Rabbi Arthur Schneier, a Holocaust survivor, Senior Rabbi at Park East Synagogue and founder and president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation is available for interview this week, in the days leading up to Saturday morning’s Park East Synagogue’s Annual International Holocaust Remembrance Service.
Rabbi Arthur Schneier will be joined by His Excellency António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations and Ambassadors from more than sixty nations to the United Nations and United States. Dani Dayan the Chairman of Yad Vashem and Dr. Albert Bourla, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Pfizer a son of Holocaust survivors will also attend Park East Synagogue’s Annual International Holocaust Remembrance Service, commemorating the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz at 10:45am on Saturday morning January 28th at Park East Synagogue, located at 164 East 68th Street.
According to Rabbi Arthur Schneier, a Vienna-born Holocaust survivor, “We must learn that the horrors of the Holocaust began with hateful speech which was just the first step in an attack on humanity. Death and life are in the power of the tongue. I first had the experience in my hometown in Vienna, when I encountered the hate speech of the Goebbels propaganda machine and the antiemetic weekly newspaper the Stürmer, that resulted in the dehumanization of Jews resulting in in the burning of books, stores, my synagogue and synagogues across Germany, and ultimately to death of six million Jews, among them one and a half million children and members of my own family in Auschwitz.”
Today, hate lives unchecked an unregulated on the Internet, we cannot allow social media platforms to continue to be the place that twenty-first century hate and antisemitism is permitted to be voiced without challenge.
“I owe my life to Carl Lutz the Vice-Consul of Switzerland, who saved over 62,000 Hungarian Jews. He along with hero diplomats, Raul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who issued protective passports and saved tens of thousands of Jews. Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Vice Consul in Lithuania who rescued 5,558 Jews by issuing transit visas to them so that they could travel through Japanese territory. Dimitar Peshev, the Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of Bulgaria, who prevented the deportation of Bulgaria’s 48,000 Jews. Ho Feng-Shan, Consul-General of the Republic of China; Turkish Counsel General Selahattin Ülkümen; Angelo Rotta, Apostolic Nuncio; Angel Sanz Briz, First Secretary of the Spanish Legation and Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Consul-General of Portugal who stated, “I shall give, free of charge, a visa to whoever shall request it. My desire is to be with God against man, rather than with man against God.”
Rabbi Schneier urges today’s world leaders to guard their tongues because speech can either divide or unite. He calls upon them to do what is not only right but necessary to implement regulations that will silence hatemongers who spew their venom through social media.
