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.

It was shown passing several Jewish buildings including at least one synagogue and the Melbourne Holocaust Museum.

The video was taken last year on Yom Kippur, and the woman driving the vehicle, anti-Zionist activist Veronica Sherman, who says she is Jewish and Israeli, said 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.

Robert Gregory, president and CEO of the right-leaning Australian Jewish Association, told The AJN, “Driving past Jewish institutions with such a message appears to have been a deliberate attempt to intimidate the Jewish community. Posting the video on Yom Hashoah was clearly intended to deepen that hurt.”

He believes there is an ongoing problem with individuals claiming to be Jewish in order to promote views that the overwhelming majority of Australian Jews completely reject.

Sherman said her action was not about changing people’s opinions.

“It’s about making people start thinking and engaging with the topic. There are lots of different approaches. Dialogue is one of them; this was to get people talking,” she said.

When The AJN suggested that the overwhelming majority of Jews reject the idea that Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza was a genocide, she said, “A lot of Jews will also completely dismiss international law. So … I don’t really have much patience for people who are denying a genocide. But yes, I do know that a lot of Jews are saying there’s no genocide.”

Sherman said she had been joined by another Jewish person in the vehicle during the original action last year and identified herself as part of an “anti-Zionist Jewish community.”

When asked if she intended to conduct similar actions in the future, Sherman did not want to say.