The Netherlands Commemorates Its Holocaust

Since 1960, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam has been the city’s only major monument to the destruction of its Jewish community during the Shoah. That changed this year, when the city council approved construction of a wall commemorating the approximately 102,000 Dutch Jews killed at the hands of the Nazis, and a National Holocaust Museum opened its doors. Nina Siegal describes the significance of these new efforts to preserve the realities of the country’s wartime history:

Between 75 and 80 percent of the Netherlands’ Jews were killed during the war, the highest rate in Western Europe. . . . By comparison, neighboring Belgium lost about 40 percent of its Jewish population, and France lost about 25 percent. . . .

Beginning in 1943, about 34,000 Dutch Jews were sent to the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, and only eighteen survived. . . . This relatively unknown camp accounted for about a third of the Dutch Jewish victims of the Holocaust . . . ; Auschwitz accounted for most of the others. . . .

The Anne Frank House, which had 1.2 million visitors last year, is one of the most popular attractions in the Netherlands. . . . But those who have promoted the new projects fear that people may come away from her [story] with the impression that most Dutch citizens were protective of their Jewish neighbors, and that the Dutch resistance was more effective than it was.

Read more at New York Times

More about: Anne Frank, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Holocaust remembrance, Netherlands, Sobibor

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society