A British university and college trade union apologized on Oct. 2 for leaving out Jews in a Sept. 27 email about Holocaust Memorial Day, saying the omission was due to a “drafting error.”
The Jewish Chronicle reports that the University College Union (UCU) sent an email to various local branches urging them to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day on Jan. 27. The email goes onto list several of ethnicities that were persecuted under the Nazi regime – including blacks, gays, those with disabilities and “non-Jewish Poles” – but Jews were not listed.
After receiving backlash over the matter, the UCU issued a follow-up email stating, “UCU apologizes for the drafting errors in Branch circular UCU/972 that was sent out in last Friday’s email to alert branches to observe Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27. UCU apologizes for the offense this caused and reassures all members that it continues to fight against all forms of anti-Semitism, hatred and bigotry in society.”
They later provided a link to an updated version of email, which had an extra paragraph describing how the Nazis’ “systematic murder of six million Jews across Europe begun by the separating and dehumanizing of the Jewish people.”
University of London Sociology Professor David Hirsh tweeted that the initial omission of Jews from the email was due to “institutional anti-Semitism” at the UCU.
The point is not a @ucu apology for this mistake. Of course it was a mistake and of course it will have no difficulty apologizing.
The point is to explain how this particular mistake could possibly have happened.
And the answer lies in the history of institutional antisemitism. https://t.co/9OKTVrT5Cw
— David Hirsh (@DavidHirsh) October 1, 2019
UCU has nothing to fear. It long ago defeated and humiliated its members who opposed antisemitism. It excluded them, allowed them to be bullied and watched carelessly as they resigned.
Now @ucu is part of a much wider and more entrenched institutional antisemitism on the left.
— David Hirsh (@DavidHirsh) October 1, 2019
In any case, a list like that of 'victims of the Holocaust', even if it had Jews in it, as one of the victim groups, would completely misunderstand the Holocaust. It would completely understand the central importance of Jews to Nazis.
— David Hirsh (@DavidHirsh) October 1, 2019
According to the Jerusalem Post’s Seth Frantzman, the UCU wasn’t the only organization to omit Jews as victims of the Holocaust in their descriptions of Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) events.
“On some websites, such as the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s page devoted to ‘75 memorial flames,’ it is clearly noted that the Holocaust was ‘the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe,’” Frantzman wrote. “However, a press release from April about the ‘HMD 2020’ theme, called ‘Standing Together,’ doesn’t mention the word Jew. The press release, also at the Trust’s website, notes that ‘HMD 2020 will also include marking the 25th anniversary of the Genocide in Bosnia.’” Frantzman noted “that while Bosnia is mentioned, the place that the Shoah began in Germany is conveniently left out.”
Frantzman added that there are similar omissions on “other sites related to the ‘HMD 2020’ and ‘Stand Together’ events.”