Articles


Rev. Tweedie urges support for Israel

Posted On 05/21/04
By: Rick Kardonne

Reverend John Tweedie of Brantford, Ontario, Vice-President for Christians for Israel International, as well as Chair of Christians for Israel Canada, spoke to an audience consisting of some of Toronto Jewry’s most prominent philanthropists recently.

The event, Canadian Society for Yad Vashem’s annual meeting, was in commemoration of the Jubilee Year of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and education centre in Jerusalem that will soon also be the home of perhaps the world’s flagship Holocaust museum.

The Ulster-born Rev. Tweedie, who has lived in Canada since 1967, has served congregations in B.C., Alberta and Ontario, where he currently serves as Senior Pastor of New Covenant Congregational Christian Church in Brantford.

The mission of Christians for Israel, which is centered in the Netherlands, is to declare God’s redemptive purposes for Israel and the Church, and to urge support of Israel through prayer and political action. Christians for Israel does not proselytize. In fact, through its cooperation with The Jewish Agency, Christians for Israel has helped approximately 80,000 Jews make Aliyah from the former Soviet Union. In addition, financial assistance is given to numerous ongoing projects in Israel, including support for the victims of terror, immigrant absorption facilities as well as projects addressing the special needs of children such as the Aleh Rehabilitation Centres.

“This is a wonderful experience,” Rev. Tweedie began his address, which took place at Beth Tzedec. His first visit to Israel was in 1980, and was most recently he was in Israel twice this past February. Whenever he is in Israel, which is frequent, he visits Yad Vashem. He told the audience his visit to Kibbutz Yad Mordechai near the Gaza border, where during the 1948 Israel War of Independence, brave kibbutzniks managed to stall Egyptian tanks which were hoping to invade Ashkelon then Tel Aviv. He discovered that Yad Mordechai was named after Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Then he described his visits to European Holocaust sites such as the Warsaw Ghetto where he saw Natan Rappoport’s sculpture of Anielewicz leading the revolt; Babi Yar outside of Kiev where 30,000 Jews were slaughtered by German troops; and Sachenhausen just outside of Berlin, which was the first German death camp and where SS chief Himmler trained SS murderers for other death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Rev. Tweedie described his visit to the Children’s Memorial at Yad Vashem, in memory of the 1.5 million children murdered by the German Nazis. “I could not understand what happened,” he nearly cried. “The Righteous Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews, and who are honoured at Yad Vashem’s Avenue of the Righteous, today have their equivalents who stand behind Israel. Christians for Israel believe that the Jewish people must live without fear in a free country named Eretz Israel.”

“Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg (the American civilian contractor who was beheaded by Iraqi terrorists) were Jewish men”, stated Rev. Tweedie. “But this (Islamic fundamentalist) war against Jews is also against, as well, Christians,” he emphasized. “We Christians and Jews need each other. Sept. 11 was only the beginning for the West. We must never forget. You are not alone,” he declared to a standing ovation.

Preceding Rev. Tweedie, Yad Vashem executive Solly Kaplinski, who is a child of Holocaust survivors, commented on the antisemitic incidents in Montreal in the last two years exemplified by the Concordia University riot that prevented Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking at the campus, and the firebombing of the United Talmud Torah school in suburban St. Laurent.

“This sheer hatred and vitriol is disturbing,” Kaplinski said. He stated that such renewed antisemitism underscores Yad Vashem’s role as being primarily not just a memorial to the six million, but also as a vehicle for education against such Jew-hate.

“The perspective of Yad Vashem is education.”

And so, Kaplinski outlined, in considerable detail, the current elaborate yet necessary expansion of Yad Vashem. The climax of this massive renovation campaign will be a Holocaust museum, designed by the renowned architect Moshe Safdie, built into the rocky hills of western Jerusalem, which will describe the vibrant European Jewish society that Hitler annihilated.

The museum halls will resemble the entrance to an underground cemetery. This museum will be completed by March 15 2005.

Toronto’s Dr. Max Glassman has endowed a wing at the new Holocaust Museum.

Also completed or nearing completion at Yad Vashem will be Warsaw Ghetto Square, the International School for Holocaust Studies, the International Institute for Holocaust Research, the Children’s Memorial, the Visitors Centre which will prepare visitors for experiencing the grim exhibits at Yad Vashem, and the Archives, which are greatly increasing in volume as the libraries of the former Soviet Union are being opened up. More than two million people per year — mostly non-Jewish — visit Yad Vashem.

The new emblem of Yad Vashem consists of leaves growing out of barbed wire. “From the barbed wire of the concentration camps, we see leaves,” stated Solly Kaplinski.

Two Toronto philanthropists who have greatly enabled this expansion to happen, Leslie Dan and Bushy Kamens, were honored; as was soon-to-retire MP Art Eggleton (Lib.-Downsview) who was one of the five MPs from all parties who introduced the successful Parliamentary bill to officially declare Holocaust Remembrance Day an official Canadian legal holiday.