By: Dmitriy Shapiro – Jewish News Syndicate; jns.org
The former Israeli Consul General in New York and current chairman of Yad Vashem acknowledged that when he first came to the United States in 2016, he didn’t see anti-Semitism as the pressing issue it is today, believing that it might have been an “overblown phenomenon” in the United States.
In his first visit back to the United States as chairman of the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, former Israeli Consul General in New York Dani Dayan seek to impart a sense of unity that he believes is an essential piece in knowledge of the Holocaust and Jewish identity around the world.
Dayan arrive in the United States this week to speak in Sunday’s virtual gala held by the American Society for Yad Vashem on the 83rd anniversary of Kristallnacht—the massive pogrom against Jews in Germany and Austria in November 1938.
“One of the interesting things that I value in Holocaust remembrance that Yad Vashem leads is that it’s one of the things that unites Jews across the ocean,” he said during an interview with JNS while on a train from Washington to New York. “There are many issues that divide us: political issues, religious issues and others, while the remembrance of the Holocaust is one that unites us in our pain, in our grief, and to some extent, also in the lessons we learn from the Shoah. So it is also important, it’s relevant, for the mission that I was very dedicated to when I was consul general in New York, and that is Jewish peoplehood and the unity of the Jewish people.”
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