Guest Post: They Tried to Kill Us

Five ways the Jews have survived, and which are still open to us

Oct 7, 2026

Every year at Purim we read the Book of Esther aloud, and every year we boo Haman until our throats are raw. It can be read as a children's story with a happy ending, and we often tell it as comedy with everyone dressed up. But strip away the costumes and the noisemakers and you are left with something colder: a people marked for annihilation, saved only because one of their own happened to sleep beside the king.

Esther defeated Haman and saved the Jews of Persia with access, courage, and influence. It is worth asking, as antisemitism climbs again in the diaspora countries we have come to call home, whether we have an Esther anywhere near a palace today and, if not, where that leaves us.

We have a joke to describe just about all our festivals: “they tried to kill us; we survived; let's eat”. It’s funny because it’s true, and it is dangerous if we focus too much on the eating part and don’t stop to examine how survival actually manifests.

If we read our calendar not as liturgy but as a field manual, a pattern emerges. Across three thousand years of attempted annihilation, Jews have survived in roughly five ways: through the courtier, the insider who bends the ear of power; the fighter, who refuses to yield; by fortune, the improbable turn that saves a people who could not save themselves and who some attribute to God; by keeping our heads down, practising in secret; and we have survived by leaving.

Each of these has a festival, or a fast attached to it and each is part of our shared memory from modern times as well as ancient. Each worked, sometimes. Each failed, sometimes. The question for Jews in the 2020s is not which of these we admire. It is which of them are still available to us and which we should choose.

The courtier, and the arithmetic

The courtier is the oldest Jewish survival strategy, and the one we romanticise most. Joseph rose to run Pharaoh's granaries. Nehemiah poured wine for the Persian king and walked away with permission to rebuild Jerusalem. Mordechai sat at the king's gate and overheard the plot that would later save him. In early modern Europe, the court Jews financed princes' wars and, in exchange, bought their communities some breathing room.

Notice what these stories have in common. The protection was never collective. It ran through one person, and it lasted exactly as long as that person kept their place. Joseph died, and a new Pharaoh arose who knew him not. Joseph Süss Oppenheimer ran the finances of Württemberg until his duke died suddenly; within a year he was hanged in a cage. The courtier's power is borrowed, and the lender can call in the loan.

There is a reason Jewish influence has always run through individuals rather than through votes, and we should say it plainly. There are not many of us. World Jewry numbers roughly fifteen million, about one in every five hundred people on earth. In Britain we are well under one percent of the population; in France, under one percent; in the United States, perhaps two. In New Zealand you could seat the community in a mid-sized stadium. No democratic politician needs our votes to win. Some will calculate, correctly, that they can win without them, and some that they can win by standing against us, for our enemies are much more numerous.

That is not a complaint. It is realpolitik, and the worst thing a small people can do is fool itself about its own size. A minority that cannot swing elections survives in a democracy on the goodwill of the majority, or through individuals placed close enough to power to remind that majority of its own principles.

So: where are the courtiers now? There are Jews in Western parliaments and cabinets, and in newsrooms and university councils. But proximity is not the same thing as Esther's role. Esther hid who she was, and then, at the moment it mattered, risked everything by revealing it. Esther was also a woman of strong principle and put community ahead of herself. The question is not whether there are Jews near power. It is whether there is anyone near power, Jewish or not, who will walk into the king's chamber uninvited when the decree comes down and stand up for our tiny tribe. If the honest answer is no, then this option, the one we have leaned on most, is off the table.

The fighter

The Maccabees had no friend in Antiochus's court and did not want one. They took to the hills, fought a guerrilla war against an empire, and kept fighting long after any sensible person would have negotiated. On Hanukkah we light candles and eat donuts for the oil, but the story underneath is about a small, stubborn force that would not stop.

The fighter's record is mixed, and we should not pretend otherwise. Bar Kokhba fought Rome with the same conviction and brought down a catastrophe that emptied Judea. Masada is a story of defiance, but it ends with everyone dead. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising saved almost no one and redeemed something that cannot be measured. Fighting is not a guarantee. It is a refusal.

And yet the twentieth century gave the fighter something it had not had for two thousand years: a state. Israel is the Maccabean option made permanent. It has been at war, in one form or another, for its entire existence, and its posture has been consistently unyielding. That posture has produced results. The Abraham Accords did not come about because Israel made itself smaller or softer. They came about, in large part, because Gulf states concluded that Israel was strong, durable, and worth aligning with. In the Middle East, strength is a language everyone speaks.

Fortune

Go back to Esther, because there is a second story hiding inside the first. God is never mentioned in the Book of Esther, not once. What drives the plot instead is happenstance. The king cannot sleep, so he has the court chronicles read to him, and they happen to fall open at the page where Mordechai foiled an assassination. Haman happens to arrive at that moment to ask for Mordechai's execution. The festival itself is named for the purim, the lots Haman cast to pick the date of the slaughter. The whole book is about the dice.

The book itself calls this venahafoch hu, the great reversal, and we celebrate it by getting so drunk we cannot tell Haman from Mordechai. That is not an accident either. Fortune is indifferent. It does not distinguish the deserving from the undeserving, and it cannot be planned for.

Jewish history is full of luck: the storm, the border guard who looked away, the visa that came through a week before the borders closed. But every survivor's story of luck sits on top of a far larger silence of people whose luck ran out. Fortune is real, and it has saved us more than once, but it’s not a strategy.

Heads down

There is no festival for the fourth way, which is fitting, because its whole point is not to be noticed. But it has a liturgy. Tradition links the solemn annulment of vows in Kol Nidre to the conversos of Spain and Portugal: Jews forced to the baptismal font who went on lighting candles behind closed shutters on Friday nights. Whether or not the link is historical, the instinct behind it is real. The Jews of Mashhad, forcibly converted in 1839, lived publicly as Muslims and privately as Jews for a century. Soviet Jews kept a kind of Judaism alive in kitchens for seventy years.

This strategy is quieter than fighting and less glamorous than the courtiers, and it has kept more Jews alive over the centuries than either. It asks for no army and no access. It asks only for patience, and for the willingness to be invisible.

Its costs are the slowest. The secret Jew pays in a currency of erosion. After a few generations the candles are still lit but few may remember why. Many converso families simply dissolved into the majority. And invisibility does not guarantee safety: the Inquisition went looking for the hidden ones precisely because they were hidden, and Spain's purity-of-blood statutes followed converts' grandchildren for generations.

It is worth noticing that many Western Jews are already choosing this option without naming it. The mezuzah moves inside the doorframe. The kippah goes under a baseball cap. Children are told not to mention where they go on Saturday mornings. Nobody announces the decision. It simply happens, one small concealment at a time.

Flight

Passover is the great festival of leaving. We do not defeat Pharaoh, and we do not win him over. We go. We eat the bread before it rises because there is no time to wait, and every year we end the Seder with the promise of next year in Jerusalem, a promise to leave wherever we ended up and return to indigenous lands.

Flight is the strategy Jews have used most and talk about least, perhaps because it looks too much like defeat. But the record is clear. The Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 who made it to the Ottoman Empire built communities that lasted four centuries. The German Jews who left in 1933 and 1934, often mocked by their neighbours for overreacting, mostly lived. Many of those who waited for things to settle down did not.

The lesson of the 1930s is not only that leaving early is better than leaving late. It is that flight requires a destination. In 1938, at Évian, thirty-two nations met to discuss the Jewish refugees of Germany and Austria, and almost all of them found reasons to take none. That door, shut then, is now open. For the first time since the Exodus, Jewish self-determination in our historic homeland provides a home.

Which is why the movement of Western Jews to Israel, from France especially in recent years, should be read as flight. It is also something more. A Jew who leaves Marseille for Netanya is fleeing one place and joining the fighter in another. Aliyah is where the fifth strategy and the second meet. That is its strength. Its cost is everything left behind: the communities, the cemeteries, the centuries of Jewish life in places we had every right to call home, and the Jews who cannot or will not leave.

Reading the hour

Lay the five side by side and the menu facing Western Jews looks shorter than we might like.

Way	Where we tell it	What it asks	What it costs	Open to us now?
The courtier	Purim; Joseph; the court Jews	Someone inside the palace	Protection ends when the patron does	Only if we can name the Esthers
The fighter	Hanukkah; the Maccabees	A refusal to yield, and an army	Bar Kokhba; Masada	Yes, in Israel
Fortune	Purim’s lots; the great reversal	Nothing	Everyone whose luck ran out	Never a plan
Heads down	Kol Nidre; the conversos	Patience and invisibility	Slow erosion, then disappearance	Already happening, unannounced
Flight	Passover; 1492; the 1930s	A destination, and the will to go	Everything left behind	Yes, and for the first time with somewhere to go

The courtier option depends on people we may not have. Fortune is not a plan. Keeping our heads down is a strategy whose success looks, after a few generations, exactly like failure. That leaves the fighter and flight, and in the twenty-first century they share an address.

This is not an argument that every Jew in London or Sydney or Auckland should pack tonight. It is an argument against drifting. The Jews who fared worst in our history were rarely the ones who chose the wrong strategy. They were the ones who never chose at all, who assumed the old arrangements would hold because they always had. The courtier option, if it is gone, can be rebuilt, but only by people who first admit that it is gone and then by those willing to get involved.

Mordechai's message to Esther, when she hesitated, was not a promise but a question: who knows whether you have come to this position for just such a time as this? Each generation of Jews has had to answer some version of it, and to read its own hour clearly enough to know which of the old ways that hour demands.

They tried to kill us. We survived. Before we eat, we should remember how.

Guest Post: We Can Finally Dance Again

For the first Simchat Torah in three years, there are no Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Read that again.

None.

No living hostage waiting in a tunnel for someone to come. No murdered hostage still held by Hamas as a bargaining chip. No family waiting for a name on a list. No mother wondering whether her child is alive. No parents waiting for a body to bury.

They are home. All of them.

It is difficult to comprehend those words because, for three years, the hostages have been part of Jewish life.

The nightmare began as Israelis woke on a Jewish holiday to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Families were murdered in their homes. Young people were hunted through the fields around the Nova festival. Children saw their parents killed. Parents saw their children killed.

And 251 people were taken into Gaza.

A baby. Children. Teenagers. Grandparents. Soldiers. Festival-goers. Foreign workers. Entire families.

Some came home in exchanges. Some were rescued. Some were recovered by Israeli soldiers. Some were murdered in captivity. And some remained.

For three years, those who remained became a kind of terrible clock. 

Every release changed the number. Every rescue changed the number. Every recovery of a body changed the number. 

Every announcement began with the same dreadful question: Alive or dead?

And all the while, something extraordinary happened outside Israel.

People became irritated by the hostages.

Their photographs were ripped from walls in London, New York, Sydney and elsewhere. Posters asking for kidnapped civilians to be returned were treated as political propaganda. Missing pets are given more dignity than Jewish victims of terror.

The words Bring Them Home somehow became controversial.

Think about that.

People had been dragged from their homes and from a music festival into Gaza, and asking for their release became a position requiring explanation.

Before Israel had even identified all its dead, people were celebrating the massacre.

Before the hostages had spent their first night in captivity, we were being lectured about “context”.

Then came the linguistic laundering.

Mass murder became “resistance”. Kidnappers became “militants”. October 7 became something that apparently required an asterisk.

And eventually, in much of the international conversation, the hostages simply faded away.

Gaza was discussed endlessly as though the war had materialised spontaneously. The photographs disappeared from news coverage. The yellow ribbons became background scenery. The people underground became inconvenient to a story in which there was room for only one set of victims.

But Jews did not forget them. We couldn't. There were empty chairs at Shabbat tables. Their photographs stood in synagogues. Their names were read at vigils. Yellow ribbons were worn on jackets and tied to fences.

At Jewish celebrations there was always something unresolved in the room.

Because somewhere in Gaza, one of ours was still there. That phrase — one of ours — will undoubtedly offend somebody. So be it. That is what peoplehood means.

You do not need to have met a hostage to understand that a Jewish child dragged into Gaza belongs to the Jewish family. You do not need to know the parents to understand their terror. You do not need to be Israeli to recognise the ancient horror of Jews being taken away while crowds celebrate.

For three years we carried their names. 

Now there are no names left on the list.

The living are home. And the dead are home.

There is something especially cruel about describing the return of a body as a homecoming. But that is what these families were reduced to praying for.

Not resurrection. Not even rescue. Just: give us our child back so we can bury them.

That, too, was negotiable. That, too, became a bargaining chip.

And now it is over.

Not October 7. That will never be over.

The murdered remain murdered. Families remain shattered. Communities will carry what happened for generations. Soldiers died trying to bring people home. Survivors will live with things the rest of us cannot imagine. Some have already found that burden impossible to carry, taking their own lives after surviving the massacre itself.

October 7 did not end on October 7. For some, it never will.

There will be inquiries, recriminations and arguments. There should be.

But the hostage nightmare is over.

And look at the calendar. Simchat Torah. Of all days.

The festival on which Jews complete the Torah and immediately begin again.

The festival of hakafot, singing and dancing.

The festival Hamas turned into a day of slaughter.

For three years the Jewish calendar kept moving. Simchat Torah came and went. Jews danced because Jews have always danced, including when history has given them every reason not to.

But we danced knowing people were missing.

This year is different. This Simchat Torah, nobody is waiting in Gaza. Nobody.

There is something almost unbearably Jewish about that.

They tried to turn a festival of Jewish joy into an anniversary of Jewish slaughter. They failed.

The Torah will come out of the ark again. The circles will form again.

Children will sit on their fathers' shoulders. People will sing too loudly and dance badly.

And this year there will be no hostage count hanging over it.

So dance. Dance for those who walked back across the border. Dance for those who returned in coffins. Dance for the soldiers who went looking for people they had never met and never came home themselves. Dance for the families who spent three years refusing to let the world move on. Dance for every person who put a hostage poster back up after someone tore it down. Dance for the communities that kept saying their names when much of the world had stopped listening.

And while we dance, remember those who should have been dancing beside us.

Simchat Torah 2023 was the beginning of the nightmare.

This Simchat Torah, the last hostage has come home. 

For the first time in three years, nobody is left behind.

We can finally dance again.

עם ישראל חי

Why You Dislike Jews

Recently, Kim Dotcom — founder of Megaupload and one of New Zealand’s most recognisable controversial public figures — posted the following prompt on X:

“Why you dislike Jews – Go.”

There was no political framing. No mention of Israel. No reference to Zionism.
Simply: “Why you dislike Jews.”

The statement was not subtle. It was not coded. It was not plausibly ambiguous. It was an open invitation to articulate hostility toward Jews as Jews.

And yet, in New Zealand’s mainstream media environment, the reaction was… silence.

Outlets such as The New Zealand Herald and Stuff routinely monitor Dotcom’s social media output. His legal saga, political commentary, and even personal updates frequently generate coverage. Journalists, including commentators such as Philip Matthews, openly engage with his posts.

But when a high-profile public figure invites his audience to enumerate reasons for disliking Jews, the matter appears to fall beneath the threshold of newsworthiness.

That asymmetry deserves examination.

1. From “Edgy” to Explicit

In contemporary discourse, antisemitism often hides behind euphemism: “globalists,” “Zionist control,” “dual loyalty,” or insinuations about finance and media. The ambiguity allows defenders to claim political intent rather than ethnic hostility.

Dotcom’s formulation dispensed with euphemism. It did not reference Israel or geopolitics. It addressed Jews as a people.

When explicit hostility is treated as mere trolling, something significant has shifted. The boundary between fringe hate and public discourse erodes not with dramatic ruptures, but with quiet indifference.

2. The “He’s Just Provoking” Defence

One explanation for the silence may be fatigue. Dotcom has long cultivated notoriety. Editors may reasonably conclude that amplifying inflammatory posts serves his brand.

But the decision to ignore speech is not neutral. When antisemitism is categorised as “just another provocation,” it is implicitly downgraded from racism to performance.

Intent does not nullify impact. A rhetorical invitation to justify disliking Jews normalises the idea that such dislike is a legitimate subject for open debate.

3. The Hierarchy of Harms

It is difficult to imagine a comparable prompt — “Why you dislike Māori – Go” or “Why you dislike Muslims – Go” — passing without immediate condemnation.

New Zealand’s public culture rightly treats racial hostility toward Māori and Muslim communities as morally intolerable. Political leaders would likely respond. Media would report. Civil society groups would speak.

The relative quiet in this case suggests an uncomfortable possibility – antisemitism occupies a lower rung in New Zealand’s hierarchy of harms.

Several dynamics contribute to this:

• The Jewish community is small and often perceived as socially secure.

• Antisemitism is seen as imported rather than domestic.

• Jews are frequently mischaracterised as “privileged,” diluting perceptions of vulnerability.

• Post-October 7 polarisation has blurred lines between anti-Israel rhetoric and hostility toward Jews.

When prejudice is perceived as low-risk, it attracts less scrutiny.

4. Free Speech vs Moral Speech

New Zealand’s debate over hate-speech reform has produced understandable caution among journalists wary of appearing censorious. But condemning racism is not equivalent to advocating legal sanction.

The issue here is not whether Dotcom should be prosecuted. It is whether overt antisemitism should be treated as socially unacceptable.

Free speech protects the right to speak. It does not require society to respond with indifference.

5. Normalisation Through Non-Reaction

The most concerning effect of silence is not reputational harm to one individual. It is cultural conditioning.

When overt antisemitism generates no institutional response, three messages are conveyed:

1. Jews are a permissible target of open hostility.

2. Antisemitism is not taken as seriously as other forms of racism.

3. The Jewish community’s concerns can be deprioritised without consequence.

Normalisation rarely announces itself. It advances through lowered expectations.

6. A Post-October 7 Context

Since October 7, global antisemitic incidents have risen sharply. In many societies, hostility toward Israel has metastasised into hostility toward Jews. New Zealand has not been immune.

In this environment, rhetorical prompts inviting collective dislike of Jews do not occur in a vacuum. They feed into an ecosystem where Jewish identity is increasingly framed as politically suspect.

Silence in such moments does not maintain neutrality. It shapes the boundaries of what is considered tolerable.

7. The Responsibility of Prominence

Dotcom is not an anonymous user. He remains a widely recognised public figure because of his role in Megaupload and the long-running extradition saga involving the FBI. His prominence is precisely why journalists monitor his output.

Prominence magnifies impact. When inflammatory speech comes from a recognised figure, the threshold for scrutiny should rise — not fall.

Conclusion: What Silence Reveals

The core issue is not one man’s social-media conduct. It is the social response.

If antisemitism is treated as noise — as background provocation unworthy of attention — it signals a moral inconsistency in how racism is ranked and recognised.

New Zealand rightly prides itself on social cohesion and pluralism. Those commitments are tested not only by overt crisis, but by moments when hatred appears casually, stripped of disguise.

The question is not whether controversial figures should be amplified.

The question is whether explicit hostility toward Jews is still considered unacceptable in principle — or merely impolite in tone.

The answer lies less in the post itself than in the silence that followed.

Media release: Bondi Terror Attack on Jewish Community

The Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand expresses its deep grief over the 14 December attack on the Jewish Community in Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia.

Antisemitism has risen at an alarming rate worldwide since October 7, 2023. Australia experienced a fourfold increase in antisemitic acts in the year following. New Zealand has not been immune to the global trend.

A key driver has been the free pass given to libel-driven antizionist rhetoric in our media, social media and even in the discourse of some of our politicians, community and church leaders. Ideas have consequences and false ideas about Jews and the Jewish state can lubricate the path to atrocities of the kind that transpired on the beach in Bondi. In an age of false narratives, few are impacted more significantly than the Jewish people.

Our Holocaust Foundation is dedicated to the faithful presentation and commemoration of the events of the Holocaust, and resistance to all attempts to universalize, dilute, or otherwise distort the historical record. Libel and propaganda played a crucial role in the gradual isolation, demonisation and dehumanisation of the Jews of Europe. The lessons for the current period are obvious.

We urge our leaders - and all those with influence - to stand with the Jewish community at this time, and to push back against reckless and irresponsible rhetoric fuelling the rise of antisemitism in our time.

Auschwitz. Now. staged in Birkdale, Auckland, NZ

The exhibition was open August-October 2025.

Details here…

“They’re afraid to be Jewish”

• ‘What the hell Is happening in America?' These are the words of Holocaust survivor Barbara Bendler Steinmetz. She escaped the Nazis as a child and is now 88. Steinmetz became the victim of a firebomb attack in the USA recently. 'People are afraid to wear a Star of David. They’re taking down mezuzahs. They’re afraid to be Jewish,’ she said. After escaping the Holocaust so many years ago, Steinmetz once again found herself facing violent hatred—this time on the streets of the United States. She was among 12 people injured in a firebomb attack carried out by an Egyptian assailant in Boulder, Colorado, during a march to raise awareness for hostages held in Gaza.

• “There will be another Holocaust—this time on the soil of the Land of Israel. This is, in fact, a way to deprive the Jewish nation of the means to defend itself, means we so lacked during the long years of exile and the period of the Holocaust.” These were the statements of Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar following threats from several European leaders to impose sanctions, including an arms embargo, in response to Israel’s ongoing campaign to eliminate Hamas. “If these initiatives are successful, Israel will simply be eliminated,” he said.

• “In 2024, antisemitic incidents in the United States rose for the fourth consecutive year, reaching 9,354 total incidents—the highest level ever recorded in the 46-year history of ADL's Audit of Antisemitic Incidents.” These are the findings of ADL, who since 1979 have published an annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents in USA.

  Sources: YNet, ADL, JNS

“Never Again” in a World That Forgets

On Yom HaShoah Jewish communities around the world gather to honour the memory of six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. In Israel, a siren sounds and the nation will freeze mid-step, in traffic, in work, in thought. Elsewhere, we light candles, recite names, and hold vigils. We remember. Because we must.

But remembrance, while sacred, is no longer enough.

“Never again.” These words, once a solemn vow born from the ashes of Auschwitz, now echo with disturbing hollowness. What was meant as a universal imperative is increasingly recited like a ritual — unmoored from the urgency and clarity it once carried. We speak the phrase. But do we still mean it?

Antisemitism is surging globally, both in its oldest forms and in new guises. Holocaust denial and distortion flourish online and even in schools. Some public figures peddle dangerous historical revisionism. Others cloak hatred in political slogans. Meanwhile, Holocaust survivors — living witnesses to the darkest chapter of the last century — are passing from this world, their stories too often unmet by the world’s will to heed them.

In a bitter irony, the Shoah is fading from public consciousness at the very moment its lessons are needed most. Today, across the globe, we see the early warning signs of genocide — dehumanization, disinformation, and the slow erosion of truth. Ethnic cleansing in some places is met with shrugs; mass displacement in others is buried beneath headlines about fuel prices. Our age is not one of forgetting by accident. It is one of forgetting by choice.

How can we reconcile this with what Yom HaShoah asks of us?

The day was never meant to be about the past alone. It is a call to moral clarity in the present. The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers — it began with words. With apathy. With neighbours looking away. And so “Never again” must not mean “Never again to Jews alone.” It must mean “Never again to anyone, anywhere” — and it must compel action, not just sentiment.

But it also does mean “never again to Jews.” And this is a truth that must be spoken clearly, especially now.

In the wake of October 7th — the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust — this Yom HaShoah feels heavier. More urgent. We are living through a moment where Jewish vulnerability is once again exposed, not in the distant shadows of history but on the front pages. Israelis were slaughtered in their homes. Children taken hostage. Whole communities shattered. And in the aftermath, many who claim to champion human rights responded not with solidarity, but silence — or worse, celebration.

It is in this context that the message of Yom HaShoah must be understood anew. It is not merely about memorializing the past. It is about recognising the patterns that lead to atrocity and mustering the courage to interrupt them. “Never again” is a warning and a responsibility. A declaration, not of what was, but of what must never be allowed to happen again.

To honour the victims of the Shoah, we must do more than mourn them. We must take seriously what their absence demands of us. As Elie Wiesel warned, “To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” Remembrance is not passive. It is a moral act — a stand against denial, distortion, and indifference.

Education is a defence, but not a shield. Laws are essential, but not sufficient. The world must learn to recognise the signs of genocide while they are still small — and resist them before they metastasize into horror. That means confronting hate wherever it festers, defending truth when it is inconvenient, and standing with the vulnerable before it is too late.

New Zealand, too, is not immune. Antisemitism here may wear softer edges, but it is no less real. Holocaust distortion, denial, and erasure seep subtly into classrooms, campuses, and discourse. We must remain vigilant — not only out of solidarity with global Jewry, but as a commitment to our own democratic and humane values. If history teaches us anything, it is that the Holocaust did not begin in the camps — it began with the corrosion of truth and the failure of courage.

This Yom HaShoah, let us listen not only to the voices of survivors, but to the silence of those who never had the chance to speak. Let us look squarely at the past — not to be paralysed by it, but to be empowered through it. Let us renew our promise: that “Never again” will not be a wistful slogan, but a real-world obligation.

Because forgetting is the first step toward repeating. And the world has already forgotten too much.

Robert Narev ONZM: Destined for Auschwitz

INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY
WELLSFORD 26 JANUARY 2025

Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena kouto katoa shalom and good evening ladies and gentlemen

My brief address is titled Destined for Auschwitz, a topic which, in my case, is followed by a question mark for reasons which will become apparent shortly.

I was born in a small town in central Germany on 6th October 1935, exactly three weeks after the promulgation by the Nazis of what became known as the Nuremberg Laws. While initially discriminatory only against the Jewish population of Germany, those laws effectively established the foundation of the Holocaust and the systematic state-organised and executed murder of six million Jews in occupied Europe.

I was an only child, clearly because the mid and late 1930s were not a propitious time for Jewish parents to have children in Germany.

My father was a high school teacher, soon deemed to be unsuitable as a Jew to teach Aryan students and my mother’s career as an opera singer was cut short for similar reasons in accordance with Nazi ideology.

There followed 5 years in Frankfurt under conditions which must have been a most stressful and indeed traumatic time for adults, compelled as we were to limit our movements to a small part of the city and to wear the Judenstern,  the Jewish star, of which  the one on my jacket is an original example.

Then in August 1942 the order came for us, together with over 1000 other Jews, to assemble at the local railway station, to be transported across the border into Czechoslovakia.

The journey finished at a railway junction some 3 kilometres from what turned out to be the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, to which we had to march in the summer heat with the few belongings which we were allowed to bring with us.

The town had previously served as a Czech army camp, housing some 5000 soldiers in barracks, which became the cramped living and sleeping quarters for never fewer than 40,000 Jewish deportees. The men were separated from the women and children and all were placed in large dormitories consisting of two or three-tier bunks.

My two elderly grandmothers died after a short time there and in the following months my father did not survive an operation carried out by no doubt skilled Jewish surgeons but with little medical facilities and equipment.

I come now to my speech title Destined for Auschwitz, including the question mark to which I referred earlier. Unbeknown to me in my two and a half years in the camp as a 6 to 9 year old, Theresienstadt was not designated as an extermination venue, but rather a transit camp to which a total of some 150,000 Jews were taken from various European countries between 1941 and 1945.

The vast majority of these, or rather of those who survived the deprivations of the camp, were regularly transported to Auschwitz and to their virtually inevitable death.

After only a short time with my mother, I was transferred to what was euphemistically called a children’s home, housing youngsters from a variety of European countries, to the extent that Czech became the lingua franca, the common language for all of us.

There was a continual arrival of new occupants, the majority of whom were more often than not there one week and dispatched to their fate the next, so that the forming of even short friendships was a rarity.

The basically unanswerable and therefore unanswered question for me, even today, is why I remained in the home for two and a half years, while children around me invariably disappeared, indeed why I was not destined for Auschwitz.

Was it the vagaries of fate or divine intervention that kept me there, was it that privileged status was given to me by reason of the fact that my father had been awarded the Iron Cross second class in World War 1 for fighting valiantly for the Fatherland which had now deserted him or that my mother was required to contribute to the Nazi war effort by working as a slave labourer in a camp factory and, finally, was it one of these which enabled my mother and me to be freed to Switzerland 3 months before the end of the Holocaust rather than succumbing to a typhus epidemic which erupted in the camp after we left and which took many lives of  inmates who had remained there.

I digress from my story for a moment by mentioning that my wife Freda, to whom I have now been married for 67 years and who regrettably was not able to join us this evening, is also a Holocaust survivor, having been hidden from the age of three by a kindly Catholic family in Poland after both her parents had been murdered either by the Nazis or local sympathisers. It is worth recording that, 75 years after those events, three generations of descendants of that courageous woman were presented in Poland with a prestigious Israeli award, granting to the lady the posthumous distinction of being named as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Are there therefore obligations incumbent upon people like my wife and me as survivors of the Holocaust? There are those who attempt, more or less successfully, to blot out or to be silent about their experiences and sufferings and then there are those who, like ourselves, who feel a duty to ensure that the millions who perished are not forgotten, that the lesson of the Holocaust should be conveyed to those who would listen, so as to give emphasis to the dictum of the 18th century British philosopher Edmund Burke when he said that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

Thus we have both spoken of our experiences to over 120 school and adult groups over the last 15 or so years, thereby making a small contribution to the growing realisation also in this country, of the importance of Holocaust education, a realisation to which perhaps even Her Majesty the Queen came in my case when compiling the New Year’s Honours list 5 years ago.

I cannot of course testify from personal knowledge that 6 million of our people were murdered during the Holocaust. I leave that to the records which the Nazis themselves largely kept. I can only hope that, with our efforts, we keep alive the memories of my father Erich, my two grandmothers Emma and Agnes, my uncle Albert, his wife Edith and teenage son Hans Peter, my father-in-law Yakov, my mother-in-law Kora and my sister-in-law Esther, a list small in itself but hopefully enough with those provided by many others to at least give pause to the diatribes of doubters and deniers.

I hope that I have also been able, at least in part, to answer the question of why I was not destined for Auschwitz and thus able to speak to you this evening.

Perry Trotter: Speech at IHRD 2025

INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

Wellsford, New Zealand, 26 January 2025

Tonight we remember Europe's decisive action to purge itself once for all of the Jews, and of all that they represent. Advisedly I say Europe acted, not merely Germany. In many of the countries into which the Nazis moved, the general populace was willing, sometimes passionately eager, to cooperate in gathering, betraying, torturing and murdering their Jewish neighbours.

I well remember the words of one of the seventy survivors I have photographed. He explained that it was not that the Germans hated Jews more than the Poles or Ukrainians. It was that the Poles or Ukrainians would kill with pitch forks or their boots. The Germans, however, applied themselves to the task. They developed an industrial machine for efficient disposal of Europe's Jews.

Europe acted, to be free once and for all of the Jews, and of all they represent. And in large measure Europe succeeded. Of the Jews of Poland, 3 million strong prior to the war, 90 per cent were murdered. In Lithuania, up to 97% of Jews were killed.

Eighty years have passed since the Holocaust. But according to recent statistics, the global Jewish population is yet to recover to pre-Holocaust levels.

Eighty years. So much has changed. And yet nothing has changed. Today there are many entities eager to resume the task interrupted by the allied victory in 1945. And just as a cooperative general populace in Europe was essential to the success of the Nazi death scheme, antisemitic ideas and actions proliferate today because so few are willing to speak up.

A decade ago about a quarter of the world’s adults held antisemitic views. Today that figure is closer to half of all adults. The implications are disturbing. The trajectory is unmistakable, undeniable.

Elsewhere I have made the observation that The Jewish Problem, as it came to be known, might be more properly named The Gentile Problem. Antisemitism is, after all, a Gentile issue before it is a Jewish issue. The Gentile Problem is that for at least three and a half millennia the Jews have been subject to various forms of persecution at the hands of non-Jews, from marginalisation to murder. The Gentile Problem didn’t begin with the Holocaust - and it certainly didn’t end with the Holocaust.

In 2019 we visited Auschwitz in Poland. It was on that occasion that I shot six of the images you will see in the Auschwitz. Now. exhibition, installed 300m from here at 267 Rodney St. On the same journey we also visited Le Chambon Sur Lignon in the South of France.

Although it is less than a day’s journey from Auschwitz to Le Chambon, the two locations may as well occupy distant galaxies.

Auschwitz was a product of Europe’s most culturally, scientifically and educationally advanced society. In contrast, Le Chambon and the surrounding towns, were home to mostly simple peasant farmers and villagers.

One has appropriately become a symbol of ultimate evil. The other, much lesser known, stands as an example of selfless love and courage in the face of such depravity.

Shortly, to conclude tonight’s programme, we will play a three minute film that tells the beautiful story of Le Chambon. It is tragic that there are so few such beautiful stories. I will ask you to view the film as a call to action.

But first, let me say that I have often reflected on how I might have behaved in 1940s Europe. Friends of the Jewish people faced appalling dilemmas. Would I have had the courage to risk my life in order to shelter Jews? I hope so, but I really don’t know. But of this I am certain: had I not had the fortitude to act in the 1930’s, when Jews were maligned and incrementally marginalised, I certainly would not have had the fortitude to act in the 1940’s, when Jews were gathered to be shot in the forests or shipped to the gates of Auschwitz.

Enemies have been many and friends have been few. And the character of friends like those of Le Chambon is ultimately only proven in times of peril. The Holocaust taught us that those considered friends of the Jewish people are worse than irrelevant if they will not act.

Allow me to ask some rhetorical questions, questions that expose and unsettle, and that demonstrate my theme that although so much has changed, nothing has changed.

In 1945 the world emerged from war. What came to be known as the Holocaust was brought to an end.

But what really changed in 1945? We know the allies prevailed but in regard to what has drawn us together tonight, what really changed?

• Did ordinary Europeans repudiate the Jew hatred that for centuries had manifested in economic, social and religious discrimination?

• Were the masses of willing accomplices brought to account or at least filled with remorse?

• Did the philosophers who influence society from above abandon their intolerance of Jewish distinction and particularity?

• Did theologians and churchmen reject the toxic, incoherent and deplorable replacement theology that for centuries had infected Christendom, while cultivating and undergirding the persecution of Jews in Christian Europe?

• And in the Middle East, was there a change of heart among the Muslim leaders so keen to see Hitler’s policies implemented in their own lands?

• Were the western political and military leaders who knew what was happening to European Jews and yet chose to do little or nothing - were they brought to account?

• Of the many nations that chose to close their doors to Jews fleeing certain calamity, how many were willing to acknowledge their moral failure? (NZ made it very difficult for Jews to find refuge here).

• Did the exemplary philosemitism, compassion and courage of Le Chambon - as you will soon see - did it begin to permeate European culture?

The answers to these questions are obvious and they are disturbing, confronting and relevant.

Let us leave this place carrying enough of this discomfort to make a difference as antisemitism surges even within our own society.

And so, to the film about Le Chambon…

Dame Lesley Max: Speech at IHRD 2025

INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

Wellsford, New Zealand, 26 January 2025

Kia ora koutou, shalom aleichem and good evening to you all,

I would first like to thank Sheree and Perry Trotter for giving me the honour of speaking tonight at this important occasion, in conjunction with the exhibition of Auschwitz Today here in Wellsford, to mark the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  I cannot speak highly enough of the way in which Sheree and Perry carry the burden, which they have voluntarily assumed, of telling this dreadful story, and of honouring the memory of the people who suffered the greatest crime in recorded human history.

The day chosen is the day of liberation of Auschwitz towards the end of the Second World War.  For many people, so many years later, the name Auschwitz conveys little information.  Yet it is the best known of all the camps established by the Nazis to carry out Hitler’s intention of annihilating every Jew in Europe.

This process started as soon as the German invasion of Poland and the East got underway.  First came the ‘Holocaust by bullets’ – where Jews were herded into forests and fields and shot.  Others were packed into sealed trucks and gassed to death by carbon monoxide.

But all this was not efficient enough.  So in January 1942, high-ranking officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to coordinate the implementation of what they called ‘The Final Solution of the Jewish Question’.  This was a euphemism for mass murder, for the annihilation, the extermination of every Jew in Europe.

I wish this desire to exterminate Jews had died with the Nazis.  It didn’t.  It is what motivates the Islamic Republic of Iran and its clients, Hamas, Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis.  They don’t hide their purpose.

But back to the Nazis.  We know all about the Wannsee conference, because one copy of the Minutes was not destroyed.  I recommend a brilliant film, ‘Conspiracy’, with Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth.  The dialogue draws heavily on those Minutes.  Of the 15 top officials, eight had doctorates.  So they were Germany’s intellectual elites.  Many of us remember that fact as we witness some of the activities at universities in support of the Hamas massacre of Jews in Israel, on October 7th, 2023.

Wannsee was a brief, focused conference.  They were finished in time for a leisurely lunch, having decided the fate of those millions.  And they were effective in meeting their targets.  Not many escaped those meticulous plans.  They annihilated 90% of the Jews of Poland, 90% of the Jews of the Baltic countries, including my husband’s paternal grandmother, uncles, aunts and cousins; 90% of the Jews who remained in Germany and Austria, including my husband’s maternal grandmother and other relatives; 77% of the Jews of Greece;  75% of the Jews of the Netherlands – and so it goes on.  Six million in all.  Of that six million, some one and a half million were children.

It’s hard to comprehend that number.  My assembly hall at Takapuna Grammar held about 1000 young people.  It would take 1500 school halls of that size to hold one and a half million children.  Thought of another way, the number of Jewish children and young people killed in the Holocaust is greater than the number of children and young people living now in New Zealand.  Now, THAT is what a genocide looks like.

The extermination camps in German-occupied Poland were one of the outcomes of that Wannsee conference.

The names of the extermination camps – where Jews were herded directly from the cattle cars they arrived in, to gas chambers – are less well-known, for the simple reason that there were virtually no survivors.  Those names should be known:  Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek,  and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Auschwitz-Birkenau had two functions.  It was both an extermination camp and a slave labour camp.  There was a selection process when the Jews arrived, after days packed without food or water into railway cattle wagons.  So that’s men, women, children, babies, the elderly, the ill, arriving to a scene of horror – snarling dogs, orders barked in German, men with guns.

People over the age of 50, pregnant women, children, babies and their mothers were directed to the left, to death.  Others who could be worked to death through slave labour and starvation were directed to the right.  There they were stripped, shaved, had numbers tattooed on their arms, and were given a light, striped uniform, all they had to protect them from the Polish winter.

Those who survived found it difficult to communicate what it was like to endure this place.  I think it’s important to try to understand the day to day misery, the all-pervading hunger, the extreme cold, the degrading, dehumanising absence of provision for bodily functions, and always, always, the terror of death, on top of the grief of loss of family.

Few survived longer than a few weeks or months.  Selections for the gas chambers occurred frequently as the starvation, slave labour, brutality and sickness took their toll.

Some had another function in this hell that was Auschwitz-Birkenau.  That was, as human guinea pigs, subjects for medical experimentation.  That deeply moving video we just saw of Ben Steiner gives us insight into this diabolical enterprise.

I have personally known three women who survived this horror.  One, Sara, had arrived with her family at Auschwitz from southern Hungary.   A Jewish prisoner, working on the arrival platform, asked if the baby she was carrying in her arms was her own.  She said no, it was her sister’s.  “Then give the baby to your sister,” he instructed.  She did.  Sara and her other sister, her twin, were then directed to the right, while her sister with her two little ones, her mother and father, were directed to the left, which meant death within hours.

Sara survived because she was a twin and so had some utility for the infamous Dr Mengele, who performed grotesque medical experiments on twins.  Her twin did not survive the death march towards the end of the war.  Sara somehow survived, getting back to Hungary as a skeleton weighing 35 kilos.  Forty years later, I met her in her home in Israel, tenderly cradling a baby grandson, the tattoo on her arm bearing witness of when she was just a number.

The other survivors I know of Mengele’s fiendish experiments on children are two people who, many years later, became the aunts of my daughter-in-law.  Another sister, Judith, was murdered in Auschwitz, at about six years old.  The two who survived, Eva and Marta, have given extensive testimony.  Eva has written a book, called “Gazing at the Stars”.  In that book she tells about the suffering of the children at the hands of Mengele.  Children were subjected to agonising procedures.  Children disappeared.  Eva tells of opening a door one day and finding, to her horror, the torso of a child she knew, his amputated limbs stacked alongside him.  Amputations done without anaesthetic.

I won’t tell you any more stories of horror.  But I will say that I am incensed that a young woman who has a huge following online, Candace Owens, a young woman who is going to do an event soon in Auckland, mocks these victims of Mengele.  It doesn’t make sense, she says.  Why would anyone bother, she says.  It’s lies, she says.  And much more besides – not so different from Hitler’s and Goebbels’ slanders.

Eva is too frail now to challenge this callous, deceiving young woman, but her recorded testimony and her book, provide the truth.  If you want to learn more, just search on YouTube the names of Eva Slonim and her sister, Marta Wise.  Get Eva’s book, “Gazing at the Stars”.  In it, you will see a very famous photograph of a number of miserable children standing behind barbed wire.  The photo is a still from footage taken by one of the Russian liberators of Auschwitz, on the day we are commemorating here, in Wellsford, 80 years later.

Eva, who was 13, looked like an ill, haggard old woman, with a white headscarf over her dark hair.  Marta, who was 10, is standing beside her, with a white scarf over her blonde hair.

I think of the other people I have known, who survived Auschwitz, most of them the only members of their family to survive.  I think of the beautiful Zosia, who came to Wellington, and the Aucklanders - Lily and her husband Victor, Mancie, whose daughter died in Auschwitz, the extraordinary Sol Filler, Ika and Karl.  None of them are still living, but most of them had children and grandchildren.

What is absolutely remarkable is that those children and grandchildren, like their parents and grandparents, are positive, contributing citizens of this country.  I have never heard expressions of hate.  I absolutely honour the survivors I know for their dignity, their restraint, the good lives they have led.  That is a kind of a miracle.  Bob Narev, whom you will hear from soon, epitomises that dignity, that restraint and a good life, well led, as does his dear wife, Freda.

I want to end on a note of hope.  So there it is.  The fact that human decency and goodness could survive the hell of Auschwitz.  And the fact that you are here tonight, to learn, to understand, to remember, and, I trust, to bear witness against attempts at trivialising or denying this unique and massive crime.

Thank you.

200 Attend IHRD Event in Rural Community

Dame Lesley Max

It was heartening to see a full Community Centre in Wellsford, New Zealand, as the local community and wider district gathered to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Special guest speakers were Holocaust survivor Bob Narev ONZM (Survivor of Theresienstadt) and Dame Lesley Max. They shared their reflections on the Holocaust and antisemitism and their personal stories.

Robert Narev ONZM, Chair of Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand

The evening came to close with a viewing of the story of Le Chambon, a small village in the South of France. The villagers, led by a Protestant Pastor, chose to follow their conscience and shelter Jews, who were being hunted down by Nazis and their collaborators. It was a fitting call to action in a period in which antisemitism has reached levels reminiscent of the 1930s.

The event was organised by Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand.

The Auschwitz. Now. exhibition is being staged in Wellsford till at least mid-February.

Speeches from the event will be posted shortly.

Event photography courtesy of Smoke

Prof Wayne Horowitz on the Holocaust

Prof Wayne Horowitz recently visited NZ. Wayne has worked for 30 years at the Hebrew University, as a teacher of Sumerian and Akkadian texts and traditions.

Wayne agreed to be filmed by the Holocaust Foundation as he described the way his family was impacted by the Holocaust. Watch.

Tabarovsky on Antisemitism since October 7

Izabella Tabarovsky is a scholar of Soviet antizionism and contemporary left antisemitism. She is a Senior Fellow with the Z3 Institute for Jewish Priorities, a Research Fellow with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and ISGAP, and a contributing writer at Tablet Magazine. Holocaust Foundation interviewed her and asked for her comments on antisemitism since October 7 and the state of academia.

Zuroff steps down: comments on education, October 7

Published on Jerusalem Post

The last Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, stepped down from the position of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Israel Office director after 38 years, Zuroff announced on Facebook on Tuesday morning.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1948, Zuroff has dedicated his life to identifying and bringing to justice Nazi war criminals who evaded capture for decades. His interest in Holocaust studies began early, and after completing a degree in history from Yeshiva University, he moved to Israel in 1970 to work at Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.

Zuroff staunchly combatted antisemitism.

“Holocaust education was the best cure for antisemitism,” he stated in an interview with Australian actor Nathaniel Buzolic, who has been vocal in his support of Israel since October 7. He immediately followed that statement and said, “It turns out it’s not true.”

He then explained that Holocaust denial is a problem “in the Muslim world and the Arab world, where they don’t teach anything about the Holocaust… where they have a deep tradition of antisemitism,” implying that Holocaust denial is another form of antisemitism.

Zuroff's career in Nazi-hunting began when he joined the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles in 1978. He later returned to Israel, where he played a crucial role in launching “Operation: Last Chance,” a campaign which offers financial rewards for information leading to the conviction of Nazi war criminals. This operation has been implemented in over a dozen countries and has led to numerous prosecutions, including that of Sobibor death camp guard John Demjanjuk in Germany.

Zuroff has been instrumental in exposing Nazi collaborators in post-Communist Eastern Europe, particularly in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. His work has led to the indictment and extradition of several war criminals and the cancellation of pensions for those found guilty of Holocaust crimes.

Continued fight against Holocaust denial

When asked during his interview with Buzolic about a story concerning hunting Nazis that stood out, Zuroff was quick to respond, stating, “The most important Nazi war criminal whom I helped bring to justice was a man named Dinko Sakic,” who was “one of the commanders of a camp called the Jasenovac,” in Croatia. It is estimated that in this particular camp, 90-130 thousand people were murdered.

“They were murdered in the most horrific way imaginable,” Zuroff added. He then drew a parallel between Nazi soldiers and Hamas terrorists when he described the way the former handled prisoners and emphasized, “exactly what Hamas did.”

When asked what Israel means to him, Zuroff put his hand over his heart and asked, “You want me to start crying here?” adding that Israel means “everything” to him, as “it’s the negation of the Holocaust.”

Despite ending his nearly 40-year tenure at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where for 13 years he was responsible for Eastern European Affairs as well, Zuroff stated in his announcement on Facebook that he will continue looking for further opportunities to combat Holocaust denial and antisemitism.

Call for Special Envoy to combat antisemitism

The Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand supports the recent call for the appointment of a special envoy to combat antisemitism. A media release by New Zealand Jewish Council and the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand stated it is time for New Zealand to get “serious about battling the world’s oldest hatred – antisemitism.  We call on the government to appoint a special envoy to combat antisemitism and work with envoys internationally to rout out this scourge in Aotearoa New Zealand”.

The release points out that special envoys have been appointed by UK, USA, Canada and numerous European nations including Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Sweden. Holocaust Foundation agrees that it is time for New Zealand to do likewise.

Also cited was a recent survey of Jewish parents of school-aged children. “A staggering 80% of respondents said their children had suffered antisemitic episodes in their schools.  This was an increase in the survey results last year when just over 50% of the parents who completed the survey said their children had been subjected to antisemitism in school since October 7th 2023.”

We urge the New Zealand government to heed the call for the appointment of a special envoy.

Pogroms and Press Complicity

“If the press is to avoid having blood on its hands it must be very careful not to inflame a very volatile situation and go down in history as causing a pogrom.”

— David Robinson

On Saturday the 7 October 2023, on Shabbat and the celebration of Simchas Torah (Rejoicing of the Law), and 50 years since the Yom Kippur War, over 1000 Hamas terrorists broke through the border between Gaza and Israel. In a very carefully planned attack they tortured, raped, burned alive, beheaded and in other brutal ways murdered all they encountered. About 200 including the aged, infirm, handicapped, children and babies were kidnapped and dragged to Gaza to be hostages. One of the lucky four hostages to be released to date, a woman in her eighties, described how she was beaten by her captors when being dragged to Gaza. Young people attending an open air concert were not spared, 260 were murdered in cold blood. 

David Robinson

The terrorists, proud of their achievements, videoed the massacre. One grabbed the mobile phone of a dead victim to boast to his parents in Gaza that he had killed ten Jews. His parents in their reply were very proud of their son’s achievements as if he had scored ten goals in a football tournament.

Many of the citizens in Gaza were delighted at the massacre and were pictured dancing in joy, desecrating the dead bodies of the victims and taunting the hostages. In one video they practically knocked each other down for the chance to stomp on dead Israeli bodies. It is not possible to express in words the horror of families of the hostages, witnessing the scenes captured and displayed by the perpetrators of this massacre. 

In all, 1400, mostly civilians, were massacred and more than 200 taken  hostage. What happened was nothing less than genocide and the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

The effect of this massacre spread around the world and many Governments including the UK, USA, Canada and Australia immediately unreservedly condemned the massacre and expressed solidarity with Israel in opposing the evil that is Hamas.

In contrast our foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta posted on twitter:-

“Aotearoa New Zealand is deeply concerned at the outbreak of conflict between Israel and Gaza. We call for the immediate cessation of violence. The protection of all civilians, and upholding of international humanitarian law is essential.”

— Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta

It is interesting to compare this post with the  New Zealand Government’s position following pogroms of Jews in Russia in 1891 when the New Zealand House of Representatives led by Sir George Grey passed a resolution for a petition to be presented to the Emperor of Russia to repeal the restrictive laws imposed on the Russian Jews.     

Immediately after the attack, following consultation with the  authorities in New Zealand, the Auckland Jewish Community closed Kadimah School (the only Jewish day school in New Zealand) and advised  that the Auckland Hebrew Congregation Shabbat services would not take place at the Remuera complex that weekend.  It is an indictment of the society in which we live that  the Jewish community in Auckland felt intimidated enough to take these unprecedented steps. This did not follow any aggression by the Israelis. It was a reaction to the slaughter of Israelis which was followed by Hamas’ call to international Jihad against Jews. 

Although the Jewish Community had expressed solidarity and sympathy with the Muslim Community for the dreadful massacre of 50 worshipers in two Mosques in Christchurch, the Muslim Community was openly aggressive in its support of Hamas.

Hamas has been, and is, openly hostile not only to the Jews in Israel but also to Jews throughout the world including New Zealand. Its charter which was in force when a majority of the Palestinians in Gaza voted in its favour clearly states:

The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight Jews and kill them.

It also states:

The establishment of Israel is entirely illegal… …Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea. 

The River is the Jordan River and the sea is the Mediterranean. In other words, Hamas which had the support of the majority of Palestinians living in Gaza seeks the annihilation of the State of Israel and the death of all its inhabitants. 

It is hard to see what more Hamas can do to satisfy its supporters and the Government in New Zealand that both its military and political wings are terrorists.  Consistent  with its charter it has authorized and carried out the torture and slaughter of Israelis thus establishing that its charter means what it says and cannot be dismissed as mere rhetoric. In case anyone did not believe in the extent of the slaughter, the murderers recorded their deeds to boast to their supporters and terrorize their enemies.

Although years were spent in preparing for this massacre, Hamas did nothing to protect their Palestinian citizens from the attacks which they must have anticipated from the Israelis. Unlike the Israelis they did not build bomb shelters or safe rooms and unlike the British in World War 2, when Londoners were able to shelter in the underground during the Blitz, they have not allowed shelter in the hundreds of kilometers of tunnels built with reinforced concrete. Instead they use the citizens of Gaza as human shields. By placing their rocket launches and ammunition near hospitals and schools they endanger their citizens using them as human shields. Even though Israel does its best to avoid civilian casualties, innocents do get killed. Hamas use the victims to further their narrative and with a complicit press, they gain public sympathy.

Unfortunately a rocket launched by Islamic Jihad aimed at Israel misfired and blew up in the carpark of a nearby hospital. Hamas immediately reported that an Israeli rocket had struck the hospital killing hundreds.  Although Israel denied it was responsible for this incident the international press hastily published the Hamas version of events, blaming Israel. In the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby to reporters: 

What I have said to people publicly, is “Don’t assume it’s Israel. You have no proof that it’s Israel. Many people have made a clear case it’s not. At the very best do not start propagating another blood libel.

The term blood libel refers to the false allegation that Jews use the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes. The Nazis made effective use of the blood libel to demonize Jews. Blood libels often resulted in pogroms against the Jews, one of the first of which occured in Norwich England in 1144.

Unfortunately the Archbishop of Canterbury is entirely correct when warning journalists of the risks of starting another blood libel. With Hamas calling for Jihad against Jews throughout the world, including New Zealand, it is extremely likely that a false accusation that Israel has bombed a hospital in Gaza will result in violence against the local Jewish community.  Calls for genocide including cries to “Gas the Jews” could very easily escalate to physical violence against person and property. 

If the press is to avoid having blood on its hands it must be very careful not to inflame a very volatile situation and go down in history as causing a pogrom.

David Robinson is a former Associate Judge of the High Court of New Zealand and is on the board of the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand

Media Release: Auckland Museum’s Apology

Media Release by Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand

Auckland Museum’s Apology for expressing solidarity with Israel

17 October 2023

Civilised nations across the world, including UK, Australia, and USA,  have seen fit to show solidarity with Israel at her time of grief, by lighting prominent buildings with Israel’s colours. Sydney Opera House, 10 Downing St, The Brandenburg Gate and buildings in Kyiv and the European Commission have responded appropriately after the worst slaughter and atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust.

Auckland Museum houses a Holocaust room and our Holocaust Foundation has directed Holocaust memorial events on its premises.

In response to the antisemitic thuggery of Hamas supporters, Auckland Museum has now apologised for the lighting of its building in expression of solidarity with the Jewish nation.

This is shameful.

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Media Release: Suggested Moral Equivalence Repugnant

Media Release by Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, Aotearoa New Zealand

Suggested Moral Equivalence between Hamas and IDF, Repugnant

13 October 2023

While we deplore the misappropriation of Holocaust memory, it is important to observe that Hamas’ 7 October attack on Israeli civilians saw the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.  Jewish people were tortured, murdered, raped, burned alive, and in recent days there has been verification of reports of babies being beheaded.

Many Israelis have been abducted and taken into Gaza. Among them is at least one Holocaust survivor.

We stand firmly with Israel at this time and share the deep grief felt by Jewish people worldwide.

Our grief is further compounded by the equivocation of several New Zealand leaders, in their response to Hamas’ attack.  All suggestions of moral equivalence between the actions of Hamas and its followers, and those of the Israeli Defense Forces, whether stated or implied, we consider repugnant and reprehensible.

This is a time for moral clarity. Antisemitism is virulent and knows a multitude of expressions. It must be called out.

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Statement on Hamas attack on Israel

Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) has issued a statement regarding the Hamas attack on Israel:

STATEMENT BY ISGAP EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR DR. CHARLES ASHER SMALL ON THE ATROCITIES

A pogrom is conventionally defined as a mob attack resulting in a massacre, with the approval of authorities, against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national group.
 
As the details of the barbaric acts against Israelis become clear, the leadership of Hamas, the Iranian Regime, and the Hamas paymasters, the Qatari Regime, are guilty of carrying out and supporting a pogrom, and actually celebrating these unspeakable crimes. The murder, torture, mutilation of bodies, and sexual crimes against innocent Jewish children, women, and the elderly are nothing less than a pogrom. Hamas is the murderous shock troops, and the Iranian and Qatari Regimes are their overseers.

"On behalf of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) team of scholars, researchers, policy experts and students from around the world, we stand in full solidarity with Israel, as it faces a genocidal war launched by Gaza-based Hamas, a terrorist group listed by the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Organization of American States, and many other international actors. Hamas is supported by the Iranian Regime and its paymasters the Qatari Regime."
 
“Make no mistake about it,” Dr. Charles Asher Small, the founding director of ISGAP, continued. “Hamas openly declares its aim of annihilating Israel and murdering Jews. And it does so with the full support of the Iranian Regime, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, and with the guiding principles of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist network financed and empowered, closely linked to the Qatari Regime, the paymasters for this axis of hate.”
 
“We call on the international academic community to show its full understanding and support for Israel at this critical time,” Dr. Small added, “and to counter supporters of Hamas, including the Iranian and Qatari Regimes, and their eliminationist ideology on campuses worldwide.”
 
“We applaud the dozens of countries that have expressed their support for Israel and its full right of self-defence, offered their assistance, and pledged to fight the cancerous evils of Hamas and its pernicious antisemitic, anti-Western, and misogynist worldview.”
 
Dr. Small added, “The ideology of Hamas, the Iranian Regime, the Qatari Regime, and the Muslim Brotherhood all share an ideology that is literally inspired by ancient European antisemitism and Nazi ideology, which is founded on a belief and rhetoric that incites to genocide.”
 
ISGAP, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, is the leading global organization dedicated to studying antisemitism in all its forms, and to connecting scholars to combat it on campuses and beyond. Its founding chair was Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace laureate, and its current chair is Natan Sharansky, the human rights activist who spent nine years (1977-1986) in the Soviet Gulag for his struggle as a Jewish activist and political dissident.

For additional comments, please contact Dr. Charles Asher Small, Founder and Executive Director, ISGAP;
Director, ISGAP-Woolf Institute Fellowship Training Programme on
Critical Contemporary Antisemitism Studies, Cambridge, UK
at charlessmall@isgap.org

Antisemitism and the Funding of Higher Education

Narratives that prevail in academia soon filter down to politics, media and society’s culture more broadly. There is evidence that those narratives are sometimes influenced by donors.

The founder of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, Dr Charles Asher Small, recently spoke of his findings concerning Muslim Brotherhood funding of many of the world’s finest universities. The implications for antisemitism are significant.