Survivors, scholars say threat of another Holocaust is not to be ignored

During a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in New Jersey last year, German-born Holocaust survivors spoke of their concern about rising antisemitism.

By ILANIT CHERNICK
People attend a national gathering to protest antisemitism and the rise of antisemitic attacks in France (photo credit: GONZALO FUENTES / REUTERS)
People attend a national gathering to protest antisemitism and the rise of antisemitic attacks in France
(photo credit: GONZALO FUENTES / REUTERS)
Over the past five years, the world has seen record high numbers of antisemitic incidents in the United States and across Europe. Holocaust survivors say verbal and physical attacks against Jews and their property in 2019 are in many ways akin to what they experienced in Germany in the 1930s, which has created a deep-seated fear that another Holocaust is possible.
During a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in New Jersey last year, German-born Holocaust survivors spoke of their concern about rising antisemitism.
Adela Dubovy, who has four grandchildren at various universities, said she is “scared” about the rising antisemitism even in her own retirement home, according to a report by AFP.
“Now I don’t wear my Star of David,” she continued. “I tell my grandkids: don’t wear your kippah in the street. You don’t want to be attacked.”
“It’s now out in the open that it’s okay to pick on the Jews all over again,” Hanna Keselman told attendees. She was born in Germany in 1930 and spent a large part of the war in France and Italy.
“They [antisemites] are very strong, even in colleges,” said Auschwitz survivor Roman Kent.
Polls done on the subject of antisemitism in Austria and the United States have yielded frightening results.
In the US, 58% of Americans believe that something like the Holocaust could happen again.
The survey, which was done by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany in 2018, also found that 68% of people believed that antisemitism was prevalent in the United States.
Seven out of 10 Americans also said that “fewer people seem to care about the Holocaust than they used to.”
The Claims Conference survey also found that nearly a third of all Americans and more than four out of 10 millennials believe that substantially less than six million Jews were killed (two million or fewer) during the Holocaust.
Almost 45% of Americans are also unable to name one of the 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos, “and this percentage is even higher amongst millennials.”
However, 93% of Americans said that “all students should learn about the Holocaust in school.”
In a similar survey done by the Claims Conference in Austria this year, similar results were reported.
More than half (58%) of Austrians said that they believe that something like the Holocaust could happen again in other European countries.
More than a third of Austrian adults – 38%, who are 43% of millennials and Generation Z – believe that National Socialism/Nazism could come to power again.
In general, 27% of respondents believe that Jewish people could face another mass genocide, while 35% were in complete disagreement.
Prof. Judy Baumel Schwartz of the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University said the hatred of Jews didn’t start with the Holocaust.
“Hatred of Jews began a very long time before Hitler,” she told The Jerusalem Post late last year. “Hitler and the Nazi regime brought it to a new extreme that never existed before, which included mass murder of the Jews and sanctions by the government that had never been seen before. Anybody who thought that... there was a Holocaust that took place against the Jewish people 70 years ago and now everything is going to be great forever, then they’re fools.”
Baumel Schwartz explained that “antisemitism metamorphoses generation to generation because everyone needs a scapegoat, and the Jews were the perfect scapegoat because they were different. They were different in the way they dressed, they had all sorts of religious garments that they wore that were a little bit strange, they wouldn’t eat with you, they wouldn’t break bread with you [or] drink your wine, and therefore they were strange. They were different. So that already made them into the ‘ultimate other’.”
Baumel Schwartz said that “on top of that, we have modern antisemitism, which changes its form and includes racial antisemitism, economic antisemitism ‘and the Jews are ruling the world and the Jews only want money,’ etcetera… all this was many centuries before Hitler.”
She made it clear that following the Holocaust and until the 1980s, it wasn’t fashionable to be antisemitic, but this was just a temporary situation and “now Europe has gone back to the way it always was.”


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