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Congress Endorses Israel’s Demand on Germany for Compensation

August 29, 1951
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With the 500-odd delegates standing in memory of the victims of Nazism, the World Zionist Congress today passed a series of resolutions dealing with the issue of moral and material compensation to the Jews persecuted by the Nazis and the guilt of the German people in the crimes against the Jews.

The first of the series read by Rabbi Mordecai Nurock of the Mizrachi said: “No thing can serve as compensation to the Jewish people for its tremendous loss, and the Congress protests most strongly against the attempts to obliterate the truth concerning the joint responsibility of the great mass of the German people for the massacres and against the liberation of war criminals.” Other resolutions, which asserted that no moral or material compensation had been paid the Jewish people by the successors of the Nazi Government, endorsed the Israel Government’s demands on Germany for compensation.

The Congress also expressed the desire that a suitable memorial be set up in Jerusalem to the 6,000,000 Jewish martyrs. It also went on record as identifying itself with the Israel Parliament in its decision to set aside the 27th day of the Jewish month of Sivan–which this year fell on July 1–as a national memorial day for the victims of Nazism.

The delegates further expressed the desire that Israel grant honorary citizenship to these victims and to the ghetto fighters and Jewish partisans because “it is a debt of honor that their names be bound up with the land of the revival of the Jewish people as a taken of honor and as a perpetual remembrance.”

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