All mainstream Jewish organizations in Norway have come together to collectively condemn the Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities for what they say is “Holocaust revitalization.”
An open letter to the board and director of the HL Center was published on Monday. It is signed by The National Council for Jewish Communities in Norway, Det Mosaiske Trossamfund (congregation) in Oslo, The Jewish Community of Trondheim, and The Jewish Community of Bergen, as well as The Jewish Community of Norway, B’nai B’rith Norway Lodge, Kos & Kaos The Nordic Jewish Network, and Chabad Lubavitch of Norway.
These together represent almost all of the country’s Jews, barring fringe groups such as the anti-Zionist Jews for a Just Peace.
The background for the letter is the HL Center’s decision to hold a seminar on April 30 on the Holocaust and the Nakba as “parallel cultural traumas” as well as a planned event on June 3, called Holocaust Memorial after Gaza.
The letter notes, “We wish to emphasize that it is both legitimate and necessary to acknowledge the suffering of civilians in armed conflicts, including the experiences of Palestinians after 1948. This is a subject that can be addressed without bringing the Holocaust into it.”
It stresses that the Holocaust represents a historical event without parallel: “an industrial, ideologically driven genocide whose aim was the total extermination of the Jewish people.”
When the Holocaust is systematically placed in parallel with other conflicts, there is a risk of relativizing its unique historical status, the missive argues.
HL Center must preserve memory of Jewish victims
It is worth noting that the HL Center was established, among other things, with funds from the restitution settlement following the liquidation of Jewish property during the Holocaust. It also receives funding from the Norwegian government under the Action Plan Against Antisemitism.
The HL Center has a particular responsibility to preserve the memory of the millions of Jews who were murdered, as well as to ensure that this memory is not relativized or instrumentalized for political purposes.
The letter calls on the Board to make a “principled clarification of the HL Center’s role and mandate, particularly with regard to comparisons between the Holocaust and contemporary conflicts.” It also asks for “greater scholarly and institutional caution” in how the Holocaust is discussed and contextualized.
Most importantly, it asks that clear guidelines be established for how the HL Center’s leadership and its events relate to ongoing political conflicts, given the fact that there have been repeated incidents over the last few years that have been seen to relativize the Holocaust.
The HL Center has a pattern of inviting fringe figures, such as [historian, political scientist, and polemic scholar in genocide studies] Dirk Moses, to give speeches on Israel and antisemitism. Its own director, Jan Heiret, said last year that it was likely Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza.
The Jerusalem Post raised this issue during a visit to the HL Center last year. At the time, Heiret told the Post that it is his duty under the center’s mandate to discuss modern genocide and modern risks of genocide.
“Some parts of the Jewish community don’t think that I should criticize the Israeli government in any way, but that’s impossible. The escalation of the war in May and June, what’s happening in Gaza now – it’s so obvious that the Israeli government is breaking humanitarian laws,” he said.
“We’re not doing a comparison with the Holocaust in that we are not saying that the Israeli government is doing the same as the Nazis, but there are some parts of the policies – or in warfare – that are comparable, such as ethnic cleansing and dehumanizing language,” Heiret told the Post.