A Rabbi’s failed attempt to clean up Holocaust distortion |
On November 20, Thomas Rose, the U.S. ambassador to Poland, delivered a speech in Warsaw in which he categorized as a “historic injustice” and “grotesque falsehood” any suggestion that “Poland shares guilt for the barbaric crimes committed against it” during World War II, presumably including the murder of millions of Polish Jews in German-occupied Poland.
After I learned of Rose’s speech, I wrote an article calling him to task for engaging in blatant Holocaust distortion by blanketly absolving Poland, the Polish nation, and Poles generally of any responsibility for or complicity in the murder of Jews in Poland during the Holocaust. Specifically, I emphasized that, “While Poles and Poland did not perpetrate the Holocaust, those Poles who assisted the Germans in doing so must not be whitewashed out of history.” I reiterated and expanded on these criticisms in a second article some days later
In my articles, I described how, contrary to Rose’s depiction of Poland and Poles as nothing more than victims of Nazi Germany, large numbers of Poles handed Jews over to the Germans, blackmailed Jews, stole Jewish property, and murdered Jews. I also specified that “the machinery for the implementation of the Nazi “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was established by Germans – not Poles . . . at places such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Majdanek,” and that “more than 7,000 non-Jewish Poles — more than from any other Nazi-occupied country — have been recognized by Yad Vashem in Israel as Righteous Among the Nations, that is, men and women who risked or gave their lives to rescue or help Jews.”
Since then, Rose has not qualified or recanted his speech. Instead, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who presented Rose with his organization’s Champion of Jewish Values award in 2022, has written a spirited and eyebrow-raising defense of the ambassador.
Boteach’s article came as a........