International Sephardic Leadership Council (ISLC) calls on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) to explain why they decline to address the historically documented collaboration between Arabs and Nazis during the Holocaust, and how that collaboration has influenced present anti-Semitism in Islamic countries.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(New York, NY) April 25, 2006 - On the occasion of Yom Hashoah, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day, the International Sephardic Leadership Council (ISLC) calls on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) to explain why they decline to address the historically documented collaboration between Arabs and Nazis during the Holocaust, and how that collaboration has influenced present anti-Semitism in Islamic countries.

The USHMM, a federally funded government institute, has never presented an exhibit or sponsored an event confronting Arab or Muslim anti-Semitism or the fate of Jews in Arab countries during the Holocaust. These countries include Jews from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Iraq and other countries effected during and immediately after the war years, because of Nazi inspired Arab anti-Semitism.

Historically, it is well documented and established that Muslim leaders worked hand-in-hand with Nazi leaders during World War II, and the intensifying hatred of Jews in the Middle East today is a result of those relationships. Amid almost daily pledges from Iran to “annihilate” Israel, the USHMM remains silent about the historic cause of the exacerbation of Muslim anti-Semitism.

Shelomo Alfassa, executive director of the ISLC commented,“When a public official of the USHMM publicly minimizes and obscures, even denies, well-settled historical facts regarding the extensive relationship between the Grand Mufti and Holocaust-era Arabs with the Third Reich, you know there is a failure in the system.” This statement was issued in response to the Chief Historian of the USHMM declaring, “There was no collaboration between the Arabs and the Nazis.” In response to this, the International Sephardic Leadership Council filed a formal complaint with the USHMM Auditor General and called for investigation. To this day, the Museum has not responded.

U.S. Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY) joined the International Sephardic Leadership Council at a January 2006 town hall meeting in Washington D.C., where he commented, “The Museum should better understand and underscore the Nazi hatred of Jews and contemporary anti-Semitism in the Muslim world which is the natural inheritance of Hitler’s beliefs.” Carol Greenwald (of Holocaust Museum Watch) and Chuck Morse (candidate R-MA) issued an op/ed in The Washington Times saying, “The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum should be an authoritative voice educating the museum's visitors and the public about the re-emergence of genocidal hatred as a political tool. The museum's mission requires it to publicize this rebirth of Nazi propaganda though exhibits and educational programs."

The former director of the USHMM agrees. Dr. Walter Reich told a major Israeli newspaper, “There is no doubt that most expressions of anti-Semitism today, and the main basis for Holocaust denial, are in the Arab-Muslim world.” Reich stated he believed it reasonable for the USHMM to take seriously the expansion and increased power of anti-Semitism and Holocaust-denial in the Arab world.

Despite the fact that the USHMM has exhibits on significant issues such as propaganda, genocide in Darfur and Rwanda, and persecution of homosexuals; it makes no mention of Arab anti-Semitism—not of its history in the last century—not of its current existence. While Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Museum, is discussing the German-Arab ties, and while Encyclopedia of the Holocaust devotes more space to the Mufti of Jerusalem than to any other Nazi leader except Hitler, the USHMM is covering its eyes and ears unashamedly ignoring historical facts.

Editor's note: This history of this subject has been made available in a 25 page document issued by the ISLC: "A Backgrounder of the Nazi Activities in North Africa and the Middle East During the Era of the Holocaust" at www.sephardiccouncil.org.

The International Sephardic Leadership Council is based in the heart of the vibrant Near-Eastern Sephardic Community of New York City, a community highly committed to Judaism, made up of 75,000 Syrian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Turkish and North African Jews; one of the largest, strongest, and fastest growing Sephardic communities in the world.