Wednesday, July 8, 2026
Thursday, June 18, 2026
Friday, May 29, 2026
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
Israel Leads the World in Defense Spending
Rank
Country
Total Spend (2024)
Per Capita Cost
1 Israel, $47B, $4,989
2 🇺🇸 United States, $997B, $2,895
3 🇸🇬 Singapore, $15B, $2,591
4 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia, $80B, $2,386
5 🇳🇴 Norway, $10B, $1,880
6 🇺🇦 Ukraine, $65B, $1,728
7 🇩🇰 Denmark, $10B, $1,670
8 🇰🇼 Kuwait $8B, $1,596, 9
🇳🇱 Netherlands, $23B, $1,276
10 🇦🇺 Australia, $34B, $1,272
https://www.jfeed.com/news/defense-spending-per-capita
Monday, December 1, 2025
Monday, September 29, 2025
Holocaust mystery solved: SS officer in infamous ‘Last Jew in Vinnitsa’ photo identified
A new study by German historian Jürgen Matthäus identifies Jakobus Oehnen, a German schoolteacher turned SS officer, as the executioner in the infamous 1941 photo known as 'The Last Jew in Vinnitsa,' taken during mass killings in Berdychiv, Ukraine
The research, conducted by German historian Jürgen Matthäus, names the killer as Jakobus Oehnen, a German schoolteacher who turned into an SS officer who participated in mass executions of Jews in Berdychiv, Ukraine, in 1941.The black-and-white photo, first introduced as evidence during the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, is now documented for the first time with confirmed details of the time, location, and perpetrator. The victim remains unidentified.According to Matthäus, the photograph was taken on July 28, 1941, at a fortress near Berdychiv, some tens of miles from Vinnitsa, just three weeks after the city was occupied by the Nazis and days before its Jews were forced into a ghetto. The image captures the moment an SS officer stands on the edge of a killing pit behind a kneeling Jewish man, holding a pistol aimed at his neck, moments before the execution. In the background, at least 20 SS soldiers and officers look on, expressionless. The city of Berdychiv in Ukraine, a major center of Hasidic Judaism, had suffered violent pogroms by Russian forces after World War I. After the Nazi occupation in July 1941, thousands of Jews were murdered by the Germans. The image’s stark power lies in the visibility of the killers - their faces are clear, their presence is documented. At least 20 SS soldiers and officers looked indifferently and peacefully, as if they were used to the sight. A small sand mound appears in the foreground, made from the earth dug out by Jews forced to excavate their own mass grave. Dozens of bodies already lie at the bottom. The doomed man, kneeling at the edge of the pit, stares into the distance, beyond the camera. Behind him, the SS officer wears a beret and glasses. His left hand rests behind his back inside his belt holster. His legs are set in a perfectly balanced stance. His boots are polished to the knee. He looks like someone who is dressed for a party. His right arm extends forward with a pistol. In just a moment he will shoot the Jew in the back of the neck and kill him. This photo has been published hundreds, if not thousands, of times in books and magazines. Yet until now, none of its critical details, i.e., the identity of the shooter, the victim, the witnesses, the location, or the exact date, had been verified.
Matthäus’ research appears in a recent edition of a historical science journal. Until March of this year, he served as head of the research department of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. His work brings long-sought context to one of the Holocaust’s most horrible images. According to Matthäus, the photograph was taken in early afternoon of July 28, 1941, at a fortress near Berdychiv, just three weeks after the city was occupied by the Nazis and days before its Jews were concentrated into a ghetto. The shooter-killer is identified as Jakobus Oehnen, born in 1906 in a small village near the Dutch border, had been a teacher of English, French, and physical education before joining the SS.Oehnen first joined the SA, the Nazi paramilitary organization, two years before the Nazi Party came to power. A year later, he enlisted in the SS. Immediately upon Nazi occupation, Oehnen was deployed in Poland, and according to the research, he had already participated in the murder of Jews a month before the photo was taken. Oehnen's unit, numbering about 700 soldiers, was part of the SS mobile killing squads tasked with “cleansing the Reich’s rear areas of dangerous elements” while the German army advanced into the Soviet Union.
By the fall of 1942, his unit had murdered more than 100,000 civilians, men, women and children, most of them Jews. Adolf Hitler himself visited the region in early August 1941 to commend the troops for their efficiency. When the Red Army liberated Berdychiv in January 1944, only 15 Jews remained out of the 20,000 who had lived there before the Nazi occupation. Oehnen was killed in combat in 1943.The photo gained global attention during the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. It was introduced by Ed Moss, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust and later immigrated to Chicago. He had received the photo from an American soldier in Munich in 1945. Over time, it came to be known by titles such as 'The Last Jew in Vinnitsa' and 'Seventy Jews and One Aryan'. Matthäus’s study does not identify the photographer but suggests it was likely a Wehrmacht soldier. The historian launched his investigation after discovering a photo negative in the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. It had been tucked inside the wartime diary of Walter Materna, an Austrian Wehrmacht officer born in 1898. Materna, a former bank clerk and World War I veteran, provided a detailed account of the July 28, 1941, massacre. He described executions at the site, including a soldier firing into the mass grave with a machine gun to ensure the dead remained so. He also documented the role of Ukrainian collaborators who informed on Jews, brought shovels from their homes to speed up the digging of mass graves, and even abandoned their dinners upon hearing that another grave was being prepared.According to Materna’s writings, 180 Jews were killed that day at the fortress, compared with 300 executed the day before. He recorded these figures in stark, impersonal language, as if noting routine logistics. Though much of his diary appears to echo stories told by fellow officers, the level of detail suggests he may have witnessed the executions himself. On the back of the photo negative, he wrote: “July 28, 1941. Execution of Jews by the SS. Fortress Berdychiv.”Portions of Matthäus’ research first appeared in the German newspaper Die Welt in 2023. A reader who suspected the man in the photo was his wife’s uncle contacted Matthäus with new evidence and family photos. A private investigator and research firm used artificial intelligence to compare the images and determined with 99 percent certainty that the man in the photo was Jakobus Oehnen.The identity of the Jewish man he murdered remains unknown.
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Defense Ministry: 12,000 wounded during war, over half under 30
According to the division’s data, 93% of the wounded are men, 66% are reservists, and 51% are between the ages of 18 and 30.
By AMIR BOHBOT
OCTOBER 29, 2024 13:08
Saturday, October 19, 2024
Thursday, November 23, 2023
Monday, June 19, 2023
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
Eesti Vabariigi aukonsulit Berliinis Sigismund Salo Rund
11. aprillil 1933 avaldas Päevaleht kõmulise uudise, et Eesti Vabariigi aukonsulit Berliinis Sigismund Salo Rundi süüdistatakse maksudest kõrvalehoidmises ja altkäemaksu andmises. „Neil päevil vangistati Berliinis juudisoost suurärimees S. Rund, Berliini suurema bensiiniäri ja autogaraažide omanik. Rundi süüdistatakse tollimata ameerika bensiiniga kauplemises, millega Saksa riik olevat saanud kahju umbes 130.000 Rmk,“ kirjutas leht.
Saturday, January 15, 2022
The secrets of Ukraine's 'Holocaust of Bullets' killing centre
'Blood oozed through the soil at grave sites. You could see the pits move, some of them were still alive': The secrets of Ukraine's shameful 'Holocaust of Bullets' killing centre where 1.6million Jews were executed
Friday, June 18, 2021
What the Soviets knew about Auschwitz - and when - the destruction of the Hungarian Jews.
CC AUCP(b)
to comrade Shcherbakov
We received the following information from our correspondent in Warsaw:
"In the camp Auschwitz the Germans are poisoning 10-15 thousand Hungarian Jews a day with gas and burning them on pyres. Definitely verified, react."
Head of the 1st Directorate of NKGB
USSR
(FITIN)
Sunday, February 23, 2020
Poland’s forgotten civil strife and the struggle for Jewish statehood
Yad Vashem apologized for showing a video to world leaders at the Fifth World Holocaust Forum that neglected to mention the Soviet Union’s occupation of Polish territory in 1939
By ISABELLA GINOR, GIDEON REMEZ FEBRUARY 22, 2020 16:24
https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Polands-forgotten-civil-strife-and-the-struggle-for-Jewish-statehood-617272
During the inauguration of a memorial to the victims of the Siege of Leningrad in Jerusalem’s Sacher Park on January 24, 2020, before the climax of Holocaust remembrance events at which Russian President Vladimir Putin was given a central platform, we were stunned to hear a rendition of The Blue Kerchief (Siniy Platochek).
True, the song was an unofficial anthem of the Red Army in World War II. But its origin belies the version of history that Putin is promoting in his war of narratives against Poland. It also brought to mind an almost forgotten chapter in which the vagaries of war juxtaposed Israeli and Polish history.
After the event, Yad Vashem apologized for showing a video to world leaders at the Fifth World Holocaust Forum that neglected to mention the Soviet Union’s occupation of Polish territory in 1939, enabled by its non-aggression deal with Nazi Germany – the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – while accusing Poland of responsibility for World War II.
Hostility and mistrust between Russia and Poland go back more than a thousand years, with Jews often caught in the crossfire.
Their fate in the Holocaust has become a focal point for the present clash. Both countries have passed laws criminalizing the “falsification of history” to their own detriment, but both engage in it when it can burnish their image. Israel made a mistake by leading the charge against Poland’s ban on so genuinely distorted a term as “Polish extermination camps” – we can’t recall any serious Israeli ever using it.
Denying that any Poles collaborated with the Nazis in hunting down Jews is patently false and should be called out, but blaming the Polish nation as a whole is as erroneous a generalization. Isabella’s great-aunt and her baby daughter, for instance, were physically pulled out of a Nazi death march, and then were sheltered by a Polish priest.
Putin’s latest assertion that Poland began the war or caused it is an egregious lie as well as a whitewashing of the USSR’s own role, and Israeli politicians have been wrong to embrace it – even if they saw a raison d’état to please him.
The Red Army’s heroic role in defeating Nazism is correctly praised. But after its liberation of Auschwitz, thousands of prisoners were deported to the USSR on the pretext that they had survived by collaboration – but actually as bargaining chips for exchange deals that never materialized. Few survived again; some were discovered and, in a handful of cases, repatriated, by French investigator Denis Sellem 50 years later. No one reminded Putin about this last month.
Interwar Polish governments indeed had no love lost for Jews, of whom they considered that Poland had too many. They were pressed to leave with a range of discriminatory measures, which propelled the Fourth Aliyah to Mandatory Palestine in the mid-1920s. When the Nazis expelled Jews with Polish citizenship from Germany, Poland refused to take them in and they were stranded at the border.
In its prewar effort to get rid of Jews, Poland found common cause with Zionist movements, especially the Revisionist youth movement Betar and paramilitary organization, the Irgun.
Their emissary, Avraham “Yair” Stern, found willing support in Warsaw for a plan to recruit a Jewish army to capture Palestine from the British; the Polish Army provided officer-instructors for training camps and sold an arsenal of weapons, which was stranded in port by the outbreak of war in September 1939.
In August, Joseph Stalin – whom Putin admires and seeks to emulate – had concluded the non-aggression treaty with Adolf Hitler dividing Poland and other eastern European countries between them. Two weeks later, Germany implemented it by invading Poland, which drew the latter’s allies, Britain and France, into the war. Stalin followed suit. A secure eastern front facilitated Hitler’s Blitzkrieg across western Europe. Unlike the other nations he subjugated, in Poland, no pretense was made of installing a puppet regime and it was ruled directly by a German Generalgouvernement.
Stalin likewise disavowed recognition of a Polish state, including the London-based government-in-exile. He annexed the Soviet-occupied eastern part of Poland and proceeded to deport hundreds of thousands into the Soviet interior, in addition to the Polish soldiers taken as prisoners of war. One of the latter was Gen. Wladyslaw Anders, who has been lionized as a national hero in present-day Poland where his American daughter, an honorary senator, is leading the international promotion of its own war narrative. (How the communists tried to poison Polish-Jewish relations in March 1968)
Anders was incarcerated in the NKVD’s Moscow prison, the Lubianka. A lower-ranking Jewish reservist, Jerzy Petersburski, had been a pop-music composer and performer. He displayed his talent to his Soviet captors by putting a popular Russian poem to a catchy waltz tune. The Blue Kerchief was an instant hit – with no credit given to its Polish creator. Petersburski and Anders were thus spared the fate that befell thousands of Polish officers, intellectuals and others whom the Soviets massacred at Katyn Forest in April and May of 1940.
The Soviets tried, with initial success, to pin this crime on Hitler, who – having completed his conquests in western Europe – tore up the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and launched Operation Barbarossa against the USSR in June 1941. The Nazis’ rapid advance soon forced Stalin to seek aid from Britain and later the United States.
One price he had to pay was to recognize the Polish government in London and the army it had raised from Polish formations who had fled westward, both led by Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski. Further, Stalin was constrained to permit the recruitment of a Polish II Corps from among the Polish POWs in the USSR to join Sikorski’s force under British command. To head it, Anders was released from the Lubianka directly to talks with Stalin, where they found a common dislike for Jews:
Stalin: “The Jews are rotten soldiers.”
Anders: “Many of the Jews who have applied to join are speculators or smugglers; they will never make good soldiers. The Polish Army doesn’t need them.”
Anders’ resentment – shared by many Poles, especially in the east – was intensified by accusations that (as Anders still maintained in his postwar memoirs) “some Polish Jews had enthusiastically welcomed the Soviet troops when they invaded Poland in 1939.”
For some Jews the Soviets did seem preferable to the onerous Polish authorities, and certainly to the Nazis. But Anders admitted that other Polish Jews had been jailed with him in the Lubianka. “Bourgeois” relatives of Isabella’s grandfather, with their infant child, were deported by the Soviets from eastern Poland and were never seen again. However, the blanket accusation that “the Jews” were responsible for the Soviet takeover and its cruel aftermath stuck – to this day! – among Poles, Balts and others. Czarist antisemitic oppression had driven many Russian Jews into revolutionary movements, and despite Stalin’s purges of the 1930s enough remained to lend this charge some credibility.
When compelled by Sikorski and the British to accept all Polish soldiers, Anders issued an apologetic order:
“I understand well the reasons for the antisemitic disturbances in our ranks. They reflect the insincere and frequently hostile behavior of the Jews in our frontier provinces... But our present policy, which is so closely bound up with British policy, is obliged to display a positive attitude toward the Jews, who are very influential in the Anglo-Saxon world. My directive is therefore... that provocations against the Jews are out of the question for now as they are harmful to our cause. When we are again masters in our own house, we will settle the Jewish matter as required by the sovereignty and dignity of our homeland.”
So, thousands of Polish Jews managed to enlist in Anders’ Army. One was the musician, Petersburski. Another was Menachem Begin, the Betar leader in Poland who was arrested in Soviet-occupied Vilna (Vilnius, in interwar Poland and now Lithuania). He was convicted of anti-Soviet activity and sent to a hard-labor camp in the Russian far north on one of the last trains out before the German attack. In Vilna, 1994, we obtained the NKVD file on Begin’s arrest and interrogation. It exemplified one source of Polish resentment: intentionally or otherwise, the Soviets’ visible, hated dirty work was done by Jewish field operatives, though higher-ranking Russians took over behind prison doors.
Hundreds of Polish Communists and other agents were planted in Anders’ Army before it was permitted to exit the Soviet Union via Iran and join British forces in the Middle East. For logistic reasons, the British command directed his army to Palestine for recuperation after the extreme hardship its men had suffered, reorganization and training. With the army came double its number in soldiers’ families, civilian officials and a mélange of camp followers.
Some 150,000 Polish expatriates thus arrived in Palestine – about one-fourth the size of the entire Jewish community, the Yishuv, with which (antisemitic undercurrents notwithstanding) it ostensibly had far more cultural and linguistic affinity than with the Arab majority.
Jewish business was boosted by generous British spending for the Polish force, as well as for the autonomous network of schools, hospitals and other institutions that were set up for its civilian dependents.
On furlough, Anders’ soldiers were delighted with the Polish cuisine of restaurants established by Fourth Aliyah immigrants. These in turn provided an eager audience for Polish entertainment troupes, such as Petersburski’s, as well as a plethora of newspapers and books published by Anders’ public relations outfit, with an emphasis on the common anti-Nazi cause. The poet Avraham Shlonsky wrote Hebrew lyrics for The Blue Kerchief, which became as popular with the newly established Palmah (the elite strike force of the Yishuv’s mainstream paramilitary organization, the Hagana) as it was with the Palmahniks’ admired role model, the Red Army.
But trouble lay ahead – first from a wave of desertions by Jewish soldiers. The high-minded Begin was loath to violate his oath of allegiance by desertion, and his discharge was arranged. Others simply absconded. Anders’ memoir claims that he made no attempt to recapture some 3,000 Jewish deserters but warned the British against them, and considered himself vindicated when Begin took command of the Irgun’s “terrorist activity.”
Actually, Anders’ Army did send search parties into kibbutzim that were suspected of harboring deserters. As the Poles were followed by British raids to seize illegal arms caches, this aroused vehement Jewish protests, and the practice had to be abandoned – after catching no deserters anyway. Many even managed, by means of changed names and forged documents provided by the Hagana, to reenlist in Jewish formations of the British forces.
Some kibbutzim soon had other applicants for shelter. Once in Palestine, the redoubtable Polish intelligence arm, the Dwójka, turned on the Soviet agents who had been infiltrated into Anders’ ranks. Most were incarcerated in separate Polish sections of British military prisons. Those who evaded arrest reported this to Moscow – and also appealed for help to local sympathizers. Thus, a group led by a hard-line Polish Stalinist, Romuald Gadomski, came to Kibbutz Negba.
Throughout the Yishuv, support for the USSR had surged when it became the only European front against the Nazis. A Communist-initiated “V [for victory] league to support Soviet Russia in its struggle against fascism” aroused such widespread response that the mainstream labor movement (led by Gideon’s grandfather, Histadrut labor federation Secretary David Remez) moved to take it over and impose a Zionist charter. Its volunteers drove ambulances loaded with medical equipment for delivery to the Soviets in Tehran along the same route that Anders’ men had traversed in the opposite direction.
Negba’s parent movement, the Socialist-Zionist Hashomer Hatza’ir, was in competition with the anti-Zionist Communist Party for the USSR’s direct patronage in what was already shaping up as the postwar global realignment. In Negba, Gadomski and his colleagues were referred to an upcoming, Polish-born activist, “Julek” Eisenberg. He not only arranged shelter but helped them print a newsletter to discredit Anders’ publications. Before long, such “red” propaganda could be disseminated as openly as that of the “whites.”
This was due to the turn in the tide of the war. In April 1943, the Germans discovered the mass graves at Katyn and accused the Soviets of the crime. The “London” Polish government demanded an investigation, to which Stalin responded by creating a Soviet-controlled competitor and a Polish People’s Army under the Red Army. In still Nazi-occupied Poland, the underground Armia Krajowa (home army), loyal to London, was now opposed by the Communist Armia Ludowa (people’s army). On Sikorski’s return trip to Britain from a tour of the Middle East – including a festive visit to the troops in Palestine – he died in a highly suspect plane crash. The battle for postwar control of Poland had begun even before its liberation, and this preliminary arena of the Cold War soon extended to Palestine too.
The “white” presence here was depleted as Anders achieved his main purpose: shipping his Polish II Corps out to the front. In May 1944, it earned a heroic niche in history for the capture of Monte Cassino in Italy, at horrific cost. A small reserve and rear echelon remained in Palestine, including the Dwójka headquarters, as well as the mass of civilians. But their position steadily weakened as the Soviets and their Polish army pushed the Germans out of eastern Poland and installed a provisional government, which also put out feelers to the Yishuv.
Conflict between Jews and “London” Poles had already begun to turn violent. Initially, Jews were the main victims, and several cases roiled both communities. A Polish “dagger artist” became the first foreign soldier to be hanged for murder in Palestine, after stabbing a Jewish counterpart to death while vowing to “kill all the Jews.” A Jewish taxi driver was shot dead in a Polish camp, where (as it transpired only years later) he drove an Irgun activist who had been lured to buy weapons. The Hebrew press reflected Jewish outrage by referring to both victims, “Hashem yikom dammo” (may God avenge his blood), a title reserved for martyrs of antisemitic violence.
The Red Army halted east of the Vistula to let the Germans put down the Armia Krajowa uprising in Warsaw. In January, as they liberated Auschwitz, the Soviets and their Polish army took the ruins of the city and moved their client government in. At Yalta in February, in the “great betrayal” that the “London” Poles would never forgive, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the Warsaw government, in exchange for Stalin’s empty promise to expand it with other Polish elements – which created justification for repatriating all Polish exiles. Both in Poland itself and in Palestine, the “white” Poles’ struggle became a desperate, doomed and increasingly bloody rear-guard action.
Payback for Gadomski’s Palestinian patrons came in the spring of 1945, when Eisenberg (under his Hebraized name Yisrael Barzilai) became the first Yishuv emissary to his former protegés now in power in Poland, who “knew how to express their gratitude for the help they had received” and leaned in favor of a Jewish state. They would precede the USSR in supporting the UN Partition Resolution for Palestine. Conversely, the “London” Poles gravitated increasingly toward the Arab cause as its opposition to Jewish statehood intensified.
On V-E Day, Anders’ Jerusalem press agency protested forlornly to The Palestine Post that though previously “Mr Churchill quite often mentioned the part played by Poland and her Army” in defeating Nazism, it was ignored in the victory celebrations. Conversely, Gadomski’s bulletin warned that Poland “must purge the ulcers of fascism and antisemitism [in] a surgical operation.” He soon would be able to make good on this barely veiled warning of violent reprisal.
At Potsdam in June and July of 1945, Clement Attlee and Harry Truman finalized British and US recognition of the Warsaw government. Though Stalin never kept his part of the bargain – to hold free elections – the British reluctantly carried out theirs. Gadomski was formally recognized by the Mandate authorities and they began turning over to him the consulates and community institutions that had been vital for the Polish civilians. In October 1945, a Jewish Agency official told Gadomski that there was “verified evidence whereby Polish reactionary circles were taking part in the organization, training and political incitement” of Arabs, and “they would become targets for physical elimination by the Jewish organizations.”
What followed is exemplified by events in Rehovot, July 7-8, 1946 (more are detailed in a paper we presented recently at the International Congress on Military History). The fatal shooting of a local woman – never solved, but widely attributed to Poles – had already inflamed sentiments when Moshe-Meir Manobla, a 22-year-old demobilized private who had fought with the British Army’s Jewish Brigade in Italy, was shot dead by Andrzej Piaskowski, a pilot who had also fought in Italy, with the RAF’s Polish Gdansk Squadron.
An outcry in the Yishuv press asked “Is Rehovot another Kielce?” The infamous post-Holocaust pogrom in that Polish town on July 4 had been (dubiously) blamed by the pro-Soviet authorities in Warsaw on “reactionary” holdouts acting on orders from Anders.
There was prima facie basis for this connection: the British operated a radio station in Jerusalem that beamed programs and messages to anti-Nazi, and then anti-Soviet, resistance forces in Europe; the Polish service was staffed by Anders’ HQ. At any rate, in Rehovot there was already enough resentment against the Poles to ignite an unprecedented outbreak. According to the Polish version this came close to a pogrom, in which Polish families were assaulted with seven injured and their homes trashed. The alarmed British evacuated Rehovot’s entire Polish population, some 200 families, “under heavy armed protection.”
Piaskowski pleaded self-defense and was acquitted, evoking renewed Jewish indignation. But now, Manobla’s page on the memorial website of Israel’s Defense Ministry corroborates the Poles’ version: Manobla was an Irgun member, and had been tasked to “eliminate” Piaskowski as part of an operation against hostile Poles who had “caused disturbances.”
By this time, the competition for Soviet patronage had been joined by a new force: Lehi (Freedom Fighters for Israel), which was also known as the Stern Gang after its aforementioned founder – who broke with the Irgun (and was killed by the British). Lehi was strongly anti-colonialist, though not Communist, but according to a former NKVD general it was penetrated by his agents. Stern’s successors in its leadership saw a natural ally in the USSR; British intelligence identified their liaison with Moscow through the Polish consulates. Stalin was beginning his brief but crucial swing in favor of partition and a Jewish state. Its prospective leadership looked promising for a pro-Soviet regime that would oust the British, prevent the Americans from replacing them, and realize the long-frustrated Russian aspiration to a warm-water base in the Mediterranean. Together with the campaign against the “London” loyalists in Poland itself, they had to be suppressed in Palestine too. The two arenas intersected.
The now “red” Polish consulates declared compulsory registration of all remaining Poles in Palestine with a view to repatriation. Most of the “London” loyalists rightly feared retribution if they complied, and went underground instead – this time sheltering with Arabs. As Jewish-Arab strife escalated, there were increasing reports of orders being shouted in Polish during Arab attacks on Jewish outposts and of Polish corpses among Arab dead. Polish experts were accused of training Arab saboteurs – one of whose targets was the “Warsaw” consulate in Jerusalem – and were suspected of involvement in the major bombings of Jewish institutions.
All three Zionist undergrounds in effect declared open season on Poles suspected of training Arab gangs or spying for them. As the British Mandate wound down and fighting escalated, such Poles were found dead frequently but merited scant mention in the press. Collating these reports with archive documents, we estimate at least several dozen were killed.
An exception that made headlines even overseas occurred at the end of February 1948, when the Stern Group abducted and executed two prominent Polish expatriates in Jerusalem, accusing them of espionage for the British and Arabs – a charge that, years later, the organization’s ex-leaders retracted.
One of the victims, Witold Hulanicki, had been the Polish consul-general from 1936 to 1939. As we showed in a detailed case study, Hulanicki was not only pro-Zionist but a friend and admirer of Stern who had granted him access to the prewar Polish government. After the war, as custodian of Axis property for the mandatory government, he had negotiated its transfer to Jewish hands.
The Sternists actually targeted him – either on orders from Moscow or to curry its favor – because of his anti-Soviet activity and cooperation with US intelligence, which was then making its first steps in Palestine.
This incident accelerated the flight of “London” Poles to the Arab side. Some turned up in Arab states’ armies, which were preparing to invade after Israel declared independence on May 14; the pilot Piaskowsky was spotted training Syrian airmen. During the battle for Haifa in April, a Life magazine photographer snapped “Jewish troops” detaining “two Polish adventurers suspected of doing sabotage for the Arabs.”
Haifa appears to have been the scene of a hitherto unknown instance of direct military aid for the Yishuv from the pro-Soviet Polish government, which had by then effectively stamped out “white” resistance. A recently declassified CIA document reported Polish ships transporting concealed cargoes of weapons “during the fighting in Palestine,” and noted that several of the ships were “damaged by Arab fire.”
Poland, then, may have been another channel for the vital supply of Soviet-approved weapons that famously arrived through Czechoslovakia.
Our institute at the Hebrew University is named after Truman for his instant recognition of Israel, but the US administration also clamped an arms embargo on the region that hobbled mainly the Jewish side. Stalin – for his own motives – thus deserves as much credit for Israel’s survival. But that does not justify his unqualified rehabilitation in the present Russian version of World War II history – vis-à-vis Poland or otherwise.
Israel’s victory in its War of Independence effectively ended the Polish civil war here too, in favor of the “reds.” But the Soviet bloc’s honeymoon with Israel was short-lived. Founding father David Ben-Gurion, in a meeting with Gadomski in 1946, had “arrived at common conclusions on several problems of mutual interest.”
But while maximizing Soviet support when it was indispensable, he steered Israel away from the dependence that Stalin had anticipated. We believe this was a main reason for keeping Mapam – the party that Hashomer Hatza’ir merged into – out of the first cabinet and for disbanding the Palmah, in which it had strong influence. By 1954, Moscow (and Warsaw) had attached their Middle Eastern strategy to the “progressive” Arab states, and took an active part in their subsequent wars against Israel. Who could have predicted that 70 years later, the Russian-Polish war of narratives would recall the intersection of these two early Cold War battlegrounds?
Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez are associate fellows of the Truman Institute, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Their latest book is The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973 (Hurst/Oxford, 2017)
Menachem Begin in December 1942 wearing the Polish Army uniform of Gen. Anders’ forces with his wife Aliza and David Yutan; (back row) Moshe Stein and Israel Epstein
(photo credit: JABOTINSKY ARCHIVES)
By ISABELLA GINOR, GIDEON REMEZ FEBRUARY 22, 2020 16:24
https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Polands-forgotten-civil-strife-and-the-struggle-for-Jewish-statehood-617272
During the inauguration of a memorial to the victims of the Siege of Leningrad in Jerusalem’s Sacher Park on January 24, 2020, before the climax of Holocaust remembrance events at which Russian President Vladimir Putin was given a central platform, we were stunned to hear a rendition of The Blue Kerchief (Siniy Platochek).
True, the song was an unofficial anthem of the Red Army in World War II. But its origin belies the version of history that Putin is promoting in his war of narratives against Poland. It also brought to mind an almost forgotten chapter in which the vagaries of war juxtaposed Israeli and Polish history.
After the event, Yad Vashem apologized for showing a video to world leaders at the Fifth World Holocaust Forum that neglected to mention the Soviet Union’s occupation of Polish territory in 1939, enabled by its non-aggression deal with Nazi Germany – the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – while accusing Poland of responsibility for World War II.
Hostility and mistrust between Russia and Poland go back more than a thousand years, with Jews often caught in the crossfire.
Their fate in the Holocaust has become a focal point for the present clash. Both countries have passed laws criminalizing the “falsification of history” to their own detriment, but both engage in it when it can burnish their image. Israel made a mistake by leading the charge against Poland’s ban on so genuinely distorted a term as “Polish extermination camps” – we can’t recall any serious Israeli ever using it.
Denying that any Poles collaborated with the Nazis in hunting down Jews is patently false and should be called out, but blaming the Polish nation as a whole is as erroneous a generalization. Isabella’s great-aunt and her baby daughter, for instance, were physically pulled out of a Nazi death march, and then were sheltered by a Polish priest.
Putin’s latest assertion that Poland began the war or caused it is an egregious lie as well as a whitewashing of the USSR’s own role, and Israeli politicians have been wrong to embrace it – even if they saw a raison d’état to please him.
The Red Army’s heroic role in defeating Nazism is correctly praised. But after its liberation of Auschwitz, thousands of prisoners were deported to the USSR on the pretext that they had survived by collaboration – but actually as bargaining chips for exchange deals that never materialized. Few survived again; some were discovered and, in a handful of cases, repatriated, by French investigator Denis Sellem 50 years later. No one reminded Putin about this last month.
Interwar Polish governments indeed had no love lost for Jews, of whom they considered that Poland had too many. They were pressed to leave with a range of discriminatory measures, which propelled the Fourth Aliyah to Mandatory Palestine in the mid-1920s. When the Nazis expelled Jews with Polish citizenship from Germany, Poland refused to take them in and they were stranded at the border.
In its prewar effort to get rid of Jews, Poland found common cause with Zionist movements, especially the Revisionist youth movement Betar and paramilitary organization, the Irgun.
Their emissary, Avraham “Yair” Stern, found willing support in Warsaw for a plan to recruit a Jewish army to capture Palestine from the British; the Polish Army provided officer-instructors for training camps and sold an arsenal of weapons, which was stranded in port by the outbreak of war in September 1939.
In August, Joseph Stalin – whom Putin admires and seeks to emulate – had concluded the non-aggression treaty with Adolf Hitler dividing Poland and other eastern European countries between them. Two weeks later, Germany implemented it by invading Poland, which drew the latter’s allies, Britain and France, into the war. Stalin followed suit. A secure eastern front facilitated Hitler’s Blitzkrieg across western Europe. Unlike the other nations he subjugated, in Poland, no pretense was made of installing a puppet regime and it was ruled directly by a German Generalgouvernement.
Stalin likewise disavowed recognition of a Polish state, including the London-based government-in-exile. He annexed the Soviet-occupied eastern part of Poland and proceeded to deport hundreds of thousands into the Soviet interior, in addition to the Polish soldiers taken as prisoners of war. One of the latter was Gen. Wladyslaw Anders, who has been lionized as a national hero in present-day Poland where his American daughter, an honorary senator, is leading the international promotion of its own war narrative. (How the communists tried to poison Polish-Jewish relations in March 1968)
Anders was incarcerated in the NKVD’s Moscow prison, the Lubianka. A lower-ranking Jewish reservist, Jerzy Petersburski, had been a pop-music composer and performer. He displayed his talent to his Soviet captors by putting a popular Russian poem to a catchy waltz tune. The Blue Kerchief was an instant hit – with no credit given to its Polish creator. Petersburski and Anders were thus spared the fate that befell thousands of Polish officers, intellectuals and others whom the Soviets massacred at Katyn Forest in April and May of 1940.
The Soviets tried, with initial success, to pin this crime on Hitler, who – having completed his conquests in western Europe – tore up the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and launched Operation Barbarossa against the USSR in June 1941. The Nazis’ rapid advance soon forced Stalin to seek aid from Britain and later the United States.
One price he had to pay was to recognize the Polish government in London and the army it had raised from Polish formations who had fled westward, both led by Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski. Further, Stalin was constrained to permit the recruitment of a Polish II Corps from among the Polish POWs in the USSR to join Sikorski’s force under British command. To head it, Anders was released from the Lubianka directly to talks with Stalin, where they found a common dislike for Jews:
Stalin: “The Jews are rotten soldiers.”
Anders: “Many of the Jews who have applied to join are speculators or smugglers; they will never make good soldiers. The Polish Army doesn’t need them.”
Anders’ resentment – shared by many Poles, especially in the east – was intensified by accusations that (as Anders still maintained in his postwar memoirs) “some Polish Jews had enthusiastically welcomed the Soviet troops when they invaded Poland in 1939.”
For some Jews the Soviets did seem preferable to the onerous Polish authorities, and certainly to the Nazis. But Anders admitted that other Polish Jews had been jailed with him in the Lubianka. “Bourgeois” relatives of Isabella’s grandfather, with their infant child, were deported by the Soviets from eastern Poland and were never seen again. However, the blanket accusation that “the Jews” were responsible for the Soviet takeover and its cruel aftermath stuck – to this day! – among Poles, Balts and others. Czarist antisemitic oppression had driven many Russian Jews into revolutionary movements, and despite Stalin’s purges of the 1930s enough remained to lend this charge some credibility.
When compelled by Sikorski and the British to accept all Polish soldiers, Anders issued an apologetic order:
“I understand well the reasons for the antisemitic disturbances in our ranks. They reflect the insincere and frequently hostile behavior of the Jews in our frontier provinces... But our present policy, which is so closely bound up with British policy, is obliged to display a positive attitude toward the Jews, who are very influential in the Anglo-Saxon world. My directive is therefore... that provocations against the Jews are out of the question for now as they are harmful to our cause. When we are again masters in our own house, we will settle the Jewish matter as required by the sovereignty and dignity of our homeland.”
So, thousands of Polish Jews managed to enlist in Anders’ Army. One was the musician, Petersburski. Another was Menachem Begin, the Betar leader in Poland who was arrested in Soviet-occupied Vilna (Vilnius, in interwar Poland and now Lithuania). He was convicted of anti-Soviet activity and sent to a hard-labor camp in the Russian far north on one of the last trains out before the German attack. In Vilna, 1994, we obtained the NKVD file on Begin’s arrest and interrogation. It exemplified one source of Polish resentment: intentionally or otherwise, the Soviets’ visible, hated dirty work was done by Jewish field operatives, though higher-ranking Russians took over behind prison doors.
Hundreds of Polish Communists and other agents were planted in Anders’ Army before it was permitted to exit the Soviet Union via Iran and join British forces in the Middle East. For logistic reasons, the British command directed his army to Palestine for recuperation after the extreme hardship its men had suffered, reorganization and training. With the army came double its number in soldiers’ families, civilian officials and a mélange of camp followers.
Some 150,000 Polish expatriates thus arrived in Palestine – about one-fourth the size of the entire Jewish community, the Yishuv, with which (antisemitic undercurrents notwithstanding) it ostensibly had far more cultural and linguistic affinity than with the Arab majority.
Jewish business was boosted by generous British spending for the Polish force, as well as for the autonomous network of schools, hospitals and other institutions that were set up for its civilian dependents.
On furlough, Anders’ soldiers were delighted with the Polish cuisine of restaurants established by Fourth Aliyah immigrants. These in turn provided an eager audience for Polish entertainment troupes, such as Petersburski’s, as well as a plethora of newspapers and books published by Anders’ public relations outfit, with an emphasis on the common anti-Nazi cause. The poet Avraham Shlonsky wrote Hebrew lyrics for The Blue Kerchief, which became as popular with the newly established Palmah (the elite strike force of the Yishuv’s mainstream paramilitary organization, the Hagana) as it was with the Palmahniks’ admired role model, the Red Army.
But trouble lay ahead – first from a wave of desertions by Jewish soldiers. The high-minded Begin was loath to violate his oath of allegiance by desertion, and his discharge was arranged. Others simply absconded. Anders’ memoir claims that he made no attempt to recapture some 3,000 Jewish deserters but warned the British against them, and considered himself vindicated when Begin took command of the Irgun’s “terrorist activity.”
Actually, Anders’ Army did send search parties into kibbutzim that were suspected of harboring deserters. As the Poles were followed by British raids to seize illegal arms caches, this aroused vehement Jewish protests, and the practice had to be abandoned – after catching no deserters anyway. Many even managed, by means of changed names and forged documents provided by the Hagana, to reenlist in Jewish formations of the British forces.
Some kibbutzim soon had other applicants for shelter. Once in Palestine, the redoubtable Polish intelligence arm, the Dwójka, turned on the Soviet agents who had been infiltrated into Anders’ ranks. Most were incarcerated in separate Polish sections of British military prisons. Those who evaded arrest reported this to Moscow – and also appealed for help to local sympathizers. Thus, a group led by a hard-line Polish Stalinist, Romuald Gadomski, came to Kibbutz Negba.
Throughout the Yishuv, support for the USSR had surged when it became the only European front against the Nazis. A Communist-initiated “V [for victory] league to support Soviet Russia in its struggle against fascism” aroused such widespread response that the mainstream labor movement (led by Gideon’s grandfather, Histadrut labor federation Secretary David Remez) moved to take it over and impose a Zionist charter. Its volunteers drove ambulances loaded with medical equipment for delivery to the Soviets in Tehran along the same route that Anders’ men had traversed in the opposite direction.
Negba’s parent movement, the Socialist-Zionist Hashomer Hatza’ir, was in competition with the anti-Zionist Communist Party for the USSR’s direct patronage in what was already shaping up as the postwar global realignment. In Negba, Gadomski and his colleagues were referred to an upcoming, Polish-born activist, “Julek” Eisenberg. He not only arranged shelter but helped them print a newsletter to discredit Anders’ publications. Before long, such “red” propaganda could be disseminated as openly as that of the “whites.”
This was due to the turn in the tide of the war. In April 1943, the Germans discovered the mass graves at Katyn and accused the Soviets of the crime. The “London” Polish government demanded an investigation, to which Stalin responded by creating a Soviet-controlled competitor and a Polish People’s Army under the Red Army. In still Nazi-occupied Poland, the underground Armia Krajowa (home army), loyal to London, was now opposed by the Communist Armia Ludowa (people’s army). On Sikorski’s return trip to Britain from a tour of the Middle East – including a festive visit to the troops in Palestine – he died in a highly suspect plane crash. The battle for postwar control of Poland had begun even before its liberation, and this preliminary arena of the Cold War soon extended to Palestine too.
The “white” presence here was depleted as Anders achieved his main purpose: shipping his Polish II Corps out to the front. In May 1944, it earned a heroic niche in history for the capture of Monte Cassino in Italy, at horrific cost. A small reserve and rear echelon remained in Palestine, including the Dwójka headquarters, as well as the mass of civilians. But their position steadily weakened as the Soviets and their Polish army pushed the Germans out of eastern Poland and installed a provisional government, which also put out feelers to the Yishuv.
Conflict between Jews and “London” Poles had already begun to turn violent. Initially, Jews were the main victims, and several cases roiled both communities. A Polish “dagger artist” became the first foreign soldier to be hanged for murder in Palestine, after stabbing a Jewish counterpart to death while vowing to “kill all the Jews.” A Jewish taxi driver was shot dead in a Polish camp, where (as it transpired only years later) he drove an Irgun activist who had been lured to buy weapons. The Hebrew press reflected Jewish outrage by referring to both victims, “Hashem yikom dammo” (may God avenge his blood), a title reserved for martyrs of antisemitic violence.
The Red Army halted east of the Vistula to let the Germans put down the Armia Krajowa uprising in Warsaw. In January, as they liberated Auschwitz, the Soviets and their Polish army took the ruins of the city and moved their client government in. At Yalta in February, in the “great betrayal” that the “London” Poles would never forgive, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the Warsaw government, in exchange for Stalin’s empty promise to expand it with other Polish elements – which created justification for repatriating all Polish exiles. Both in Poland itself and in Palestine, the “white” Poles’ struggle became a desperate, doomed and increasingly bloody rear-guard action.
Payback for Gadomski’s Palestinian patrons came in the spring of 1945, when Eisenberg (under his Hebraized name Yisrael Barzilai) became the first Yishuv emissary to his former protegés now in power in Poland, who “knew how to express their gratitude for the help they had received” and leaned in favor of a Jewish state. They would precede the USSR in supporting the UN Partition Resolution for Palestine. Conversely, the “London” Poles gravitated increasingly toward the Arab cause as its opposition to Jewish statehood intensified.
On V-E Day, Anders’ Jerusalem press agency protested forlornly to The Palestine Post that though previously “Mr Churchill quite often mentioned the part played by Poland and her Army” in defeating Nazism, it was ignored in the victory celebrations. Conversely, Gadomski’s bulletin warned that Poland “must purge the ulcers of fascism and antisemitism [in] a surgical operation.” He soon would be able to make good on this barely veiled warning of violent reprisal.
At Potsdam in June and July of 1945, Clement Attlee and Harry Truman finalized British and US recognition of the Warsaw government. Though Stalin never kept his part of the bargain – to hold free elections – the British reluctantly carried out theirs. Gadomski was formally recognized by the Mandate authorities and they began turning over to him the consulates and community institutions that had been vital for the Polish civilians. In October 1945, a Jewish Agency official told Gadomski that there was “verified evidence whereby Polish reactionary circles were taking part in the organization, training and political incitement” of Arabs, and “they would become targets for physical elimination by the Jewish organizations.”
What followed is exemplified by events in Rehovot, July 7-8, 1946 (more are detailed in a paper we presented recently at the International Congress on Military History). The fatal shooting of a local woman – never solved, but widely attributed to Poles – had already inflamed sentiments when Moshe-Meir Manobla, a 22-year-old demobilized private who had fought with the British Army’s Jewish Brigade in Italy, was shot dead by Andrzej Piaskowski, a pilot who had also fought in Italy, with the RAF’s Polish Gdansk Squadron.
An outcry in the Yishuv press asked “Is Rehovot another Kielce?” The infamous post-Holocaust pogrom in that Polish town on July 4 had been (dubiously) blamed by the pro-Soviet authorities in Warsaw on “reactionary” holdouts acting on orders from Anders.
There was prima facie basis for this connection: the British operated a radio station in Jerusalem that beamed programs and messages to anti-Nazi, and then anti-Soviet, resistance forces in Europe; the Polish service was staffed by Anders’ HQ. At any rate, in Rehovot there was already enough resentment against the Poles to ignite an unprecedented outbreak. According to the Polish version this came close to a pogrom, in which Polish families were assaulted with seven injured and their homes trashed. The alarmed British evacuated Rehovot’s entire Polish population, some 200 families, “under heavy armed protection.”
Piaskowski pleaded self-defense and was acquitted, evoking renewed Jewish indignation. But now, Manobla’s page on the memorial website of Israel’s Defense Ministry corroborates the Poles’ version: Manobla was an Irgun member, and had been tasked to “eliminate” Piaskowski as part of an operation against hostile Poles who had “caused disturbances.”
By this time, the competition for Soviet patronage had been joined by a new force: Lehi (Freedom Fighters for Israel), which was also known as the Stern Gang after its aforementioned founder – who broke with the Irgun (and was killed by the British). Lehi was strongly anti-colonialist, though not Communist, but according to a former NKVD general it was penetrated by his agents. Stern’s successors in its leadership saw a natural ally in the USSR; British intelligence identified their liaison with Moscow through the Polish consulates. Stalin was beginning his brief but crucial swing in favor of partition and a Jewish state. Its prospective leadership looked promising for a pro-Soviet regime that would oust the British, prevent the Americans from replacing them, and realize the long-frustrated Russian aspiration to a warm-water base in the Mediterranean. Together with the campaign against the “London” loyalists in Poland itself, they had to be suppressed in Palestine too. The two arenas intersected.
The now “red” Polish consulates declared compulsory registration of all remaining Poles in Palestine with a view to repatriation. Most of the “London” loyalists rightly feared retribution if they complied, and went underground instead – this time sheltering with Arabs. As Jewish-Arab strife escalated, there were increasing reports of orders being shouted in Polish during Arab attacks on Jewish outposts and of Polish corpses among Arab dead. Polish experts were accused of training Arab saboteurs – one of whose targets was the “Warsaw” consulate in Jerusalem – and were suspected of involvement in the major bombings of Jewish institutions.
All three Zionist undergrounds in effect declared open season on Poles suspected of training Arab gangs or spying for them. As the British Mandate wound down and fighting escalated, such Poles were found dead frequently but merited scant mention in the press. Collating these reports with archive documents, we estimate at least several dozen were killed.
An exception that made headlines even overseas occurred at the end of February 1948, when the Stern Group abducted and executed two prominent Polish expatriates in Jerusalem, accusing them of espionage for the British and Arabs – a charge that, years later, the organization’s ex-leaders retracted.
One of the victims, Witold Hulanicki, had been the Polish consul-general from 1936 to 1939. As we showed in a detailed case study, Hulanicki was not only pro-Zionist but a friend and admirer of Stern who had granted him access to the prewar Polish government. After the war, as custodian of Axis property for the mandatory government, he had negotiated its transfer to Jewish hands.
The Sternists actually targeted him – either on orders from Moscow or to curry its favor – because of his anti-Soviet activity and cooperation with US intelligence, which was then making its first steps in Palestine.
This incident accelerated the flight of “London” Poles to the Arab side. Some turned up in Arab states’ armies, which were preparing to invade after Israel declared independence on May 14; the pilot Piaskowsky was spotted training Syrian airmen. During the battle for Haifa in April, a Life magazine photographer snapped “Jewish troops” detaining “two Polish adventurers suspected of doing sabotage for the Arabs.”
Haifa appears to have been the scene of a hitherto unknown instance of direct military aid for the Yishuv from the pro-Soviet Polish government, which had by then effectively stamped out “white” resistance. A recently declassified CIA document reported Polish ships transporting concealed cargoes of weapons “during the fighting in Palestine,” and noted that several of the ships were “damaged by Arab fire.”
Poland, then, may have been another channel for the vital supply of Soviet-approved weapons that famously arrived through Czechoslovakia.
Our institute at the Hebrew University is named after Truman for his instant recognition of Israel, but the US administration also clamped an arms embargo on the region that hobbled mainly the Jewish side. Stalin – for his own motives – thus deserves as much credit for Israel’s survival. But that does not justify his unqualified rehabilitation in the present Russian version of World War II history – vis-à-vis Poland or otherwise.
Israel’s victory in its War of Independence effectively ended the Polish civil war here too, in favor of the “reds.” But the Soviet bloc’s honeymoon with Israel was short-lived. Founding father David Ben-Gurion, in a meeting with Gadomski in 1946, had “arrived at common conclusions on several problems of mutual interest.”
But while maximizing Soviet support when it was indispensable, he steered Israel away from the dependence that Stalin had anticipated. We believe this was a main reason for keeping Mapam – the party that Hashomer Hatza’ir merged into – out of the first cabinet and for disbanding the Palmah, in which it had strong influence. By 1954, Moscow (and Warsaw) had attached their Middle Eastern strategy to the “progressive” Arab states, and took an active part in their subsequent wars against Israel. Who could have predicted that 70 years later, the Russian-Polish war of narratives would recall the intersection of these two early Cold War battlegrounds?
Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez are associate fellows of the Truman Institute, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Their latest book is The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973 (Hurst/Oxford, 2017)
(photo credit: JABOTINSKY ARCHIVES)
Wednesday, August 7, 2019
Johann Andreas Eisenmenger - POSED AS A RIGHTEOUS JEWISH CONVERT, THEN WROTE AN ANTISEMITIC CREED
— “Eisenmenger belonged to the class of insects which sucks poison even out of flowers,” the 19th-century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz wrote.
In 1700, Johann Andreas Eisenmenger published “Judaism Unmasked,” one of the most noxious and highly influential antisemitic works ever written.
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Saturday, July 6, 2019
Islamic Schoolbooks Teach ... - reference.
https://www.memri.org/reports/indian-islamic-schoolbooks-teach-hate-against-polytheists-and-unbelievers
The following are some questions and answers relating to non-Muslims from part 2 of Noorani Talim.
"Q. What do you call someone who associates someone equal to or partner with Allah?
"A. We call them Mushrik [polytheist] and Kafir [unbeliever]
"Q. What is wrong in being a Kafir or Mushrik?
"A. Allah will always be unhappy with a Kafir or Mushrik and after death they will remain in the fire or hell forever.
"Q. Will Kafirs or Mushriks never go to paradise?
"A. No, never, they will remain in hell for eternity.
"Q. How is it known that Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihe Wasallam is the Prophet of Allah Ta'ala?
"A. It is proven by the fact that, our Holy Prophet called people towards Islam, he performed many miracles and he gave such knowledge of the unseen (Ilm-e-Ghaib) which can only be given by none other than a Prophet of Allah.
"Q. What do you call a person who does not believe in Muhammad Mustapha Sallallahu Alaihe Wasallam as a Prophet?
"A. He/She is a Kafir
"Q. What if someone believes in Allah Ta'ala but does not believe in the Holy Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihe Wasallam?
"A. The person is also a Kafir."
The following are some questions and answers from part 3 of Noorani Talim.
"Q. What is 'Kufr'?
"A. To disbelieve in any of the things that are compulsory to believe in Islam.
"Q. Who was the last Prophet?
"A. Hazrat Muhammad Mustafa (peace be on him).
"Q. Are there going to be any Nabis [prophets] now?
"A. There will be no Nabi now. This is because our holy Prophet (peace be on him) is the seal of the prophets. If a person doubts this, then he is a Kafir.
"Q. If a person prays Namaz [i.e., the five daily prayers in Islam], fasts, etc. and believes everything of Iman-Mufassal [complete faith] but is insulting and be rude to the Prophet (peace be on him). Is this person a Muslim?
"A. No! Such a person is a Kafir and murtad [apostate].
"Q. If a person does not insult the Prophet but purposely believes that those who insult the Prophet are Muslims. Is such a person regarded as a Muslim?
"A. No! This person too is a Kafir and murtad."
The following are some questions and answers from part 4 of Noorani Talim.
"Q. It is not possible that humans, animals and mountains just evolved by themselves?
"A. No, this is impossible because we can see for ourselves that the tiniest things such as pens and pencils cannot make themselves, then how can the Earth and Sky and other big things come into being all by themselves.
"Q. If a Muslim says that Allah is nothing and says that the earth and sky just came into being and were not created by Allah, what is the ruling on this?
"A. Whoever says this has stepped outside the folds of Islam and is deemed a Kafir.
"Q. What is the Islamic ruling of someone who speaks badly of Allah?
"A. It is an act of Kufr [unbelief] to speak or think of Allah in this way.
"Q. What is Jannat [heaven] made of?
"A. The walls of Jannat are constructed from bricks made of gold and silver and are laid in alternate position i.e. one gold, one silver, one gold etc. The cement is made from sweet smelling musk and the stones are of pearls and diamonds.
"Q. Can you explain other qualities of Jannat?
"A. There are many qualities of Jannat which cannot even be explained, out of which here are some:
"i) Jannat has oceans of water, milk and honey. The streams of these oceans will go up to the Jannatees [residents of paradise] houses and will be sweet smelling.
"ii) The women of Jannat are so beautiful that is one was to be shown in this world, from the earth to the skies would be brightened. Their bangles are so shiny that the sun's rays would disappear like the stars with the sun's rays.
"iii) When the Jannatees will eat and drink but they will not perform excretion or urine, they will also be clean from saliva and mucus. Their sweat will be sweet smelling. Their food will be completely digested.
"iv) The Jannatees will have all kind of fruit and food. If one desired to eat some meat that would be presented to them straight away. If they desired to drink something that would be there straight away in a glass.
"v) If the Jannatees wanted to meet with each other they would straight away be presented in from of the guests. Their carriage would get to their destination straight away.
"vi) Jannatees will always stay healthy and free from illness. They will never become ill, they will always remain alive, they will always remain young and never grow old. They always remain in luxury and never face difficulties.
"vii) The Jannatees from the lower grades will have Eighty Thousand servants and seventy-two wives.
"Q. What is Dozakh [Hell]?
"A. Dozakh is a place made for Kafirs, wrong sects, and sinful Muslims and is made of fire.
"Q. What is the fire of hell like?
"A. The fire of hell was fired up for a thousand years then it went red, it was then heated for another thousand years and it went white then for another thousand years it was heated and it went black. It is now completely black with no light whatsoever.
"Q. Is there any light in Hell?
"A. No, Dozakh is completely dark.
"Q. How hot is the fire of Dozakh?
"A. The fire of Dozakh is seventy times hotter than fire in this world.
"Q. How deep is Dozakh?
"A. Only Allah knows how deep it is, but it is quoted in the Hadith Sharif that if a stone was thrown inside it after seventy years it would still not hit the bottom.
"Q. What food and drink will be given to the Dozakhees [residents of hell]?
"A. The puss that will come out of the Dozakhees will be given to them to drink and to eat they will be given a fruit with thorns which if a part of it comes into the world with its heat and bad smell the whole world would suffer. However, the Dozakhees will eat it without any choice and it will get stuck in their throats. To obtain relief from this they will ask for water and will be given boiling hot oil to drink, which after drinking their insides will burn out.
"Q. Can you explain some other details of Dozakh?
"A. i) There is fire in the hell is every direction and everything is made from fire of Dozakh is so strong that if a pin-point of it was thrown into this world everything would die with its heat. Also if one link from the chains of the Dozakhees was to be put on top of the mountain, the mountain would shake and the link would sink in.
"ii) The face of the guard of Dozakh is so scary that if it was seen on earth all the people would die of fright.
"iii) In hell there will be snakes the size of large camels and scorpions the size of large donkeys whose bit sting would have the painful effect of up to forty years.
"iv) The last punishment given to the less sinful is that they will be shoes of fire to wear, which with the heat will boil the wearer's brain and his head will blow open like a pan's cover blows open.
"Q. What is the order for those who do not believe in Jannat or Dozakh?
"A. The one does not believe in Jannat or Dozakh is an Infidel (Kafir)."
The following are some questions and answers from part 5 of Noorani Talim.
"Q. What is known as Gunaah-e-Kabira?
"A. Extremely large sins are considered Gunaah-e-Kabira. The main ones include polytheism, infidelity, adultery, theft, alcohol consumption, telling lies, back-biting, telling tales, not praying Namaz, not fasting in the month of Ramadan, and not giving Zakat [alms].
"Q. If one does not perform Gunaah-e-Kabira then will he not remain a Muslim?
"A. Those who perform Shirk [polytheism] or Kufr does not remain a Muslim, he then becomes a Mushrik or Kafir. As for the rest of the Kabira Gunaahs [large sins] one does stay a Muslim if he commits these sins, a very disobedient Muslim is known as 'Faasiq.'
"Q. What is known as Shirk?
"A. To partner or treat as equal something or someone with Allah or Allah's characteristic is considered shirk.
"Q. What is meant by to partner with something with Allah?
"A. To Partner with Allah is to believe in more than one Allah, like the Christians have three Gods, this is the reason why they are Mushriks. The Hindu faith is associated with many gods, they are also defined as Mushriks.
"Q. What is Kufr?
"A. To reject any fact of Zaruriyaat-e-Deen [compulsory beliefs or religion]."
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