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BERLIN — Disagreement between Israeli officials and the organizers of a ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany risks overshadowing the commemoration.
The dispute began after the head of a foundation overseeing the Buchenwald memorial near Weimar in the east of the country invited German-Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm — the grandson of a Holocaust survivor — to speak at Sunday’s anniversary ceremony.
Israeli officials objected to the commemoration speech by Boehm, a known critic of the Israeli government and its actions in Gaza, prompting organizers to withdraw the invitation.
Israeli officials accuse Boehm, a philosophy professor at the New School for Social Research in New York with double German-Israeli citizenship, of trivializing the Holocaust.
“The decision to invite Omri Boehm, a man who has described Yad Vashem [Israel’s memorial to Holocaust victims] as an instrument of political manipulation, relativized the Holocaust and even compared it to the Nakba [the Palestinian term for the flight of an estimated 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war], is not only outrageous, but a blatant insult to the memory of the victims,” the Israeli embassy wrote on X. “Under the guise of science, Boehm is attempting to dilute the commemoration of the Holocaust with his discourse on universal values, thereby robbing it of its historical and moral significance.”
The head of the German foundation overseeing the Buchenwald memorial criticized the Israeli pressure.
“To actually be pressured into denying a Holocaust survivor’s grandson the floor is really the worst thing I’ve experienced in 25 years of memorial work,” the foundation director, Jens-Christian Wagner, said on public radio. “Third parties are playing history politics on the backs of the victims and that is extremely regrettable.”
Boehm was invited “because we can expect him to provide a high level of ethical reflection on the relationship between history and remembrance, in particular on the value of universal human rights and their significance with regard to the Nazi crimes,” Wagner said in a statement.
He said he pulled the “emergency brake” to cancel Boehm’s speech in order to prevent the controversy from overshadowing an event intended to honor survivors. “I really couldn’t reconcile it with my conscience to burden them with a conflict that had nothing at all to do with them on the 80th anniversary,” he said in the public radio interview.
Critical remarks
Boehm’s previous critical remarks on Israel as a Jewish state, have often led to controversy. In the run-up to a speech at the Vienna Festival last year, for example, the Jewish Museum withdrew its support as partner after days of public debate.
“In a liberal democracy we cannot allow the idea that some people will be second class citizens,” Boehm said in a TV interview with public broadcaster ORF in Vienna last year. “In a Jewish state, a state that articulates a sovereignty of the Jewish people, non-Jews do not belong to the sovereign people,” he added.
He has also criticized the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza, where the country’s military has been waging war for a year and a half.
“My Palestinian friends know that anyone who calls what my country is doing in Gaza ‘self-defense’ deeply shames my identity,” Boehm said in a speech last year when accepting The Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding, a prestigious literature prize in Germany.
Boehm has not yet reacted publicly to the debate surrounding his disinvitation to the Buchenwald memorial event.
Between 1937 and 1945, the Nazis held more than 250,000 people at the Buchenwald camp. More than 56,000 died there, including 11,000 Jews.
