Rabbi: Darfur refugees not Israel’s responsibility

A noted West Bank rabbi said Israel does not have to take in refugees from the Sudanese genocide.Rabbi Dov Lior, from the Hebron-Kiryat Arba area, rejected comparisons between the Holocaust and the crisis in Darfur in comments responding to a question on an Internet forum, The Jerusalem Post reported.Rabbi Lior, a refugee during the Holocaust, said the moral obligation of other nations to assist victims of the Sudan crisis cannot be compared to the obligations on nations during the Shoah because Jews were specifically hunted “wherever they were.””We have enough poor people in Israel,” Lior said. “There are plenty of nations that can help those refugees besides us.”The director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office, Efraim Zuroff, agreed that the plight of the Sudanese cannot be equated with Jews during World War II.”Sudanese who managed to reach Israel had already escaped ethnic cleansing by entering Egypt from Sudan,” he said. “The move to Israel was an attempt to find a better haven.”