BICOM

President Rivlin has issued a warning against the rise of extreme right-wing parties in Europe in comments regarded as direct criticism of French presidential nominee Marine Le Pen and her party.

Speaking at a ceremony marking the end of Holocaust Remembrance Day at Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot, President Rivlin said: “Two weeks ago a French presidential candidate denied France’s responsibility for the deportation of its Jewish citizens to the Nazi concentration and death camps. A member of her party denied not only the French involvement in the deportation of Jews to their death, but the mass extermination itself.”

Rivlin said: “As a sovereign state that has gained national independence, we have a duty to demand from other nations and states not to evade responsibility. Denying collaboration with the Nazis seeks to annul the political and moral responsibility that must stand at the heart of memory of the Holocaust for generations to come.”

He added: “We must wage a war against the current and dangerous wave of Holocaust denial. We must resist the renunciation of national responsibility in the name of alleged victimhood.”

Rivlin also warned against what he termed “unholy alliances” between Israel and far right parties in Europe.

He said: “it could be thought mistakenly that we have common interests, it must be pointed out once again: We have not and will not have anything in common in antisemites in any guise.”

IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot yesterday led a delegation as part of the annual ‘March of the Living’ commemoration at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.

In a speech at the remembrance service Eisenkot said: “Standing here in front of these tracks of death, which carried away and silenced the voices of so many of our people, let us solemnly swear that no more shall the voices of our people be muted. We shall continue to be their voice, their light and their shield — as the Pillar of Fire leading the Jewish people onto the march of the living.”

Tel Aviv Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, a child survivor of the Auschwitz camp, led the march with Education Minister Naftali Bennett. Supreme Court Chief Justice Miriam Naor also participated in the event.