Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Immanuel Jakobovitz, has publicly compared Britain’s response to the Brussels soccer riot, in which 38 people were trampled to death with the German people’s post war response to the Nazi Holocaust.
Writing in the London Times, Jakobovits said that Britain had shown a quite remarkable acceptance of collective shame for the deeds of some miscreants. This, he said, represented a demonstration of moral solidarity that is as rare as it is significant among the most civilized of nations.
He contrasted this attitude with the callous indifference with which not so long ago many citizens of another European country sought to shed any sense of shared guilt and shame for indescribable barbarities organized and committed for years by an infinitely larger proportion of fellow citizens and on an infinitely vaster scale. In Judaism, he added, the acceptance of corporate responsibility has always been regarded as supreme ideal.
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