ECAJ vs ADC

A WAR of words has broken out between the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) and the Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) after the ADC criticised former High Court chief justice Michael Kirby.

Explaining why he would not take part in the postal plebiscite on same-sex marriage, Kirby referenced the Holocaust.

“I do understand the view of those who say ‘I am not going to participate in something that is my own humiliation’,” Kirby said.

“During the run up to the Second World War some Jewish people, though the situation was much more desperate and fraught, took part with the Nazis in the regulation of the Jewish community.

“Looking back on it, we can now see that that is something when you are being denigrated and treated unfairly and as a second- class citizen, you shouldn’t necessarily go along with.”

ADC chairman Dvir Abramovich said that no matter how strong one’s objection may be to the plebiscite, “invoking such inappropriate and offensive analogies to advance any agenda undermines the historical truth and the meaning of the Holocaust, and only serves to trivialise the extermination of six million Jews and millions of others, which, as we know, included gay people”.

Springing to Kirby’s defence, ECAJ slammed the ADC.

“We were appalled by the public attack on Michael Kirby, whose life’s work has exemplified the kind of civic courage which is the nemesis of dictatorships everywhere, and which was so conspicuously lacking in Europe in the 1930s,” executive director Peter Wertheim said.

“Justice Kirby was not making factual analogies between these two situations at all.

“He was attempting to draw, in a measured and qualified way, moral lessons from the terrible events of the Holocaust and the Nazi era, not to liken other events to them.

“That criticism was based on a misconstruction of Justice Kirby’s comments in the media and was manifestly unwarranted. The ADC should be big enough to admit that it was wrong on this occasion and to move on.”

Standing by his comments, however, Abramovich fired back. “It is a very sad day, when in the midst of an unprecedented explosion in anti-Israel rhetoric and anti-Semitic violence, one Jewish organisation attacks another,” he said.

JOSHUA LEVI