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Wednesday, April 02, 2014

Insights into Hasidic Judaism and WWII concentration camps



This 25 minute video of a New York City television broadcast consists of an interview with author Deborah Feldman, who left Satmar Hasidic Orthodox Judaism for a life of freedom, supported at first by the proceeds from her exposé Unorthodox.

Two segments of the video are of interest : 1From the beginning of the video and ending at 5 minutes 25 seconds, Deborah Feldman testifies to the lack of freedom in Orthodox Hasidic Judaism. She begins by noting that Satmar rabbis view “the Holocaust” as a divine punishment on Judaics for having abandoned the Talmud (Feldman refers to this abandonment as choosing to be “assimilationist”); and while Feldman does not mention it, this “Holocaust” belief has led Lubavitch Grand Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson and Sephardic Shas Party "Torah sage” Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, among other top Orthodox rabbis, to opine that Adolf Hitler was "God’s avenging angel" on the Talmudic-rejecting modern Judaics. (Cf. Judaism’s Strange Gods, pp. 37-39).

"A small but significant minority in the ultra-Orthodox community believe that the Holocaust was divine punishment for Jewish assimilation, intermarriage and the emergence of liberal streams of Judaism, such as the Reform movement, that do not accept traditional Judaic religious strictures. 'The minority of the righteous undergo the tribulations sent because of the sinful majority,' wrote Avigdor Miller, a popular ultra-Orthodox rabbi...” Paul Berger, Forward, April 9, 2014

2. At 19 minutes 40 seconds into the video there is a brief but important account of a "Holocaust survivor" - Deborah Feldman's grandmother's experiences under the Germans. This information ends at the 21 minute 20 second mark. To summarize Feldman’s testimony about her grandmother’s experience, she upholds the view that Germans did not seek to exterminate her Judaic grandmother, but rather, forced her into slave labor and transported her around Europe. Feldman’s grandmother’s life was threatened by typhus.
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11 comments:

Rugestnom said...

The statement is not ludicrous at all.There are numerous accounts according to which people were sent to "gas chambers" immediately after having arrived into a camp. The official story has it that camps like Sobibor, Belzec or Treblinka were not labour camps but camps serving only the purpose of extermination no matter whether inmates were capable of work or not.
And by the way: "Revisionist" does not necessarily mean a "Denier". The term "Revisionist" derives from Latin RE-VISERE ("to view again"). I do not know how many Revisionists "look again" at the existing evidence, the term itself is usually very narrowly understood, unfortunately...

Andrew E. Mathis said...

You write, "The official story has it that camps like Sobibor, Belzec or Treblinka were not labour camps but camps serving only the purpose of extermination no matter whether inmates were capable of work or not."

I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. Yes, the three camps you mention were camps built for the purpose of extermination. Ergo, selections were made in the ghettoes that "fed" these camps — and very rarely at the camps themselves.

Auschwitz (where this woman's grandmother was) is known to have regularly submitted deportees to Selektion. Nothing that the woman in the video said contradicts or "revises" what we've known about the Holocaust since the 1940s.

Unknown said...

The latest revisionist documentary on Treblinka is here - www.gaschamberhoax.com People can decide for themselves if they have been lied to or not.

Rugestnom said...

It was you, Andrew, who stated: "No Holocaust historian has EVER stated that Jews capable of working were not kept alive." Actually plenty of them stated THAT. And this is exactly what I am "trying to prove".

Once again I state that "Revisionist" is not the same as "Denier". Many view of various sides in the debate overlap each other.

Andrew E. Mathis said...

Rugestnom, please provide the names of historians who have made this claim.

Rugestnom said...

You do not need to look far: just look in Raul Hilberg's Magnum Opus, "The Destruction of European Jews", published at least twice (1961 and 1985) and which is available both in its full version (3 volumes) and in its "abridged" verion (1 volume). There are plenty of instances with such claim.
By the way: for the last at least 20 years David Irving is also making such claim, to know this you do not even need to go to any library, just listen to videos on Youtube.
Thus I gave you 2 examples, 1 non-Revisionist and 1 Revisionist.
I could well go on to list dozens if not hundreds of names, both historians and "survivors" who not only WERE making such claim but continue to do so even now...

Andrew E. Mathis said...

I think we might be misunderstanding each other.

If you are stating that both Hilberg and Irving wrote/stated that Jews were not 100% exterminated at Nazi camps identified as death camps, i.e., that some were syphoned off for labor, with that number varying based on place and time, then we agree.

If you are stating that Hilberg wrote in 1961 that Jews were killed at these camps with no exceptions, then you're 100% wrong.

Please clarify.

Rugestnom said...

The point is that BOTH authors were stating that there were Jews who were used as labour force and that there were also Jews who were killed without any endeavour to use them in such capacity. There are of course HUGE differences between both authors but this is another matter.
I suppose that the main misunderstanding here is the following one: the Author of the above post sees the comment made by the Jewess in the video as "Revisionist friendly" while you do not see anything "Revisionist friendly" there. I think I know why. The notion that the Germans were killing their victims without any previous use of them as labour force is MORE PREVALENT among non-Revisionists while the Revisionists see the German policy either as more benevolent or less malevolent than that.
So both the Author and yourself can claim the point here. I merely do not see anything illogical in the way the Author commented on the whole thing.
By the way: the only difference between the 1961 and 1985 editions of Hilberg's book I know of is, that in 1961 he claimed that the so-called "Holocaust" was perpetrated on TWO orders from Hitler, while in 1985 he NO LONGER made that claim as there is no such order known. But this is only my "footnote" to the matter

Unknown said...

Rugestnom,
Have you seen the documentary One Third of the Holocaust http://codoh.com/library/document/534 It uses The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg as source material and points out discrepancies to dispute holocaust claims.

Andrew E. Mathis said...

Have you seen my refutation thereof?

onethirdoftheholocaust.blogspot.com

Rugestnom said...

Yes, colleagues, I have seen both of them, the first contains however much more material, but I am not relying only on the "One Third" or on your "refutation thereof"...