Imams Say Jews' Suffering Offers Universal Warning
About Hate
By A.J. Goldmann
Published May 29, 2013, issue of June 07, 2013.
Krakow, Poland — When
Muslims tour Auschwitz and other sites of the Jewish Holocaust, and encounter survivors
of that genocide face-to-face, the points of connection they make can be quite
unpredictable.
For Barakat Fawzi Hasan, a
Palestinian assistant professor in Islamic Education at Al-Quds University in
Jerusalem, a moment of clarity came as he and his co-religionists listened,
spellbound, to Lidia Maksymowicz as she told her harrowing story of survival.
Although she was only five years old when she was liberated from Auschwitz,
Maksymowicz could still remember the taste of buttered bread and coffee with
milk given to her by the Soviet soldiers who entered the camp.
“As Palestinians who have
felt for 65 years the pain of being displaced, we feel the pain of the others,”
said Hasan after hearing her talk. Seeing the children’s belongings at
Auschwitz, reminded him of “some of the stories of the children of Palestine,”
he added.
Hasan said that he would
like to bring Holocaust survivors to Palestine to relate their stories. “I
cannot hold back my tears when I see the tragedy that took place here in
Europe, especially what happened to the Jews. I hope that Palestinians and
Israelis take a lesson from all of this and that we both have a future of hope
and peace.”
For Muhamed Jusic, a
religious education teacher from Bosnia, the touchstone was his own first-hand
experience of genocidal war in his native land during the break-up of
Yugoslavia in the 1990’s.
“For many people to visit
such places is just history,” said Jusic, who is also a public affairs
commentator and interfaith activist back home. “For me it isn’t. The fact that
I come from Bosnia affects everything that I saw here. My personal experience
of the war and the things that I went through emphasize that we need to learn
and study about what happened during the Second World War because what happened
in Bosnia proves that it can happen again, maybe not on the same scale, but it
can be repeated.”
Marshall Breger, an
Orthodox Jew, has seen such reactions from Muslims before. In 2010, he and
Rabbi Jack Bemporad, organized a
similar trip for American Muslim leaders. But the trip Hasan and Jusic took
part in, from May 17 to May 24, was designed by Breger, Bemporad and Suhail
Khan, a senior fellow at the Institute for Global Engagement, to be
international in scope.
“It’s the nature of
religion in America to have a little more tolerance, and for clerics in America
to know a little more about other religions,” said Breger, a former senior
official in the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W.
Bush. “Many of the people on this trip, frankly, at best knew nothing. I say
‘at best’ because they probably have read ‘Protocols [of the Elders of Zion’]
or other things.”
The undertaking proved far
more daunting than the previous trip for American Muslims. Just obtaining visas
for some of the participants proved incredibly difficult. Several of the
confirmed participants never showed up. Others arrived late, due to travel
restrictions. Hasan, who as a Palestinian is stateless, with no passport of his
own, was granted a visa to go abroad by Israel but denied passage through Ben
Gurion International Airport. Instead, he had to travel to neighboring Jordan
and fly from there to Germany.
“We moved heaven and earth
to get them here. They’re heroic,” said Bemporad.
In the end, a dozen
Muslims attended the week-long program — imams, educators, activists and
scholars drawn from all over the Muslim world, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan,
the Palestinian Authority, Bosnia, Turkey, Nigeria, Indonesia, India and the
United States.
The tour, which included
visits to concentration and extermination camps in Germany and Poland, was
funded by the U.S. Department of State and S.A. Ibrahim, an Indian American
businessman and interfaith activist. Additional support came from Poland’s
Foreign Ministry.
“People use the Holocaust
for all sorts of political and ideological purposes,” said Bemporad, explaining
his rationale for the excursion. “If you want to change people’s ideas, you
need to present them with the actual experiences of a person who went through
it, you need to see the actual conditions and know something about the
history.”
Bemporad, director of the
New Jersey-based Center for Interreligious Understanding, which sponsored the
trip, said he hoped the experience would inspire participants to speak out
against Holocaust denial in their countries as well as help them understand
that when it was happening, the Holocaust “had nothing to do with Israel.”
At several points, the
participants made a clear connection linking the fates of Muslims and Jews. One
such moment occurred inside of the crematorium at Dachau, where the
participants recited the Janazah — the Muslim prayer for the dead — for Noor
Inayat Khan, an Indian Muslim anti-Nazi spy who was murdered at Dachau in 1944.
The program also visited
several sites of Muslim interest, including an excursion to the architecturally
striking mosque in the Munich suburb of Penzberg, a rare success story in
Germany, since it was built without any of the controversy that often
accompanies such projects there today.
The group was also
supposed to tour Munich’s grand Orthodox synagogue and meet Jewish community
leaders, but community president Charlotte Knobloch flatly refused to welcome
the delegation. In the city that was once Hitler’s ideological stronghold,
Knobloch’s refusal to engage seemed particularly a missed opportunity.
“I thought it was very
important for the imams to see that Jewish life — and in particular Jewish
religious life — in Munich has not been destroyed,” a disappointed Breger said.
After Munich and Dachau,
the group went on to Warsaw, where they toured the recently-opened
Museum of Polish Jews and met with Holocaust survivors and with Righteous
Gentiles, as non-Jews who saved Jewish lives are known. That night they dined
with Poland’s chief rabbi Michael Shudrich and several Polish imams. The
participants were impressed by the solidarity between Jewish and Muslim
leaders, which has been strengthened by recent debates in Poland about hallal
and kosher slaughtering.
From Warsaw, the group was
driven to Auschwitz. There, they toured both the museum at Auschwitz 1 and
Birkenau, many with tears in their eyes. As the group viewed the exhibitions
housed in the former barracks, Imam Mohamed Magid, an American veteran from the
first trip, routinely added commentary to the official guide’s explanations.
“I want everyone to know
that behind every object here there was a real human being,” he said, stopping
before a vitrine full of children’s shoes. “You can hear their footsteps,” he
added chillingly. Before entering the gas chamber in Auschwitz I, he turned to
the group:
“As you go in, I’d like
you to imagine that screaming, to imagine the crying. We go here in a nice bus,
we had a nice lunch and later we’re going back to the hotel,” he reminded his
fellow visitors.
The most remarkable moment
came when the group decided to take their afternoon prayers in front of the
infamous “Wall of Death.” Imam Muzammil Siddiqi of the Islamic Society of
Orange County, California, another participant in the 2010 trip, led the
service. The participants kneeled down on the naked earth and genuflected
repeatedly, the coarse dirt sticking to several foreheads. By the time the
group reached Birkenau, they were running several hours behind schedule. But
the participants collectively defied an irate bus driver in order to spend the
extra time walking along the “Judenrampe” to the site of the crematoria.
“None of us is here out of
curiosity,” said Safi Kaskas, a businessman and interfaith activist who was
born in Lebanon, has U.S. citizenship and lives in Saudi Arabia. “We’re all
here because we care deeply about human suffering and what happened to the
Jews.”
“It’s important to
understand what happened to the Jews, to understand and appreciate the
suffering they’ve been through…in order to better communicate,” he explained,
“in order to convince my Jewish neighbors that it is better to have peace than
to have war [so] the suffering they experienced in Europe should not repeat
itself in the Middle East.”
Echoing the sentiments of
many of the other participants, Jusic, the Bosnian religious educator, said
that the proper meaning of Auschwitz belongs not to the past, but to the
future. “We cannot go back and help those children and women we saw and those
innocent people being gassed and burned, but we can make sure that it doesn’t
happen to anyone else,” he said.
Breger was pleasantly
surprised at the trip’s end, when the participants all signed a public
condemnation of Holocaust denial nearly identical to the one that was drafted
by the 2010 group.
Breger added that he was
now looking to organize a third trip that would bring rabbis and imams together
to visit both Auschwitz and Srebrenika, the site of the July 1995 Serbian
massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, which many Muslims perceive as an example of
the West looking the other way while Muslims were slaughtered. “By speaking to
that belief, you would go a great way towards making it easier to engage with
the tragedy of the Shoah and Jewish pain and trauma,” said Breger.
Contact Adam Goldmann at
feedback@forward.com.
