A U.K. rabbi learned of the Golders Green attack at Auschwitz. Here’s what he has to say

On Thursday, a GBNews reporter interviewed Rabbi Doron Birnbaum in Golders Green, a north London neighbourhood where two Jewish men were stabbed this week in a knife attack authorities are treating as an act of terrorism. Birnbaum, an educator, had just returned to the city after visiting Holocaust sites in Poland with 90 Jewish students when he was asked about the attack. Here’s the full text of what he said.

Rabbi Doron Birnbaum: I’ve just come back, as a rabbi and educator in Hasmonean High School, one of the big schools in the Jewish community, for the last four days with 90 Jewish students in Poland, in places like Tarnów and Krakow, where you’d have a bustling Jewish community like what you can see around Golders Green. There is nothing left anymore.

We visited mass graves of children. We visited camps in Majdanek, and yesterday, as we were in Auschwitz, the largest Jewish cemetery in the world, where 1.3 million of our brothers and sisters were murdered, I was in a barrack called the latrines. It’s where they used to, supposedly, allow the Jewish woman to go to the toilet, if ever allowed. My phone pings, I get a message that two Jewish people have been stabbed in Golders Green, minutes from my home.

And out of respect, I step outside the barracks, and I’m in Auschwitz, and I want people to understand this, because sometimes in numbers, we miss the personal narrative. Everyone’s got a family Whatsapp group. As a Jew, I go on to my family Whatsapp group, and I ask, are you OK? Are my family still alive? I get pictures and videos from the community. I zoom in at the bodies, the legs, the clothes that can be seen, to try and identify, ‘Is that my own family?’ and every single Jew in our community did that yesterday.

I then have to take a group of 40 teenagers, in Auschwitz, outside the gas chambers, sit them down, explain to them what’s happened in their community, and say ‘You might need to check on your parents, just to see if they’re OK.’ And people need to see the connection between these two things.

There are Jewish communities that have been decimated and don’t exist anymore, and one day, in 80 years’ time, am I or my children going to take our grandchildren down the streets of Golders Green, Hendon, Edgware, Stamford Hill, any Jewish community in the U.K., and they’re going to say, look at that marking on the wall: There was once a Jew here. Because that’s the way we’re going.

The conversations we’re having around family tables are the same conversations they had in 1935, Will — and that’s the place where, unfortunately, we heard the devastating news about this terrorist attack, yesterday.

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