Moshe Katsav
(1945 - )
Born in Iran in 1945, Moshe Katsav came to Israel with his parents in 1951. The eldest of eight children, he grew up in the new immigrant tent camp (and later development town) of Kiryat Malachi.
Posted on 08/31/2004 8:37:37 AM PDT by lizol
Katsav skips Lodz ceremony By ETGAR LEFKOVITS
In a diplomatic snub, President Moshe Katsav decided to skip the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto held on Sunday in the central Polish city, without informing city officials he was not coming.
The city-sponsored commemorations, which drew 5,000 Holocaust survivors and visitors from around the world, included the inauguration of a monument in memory of the Jews of Lodz at the site of a former freight train station from which the Germans sent nearly 150,000 Jews to their deaths.
Katsav had been invited to attend the event last year, and had accepted the invitation, a Polish Embassy official said on Monday.
The invitations that went out for the event this summer listed Katsav as one of the dignitaries who would be present.
The presidents of Poland, Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic, who were also invited to the commemorations, did not attend the event either.
Lodz Mayor Jerzy Kropiwnicki, who organized the multi-million dollar commemorations, said through a spokesman on Monday that the mayor felt "deep regret" that the president of the State of Israel did attend the event, adding that the city did not even receive notice that Katsav was not coming.
Science and Technology Minister Ilan Shalgi, Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai, and Ambassador to Poland Eitan Peleg represented Israel at the event, which was attended by Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka and a host of foreign ambassadors.
Katsav's spokeswoman Hagit Cohen said that the president had visited Jewish memorial sites in Europe over the last year, and plans on visiting Poland next year at the invitation of the Polish president for the 60-year commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz.
She added that the president attends foreign events at the invitation of heads of state, and not at the invitation of mayors.
Questions of proper protocol aside, Katsav's decision not to attend the event was criticized by outside observers, who viewed it as an unnecessary slight in the place of an easy diplomatic gain.
"Not for the first time, there is closed-mindedness on the part of President Katsav regarding the history and sensitivity of Polish-Jewish relations," said the Polish-born Israeli political analyst Uri Huppert.
"An occasion of such historical importance for the Jewish people does not require a regal state invitation for the President of Israel to attend," he said.
Before the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Lodz was home to 233,000 Jews, who constituted one third of the city's residents, in what was Poland's second largest Jewish community after Warsaw.
In all, more than 200,000 Jews from Poland, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, and what was then Czechoslovakia were imprisoned in the ghetto, with only 5,000- 7,000 of them surviving the Holocaust.
link to interesting essay on this topic:
http://www.tcr.org/tcr/essays/EPrize_Rumkowski.pdf
Ping
Rumkowski is indeed a tragic figure. I'm sure in his heart he was doing what he thought was best at the time. It is one of the crueller aspects of the Holocaust, how the Nazis turned Jew against Jew.
Born in Iran in 1945, Moshe Katsav came to Israel with his parents in 1951. The eldest of eight children, he grew up in the new immigrant tent camp (and later development town) of Kiryat Malachi.
He was the Shimon Peres of his time.
Easy to say, but a few years ago I saw a documentary on the Eichmann trial. What was revealing to me, was that up to the trial in 1962, Israelis who had not been through the Holocaust pretty much avoided the subject, and even looked down, and heaped disdain on the survivors. "Why didn't you fight?" was the common question aimed at the survivors. When the Israelis actually heard the testimonies at the trial, they finally understood what those survivors really went through.
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