The Jewish Press, January 27, 2006
Museum Spat Revived

The old quarrel over just how involved the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum should be in current world affairs has re-emerged — but with some key actors reversing roles.

A group affiliated with Amcha: The Coalition for Jewish Concerns, the organization created by activist Rabbi Avi Weiss, is demanding that the museum attack today’s rising tide of anti-Semitism in the Arab and Islamic world and change its exhibits to document Arab support for the Nazis during World War II.

It was Rabbi Weiss who insisted that the museum should have no political role when the State Department in 1998 tried to get Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat invited to tour its permanent exhibition.

A group called Holocaust Museum Watch held a meeting in Washington last week and threw down the gauntlet.

“We are demanding that the museum call for a conference on Arab anti-Semitism,” said Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, spiritual leader of a synagogue here and a longtime associate of Rabbi Weiss. “We want the museum to start exploring the role the Arab world played in the persecution and death of Jews between 1933 and 1945. We would like to see both done as soon as possible.”

Rabbi Herzfeld said a museum statement criticizing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for calling for Israel’s destruction and denying the Holocaust was a result of his group’s pressure.

Not so, museum insiders say. They insist the statement on Iran had been in the works for weeks and had nothing to do with outside pressure.

In that statement, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council chair Fred Zeidman said that “President Ahmadinejad’s offensive remarks reflect an extremist mindset of the worst sort and should be cause for concern worldwide. A national leader promoting anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and genocide is simply unacceptable.”

Rabbi Herzfeld rejected charges that his group is hypocritical, supporting the museum’s involvement in current affairs only when it suits certain political objectives.

“The museum opened the door to this,” he said. “They are talking about persecutions in the Congo, in Darfur; they’ve universalized the Holocaust message. And they’ve taken on the role of talking about anti-Semitism in the world today, in America and in Europe. So you have to ask yourself, what is missing?”

What’s missing, he said, is talk about “the Arab countries that want to destroy Israel, who are taking the people killed by the Nazis and depicting them as Nazis themselves.”

The museum declined to comment, but a longtime supporter jumped right in.

Michael Berenbaum, a top Holocaust scholar and former member of the council, agreed that anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial are growing problems in the Muslim world, but said the museum should “reserve its moral platform for issues of mass murder and genocide. That was clearly the intention of its creators, including no less a figure than Elie Wiesel.”

Becoming involved in the current battle over anti-Israel, anti-Semitic sentiments in the Muslim world would be to “politicize the Holocaust and transform the museum into just another Jewish defense agency,” he said.

Berenbaum said that while Arab support for Hitler “deserves mention” in the museum, “it was not a major factor. They were unimportant allies, and it had little to no impact on the Final Solution. We have to remember that the museum is an exhibition, not an encyclopedia.”