Gandel orator lauds survivors
IN a poignant moment during the 32nd B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) Gandel Oration last Tuesday night, Rabbi Abraham Cooper asked all Holocaust survivors in the auditorium at St Kilda Town Hall to stand up to be honoured, and as elderly men and women rose to their feet, the hall broke into spontaneous applause.
IN a poignant moment during the 32nd B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) Gandel Oration last Tuesday night, Rabbi Abraham Cooper asked all Holocaust survivors in the auditorium at St Kilda Town Hall to stand up to be honoured, and as elderly men and women rose to their feet, the hall broke into spontaneous applause.
Rabbi Cooper, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, acclaimed their presence and told them they were the bedrock of a Melbourne Jewish community built on Shoah survivors and rivalled in its dynamism and energy perhaps only by Toronto, Canada.
The rabbi said Nazi commander Adolf Eichmann had not just killed massive numbers of Jews, but “felt sure that Judaism itself had been terminated, that the Jewish people was finished”.
“But that’s not the case … here we are in Melbourne in 2015 … a community transformed by survivors, by courageous, tenacious, gentle people, who had the courage to serve as a bridge to our past,” he said.
In an oration themed as “Global Anti-Semitism, Holocaust Denial and the War Against Israel”, Rabbi Cooper paid tribute to the late Simon Wiesenthal, the iconic Nazi hunter, who was liberated from the camps in an emaciated state but immediately applied to authorities for the right to join in the search for fugitive Nazis.
But he said Wiesenthal made it clear to other Jews in pursuit of Nazis after the war that they must not become vigilantes and murder Nazis, or take revenge on innocent family members of Nazis.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, said Cooper, is dedicated to reminding communities around the world of the ultimate consequences of hatred, as manifested in the Holocaust.
Rabbi Cooper recalled Wiesenthal’s response when asked whether the Holocaust could happen again. The Nazi hunter had reflected that “hate plus technology plus a crisis” were the ingredients of the Shoah. Wiesenthal had posited that had the apparatus of the Nazis been available historically, “no Jews would have survived in Spain, no Catholics in England and no Protestants in France”.
The rabbi, who was a delegate to the so-called World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001, said the infamous conference laid the foundation for the anti-Israel hatred that has become a hallmark of today’s world and called it “the worst public display of anti-Semitism since World War II”.
In Europe, he said, “70 years after the Shoah, most European diplomats and politicians, they’re happy to stand in silence for dead Jews, they don’t really have too much time to worry about live Jews”.
PETER KOHN
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