Son of Elie Wiesel Responds to Antisemitic Graffiti on Father’s House: ‘Holocaust Memory and Jews Are Under Attack’

Dovid Efune

The late Professor Elie Wiesel, speaking at Algemeiner‘s 40th anniversary gala, on April 22, 2013. Photo: Sarah Rogers / Algemeiner.

The only child of the late Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel has responded to the antisemitic desecration of his father’s childhood home in northwestern Romania over the weekend.

“Antisemitism exists in Europe. This is not an isolated incident,” Elisha Wiesel told The Algemeiner on Sunday. “What is happening to my father’s home is a small indication of what is happening on a continental level. Both Holocaust memory and Jews are under attack.”

The discovery of the graffiti – scrawled in bright pink paint – has prompted an investigation by local authorities, who also condemned the incident. Among the messagesdaubed on the small structure in the town of Sighetu Marmatiei was, “Nazi Jew lying in hell with Hitler” and “Public toilet, antisemite pedophile.”

In addition to condemning the attack, Elisha – who serves as chief information officer at Goldman Sachs – offered some practical steps and called on the Romanian government to add his father’s most famous work, his memoir “Night” – about his experiences in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz – as mandatory reading in the country’s national curriculum.

He also called for “making sure that the appropriate funding and governance exist so that my father’s home can tell the story it needs to tell: the story of a Jewish family and community that once was, and the story of a man who wanted their voices – and the lessons of their destruction– so desperately to be heard.”

The younger Wiesel also offered an optimistic take on the incident, saying “there is room for hope too.”

“Talk to the young Romanian woman who works day after day curating inside the house, even during the winter when there is no heat supplied to the building,” he said. “Her name is Alina Marincean – a non-Jew for whom this has been a labor of love. She is deeply committed to my father’s memory and to the Jews of Sighet who were eradicated. Talk to her and be inspired. She knows the timetable of when the ghetto was first created, of when the Sighet transports went to Auschwitz the way my cousins and I do.”

“What she is doing deserves far more attention than the scrawled hatred of some drunk thugs. What can be done to help her?” he concluded.

In total, 380,000–400,000 Jews were murdered in Romanian-controlled areas during the Holocaust under Marshal Ion Antonescu, the country’s fascist dictator who was allied with Nazi Germany.

Elie Wiesel and his family were deported in 1944 to Auschwitz. While he and two of his sisters survived, his father, mother and younger sister were murdered there.

Until his passing in 2016, Elie Wiesel served as chairman of The Algemeiner‘s advisory board. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

Avi Panel Ft. ZEHAVA – Omrim Li | אבי פאנל מארח את זהבה כהן – אומרים לי

   Avi Panel Official

US ENVOY KUSHNER CALLS UNRWA CORRUPT, INEFFICIENT, UNHELPFUL FOR PEACE

MICHAEL WILNER

Advisers to US President Donald Trump have publicly questioned the purpose of UNRWA throughout the last year, partially suspending US funding to the UN body in January.

A Palestinian woman takes part in a protest against possible reductions of the services and aid offered by United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), in front of UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City August 16, 2015.. (photo credit: REUTERS/MOHAMMED SALEM)

WASHINGTON – Emails published by Foreign Policy magazine this week shed light on discussions within the Trump administration on phasing out support for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, an organization that provides aid to descendants of refugees from 1940s Mandate Palestine.

Advisers to US President Donald Trump have publicly questioned the purpose of UNRWA throughout the last year, partially suspending US funding to the UN body in January and suggesting to Mideast allies that its continued existence is a disservice to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process

Supporters of UNRWA believe the organization provides critical assistance to nearly five million Palestinians region-wide, and that its collapse would result in a humanitarian crisis for the community. But opponents say it perpetuates a myth that the descendants of refugees displaced during the 1948 partition will be able to settle in modern-day Israel.

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser; Jason Greenblatt, his special representative for international negotiations; and Nikki Haley, his envoy to the UN, all side with the critics, according to the emails obtained by Foreign Policy.

“It is important to have an honest and sincere effort to disrupt UNRWA,” Kushner wrote in an email dated January 11, addressed to several other senior officials. “This [agency] perpetuates a status quo, is corrupt, inefficient and doesn’t help peace.

“Our goal can’t be to keep things stable and as they are,” he added. “Sometimes you have to strategically risk breaking things in order to get there.”

Victoria Coates, a special assistant to the president and adviser on the Middle East peace team, wrote separately that from her discussions with Kushner, Greenblatt and Haley, the administration might agree on a strategy to phase out UNRWA altogether “by the time its charter comes up again in 2019.”

“UNRWA should come up with a plan to unwind itself and become part of the UNHCR,” she wrote, referring to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, also according to Foreign Policy.

The Palestinian Authority leadership claims Kushner’s true goal is to remove claims of a “right of return” to Israeli land by Palestinian refugees from the negotiating table.

The Israeli government, which has long criticized UNRWA’s role, insists it will never recognize Palestinians’ “right of return.” They claim that the negotiating position is in fact a strategy to create two Arab states – an Arab state of Israel and an Arab state of Palestine – by flooding the Jewish state with generations of Palestinians far removed from the initial War of Independence.

UNRWA has also been a target of congressional Republicans for years, and is the subject of two current draft bills originating in the House and Senate. The premise of both would be to defund the agency, which relies on US assistance.

Oxford University Labour Club Calls for Disciplinary Action Against MP Who ‘Dismissed Legitimacy’ of Antisemitism Row

Algemeiner Staff

British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Photo: Reuters / Pierre Albouy.

The Labour Club at Oxford University (OULC) in England called on Monday for disciplinary action against a parliamentarian who appeared to blame accusations of antisemitism within the opposition party on “right-wing trolls.”

MP Chris Williamson — a strong supporter of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn — said in an April interview that he saw evidence of people “setting themselves up as pro-Labour, pro-Jeremy Corbyn individuals on social media,” and then making “antisemitic, horrible and abusive remarks.”

The OULC said Williamson’s comments “dismissed the legitimacy of the issue of antisemitism within our party,” and recommended the withdrawal of the Labour whip.

“It is imperative that the Labour Party and OULC send a clear message of solidarity with the Jewish community,” the club said.

Williamson drew further condemnation after speaking at a meeting of left-leaning Labour members a day after the OULC issued its criticism — this time from the Jewish Labour Movement, which claimed he was complicit “in the face of antisemitism.”

The controversy stemmed from comments made at the same gathering by a party activist — identified only as Jack by a Jewish Chronicle reporter in attendance — who described the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel as “Israeli … foot soldiers” who are “trying to take our democracy away from us.”

“What could be a greater threat to our democracy than a foreign government who is trying to veto the person we want for prime minister?” he said to applause.

Williamson address the audience minutes later, but failed to publicly confront Jack over his accusation, instead calling on Labour members to be “brave” while facing “sinister” actions taken against them, according to the Chronicle.

He also asserted that some in the party had “allowed their passion to run away” and spoke in “a light which could be perceived as antisemitic,” but added, “I don’t believe they are antisemites.”

In response to criticism, the lawmaker expressed astonishment that a “veteran anti-racist” like himself is being targeted “for alleged comments made by another person,” and pledged to “not be bullied by the JLM or anyone else for that matter.”

The latest developments have further inflamed what many leaders of the UK’s Jewish community — who held a rare rally on the issue in March 26 — have repeatedly described as an antisemitism crisis in Labour under Corbyn’s leadership.

The veteran pro-Palestinian campaigner, who once referred to the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends,” faced increasing criticism since his election in 2015 for inappropriate behavior by some members of his party, among them a Labour parliamentarian who said Israelis should “relocate” to the United States and a former London mayor who claimed that Adolf Hitler had once been a Zionist.

During his tenure, multiple Labour council candidates and potential candidates were found to have made conspiratorial and hostile comments on Israel and Jews; studentrepresentatives were criticized for sharing antisemitic, racist, and homophobic tweets; a party member derisively called a Jewish journalist a “Zionist”; Jewish Labour councillors resigned after saying they’ve been subject to antisemitic abuse; and another councillor stepped down after calling Jews “parasites” and pedophiles.

Tensions between Labour and the Jewish community escalated in March, following revelations that Corbyn and several Labour members had been part of the Facebook group Palestine Live, which included posts denying the Holocaust and alleging Israeli involvement in the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks.

Late month, Labour decided to approve a version of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which was edited to remove examples relating to Israel — going against the advice of 68 leading UK rabbis. The country’s top three Jewish newspapers subsequently published an unprecedented joint editorial warning that “a Jeremy Corbyn-led government” would pose an “existential threat to Jewish life in this country.”

The crisis has also extended to the OULC, which in 2016 voted to endorse Israel Apartheid Week, prompting its co-chairman Alex Chalmer to resign from his position.

“[A] large proportion of both OULC and the student Left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews,” Chalmer, who is not Jewish, wrote in an online statement explaining his position.

He also accused some peers of “throwing around the term ‘Zio’” — a slur for Jews popular with neo-Nazis — “with casual abandon,” and shared accounts of “senior members of the club expressing their ‘solidarity’ with Hamas and explicitly defending their tactics of indiscriminately murdering civilians.”

A subsequent internal Labour report on the matter — released by The Jewish Chronicleafter being suppressed by Labour’s National Executive Committee — found that “there have been some incidents of anti-Semitic behaviour,” and recommended “disciplinary procedures.” However, it stopped short of implicating the OULC as a whole, claiming that there is “no evidence that the Club is itself institutionally anti-Semitic,” while also acknowledging a “cultural problem in which behaviour and language that would once have been intolerable is now tolerated.”

It noted that “some Jewish members do not feel comfortable attending the [OULC] meetings, let alone participating.”

A subsequent investigation by Labour into two members of the club was terminated and the students let off without facing any disciplinary action, in a move that was decried by leaders of the UK Jewish community.

Druze man jailed over spying for Israel slams Nationality Law

Arutz Sheva Staff

Azzam Azzam, who served 8 years in Egypt on charges of spying for Israel, says ‘Nationality Law discriminates against us.’

Azzam Azzam / Flash 90

Azzam Azzam, an Israeli Druze who was imprisoned in Egypt on charges of spying for Israel, said this morning in an interview with Army Radio that “The Nationality Law discriminates against us.”

In addition, Azzam called on Minister of Communications Ayoub Kara to resign and said: “You are a Druze since you were born and will die Druze. I am not ready to abandon my community for a role – a role that will come and go. You cannot forget your roots.”

The IDF said yesterday that it had suspended for two weeks Druze officer Amir Jamal, who published a Facebook post against the Nationality Law.

At the beginning of the week, Jamal, 23, who serves as a company commander, posted an open letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu on Facebook announcing that he had decided not to continue his military career and that he calls on community leaders to promote a cessation of compulsory conscription for Druze.

“Why do I have to serve the State of Israel, the state that my two brothers and I served with devotion, with mission, and love of the homeland, and in the end what do we get?” Jamal wrote, “to be second class citizens. To continue and serve the state? I don’t want to continue, and I am sure that hundreds more people will stop serving and will be discharged from the army following your decision, Netanyahu, yours and your government. “