gencia Judía de Noticias:
An emotive act of commemoration for the Shoa victims from Rhodes, Salonica and Cos.
AJN (28/08/08).- In the “Centro Comunitario Chalom” in Buenos Aires, founded originally by the Jews from the Island of Rhodes, an act of evocation and commemoration was held for the victims of the Shoa from Rhodes, Salonica and Cos, and all the other Sephardic martyrs massacred for the Nazi cause during the World War II. Strong criticism was expressed against Iran and its president for denial of the holocaust. This act of commemoration is repeated every year on the Hebrew calendar date when the Jewish population from the Greek Islands was deported to the concentration camps in Eastern Europe, particularly Auchwitz, where they they were murdered.
Also participating in the event were the Ambassador of Greece, Michael B. Christides; the Consul from the Turkish Embassy, Mehemet Bulut; the Archbishop of the Greek Church for South America, his Reverend Eminence Tarasios; the President of the Parliamentary Commission against Anti-semitism in the United Kingdom, John Mann; Claudio Avruj, representing the Chief of Government of the City of Buenos Aires; several institiutional directors headed by Angel Schindel, Carlos Frauman and Mario Feferbaum, Acting Vice President of the DIAI, President of the OSA and President of the Foundation in Memory of the Holocaust – the Holocaust Museum, respectively and members of the community.
Before the President of the Centro Comunitario Chalom, Pablo Malewitz, welcomed the attendees, Claudio Avruj gave a talk and conveyed a message from the Chief of Government of the City of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, confirming his solidarity with the act. The meeting continued with the lighting of seven commemoration candles, interspersed with talks by the speakers and a video, specially prepard for the occasion, that showed a journey, made during the month of July, by David Galante, a Rhodes survivor of the Shoa, to his city of birth.
The diplomat added, “From the bottom of my heart I wish to honor those martyrs, to my fellow Jewish citizens, that their sacrifice will will not be forgotten, no matter how many centuries will pass, that from their sacrifice we will all build, without consideration of color, sex or religion, an inpenetrable wall that will never again permit assassination of innocents to happen. This is our promise, but also our obligation to all our Jewish friends from Salonica, Rhodes and Cos, that were so cruelly murdered in Auchwitz-Birkenau. May their memory be eternal.”
David Galante, being one of the few Rhodes survivors of the Shoa, offered the following,”The truth of the horror that was cast on their lives and the motive for which our destiny was tied to six million who were murdered”, and added,”we learned that silence was the best friend of the assassins and for that reason I give evidence, speaking up every opportunity that I have. We learned that remembering is the way to stay alert and not to forget. Remembering what happened is today our way of reminding the world what happened and pass on the message so that it will never happen again”. Later Federal Judge Daniel Rafecas referred to a recent trip, with a number of teachers, to Poland, organized by the Fundación Memoria del Holocausto, together with Yad Hashem, where they visited the death camps and the places where the ghettos existed – where he was thinking about the Jewish resistence during the time of the Nazi regime, particularly of the work of the Bulgarian thinker Tzvetan Todorov “Whom I admired for confronting the Nazi perpetrators and their allies with what they were doing to their Jewish captives”. “It was a rsistence that was passive and ubiquitous, then repeated everywhere; in the cities, at deportation points, en the ghettos, and in the death camps. This resistence was the fight to preserve one’s life. Every one of them, captives in the camps and in the ghettos maintained this modicom of resistence until the end as a way to confront the Nazi genocide.” Added the judge, in order to later relate this to the resistence of the Jews in Greece as mentioned by Primo Levi.
Finally, representing the DAIA and the Jewish community of Argentina, Angel Schindler stressed that, “the preservation of the memory, honoring the martyrs and the heroes, and at the same time never forgeting the executioners, their accomplices and those collaborators in the occupied countries, who often were even more fervent than the Germans in persecuting our brothers, all this constitutes a sacred duty for our people.” He added, “Hence to perpetuate the commemoration by having a date for International Holocaust Remembrance set by the United Nations to coincide with the liberation of Auschwitz; the date the Jews tend to remember the Shoa by, the date of the uprising in Warsaw, and the date the survivors remember.
All these repititions are not just repititions since we need to repeat them constantly, while at the same time remember and thank those just people of all nations that proclaimed by their actions that one can be dignified, that one can achieve by one’s actions a humanitarian compromise, offering a hand to the oppressed, to the persecuted, and save lives even at the cost of one’s own. We must learn from the lessons of the past and not re-live it, as Schindler said, ” Unfortunately we are witnessing today with astonishment the utterances of the head of state of Iran, who denigrates our martyrs denying the Shoah and calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. Thus the DAIA renews daily its commitment to denounce anyone seeking to repeat that horrendous past, to denounce the perverted deniers of the Shoa and their local allies, to denounce those who justify the fundamental terrorism that attacked us here in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994, to denounce those anti-Semites who disguise themselves as anti-Zionists as though these two were not the same.
Schinldel concluded, ”Ladies and gentlemen, to honor our bretheren we must honor their travails. Never again hatred, never again discrimination, never again persecution, never again.”
EACH-HJP
Link to the article at AJN website (in Spanish).
