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→ 15 December 2023
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Rampant antisemitism in New Zealand’s schools – HCNZ

In an ongoing survey of Jewish parents being undertaken by the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand since 22 November 2023, there is concerning evidence of high levels of antisemitism in New Zealand’s schools.

50% of the parents who have completed the survey said their children had been subjected to antisemitism in schools since 7 October 2023.  The age range of children affected was 9 -18 years of age. Only 40% of parents reported incidents to schools, one commenting that the school in question had handled incidents badly previously. Other respondents reported that they find it preferable to go directly to the parents of the bullying child and another saying their school was ill-equipped to deal with antisemitism.

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→ 19 October 2023
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“We will never forget, but will not be captive to the past”

The Press 18 October 2023

Juliet Moses

Julian Moses is a spokesperson for the New Zealand Jewish Council.

“Hamas did not build a state, but a terrorist infrastructure to destroy one.”

Jews are an ancient people with a long collective memory. Embedded in the memory, alongside happier times, our massacres we have suffered – during this destruction of our two temples in Jerusalem by the Babylonians and Romans, the 1190 massacre at York Castle, the pogroms of the Russian Empi (which my family flew), the 1929 Hebron rights, the Nazis’ Kristallnacht 1938, Baghdad’s Farhud of 1941, the 1972 Munich Olympics, to name a few.

Now there is another messenger that we will carry with us. October 7, 2023.

On our joyous festival of some Torah, Hamas, the year-round-backed terrorist regime that rules Gaza, stage a mass coordinated terror attack on Israelis with thousands of rockets and infiltration by more than 1500 members.

More than 1400 Israelis were murdered (proportionately in New Zealand, that would be about 770 people) and thousands hospitalised. More than 190 hospitals remained in Gaza. It was the deadliest day for us since the Holocaust.

As President Biden said: “this attack is brought to the surface painful memories and the scars left by millennia of anti-Semitism and genocide of the Jewish people.”

The barbarity, gleefully broadcast to the world, is unspeakable. Literally. Hardened war correspondence and soldiers at the scene had been rendered speechless, crying and retching.

There were raped women paraded through Gaza like trophies, Holocaust survivors and children taken hostage in Taunton, babies burned in the cops, families riddled with bullets while in hiding, a woman’s execution uploaded onto Facebook for her granddaughter to discover, 260 revellers at a music festival – peace – slaughter, shot in the back and safely and dismembered by grenades as they had in a bomb shelter.

The victims included Arabs (who comprise 20% of Israel’s citizens) and many other nationalities. Elderly peace activist Vivian Silva, who drove cancer-stricken Gazans to Jerusalem for treatment, is presumed adducted.

It leaves an indelible bloodied stain on the frame fabric of humanity.

Our pain and read are soothed by the many Kiwis who have expressed their horror and supported us, and compounded by those who not even allowed us the dignity and time to mourn.

While the death squads still stalled their prey through Israel and we were desperately missed during our family and friends need to check on them, the celebrations, justifications, equivocation, sanitisations and contextualisations began.

In New Zealand came from politicians, academics, columnists, a formal all-black, and (I will limit the word “civil”) society groups.

In declaiming about decolonisation, liberation, power imbalances, resistance and justice, they had to history’s long list of codewords like Christ-killers, poisoning the wells, Usery, and racial purity, that legitimise the dehumanisation and massacre of Jews. Yet, it is they who have lost their humanity.

Thousands marched in Auckland on Saturday, shutting the Hamas rallying cry “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” demanding the annihilation of Israel, where almost half the world’s Jewish population of some 15 million lives. We do not feel safe.

There was also the silence, including from those we believe to be friends, record the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “In the end, we remember not the words of our enemies, the silence of our friends.”

As a moral duty of anyone who cares about the Palestinian people and wants peace to unequivocally condemn these atrocities, demand the release of hostages and reject the insidious inversion of morality in reality being propagated.

That inversion will talk about occupation and blockades, but omit to mention that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, dismantling every settlement and removing every two (including those buried there).

It created the conditions for Palestinians to self-government for the first time in history, to be free and flourish, and coexist peacefully with the neighbours.

Instead, they elected Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist regime, after which both Israel and Egypt imposed military blockades to defend their borders.

Hamas did not build a state, but a terrorist infrastructure to destroy one.

Hamas does not want, and violently derails, peace – except that which the founder of Palestinian nationalism, Yasser Arafat, envisaged when he said, “peace for us means the destruction of Israel.”

Actually, can be no peace without the destruction of the genocidal ideology of Hamas. Enshrined in Hamas’ founding document as the unambiguous injunction to both obliterate Israel and Jews.

Hamas knows that, unlike itself, as well sees its first duty is protecting its people. Hamas launched this attack – for terrorism, not territory – understanding is people, who had two holes hostage, would pay a terrible price.

What would you demand of our government if there were an army of over 30,000 Isis-like terrorists and our border, willing and able to continue their genocidal mission?

In the meantime, Jewish people will do what we have always done. We will outlast Hamas, as with all our enemies who have sought our destruction through our civilisation.

We will never forget, but will not be captive to the past. We want to smear for all innocent lives lost. And to all those who on our right to self-determination, freedom and dignity, we will honour the same in return and continue to out stretch our arms in peace.

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→ 1 May 2023
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Israel at 75 | NZFOI

This is the speech given by Tony Kan, President of NZ Friends of Israel Association Inc at the Israel at 75 commemorative lunch held in Christchurch on April 30, 2023.

Mr Ambassador, Shmuel and the other members the Board of Management of the Canterbury Hebrew Congregation, to the committee members of NZ Friends of Israel, to the members of the NZ Friends of Israel and other supporters of Israel, on behalf of the New Zealand Friends of Israel, welcome.

One of the earliest records of New Zealand’s support for the Jewish people is recorded in a speech before the House of Parliament by Sir George Grey, in 1891, who said:

“…that New Zealand take for the first time a place amongst the nations of the world, in moving a question which is of common interest to all mankind, and formally recognize that it is the duty of the New Zealand nation, however small or however great it may be, to do all the good it possibly can for people in all parts of the world.”

He then placed before the House a motion:

“That a memorial be addressed to His Imperial Majesty of All the Russias, respectfully praying that all exceptional and restrictive laws which afflict His Jewish subjects may be repealed, and that equal rights with those enjoyed by the rest of His Majesty’s subjects may be conferred upon them.  That the said memorial be signed by the Speaker, and be by him transmitted to his Majesty.”

Zionism, which is the movement for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, was supported by many countries in the early part of the 20th century, including New Zealand.

One of the ways in which New Zealand supported Zionism was by endorsing the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which expressed the British government’s support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. New Zealand was one of the countries that voted in favor of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922, which gave Britain the responsibility of administering the territory and preparing it for self-government.

Peter Fraser, who served as the Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1940 to 1949, was a supporter of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Figure 1  Sir Peter Fraser

Fraser had extensive contacts with New Zealand’s Jewish community and local and visiting Zionists.  Like Savage, he was a close friend of the Jewish brewer, Ernest Davies.  He attended a reception given by the Auckland Jewish community for David Ben-Gurion in January 1941 when Ben-Gurion was returning to Palestine after an unsuccessful attempt to arouse American Jewish opposition to the 1939 White Paper.  When the Zionist Federation of New Zealand held its first Dominion Conference in Wellington in 1943, Fraser delivered an understanding and thoughtful address.

In addressing the United Nations delegates at the San Francisco Conference in April 1945, Fraser asserted that:

“Whatever can be done to help the persecuted Jewish people shall and must be done to the utmost ability of all right-thinking men…

There should be no antagonism or misunderstanding between the Jewish and Arab peoples, everyone living in Palestine would naturally benefit from what the Jewish people have made out of a land which was once desert, until the desert bloomed as a rose. Palestine is very akin to the ideals of New Zealand except that the Jewish people went into Palestine with a tradition of privation…

…I hope and believe that the representatives from this country who take part in the counsels stand foursquare for justice for the ancient home and new hope of the Jewish people.”

New Zealand supported the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and eventually voted in favor of the UN partition plan that called for the creation of separate Jewish and Arab states in Palestine.

Yizthak Triester reports that: Yet before the vote, the New Zealand Prime Minster was torn:  He wanted the United Nations to succeed as an international body. He wanted Britain to be allowed to withdraw from Palestine. But he knew that without an international military presence, the Partition Plan would lead to war. He voiced his concerns to Carl Berendsen, New Zealand’s delegate to the United Nations.

Figure 2  Sir Carl Berendsen

By November 21, Fraser had made up his mind. He told the British Secretary of State that, “We must support partition as the solution which offers the best possible hope, however small, of dealing with the situation as it exists at the present time.”

However, Berendsen continued pushing the UN to delay the vote until a better solution was found, preferably with the United States committing to send soldiers to the region to enforce the decision.

Figure 3  Chaim Weizmann

On November 22, Chaim Weizmann, who would become Israel’s first president, sent a telegram to Fraser, stressing that if New Zealand abstained from the committee vote on partition, “through doubt on certain issues,” New Zealand would prejudice the only chance for a decision.

As the deadline for the vote approached, Fraser replied to Weizmann that partition without enforcement was, “futile and seems calculated to lead to bloodshed and chaos.”

Isaac Gotlieb counted Berendsen as a friend and neighbour, though they did not see eye to eye on the issues of Judaism or Zionism. And Carl had his doubts about the partition plan.

By now, Fraser realized that without New Zealand’s vote, the Partition Plan may not receive the necessary two thirds majority. Although he feared the plan was flawed, he knew there was no alternative. So, before the vote, he went to discuss his options with Isaac Gottlieb.

Figure 4  Isaac Gottlieb

Isaac Gotlieb was a passionate Zionist. In 1943, he became the first head of the New Zealand Zionist Federation. He traveled the country raising money for the Zionist cause, and in 1946, he represented New Zealand at the first World Zionist Convention in Basel.

Isaac Gotlieb was born in Latvia in 1891 and emigrated to NZ in 1909, having completed his apprenticeship as a carpenter in Wales, and after a few years, in 1924 at the age of 33 opened his own company called The Art Cabinet Co.

He became a very successful businessman. During the depression years, while others went bankrupt, Isaac and his brother Morris flourished.

He mixed in social circles that included Fraser, and other government officials. When the prime minister and his colleagues came to visit my great uncle on just before the partition vote, he employed every argument he had to convince them that they should support it.  It worked.

In a speech to the New Zealand Parliament on 27 November 1947, Fraser stated his government’s support for the partition plan, which proposed the creation of separate Jewish and Arab states in Palestine.

In his speech, Fraser said,

“It is the solemn duty of the General Assembly to create a free and independent state of Israel, and to guarantee it a secure existence in the world. This is an act of justice that we owe to the Jewish people, who have suffered so much in recent years. At the same time, we recognize the rights of the Arab people, and we hope that the two states will live side by side in peace and friendship.”

On 29 November 1947, New Zealand was one of the 33 countries that voted in favour of the partition plan, while 13 countries voted against it and 10 abstained. New Zealand’s support for the partition plan was based on its belief that the Jewish people had a legitimate claim to a homeland in Palestine, and that the partition plan was a fair and practical solution to the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the region.

After the establishment of Israel in 1948, New Zealand was one of the first countries to recognize its independence. New Zealand also provided military and other forms of support to Israel in its early years, including sending a small contingent of troops to serve with the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) in the region.

75 years later, Fraser’s hopes for Israel have been realised.  Today, Israel’s economy is a source of regional employment and wealth.  With the Abrahamic Accords, regional peace is another step closer.  And if further peace can be given a chance and maintained, then the economic windfall for all concerned, not just Jews, would be astronomical. 

Today, Mr Ambassador, New Zealand continues to stand with Israel, affirming its right to exist, and working with Israel to ensure peace prevails, so that all may live and become anything they lawfully aspire to be.

In the desert, the Rose is blooming.

Thank you for your attention.

FAREWELL

Folks, thanks again for taking the time to come out and share in this special occasion. 

Please do take home a balloon or two as a momento.

Before you go, I’d like to thank you, Shmuel, member of the Board of Management of the Canterbury Hebrew Congregation, for all your help in getting this event going.  I’d also like to thank Rebecca Marchand, our secretary for ably organizing the ticket sales and communicating with ticketholders, to Yoko Allan, David Allan, Alison Clarke and John Clarke for all their work in scouting out the venue and for handling the decorations.  I’d also like to thank you all for your support, without which this event would not be possible.

And of course, I’d like to thank the Ambassador himself for making the time to come, for sponsoring the event, and for the Israel-NZ badges, which may be obtained from Sarah, over there.

The Torah Prophet, Zechariah said,

Thus says the Lord: I have returned to Zion and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem shall be called the faithful city, and the mountain of the Lord of hosts, the holy mountain.

           4      Thus says the Lord of hosts: Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of great age.

           5      And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets.

           6      Thus says the Lord of hosts: If it is marvelous in the sight of the remnant of this people in those days, should it also be marvelous in my sight, declares the Lord of hosts?

           7      Thus says the Lord of hosts: Behold, I will save my people from the east country and from the west country,

           8      and I will bring them to dwell in the midst of Jerusalem. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God, in faithfulness and in righteousness.” [1]

And the Torah prophet Ezekiel said:

     37:1      The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones.

           2      And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry.

           3      And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”

           4      Then he said to me, “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.

           5      Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.

           6      And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

           7      So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone.

           8      And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. But there was no breath in them.

           9      Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.”

         10      So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.

         11      Then he said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are indeed cut off.’

         12      Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel.

         13      And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people.

         14      And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I am the Lord; I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the Lord.” [2]

Zechariah spoke around 520 BCE and Ezekiel 586 BCE:  They spoke over 2,500 years ago.

Can we not stand back and behold what has happened and not be marvelled? 

Am Yisrael chai, the People of Israel live.

Please join me in saying it again.

Am Yisrael chai, the People of Israel live.

And again.

Am Yisrael chai, the People of Israel live.

As you leave with that thought to ponder, may you return to your homes safely.  Thank you.

[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Zec 8:3–8). (2016). Crossway Bibles.

[2] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Eze 37:1–14). (2016). Crossway Bibles.

The PowerPoint Slide Deck may be found here.

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→ 9 April 2023
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Resilience – Inge Woolf’s story of survival and triumph | Stuff

Inge Woolf with her daughter, Deborah Hart.

It was to be one last mother daughter adventure: penning the story of a lifetime.

They had been on a few journeys together, Inge Woolf and Deborah Hart. This last one, though, would be bittersweet.

Holocaust survivor Woolf had been part-way through writing her memoir in 2020 when she was told she was dying.

A practical woman, a realist, she told her family simply that everyone had to die sometime, recalls Hart.

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→ 11 July 2021
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Reckoning with the Nazi past of the man who helped build Mt Hutt skifield | Stuff

Mr and Mrs Willi and Edna Huber

We may never know the full truth about Huber’s four years in the service of the Nazi regime. But, while some secrets die hard, the truth sometimes has a way of coming to the surface.

In Autumn 1943, Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman saw mass graves in the areas of Eastern Europe where Huber served and where Nazi death squads murdered millions of Jews.

‘The earth is throwing out crushed bones, teeth, clothes, papers,’’ Grossman wrote.

“It does not want to keep secrets.”

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→ 14 June 2021
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New Zealand’s first Anne Frank memorial unveiled in Wellington | Stuff

Boyd Klap was a key person involved in creating the memorial, the first of its kind in New Zealand. The three chairs, with one facing away, represents exclusion.

In a grass clearing overlooking Wellington a memorial in the form of three steel chairs has been installed.

Unlike a typical memorial consisting of a park bench and a plaque with an idyllic view of the city, the chairs engage in simple object theatre, designer Matthijs Siljee​ said.

“If new visitors were to walk up the path and their eye level comes level with the grass, they will all of a sudden think ‘hey someone has left some chairs behind.’ It is in that unassuming way that the memorial will introduce itself to the visitors,” Siljee said.

Located in Ellice Park in Mt Victoria, the memorial is the first of its kind in New Zealand, commemorating Anne Frank and the 1.5 million children who were killed during the holocaust.

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→ 10 June 2021
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How long before we can forgive? Nazi-Hunter responds | HAAFANZ

Ephraim Zuroff

Lana Hart’s op-ed (“How long before we can forgive?” June 7) raised many important questions regarding the justice system and the attitude toward criminal offenders, among them the recently-deceased former Waffen-SS officer Willi Huber, who achieved hero status among local skiers for his contribution to the establishment of the skiing facilities on Mt. Hutt. Ms. Hart brings several examples of people punished for their behavior and a wide range of responses by the criminals to their punishments.

And while she notes the importance of the severity of the original wrongdoing  in determining a person’s punishment, and the principle of proportionality, she fails to understand the significance of Huber’s crimes and fails to attribute sufficient importance to his lack of remorse and  his obvious adulation for the leader of the most genocidal regime in human history.

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→ 10 May 2021
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The Nazi Who Built Mount Hutt | North and South

The untold story of a former Waffen-SS soldier who lied his way into New Zealand — and got away with it.

By Andrew Macdonald and Naomi Arnold

Cover illustration by Ross Murray

In a lonely lodge high in New Zealand’s Southern Alps, three soldiers sipped schnapps and swapped war stories long into the winter night. It was a Saturday evening in the mid-1960s, freezing cold outside, and the middle-aged veterans were relaxing after a day spent wheeling down the ski slopes of North Canterbury. They knocked back nips at one end of the common room while other guests at the private lodge chatted around the roaring pot-bellied stove at the other. The bottle drew empty as the evening drew long.

Charlie Upham, in his mid-50s and reserved, was an infantry legend, the holder of the exceptionally rare Victoria Cross and Bar for battlefield valour in Greece, Crete and North Africa. Brian Rawson, a more sociable man of a similar age, had commanded Sherman tanks in North Africa and Italy. The third man was Willi Huber, a charismatic Austrian in his 40s with blond-brown hair and grey eyes, and he had a very different kind of war story.

Rawson, by then a banker in Christchurch, and Upham, who’d taken up farming in Hundalee, had hired Huber as a ski instructor for a few weeks at Amuri Ski Lodge near Hanmer Springs. Huber had emigrated to New Zealand in the 1950s, and told people he had been roped into the German army as a teenager — meaning he had fought for Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in World War II. Upham and Rawson accepted this. “We might have been shooting at one another,” Rawson joked to Huber.

“Soldiers understand that soldiers get called up, and that it’s all political,” recalls Debbie Rawson, Brian’s daughter, who Huber taught to ski. To the two Kiwi veterans, Huber was just a regular “good guy”, popular with the ski-lodge crowd and one of thousands of Europeans starting a new life in postwar New Zealand. Debbie remembers the three men drinking and chatting together in the lodge’s common room, “telling jokes and roaring their heads off with laughter”.

The Austrian went on to build a name for himself in the clannish Canterbury outdoors scene as an expert skier and alpine hiker. He took an interest in people and pitched in to get things done, in the Kiwi way. His crowning achievement was helping establish the internationally known Mount Hutt ski field, which memorialised him with an advanced 821-metre ski run named Huber’s Run as well as a plaque in his honour. Huber’s Hut restaurant served Huber’s Breakfast Burger, Huber’s Smoked Salmon Salad, Willie’s Angus Burger, and Willie’s Midweek Breakfast Special. His achievements were celebrated in a string of articles over the years in local and national media that only briefly touched on his past as a “war hero” in the “German army”.

Then, in 2017, came a shocking admission: Huber told TVNZ’s Sunday programme he had served in Hitler’s feared elite guard, the Waffen-SS. This was at stark odds with the narrative he had carefully maintained for 65 years. Far from being a naive conscript, Huber had volunteered for one of the most notorious criminal organisations the world has ever known. Following the interview, and particularly after his death in August 2020, pressure mounted to strip Huber’s name from Mt Hutt.

Nearly a year after Huber’s death, his past has never been fully unravelled. Many of his stories remain accepted without scrutiny. Now, for the first time, drawing on interviews with people who knew him and official documents from archives, libraries and private collections in five countries, North & South has pieced together the life of this Nazi warrior turned Kiwi alpine legend. We discovered that the true nature of his role in the war was very different from what he claimed, and that he lied on his immigration application in order to enter New Zealand. On multiple occasions over the years, he spoke of his service for Nazi Germany with pride.

In the 1960s, Huber and Upham’s paths crossed at Craigieburn Valley Ski Area, in inland Canterbury. Huber overheard some skiers talking excitedly about the presence of a double Victoria Cross winner. He later told his friend Len Vidgen that he became quite “peeved” at all the attention Upham was getting. “He thought, ‘Fuck that, I’ve got an Iron Cross’,” Vidgen says. Huber told Vidgen that he got into his car and drove the four-hour return journey to retrieve the medal from his home in Christchurch. When he got back, he showed it to Upham: a black cross pattée of iron with a silver frame — and in the middle, a swastika.

Read the article in the June issue of North and South Magazine. Available through your library or nearest bookseller.

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→ 9 April 2021
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The man who survived Dr Mengele | Newsroom

Benjamin Steiner

Benjamin Steiner died in Auckland last week at the age of 81, and as Mark Jennings writes, his life story was unique in many ways

Benjamin Steiner cut a distinctive figure with his dapper clothes, trilby hat and twinkly eyes. But belying that appearance, his body covered in scars and the number A-421734 tattooed on his left forearm, was a terrible truth.

Steiner was a survivor of Auschwitz, and the subject of the notorious Dr Josef Mengele’s experiments.

The small, softly-spoken man lived in New Zealand most of his life. He was a professional and passionate saxophonist and worked as chief purser for the airline that became Air New Zealand.

Born in 1935 in Budapest, he was 8 years old when he was transported to Auschwitz – Birkenau in a railway wagon. By 1944, 12,000 Jews were being delivered to Auschwitz on an average day.

Winston Churchill once described the treatment of Hungarian Jews as the “greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world…”.

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→ 8 April 2021
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The Holocaust Is My Heritage: Bearing the Scars and Stories of Survivor Grandparents | Haaretz

My last photo with my Zayde

NZFOI: Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah

My Zayde told us about his childhood in Kazimierz, and about burying half-alive bodies in Buchenwald. What it means to be the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, and to lose them.

He and his father were imprisoned in Plaszow concentration camp, where he said every day brought a new tragedy. He would tell us, in unadorned language, that he saw young boys being hanged for stealing bread, and that’s when he learned you say the Shema prayer before you die. He piled earth over bodies, after they were shot dead, and was haunted by watching the soil shiver – the victims were still alive, and slowly suffocating.

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