The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau

January 28, 2025

The European Jewish Association (EJA) was deeply honored to participate in yesterday’s profoundly moving ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, held at the historic site itself. Upholding our solemn commitment, we remain dedicated to our mission to combat antisemitism, preserve the memory of the Holocaust, and protect Jewish life across Europe.

Yesterday, the world united to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945. At the site where over a million innocent lives were brutally extinguished, dignitaries, survivors, and leaders from across the world gathered to honor the memory of the six million Jews and countless others murdered during the Holocaust. Among the leaders present at the ceremony were Chancellor Scholz, King Charles III, President Zelenskyy, President Macron, and Israel’s Education Minister Kisch.

Fifty-six survivors of Auschwitz joined world leaders in the ceremony, which took place in a giant tent placed over the camp’s infamous gates—a gate that has become a symbol of Auschwitz’s grim history. This event was not only a moment to honor the victims but also a painful acknowledgment that this may be one of the final commemorations attended by those who lived through the horrors of Auschwitz, who bear witness firsthand to what they endured and how they survived.

Holocaust survivor Tova Friedman, who was just six years old when Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army, delivered a poignant message: “We are here to proclaim and pledge that we will never allow history to repeat itself.” Tova, who survived by hiding among the dead to evade Nazi soldiers, shared how, at age 86, she is still haunted by the memories of those dark times.

Polish historian and Holocaust survivor Marian Turski echoed this sentiment, quoting Rabbi Nachman of Breslov: “All the world is a narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to be afraid.” His words, along with the testimonies of survivors, serve as a warning and reflect the survivors’ fears about the alarming rise of antisemitism and hatred in today’s world and a call to the world’s leaders to not be afraid and fight against antisemitism.

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The EJA is delighted to announce the official conclusion of our 2024 delegation to Auschwitz

Over two days, we hosted diverse speakers addressing the rise in antisemitism, communal encounters, and improved security measures. This assembly held paramount importance as we united to confront this unsettling pattern. One of the key moments we included was a thought-provoking debate between Elon Musk and Ben Shapiro.

The latter part of our delegation focused on a visit to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. A memorial ceremony and the recital of the Kaddish prayer marked this solemn trip.

These poignant moments underscored the European Jewish Association’s unwavering dedication to commemorating the profound tragedy of the Holocaust and battle against antisemitism.

#NeverAgainWasNow #NotOnMyWatch #EJAAuschwitz2024

Far-right going mainstream in Europe

ZAGREB: Hungary’s prime minister declares that the “color” of Europeans should not mix with that of Africans and Arabs. His Polish counterpart claims Jews took part in their own destruction in the Holocaust. And the Croatian president has thanked Argentina for welcoming notorious pro-Nazi war criminals after World War II.Ever since World War II, such views were taboo in Europe, confined to the far-right fringes. Today they are openly expressed by mainstream political leaders in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, part of a global populist surge in the face of globalization and mass migration.
“There is something broader going on in the region which has produced a patriotic, nativist, conservative discourse through which far-right ideas managed to become mainstream,” said Tom Junes, a historian and a
researcher with the Human and Social Studies Foundation in Sofia, Bulgaria.
In many places, the shift to the right has included the rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators, often fighters or groups celebrated as anti-communists or defenders of national liberation. In Hungary and Poland, governments are also eroding the independence of courts and media, leading human rights groups to warn that democracy is threatened in parts of a region that threw off Moscow-backed dictatorships in 1989.
Some analysts say Russia is covertly helping extremist groups in order to destabilize Western liberal democracies. While that claim is difficult to prove with concrete evidence, it is clear that the growth of radical groups has pushed moderate conservative parties to veer to the right to hold onto votes.
That’s the case in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party – the front-runner in the April 8 elections – have drawn voters with an increasingly strident anti-migrant campaign. Casting himself as the savior of a white Christian Europe being overrun by hordes of Muslims and Africans, Orban has insisted that Hungarians don’t want their “own color, traditions and national culture to be mixed by others.”
Orban, who is friendly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, was also the first European leader to endorse Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. In 2015, he erected razor wire at Hungary’s borders to stop migrants from crossing and has since been warning in apocalyptic terms that the West faces racial and civilizational suicide if the migration continues. Orban has also been obsessed with demonizing the financier and philanthropist George Soros, falsely portraying the Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor as an advocate of uncontrolled immigration into Europe. In what critics denounce as a state-sponsored conspiracy theory with anti-Semitic overtones, the Hungarian government spent $48.5 million on anti-Soros ads in 2017, according to data compiled by investigative news site atlatszo.hu.
In a recent speech, Orban denounced Soros in language that echoed anti-Judaic cliches of the 20th century. He said Hungary’s foes “do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs.”
In nearby Poland, xenophobic language is also on the rise. When nationalists held a large Independence Day march in November, when some carried banners calling for a “White Europe” and “Clean Blood,” the interior minister called it a “beautiful sight.” Poland’s government has also been embroiled in a bitter dispute with Israel and Jewish organizations over a law that would criminalize blaming Poland for Germany’s Holocaust crimes.
With tensions running high in February, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki listed “Jewish perpetrators” as among those who were responsible for the Holocaust. He also visited the Munich grave of an underground Polish resistance group that had collaborated with the Nazis.
In the same vein, an official tapped to create a major new history museum has condemned the postwar tribunals in Nuremberg, Germany, where top Nazis were judged, as “the greatest judicial farce in the history of Europe.” Arkadiusz Karbowiak said the Nuremberg trials were only “possible because of the serious role of Jews” in their organization and called them “the place where the official religion of the Holocaust was created.”
Across the region, Muslims, Roma, Jews and other minorities have expressed anxiety about the future. But nationalists insist they aren’t promoting hate. They claim they’re defending their national sovereignty and Christian way of life against globalization and the large-scale influx of migrants who don’t assimilate.
The Balkans, bloodied by ethnic warfare in the 1990s, are also seeing a rise of nationalism, particularly in Serbia and Croatia. Political analysts there believe Russian propaganda is spurring old ethnic resentments.
Croatia has steadily drifted to the right since joining the EU in 2013. Some officials there have denied the Holocaust or reappraised Croatia’s ultranationalist, pro-Nazi Ustasha regime, which killed tens of thousands of Jews, Serbs, Roma and anti-fascist Croats in wartime prison camps. In a recent visit to Argentina, President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic thanked the country for providing postwar refuge to Croats who had belonged to the Ustasha regime.
The world’s top Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff of the Wiesenthal center, called her statement “a horrific insult to victims.” Grabar-Kitarovic later said she had not meant to glorify a totalitarian regime.
In Bulgaria, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency, the government includes a far-right alliance, the United Patriots, whose members have given Nazi salutes and slurred minorities. Deputy Prime Minister Valeri Simeonov has called Roma “ferocious humanoids” whose women “have the instincts of street dogs.”
Junes, the Sofia-based researcher, said that even though hate crimes are on the rise in Bulgaria, the problem has raised little concern in the West because the country keeps its public debt in check and is not challenging the fundamental Western consensus, unlike Poland and Hungary.
While populist and far-right groups are also growing in parts of Western Europe, countries like Poland and Hungary are proving more vulnerable
to the same challenges, said Peter Kreko, director of Political Capital Institute, a Budapest-based think tank.
“In younger, weaker, more fragile democracies,” he said, “right-wing populism is more dangerous because it can weaken and even demolish the democratic institutions.”
The article was published on The Daily Star

COVID Diary- Reflections from Our Advisory Board Member Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs

Every Day during the Corona crisis our Advisory Board Member Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs (NL) writes a diary, on request of the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam, which is published on the website of the NIW, the only Jewish Dutch Magazine. Rabbi Jacobs is the head of Inter Governmental Relationships at the Rabbinical Centre of Europe. We will be regularly publishing a selection of his informative, sometimes light hearted, but always wise pieces.
For our Dutch readers you can follow the diary every day at NIW home page: https://niw.nl
“Schoenmaker, houd je bij je leest”, is a Dutch expression, which means “cobbler stick to your trade” And so, as I’m not a medic, I don’t get involved with medical technology. But if someone is dead, then I could and should get involved. And if something takes place between life and death, the dying process, then it seems to me that both the doctor and the rabbi may operate together (in the figurative sense of the word of course). What am I referring to? Organ donations. Not organ donations from a healthy person who donates a kidney to a fellow human being and thereby saves a life. Nor am I talking about donating organs after death, whether that should or should not be done. No, I’m referring to the case of a donor who would normally have been dead, kept alive artificially and now being used as an organ supplier. He is declared brain dead. In the past, a person was dead, alive or dying. We expect respect for life, for death, but also respect for that intermediate phase. I remember nurses in the gerontopsychiatric ward of the Sinai Center. “Mrs Cohen, how are you today? Your children have arrived to visit you.” They spoke fondly to Mrs. Cohen, who was on a ventilator, although perhaps she would have been legal declared brain dead if she had been a donor. But was Mrs. Cohen already dead? Her body still had temperature, her heart was beating, all organ functions were still intact and she was given medication. The donor is considered brain dead, which is a legal terminology. Without this legal assistance the donor would be considered alive! And ‘the operation’ would have bee an illegal and punishable act. Is the public aware that the donor will receive medication during the organ donation procedure? Medication for a dead body? He is given sleeping pills to control blood pressure. To counteract resistance, the donor was initially tied up to the bed, but nowadays muscle relaxants are administered by the anaesthetist. The impression that the donor is actively resisting is dismissed as reflexes! Enough written about organ donations. Another (less morbid?) topic: There is quite a bit of
opposition to kosher slaughter. I will spare you the details. But the cow would still be alive after the kosher slaughter, because there are visible reflexes. I just don't get it: cattle reflexes are signs of life; human donor reflexes are signs of death!? And therefore is my conclusion: when in doubt do without!

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“An anti-Semite will never love Israel”

Anti-Semitism is the radicalisation of racism

The European Jewish Association (EJA) kicked off a new annual conference on Monday, this time in Porto, Portugal, as part of the 75th anniversary of Israel’s independence and the centenary of the Portuguese city’s Jewish community. Security, the fight against anti-Semitism and the dissemination of Jewish life gained momentum in the face of a worrying rise in hate speech, prejudice and misinformation.
In the face of rising anti-Semitism and hate speech, leaders of Europe’s Jewish communities are preparing to take the discussion to the European Parliament in Brussels.
While the civilian population in Israel was under attack and acts of terrorist violence were increasing on national territory, in Barcelona the Maimonides synagogue was vandalised with a macabre inscription: Free Palestine from the river to the sea. The rising tide of violence against Jews is even worse in northern countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.
Alarmed also by the words of the representative of the European Commission, Margaritis Schinas, the Jewish community is preparing to fight on all fronts against anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, which are two sides of the same coin, as Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs has bluntly summed up: “never will an anti-Semite love Israel”. 

The importance of the definition of anti-Semitism
One of the most worrying points has been the increase in aggressive content against Israel and the Jewish community on social media, something that is growing exponentially amidst the spread of misinformation and stereotypes. On this point, representatives of the Jewish university community in France and the Fighting Online Antisemitism (OFA) agree.
It is not anachronistic to speak of anti-Semitism, quite the contrary. As the most radical expression of racism, European governments must broaden their perspective on the premise that we do not live in a world surrounded by islands, but in a world where the problems of the Middle East and the enemies Israel fights against will also impact, sooner rather than later, on European countries. Under anti-Zionism a further radicalisation of racism is achieved and also includes non-Jews who defend Israel.

Pretending to inform with disinformation and hoaxes

Technological evolution has made it possible to broaden voices and sources, but it has also taken away the rigour and reliability of information sources, which are often self-interested cuttings of a reality. In this sense, social networks have become a hotbed of conspiracy theories represented in multimedia content, such as images or videos, which point to the Jews as responsible for all evils. If social media had existed in 1929 during the Hebron pogrom, it would probably have immortalised many comments that would be little different from the comments made by an anti-Semite in the year 2023. There might be different words or spellings, but the content would be the same.

Anti-Semitism on the rise and Jewish communities prepare to take the discussion to the European Parliament
During the pandemic of 2020, conspiracy theories also turned to pointing the finger at Jews as having been responsible for the spread of the virus. At the same time, many European media picked up the false information that Israel was preventing the vaccination of Palestinians. Again, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism were shown as equals.
It is also the networks where Palestinian groups, via Telegram, spread videos where they teach how to prepare homemade explosives as if it were a cooking show. We cannot leave aside the thousands of accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram that spread false content, stirring up prejudice or calling for the exclusion of Jewish communities.
Personally, I am grateful for the EJA’s invitation to these days in Porto, a city that is home to a thriving Jewish community that is preparing in a forceful way. However, there is a wake-up call also for non-Jews who believe not only in Israel’s right to exist, something so obvious and yet so little understood, but also for those of us who know the danger of the enemies who seek to destroy Israel.
I doubt that many of those who choose to be anti-Semites out of ignorance rather than vocation imagine what would be involved if Europe became the backyard of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Jihad that threatens the entire world.
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