To the President of the State of Israel and the

Director of the Yad Vashem Memorial

 
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
and OSHA NEUMANN
Following the example of Jean-Moise Braitberg, we ask that our grandmother’s name be removed from the wall at Yad Vashem. Her name is Gertrud Neumann. Your records state that she was born in Kattowitz on June 6, 1875 and died in Theresienstadt.
M. Braitberg delivers his request with excellent reasons and eloquent personal testimony. His words are inspiring, but they give you – and those who stand with you – too much credit. I will instead be brief. Please take this as an expression of my disgust and contempt for your state and all it represents.
Our grandmother was a victim of that very ideal of ethnic sovereignty in whose cause Israel has shed so much blood for so long. I was among the many Jews who thought nothing of embracing that ideal, despite the sufferings it had inflicted on our own race. It took thousands of Palestinian lives before, finally, I realized how foolish we had been.
Our complicity was despicable. I do not believe that the Jewish people, in whose name you have committed so many crimes with such outrageous complacency, can ever rid itself of the shame you have brought upon us. Nazi propaganda, for all its calumnies, never disgraced and corrupted the Jews; you have succeeded in this. You haven’t the courage to take responsibility for your own sadistic acts: with unparalleled insolence, you set yourself up as spokesmen for an entire race, as if our very existence endorsed your conduct. And you blacken our names not only by your acts, but by the lies, the coy evasions, the smirking arrogance and the infantile self-righteousness with which you embroider our history.
In the end, you will give the Palestinians some scrap of a state. You will never pay for your crimes and you will continue to preen yourself, to bask in your illusions of moral ascendancy. But between now and the end, you will kill and kill and kill, gaining nothing by your spoilt-brat brutality. In life, our grandmother suffered enough. Stop making her a party to this horror in her death.
Michael Neumann

I join my brother, Michael Neumann, in asking that any reference to our grandmother be removed from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial.
I have been to this memorial. Its buildings, paved courtyards and plazas spread themselves authoritatively over many landscaped acres. It frames the Holocaust as a prelude to the creation of the state of Israel. It embalms memorabilia of the death camps and preserves them as national treasures. That treasure does not belong to Israel. It is a treasure only if it serves as a reminder never to permit any nation to claim an exemption for its chosen people from the bounds of morality and decency.
Israel has twisted the Holocaust into an excuse for perpetrating more holocausts. It has spent the treasure of the world’s sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust on a fruitless effort to shield itself from all criticism as it massacres and tortures Palestinians and suffocates them under a brutal occupation. I do not wish to have the memory of my grandmother enlisted in this misbegotten project.
I grew up believing that Jews were that ethnic group whose historical mission was to transcend ethnicity in a united front against Fascism. To be Jewish was to be anti-Fascist. Israel long ago woke me from my dogmatic slumber about the immutable relationship of Jews to Fascists. It has engineered a merger between the image of Jewish torturers and war criminals and that of emaciated concentration camp victims. I find this merger obscene. I want no part of it. You have forfeited the right to be the custodian of my grandmother’s memory. I do not wish Yad Vashem to be her memorial.
Osha Neumann
The Braitberg letter, in French can be found at

http://www.lemonde.fr/opinions/article/2009/01/28/effacez-le-nom-de-mon-grand-pere-a-yad-vashem_1147635_3232.html

and the translaton here:

http://www.bilin-village.org/english/articles/different-look/Erase-my-grandfather-s-name-at-Yad-Vashem

Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at a Canadian university. He is the author of What’s Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche and The Case Against Israel. He also contributed the essay, “What is Anti-Semitism”, to CounterPunch’s book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at mneumann@live.com
Osha Neumann is a defense lawyer in Berkeley and author of Up Against the Wall MotherF**ker: a Memoir of the 60s with Notes for Next Time.

http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann02202009.html

–

To the President of the State of Israel and the

Director of the Yad Vashem Memorial

 
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
and OSHA NEUMANN
Following the example of Jean-Moise Braitberg, we ask that our grandmother’s name be removed from the wall at Yad Vashem. Her name is Gertrud Neumann. Your records state that she was born in Kattowitz on June 6, 1875 and died in Theresienstadt.
M. Braitberg delivers his request with excellent reasons and eloquent personal testimony. His words are inspiring, but they give you – and those who stand with you – too much credit. I will instead be brief. Please take this as an expression of my disgust and contempt for your state and all it represents.
Our grandmother was a victim of that very ideal of ethnic sovereignty in whose cause Israel has shed so much blood for so long. I was among the many Jews who thought nothing of embracing that ideal, despite the sufferings it had inflicted on our own race. It took thousands of Palestinian lives before, finally, I realized how foolish we had been.
Our complicity was despicable. I do not believe that the Jewish people, in whose name you have committed so many crimes with such outrageous complacency, can ever rid itself of the shame you have brought upon us. Nazi propaganda, for all its calumnies, never disgraced and corrupted the Jews; you have succeeded in this. You haven’t the courage to take responsibility for your own sadistic acts: with unparalleled insolence, you set yourself up as spokesmen for an entire race, as if our very existence endorsed your conduct. And you blacken our names not only by your acts, but by the lies, the coy evasions, the smirking arrogance and the infantile self-righteousness with which you embroider our history.
In the end, you will give the Palestinians some scrap of a state. You will never pay for your crimes and you will continue to preen yourself, to bask in your illusions of moral ascendancy. But between now and the end, you will kill and kill and kill, gaining nothing by your spoilt-brat brutality. In life, our grandmother suffered enough. Stop making her a party to this horror in her death.
Michael Neumann

I join my brother, Michael Neumann, in asking that any reference to our grandmother be removed from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial.
I have been to this memorial. Its buildings, paved courtyards and plazas spread themselves authoritatively over many landscaped acres. It frames the Holocaust as a prelude to the creation of the state of Israel. It embalms memorabilia of the death camps and preserves them as national treasures. That treasure does not belong to Israel. It is a treasure only if it serves as a reminder never to permit any nation to claim an exemption for its chosen people from the bounds of morality and decency.
Israel has twisted the Holocaust into an excuse for perpetrating more holocausts. It has spent the treasure of the world’s sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust on a fruitless effort to shield itself from all criticism as it massacres and tortures Palestinians and suffocates them under a brutal occupation. I do not wish to have the memory of my grandmother enlisted in this misbegotten project.
I grew up believing that Jews were that ethnic group whose historical mission was to transcend ethnicity in a united front against Fascism. To be Jewish was to be anti-Fascist. Israel long ago woke me from my dogmatic slumber about the immutable relationship of Jews to Fascists. It has engineered a merger between the image of Jewish torturers and war criminals and that of emaciated concentration camp victims. I find this merger obscene. I want no part of it. You have forfeited the right to be the custodian of my grandmother’s memory. I do not wish Yad Vashem to be her memorial.
Osha Neumann
The Braitberg letter, in French can be found at

http://www.lemonde.fr/opinions/article/2009/01/28/effacez-le-nom-de-mon-grand-pere-a-yad-vashem_1147635_3232.html

and the translaton here:

http://www.bilin-village.org/english/articles/different-look/Erase-my-grandfather-s-name-at-Yad-Vashem

Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at a Canadian university. He is the author of What’s Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche and The Case Against Israel. He also contributed the essay, “What is Anti-Semitism”, to CounterPunch’s book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at mneumann@live.com
Osha Neumann is a defense lawyer in Berkeley and author of Up Against the Wall MotherF**ker: a Memoir of the 60s with Notes for Next Time.

http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann02202009.html

–

The letter below is just one of many letters written by Jews of good consciense who are opposed to Israel’s crimes against Palestinians. Israel does not speak for all Jews.
Administrator

Appeared in Le Monde January28,2009

MY GRAND FATHER’S NAME FROM THE YAD VASHEM MEMORIAL.
Open letter to the President of Israel by Jean-Moïse
Braitberg, Writer and Author.

Mr. President of the State of Israel ,

Mr. President of the State of Israel, I write you so that you can intervene with those who have lawful right to have the name of my grandfather, Moshe Bratjberg, removed from the Yad Vashem Memorial, which is dedicated to the memory of Nazi Jewish victims. He was gassed at Treblinka in 1943, as well as other members of my family who died during deportation in different nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. I ask you to grand my plea, Mr. President, because what happened in Gaza, and in a more general context, the fate imposed on the Arab people of Palestine for the last sixty years, disqualifies Israel, in my eyes, as the center of rememberance of the evil perpetrated on Jews, and thus to all of humanity.

You see, ever since I was a child, I have been living among survivors of these death camps. I have seen the numbers tattooed on their arms, I have heard the accounts of torture; I have known of impossible mourning and I have shared their nightmares.

They taught me that these crimes should never again be repeated; that never again should a man, strong by his alliance to an ethnic or religious group should disdain another, should
deny him of his most basic rights that include a dignified life in security, devoid of obstacles, and of light, as distant as it may be, of a future of peace and prosperity.

Thus, Mr. President, I see that despite several tens of resolutions taken by the international community, despite the striking evidence of injustice bestowed upon the Palestinian people since 1948, despite the hopes born out of Oslo and despite the recognition of the right of the Israeli Jews to live in peace and security, and confirmed several times by the Palestinian Authority, that the only answers brought about by the successive governments of your country have been violence, spilled blood, incarceration, ceaseless controls, colonization and plundering.

You will tell me, Mr. President, that it is legitimate for your country to defend itself against those who launch rockets on Israel, or against the suicide bombers that take with them many innocent Israeli lives. To this, I would answer you that my feeling for humanity does not change according to the victims’ citizenships.

On the other hand, Mr. President, you steer the destiny of a country that claims not only to represent the global Jewish community, but also the memory of those that were victims of Nazism. And this is what concerns me and is unbearable for me. By keeping at Yad Vashem, in the heart of the Jewish State, the name of those close to me, your State holds prisoner the memory of my family behind the barbed wires of Zionism, and makes it hostage to a so-called moral authority that commits the abomination of denial of justice on a daily basis.

Therefore, please, remove the name of my grandfather from the sanctuary dedicated to the cruelty imposed on the Jews so that it may not justify anymore that which is imposed on Palestinians. Please accept, Mr. President, the assurance of my respects.

Jean-Moise Braitberg is a writer
sourcehttp://mobile.lemonde.fr/opinions/article/2009/01/28/effacez-le-nom-de-mon-grand-pere-a-yad-vashem_1147635_3232.html

The letter below is just one of many letters written by Jews of good consciense who are opposed to Israel’s crimes against Palestinians. Israel does not speak for all Jews.
Administrator

Appeared in Le Monde January28,2009

MY GRAND FATHER’S NAME FROM THE YAD VASHEM MEMORIAL.
Open letter to the President of Israel by Jean-Moïse
Braitberg, Writer and Author.

Mr. President of the State of Israel ,

Mr. President of the State of Israel, I write you so that you can intervene with those who have lawful right to have the name of my grandfather, Moshe Bratjberg, removed from the Yad Vashem Memorial, which is dedicated to the memory of Nazi Jewish victims. He was gassed at Treblinka in 1943, as well as other members of my family who died during deportation in different nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. I ask you to grand my plea, Mr. President, because what happened in Gaza, and in a more general context, the fate imposed on the Arab people of Palestine for the last sixty years, disqualifies Israel, in my eyes, as the center of rememberance of the evil perpetrated on Jews, and thus to all of humanity.

You see, ever since I was a child, I have been living among survivors of these death camps. I have seen the numbers tattooed on their arms, I have heard the accounts of torture; I have known of impossible mourning and I have shared their nightmares.

They taught me that these crimes should never again be repeated; that never again should a man, strong by his alliance to an ethnic or religious group should disdain another, should
deny him of his most basic rights that include a dignified life in security, devoid of obstacles, and of light, as distant as it may be, of a future of peace and prosperity.

Thus, Mr. President, I see that despite several tens of resolutions taken by the international community, despite the striking evidence of injustice bestowed upon the Palestinian people since 1948, despite the hopes born out of Oslo and despite the recognition of the right of the Israeli Jews to live in peace and security, and confirmed several times by the Palestinian Authority, that the only answers brought about by the successive governments of your country have been violence, spilled blood, incarceration, ceaseless controls, colonization and plundering.

You will tell me, Mr. President, that it is legitimate for your country to defend itself against those who launch rockets on Israel, or against the suicide bombers that take with them many innocent Israeli lives. To this, I would answer you that my feeling for humanity does not change according to the victims’ citizenships.

On the other hand, Mr. President, you steer the destiny of a country that claims not only to represent the global Jewish community, but also the memory of those that were victims of Nazism. And this is what concerns me and is unbearable for me. By keeping at Yad Vashem, in the heart of the Jewish State, the name of those close to me, your State holds prisoner the memory of my family behind the barbed wires of Zionism, and makes it hostage to a so-called moral authority that commits the abomination of denial of justice on a daily basis.

Therefore, please, remove the name of my grandfather from the sanctuary dedicated to the cruelty imposed on the Jews so that it may not justify anymore that which is imposed on Palestinians. Please accept, Mr. President, the assurance of my respects.

Jean-Moise Braitberg is a writer
sourcehttp://mobile.lemonde.fr/opinions/article/2009/01/28/effacez-le-nom-de-mon-grand-pere-a-yad-vashem_1147635_3232.html