It must be two decades, at least, since I visited Miami Beach’s Holocaust Memorial, which I do not personally recall very well. I came upon it inadvertently while wandering around Miami Beach, after touring the Florida Jewish Museum. The photo on the present Memorial website depicts several palm trees swaying behind the sculpture of an upraised right forearm thrusting upwards as if from a dark, eerie underground.
I get chills every time I stand before any haunting symbol for our six million brethren, and the millions of others who died for being who they were. I suppose I felt guilt and shame for having escaped their fate because of timing and location. I was born in a free country five years after the Jewish people’s cruelest nightmare ended. I thought it will never happen here.
Nobody needed to explain to me that this site along Meridian Avenue, across a narrow river from Dade Avenue, must be treated with reverence and the deepest respect. This is sacred ground.
It was not sacred ground to a group of pro-Arab activists. I learned a short time later that these goons occupied the space to protest the Holocaust against the poor Palestinians. How vulgar can these thugs be?
This pro-Arab demonstration was merely a mild preview for the present rampage that we are enduring now. Protests were planned at Holocaust sites in Washington DC and in a Detroit suburb in the last few years, in the midst of the anti-Jewish firestorm that intensified since Oct. 7.
The pro-Arab mob habitually employs all kinds of mean-spirited tactics to bash Israel and its supporters, among them comparing Israel’s attacks on Gaza to the Holocaust.
I learned of the Holocaust demonstrations this past week at the same time that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz likened the children who hid in their homes from ICE agents to Anne Frank, and a Trump administration official jumped into the debate with a ridiculous retort.
All of these gestures and remarks are tasteless whatever the source, be they from Democrats, Republicans or the hoods who pity the Gazans. They have no place in the debate. Not that it will stop everyone. I hope that Walz has enough class to back off and maybe even President Trump’s people will get wise. It would be a shock to my system if the protesters followed suit.
The Algemeiner news site reports that a group called Doctors Against Genocide cancelled a demonstration outside the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, a few blocks from the White House, following a backlash from Jewish organizations who charged that it crossed a moral line.
Doctors Against Genocide issued a so-called clarification statement: “The goal of our event was to visit the Holocaust Museum to express our empathy for the horrors of that genocide in Gaza. Our initial communication did not sufficiently convey this, leading to misinterpretations and unfounded accusations. As DAG we stand against all hate of vulnerable people, whether that hate comes in the form of antisemitism, anti-Palestinianism, anti-Black hate, anti-White hate, or any other prejudice. Never again for all.”
Never again for all? Does their empathy cover Hamas’ invasion of Oct. 7, 2023, in southern Israel, where they murdered 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped another 250?
DAG nonetheless staged a protest outside the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan, north of Detroit, in July 2024 because of its positive portrayal of Israel and refusal to elevate the displacement of Arabs.
“The museum is not objective,” said Rene Lichtman, who is curiously a Holocaust survivor and organizer of the protest. “They present the history that the right wing will allow them to put on. The question we have for them is: How are you now going to portray the nakba?”
The nakba is the word Arabs use after they attacked Israel in 1948 and lost 78 percent of the territory that they sought to deny to the Jews. Their assault featured gunning down Jewish inhabitants after they surrendered. Arab civilians who were supposedly displaced had been told by their leaders to flee the region for a few days so Arab armies could swarm in and destroy Israel.
If this is not twisted thinking, what more is coming?
“I find it pretty grotesque,” said attorney Mark Jacobs, co-director of the Coalition for Black and Jewish Unity, told Deadline Detroit, “that the protesters would select the Holocaust Center, a solemn and sacred place, to essentially call for the eradication of Israel, which was created as a safe harbor for the Jewish people after the world’s worst genocide.”
In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz shockingly compared the ICE invasion to an aspect of the Holocaust a few days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Referring to Minneapolis children who are hiding from ICE agents seeking illegal migrants, he said, “We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank.”
I was surprised that Walz would invoke Anne Frank, who wrote her famous diary while hiding in an Amsterdam attic until the Nazis dragged her and her family concentration camps, where she died. Walz was certainly out of line and owes the Jewish community an apology.
Compounding this ugliness was Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the antisemitism envoy nominated by President Trump. He felt compelled to enter a race to the bottom with Walz when he said, “Anne Frank was in Amsterdam legally and abided by Dutch law. She was hauled off to a death camp because of her race and religion. Her story has nothing to do with the illegal immigration, fraud and lawlessness plaguing Minnesota today.”
Does it help to parse it so much? I intended to parse Kaploun’s parsing, but I deleted the passage because it sounded just as silly. Suffice it to say that much of Kaploun’s response was a Republican hit. Kaploun probably should have just condemned Walz’s comment and said these situations were incomparable.
He also chided Walz when he tweeted, “Ignorance like this cheapens the horror of the Holocaust.”
Be careful, Rabbi Kaploun, that you don’t cheapen the horror of the Holocaust.
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Bruce S. Ticker is a Philadelphia-based columnist.
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Bruce S. Ticker is a Philadelphia-based columnist.