Senior representatives of the Jewish community in Ireland have objected to President Michael D Higgins giving the keynote speech at the Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration later this month.
The President is to address the gathering in the Mansion House in Dublin on Sunday January 26th, the eve of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp.
Mr Higgins has given the keynote address at the event on six different occasions in the past, including last year.
A spokesman said: “The President has received an invitation to this year’s National Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration. The President has accepted this invitation and is working on his speech.”
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The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland chairman, Maurice Cohen, said the Jewish community in Ireland would prefer if Mr Higgins did not give the keynote speech this year. Mr Cohen said some of the President’s criticism of Israel was based on misinformation, including the allegation that the Israeli embassy leaked a letter that he had written to the president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian. The letter in question had appeared on the Iranian embassy website.
“It’s not his criticisms of Israel, it’s his false criticism of Israel,” Mr Cohen explained.
“Furthermore, the President has accused Israel, without any evidence, of harbouring intentions to ‘resettle Egypt’,” Mr Cohen said.
Mr Cohen stressed that he got on well with Mr Higgins on a personal level and had not objected in the past to the President giving the keynote.
“The question is: is he suitable this year because of what he has been saying recently? There is a feeling on the part of the Jewish community that he has overstepped the mark,” he said.
Ireland’s chief rabbi, Yoni Wieder, said he objected to Mr Higgins’s presence because he believed the President had “neglected even to acknowledge the scourge of contemporary anti-Semitism in Ireland, let alone do anything to address it”.
“It is so important that Irish politicians and public figures come together to honour the memory of victims of the Holocaust. Yet the awful irony is that many of them are turning a blind eye to a troubling increase in anti-Jewish hatred in Ireland today,” Mr Wieder said.
The rabbi will be attending the event in the Mansion House.
Oliver Sears of Holocaust Awareness Ireland said remembrance of the Holocaust is a time that is “sombre, precious and inviolable” for Jewish people.
“Given President Higgins’s grave insensitivity to Irish Jews, we are deeply disturbed that he will yet again cause further insult,” he added.
The President’s spokesman said he had repeatedly addressed the issue of anti-Semitism against the Jewish community in Ireland, including in Manchester in April last year when he said it was not fair to drag Irish Jews into the conflict in the Middle East.
“I think that [Ireland’s Jewish community] is being dragged into being asked, ‘Whose side are you on?’ I think that is a very unfair burden to put on the Jewish community. I know them, I meet them,” the President said then.
A spokesman added that Mr Higgins has repeatedly called for the release of the Israeli hostages and for an end to fighting. The President had never suggested that the Israeli embassy had leaked the letter to the president of Iran, merely that the embassy had “circulated” it. The letter in question had been drafted by the Department of Foreign Affairs, the spokesman added, and the president had included a plea for peace in the Middle East.
In relation to claims made by the President that the Israelis were looking to set up settlements in Egypt, the spokesman said this referred to an Israeli proposal that Palestinians be settled there, not Israelis.
The event is organised by Holocaust Education Ireland. The Irish Times has contacted it for a comment.
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