Dr. alex
Grobman

DR. ALEX GROBMAN is the the son of Frank Grobman, who owned and operated a Frank's Pharmacy at 831 North 5th Street from the 1940s until being burned out in the 1968 race riot, and Reba Grobman, who worked as a secretary to Rabbi Kahn of Congregation Beth El in the 1970s.

Today Dr. Grobman is recognized as one of the world's leading scholars in matters relating to the Holocaust. The Holocaust Teacher Resource Center website, through whose speakers bureau Dr. Grobman can be contacted, states the following about him: 

Dr. Alex Grobman is an historian with an MA and Ph.D. in contemporary Jewish history with a major in the Shoah from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is president of the Brenn Institute, a think tank dealing with historical and contemporary issues affecting the Jewish community.

Dr. Grobman established the first Holocaust center in the US under the auspices of a Jewish Federation in St. Louis, Missouri and served as its first director. He also served as director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angles where he was the founding editor-in-chief of the Simon Wiesenthal Annual, the first serial publication in the United States focusing on the scholarly study of the Holocaust. With Rabbi Daniel Landes, Dr. Grobman edited Genocide: Critical Issues of the Holocaust, a companion to the Center’s Academy Award winning film Genocide.

Dr. Grobman is the author of Rekindling the Flame: American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors of European Jewry, 1944-1948, and editor of In Defense of the Survivors: The Letters and Documents of Oscar A. Mintzer AJDC Legal Advisor, Germany, 1945-46. His latest book Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened, and Why Do They Say It? published by University of California Press in Berkeley was used to refute David Irving at the Lipstadt/Irving trial. In 2002, it was published in Italian and in paperback. In 2007, it will be published in Greek. He has also edited three academic guides: Anne Frank in Historical Perspective, Those Who Dared: Rescuers and Rescued, and Schindler’s List.

Dr.Grobman has just completed a book on the Vaad Hatzala in the post-war period 1946-1949.

Dr. Grobman also has contributed articles to the New Jersey Jewish Standard and the San Diego Jewish World.  

Dr. Grobman's latest book is "Nations United: How The UN Undermines Israel and the West." 

Dr. Grobman is also involved in the defense of intellectual freedom in America's schools. He trains students how to respond to Arab propaganda on American campuses. One student who worked with him for three years became president of Harvard Students For Israel. Another became active at Yale University and is in Harvard graduate school this year. Other students are at Yeshiva University and Columbia.

New Jersey Jewish Standard - December 14, 2006

San Diego Jewish World - July 5, 2007

Rationalizing the irrational: the excuse Jews make
to avoid acknowledging Arab hatred

Quite frequently there is significant evidence in the press about a particular event to understand what is transpiring, yet at times we seem unable to analyze the information, assimilate it or comprehend its import. Part of the problem is a predilection not to accept what is unpleasant. Denial becomes the response. Additionally, confronting the truth, especially when a situation concerns us deeply is difficult to acknowledge because it might require some form of action that could disrupt our lives.

During the Shoah, most Jews in Europe and the U.S. were unable to comprehend what the Nazis were planning because there was no historical precedent for the systematic, bureaucratically administered destruction of a people—and especially one scattered throughout Europe. In November 1942, Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground resistance movement, met with leaders of the West in London and in July 1943 with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to inform them of his first hand account of the Nazi effort to destroy the Jews of Europe. Karski also met with U. S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter accompanied by Frankfurter’s friend, the Polish ambassador in exile. After Karski told Frankfurter what he had seen in the Warsaw Ghetto and in an extermination camp, Frankfurter said he could not believe it. When the ambassador protested, Frankfurter said he was not calling Karski a liar, but that he could not accept the information. Either Frankfurter found the thought of Jews being killed in this fashion inconceivable or he knew that if he acknowledged the systematic destruction he would have to act publicly in their defense.

After having experienced the Shoah, the idea that a group might seek to destroy the Jewish people should not seem like such an alien concept, yet that is precisely the way some Israelis and American Jews act when it comes to the Arab/Israeli conflict. Attacks against Israel by Arab religious and political leaders are a real threat to their very being as a nation and a people. Accusations that Jews are Satan, sons of apes and pigs, and evil are not just words—they have motivated Arab homicide bombers and other Arab murderers into indiscriminately maiming and killing Jewish men, women and children on buses, in cars, restaurants and in their homes.

Some Israelis are willing to overlook public pronouncements in the Arab media that call for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people. They seem oblivious to the impact Arab textbooks claiming Israel is illegitimate have on students. They ignore clear violations of agreements made with the Jewish state, and statements challenging any Jewish connection to sacred sites in the country. Rarely is anything said when the Holocaust is denied. With all of the Arab demonization of Jews, Israel and the denial of their right to live in the Land of Israel, there are many Israelis who staunchly adhere to the notion that Arabs want peace. 

What do the Arabs have to say or do before Jews acknowledge the true extent of Arab hatred and their ultimate goal to obliterate Jewish presence from Israel? Why do Israeli officials lower themselves to meet with a Holocaust denier who also rejects their historical connection to the Land of Israel?  In other words, is there any way for us to understand this self-destructive and suicidal conduct?

Kenneth Levin, a clinical psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, offers one of the most credible explanations for this aberrant behavior when he says that Israelis are in “state of chronic siege,” which causes them to seek ways out of their stressful lives. Their search for a more normal existence has produced “the Oslo approach,” which is founded on “wishful thinking” that has no connection to “reality.” Those maintaining this view in the face of contradictory evidence and who will not tolerate any debate are textbook “delusional,” Levin says. Jews who question Arab motivation are called “enemies of peace,” similar to those engaged in anti-Israel terror.

 Israelis are influenced by a number of factors Levin explains. The so-called “new historians” who rewrote Israeli history convinced a substantial number of Israelis that Israel was at fault for the occupation of the territories and that its military aggressiveness is prolonging the conflict. This in turn has created an impetus among some Israelis to pressure Israel to relinquish the territories, which they claim would end the hostilities and herald a new era of peace. That so many Israelis see Israel as the aggressor is quite surprising in view of what really happened: The Arabs rejected the UN partition plan in 1947 and five Arab countries invaded Israel after it was declared a state in 1948. In 1967, the Six Day War was precipitated by Egypt’s closing of the Straits of Tiran (Israel's primary shipping route to the south and especially for oil), a casus belli (an act of war) in of itself, the blockade of the port of Eliat and the escalation of border fighting along the Egyptian and Syrian fronts. In 1973 the Arabs attacked Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year.

Unrelenting verbal and physical attacks to undermine and destroy the Jewish State are ignored, while the Arabs responsible for these actions are presented as “moderate” in their behavior and in their expectations of what Israel must do to ensure peace in the region. In particular, Israel is being asked to mend its ways and to be more accommodating in its concessions to the Arabs.

Levin considers this attitude delusional since it fails to acknowledge the limited importance Arabs attach to Israeli actions.  For a century, for example, Israelis have touted the power of economic inducements to bring social stability to Arab countries and act as a disincentive to radicalism. This approach fails to take into account the lack of significance Arabs view commerce with Israel when compared to the economic potential of working with half a billion Arabs. Ironically, as Arab wealth has increased, ideologically motivated extremists have more funds to pursue their aggressive agendas.

Israelis also fail to consider the need for Arab regimes to keep Israel at arm’s length in order to placate the fundamentalists who threaten them. That Egypt has reneged on practically all of it agreements of the 1978 Camp David treaty is also ignored.

Israel has no control in determining when the Arabs will decide that peace should come to the Middle East, Levin opines. That will only happen when the Arabs themselves believe that it is in their interest to stop the fighting. In other words, Israel’s military should be able to prevent the Arabs from winning a war, “but they cannot force peace.” This reality is so painful that some Israelis “take refuge in delusions of Israeli culpability,” regardless of all the evidence to the contrary.

The tendency to withdraw “to delusions of transgression, and of salvation through self-reform and concessions, is common, even endemic, within communities under siege,” Levin says.  In psychiatric literature they describe this as “Jewish-self hatred” or “identification with the aggressor.” Attributing antisemitic caricatures to fellow Jews is another manifestation of this pathology. Assuming responsibility for something over which you have no control is similar to an abused child who feels responsible for his plight and views himself as “bad.” The child maintains, “the fantasy that if he becomes good enough,” his father will cease hitting him, his mother will give him attention and whatever other form of abuse he suffered will stop.

The “fellowship fallacy”—that the Palestinians share Jewish values, goals and positions is another myth that pervades some Israel circles. Having met informally or in public forums with high-level individuals from the territories who are connected to the PLO, the Israelis hear statements that are less antagonistic and more reasonable than heard from the PLO leadership. They assume that these conciliatory words are what the PLO would really agree to in negotiations with Israel. Such was the case after informal discussions with Faisal Husseini, the leading spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization in the disputed territories. In October1989, Husseini proclaimed, “The Palestinian Peace Camp has won, and now leads the PLO and the Palestinian people.”

In a November 1992 speech to an Arab youth group in Amman, Jordan, however, Husseini declared, “We have not conceded and will not surrender any of the existing commitments that have existed for more than 70 years… We have within our Palestinian and united Arab society the ability to deal with a divided Israeli society….We must force Israeli society to cooperate…with our Arab society, and eventually dissolve the ‘Zionist entity.’” During the Oslo period, he asserted that their objective was to establish a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.”        

The attitude toward Husseini illustrates the willingness of many Israelis to overestimate words of encouragement and underestimate the contradictory and inflammatory rhetoric he expressed to others. This situation continued under Yasser Arafat whose assurances about his yearning for peace would, incredibly, be accepted with greater credibility than his speeches and statements to the Arab media and public, and the racist curricula taught in Palestinian schools. The same attitude seems to be operating with regard to Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestine Authority.      

Those who challenge these myths are attacked as racists and extremists for denying the humanity of the Arabs and their feelings and aspirations. Mordecai Bar-On, a founder of Peace Now, believed that part of the reason for this intolerance was due to a lack of education and upbringing, which breeds less tolerance and an inability to understand the “other” and complex issues. This would account, he said, for the Sephardic community’s mistrust of Arabs. Distrust could also be found among elements of the Ashkenazi community that were less educated and were more traditional in background and practice.

Still another popular myth is that Arabs cannot be antisemitic since they themselves are Semites. If Arabs think that they cannot be antisemitic, it's out "of either ignorance or bad faith," declares Bernard Lewis, one the world's leading experts on Islam and the Middle East. "Semite, like Aryan, is a classification of language, not of race or nationality. The misuse of both these terms originated in the same quarters, and serves the same purpose." Antisemitism has never "been directed against any but Jews, and this has been well understood by all concerned. The Nazis saw no difficulty in simultaneously hating Jews and courting Arabs, and there were few Arabs who likewise found no difficulty in responding to this courtship."

The Egyptian intellectual Dr. Mamoun Fendi, a columnist for the London Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, also refuted the argument incessantly discussed in the Arab media—that the Arabs are Semites and accordingly cannot be antisemites. "When Arabs respond to accusations of antisemitism with the argument that 'we are Semites,' he said, "the West  laughs... because the term antisemitism as it is understood here in the West, is not the result of an anthropological classification of the races. The 'semitism,' of the concept of 'antisemitism' is mostly connected to the Jewish holocausts in Europe—that is, to the hatred of those people [the Jews], which led directly to the gas chambers in which the Jews were cremated. Therefore, when some Arabs say 'We are Semites,' the ordinary man [asks]: 'When exactly were the Arabs cremated in the gas chambers of Europe, and how are the Arabs connected to this?' Of course the Arabs were not cremated by the Nazis. Therefore, the Arabs' claim that they are 'Semites' is... an attempt to shove themselves into someone else's history.

"There are [in the West]... some who ask whether this [Arab] attempt to shake free [of charges of antisemitism] is connected to the Arabs' denial of this history, and that therefore, they stand in the same ranks as Europe's Neo-Nazis who deny that the gas chambers existed and that the Holocaust [ever] happened. While Germany purifies itself of this historical crime, we find that some Arabs celebrate the event [i.e. the Holocaust]."  

Denying Israel's right to exist "has clear genocidal implications," asserts Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer. There is little doubt that abolishing the Jewish state would result in the "wholesale murder of its citizens."

After the Israelis defeated the Arabs in the War of Independence, Ben-Gurion said "The Arab people will not be reconciled to the fact that six hundred thousand Jews defeated them; and this will remain a critical issue for us for a long time." He also recognized the Arabs would not be deterred from liquidating the Jewish State—that they would take every opportunity to achieve a strategic advantage, and that they believed time was on their side: "It should not be assumed that the defeat has restrained them from [wishing to] extirpate us from our land. They are certain, with some justification that time is on their side. Ten, fifty, a hundred or two hundred years. They have a classic example right here in the country—the eleventh-century Crusader conquest. A Christian state rose[and] thrived for decades, [but] eventually the Muslim world overpowered and totally annihilated it."

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir also understood the extent of this hatred when on October 16, 1973, she warned members of the Knesset: "I have never doubted for an instant that the true aim of the Arab states has always been, and still is, the total destruction of the State of Israel, or that even if we had gone back far beyond the 1967 lines to some miniature enclave, they would not still have tried to eradicate it and us."  

Golda realized that Arab leaders like Yasser Arafat were telling the truth when they openly declared that there was no solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict other than the destruction of the Jewish state. Yet, there is a predisposition in the West to disregard whatever the Arabs say as insignificant since it does not reflect what they really mean or will do, observes professor Gil Carl AlRoy.                          

This theory blames the Arabic language for this disconnect. At best, the correlation between words and action is unpredictable and random. Christian missionaries spread the patronizing notion that Arabs were wonderfully mischievous children.

Most scholars reject such views about the Arabic language. There is no ambiguity. Special emphasis is added to ensure that what was said, was intentionally said and is clearly understood. And therefore, failure to destroy Israel should not be misconstrued as a lack of commitment to achieving that goal. In the West, journalists and diplomats tend to highlight the discrepancy between what Arab leaders say in public and in private. When Arab leaders make a public statement that affronts Westerners, it is rejected as being meant only for Arab public consumption, for the street, while in private these same leaders are amiable and conciliatory.

Levin and others have done a great service by diagnosing the irrational behavior of many Israelis and Jews who persist in acting out their fantasies. If we are to move beyond this delusion, to accept the situation as it is instead of what we wish it to be, we need to understand the nature of this pathology, which has caused tremendous damage to Israel and the Jewish people. We cannot afford to “rationalize the irrational.” The future of the Jewish state is at stake..

San Diego Jewish World - July 15, 2007

New Jersey Jewish Standard - August 30, 2007

Rabbi

Much will be written about Judah Nadich, the 95-year-old rabbi emeritus of the Park Avenue Synagogue and founding board member and honorary trustee of the Abraham Joshua Heschel School who died on Sunday. He was an icon in the Conservative movement.

During World War II, Nadich was an American Jewish chaplain. After the liberation of Paris in August 1944, he served at the Office of the Theater Chaplain in the city. By virtue of his position, he became an unofficial spokesman on Jewish affairs for the foreign correspondents of The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, and other members of the American press in the region.

He and other American Jewish chaplains alerted American Jewish organizations and leaders about the problems confronting the Jews of France: the need to return to the Jewish community the children who were placed in convents, on farms, and elsewhere by parents who were no longer alive; the urgency of providing relief to a significant proportion of the Jews during the upcoming winter months; the importance of resolving legal issues of how to recover confiscated property and the legal status of foreign Jews in the country; and the difficulty of reuniting families.

After Earl G. Harrison, a former U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, visited Germany and Austria to assess the condition of the Jewish displaced persons, his negative report about the plight of the Jews in Europe created a great deal of criticism throughout the United States. President Harry S Truman was disturbed that military government officers had not provided the Jewish DPs with proper housing or treated them humanely.

As a result, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, reluctantly agreed to assign a chaplain as special adviser on Jewish affairs to the Theater Commander of the U.S. Forces in Europe, until a prominent civilian could be appointed.

The need to respond immediately to Truman prompted Eisenhower to find a Jewish chaplain. Chaplains were already in Europe, knew the issues facing the DPs, and understood how the army functioned.

Jacob Trobe of the American Jewish Distribution Committee (JDC) recommended Nadich to the position. Nadich was picked over another chaplain because of his experience at the Office of the Theater Chaplain, and because he had impressed Trobe.

In his role as adviser, Nadich also became the liaison between the army and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the JDC, the Jewish Agency, the World Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Congress, and other Jewish organizations in the United States, Great Britain, and Palestine.

On Aug. 27, 1945, Nadich began a tour of the Zeilsheim DP camp outside Frankfurt. Two days later he began an extended tour of the camps in Bavaria, and then two days in Berlin. He also made an extensive inspection around Heidelberg under the command of the Seventh Army.

Upon his return to Frankfurt, Nadich met with Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, highlighting the importance Eisenhower attached to Nadich’s mission.

Smith was disturbed to learn that in the Third Army area, under Gen. George S. Patton, American soldiers stood guard at the gates of the DP camps, Jews had to obtain exit passes, only 10 percent of the camp population was permitted to leave at any one time, and the surrounding villages and towns were off limits to them.

Smith’s response was swift. He immediately called a number of the generals in the Third Army, including Patton, to demand that conditions be improved. On Sept. 15, Smith conveyed the substance of Nadich’s report to Eisenhower.

After Eisenhower issued a memorandum to his commanders to provide the DPs with adequate housing and nourishing and sufficient food, allow them to guard the camps themselves, and make regular inspections to remove all incompetent personnel, Nadich explained why much more was needed, especially in the Third Army area.

Simon Rifkind, U.S. district court judge, replaced Nadich after arriving in Frankfurt on Oct. 22, 1945. Nadich remained for another three weeks to assist in the transition. He then returned to the United States, where he was discharged from the army. He later wrote about his experiences in his book "Eisenhower and the Jews."

The American Jewish chaplains played a vital role in helping the Shearith Hapletah, the remnant of the Shoah. Nadich will be remembered for having been an advocate of the survivors at the highest level of the American military.

The rabbi is survived by his wife, the former Martha Hadassah Ribalow; his sister, Esther Rosenberg of Baltimore, Md.; daughters Leah Meir of Teaneck, Shira Levin of New York, and Nahma Nadich of Newton Centre, Mass., and eight grandchildren.

Tehey nafshoh tzerurah bitzror hachaim: May his soul be bound in the bond of everlasting life..