International Campaign for Real History
(and newspapers of the Knight-Ridder chain) By SAMUEL MAULL, ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK (AP) – A rabbi has sued the American Jewish Committee to block construction of part of a Holocaust memorial at the site of a Polish death camp.
Rabbi Avi Weiss, who says he lost at least seven relatives at the camp known as Belzec, said in court papers filed Monday that digging a 600-foot-long memorial trench through the site desecrates what is essentially a graveyard. Nearly all of the 500,000 people killed at Belzec were gassed and buried in mass graves, Weiss’ court papers say. In 1943, the Nazis, to hide evidence of the mass murders, disinterred the bodies, burned them, crushed the bones with a machine and scattered the ashes over the site, the papers say. “The soil of the camp is suffused with human bone shards and ash, and construction of the trench will involve displacing, disturbing and disinterring the remains of those who were murdered at Belzec,” says the complaint filed in Manhattan’s state Supreme Court.
The AJC, a Jewish cultural and civil rights organization, is serving as international partner with the Polish government to build the memorial at Belzec, about 100 miles southeast of Warsaw. The organization describes the 11.5-foot-wide, cobblestone-paved trench as a walkway meant to evoke the history of the grounds. Weiss claims the state court has jurisdiction because the AJC’s main offices are in New York. He says he has standing in the lawsuit because his relatives were killed at Belzec. AJC President David Harris called the lawsuit “frivolous” and “without any merit.” He said AJC’s plans for the memorial had received almost universal support from Holocaust survivors and their families and from rabbinical authorities.
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