root of Christianity. And sometimes I think: Christians have still not forgiven the Jews for the fact that Christianity has no truly original religious roots.”

As far as the other daughter religion, Islam, is concerned, ideas of a peaceful symbiosis can probably only be regarded as utopian in the long term. In view of the many millions of Muslims in Europe, especially Turkish Muslims, it should at least be borne in mind that there is still a Sabbatean sect in Turkey today, called Dönmeh.[42] These are Jews who have converted to Islam as a pretense, meaning they are an eastern variant of the Sephardic Maraños.

In normal times, criticism of religion should actually be abstained from as a matter of course, especially since the believer probably feels strengthened by it.[43] But we are obviously facing a profound upheaval: Christianity will finally be absorbed by Judaism, the dividing line, meaning the new friend-foe relationship, will run between Judaism, including the daughter religions to be absorbed, and all those who do not want to join in. Similarly, Lenin, who was of Jewish origin, declared at the beginning of the 1920s all those who were not prepared to cooperate with the communists to be fascists, to be fought to the death. Let us remember Ernst Bloch’s short formula: “Ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem”.[44] The Romanian Patriarch Justinian Marina concluded in Soviet times:[45]

“Christ is the new man. The new man is the Soviet man. Consequently, Christ is a Soviet man.”

Actually, one should defend all the good believers and the well-intentioned who find comfort and a home in Christianity, since they usually do not even know what they believe and what a tragic process of transformation is being carried out with their help and on their backs.

The title of a small book by Karoline Ederer, the publisher of the Jewish revisionist Joseph G. Burg (both now deceased), is insightful: Why should we care about Jewish history as a religion?[46] Arthur Schopenhauer argued similarly:

“A peculiar disadvantage of Christianity, which especially stands in the way of its claims to become a world religion, is that it revolves in the main around a single individual event and makes the fate of the world dependent on it. This is all the more objectionable as everyone is inherently entitled to completely ignore such an event.”

Golgotha can be ignored with impunity today, Auschwitz cannot. Thus the prophecy of Maimonides seems to be coming true:[47]

“Jesus paved the way for the Messiah,”

who, as Baruch Lévy wrote to Karl Marx, would be the Jewish people as a whole.[48] But even if the new faith were to become the state religion or global religion, we are still entitled to ignore it, at least inwardly.

A few more reports to confirm the trends outlined above: A new pilgrimage site is being established on the Sea of Galilee. Near Kursi on the eastern shore, at the archaeological excavation Tel Hadar, the “Feeding of the Four Thousand” (Gospel of Matthew 15:32) is now being commemorated. This is where Jesus performed the first miracle on Gentiles, claimed Bargil Pixner, a Benedictine monk and archaeologist from the Austrian province of Tyrol. A stone commemorates the place where “Judaism became a ‘world religion’ via Christianity”. Pixner believes he has found the place “where the needle was set to infuse” the tribal god of Israel into the rest of humanity.[49] The Washington Jewish Week of February 17, 1994 put it prose-like in a headline:

“The Jewish agenda is global!”

German historian Konrad Repgen observes an almost palpable impetuous urge for bishops and the Pope to declare the Church guilty. It is more emotional than rational, and is sometimes reminiscent of neurotic behavior.[50] The Pope, for instance, announced a solemn declaration of guilt for Ash Wednesday of March 8, 2000.⁵⁰ During the debate about Germany’s Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Albrecht Fürst Castell-Castell, a member of the German nobility (yes, they still exist) suggested in a letter to the editor that one should be able to read the following words in the center of the memorial park:[51]

“The German people confess their guilt and ask for forgiveness.”

As one of his distant ancestors had taken part in a crusade, he once traveled to the “Holy Land” to find descendants of Muslims who had almost been exterminated at the time – in order to apologize to them. (Video cassette about German nobility houses.)

The tribal god injected into us, whose name Luther usually translated as “Lord”, is known to be YHWH, Yahweh or Jehovah.

“How it came about that Yahweh became the god of the […] originally El-worshipping tribal confederation of Israel is unknown; it is assumed that his cult was conveyed to the other tribes by a certain group that had merged into Israel, so that Yahweh appears in the sources as the national god of all of Israel (i.e. Israel and Judah).”[52]

“Since the meaning of the name Yahweh and its secondary forms has been constantly pondered for theological reasons since antiquity, the literature on this subject – and the range of hypotheses – is almost unmanageable.”[53]

This is how “realities” that move the world are justified! I wonder whether German novelist Martin Walser was aware of this when he, during his debate with the then head of the German Jews Ignatz Bubis, referred to a sentence by Gershom Scholem:[54]

“The law of Talmudic dialectics: truth is a continuous function of language.”

This means nothing other than that language establishes truth. After all, Siegfried Unseld grants him, Walser, the same right.⁵⁴ However, undesirable truths are usually “communicatively hushed up”, as the leftists say.

Which way ever the world – and the entire cosmos – may have come into being, it was in any case billions of years before the formerly polytheistic Hebrews found or invented their tribal god, and imposed it on other peoples by means of “Hebrew etymologies” in order to establish themselves as a “people of God”.

Joseph Brodsky, born in 1940 in Leningrad, who emigrated in 1972  and has since become a lectured at universities in from Michigan, New York and Columbia, wrote:[55]

“Man has a habit of discovering higher purposes and meanings in manifestly meaningless reality. He tends to regard the hand of authority as a tool of Providence, albeit a blunt one. An all-encompassing sense of guilt and delayed atonement comes together in this attitude, making him easy prey and even proud of having reached new depths of humility. This is an old story, as old as the history of oppression, that is, as old as the history of subjugation.”

So here is a Jewish author explaining the principle of priestly rule! A few more stages along the way, Martin Buber wrote:[56]

“The task assigned to Israel is the messianic leavening of history.”

According to Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “the Jews were the fathers of meaning in history.”[57] According to R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Jewish messianism is “the great paradox of Jewish history: the memory of the future.”[58] Maimonides described the reading of profane historical works as a “waste of time.”[59]

According the German Jewish Lexikon (1927), the Germanic tribes had no words for Hebrew terms such as guilt, atonement, humility, faith, sin, resurrection, angels, hell, Holy Spirit, repentance, etc., etc:[60]

“In all its stages of development […] German has also absorbed much Hebrew (and Aramaic) linguistic material, partly by translating specific biblical words (loan translations) and by quoting biblical sayings and idioms, partly by adopting original Hebrew words with few changes (foreign words), partly by recasting Hebrew words into German (loan words). Beyond linguistic interest, this influence of Hebrew words, thoughts and expressions has great cultural-philosophical significance. The fact that the translated words brought completely new moods and mental situations to the hitherto pagan peoples, i.e. a considerable change in meaning, is of great significance. […] And in another thousand years, the German language had become, so to speak, Christianized in essential spiritual areas, or in other words: it was Hebrewized.”

Benjamin d’Israeli already said it openly in 1844:

“Christianity is Judaism for non-Jews.”

Whether the flow of linguistic features actually took place from Hebrew into German or whether Hebrew always drew on the folklore of the respective host peoples is something that linguists and folklorists should investigate. We have already learned that Hebrew only knew 5 to 6 thousand words in “biblical times” (Radday and Wurmbrand). But there can be no question that our vocabulary has taken on Jewish meanings and moods, and thus reflects a different – Hebrewized – reality than originally.

However, whether reality is meaningless, as Brodsky believes, or rather meaningful, depends on us and on whether we reappropriate our actual soul forces, meaning reclaim our – non-Jewish – reality:[61]

“I implore you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of supernatural hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life they are. They die themselves and are themselves poisoned.”

Let’s finally stick our heads out of the spiritual gas chamber of our poisoners!

“For Forgetting”

Yehuda Elkana, former head of the Institute for the History of Science and Philosophy at Tel Aviv University, was deported to Auschwitz at the age of ten. Elkana wrote the following article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz dated 16 March 1988, p. 18 (here quoted from Tom Segev’s book The Seventh Million, Henry Holt, New York, 2000, pp. 503f.):

“An atmosphere in which an entire nation determines its relation to the present and shapes its future by concentrating on the lessons of the past is a danger to the future of any society that wishes to live in relative serenity and relative security, like all other countries. […] The very existence of democracy is endangered when the memory of the past’s victims plays an active role in the political process. All the ideologies of the fascist regimes understood this well. […] The use of past suffering as a political argument is like making the dead partners in the democratic process of the living. […]

I see no greater danger to the future of Israel than the fact that the Holocaust has been instilled methodically into the consciousness of the Israeli public, including that very large part that did not endure the Holocaust, as well as the generation of children that has been born and grown up here. For the first time I understand the seriousness of what we have done, when for decades we have every child in Israel to visit Yad Vashem over and over again. What did we expect tender children to do with this experience? Our minds, even hearts, closed, without interpretation, we have proclaimed ‘Remember!’ What for? What is a child supposed to do with these memories? For a great many of them, the horror pictures were likely to be interpreted as a call for hatred. ‘Remember’ could be interpreted as a call for long-standing, blind hatred. It may well be that the world at large will remember. I am not sure of that, but in any case that is not our concern. Each nation, including the Germans, will decide for itself, in the context of its own considerations, whether it wishes to remember. We, on the other hand, must forget. I do not see any more important political or educational stance for the country’s leaders than to stand up for life, to give oneself over to construction of our future – and not to deal, morning and evening, with symbols, ceremonies, and lessons of the Holocaust. The rule of historical remembrance must be uprooted from our lives.”

Endnotes

All emphases were added by the author.