A group of European rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement condemned in a letter what they consider a trivialization of the Holocaust by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
The letter, penned earlier this month by more than 100 rabbis from the Rabbinical Centre of Europe, an association with many rabbis affiliated with the Chabad Lubavitch movement, said that terms like “ghetto,” “genocide,” and “holocaust” belittles the “terrible suffering experienced by the victims of the horrific Holocaust and the Jewish people at large.”
In an interview from July, Pashinyan said that Azerbaijan, with which Armenia has had a long and bloody dispute over land with religious undertones, “created a ghetto, in the most literal meaning of the word” in Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed area at the heart of the conflict.
Pashinyan also spoke about Adolf Hitler and his gradual ascent to power. Hitler did not “pull out the sword and started chasing the Jews in the streets” immediately after his rise to power, Pashinyan said.
The letter’s signatories included some of the most prominent Chabad rabbis in Europe, including Binyomin Jacobs, a chief rabbi in the Netherlands, and Baruch Oberloander of Budapest, Hungary.
by email and never miss our top stories
European Chabad rabbis rarely speak out on geopolitical matters, a task that normally falls to the European Jewish Association, a Brussels-based advocacy group headed by Menachem Margolin, a Chabad rabbi from Israel.
The letter follows an Azerbaijani rabbi’s push for attention in Jewish and other media to Holocaust-related rhetoric by Armenian leaders. The Baku-based News.za agency describes Rabbi Zamir Isaev of Baku as “the initiator of the campaign of the rabbis of Europe and America” against the use of the Holocaust themes in “Armenian propaganda.”
Azerbaijan, an oil-rich nation whose annual gross domestic product of $56 billion is four times larger than Armenia’s, is thought to have a relatively robust lobbying apparatus in the European Union, the United States and beyond.
Azerbaijan is an ally of Israel and a major supplier of petrol to the Jewish state. Its officials have often claimed that their country has no antisemitism and it was the first Muslim-majority country to include the Holocaust in its curriculum for high school students. It is also a major consumer of Israeli weapons.
Azerbaijani officials have often compared the Holocaust, in which about six million Jews died, to the Khojaly massacre of 1992 against Azerbaijani civilians. The Azeri government says that 613 people were killed in that atrocity, perpetrated by Armenian troops.
The website of the Azerbaijani defense ministry states that “Khojaly does not differ from other horrifying tragedies of Katyn, Lidice, Oradour-sur-Glane, Holocaust, Songmy, Rwanda and Srebrenica, which remain in history as deep and shameful scars.”
Armenian officials have often said their nation has a special bond with Israel born of their shared experience of genocide. Israel and Armenia “share a common history through painful and sad times with the extinction of millions in the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide,” former president Sarkissian said in a 2020 speech in Holon near Tel Aviv, referring to the killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Turkish soldiers during World War I.
As The Times of Israel’s political correspondent, I spend my days in the Knesset trenches, speaking with politicians and advisers to understand their plans, goals and motivations.
I’m proud of our coverage of this government’s plans to overhaul the judiciary, including the political and social discontent that underpins the proposed changes and the intense public backlash against the shakeup.
Your support through The Times of Israel Community helps us continue to keep readers across the world properly informed during this tumultuous time. Have you appreciated our coverage in past months? If so, please join the ToI Community today.
~ Carrie Keller-Lynn, Political Correspondent
Yes, I’ll join
Yes, I’ll join
Already a member? Sign in to stop seeing this
We’re really pleased that you’ve read X Times of Israel articles in the past month.
That’s why we started the Times of Israel eleven years ago – to provide discerning readers like you with must-read coverage of Israel and the Jewish world.
So now we have a request. Unlike other news outlets, we haven’t put up a paywall. But as the journalism we do is costly, we invite readers for whom The Times of Israel has become important to help support our work by joining The Times of Israel Community.
For as little as $6 a month you can help support our quality journalism while enjoying The Times of Israel AD-FREE, as well as accessing exclusive content available only to Times of Israel Community members.
Thank you,
David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel
Join Our Community
Join Our Community
Already a member? Sign in to stop seeing this