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OPINION
A Journey Into History
F
JULY 31 ▪ 2015
atefully we arrived in Vienna
on July 13, the last full day of
the P5+1 Iran nuclear talks. Our
Congregation Etz Chaim group had
spent the previous week in Warsaw
and Krakow, Poland — the images
after our visit to the death factories of
Auschwitz and the ghettos of Warsaw
and Krakow freshly etched in our
memory. After Poland and
just before Vienna, we
spent the weekend in Budapest, where we learned
about the equally dismal
plight of Hungarian Jews
as the Nazis escalated their
timeline to kill as many
Jews as possible before
their assured loss to the Allied powers
during the war’s final days.
While we were in Budapest learning about the Nazis’ Jewish genocide,
Iranians were celebrating Quds Day.
Quds Day is held the last Friday of the
Muslim holy month of Ramadan as an
international day of struggle against
Israel and for the liberation of Jerusalem. Israeli and U.S. flags are burned
as the Iranian crowds chant their alltoo-familiar “Death to America, death
to Israel.”
The Nazis’ systematic final
solution to the Jewish question had
resulted in two-thirds of Europe’s 8.8
million Jews being slaughtered. Even
today, the worldwide Jewish population is not at the level it was before
World War II. Never again!
Arriving in Vienna, I appreciated
the significance of the Iran nuclear
talks and thought about the Munich
Conference of 1938. Hitler’s Germany
was appeased. Neville Chamberlain
proclaimed, “Peace for our time.” More
recently, in 1994, I remember President
Bill Clinton triumphantly hailing the
AJT
12
1994 nuclear deal with North Korea:
“Today … we have completed a