Germany’s announcement Monday that plans to open a supermarket near the site of Ravensbruck concentration camp would be scrapped has been welcomed by Jewish groups, which had protested the project.
In a cable sent Tuesday to German officials, the Anti-Defamation League said, “It is only fitting that the integrity of the site be preserved as a memorial and reminder for the world of the horrors and tragedy of Nazi rule.”
But Abraham Foxman, ADL’s national chairman, said the supermarket plans betrayed an “insensitivity, lack of memory” that Jewish organizations needed to guard against.
Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, said he is pleased that the issue has been resolved, but warned of a “repeated pattern” of trivialization of the Holocaust.
“This is something we’re going to have to be wary of for the next many years, if not decades,” said Steinberg.
A spokesman for the federal state of Brandenburg, where the camp site is located, announced Tuesday that authorities would soon draft plans on how to deal appropriately with the memorial sites in the area, according to Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
But Cooper warned that “this incident won’t be the last,” because the people from the former East Germany, where Ravensbruck is located, “have a black hole of history that goes back from 1990 to 1933.”
Construction of the supermarket, which is nearly complete, sparked protest from European Jewish communities and U.S. organizations, which expressed shock over the callousness of building a supermarket near the former Nazi camp.
But local residents staged counterdemonstrations, arguing they needed the economic infusion that such a complex would bring.
In a letter sent last Friday to the prime minister of Brandenburg, the federal state in which the camp is located, Foxman asked Manfred Stolpe to “do everything to prevent the implementation of such a plan.”
More than 132,000 inmates, mainly women and children, were held at Ravensbruck, of whom at least 90,000 died. Many Jews were held there, as were Gypsies, Christian activists and others who opposed the Nazi regime.
German authorities said the supermarket may be converted into a meeting center or library.
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