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Jewish News 11 November 2021
News / New memorial / Hate fight / Freedom campaign
Wall of Names memorial is inaugurated in Vienna by Stephen Oryszczuk in Vienna
Austrian and European Jewish leaders inaugurated a new Shoah Wall of Names in central Vienna on Tuesday to mark the 83rd anniversary of Kristallnacht. The memorial is engraved with the names of 64,440 Austrian Jewish victims of the Nazis and complements an existing Holocaust monument in the city, at Judenplatz, where senior Israeli and Austrian leaders held a ceremony earlier in the day. The spherical open-air Wall of Names was opened by Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg at Ostarrichi Park, alongside Holocaust survivors, Israeli minister Nachman Shai, Israeli ambassador Mordechai Rodgold, and Vienna’s Jewish community leader Oskar Deutsch. Hannah Lessing, secretary-general of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, also attended, as did Vienna’s Mayor Michael Ludwig, and Sebastian Kurz, who was Austria’s popular
The monument includes the names of 64,440 Austrian Jews
pro-Israel Chancellor until he was forced to resign last month. Addressing the assembled dignitaries, Deutsch said the inscribed family names on the wall “not only give the relatives of Shoah victims a place to commemorate their family’s individual fate in a central and public square in
Austria’s capital [and] makes clear that the Shoah is nothing anonymous, nothing abstract”. Earlier in the day, the European Jewish Congress (EJC) presented a vast five-volume academic study on the history of antisemitism and “how to defeat [it]”. A collaboration between
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universities in Vienna, Tel Aviv and New York, it had the official support of Wolfgang Sobotka, the president of the Austrian National Council. “This is the most ambitious study of the problem of antisemitism,” said EJC president Dr Moshe Kantor, who in 2018 brought together 119 worldwide academics specialising in antisemitism. “It details the groundwork for a united and concerted preventive action plan for society today and in the future.” Among the study’s influential contributors was Katharina von Schnurbein, the European Commission’s Coordinator on Combating Anti-Semitism, and Natan Sharansky, the former chairman of the Jewish Agency and renowned Soviet refusenik. Senior Christian and Muslim religious leaders also had an input. Kantor was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria, the country’s highest decoration.
‘Pay up to fight antisemitism’
The European Jewish Congress has backed a report saying all countries should commit a fixed annual proportion of 0.02 percent of their gross domestic product to the fight against antisemitism. Based on the UK government’s most recent economic figures, this would equate to around £460 million from the Treasury every year, roughly 30 times more than it spends. It follows the publication this week of a three-year study, presented to the Republic of Austria on Tuesday, in which the continent’s most senior Jewish leaders also called for more laws to make antisemitism illegal across Europe, and for these laws to be embedded within states’ constitutions. In An End to Antisemitism, academics argue the fight against Jew-hatred by governments should include a raft of measures, saying: “Each country should fund the fight… with at least in excess of 0.02 percent of its [GDP] annually.”
NAZANIN’S HUSBAND ASKS JEWS FOR HELP The husband of Iranian hostage Nazanin ZaghariRatcliffe, has asked the Jewish community to lend its backing to the campaign to free his wife, writes Jenni Frazer. On Monday, Richard Ratcliffe was 16 days into a lifethreatening hunger strike in London. He told Jewish News that he believed Anglo-Jewry was only too aware of what he called “hostage diplomacy” and the way that some states used “ordinary people” in that regard. “Other states are watching and copying this behaviour, and it is a threat to the world”, he said. He felt the Jewish community “was alive to the behaviour of illiberal states and their danger”. Three days previously — day 13 of his strike – Ratcliffe was visibly suffering, sitting swathed in woollen hats, scarves and gloves, in a makeshift “camp” opposite the Foreign Office in Whitehall. Behind him were thin pop-up tents and blankets – little defence against the increasingly cold weather. His wife, 44, has served five years in an Iranian prison and may now face a further year
Richard Ratcliffe holds a photograph of wife Nazanin while sitting with Claudia Winkleman and Victoria Coren Mitchell
behind bars in Tehran, though at present she is at her parents’ home in the capital. She was arrested at Tehran Airport in 2016 and imprisoned after being found guilty of “plotting to overthrow the Iranian government” and spying, charges which she has consistently and vehemently denied. Ratcliffe and his family maintain that his wife is being held as ransom for £450 million, money owed by the British government to Iran over a cancelled arms deal when the Shah fell from power in 1979.
Nazanin, who was working as a project manager for Reuters news agency when she was seized, has joint British and Iranian nationality. Two of his high-profile supporters have been the TV presenters Claudia Winkleman and Victoria Coren Mitchell, both of whom are Jewish, and who have visited him twice. As he spoke to Jewish News, a stream of passers-by and well-wishers stopped to chat to him. Donations can be given through REDRESS, whose lawyers are working on the Ratcliffes’ behalf.