From Washington Post “On Faith” Blog
By Jack Bemporad, Marshall Breger, Suhail A Khan, Published: June 4, 2013 at 9:12 am
May 18-24 felt like a lifetime: emotional, exhausting, and exhilarating, as amid the horror of the Holocaust, we escorted a global delegation of influential Muslim leaders from nine countries on an historic journey to concentration camps in Germany and Poland.
In 2010 we had embarked on a similar journey with eight of America’s leading imams, because falsehoods about the Holocaust remain a leading propaganda tool to foment deadly anti-Semitism and anti-Western sentiment. We sought to undercut that legacy with a journey that bore witness to the truth of the Holocaust.
Not everyone agreed with us. Some Jewish groups urged us not to undertake this trip, arguing that some of the invited American imams had not been allies of the Jewish community in the past. We believe, however, that human beings grow and are transformed by their experiences and that it is our duty to engage with all those willing to openly engage with us. Further, we know the Holocaust is not taught in Islamic countries and so most have little to no knowledge base of the Holocaust. Therefore setting litmus tests for dialogue does little to increase knowledge or change hearts and minds.
Our 2010 journey met with great success. Following the trip, imams with massive congregations of 5000 families reached out to their Jewish neighbors, condemned Holocaust Denial and any form of anti-Semitism as being against Islam; they spoke publicly about their experience visiting the camps and some even began sharing community meals and rituals with their Abrahamic cousins.
We wondered; what would imams, sheikhs, Islamic educators and leaders from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bosnia, Palestine, Indonesia, India, Nigeria and Turkey have to say to a similar journey?
We embarked, once again, on an unprecedented mission of learning and compassion.
We were also joined by three State Department Ambassadors: In his first official act was Secretary of State John Kerry’s newly appointed Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, Ira Forman; Ambassador Michael Kozak, the State Department’s Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor; and Rashid Hussain, U.S. Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
We began in Germany. We prayed at a mosque outside Munich where the imam spoke to the importance of our journey. At the Jewish Museum, a young woman working at the bookstore expressed curiosity about our group. One of our Muslim participants explained that the group included a rabbi and Muslim imams from around the world, on the way to Dachau and Auschwitz to pray for the victims and to learn about the Holocaust. Tears of hope filled her eyes as she told us she never imagined such a thing possible. Then the delegation toured the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. We walked through the infamous “showers” where victims were gassed and the ovens where the murdered were disposed of. We met our first survivor, 93-year-old survivor Max Mannheimer, who spoke of his time at Dachau and other camps. We issued a collective gasp when he showed us the tattooed number he still bears on his arm from Auschwitz.
