Community Sends a Clear Message to Iranian Leader
By Kristin Erekson
The Jewish Advocate
Near Faneuil Hall Marketplace last Thursday, Boston's Jewish leaders raised their voices in protest of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's conference earlier this month, where he denied that the Holocaust happened.
Sponsored by organizations such as the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Synagogue Council of Massachusetts, GesherCity and the American Jewish Committee, a candlelight vigil was held at the New England Holocaust Memorial, and hundreds of individuals came to honor victims of Nazi persecution.
Rabbi Moshe Waldoks of Brookline's Temple Beth Zion began the event by saying that the "rhetoric emerging from Iran" is seeking to engulf the Jewish community in darkness, but as Jews unite to light candles in protest, the "truth will be shown."
"We are feeling great pain and insult for all those who have died," added Waldoks, the Holocaust committee chair at JCRC. "But we should not let our voices be stilled."
Nancy K. Kaufman, executive director of JCRC, said the main mission of the demonstration was to send a message to Ahmadinejad that "We in Boston will not stand idly by."
"To use Jews as targets of a radical agenda of fear and destruction is [unacceptable]," Kaufman added.
On Dec. 11, the Foreign Ministry of Iran sponsored the conference, where organizers invited people from 30 different countries to debate whether the Holocaust was as cataclysmic as history has documented. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and members of the Neturei Karta, an extreme sect of anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews, were among the many who appeared at the convention. A rabbi in attendance declared that the Holocaust should not be used as a crutch to justify the need for a Jewish state.
The Consul General of Israel to New England Nadav Tamir said that now is the time for the international community to come together "to stop Iran" from obtaining nuclear weapons that would wipe Israel off the map.
"This is about a country that is inciting for genocide and acquiring the means to achieve it," Tamir added.
At the vigil, officials with the Israel Action Center of the JCRC handed out flyers that urged constituents to thank their local officials who supported two pieces of legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives this September that aim to weaken Iran's nuclear mission. The Iran Freedom Support Act strengthens and renews U.S. sanctions against Iran, choking off funds that aid the Islamic Republic's pursuit of nuclear weapons. The Resolution on Lebanon also calls on the international community to ensure that Iran and Syria are not allowed to rearm Hezbollah.
President George W. Bush's press secretary Tony Snow said in a statement that Ahmadinejad's conference was "an affront to the entire civilized world as well as the traditional Iranian values of tolerance and respect … The Iranian regime perversely seeks to call the historical fact of those atrocities into questions and provide a platform for hatred."
Beacon Hill resident Mary Mahoney, 73, who is not Jewish but attended the protest, echoed Bush's beliefs.
"To deny history is to deny civilization," Mahoney said.
Dr. Bernd Rinnert, the German Deputy Consul General in Boston, noted during the vigil that Germany strongly opposes the statements made in regards to the Holocaust by Ahmadinejad.
"Denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany, carrying up to five years in prison for those committed," Rinnert said. "Germany is one of Israel's closest allies."
Israel Arbeiter, 81, of Newton, who is a survivor of Auschwitz and president of the American Association of Holocaust Survivors, was shocked that a country such as Iran hosted a conference that drew into question a well-documented historical fact.
Arbeiter told the Advocate in a previous interview that it is impossible for him to forget the atrocities he experienced during Nazi persecution, from not being able to walk on the sidewalk in his hometown in Poland to his younger brother's and parents' violent deaths in concentration camps.
"If Ahmadinejad wants to know the truth about the Holocaust, he should have asked someone like me," said Arbeiter in a speech at the vigil. "I saw men, women and children being led into gas chambers, never to be seen again. I inhaled the smoke of burning flesh."
Though this time, Arbeiter added, society should not let history be repeated.
"We remember the silence of the world when Jews were burned in crematoriums," Arbeiter said. "We will never, never be silent again."
