Richard Prasquier, President of CRIF, expressed his satisfaction with the improved Jewish-Polish relations and announced that CRIF and the Polish Library in Paris would be organising a symposium in Paris next June.
Together with Polish Ambassador Tomasz Orlowski, he spoke of the heroic action of Irena Sendler, the Polish Righteous One who died a year ago and who saved 2500 children by getting them out of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The President of CRIF also spoke of the “events which took place in January”. While attentive to “the suffering of the Palestinians” and the distress of “all the families”, he denounced the confusion between what took place in Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto and the accusations of genocide levelled at Israel.
In a related issue, Ariel Goldmann, representing CRIF at the commemoration of France’s Jewish deportees, recalled the memory of the 78 000 Jews deported from France by the Nazis with the complicity of the Vichy government, without forgetting to pay tribute to the Gentiles who, at the peril of their lives, saved many Jews in France.
He insisted on the duty that all people have to remember and on the necessity for relentlessly fighting anti-Semites and negationists, to ensure they have no right of say in our country. “The anti-Jewish aggressions of recent years, indeed recent months, testify that the foulest anti-Semitic ideas are still circulating. This is unacceptable. Warped religious fanaticism is threatening Jews, just as it is threatening the rest of the Western world. To think that today it is possible to stand for election with a political manifesto exclusively based on the hatred of Zionists, just like in 1938 it had been possible to stand for election exclusively on the premise of anti-Semitism, sends shivers down our spine,” concluded Ariel Goldman.
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