113 Candles
An Interview with Israel Singer
By Lisa Davidson

The first memory Dr. Israel Singer, Secretary General of the World Jewish Congress, Chief Negotiator of the World Jewish Restitution Organization, Member of the Volcker Commission and the new Vice-Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, has of the Holocaust, was as a 3 year old child in his family kitchen in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “My grandmother, who also survived miraculously, was lighting 113 candles on this small table, on Hoshana Rabbah. I asked why she was making such a big fire and she said that the fire is for all the relatives in our family who were killed on that day, in their town, Galicia. All these children, brothers, sisters – 113 people. So I always felt that the Holocaust was a kitchen table with 113 candles, that was my first association.

Singer’s parents had been issued exit visas by the Chinese Consul General in Vienna, Dr. Ho Fengshan: “Their idea was to move west, and keep moving, and eventually they travelled to France and then to the US. They escaped and that is how I am alive. I don’t forget that I could have been one of those candles. But I don’t live with terror, anger or vengeance, but with a lot of memory because as a small child the first thing I remember was not a Jewish holiday or a Seder…but this table with the candles.”

The Holocaust was always a very open issue in Singer’s household. His parents never repressed their Holocaust memories, always talking to their young son about their experiences in WWII Europe, unlike the parents of many of his classmates, many of whom had gone through the camps.

 “My parents, for a period of three years were actually saving as many of my family’s relatives as they could, and got them to America. They have absolutely no guilt whatsoever with regard to WWII because they were actually very active at the beginning of and during the war, when they were involved in saving people’s lives, and not just themselves. I believe that most of my friends’ parents didn’t tell their children because they unnecessarily felt guilty or were embarrassed about their survival.”

In the last ten years around 15 million American documents have come to light in the quest for the truth about what happened in the Holocaust.  Singer sees as important the work which the scholars will carry out over the next fifty years - investigatory work to ensure that the whole truth is exposed.  His overriding interest, however, is in discovering why European Jewry was abandoned.

Singer  believes that the Holocaust is a subjective, rather than an objective story and it is therefore the obligation of the Jewish people to tell it - not that of the Germans, Americans, or other groups, who inevitably recall events from their own perspectives.

He feels that the Holocaust is a continuum of Jewish history, as Jews have to learn how to defend themselves. Consequently, the State of Israel is very important as a safe-haven for Jews in danger while it protects those in the Diaspora. As the head of a political organization, he says that his struggle for restitution is not about the past but about the present and the future, to enable Jews to realise their identity. Money for him is not the issue. “It is not about Jewish people getting back their material goods (with the exception of the 72,000 pensioners for whom I negotiated pensions in the last five years, giving them a more dignified way of life). It is about the Jewish people getting back their History. It is about finding out what happened and telling the truth.”

For the World Jewish Congress, one of Dr. Singer’s most important tasks was saving Soviet Jewry: “It was an opportunity to make sure that in this generation we are not going to make the same mistakes we made in the last. We wanted to show people that we weren’t going to be victims, and that we were not going to allow other people to make us victims.” Within the framework of his WJC activity his was the first official visit by a representative of an international Jewish organisation to the Former Soviet Union, where he negotiated with the highest authorities in Moscow and was instrumental in the release of well-known Prisoners of Zion.

Dr. Singer was recently named a vice-chairman of the Yad Vashem Council. Although Yad Vashem’s home is in Israel, he feels it is also important to give the organization a non-Israeli orientation. “The Jewish people who live outside Israel also have a role in Yad Vashem. They, too, deal with the tragedy which affected the Jewish people, not just the Jewish people living in Israel. I plan to add various aspects, such as to take all the documents existing outside of Israel and bring at least a copy to Yad Vashem, where over 55 million documents are stored in its archives. This will make Yad Vashem the home of the history of the Jewish people’s history. The Holocaust was a Jewish event, about ideologically killing Jews, and this needs to be told by Jews. We need to protect the unique telling of this history from a Jewish perspective and that’s what I would like to do from the Diaspora. We have documents not yet acquired by Israel and I have a galut perspective on how to get them. I hope to be the representative of the Jews, on the Yad Vashem Council, who thinks like Jews in Israel, but still lives in the Diaspora.”