Tuesday 10 May 2016

Joni Needs to take a Closer Look: Invitation to Joni


This is "Joni" who claims to have read Gross's Neighbours". Maybe he has, but now he needs to read about the Polish Resistance (not "resilience") to the Nazi occupier and the Resistance to the Communist takeover 1945-49 and in particular which government was responsible for these units - clue Joni, it was not a Warsaw or even Lublin government).

Joni, if ever you are in Warsaw, look me up, I'll show you the material evidence and nuances your educators over there seems to miss out. I'll show you where in a friend's house, one of Rabbi Zev's "just individuals" hid a Jew who'd escaped the Ghetto and tell you, standing on the spot,  what happened when the Gestapo found out.  I'll show you the Ghetto. Come at the end of August and the beginning of September and take part in the "Festiwalsingera" (annual Jewish culture festival) and go back and tell Rabbi Zev how much antisemitic feeling you experienced there.We can go to Plaszow and I'll read you what it actually does say on the monument.

If you have time we will go to the site, in a forest, with the architect of a prize-winning monument to be built soon to commemorate a sub-camp of an extermination site and we can talk about the problem of the Post-War fate of such ephemeral sites in the ruined country and the proper way to commemorate such events. The Chief Rabbi was very enthusiastic, the site is a difficult one to preserve. 

 I'll also show you what happened to those Resistance fighters and why what you said does them a great disservice. My late father in law was one. I'll take you to his grave in the small Jewish town of Grójec and we'll have a talk about Poles and Jews living alongside each other for generations before the Nazis came. let us talk about why so many Jews moved west in the nineteenth century into precisely the Polish-speaking areas of the Russian Empire and what the origin of those "Pogroms" which your friend "knows about" actually were. 

I'll do that if you promise to then arrange to give a talk to all those young people Rabbi Zev dragged along to attack my country and its people and tell them (honestly) what you saw and learnt here.

Culture, shared history and heritage, Joni, have the ability to link, to unite, and I am dead against anyone who tries to play on ignorance and intellectual laziness to use them to sow division like your rabbi attempts to do in the video.

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