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No, the president of Poland didn't say that Jews cause anti-Semitism
[PJ Media] In late June of 1941, my father's first cousins Moshe and Dvora fled their house in the tiny town of Kameny Most, about halfway between Slonim and Baranavichy in what is now Belorus. Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa days before, and their home stood almost on the German-Soviet line that had divided Poland in 1939. Now the Germans had marched into town. The boy and girl, then 15 and 16, reached the woods behind their house before the Germans arrived. Their parents and baby brother fled a minute later, but the Germans already were there. They couldn't reach the woods and hid in the tall grass. A Polish neighbor pointed them out to the Germans, who shot them on the spot. Moshe and Dvora joined the partisan brigade led by the Bielski brothers, made famous in the film Defiance. Not long afterwards they returned at night, barricaded the neighbor in his house, set it afire and burned him alive. By the grace of God the teenagers survived the war and came to the new State Israel and started large and flourishing families. I had the merit to arrive at Dvora's deathbed in 2004 just in time to receive her blessing upon the American branch of her family.I tell this story to make it clear that my family isn't soft on Polish anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a matter of the most profound importance, and Polish anti-Semitism is something I take personally. That is why it is especially irresponsible to accuse Poles of anti-Semitism falsely, as the Jewish Insider website yesterday accused Polish President Andrzej Duda. According to the website, President Duda told a group of Jewish community leaders assembled at the Polish Consulte in New York that hostile remarks by an Israeli cabinet minister about Polish anti-Semitism "were a 'humiliation' and were the reason for an increase in antisemitic attacks against Jews in Poland." It is wrong to cry wolf under any circumstances, and reckless to cry wolf where real wolves might turn up. President Duda never said it. I know he never said it because I was at the meeting. For an accurate account, see Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's note in the Jerusalem Post. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2019-09-28 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=551412 |