KRAKOW, Poland — Holocaust survivors gathered in Krakow on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz amid unease regarding the safety of Jews in Europe.
Some 300 survivors from 19 countries — each with a child, grandchild or companion — are expected to attend official ceremonies on Jan. 27 at the site of the former concentration camp in Oswiecim. The journeys of the guests — most of them in their 80s and 90s – were sponsored by the World Jewish Congress and the USC Shoah Foundation.
Ronald Lauder, president of the WJC, is to address the ceremony, which was organized by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the International Auschwitz Council. Among the thousands of expected guests are state leaders as well as film director Steven Spielberg, founding chair of the Shoah Foundation, Israeli-American businessman Haim Saban and others.
In Germany, where International Holocaust Remembrance Day events and ceremonies were to be held across the country, Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said Jan. 26 that Jews would always remember the Holocaust, but that non-Jews in Germany had a duty to remember, teach and learn about it.
“At the same time, unfortunately, the threat to Jews around the world has increased,” Schuster added, alluding to the recent terrorist attack in the Paris kosher supermarket in which four hostages were killed. “Attacks by extremist Muslims have become an increased danger to the Jewish community. We must not turn a blind eye.”
European leaders must do more to combat rising anti-Semitism on their home turf, Lauder told reporters in Krakow, saying governments must adopt a “zero tolerance” policy toward preachers of hate and importers of jihad.
Spielberg told some 100 Holocaust survivors and their companions in Krakow that “we are once again facing the perennial demons of intolerance.”
Lauder said he had been hearing from worried Jews across Europe, especially following the rash of terrorist attacks on Jewish targets in Belgium and this month in France.
“The Jewish population is frightened,” he said. Religious Jews “are afraid of getting attacked in the street” for wearing a yarmulke. “Jews want to leave Europe because they feel their governments are not protecting them.”
Lauder called for the deportation of leaders who promulgate hate speech and the closing of schools that teach hateful messages. European citizens who go abroad to receive Islamist military training, he said, “are not learning how to make couscous. They should lose their passports.”
Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, told JTA that unlike in western Europe, jihadists have not posed a problem in Poland. He also said that classic Catholic anti-Semitism has greatly decreased thanks to the efforts of the late Pope John Paul II.
But Rabbi Schudrich said that in addition to the terrorist threat, there is an increased willingness in Western Europe to express traditional anti-Semitism.
“It’s as if at some level the expiration date of the Holocaust is up,” he said.
