Does Israel Have a Special Duty to Stop a ‘Holocaust’ in Syria?
Why religious leaders say yes and political leaders say no
by Sigal Samuel
Apr 08, 2017
4 minutes
Just hours before the Trump administration struck Syria on Thursday night, Israel’s former chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau said that what is happening in the war-torn country is a Holocaust.
“This is certainly a shoah of the Syrian people and it did not start today. For the past six years they have been living in a Holocaust,” Lau said. The word shoah, which means “catastrophic destruction” in Hebrew, is typically used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, which the rabbi himself survived as a child.
Lau went further, suggesting that Israel, which rose out of the ashes of the Holocaust, now has a special responsibility. As “a nation that has suffered more than any other nation,” he
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