Yad Vashem graffiti a “desecration of God’s name”
ISRAEL resonated with shock this week after vandals daubed graffiti at Yad Vashem, accusing Zionists of causing the Holocaust.
This doctrine, which is the preserve of hard-line Charedim, was asserted in messages on walls and memorials at the site in Hebrew, and discovered on Monday morning. “The main line of investigation is ultra-Orthodox religious extremists from the Charedi community,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told The AJN.
Slogans included “The Zionists wanted the Holocaust!”; “If Hitler hadn’t existed, the Zionists would have invented him”; and “Persecuting Jews! You declared war on Hitler in the name of the Jewish people. You brought about the Shoah!” One of the messages was signed: “World ultra-Orthodox Jewry”.
For all of Israeli society’s frictions, Yad Vashem has never before been subject to such an attack. “I am afraid that these expressions have crossed a red line,” said Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev.
“I think that those who did it did so intentionally to ruin the messages that are coming out of Yad Vashem, messages of unity, messages of open discourse, tolerance for all kinds of religions, beliefs and ideas,” he said.
Yad Vashem’s chief executive, Israel Meir Lau, former chief rabbi and one of Israel’s best-known survivors, called the vandalism “a desecration of God’s name”.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented after seeing the graffiti: “It is hard to believe that a human being could be capable of writing such things. I hope that the police will apprehend the perpetrators and bring them to the
justice they deserve.”
Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch called the attack “a heinous crime against one of the State of Israel’s most prominent symbols”.
Jewish leaders around the world also expressed shock. Abraham Foxman, national director of the US-based Anti-Defamation League, said the vandals “are morally bankrupt and must be brought to justice”, adding: “If in fact they are extremist Charedi Jews, as Israeli law enforcement suspects, then it is a particularly sad day for Israel and a reminder that Holocaust education is just as important for Jews as non-Jews.”
As the search began for the perpetrators, the most extremist Charedi groups said they did not believe their members would perpetrate such an attack.
The main anti-Zionist Charedi organisation, the Eida Charedit, takes the view that vandalism and violence “is not allowed as part of a fight for Yiddishkeit”, one of its most senior rabbis, Shlomo Pappenheim, told The AJN. He said, however, that there are some fringe individuals who engage in “meshugane violence”.
NATHAN JEFFAY
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