Responding to the recent public apology letter by the organizers of the progressive March for Racial Justice for holding its resistance event on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, which thus excludes Jews, the President and Chairman of the International March of the Living expressed its profound disappointment.
By choosing a day in the Jewish calendar that Jewish people cannot participate in, you have effectively turned your March for Justice, into a monumental act of injustice against the Jewish people.
“While organizers of the March for Racial Justice have apologized for their ‘grave and hurtful oversight’, the correct path moving forward would be to change the date,” Phyllis Greenberg Heideman, President of the International March of the Living and its Chairman, Shmuel Rosenman, said. “By choosing a day in the Jewish calendar that Jewish people cannot participate in, you have effectively turned your March for Justice, into a monumental act of injustice against the Jewish people.”
The Jewish leaders tied the move with the recent neo-Nazi and White Supremacist march in Virginia which targeted Jews, African-Americans, and other minorities and suggested that now was not the time to break ranks.
During the Virginia event, armed neo-Nazis stood by a Jewish synagogue shouting ‘Sieg Heil’ and other anti-Semitic slogans. Jews were a very clear and preferred target throughout the Charlottesville march, which makes the exclusion of Jews in this counter-march even stranger.
“Especially in light of recent events in Charlottesville, where prejudice and hatred against Jews, African Americans and others were painfully evident, we must all stand together to combat injustice and intolerance,” Heideman and Roseman continued. “While organizers of the March for Racial Justice have apologized for their ‘grave and hurtful oversight’, the correct path moving forward would be to change the date.”
“The biblical words on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, perhaps the foremost symbol of American independence, read “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all inhabitants” (Leviticus 25:10). Indeed, we are only truly free when we work for the freedom for all members of the human family.”
The International March of the Living is an annual educational program, which brings individuals from all over the world to Poland and Israel, in order to study the history of the Holocaust and to examine the roots of prejudice, intolerance, and hate.
March of the Living implores March for Racial Justice to change the date so as not to exclude Jewish people.
“On behalf of 250,000 alumni of the March of the Living, who have traveled to Poland to see firsthand the remnants of the Holocaust and the devastating results of prejudice and hatred, we implore with the organizers of the March for Racial Justice to do the right thing: Change the date of the march so that no-one is excluded,” The International March of the Living leaders suggested. “Only then, will it truly be a march for justice.”
