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The Necessity of Zionism | Opinion
MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT , GENERAL COUNSEL AND ASSOCIATE EXECUTIVE VICE
PRESIDENT OF THE WORLD JEWISH CONGRESS
ON 4/17/23 AT 6:55 AM EDT

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OPINION
HOLOCAUST
ISRAEL
JEWS
WORLD WAR II

Exactly 78 years ago on April 15, when British troops entered the Nazi
concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen not far from the German city of
Hanover, they came face-to-face with human misery for which they were
totally unprepared. Upward of 10,000 emaciated corpses lay scattered
about the camp and more than 55,000 prisoners, the overwhelming majority
of them Jews, were suffering from a combination of typhus, tuberculosis,
dysentery, extreme malnutrition, and countless other virulent diseases.

In addition to their dire physical condition, the survivors, both my
parents among them, were forced to confront a sense of utter isolation
and abandonment. "For the greater part of the liberated Jews of
Bergen-Belsen," my mother recalled many years later, "there was no
ecstasy, no joy at our liberation. We had lost our families, our homes.
We had no place to go, nobody to hug. Nobody was waiting for us
anywhere. We had been liberated from the fear of death, but we were not
free from the fear of life."

This fear of life was in large part due to the realization by many of
the survivors that they indeed had nowhere to go after the end of the
war. While the liberated Jews from western Europe and Czechoslovakia
were repatriated in a matter of months, most of the survivors from
eastern Europe—especially those from Poland—were unwilling to return to
their countries of origin. Their homes there, their communities, had
been destroyed. Most if not all of their families had been murdered.
With only a very few exceptions, their Christian neighbors had, at best,
been indifferent to their suffering. What they wanted now was a new
beginning in a place that was not filled with ghosts, that did not evoke
nightmares.

Marking the Holocaust
Israel's President Isaac Herzog looks on during a visit to the
Gedenkstaette Bergen-Belsen Memorial, site of the Bergen-Belsen Nazi
concentration camp in September 2022.
RONNY HARTMANN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
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To their dismay, they discovered that they were stranded. The British
only allowed a miniscule number of them to enter Palestine, and
restrictive immigration laws kept the gates of the United States,
Canada, Australia and other Western countries closed to them.

Yet the Jewish survivors in Displaced Persons camps throughout Germany,
Austria, and Italy did not give in to despair. They had been freed from
the persecution and oppression they had endured under the Nazis and
their accomplices, and now they were determined to claim and affirm
their own separate Jewish national identity in the form of a politically
and spiritually redemptive Zionism. The creation of a Jewish state in
what was then still British-Mandate Palestine was far more than a
practical goal. It was the one ideal that had not been torn from them
and that allowed them to retain the hope that an affirmative future,
beyond gas chambers, mass-graves and ashes, was still possible.

In the Bergen-Belsen DP camp, where I was born in 1948, a popularly
elected Jewish leadership headed by my father, Josef Rosensaft, made
Zionism the order of the day. At the first Congress of Liberated Jews in
the British Zone of Germany, convened in September 1945 in Belsen by my
father and his colleagues without permission from the British military
authorities, the survivors formally adopted a resolution calling for the
establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

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Two months later, my father denounced the British government's stifling
of "Jewish nationalists and Zionist activities" at Belsen in the pages
of The New York Times. He further charged "that the British exerted
censorship over the inmates' news sheets in that the Jews are not
allowed to proclaim in print their desire to emigrate to Palestine."

In December 1945, my father told representatives of American Jewry
assembled at the first post-war conference of the United Jewish Appeal
in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that the survivors' sole hope was
immigration to Palestine, the only place in the world "willing, able and
ready to open its doors to the broken and shattered Jews of war-ravaged
Europe." The following week, he declared at an emergency conference on
Palestine in New York City: "We know that the English are prepared to
stop us with machine guns. But machine guns cannot stop us."

In early 1946, he told the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on
Palestine that if the survivors would not be allowed to go to Palestine,
"We shall go back to Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and you
will bear the moral responsibility for it."

Small wonder, then, that the British authorities considered my father to
be an "extreme Zionist" and a "dangerous troublemaker."

My father, who taught me that love of the Jewish people and love of the
State of Israel are the most important elements of Jewish leadership,
understood that the goal of a Jewish state was a spiritual lifeline that
gave the survivors of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, and all the other
centers of horror a sense of purpose and a basis for hope.

Today, the State of Israel remains a refuge for imperiled Jews across
the globe, whether from Ukraine, Russia, Ethiopia, or elsewhere. It is
not perfect. No state is. But disagreement with the policies of any
nation's government cannot be a reason for calling that nation's
fundamental legitimacy into question. And the massive peaceful
demonstrations of the past four months throughout Israel have
demonstrated beyond any doubt that it is indeed the only democracy in
the Middle East.

At a time when Israel's right to exist is challenged in many parts of
the world on an almost daily basis, we must remember that just as the
road to the establishment of Israel 75 years ago led through and past
the mass-graves of Bergen-Belsen, the defiant Zionist spirit of the
Jewish DPs of Belsen is and must always be an integral part of Israel's
own national identity.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, the son of two survivors of Auschwitz and
Bergen-Belsen, was born May 1, 1948, in the Displaced Persons camp of
Bergen-Belsen. He is the associate executive vice president and general
counsel of the World Jewish Congress and the chairperson of the Advisory
Council of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation. He teaches about the
law of genocide at the law schools of Columbia and Cornell Universities.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

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Fabian Terracciano
2 hours ago

You and I and Most religious people would use logic, reason, statistics,
probabilities, the scientific method, evidence, etc, to solve any
problem or generally "think" EXCEPT when it comes to religion.

With religion, all cognition goes out the window. The indoctrination
people are exposed to at yo...

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Fabian Terracciano
2 hours ago

The only proven benefit of faith is to posture delusional happiness in
those cases which happiness is otherwise not present. That is, it's
better to be happy and delusional than to be unhappy while living in
reality.

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Fabian Terracciano
2 hours ago

People are religious for at least one of ONLY four reasons:

Indoctrinated by their parents (the overwhelming majority),

“Born Again” Syndrome, a psychological survival mechanism alternative to
suicide to due depression, drugs, prison, alcohol, etc,

Stone Age Thinking Disorder such that they actually r...

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whosonfirst
2 hours ago

NewsWeek needs a way to report spam posting from folks like Terracciano
without having to do every one of their spam posts one at a time.

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Fabian Terracciano
2 hours ago

Genesis 19:31 "The next day the older daughter said to the younger,
“Last night I slept with my father. Let’s get him to drink wine again
tonight, and you go in and sleep with him so we can preserve our family
line through our `.” So they got their father to drink wine that night
also, and the youn...

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whosonfirst
2 hours ago

"""My father, who taught me that love of the Jewish people and love of
the State of Israel are the most important elements of Jewish leadership,"""