The rabbi who offered a prayer at President Donald Trump’s inauguration 10 days ago is criticizing the White House statement on International Holocaust Memorial Day that failed to mention Jews as a “mistake.”
“I do not accuse President Trump of wanting to dishonor the memory of the victims of the Holocaust who were Jewish, but it was a mistake,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
Hier added that to remove Jews from mention in commemorations of the Holocaust, as is done by nationalist groups in the US and Eastern Europe seeking to minimize how much the Holocaust was specifically targeting the Jews of Europe for genocide, “is dangerous.”
“The Final Solution was not planned against Gypsies. The Final Solution was not planned against homosexuals. It was not planned against any group other than Jews,” he said, noting the decisions reached by the Nazi to deliberately kill the Jews at the Wannsee Conference in 1942. “Of course there were many victims who were non-Jews. But the principle objective of Adolf Hitler was to do away with Europe’s Jews.”
Despite White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s claim that “by-and-large” the President has “been praised for the Friday statement commemorating the Holocaust, in point of fact the White House been criticized by Jewish groups on the right, left and center for merely lamenting the deaths, but not specifically mentioning Jews.
Spicer said Monday that people were “nitpicking” the statement, calling the criticism “frankly disappointing” and “pathetic.”
Hier gave a two-minute prayer at the inauguration on the steps of the Capitol on January 20, saying that “a nation’s wealth is measured by her values, and not by her vaults.”
Spicer claimed Monday the statement had been written with “the help of an individual who is both Jewish and the decedent of Holocaust survivors,” but he declined to identify the person.
When asked if he saw the hand of top Trump strategist Stephen Bannon, a self-described nationalist, in the omission, Hier said: “I have no idea how the statement was drafted.”
Hier chalked the Holocaust controversy up to a “rookie mistake” and said he did not think the administration acted with any malice, noting that Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, converted to Judaism to marry top Trump aide Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew.
“From here on in, hopefully they’ll correct it,” Hier said.
Hier pointed to a letter obtained by the Wiesenthal Center written by Hitler in 1919 in which he called for “the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general” by “a government of national strength, not of national weakness.”
“It shows you. Before Hitler ever heard of Eichmann, before he ever heard of Himmler, before he ever met Goering, what was in his mind to do,” Hier said.