Holocaust stunt causes deep hurt

A video of a vehicle driving through a heavily Jewish area of Melbourne with a sign reading “There is a Holocaust in Gaza” was posted to Instagram on erev Yom Hashoah this week.

The video was taken last year on Yom Kippur, and the woman driving the vehicle, anti-Zionist activist Veronica Sherman, who claims to be Jewish and Israeli, says she deliberately re-posted it in time for Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The Jewish Community Council of Victoria said, “Words cannot express the deep hurt that is felt by our community to see this today. We utterly condemn this act of grave harm on behalf of the whole Jewish community, but particularly on behalf of Holocaust survivors who live among us.”

Sherman was contacted by The AJN and when asked if she could understand why people might feel hurt and intimidated by seeing the post she responded, “I actually don’t care at all. There’s so much about Jewish feelings and we need to stop centring Jewish feelings during a genocide.”

Sherman, who identifies as Jewish despite being raised a fundamentalist Christian in Sweden before making Aliyah to Israel at age 10, defended the action as a necessary protest against what she describes as genocide in Gaza.