I found myself feeling immersed in the Holocaust this morning. That’s not as morbid as it sounds- let me explain. The program for which I work is sending a delegation of their students to Poland immediately after Succot. Being as we live in Israel and Israel is a Jewish state, the entire country has vacation in honor of the holiday starting this Wednesday night. The staff at my program, me included, was hard-pressed to get all the necessary things photocopied, glued and stapled for this upcoming trip as soon as possible, a.k.a, this morning.
In the midst of the madness (and after the copier had had gotten jammed for the umpteenth time) I took a much needed 10 minute breather- I went to read the news. I was surprised to find the following headline on The Jerusalem Post website-” Holocaust Denier Irving to Lead Tours of Death Camp”. I was intrigued by the seemingly oxymoronic title, so I clicked in the article, hoping that it would provide some type of clarity.
To be perfectly frank, I still don’t completely understand Irving’s logic for why he was leading such a tour. Though numerous juries have proven otherwise, Irving claims he is not a Holocaust denier. His claim only managed to confuse me even more when he compared Auschwitz to a “Disney-style tourist attraction”. The word “Disney” doesn’t usually spring to mind when thinking of Auschwitz (although I feel as though I must state that he does concede to the fact that Treblinka is indeed a death camp).
Thinking about this interesting affair even more, I found it a bit odd, that it should happen right around the time of Succot. Irving probably doesn’t know much about Judaism, but he couldn’t have picked a better time to broadcast his anti-Semitism. His actions are the best example of “what-not-to-do” for the Succot holiday. Succot may be a Jewish festival, but it was a festival where all the nations of the world were celebrated by the Jews, and it was done for everyone to see. The priests would offer 70 offerings over the course of the seven day festival, in conjunction with the 70 seventy nations of the world.
The message we can learn from Irving is simple, and probably not one he had intended to teach. However, his actions only strengthen the idea of the Succot holiday- respecting one another, despite differences; differences of belief, religion, and race.
