New Israel Holocaust Memorial Honors Gay Victims
New Israel Holocaust Memorial Honors Gay Victims
by 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff
March 16, 2005
(Jerusalem) Israel’s new museum dedicated to victims of the Holocaust features a special exhibit dedicated to gay and lesbian victims of the Nazis.
The Yad Vashem Museum was officially opened Tuesday in Jerusalem.
The inclusion of gays was not part of the original plan. Several months ago while the museum was still under construction Jerusalem City Council member Sa’ar Netanel toured the facility honoring Jews killed by the Nazis.
He said he was surprised there was no mention of gay Holocaust victims and mentioned it to the museum’s director.
"The Jewish people has a moral obligation to remember all the victims of World War II," Netanel told the Haaretz newspaper.
"The state of Israel should be the first country in the world to mention all the victims," he said.
Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem wrote Netanel in response, "Jews indeed were not the only victims of the Nazi regime, but they were the only group that it aspired to completely wipe out. It is clear that in dealing with the Holocaust we also touch on its contexts and related areas, among them the subject of other victims of the regime. Accordingly, the new museum will present the subject of other victims, including homosexual victims, of the Nazi regime, in a relevant place."
There are monuments to the gay victims of the Holocaust in San Francisco and San Sabba, Italy.
Under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which banned sexual intimacy between members of the same gender, an untold number of gays were rounded up by the Nazis and send to concentration camps where they were subjected to medical experiments including lobotomies, and forced to work in labor camps.
The number of gays sent to the camps ranges from 5,000 to 15,000, many of them sent to the gas chambers.
The American Holocaust Museum in Washington also has an exhibit dedicated to gays and lesbians. A portion of the exhibition toured the country last year.
But still, many Americans do not know that the Nazis also targeted gay, gypsies and other groups.
In 2003 Minnesota state Rep. Arlon Lindner during debate on two bills he had brought forward to repeal gay rights laws in the state, said gays were lying when they cited thousands of homosexuals who were exterminated or sent to concentration camps by the Nazis.
"It never happened," Lindner told the House.
"I was a child during World War II, and I’ve read a lot about World War II," he said. "It’s just been recently that anyone’s come out with this idea that homosexuals were persecuted to this extent. There’s been a lot of rewriting of history."
The remarks shocked the legislature, but attempts to censure him failed.
This item was published on March 16, 2005 in http://365gay.com/NewsContent/040403holocaustDenier.htm