Posted on 07/31/2003 12:19:15 PM PDT by yonif
A nearly completed memorial walkway cutting through the Belzec death camp in Poland has sparked a legal and religious battle between two American Jewish groups.
Condemning what they saw as "the desecration of the holiest Jews of all" inside the 60-acre camp, located in southeast Poland, Rabbis Avi Weiss and Shmuel Herzfeld, of the Coalition for Jewish Concerns Amcha, announced Wednesday in Warsaw they would take legal action against the Polish government in order to halt the construction of the path.
Construction of the 200-meter walkway, part of a joint memorial project of the Polish government and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), began last spring. The $4 million project, which includes a memorial wall, a perimeter walkway, and a small museum, is slated for completion by the end of the year.
The AJC insists archeological excavations and additional rabbinic examinations determined that the pathway, which diagonally traverses the site, will not disturb any of the mass graves. The committee's director of international Jewish affairs, Rabbi Andrew Baker, said his organization received approval for the walkway from the foremost halachic authorities in Europe, including Rabbi Elyakim Schelinger of the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe, and Chief Rabbi of Warsaw Michael Schudrich. Baker said he is baffled by Weiss's "intolerable" crusade against the path.
On Wednesday morning, Rabbis Weiss and Herzfeld entered the site and informed workers that they were rabbis and instructed them to cease digging, telling them they were desecrating human remains.
Weiss, the director of Amcha, said that despite assurances from Rabbi Schudrich that there would be strict rabbinical supervision of the project, the on-site supervisor had to be awakened and later admitted to them that bones were, indeed, scattered everywhere.
"We walked into the camp and there was no rabbinic supervision," Weiss said. "What we saw was a terrible, terrible desecration. Tall cranes literally sat on bone chards. There were makeshift houses and a dog was running around. It was a painful sight."
Over a week ago, he filed a lawsuit against the committee and has said he will seek in injunction to stop what he called an offensive "trench" that defiles the remains of the dead. Weiss also said he is looking to take the case to a beit din [Jewish court] in the US.
But Baker said Weiss's claims are untrue; they are a "moot issue" because the AJC made sure the top 25 cm. of soil on the site the only part that may have contained remains, he said were removed. The walkway, already 70 to 80 percent complete, is cutting through "virgin soil," Baker said, adding that the committee was not even in charge of its actual construction.
Over 500,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis at the Belzec death camp between March and December of 1942, and their bodies were dumped into 33 mass graves. As the war neared its end, the Nazis unearthed the graves to burn the bodies and crush the remaining bones to hide the evidence.
In 1994, the United States Holocaust Museum, in conjunction with the Polish government, privately decided to build the memorial and in May 2002 the museum proposed the construction of the now-disputed walkway, which was designed by a team of Polish artists. The museum later transferred their role in the memorial project to the AJC in November 2002.
Visitors entering the walkway would slowly descend from one end of the camp near the original railway ramp along a narrow corridor leading to a 10 meter high memorial wall at the opposite end. Thus, they would symbolically follow the path of the victims. "I don't want to malign the motives of the people who are doing this project, but they are making a tragic mistake," Weiss said.
Baker said the only mistake was Weiss's objections to the walkway. "[Amcha] is making every effort to draw maximum publicity to their argument, and one wonders what their purpose really is," he said. "I cannot understand why Rabbi Weiss is undertaking this crusade particularly when such eminent rabbinical figures have so clearly endorsed this part of the project."
Rabbis call incompleted Balzac memorial 'terrible desecration'
I thought: "What? They've got a Balzac memorial...in Poland? And the Jews are upset about it? B/c it's a Balzac memorial? Or b/c its in Poland? What??"
Only when I started reading it did I realize it was Bel-zac, not Bal-zac.
If the designers were Gentile Poles, that probably right there explains the source of the bitterness.
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