It’s not every day you get to meet a bona fide hero. Following our big campaign against the auctioning of Nazi memorabilia, our Chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin and our Director of Public Affairs Alex Benjamin travelled to Geneva to meet with Mr Abdallah Chatila.
Mr Chatila decided to buy 600,000Euro worth of this memorabilia when he heard our aggravation at the sale, with the express purpose of taking it out of the marketplace, and entrusting it to the Jewish Community.
We met with Mr Chatila not only to thank him personally and present him with a gift (we planted 18 trees in Israel for him – 18 being the numerical value of Chai the Hebrew word for life), but to explore future areas for co-operation.
Mr Chatila will be joining an EJA trip to Auschwitz in January, along with a 100 parliamentarians, where he will join us in our call for an end to the macabre and disgusting sale in Nazi trinkets, and we will present him with an award for his action.
A humble man, Mr Chatila told us he had no interest in the pieces per-se, but bought them and gave them away to send a message: Hitler and the Nazis are the personification of death, and such items do not belong amongst the population at large.
He said he didn’t want to be remembered as the man who bought the hat, but for the message behind his action. We reassured Mr Chatila that his action is what will be remembered, that it serves as a selfless example to humanity, and that we will work together to ensure that no other like-minded person is forced to do the same – because governments will simply ban such sales.
We thank Mr Chatila again and look forward to fruitful co-operation in making this campaign a reality in the months ahead.
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