Senior Israeli Rabbi blames victims for the Nazi Holocaust

Where rabbis may tread
Anshel Pfeffer in Haaretz

Extracts:

Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, who wrote 50 years ago in the introduction to his anti-Zionist screed, Ve'Yoel Moshe, that "it is no wonder that such terrible anger and wrath went out from the Lord." He then devoted the entire book to explaining how the heretical Zionists brought the Holocaust on the Jewish people through their impudent efforts to set up a Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah.

As far back as 1933, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook, the spiritual father of religious Zionism, compared Hitler in a sermon to a shofar made from the horn of an unclean animal, which can be used on Rosh Hashanah only if there are no kosher horns available. If the people of Israel do not seek redemption themselves, he said, "the enemies of Israel blow in our ears for redemption. They force us to hear the sound of the shofar, they warn and make noise and do not allow us to rest in exile. The horn of an unclean animal becomes the shofar of the Messiah. Amalek, Petliura [who was allegedly responsible for many Ukrainian pogroms], Hitler - they wake us up to redemption."

Another rabbi, this time a living one, who has been very free with Holocaust analogies is Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who eight years ago said that Holocaust victims were "reincarnations of souls who committed sins." Yosef caused a minor public storm, but it quickly blew over. He is still the spiritual leader of a major coalition party, and the country's leaders regularly ask him to support their policies.

Professor Yisrael Gutman, Yad Vashem's chief historian, said this week that he disapproves of the monument to homosexuals murdered by the Nazis that was dedicated in Berlin on Sunday because he felt that it put the Holocaust and the gay community's sufferings on the same plane.

This week's Haaretz Magazine includes an interview with American-French author Jonathan Littell, whose best-selling novel Les Bienveillantes ("The Kindly Ones") is coming out in Hebrew this month. Littell, himself of Jewish parentage (though he does not see himself as a Jew), believes that the Holocaust is not unique or essentially different from other genocides. He also compares the actions of Israeli soldiers in the territories to the way the Nazis treated Jews in the years before the Holocaust. 

Full article in Haaretz