At the very hour that President Reagan visited the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp today, a group of 200 former Jewish fighters in the French resistance movement met to dedicate a forest in the Jerusalem hills in memory of Nazi victims and Jewish freedom fighters in France during World War II.
Ambassador Jacques Dupont, who attended the ceremony, said it was too early to forget the Holocaust and it was too early to forgive and reconcile with the German people.” Just as we condemned the French regime which collaborated with the Nazis, so must we condemn any attempt at reconciliation,” he said.
Moshe Rivlin, chairman of the Board of the Jewish National Fund, focused on the symbolic difference between laying wreaths on the graves of SS soldiers and planting trees in Israel. The latter, he said, symbolizes life, liberalization, renovation and peace.
The ceremony ended with the participants, which included Likud MK Eliahu Ben-Elissar, planting the first trees dedicating the Liberation Forest on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war.
Additional stories on President Reagan’s visit to Bitburg as well as the Solidarity Sunday for Soviet Jewry rally in New York are continued in the supplement.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
