For the first time, in honor of Holocaust Memorial Day, the new “Never Again” Knesset forum convened in the Knesset to discuss ways to actualize the forum’s name.

The session was chaired by MK Dr. Michael Ben-Ari (National Union), a protégé of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose New York-based Jewish Defense League sported the same “Never Again” motto. MK Tzipi Hotobeli (Likud), Larry Pfeffer, Dr. Mordechai Kedar, Prof. Hillel Weiss, Moshe Feiglin, Yehudit Dasberg and others participated as well.

Ben-Ari said that the forum wishes to emphasize the importance of “sounding a timely siren of warning” in order to ensure that Jews are never again targeted as they were during the Holocaust. “I hope that the thoughts that are expressed here will become part of the national consensus, so that such a thing should never, G-d forbid, happen again.”

"We must honor and remember those who worked to save Jews, such as Rabbi Weissmandl, Hillel Kook, George Mantello (Mandel), Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, Recha and Yitzchok Sternbruch and others. Why are there no streets named after these people?

Hypocritical Protest Against Swiss

Ben-Ari scorned the absurdity of Israel’s formal protest against Switzerland’s leaders for shaking the hand of Holocaust-denier Ahmadinajad, “when Israel itself has been waging negotiations for years with a known Holocaust denier, Mahmoud Abbas.”

First Step: De-Legitimization

Dr. Kedar, a well-known expert on Arab affairs, said, “Every process of destruction begins with a process of de-legitimization. When we look at the Moslem world around us, we see that this process is underway against us, in three steps: De-legitimization, de-humanization, and demonization.” He explained that the Islam recognizes neither Judaism as a legitimate religion, nor Israel as a legitimate country. “Anyone who reads the Arab press sees caricatures of a Jewish star together with a swastika, with Jews depicted as various animals.”

Kedar noted that the Haaretz newspaper did a tremendous disservice to Israel and Egypt in the past week when it headlined the news that Israel’s Mossad had supplied Egypt with the intelligence on Hizbullah. “This put Egypt in a tremendously awkward position, and was totally irresponsible. The newspaper claims to be for ‘thinking people,’ but in truth, it is no more than a newspaper of ‘people who think [highly of] themselves.’”

Frankfurter Saved Swiss Jewry - But Who Remembers?

Prof. Meir Schwartz, who is nearing the end of a 20-year study on the heretofore unknown extent of the destruction of Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass that heralded the beginning of the Holocaust in Germany), said, “The main thing is not to be silent.  In Switzerland, a young man named David Frankfurter saw that the Nazis were trying to do to the Jews there what they did elsewhere, and he assassinated the head of the Foreign Section of the Nazi party in Switzerland. He confessed to the crime, sat in jail for nine years, was pardoned after the war and came to live in Israel. He saved the 20,000 Jews of Switzerland! Yet in Israel today, hardly anyone knows what he did. Only one city, Petach Tikvah, has a street named after him… It is hard to say that this is what should be done, but we must raise a generation of people who understand what happened there.”

“Some 5,000 Jews were killed in Germany between 1933 and 1939, but everyone was silent – and the result was six million dead in the years afterwards.”

‘Six million Jews died of an overdose of hope,’ Rabbi Ashkenazi said - and today, we still suffer from this overdose.

MK Hotobeli: Too Much Hope is Lethal

MK Tzipi Hotobeli said, “We were always taught that one who knows history will not repeat its mistakes – but I have news for you: That’s not true. The same mistakes can very well be repeated, as we see now… Rabbi Yehuda Ashkenazi, a great rabbi in France of the previous generation, described the Holocaust in one sharp sentence: ‘Six million Jews died of an overdose of hope.’ This horrific diagnosis precisely describes the collapse of the impressive house of cards built by Germany Jewry over the course of 200 years – a house that was nothing more than an illusory confidence that an alternative world could be built without Jewish identity and that they could merge totally into the local culture.”

“Today, too,” she continued, “we still have an overdose of hope in our national make-up – leading to fraudulent peace agreements with terrorists, leading the West to close its eyes to Iran, leading some Israelis to believe in the hope of a better life abroad. All this instead of realizing that we have no choice but to establish a meaningful Jewish identity in our national land.”

Rabbi Ariel: Us or Them

Rabbi Yisrael Ariel spoke of the need to increase the Jewish People numerically, and added: “We must imbue ourselves with the axiom that if one arises to kill you, you must kill him first; if today it’s Iran, then it’s ‘either us or them.’ We must build our inner unity, and not work against each other, as has cost us much in the past.  We believe that we did not come to this land for naught, and let us hope that we cure ourselves of all our sicknesses and build ourselves anew.”

Let Us Not Hide Our Failures

Larry Pfeffer, originally of Romania, elaborated on the point made by others:

“We need not point a finger only at the goyim for having perpetrated the Holocaust. There were many Jews who could have done much more to save other Jews – and there were some organizations that even sabotaged the efforts to save Jews. We must ask ourselves why people like Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise – who was not an evil person - did not disclose the information that he received regarding what was happening?  We must ask and ensure that this does not happen again…

"We must honor and remember those who worked to save Jews, such as Rabbi Weissmandl, Hillel Kook, George Mantello (Mandel), Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, Recha and Yitzchok Sternbruch and others.  Why are there no streets named after these people? Why are we not teaching our youngsters this important lesson of how to grab the bull by the horns and take action when it is necessary?

"It is ironic that we are talking about Hillel Kook here in this very building, the Knesset, in which he was a Knesset Member – yet so little is known, even by today’s MKs, about his actions.  We teach about Chana Senesh, and about the Warsaw Ghetto – but not enough about what we did not do.  We know about the Kapos in the death camps, but what about the Kapos with white collars, those who could have done more to save Jews but didn’t? This must be our lesson from the Holocaust.”

Chairman of the Never Again Knesset Forum MK Ben-Ari noted that the late Torah commentator Prof. Nechama Liebowitz commented on the verse in Psalms that describes a specific list of nations conspiring to destroy Israel.  “She said that this does not describe a particular historic event, as these nations never joined up together against Israel. It rather portrays the general, long-standing situation of hatred against the eternal nation.”