Transcript of Speech delivered
12 December 2006 by Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of Neturei
Karta at the Conference in Tehran, Iran: “The Holocaust,
Global Vision”
With God’s help I pray to God that He bestow upon me
His wisdom and His knowledge and that I should be worthy
of conveying this to this worthy gathering and the message
should go out to the world, the truth of God, the truth
of the Torah, amen.
I was in turmoil about what to talk about; we had many
different thoughts on this issue of the holocaust. When
you speak about the “holocaust” you are not talking about
a single time or a single event. Rather you’re talking about
the concept that touches upon nations, that touches upon
religions, that touches upon humanity; It touches on the
whole world configuration and therefore, in a time limit
of fifteen minutes, of course, it is really impossible to
convey the views and the feelings and all the issues that
abound with this issue of holocaust. But as I started, I
humbly pray to God, that He should bestow upon me His words,
I hope to be the good messenger to be able to convey the
points that could be an opening, an eye-opener for the beginning
of the question, the return, the reevaluation of the holocaust;
it should be a time that we should be able to know from
where to start to think about what the holocaust was all
about.
Firstly, when the word “holocaust” is used, it is used
in regard to the Jewish people... I should start of course,
by thanking the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Honorable
President Achmadinejad, and all the people involved here;
the Foreign Ministry and others who have put together this
conference, allowing the talks of the holocaust to come
about. So I really thank them and God should give them all,
strength and courage that they should be able to do God’s
will and in the future that we should be able to have invigorating
and open talks about what is in our hearts.
The issue of the holocaust, if we wouldn’t talk about
it, would remain embedded in the people’s hearts with very
bitter feelings [against the Jewish nation], as they are
untill today. You find many people who are very embittered
against Jewish people and they feel that the holocaust is
being used as an excuse to perpetrate a terrible crime against
a portion of humanity, at least. The main people who are
suffering anew from the holocaust today, would be the Palestinian
people. And therefore this is something which has had representation
here, by the Muslim people. But there are other people also
who feel that they are being harmed by the issue of the
holocaust. Of course the Jewish people throughout the world
will tell you that it is an open wound and it hasn’t gone
away and that they are still suffering from repercussions
of the holocaust. But many people say that we can’t talk
about this subject. And therefore the feelings and the notions
of people about what is wrong, what is right, what happened,
and who was responsible and so forth remains their opinions
and they walk around their whole life hating each other
and eventually it can explode and terrible crimes could
come about because of this. So therefore this is so important
to open this discussion and in the future let us hope that
we should come to a clarification of all of this.
The holocaust is something which is, I believe, (and
I’ve heard many speakers here say) is something which is
very hard to say that the Jewish people did not suffer.
I mean somebody has to be, I think, either very very embittered
or a person who doesn’t want to open his mind to study,
to say that the Jewish people weren’t exterminated. The
fact is that there were millions and millions of Jewish
people living in Europe before World War II. Poland, the
statistics say around 3 million, and Hungary there was over
half a million, maybe close to a million and you go through
Slovakia, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Ukraine, they were
all full of Jewish people, full of Jewish communities and
today they don’t exist. And almost nobody tries to refute
that. It would be ridiculous to refute it because the fact
is, the Jewish people were there and now they are not there.
Now maybe I can say that at the discussion of the holocaust,
I may be the representative, the voice of the people who
died in the holocaust because my grandparents died there.
They were killed in Auschwitz. My parents were from Hungary.
My father escaped and his parents remained. He wasn’t able
to get them out of Hungary and they died in Auschwitz as
were other relatives and all the communities that they knew.
So to say that they didn’t die, to me you can not say that.
I am the living remnant of the people who died in the holocaust
and I am here, I believe sent by God, to humbly say, simply
to speak to the people here and say, “you should know that
the Jewish people died, and do not try to say that it did
not happen. They did die.” There are people throughout
the Jewish communities, still alive in their seventies and
eighties and every one of them will tell you their stories.
It is something which you can not refute, but that being
said, it doesn’t mean that the holocaust is a tool to use
to oppress other people. And that is the most new unfortunate
piece of the holocaust, why the holocaust is such a bad
word, because the holocaust is being used today to oppress
another people. But mind you, it is not being used by the
Jewish nation.
The holocaust is being manipulated and abused by a movement
that refers to themselves as the Jewish nation, that usurped
the name of the Jewish nation. The Jewish nation after World
War II was very weak and the people who were in power, who
were non-religious, people who were far from God who decided
for convenience sake that they wanted to use the word “Judaism”,
they wanted to use the Star of David, they wanted to use
the Bible to be able to gain a materialistic gain: the state
of “Israel”. They decided that they are going to use the
holocaust to be able to reach their goal of having a nation.
How does this work? We really are going to have to digress
and speak just a little about the concepts of Judaism and
Zionism because otherwise it does not really make sense,
this whole discussion.
Judaism is a religion practiced by the Jewish nation
for thousands of years. We were 600,000 people, [males from
the age of twenty to sixty, beside all the other members
of the Jewish nation] the children and grandchildren of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and we stood by Mount Sinai and
accepted a Torah from God Himself. God spoke and everyone
heard it together and heard how God said “I am your God
and you must follow my commandments.”
The world belongs to God. God is compassionate. God is
the ultimate in compassion. He gave us the Torah and He
told us that we must go up to the Holy Land as part of the
acceptance of the yoke of the Torah, the responsibilities
of the six hundred and thirteen commandments. It wasn’t
the will of the people to send out the people of Canaan,
it had nothing to do with the earthly intentions of a human
nation. In fact the Jewish people didn’t want to go into
the land of Israel, they were afraid, they didn’t want to
hold war; they were punished for that. They had to go forty
years in the wilderness. Eventually they went into the land
because it was God’s command. It was through miraculous
events that the Canaanites were wiped out and through miraculous
events that the walls of Jericho sunk in. This was all through
God’s will. The Jews throughout their exilic history never
fought wars and never did anything that was not compassionate,
because they wanted to do the will of God: “Just as God
is compassionate, you must be compassionate.”
We don’t understand the ways of God, we don’t understand
a tsunami; we don’t understand when God gives a decree on
a people. But we know one thing: God is compassionate. And
we know one thing, that we never in our history would change
one letter of the Torah. We would never do anything because
it is our will, only what the Torah says. When God commanded
us to go into the land, it was because it was God’s will,
one reason being because the Canaanites served idol worshipry,
they defiled the land. They were offered the choice to stop
serving idol worshipry. If not, it was God’s command, they
must leave or they were killed. God’s command had nothing
to do with the will of the Jewish people. The Jewish people
went into the land of Canaan and God stipulated, that if
they did not maintain a high level of holiness, they would
be sent out of the land and they were eventually sent out.
The Jews accepted this punishment, as it says in the words
of the prophets, I know that the Muslim people accept the
words of the prophets, as they know they are the words of
God. It says in the words of the prophets that the Jewish
people were sent out of the land because they were not on
this level of holiness. God clearly stated “do not return
en masse to the land. Do not create your own entity. Do
not rebel against any nations. You must be loyal to the
country that you reside in”. The Jewish people accepted
this and they never wanted to have a state.
Zionism came along one hundred years ago, a transformation
from religion into nationalism. This movement was created
by Jews who left the folds of the Torah. Theodore Hertzl
[founder of Zionism], who did not want to abide by the rules
of the Torah, by God’s rules, said “we have our own physical
protection and we will go into a land and take it over”;
therefore they decided to go and create the state of “Israel”.
Clearly all the rabbinical authorities were opposed to this.
It would be forbidden for us to have a State, even if it
would be in a land that is desolate and uninhabited. It
compounds the sin and the terrible crime because it was
the in the inhabited land of the Palestinians. Now, they
were afraid that people were going to oppose them because
it is a terrible evil philosophy and ideology, this ideology
of Zionism, so they waived the Bible and said, “You who
are God-fearing know that this [the Zionist philosophy]
is God’s word.” Therefore, people, unfortunately, today
say that “maybe God’s word is bad” (G-d forbid) or that
the Torah has been changed, or things like that. Know that
God is compassionate. The Torah is totally true. There’s
not one iota of the Torah that is not totally compassionate.
We must try to understand God’s ways. We cannot comprehend
everything of God, but everything of God is pure and compassionate.
The Jews remain loyal to that Torah. Zionism turned away
from that, created a state, rebelled against God, repressed
the people. To intimidate the people they said that “we
will create a state and you cannot question us because of
the Bible.” They wanted religious people not to come in.
I have full documentation that, because of time constraint,
I cannot present now, but this documentation shows that
they had collaborated with the Nazis; and they thwarted
the efforts to save the Jews; they said “Orthodox Jews we
do not want, let them die”; and it is documented that they
aided and abetted the death of Jews and they thwarted the
efforts of Jews being saved. This is what the Zionists did.
There should be Nuremburg trials on the actions of the
Zionists. Not only that, but the irony is, they said “as
more Jews die then we will get more land because the more
the bloodshed, then the nations will feel guilty and the
nations will give us land”. After World War II they went
to the nations and said “you must give us land”. They were
given the land. Therefore they use the word “holocaust” because
they demand that, that is one of the reasons to give them
land. And they are afraid that if you talk about the holocaust,
you will be able to find the truth: that they are guilty
just as the Nazis are. They collaborated with the Nazis,
so therefore they said “you can not talk about it.” Here
in Iran, thank God, Iran opened the story. Let the world
know that they should not be embittered [against the jews].
You do not have to be embittered. Open your hearts, ask
your questions. We also agree with you that the holocaust
is being misused. Jews were killed, but they died to sanctify
God’s name. Their souls went up in purity and they don’t
want to be brought down now to rebel against God. I am here
to speak the cry of the dead of the holocaust: “We do not
want to be used, to be soiled, to rebel against God with
our blood. We do not want the state of “Israel”. We don’t
want that our blood should be used and tainted for the state
of “Israel”, which is a steady rebellion against God. We
want a speedy and peaceful dismantlement of the state.
With God’s help let us all pray for that and let us work
together that the world should rethink this rebellion against
God and know that it is wrong and we should have a dismantlement
of the state and a return to Palestinian rule so that we
can live in harmony as we have for hundreds of years with
the Muslims.
Thank you. |
