Rosh Ha’ayin Mayor Moshe Sinai announced plans to make his city the first to pair up with a German town which housed a Nazi death camp. The town of 40,000 near Tel Aviv will be twinning with the infamous Bavarian town of Dachau, home of the first Nazi concentration camp where 60,000 were murdered by the Nazis.
The camp was erected by the Nazis in March 1933 and carried the famous, cynical slogan “Arbeit Marcht Frei (work makes one free)” above its entrance years before the same sign was placed above Auschwitz in Poland. While Israeli towns are twinned with similar-sized towns in Germany, none have ever twinned with places that hosted death camps. “I don’t understand how they could do something like this, because of the symbolism,”, said Israeli businessman and politician Moshe Zanbar who survived the Dachau at the age of 18.