Messinger and Zuroff speak at Holocaust Centre with Limmud

26 Dec 07 – The Holocaust Centre – home of the Aegis Trust – became a satellite of the Limmud conference for a day earlier this week with sessions from Ruth Messinger, President of the American Jewish World Service, Ephraim Zuroff, Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, and survivors of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide.

Zuroff offered a compelling overview of the Wiesenthal Centre’s investigations of Nazi war criminals, highlighting the need to deny impunity to the perpetrators of genocide no matter how old they might be.

“In a world in which there have been several genocides since the Shoah, a place like this, a place like Beth Shalom, stands out as a beacon of light, enlightenment and education,” Ephraim Zuroff commented. “The world sorely needs institutions like this. On behalf of the Wiesenthal Centre, I would like to say thank you to the Smith brothers, and to wish them and the Aegis Trust much success in their wonderful and important endeavours.”

Messinger discussed the work of the American Jewish World Service in aiding relief and development in the Third World, before going on to address the Darfur crisis. The first woman to secure the Democratic Party's nomination for Mayor of New York, for the past five years Ruth Messinger has been named one of the 50 most influential Jews of the year by the Forward, which put her in the top spot on the list in 2005.

Under her leadership, the AJWS was instrumental in founding the Save Darfur Coalition, an advocacy group comprising dozens of US-based religious and civil society organisations. Save Darfur has helped to give the crisis greater profile in the US than in any other country to date – and it has supported valuable work internationally, including some of that undertaken by the Aegis Trust.

“Let me be absolutely clear, it's my privilege to be here,” Ruth Messinger said in opening her talk. “Having met James, and read Stephen's book [Making Memory], and followed the story of this extraordinary place, I said I would come to Limmud if I could get to Beth Shalom.

“I've been to the museum in Kigali which Aegis has done; the museum is just extraordinary. It tells the story of the Rwandan genocide magnificently, but it also tells the story of genocide through the 20th Century … and that in a sense brings me to our own story. Because as Jews, who know better than anyone else the dangers of silence from the rest of the world, we have lived through, depending on your age in this room, Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda and now Darfur. So our verbal contribution to the rest of the world – ‘Never Again’ –  is rapidly losing all meaning. Genocide has occurred again and again and again.

“So let me talk about Darfur. This genocide is happening on our watch and we no longer have any excuses that might have existed in terms of the way information did or didn't spread during the Shoah… And regardless how active any one of you in this room is, and I say this to myself as well, by definition we're not doing enough. Because people are still being killed.”

Messinger concluded with an impassioned appeal for people everywhere to divest their money from companies involved in Sudan’s oil industry, which fuels ethnic cleansing in Darfur. “In some small way, any of us who are not eyeballing our pension funds and trying to increase the economic pressure on Sudan is actually buying a weapon,” she said. “I really want you to try to think about it this way, that it's not only that too many of us are doing too little, but that in some way, many of us are actually supporting the genocide, even though of course it is our intention not to do that.”

The presentations by Ephraim Zuroff and Ruth Messinger sandwiched a discussion involving Holocaust survivor Martin Stern and Rwandan Genocide survivor Beatha Uwazaninka, regular speakers at the Centre who have both taken an active role in campaigning for an end to the Darfur crisis.  After briefly relating their personal experiences, they discussed issues of accountability, justice, and the imperative to act in the face of genocide today.

“The impact of the Holocaust doesn't diminish with time. If anything I think it increases. Every second of every minute of every day of my life is affected by it,” commented Martin Stern, one of only 100 children to survive the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. “Yet if I do nothing about Darfur, what right have I to protest about the people who did nothing about the Holocaust?”