Philip Rubenstein
Occupation: Nazi Hunter
Dr. Efraim Zuroff in Conversation with Philip Rubenstein - Occupation Nazi Hunter
All right, so a very warm welcome back to everybody. And today I’m now at the latest session, we have a very special guest, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, who will be in conversation with Philip Rubenstein. And before I hand over to them, I just want to do a little introduction. I’m a Holocaust historian. Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the Chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and the director of the Center’s Israel office and Eastern European Affairs. He has played a major role in facilitating the prosecution of many Nazi war criminals all over the world. He is author of four books translated into 15 languages, and numerous articles on Holocaust-related issues and their impact on the Jewish world. He will be in conversation with our very own Philip Rubenstein, to talk about his work as a Nazi hunter over the past four decades, and about his recent book, “Our People,” co-authored with well-known Lithuania writer, Ruta Vanagaite. The book tells the story of their trip through Lithuania and Belarus in 2015, to visit many of the sites where Jews were murdered, following the Nazi invasion in 1941. So it is my great pleasure now to hand over to both of you for what I’m sure is going to be a very interesting presentation. Thank you.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Lockdown University again. And this session is really timely, especially for those of you who listened to William Tyler’s fantastic piece yesterday on the invasion of the Soviet Union. So today, as Wendy says, I’m really absolutely delighted to be talking to Dr. Efraim Zuroff, one of the most prominent Nazi hunters in the world. And as Wendy said, we’re going to manage this conversation in two halves. So the first half, we’re going to be focusing on a Efraim’s background, and the work he’s done over the past four decades. And then the second half, we are going to talk about the book, “Our People,” and we’re going to make sure there’s obviously plenty of time towards the end, for everyone’s question. So I want to dive straight, and Effie, I want to ask you about this phrase, Nazi hunter, because when we hear this phrase, especially with various TV and movie renditions, people conjure up all kinds of images. So what does it mean in practise to be a Nazi hunter? What does the day look like?
Okay, when people ask me, what’s my job? I say, I’m one-third detective, that’s finding the Nazis, hoping to find the Nazis, ‘cause almost no one else is looking for them. One-third historian, that’s my real profession. I have a PhD in the history of the Holocaust from Hebrew University, and one-third political lobbyist, which is something that you, Philip, are well-acquainted with because of your incredible contribution as the right-hand man, the when the all-party war crimes group lobbied the British government to pass the law, to enable the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the UK.
So I have to say, Effie and I, just so everyone knows, so we worked together 30 years ago, and I used to call him my Mr. Motivator because he’d phone me up once a week and he’d say, “new, what’s going on?” And I’d say, “Well, you know, we’re doing A, B, and C. Things are moving slowly.” And he’d scream down the phone, “Push harder, push harder.” So I’d come off the phone energised and emboldened every week so if I haven’t thanked you for that 30 years ago, I’m thanking you now. So how did you get started?
Listen, I had absolutely no fantasy about being a Nazi hunter. And it’s actually quite interesting, because very often if I speak to a group or, you know, do a webinar, some presentation, people will very often come up to me afterwards and say, “You know what? You have my dream job. When I was growing up, I dreamt of being a Nazi hunter, catching those Nazis, torturing them, killing them,” and I don’t know what else, I mean, but that certainly was not my personal fantasy. Oddly enough, my personal fantasy was to be the first Orthodox Jew to play in the NBA.
But to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t good enough and neither can you be an Orthodox Jew playing in the NBA so basketball’s loss was Nazi huntings gain. And basically it started out with my studies as a graduate student concentrating, focusing, on the history of the Holocaust at Hebrew University. But it took off really when, a couple of things, there were a couple of milestones on the way. One was that I had to go to the United States to collect material for my PhD, which was about the Vaad ha-Hatzala, the Orthodox Rabbis Rescue Committee, and most of the documentation was in America. And I was looking for a way to come to the States for a period that would enable me to collect the material. And along comes Rabbi Marvin Hyer, who offers me to be the first academic director at the Wiesenthal Centre so I took the job and I got the documents during that time but in the process, two things happened. One is I met Simon Wiesenthal personally, and I learned more about him.
To be honest, I never had any special interest in Nazis or in hunting Nazis or anything like that. But Simon’s life and Simon’s story really intrigued me. That was one thing. The other thing was that the Americans had just started taking legal action against Nazi war criminals, who was living in the United States, and they had set up a special office, and that office contacted me when I began my work in Los Angeles in order to enlist our assistance in convincing survivors to cooperate with them, because this was a brand new office, and survivors, many survivors, are quite sceptical about government, they’re not sure they’ll be treated fairly. And the person who came to see me, Bill Crane, he was one of the investigators there, was convinced, or the people in Washington were convinced, that if they come with the endorsement of a Jewish organisation named for Simon Wiesenthal, then, you know, it’ll go more smoothly.
But I came away with my meeting from Bill Crane with the feeling that there must be something I can do to help this effort. So I started a project in LA in '78 to try and set up a database of all the survivors in North America to be able to help the Office Of Special Investigations, that was the name, find potential witnesses for the trials, for the prosecutions that they were going to conduct. To be perfectly honest, that initiative was a total failure because The Wiesenthal Centre didn’t want to invest any money in it but as a result of that connection with the office in Washington, I convinced them that they needed a researcher in Israel. So when I returned to my home in Israel, 'cause I had made Alia in 1970 already, when I returned there in 1980, I came with a contract for two months to work for the US Justice Department, which later was extended by four months and ultimately, lasted six years until I made a discovery which actually changed my life and really turned me into a Nazi hunter, and that was, I discovered that you could find the immigration destinations of thousands of Nazi war criminals, escaped Nazi war criminals, using the files of the international tracing service, the Arolsen files.
Now, what’s interesting is this, first of all, that material, the originals were in Germany in Arolsen, it was owned by 11 different countries, had a complete set, but the only country in which there was free access to these documents was in Israel. And I’m not even sure why, but Arolsen refused to give information about Nazi war criminals in order for research purposes. The only people who could get any information from Arolsen were first-degree relatives, or close relatives. So, in other words, if I had written to Arolsen and said, “I’m looking for my grandfather,” they might have answered me, you know, 5, 6, 8 months later, and maybe they would’ve had the information but if I were asking them for information on escaped Nazi war criminals, they wouldn’t answer at all. But sure enough, the material was accessible in Yad Vashem and I found that out. In other words, I made this discovery while searching for an informant who had informed a American officer that Josef Mengele had been arrested by the American Army and released in late 1946 near Vienna.
And the reason Mossad found that document made a scandal. And in the course of our office was the ones who had to, in other words, they decided to do historical investigation also to see whether this was true and our office was entrusted with the investigation. And my task was to find the informant whose name was David Freiman, a Jew from Lvov deported to Auschwitz in September '44, and had no idea what to do. And a friend of mine, David Silberklang, who still works at Yad Vashem, that’s where I did most of my work, suggested that I look in the Arolsen files. And that changed my life, basically, because what I realised was that I could help convince the Anglo-Saxon countries who had not yet made a decision whether or not to prosecute Nazis by using the material in Arolsen and flooding them with lists of suspects. And at that time, this is '86, so the Americans were the only ones who had actually started, they had decided, made a decision to take legal action. Canada was investigating, Australia was investigating, UK, and New Zealand didn’t even have a clue that they had a problem.
And I explained to Rabbi Hiyat, that he has to open office in Jerusalem because every self-respecting Jewish defence agency needs a office in Jerusalem, and I can flood them with the names of suspects. And that’s what we did. And that’s how the whole thing started in the UK as well, with the list of 17, which I compiled in Jerusalem. and they submitted to Donald Ballentyne, the British Consul in Los Angeles, and all the rest is history. So Canada 1987, Australia 1989, UK thanks to Greville, the All-Party war crimes, and you, Phillip, 1991, all passed laws enabling the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. The only ones that did not agree were New Zealand. They had a government investigation. They discovered that there were Nazi war criminals in New Zealand but they decided not to take action. All I can say is that the number in New Zealand was far less than in the other countries.
So I just want to back up a little. So you have the database and you’re putting lists together, and you effectively launch Operation Shock And Awe with all the Anglo-Saxon countries, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and, of course, UK. And then you send lists to the government and you completely blindsided each one of these governments, because everyone is thinking, and all the press, we’re all thinking, “What the hell’s going on here? Who are these people? How did they get here in the first place? How come they’ve been secreted here for the last 40 years and no one knew? So how did they get to all these countries? Who were they?”
Okay, there are three categories. Let’s start with the United States, 'cause those facts I know better than I do than other countries. So there were three categories of Nazi war criminals who were allowed to enter the United States. One was a group of 150 rocket scientists, engineers, and technicians who had produced the V2, which was far advanced than anything that the Americans had. And I think, if you know the history, Hitler actually assumed that they could actually win the war with using the V2, and those V2 were were fired at England, at the UK, at London. Okay, so that’s one group. There was another group of several dozen, or maybe a little more, of Eastern Europeans. You have to keep in mind one thing, 98% of these people were not Germans and Austrians, they were all Eastern Europeans, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Croatians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, so the crimes and the extent of the criminality of the Eastern European collaborators was not known in the West for many years. In other words, the iconic images of the Shoah in 1945, '46, '47 were first of all Bergen-Belsen liberated by the UK, the camps liberated by the Americans, Mauthausen, and Dachau, and Buchenwald, and they knew that there were death camps, okay? But they didn’t realise about, for example, about the Holocaust of Bullets, a million and a half Jews murdered in two years by the Einsatzgruppen who numbered only a few thousand men and women and their helpers. And they didn’t realise that it was only in Eastern Europe that collaboration with the Nazis included participation in systematic mass murder. So all these people lied on their forms. “Where were you during the war?” “I was a farmer.” “I was a student.” “I was a accountant in a dairy cooperative,” That was what the mayor of Kovno wrote on his immigration application and all sorts of other lies. And they slipped through the cracks. That’s the huge majority. The estimate is that at least 10,000 Nazi war criminals entered the United States alone.
They slipped through the cracks. I just want to, I’m going to put up a slide here 'cause you will recognise this individual. So-
Ooh, ah.
Oops, oops, hang on. Sorry, so this is Antanas Gecas, who was a mining engineer who lived in Edinburgh for many years, very happily after the war, and he has a fairly typical story. So he was a member, as you remember, of the 12th Lithuanian Battalion involved in mass shootings of Jews. They were so successful that the Germans moved them to Belarus when they went in there. And he was involved in the killing of at least a thousand people, a thousand Jews in Slutsk. And, of course, what he does as many others do, is towards the end of the war, he turns coat because he sees the Germans are losing the war and he joins the Polish Free Forces, and that’s how he got here in the first place. But I want to ask you about people like him, because there’s this phenomenon, isn’t there? I mean, you’ve talked about this a lot. Let me just stop sharing, okay. So many of these guys, they follow a pattern. They come to a new home in the West and they disappear into lower middle class jobs. He was a mining engineer.
And the only prosecution we had here, Sawoniuk, he was a railway inspector. They do these jobs, they disappear into the community, they become good citizens. And when they’re caught, they all have, they go into instant denial. “It wasn’t me,” or, “Well, it was me, but I wasn’t there that day,” or “I was there that day, but I never took any part in the shootings. I was right at the back, never involved.” And there’s almost never any remorse or contrition. And I just wondered, you know, you’ve been very close to some of these individuals. I mean, you’ve seen the whites of the eyes. How do you explain that?
- First of all, let me make a categorical statement, which is, and I’ve been asked this question many times, especially when I teach, when I lectured at Yad Vashem to teachers who come from Europe, mostly from Europe, but from all over the world, and people say to me, “You know, so many years have passed. The people who committed these crimes are probably sorry.” That’s the question that I’m asked. And I can tell you from all the cases that I found, in almost every case that I was involved in a serious way, there’s never been a case of a person who expressed any regret or remorse. Never. So in a certain sense, they’re in a time warp. They’ve spent the rest of their lives justifying what they did. They come from a very anti-Semitic beginning, because these are countries in which anti-Semitism was quite high, even though, ironically, for example, Lithuania, which had the highest percentage of victims of the large communities, the anti-Semitism wasn’t that terrible during the interwar period. There was anti-Semitism, but it was nothing compared to Poland, for example, who had a party which openly talked about, you know, kicking out a third of the Jews, the Polish Jews, and converting a third or something in the index. So, you know, it wasn’t on that level, but we saw what happened there. And in other words, there was no counter to this antisemitism.
In other words, it’s not as if the church, the church was part of it, the church promoted it. It’s not as if their spiritual leaders said to them, you know, “Respect the Jews. These are Jews, Jesus was a Jew, they’re our brothers.” What Pope John Paul II said, and what happened in the decisions in '65 and the change, the Nostrom. So as a matter of fact, in our book, “Our People,” I have a picture, we have a picture of a church service in Minsk in the same unit that Gecas served in the 12th Battalion. Every Sunday they went to church in Minsk, and they gave confession. And this priest, well, Zenonas Ignatavicius, he probably told him, “Keep up the good work. You’re doing God’s work. We’re ridding the enemy of the horrible Jew,” or something like that. I mean, I don’t know what exactly what he said, but he was there to comfort them, to strengthen their morale. And I mean, this is an incredible outrage, totally outrageous. By the way, he was honoured, about a year ago, there was a plaque put up on his house in Vilkija, that’s where he was born and raised. And with a participation of soldiers from today’s Lithuanian army, a member of the EU, of course. I mean, this is crazy. This is absolutely mad. And this is one of the phenomenon of Holocaust distortion. In other words, they want to take people who, for various reasons are considered heroic, usually it’s people who fought against the Soviets after World War II and glorifying them, even if they murdered Jews during the Shoah. You would imagine in any normal country, if someone murdered his fellow Jewish citizen, its Jewish citizens, he would be disqualified from being a national hero.
It’s so depressing, isn’t it? I mean, you look at all of these Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Ukrainian heroes, and so many of them have got a Jew-hating or murdering past. And it’s utterly depressing. I mean, I remember, back in the '80s, we reached out to members of the Ukrainian community who were very upset with us because they said that you’re casting aspersions across all Ukrainians, and we’ve only got some bad apples. And they were very well-meaning, very decent people, but I remember we went out and we started talking about their heroes, and we started to talk about, of course, well, Nitsky. And, you know, and it was a short conversation because as far as they were concerned, he was untouchable.
Of course, and there’s a huge statue of him in Kiev.
Yeah, and these are very difficult conversations to have when you’ve got people who’ve just got such fixed views of their heroes. I mean, they’re heroes as far as they’re concerned, haven’t got any feet of clay.
Listen, I’m telling you, when people consider themselves victims, there’s no limit to what they feel able to do because they’re victims. And this whole notion that victim hood is something that motivates all the countries, in Eastern Europe who were under communism. This is why they want to, they’re promoting the canard of equivalency between communism and Nazism. If a country has a choice between being a country of perpetrators or a country of victims, I mean, it’s a no-brainer. So, in other words, don’t think of what we did during the brief Nazi occupation of three years, think what was done to us for 44 years under the Soviet Union.
So this is important. So in the late '80s, most of your focus is on finding Nazi war criminals in Western countries and in pushing governments to do something about it. But in the '90s, when the Berlin War comes down, when the Soviet Union has collapsed, and when all of the independent countries suddenly start to arise, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, et cetera, your focus changes and you start to try and engage with those countries about the complicity of their nationals. Now, at the time, Ruta has a nice expression, she said, “You ride into town to spoil their wedding.” So at the time-
And I wasn’t even invited and wasn’t-
You weren’t invited. You gate crashed the wedding, right? So you saw there was an opportunity. What at the time were you hoping to achieve?
Okay, one of the things that motivated me to try very hard to obtain prosecutions in countries of Eastern Europe was I saw what happened in the case of Dinko Sakic. Dinko Sakic was the last living concentration camp commander. And he was the commander of one of the worst camps, that’s Gecas, one of the worst camps, it was nicknamed The Auschwitz of The Balkans, Jasenovac, absolutely terrible. And he was convicted. And the case had a very positive impact, at least in the short run. In the short run, had a positive impact on the issue of the attitude towards the Ustasha, the issue of the crimes committed by the Croatians. And so my goal was to replicate that trial, if at all possible, in all these countries. And all of them had these suspects who should have been brought to justice. I mean, listen, in Lithuania, the Lithuanians had at least 14 people I think it is, or even more, who were stripped of their American citizenship and kicked out and went back to Lithuania because in America, you couldn’t prosecute Nazi war criminals for the crimes because they were committed outside America, and the victims were not Americans so it would’ve taken years to change the law. So the Americans opted for what I call the Al Capone compromise. In other words, the same way that Al Capone was nailed on tax evasion instead of racketeering and murder, so here they’re nailing people for immigration and actualization violations, but they returned to Lithuania, the infrastructure, the legal infrastructure for their prosecution.
In Lithuania, there was no statute of limitations on cases of genocide with war crimes and crimes against humanity. They easily could have put these people on trial. Some of them were really big criminals. Aleksandras Lileikis, the head of the Lithuanian Security Police, who took 70,000 Jews to be murdered in Ponary. And his deputy Kazys Gimzauskas and others. But the Lithuanians pulled every trick in the book to make sure they were never punished. They were put on trial. The Lileikis trial, what’s that? Lileikis trial ended because he had a heart attack. Gimzauskas was convicted, but he already was suffering from Alzheimer. And he had arrived through six years previously or so. So they did everything possible to prevent their people from being punished. One second. No one’s punished, maybe there were no crimes.
I mean, even with this guy, with Sakic, the motivation of the Croatian government was hardly pure, was it? I mean, they-
No, not at all.
They wanted to keep him from the search.
They wanted informations, they wanted relations with Israel. Tudjman, who’s the president, he’s the only Western leader, head of state, who ever denied the Holocaust, he considered himself a historian. He wrote a book called, “The Wastelands of Historical Reality,” in which he wrote that the Jews inflated the number of victims of the Shoah from 1 million to 6 million. And the Jews ran their settlements So he also wanted to visit the Holy Land. He was a very religious Catholic, of course. The irony of the story is that Tudjman’s brother was murdered by the Ustasha, and he fought with Tito’s partisans so he was on the right side during the war. But when he became a Croatian politician, he realised that if he wanted to win the presidency, he had to become an ultra-nationalist.
Well, that’s depressing, isn’t it? There’s no votes in Judaphilia, is there?
No, I guess not.
Yeah.
And Sakic, I mean, he’s an unusual case in some respects compared to many of the people who we’ve talked about. Because while he was in Argentina, I mean, he was proud of what he did. He was boasting about his role. He told a TV interviewer he would do it all again, right?
I mean, we sent that guy to interview him with a TV crew. He said, you know what he said at one point in the conversation besides saying that he would do it again, he said, “Do you know what the problem with Jasenovac was? They didn’t let us finish the job.”
When you talk about the educative role of a trial like that, what impact did the trial make in Croatia at the time, or elsewhere?
Listen, in the short run, it had a positive impact. So, for example, I’ll give you an example. In Split, there was a street name for Mile Budak. Mile Budak was the education minister in the Ustasha government, and the Deputy Prime Minister, that name of that street was changed after the trial, For example, there was a square in Zagreb that had been called to the victims of fascism. And it was changed in Croatia to heroes of Croatia. I mean, people, who’s the hero of Croatia, Sakic, of course. And that was changed back to victims of fascism. So there was certain steps that were taken, and, you know, it was a risk to do it in Croatia. It was a gamble. But we felt that that’s the place where the people need the lesson of their sins. If we were thinking only of result, we would’ve had him sent to Serbia. He’d be hanging from the highest tree in Belgrade after five minutes after he was convicted. Saying that facetiously, but you understand my point.
I want to talk about the book in a moment but before we do, I just wonder if you’ll allow me to just ask a personal question and obviously what happened in Lithuania, we’ll talk about, but, you know, you’ve been doing this for 40 years, and I just wonder how can you bear to keep doing it day in, day out when you look at someone like Sakic, when you pored over the witness statements, when you pored over what he did, when you do this, how do you stay sane?
I’ll tell you, I’ll give you a story from the verdict of the Sakic case, okay? On the day of the verdict, the courtroom was packed, but the problem was that half the people in the courtroom were in favour of Sakic, and the other half were against him. Anyway, when the judge announced the verdict, all hell broke loose, pandemonium, fights. Don’t ask. By the way, one guy said to me, in American English, “Why don’t you go back to where you belong and take care of the Palestinians?” But leave that aside for a minute. Listen, someone stopped me on my way out. Tall gentleman, very nicely dressed, who somehow it appeared that he had been in some connection with this trial, it wasn’t clear to me. He said to me, “Listen, I have one word only to say to you in Croatian, it’s one word, hvala. Hvala means thank you in Croatian. Without you, this trial wouldn’t have happened.” Okay? Now, I had no idea who he was. So I asked someone who was this guy? And the story emerges the following, one of the most dramatic testimonies in the trial was that one day in April '44, there had been a breach of discipline in the camp.
And Sakic immediately calls a roll call, Appell, all the inmates have to appear in the central square. And he’s picking people out at random who will be hung in reprisal for the breach of discipline. So one of the people whom he pulled out was a doctor from Montenegro, not a Jew, a doctor from Montenegro named Dr. Mile Boskovic. And when Sakic ordered him out of the line, he said to Sakic, “Listen, I’m from Montenegro and my tradition doesn’t allow me to be hung.” So Sakic, on the spot, pulls out his revolver, shoots him in the head and murders him. The person who stopped me was his brother. Now, I can promise you, without even knowing that his brother never dreamt that there would be an independent, democratic Croatia, and that Croatia would put this ultra, ultra patriot, Dinko Sakic on trial, convict him, sends him to life in prison, and he died in prison. Simon Wiesenthal always emphasised the obligation that we owe to the victims and to their families and to good people everywhere, to give some sense of closure, some sense of hope that there is justice in the world. This was a perfect example. And, you know, when Kepiro, Sandor Kepiro, was acquitted in Hungary, I cried. I was beside myself. I put in five years on that case, okay? So what you have to do is you have to understand that the odds are stacked completely against you. The chances of justice are very minimal.
So every case that you win, every case that someone is prosecuted, convicted, and punished is a semi-miracle. And you have to find consolation in that. So I’ll give you an example. One of the things I did was I made like a scale of success. Okay? I started from one to six. I started with exposing a Nazi, publicly exposing them, getting two is getting a government to investigate. Three is getting an indictment. Four is getting a trial, five is a conviction, and six is a punishment. It’s very hard to get the six. And I have to, in a sense, console myself with what we achieve. But at the bottom line, I think is that I think of the victims and I think of what happened to them and to the people who survived, the survivors as well, suffered horribly. See, can’t there be someone? I always say to myself, I have to be as zealous in chasing these people as the Nazis were zealous in trying to kill us. That’s what we need.
I think it’s what’s makes you so unusual and so unbelievably effective as well. I do want to turn to the book 'cause it is an extraordinary book so I hope everyone can see this, it’s called, “Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust,” by Ruta Vanagaite and Efraim Zuroff. And it was published in Lithuanian a few years ago, but it’s only recently been published in English. And it is a… I don’t want to sugarcoat it 'cause it’s a harrowing book. And it’s harrowing, I think, because it’s so specific about the murderers and the victims and the witnesses and the bystanders. And it’s the tale of a road trip that Ruta and Efraim do to the killing fields, to 40 of the 234 mass graves in Lithuania, and then they go on to Belarus. And the specificity, I think, is really important. I mean, Ruta quotes from a shy educator, and I just want to read her quote 'cause I think it’s such an important thing that she says in the book, “There were not 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust. There were 6 million murders. And in each case, one particular human being was murdered.” And, I mean, for me it was one of the most important things, one of the most important reminders in the book. I wanted to ask you, Efraim, I mean, effectively, just really just to kind of introduce the book and tell us why you did it and how the two of you got together and then we can talk about some of the background as well. I’m just going to put up, first of all, I just want to put up the photo of Ruta so everyone can see that. But I also just want to put up the map of, whoops, we’ve got this. Okay, I want to put up the map. So these are all the places in the book, I mean, you went to many more places.
Yeah.
But this will just give everyone an idea as to the main places that you went to, towns, cities, forests, pits, et cetera.
Okay, so I have to explain that I first met Ruta in 2015, and she had invited me to come to participate in a conference on Holocaust education that she had planned as part of a grant. She had a project called, “Being a Jew.” See, it all starts with the fact that Ruta discovered that her grandfather, and her aunt’s husband, had participated in the persecution of Jews during the Shoah. And she was horrified by it, and she wanted to atone for it. And the first step that she took was to do a project called “Being a Jew,” 'cause she felt that Lithuanians have no idea who the Jews are, their history, their traditions, and it’s important to educate the younger people, and what she did was she invited people. She started this seminar for these kids, junior high in high school and she took them to the synagogue in Vilna and someone from the community talked to them about Jewish traditions, Jewish history, Jewish customs. Then they did a wonderful ceremony, Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, in front of this Vilna city hall and then they took the kids to Ponary, and it was very, very wonderful. I couldn’t participate in the educational conference because I had already committed to lectures in the United States.
It was taking place on Yom Hashoah in 2015, Holocaust Memorial Day, but a month before that, I came to Vilna to protest against the neo-Nazi march in Vilna, which is held every year, March 11th, which is March 15th, no, 15th, I think, it’s Independence Day from the Russians the second time, in other words, in 1990. So 1918, the Lithuanians became independent and the Neo-Nazis march in Kovno, which was the interwar capital in March 15th, no, no, not 15th, what am I talking, 11th, March 11th, they got independence from the Russians, 1990 so they march in Vilna. So I said, “Listen, I haven’t been invited to speak in Lithuania. I’m the most hated Jew in Lithuania.” She’s even offering to pay my expenses and they give me an honorarium. Who is this woman, for God’s sake? So we met, and it turns out, I didn’t even know this, it turns out she’s one of the most popular authors in Lithuania. She explained to me about her discovery about her relatives, and I was shocked. In all the years I was coming to Lithuania, I must have been there, I don’t know, 30, 25, 30, 40 times, no one had ever admitted it to me that anyone that they knew or their relatives were involved in the killing. And here she’s telling me that her family’s involved and she wants to atone for it.
So by this time, we had already run out of suspects in Lithuania. So there was no thought of, you know, finding people to put on trial. It was a fight over the narrative. In other words, I had been trying for several years already to convince the Lithuanians that they had to face the truth about what had happened in Lithuania during the Shoah. But, you know, I’m a guy from Brooklyn, okay? I have a Brooklyn accent. I’m a guy with a kippah in my head coming from Jerusalem. Is anyone in Lithuania going to take me seriously? I’d reached the conclusion that I wasn’t getting anywhere. Then all of a sudden when she told me that she, an ethnic Lithuania, whose family, and one of the most popular authors, I said, it was like a eureka moment. Maybe if Ruta tells them, maybe they’ll believe it. So we started thinking of ideas, what could we do? And what ultimately emerged, and this was Ruta’s idea. I mean, we thought of having like an essay contest, and the winners would be sent to Israel, for kids, for high school, the winners would be sent to Israel, but we couldn’t train the kids to differentiate between the truth and the government’s manufactured lies. Anyway, what we decided was we’re going to go to places that have to do with our biographies. So we made up the itinerary based on our own biographies. So my mother’s family’s from Lithuania. My grandparents were born in two different shtetls. My uncle, who I’m named for, Efraim, Rabbi Efraim Zar, was murdered in Lithuania. He was born in Lithuania. So we made up a list and we kept on adding places and we went from place to place to see if we could find the mass murder site. Is there a monument?
What does it say? Because the ones built during Soviet times talk about the victims of fascism. They don’t even say it’s Jews, murdered by Hitler right fascists. So, you know, it’s sort of bourgeois, et cetera. The ones in Lithuanian, built in Lithuania do mention that it’s Jews, but they don’t elaborate that almost all the killers were Lithuanian, as was the case. Anyway, we spoke to people who lived 50 metres from the mass grave. We spoke to people who remembered the events. We went to local museums to see what there was about the Jewish community. So I just want to highlight two incidents that for me are emblematic. When we were in , which is right near where my grandfather was born, I see an old woman, elderly woman, coming out of a grocery store. So I don’t speak Lithuanian so I say to Ruta, “Ask her, what does she remember?” So this woman starts telling the following story. She was friendly with a Jewish girl. In other words, there was a Jewish family in the town, and they had two girls and she was one of two girls and-
The Bentski girls, is that right?
Bentski girls, exactly, yeah, they were about eight. She and her friend were about eight years old. And when the measures started against the Jews, so there was an intense discussion in the home of this woman, Olga, I think her name was Olga, whether or not they could save her friend. So I said to her, “But you must have been afraid of the Germans.” She said, “No, we weren’t afraid of the Germans at all. We could have hidden her forever. We were afraid of our neighbours.” And she started crying, Gott im Himmel, And I’m telling you, it was so touching. It was like, it was the first, it was like as if this enormous boulder had rolled off her heart that she was able to talk to someone who empathised with the sorrow that she felt for her friend.
Between 1941 and 2015, she’d never told that story to anyone.
I didn’t ask specifically, my impression is that she had never told the story. It was like a enormous burden was lifted from her. Okay, I want to go to a more, you know, a different story was our visit to the museum in Ponevitch. There’s a municipal museum in Ponevitch. So I’m sure in our audience, our wonderful audience of 1,800 people, we have people who know about Ponevitch. In any event, Ponevezh is a famous Yeshiva, which was started in the town of Ponevezh, Ponevitch in Yiddish, and I walked into the museum and I said to the head of media relations, I said, young guy, I said, “Is there anything here about the Jewish community?” Now 7,000, close to 7,000 Jews lived in Ponevitch before, oh, that’s the building, lived in Ponevitch before the Shoah. And almost all of them were murdered. And Ruta’s uncle, the husband of her aunt, who-
Was the chief of police, wasn’t he>
Until the end of August, by which time many people were murdered. And anyway, what we’re looking at is the building of the Ponevezh Yeshiva. So he said, “No, there’s nothing about the Jewish community.” So I said to him, “Are you aware of the fact that millions of people all over the world know the name of your town?” He goes, “What? Are you crazy? What are you talking about?” I said, you know, the bakery opposite the bus station, that is the building of the Ponevezh Yeshiva.“ So I, of course, explained to him what is the Yeshiva, what is the Rabbi, what they do. I told him about Rabbi Kahaneman. He escaped from Lithuania in 1940. He went to Israel and he established the Ponevezh Yeshiva. And until recently, it was one of the top, at the very top. Okay?
Is there anything there? Is there a plaque? Is there anything there? No, there’s a plaque on the building, but in the museum there’s nothing. And I said to Ruta after we walked out of there, I said it in Hebrew first, so I had to say it in Hebrew, there’s a famous story in the Book of Kings about Elijah the Prophet and King Ahab. There was a Jew living next to the King Ahab’s in a palace who had a beautiful vineyard. His name was Naboth, and Ahab wanted that vineyard. So he offered to buy the vineyard from Naboth, Naboth refused, so he murdered Naboth. So when Elijah the Prophet encountered Ahab, he said to him, "Have you murdered and inherited?” So I said to Ruta, In other words, “You murdered our Jews, you inherited, you stole all their property, and then you erased them. They don’t exist anymore.” So I have to say that just personally, it was the most emotionally wrenching experience, this whole business, and we did it for 40 days. Thank God it wasn’t continuous. 'cause I don’t think I could have survived.
Your great uncle Efraim. he was a student at Ponevezh, is that right?
He was, yes, he studied, but he learned in Ponevezh, not only at Ponevezh, he also learned in Radin. And I found his request for a Lithuanian permit to be in Lithuania because the town where my grandfather was born, today in Lithuanian. But is a very famous town. I’ll explain to you why very briefly. Poland and Lithuania fought a battle from 1918 to 1920 over Vilna, and the Poles won. So Vilna was part of Poland during the interwar period. but there were no diplomatic relations between Lithuania and Poland, I think, for 15 years. But one day a year on Tisha B'Av the Lithuanians and the Poles allowed the Jews to meet in the Jewish graveyard of where my grandfather was born. And in that graveyard, that was in Lithuania, the shtetl itself was in Poland. So officially, Efraim was a Polish citizen. But he wanted to learn in Ponevezh and he needed a permit. But that’s how became famous.
I just want to ask you just about Ruta’s reactions as well, because I mean, again, if we just take a step back and put all of this into context as you document so well in the book, I mean, there’d been a Lithuanian Jewish community since the 14th century. It was the intellectual Jewish hub of Eastern Europe. The great Yeshivas were there. Not only Ponevezh, but Mir and Kovno Kollel and others as well. You know, Vilna Gaon, of course, was from Vilna. I mean, it was the great hub. And of the 220,000 Jews, there’s 8,000 left. The community is all but wiped out as a result of the Shoah. I mean, and many of the people who are listening tonight are going to have, they’re going to be from Litvak families. We know that just because of all the people who watch. And you’re going from town to town. You are saying Kaddish everywhere that you find a mass grave, you hear all these horrific stories of these 17-year old kids who were just brutal in terms of what they do. There’s a systematic, there’s the systemization of finding the local forest, taking people out, murdering them, and there’s Ruta who is listening to all of this, and she’s trying to find some crumb of comfort, some positive element left about her countrymen. I mean, how was she able if she was going to be your cypher to the Lithuanian people, what was she going to have left in terms of what Lithuania would be when it looked at itself in the mirror?
If you read the discussions, 'cause we taped all our conversations as we went from place to place so it’s obvious that Ruta is, you know, in Hebrew, you say a . She’s looking for some sort of redeeming value or redeeming characteristic to assuage the pain and the horror that she feels that her countrymen murdered our people. So part of the discussions were also, you know, I wouldn’t say arguments. The one thing that she did that got me upset was she didn’t believe the stories, the testimony of the worst humiliations. And there were stories that I read to her as we went from town to town, she didn’t believe it but the fact that she tried to put it into some sort of context which she could explain to herself saying that they, you know, some of the people wanted, they joined the battalions, they didn’t know what was going to happen. But, of course, one of the things that makes all this worse, and this we learned from Christoph Dieckmann, we learned two things from Christoph Dieckmann. One is that there were less than a thousand Germans in Lithuania during the Nazi occupation, we didn’t know that when we wrote the book. It makes it so horrendous because, remember, to murder-
And they weren’t the elites, I mean, the Einsatzgruppen were not elite soldiers by any means, were they?
No, those who joined, of course not. But what I’m saying is, first of all, I didn’t mention two other things. One is that more than 5,000 German, Austrian, and Czech Jews were brought to Lithuania to be murdered, okay? So add that to the 212,000 and at least 20,000 Belorussian Jews were murdered by the Lithuanians. So small, little Lithuania, less than 3 million people, murdered almost a quarter of a million Jews. This is crazy, this is absolutely mad. And the fact that they’re lying about it made it so much worse and so infuriating. But I wasn’t angry at Ruta. You can’t be angry at Ruta. You can only want to kiss her feet, I’m telling you. Such a courageous woman. So daring and so, you know, willing to put herself on the line. She’s not the problem at all, she’s part of the solution. And a hundred thousand people read this book in Lithuania because it was a bestseller. The only reason this book was published was because Ruta was such a popular author that her publishing company, Alma littera, wanted to keep her writing. So when she told them that she’s going to write a book on the Holocaust, they nearly had heart failure, okay. But they said, “We’re willing to print it if you don’t tell anyone what you’re writing about until the launch, till the day of the launch.” Which was brilliant because, as a result, the government was totally unprepared for what happened. They printed 2000 copies, sold out in less than 48 hours, another 2000, another 3000, ultimately 20,000 copies. And a hundred thousand people read it because it was the most popular book in all the public libraries for three years. So, I mean, whatever, you know, you can’t find people like this, you know what I mean? It was only possible because of Ruta and she deserves the credit, and what did she get? She got curses, she got Vytautas Landsbergis is the father of Lithuanian independence telling her, “Now that you’ve betrayed the country, why don’t you go commit suicide?” So she ultimately ran away to Israel for three years. So, but I’m firmly convinced we can’t win as outsiders. We can never win any of these battles.
That’s why in Britain, the only reason we were successful is because you were successful with the help of the All-Party War Crimes group which, as we all know, or you maybe you don’t know, morphed into the Holocaust Education Trust, which is amazing, and they’re doing amazing work. Karen Pollock and staff, okay? That’s why we won. We never could have won by ourselves, who are we? We’re a bunch of New Yorkers, you know, we were a little crazy. So I’m firmly convinced that that’s the only way to win. And that’s why for me, Ruta was like finding gold. You know what I mean? It was like to find a potential of a person who could help us win the battle but we’re just at the beginning, we have people, there’s people like Grant Gochin, okay, who sued the Lithuanian government and lately submitted a suit to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to cancel all the honours of Jonas Noreika, who was the liaison with the Nazis in Northwest Lithuania. And he lost over a hundred relatives of his in northwest Lithuania. We have people like Silvia Foti, who’s Jonas Noreika’s granddaughter, who wrote a book. She started writing a book about “My Grandfather, The Hero,” and ended up writing a book, “My Grandfather, The Nazi War Criminal,” 'cause she did the research. Things are happening. The Institute, which the government set up to be like the Yad Vashem.
I mean, God forbid the the comparison of Lithuania to answer all the historical questions. And there’s the one who denied that Noreika was, he said Noreika was actually a righteous Gentile, okay? The same Noreika who’s a Nazi war criminal, who, when they asked them to produce a list of perpetrators in Lithuania, after Joseph Melamed of blessed memory, the Chairman of the Association of Lithuanian Jews came up, he published something that said 23,000 perpetrators. They said there’s 2055 and in any event, they were under German officers so we can’t blame them of anything, and nothing was even done with those 2055. So, I mean, we’re up against the biggest lies. We’re up against the government. The only way we can win is with local help. And the only way the local people can be empowered is if people from the outside, from the Jewish world or the non-Jewish world come and make their investment and do what they can to get the truth out. I promise you, ultimately the truth will win but it’s not going to happen overnight.
Efraim, I’ve got so many other questions I want to ask you, but I have to confine myself just to one 'cause it’s not fair to everyone else who wants to ask a question, but I want to ask you this. I mean, Robert Wistrich famously called antisemitism, “The longest hatred.” Do you feel it is so hardwired into some societies, or do you feel that actually with the benefit of time and education and keep educating, keep talking about it, that it is possible to get positive change in attitudes?
I think it is possible to get change, but to uproot it completely, I don’t see that as a realistic possibility, to be honest. There’s no question that education and life experience of the right kind is beneficial. Education, teaching. And there are a lot of people out there today who are doing wonderful work in terms of Holocaust education and I want to particularly commend the Holocaust Education Trust in the UK because I’m acquainted with their activities. I speak to their groups who come to Israel. I’m in touch with Karen. I know more or less what’s going on. And as we say it is, to them, all honour to them. And I thank Greville up there because he’s the one, without him there wouldn’t be a Holocaust Educational Trust and Merlin Reeves and the people on the committee and you, Philip Rubinstein.
Thank you. With that I’m going to turn to people’s questions 'cause we’ve got an enormous amount. We’re only going to be able to get through a few so I apologise in advance to anyone or many of you whose questions we don’t get to.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: I just want to start with Keith who says, “Can you comment on the legacy of Simon Wiesenthal? Hella Pick’s view was slightly neutral on his effectiveness.”
A: So I mean, for me, Wiesenthal was one of the only people who was talking about the Shoah in the '50s and '60s when no one was, and it was only in the '70s and '80s that the rest of the world woke up. But, I mean, what’s your view of what Simon Wiesenthal gave to the world?
- Okay, first of all, I want you to understand that the greatest fear, the greatest anxiety, worry of Simon Wiesenthal was not, in my opinion, was not that he didn’t catch Nazi X or Y. His greatest worry was that the Holocaust will be forgotten. Now you have to understand when he was most active, exactly what you said, Philip, I totally agree with you. The '50s, the '60s, the '70s, who was interested in the Holocaust? Growing up, I never studied the Holocaust until I got to college. Okay? And there was very little written, and there were two people basically who helped keep the flame alive. One was Simon, of course, and one was Elie Wiesel. They were the people who did the most. Listen, there were other people as well. I don’t want to say that they’re the only ones, okay? But they were the prominent ones. And if we had, then we had this tremendous exponential growth of Holocaust education and books about the Holocaust and films about the Holocaust and all of this, it’s thanks to those heroes and the other heroes who I’m not mentioning now, but also worked during that period when there was very little or no interest in the Shoah.
So, you know what I mean? There’s all sorts of stories, how many Nazis Simon caught, et cetera. A lot of those people were caught when he worked for the American Army, not as a solo operator. You have to remember he was underfinanced, he had very little help, but he kept the memory alive and he kept the issue alive. And it’s thanks to Simon Wiesenthal that we later came on and convinced governments like the United States, UK, Australia, Canada, to prosecute Nazis, that we prosecuted some Nazis even in Eastern Europe, which was a miracle in itself. All that in a certain sense owes to Nuremberg and it owes to Simon. And listen, you can be, Simon was a great self-promoter because he had to be a self-promoter. That’s the way it works. And in a sense, I think Tom Segev is the one who wrote a very good biography, and the book, for example, and the personal attacks by Guy Walters, for example, on Simon are pure rubbish.
Q: We’ve got a question here from Lester Christie who says, “Can you tell us about Stanislaw Chrzanowski? So for anyone who’s in the UK, there was a BBC Radio 4 programme that was on a few days ago.
[Efraim] Yesterday.
[Philip] It was yesterday, wasn’t it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
A: Half an hour, so this is a Nazi war criminal who’d been living in Telford in Shropshire for many, many years. And probably, the two people I think who’ve done most to try and expose him are Jon Silverman, journalist, former journalist now Professor Of Media Studies, and private citizen, Dr. Stephen Ankier, and his own stepsons.
Stepson, John Kingston.
John Kingston and the story, he was involved in murders in Slonim in Belarus And the implication in the programme, it’s worth listening to, is that he was never prosecuted, even though there was a huge weight of evidence because he was protected by the security services who he worked for. And I have to say, I don’t know what you think, Efraim, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it’s likely that the same thing happened with Gecas as well.
No, Gecas worked for MI6.
Yeah, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if this was the case. I don’t know if there’s anything you want to add.
No, no, listen, Gecas himself, the officer of the Lithuanian murder squad in Belarus worked for MI6 apparently at some point. And nothing would surprise me in terms of learning about additional cases, I think that some sort of investigation should take place. And I actually was interviewed by Nick Southall, he’s the BBC reporter. And apparently my comments didn’t get into the initial story, but apparently they’ll be publicised later. But I think in a certain sense, this was a doubled betrayal of the victims, in other words, Britain and the Allies, and no one was able to save them. And then they gave the murderers cushy jobs and saved them from prosecution so that’s really a horrible, horrible result.
Q: So there’s a question here from Alan Magid. This is a big one. How did Mengele escape all the Nazi hunters and Mossad who were looking for him?
A: Okay, so we now know that the Mossad, we’re talking about Zvi Aharoni, who was the same person who was the first to identify Eichman, he corroborated his identity. He was sent on a mission, a solo mission, by Isser Harel before they sent the team to kidnap Eichmann. He claims that he saw Mengele face-to-face in Brazil in 1962 but he reached a conclusion that there was no way that a Mossad team could either kidnap or execute Mengele without being caught. Now, at that point, the Mossad more or less stopped hunting Nazis, and there’s several different versions of why that took place. One is that the discovery that Nasser had brought German ballistic missile scientist to Egypt to build a ballistic missile project for the Egyptians so they could destroy Israel. That’s obviously a little more important than Nazi war criminals. You’ll excuse me. I mean, you have to put things into proportion. Okay, that was an immediate threat to the existence in the state of Israel like Iran today in a certain sense, okay? So that was one explanation. There’s another explanation, which is quite, you’ll find it quite surprising. There was a famous case of a young child who was kidnapped by his grandparents, his Haredi ultra-orthodox grandparents, because they learned that their son was thinking of returning to the Soviet Union with the child, and they were afraid that the child would become, would assimilate in the Soviet Union.
So they hid him in all sorts of ultra-orthodox places in Belgium and later in the United States. And Ben Gurian gave instructions to do everything possible to find this kid because they considered it a terrible scandal. And, as a result, they took, according to one version, they took people off hunting Nazis to go find Yossele Schumacher. But I think the version that I gave before is more, sounds to me more serious. But one thing I want to say, and this is important, the Mossad several years ago commissioned three volumes on all its efforts to bring Nazis to justice. Okay? There were three volumes. They have not been printed. They were on the website of Yad Vashem, and you can download them. Unfortunately, for those who don’t read Hebrew, it’s only in Hebrew, okay, so one was only on the Mengele case. Another one was on all the cases except Eichmann and Cukurs. And the third one, a 144 pages, was about the organisational history of the unit set up in 1960 by the Mossad to combat anti-Semitism and hunt Nazis. Now, this was done in 1960 after a wave of anti-Semitic incidents in Europe. And for some reason, the thinking in Jerusalem was that these anti-Semitic incidents are the work of old Nazis, that it was Nazi war criminals who have not been caught. Turns out that that wasn’t true, but that was the unit that was set up to fight anti-Semitism, combat anti-Semitism, and also to look for Nazis.
Q: So many questions here, there’s one I’m just going to pull out 'cause it’s a very interesting one. It goes back to the case that we discussed earlier. Why did you go to the funeral of Dinko Sakic?
A: I didn’t go, I didn’t go, I heard about it. In other words, I know that Sakic, and it’s important to tell you this, I think, Sakic, it was a private funeral. Dinko Sakic asked to be buried in his Ustasha uniform, okay? In his Ustasha uniform, but the real killer is what the priest said at the funeral. And I kid you not, listen very carefully. He said the following, his name was Vjekoslav Lasic. He was a Dominican priest, Catholic, who said the following, "It’s true that Dinko Sakic did not observe all the Ten Commandments, but he was a martyr for Croatia.” So if a priest gives a speech like that, if this is what he says, you could imagine what an uphill battle we have to fight against Ustasha nostalgia.
Q: There are so many moving comments here. So many people are talking about their own family from different parts of Lithuania. Monty, for example, his father went to Ponevezh Yeshiva, who was born in South Africa. Another question though, is did you ever investigate or find any Nazi war criminals living in South Africa?
A: No, and the reason is the following. South Africa, you might have noticed that out of all the Anglo-Saxon countries that I spoke about, I did not mention South Africa. And the reason is that South Africa was hermetically closed to immigration after World War 22, all immigration. So if not for that, you would’ve had plenty of survivors in South Africa and plenty of Nazi war criminals. Everywhere that the survivors went, the Nazis went, and they ended up living almost many of them in the same cities, usually in America, in the eastern seaboard, in UK in the big cities, London, other places. And the same in Australia, and the same in Canada, Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, et cetera. And when they got older, they moved to Florida. Both of them moved to Florida, survivors moved to Florida, and the Nazis moved to Florida.
Yeah, I’m just very conscious of the time and I think it’s probably best to close here. I have to say, your relentlessness, your tirelessness and your sheer energy has not diminished one jot over the last 40 years. And it’s been such an honour and a privilege to know you and to talk to you over the last hour and a quarter. Thank you so much. We all thank you for the work that you do and thank you everyone for listening. And I hope we capture some of the comments that people have made because there really have been some really kind of heartfelt comments.
Listen, I just want to, Philip, if you’ll allow me to.
He always has to have the last word, okay, here we go.
Of course, that goes without saying. So if anyone wants to follow me, follow what we’re doing, okay, on Twitter, it’s @EZuroff on Twitter. If you want to follow me on Facebook, I can get rid of some of the friends, I have no idea who they are, and I’ll put you on there 'cause I’m close to 5,000 already. And if any of you have questions, you can write to me at swcjerus@netvision.net.il And I, especially the Litvaks among you, I hope you’ll read the book. It’s our monument, Ruta and I basically created a monument for the victims and we shed a lot of tears on the way there. I think more, I have to say one thing, I never imagined I would be so emotionally wrought by what happened, by what we did. I was in so many of the death camps, so many of the mass murder sites, nothing moved me the way I was moved in Lithuania, going with Ruta from place to place as Philip told you, Kaddish every place, and thinking that beneath my feet or two steps away from me are layers and layers of the remains of my brethren.
Please, everyone, you know, this is an important book. It’s, as I said, it’s not an easy read, but it’s a really important book and I thoroughly, thoroughly recommend it to everyone. So Effie, thank you.
So I would just like to jump in and reiterate, you know, exactly what you have said, important to read the book. There are many, I think there are many Lithuanian Jews listening tonight 'cause I know that the South Africans, the Scottish, and the Mexican Jews are of Lithuanian descent. So to both of you, to Phil and to Effie, thank you very, very much for really a riveting and very informative presentation. It’s just absolutely what our horror story, and so hard to believe. Effie, I agree, education is indeed the key to changing primary belief systems. And we definitely need to find more Ruta’s who, as you said, are like gold, who will bat for us and be on our team. And I’d like to ask you both, if you would consider coming back and going into more detail about the cases that you’ve worked on. Just.
Listen, first of all, I want to thank Lockdown University. I want to thank Philip and Claudia who got me into this thing, which I didn’t even know about. I’m sorry, I apologise, but I’ll be more than happy to come back.
Well, thank you, Effie, thank you very, very, very much. And Phil, thank you as always. You know, as I said before, Phil is part of our immediate family. And, you know, he is the son-in-law of the great Trudy Gold and the husband of Claudia, and now Effie, thank you for joining our family and we look forward to welcoming you back soon.
Listen, one thing I’ll tell you, one of the benefits that you probably don’t realise is that I renewed my friendship with Philip now as a result of Claudia’s invitation to be at the London Jewish Book Week.
Well, I’m thrilled about that. And actually one of the benefits of this is that many friendships have been reestablished and, in fact, one of our presenters has been reunited with family. David Pima has now been reunited or reacquainted with family that he lost touch with for years. So hopefully that this really will be bridge building and enlarge community where we can really help change the narrative. And you know, as I said before, it’s really a community just based on friendship and integrity and learning.
Thank you, thank you so much for the invitation.
[Wendy] Thank you.
Effie, let me just ask you if anyone’s still here listening, given the day that it is, are you willing to make a prediction as to whether or not there’s going to be a fifth election in Israel?
You know what the Talmud tells about the prophecy after the destruction of the Temple? There’s a famous passage in the Talmud that says, “After the destruction in the second Temple, prophecy was only given to fools.”
Okay, that answers the question, Phil. So to all our participants, thank you for joining us tonight and we look forward to getting together again soon. We’ll see everybody tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you very much, thanks, Effie. Thanks, Phil, thank you everyone. Night night.