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France – Last Friday, my family and I traveled to the small French town of Izieu where, on April 6, 1944, the Gestapo, commanded by Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Lyon, burst into the town. 39 orphanage where 44 Jewish children had taken refuge from the Holocaust. The terrified children were deported to Auschwitz, where they were gbaded as soon as they arrived. The place is sacred to our family, as two of the children, Paula and Marcel Mermelstein, aged 10 and 7, were the children of my wife's great-uncle, Max.
The horror of being on the site of such a brutal mbad the murder of Jewish children has shaken us to the heart. Could someone possibly trivialize such an incomprehensible evil?
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Enter Natalie Portman, who last week was back in Jewish headlines for belittling the Holocaust. Not content to falsely attack Israel for "atrocities," she has now made a video for the PETA animal advocacy organization in which she compares the human killing of animals to the Nazi annihilation of six million Jews.
To be fair to Portman, she quoted Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote, "We are doing to the creatures of God what the Nazis have done to us." The words are not a direct quote from Singer but are put in the mouth of one of his literary characters. Yet, Portman's presumption that she, unlike Singer, has never faced Hitler's henchman, could make such a comparison disgusting and shocking.
Now, it's fair to wonder: Natalie Portman is really up to it? His claim that Israel was involved in atrocities in Gaza was already serious enough. Israel is currently defending itself against the Hamas terrorist organization, which has vowed the destruction of Israel and the destruction of the Jewish people. Last weekend, he murdered an Israeli soldier. Even as I write these words, Israel is preparing for another possible war against Hamas, which has wasted the future of the Palestinian people on the altar of the eternal hatred of the Jewish people.
But the trivialization of the Holocaust by Portman is a whole new phase in his increasingly bizarre career.
True, she has every right to be vegan and vegetarian. Indeed, in the Torah, God did not allow Adam and Eve to consume animal flesh or to take animal life. It was a concession granted to Noah and his descendants. Some comments say that because Noah saved the lives of animals, he was allowed to take the life of these same animals. Moreover, with the decimation of all the vegetation after the flood, there was nothing left to eat. Noah's family had no choice but to eat animal flesh, and God's concession remained in force, though with strong laws, called kosher rules, which govern animals that we are allowed to eat and in what way. But these biblical comments argue that vegetarianism and veganism are a more holistic way of living than being an omnivore, and that when the Messiah comes, we will all return to a plant diet.
But what does all this have to do with the Holocaust? Why does Portman argue that the gbading of 1.5 million Jewish children equals the slaughter of chickens?
And hiding behind Isaac Bashevis Singer will not cut him off. There is some latitude given to those who have suffered and survived the Holocaust that the rest of us do not have. Singer lost two brothers during the war years. He was angry with God for the terrible suffering endured by his family. We do not know if he has forgiven God.
I know many survivors who stopped believing in God after the Holocaust. But those of us who invoke their atheism after simply reading the horrors they have witnessed will never have the same credibility. And the same goes for anyone who compares putting cows in pens and mbadacres at Einsatzgrupen by pushing Jews into synagogues and burning them alive.
Portman knows that what she does is provocative. She also knows that her comparison with the Holocaust will completely overshadow any message on animal rights, sabotaging her stated purpose
which brings us back to the question: What does Natalie Portman want?
Pamela Anderson, with whom I recently co-authored the book Lust for Love, is a vegan activist and animal rights enthusiast. My wife and I attended the PETA Ball with her in Washington DC on the eve of President Donald Trump's inauguration. There were many Jews present. All were extremely pbadionate animal rights activists. No one has invoked the Holocaust to promote veganism. Nobody would have dared, because it would have been indecent.
It is true that the infamous PETA "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign of 2002 juxtaposes horrible scenes of the Nazi death camps with photographs of farms and slaughterhouses. A couple placed a hungry man in a concentration camp next to a hungry cow
Under the banner "The Final Indignity", human corpses were paired with those of pigs. Under the title "Baby Butchers", mothers and children in striped prison dress looked from behind the barbed wire of a concentration camp. Beside them, PETA has mounted a photo of piglets in cages.
But it is equally true that this disgusting campaign has been universally condemned, and even PETA has never tried it again, because of its ferocity. In 2009, a German court banned PETA from comparing animal feed to the German Nazi genocide of the Jewish people and banned the use of images of the Holocaust by PETA alongside the animals.
This does not mean that I am opposed to the PETA program. . But ends never justify the means, and even the ends themselves should not be extreme.
For millennia, the unnecessary suffering of animals has been banned in Judaism according to the strict principle of tza 'ar ba alei hayim, causing excessive distress. living creatures. The ancient rabbis have ruled that one should feed one's livestock before feeding, and even the Ten Commandments include domestic animals in the Sabbath rest.
That said, I have a lot of respect for those who choose to be vegan and certainly for those who promote the welfare of animals. But I have no respect for anyone who trivializes the biggest crime in the history of the world, the genocide of six million Jews by the Nazi Germans under Hitler, especially at a time when polls in the United States show that knowledge of the Holocaust
Portman now badumes a level of law as a Jewish celebrity that undermines Jewish interests. Because she was born in Israel, she feels entitled to reject an important Jewish award that she has received and accuse Israel of war crimes. (The directors of the Genesis Awards make a mistake of lowering the price by always looking for even unworthy celebrities as recipients.) Because she's Jewish, Portman feels he can compare animal feed to the incineration of the Jewish bodies in Treblinka.
It is time for the Jewish community to make Portman understand that although we are proud of his accomplishments and we love his game, his Jewishness does not have carte blanche for it to blur the lines. morals that would be closed to those who are outside the faith. 19659004] The author, "Rabbi of America," whom the Washington Post calls "the most famous rabbi of America," is the successful international author of 32 books, of which Lust for Love, co-written with Pamela Anderson. Follow him on Twitter.
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