by the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council

We invite Nazi Holocaust survivors, refugees and their descendants: add your name to our call to stand up and stop genocide.

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As rabbis, we have taken on a sacred responsibility to protect our centuries-old tradition, support our community, and provide moral leadership in the midst of crises. We are in a horrific historical moment. Many of us have parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents who survived or died on the Nazi death marches, and we all grew up in the shadow of the Nazi holocaust. The State of Israel is currently committing a holocaust, the deliberate mass slaughter of the Palestinian people, with weapons supplied by the United States.

The photos and videos emerging from northern Gaza are a chilling echo of all-too-familiar images of European ghettos and Nazi concentration camps during World War II. The Nazi camps were hidden from the world, but as Susan Albuhawa writes, “Israel is committing the holocaust of our time, and doing so in full view of an apparently indifferent world.” Today we stand with our ancestors behind us, in solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters, and demand an immediate arms embargo and an end to the genocide – we will not act with indifference to Palestinian suffering.

There is no time to waste and no room for ambiguity. We must call the Israeli government’s actions what they are: genocide. A growing mountain of documentation now accompanies the Palestinian testimonies we have received throughout the year. While Zionist discourse propagates the myth that Israel must If we commit these heinous acts for the sake of Jewish safety, we know that it was never about anyone’s safety, as the staggering death toll confirms. The Israeli army has killed at least 42,000 Palestinian grandparents, parents, babies, children, artists, leaders, poets, teachers, journalists and doctors. There are countless more under the rubble, yet undocumented within Palestine’s devastated healthcare system.

We call on you and all people of conscience to appear today and respond to our tradition’s demand that we speak the truth – dabru emet (Zechariah 8:16), and choose life – u’vacharta bachayim (Deuteronomy 30:19). We must ask ourselves who we are: will we be like the courageous “righteous Gentiles” who risked their personal safety to protect and save Jewish lives during the Nazi Holocaust? Or will we behave like those who “didn’t want to get involved” or enthusiastically joined the Nazi party? There is no middle ground. We implore you: join us and speak the truth and choose life. We need everyone.

Dabru emet, speak the truth: the Israeli army herds Palestinian men and boys into lines and forces them to walk to wells. These are death marches.

Dabru emet, speak the truth: the Israeli army forces Palestinian families to flee again and again, even though nowhere is safe from their bombs. This is ethnic cleansing.

Dabru emet, speak the truth: the israeli army is Burning Palestinians to death in hospitals and displaced persons camps. The Israeli army does Palestinians buried alive in the rubble of their destroyed homes. The Israeli army does leaving babies to die and decompose. This is an eradication campaign.

These atrocities are crimes against humanitya phrase codified in international law in response to the Nazi Holocaust and seeking to prevent horror of this magnitude from ever happening again. Lo ta-amod al dam re’echa (Leviticus 19:16): We must not – we will not – stand by as endless Palestinian blood is shed. So many lives can still be saved.

We must honor our ancestors who were murdered by the Nazis when the world’s most powerful countries allowed genocidal violence to escalate unchecked. We must honor all our ancestors who have been displaced and murdered throughout history because of racist, nationalist ideologies. We must honor our ancestors by shouting the truth to the heavens and putting our bodies on the line to stop the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians now. AmeinuOur people are the ones standing up to stop genocide.

Join us as we join our Palestinian allies in calling on our government to block weapons to Israel and commit to a full arms embargo.w.

We invite Nazi Holocaust survivors, refugees and their descendants: add your names to our call to stand up and stop genocide.