Self-promotion and Holocaust Day

Image Source: ADI website

Nothing is off limits, it seems. No topic, no matter how sacred, is deemed by Doron Almog and his PR team as unrelated to the relentless campaign they wage to entrench institutionalization in Israel.

And so today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, they turned to nazism's evil as a defense. Yes, you read correctly: defense of the practice of removing people with disabilities, even children and babies, from their families to be locked up in large, isolated institutions for the remainder of their lives!

Readers, if you see any justification for that practice in the evil of nazism, please enlighten me! (I warn you, your chances of success are nil).

In case you are incredulous as to the ADI shenanigans and suspect I exaggerate, here are a couple of verbatim excerpts from ADI's two recent media statements. One, apparently, would not suffice.

Almog mentions the German youth who volunteered at Nahlat Eran as a gesture of atonement for the sins of their people during the Holocaust: 

"By volunteering in Israel with the most vulnerable members of our society, they are breaking the silence and making the exact opposite statement made by their grandparents just a few decades ago – that they consider Jews to be their brothers, that all people are equal, and that as humans, we are mutually responsible for one another.” ["Descendants of Holocaust perpetrators seek atonement in Israel", FORWARD, January 26, 2021] 

Excuse me for wondering. If "all people are equal", why are our most "vulnerable" as ADI enjoys labeling people with disabilities, not "equal enough" to merit a life within a family and community?!

And here is the second post: 

“Their grandparents [the volunteers] were indoctrinated in racist ideology. They thought they were the superior race. In 1939, Hitler rounded up disabled people and murdered them. Here, their grandchildren learn that we are all equal. That every life is precious.” [Facebook]

Once again, forgive my denseness. I just can't fathom how the separation of babies and children from their parents and siblings to languish in institutions demonstrates that "we are all equal. That every life is precious."

I urge you to call out the supporters of the vile practice of institutionalization - Israel's ongoing, thriving evil. They will persist in disseminating the above distortions and lies unless we raise our voices..

Who was Władysław Szlengel?

Image Source

Władysław Szlengel (1914-1943), a victim of the Holocaust, is a poet of whom I first heard this weekend via the Haaretz Book Review section.

Szlengel and his wife fled to Bialystok after the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. They returned to their home in the Warsaw Ghetto after the Nazi incursion into USSR. Throughout that period, Szlengel published poems and articles in Polish in literary and political journals.

The literary Café Sztuka situated in the Ghetto was the venue for literary evenings and events. There Szlengel excelled in his prophetic poetry and satirical songs and skits which laughed at the Jewish society around him, at the good and the bad therein. He saw himself as "The Writer of the Chronicles of the Drowning".

He was extremely sensitive to all that happened in the world of the Ghetto. Thus, for instance, he wrote a poem about a Jew who had never seen an airplane and heard:

"That you can now get from Poland to Palestine in an airplane... So is the Holy Land so close?"

And most of all, his poems settle accounts with G-d as does the following (my translation into English):

They said: Pray
I prayed
They said - You must fast - I fasted...
They said: Don't steal
I didn't steal!
They said don't eat pig (which I love)
I didn't eat it
They said: don't commit adultery
I restrained myself...
For the L-rd...
Excuse me? I asked, for what?
I said, G-d will help
I said, G-d will deliver
I believed: G-d is with me...
How do You answer me today?
For all my deeds
Do You still expect me
In two days time, as in a will,
while I walk toward the Prussian gas
to say Amen?

Szlengel [Image Source]

In the Ghetto, Szlengel printed and secretly distributed a book of poetry entitled "Which I Read to the Dead" which has just been translated into Hebrew. That title is taken from this piece of his:

"I review and sort the poems I have written to those no longer alive. I once read these poems to living, warm people when I believed with all my heart that all this come to an end, that we will survive, that we will live to see tomorrow... This is our history. These are the poems I read to the dead."

And so we learn - on Holocaust Remembrance Day - of yet another precious, gifted Jewish soul, snuffed out by evil.