Who was the perpetrator of the Genocide and what is it worth for the Jewish rabbis to know?
President Isaac Herzog’s handshake after receiving the credentials of the new Ambassador of Azerbaijan Mukhtar Mammadov in 2023.
Azerbaijan won over Israel to its side with huge sums of money, buying weapons, lobbying work, and the latter seems to approach the Armenian Genocide with “jealousy”. It is unusual, but a fact. In a letter signed by more than 100 rabbis after Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s
interview with France-Presse in July, they accuse Armenia of distorting the memory of the genocide and damaging Azerbaijan’s reputation.
Interestingly, among these rabbis are one of the most famous Shabad rabbis in Europe, Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs ((J.S. (Binyomin) Jacobs)) of the Netherlands, who previously sometimes participated in events organized by the Armenian community, and Rabbi Baruch Oberloander of Budapest (Hungary).
Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs of the Netherlands
Canaan Lidor published the article in the five-language Israeli magazine
Times of Israel in mid-September under the title “European rabbis take an unusual step to condemn comparisons of Armenians with the Holocaust”. The rabbis were upset by the following statement of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan:
“…No genocide known to you happened so that one day they woke up and started slaughtering. Let’s go after the world’s most famous story of genocide, the Holocaust. Did Hitler come to power, did he draw his sword and start going after the Jews in the streets the next day? No, it took years, a process that was very readable and predictable. It was expressed in rhetoric, it was expressed in politics.
Now a ghetto has been created in Nagorno-Karabakh, literally. I say again, sometimes we don’t make the terms understandable, we give people headings: humanitarian crisis, humanitarian crisis. Some percentage of the audience understands what it is in every detail, but the majority doesn’t do, because it’s none of their business. Humanitarian crisis, what is humanitarian, what is crisis? But today Azerbaijan is creating a ghetto in Nagorno-Karabakh…”.
The rabbis, more than a hundred of them, believe that these comparisons are inappropriate and insult the dignity of the Jewish people who suffered the Holocaust. The letter follows an Azeri rabbi calling attention to Armenian leader’ s rhetoric regarding the Holocaust in Jewish and other media. Baku News.az agency describes Baku rabbi Zamir Isaev as “the initiator of the European and American rabbis’ campaign” against “Armenian propaganda” and the use of topics related to the Holocaust.
The author of the article, Canaan Lidor, finds that European Chabad rabbis rarely respond to geopolitical issues, a task usually reserved for the European Jewish Association, a Brussel based advocacy group headed by Menachem Margolin.
In fact, Azerbaijan has a good and powerful lobbying apparatus in the European Union, the United States and beyond, and is able to unite Jewish rabbis around it. As
reported by the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS), one of the organizers of the rabbinic conference held in Azerbaijan is the Orthodox Rabbinical Alliance in Europe, which unites more than 700 religious leaders across the continent.
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Rabbi Pinkas Goldschmidt – President of European Rabbis’ Conference |
“Azerbaijan is a place of special memory for the Jewish people and is home to one of the most unique Jewish communities in the world,” said Rabbi Pinkas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, who met Aliyev earlier this year. Rabbi Goldschmidt’s words were followed by the statement of Aliyev’s representative Elchin Amirbayov. “The fact that this European rabbinical conference will be held here in Baku is a recognition that people feel safe here. It’s just the right place.” This opinion is not shared by the chief rabbi of Armenia, Gershon Meir Burstein, who accused Azerbaijani rabbi Zamir Isayev and the rabbis of Europe, who called the Jews to leave Yerevan.
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Chief Rabbi of Armenia Gershon Meir Burstein |
The chief rabbi of Armenia called on Isayev, his colleague of Azerbaijan, to
take care of his work. “People who should have preached peace and morality in their countries are busy with it, I don’t want to insist, but I don’t rule it out either. They are throwing mud and practicing evil policies, subject to financial or other temptations,” he said and advised the European Union. chief rabbis to perform their proper duties. “Your remote condemnations, which have no basis, showed your ignorance, because the terms genocide and ghetto have been used for a long time and are international.”
“It would be better to reconsider what you are doing and what your actions may lead to. I am sure that this does not lead to peace,” concluded the Armenian rabbi.
Already against this background, the far-reaching goals of the provocation to burn down the door to Synagogue in Yerevan
become clear.
Azerbaijan considers itself an ally of Israel and the main supplier of gasoline to the Jewish state. Its officials often insist that their country has no anti-Semitism, and it was the first Muslim-majority country to include the Holocaust in the curriculum for high school students. It is also a major consumer of Israeli weapons, having bought more than $5 billion worth of weapons that Baku used in the 2020 Artsakh war.
Azerbaijani officials have often compared the Holocaust, which killed an estimated six million Jews, to the 1992 Khojaly massacre of Azerbaijani civilians.
The Azerbaijani government says that 613 people were killed during the crime committed by the Armenian troops.
The website of the Ministry of Defense of Azerbaijan states that “Khojalu is no different from other terrible tragedies of Katyn, Lidice, Oradur-sur-Glan, Holocaust, Songmi, Rwanda and Srebrenica, which have remained in history as deep and shameful scars.”
The reality is that the Armenian nation has a special connection with the Jewish people in its destiny and that pain was born from the common experience of the genocide. Israel and Armenia “share a common history in painful and sad times related to the Holocaust and the destruction of millions of people in the Armenian Genocide,” said former President Armen Sarkissian in a 2020 speech in Holon, near Tel Aviv, referring to Turkish soldiers during the First World War. to the murder of hundreds of thousands of Armenians.”
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Zamir Isayev – Rabbi of Azerbaijan |
In fact, the rabbi of Azerbaijan, Zamir Isaev, managed to mislead the rabbis of Europe and America in different ways, prompting them to initiate a campaign against Armenians and Armenia, he even persistently convinced the Jews living in Armenia to leave the country and go to Azerbaijan.
It is interesting that days after the article dated September 19 in the Israeli magazine Times of Israel, Azerbaijan was supposed to carry out ethnic cleansing in Artsakh and more than 100,000 people were to be forcibly deported. This is exactly what Nikol Pashinyan predicted in his interview to France-Presse agency and did not devalue the reality of the Holocaust.
And now combining these facts is worth for the rabbis of Europe and other countries in order to find out what kind of game Azerbaijan has dragged them into.
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Forced migration September 27, 28 |