Right-wing, anti-Corbyn figures attack credentials of Holocaust survivors in attempt to undermine public letter supporting Corbyn and Labour – but fail

On Sunday the SKWAWKBOX published details of a letter, also published in the Sunday Times, signed by twelve Holocaust survivors. Contradicting the media’s preferred narrative, the letter spoke positively of the Labour Party and said that its leader Jeremy Corbyn had ‘bent over backwards’ to help Jewish people.

Right-wing hardliners decided to attack this inconvenient letter – by attacking the history of the signatories as Holocaust survivors.

Two anti-Palestinian activists have been spreading smears that one of the letter’s signatories is not a Holocaust survivor:

The heading of a right-wing article attacking the Holocaust survivors

The article claims that the signatories are ‘identify[ing] as survivors

in order to embellish their credentials as antisemitism deniers/Corbots/critics of the communal leadership‘.

The right-wingers based their claim on the fact that one of the signatories was born in Nazi Germany but left in 1939 when he was only two years old – and have also claimed, for ‘good’ measure, that some of the signatories did not know what they were signing.

One of the right-wingers even sent these claims to the letters editor of the Sunday Times.

A journalist who writes for the Jewish Chronicle – which has already put out fake news to discredit the letter – has also picked up the false claims and emailed the letter’s coordinator, with the apparent intent of publishing an article to amplify them.

But the attack on the description of the signatory as a Holocaust survivor falls flat on its face – according to no less an authority than Yad Vashem, the Word Holocaust Remembrance Centre.

The letter’s signature of Hyman Bindiger, Holocaust survivor who left Germany in 1939

Yad Vashem’s FAQ page includes a section titled “How do you define a Shoah [Holocaust] survivor?” It’s very clear and simple:

At Yad Vashem, we define Shoah survivors as Jews who lived for any amount of time under Nazi domination, direct or indirect, and survived. This includes French, Bulgarian and Romanian Jews who spent the entire war under anti-Jewish terror regimes but were not all deported, as well as Jews who forcefully left Germany in the late 1930s. Yad Vashem (emphases added)

The hypocrisy of the right-wingers was further exposed when a Twitter respondent revealed that one of them had described the family of a Labour MP as Holocaust survivors even though they had left Germany much earlier than the family of the man they are attacking.

Shraga Stern, the coordinator of the signatories told the SKWAWKBOX:

I am proud to say that I facilitated the collection of signatures and that I was punctilious in assuring myself that (a) all the signatures were authentic and (b) that the signatories knew exactly what they were signing. Some of them even suggested amendments.



I have no hesitation in adding that each and every one of the signatories is a genuine holocaust survivor according to widely accepted definitions of that phrase.



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