LETTER: ERASE MY GRAND FATHER'S NAME FROM THE YAD VASHEM MEMORIAL

Open letter to the President of Israel by Jean-Moïse
Braitberg, Writer and Author.

Mr. President of the State of Israel ,

I am writing to ask you to intervene on my behalf to whom
ever it may concern, to withdraw from the Yad Vashem
Memorial dedicated to the memory of Jewish victims of
Nazism, the name of my grandfather Moshe Bratberg, gassed in
Treblinka in 1943, as well as the other members of my family
who perished in different Nazi concentration camps during
the second world war.

I ask of you Mr. President, to accede to my demand, because
what happened in Gaza recently, and in a wider perspective,
the fate imposed on the Palestinian people over the past
sixty years, disqualifies totally, in my view, Israel as the
center on Remembrance of the Evil done to the Jews and
therefore to all of Humanity.

Let me explain; since Infancy I have been surrounded by
survivors of the Death Camps. I have seen the tattooed
numbers on peoples' arms. I heard horrible stories of
tortures. I felt their impossible mourning and shared their
nightmares.

I was taught, that these crimes should never be allowed to
be repeated; that a Human being, proud to be a member of an
Ethnic or Religious group, should not be allowed to despise
another Human being or trample all over his most elementary
human Rights that should translate in a dignified and secure
life with total absence of obstacles or hindrances but with
a light, of a serene and prospering future, at the end of a
tunnel whatever the length of it may be.

However, Mr. President, I note that in spite of tens of
resolutions taken by the International Community, in spite
of the obvious evidence of the injustice done to the
Palestinian People since 1948 and despite the flickers of
Hope that were lit at Oslo and despite the recognition of
the Right for the Jewish Israelis to live in peace and
security, reasserted many a time and regularly by the
Palestinian Authority, the only responses, given by your
countries successive governments, have been Violence, Blood
spills, Internments, continuous Check Points, Colonization,
and Spoliations.

You may say, Mr. President, that it is within your
country's legitimate right to defend itself against
those who fire rockets on Israel or the Kamikazes who take
with them numerous innocent Israeli lives. To which I would
answer, that my human sensitivity does not vary according to
victims' citizenship.

On the other hand, Mr. President, you are leading a country
that claims to represent, not only, all Jews as a nation but
also the memory of those who were the victims of the Nazi.
This is exactly what concerns me and disturbs me immensely;
Retaining the names of my family at the Yad Vashem Memorial
in the heart of the Jewish State, your country is holding,
my cherished family's memory hostage, behind Zionism
barbed wire, of a so-called Moral Authority that commits on
a daily basis the Abomination of the denial of Justice.

So please, Mr. President, withdraw the name of my Grand
Father from the sanctuary dedicated to the cruelty committed
against Jews so that it does not justify the cruelty
committed against Palestinians.

Best respectful regards,

Jean-Moïse Braitberg,
Author, writer