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Friday January 12, 2007

After Tehran conference, anti-Zionist rabbi shunned

by dinah a. spritzer
jta

vienna | Three lawsuits have been filed against a Viennese rabbi who attended a Holocaust denial conference in Iran in December.

The suits, filed by the Vienna Jewish community, the Documentation Center of the Austrian Resistance Movement and a Jewish Holocaust victim who has not gone public, accuse Moishe Arye Friedman of Holocaust denial and propagation of Nazi ideology.

Both charges carry large fines and jail time, though the suits’ chances of success are unclear.

“Let me say that there are moments when you have to do something even when it’s not sure when it will be successful,” said Raimund Fastenbauer, general secretary for Jewish affairs for the 7,500-strong Jewish Community of Vienna.

International media were filled with photographs of Friedman, wearing traditional Chassidic garb and long sidelocks, warmly shaking hands with a beaming Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a conference of Holocaust deniers in Tehran.

The images enraged Jews around the world, who argued that the presence of Jews — even from fringe groups like the Neturei Karta or of someone like Friedman, who does not appear to represent any group — allows rabid anti-Zionists and anti-Semites a cover for their ideology.

Most of the speakers at the Iranian Foreign Ministry event, including former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, argue that Zionists invented or exaggerated the Holocaust to justify the creation of the state of Israel.

“I am not a denier of the Holocaust, but I think it is legitimate to cast doubt on some statistics,” the New York Times reported Friedman as saying during the conference.

According to the Times, the Austria Press Agency reported that Friedman calculates the Holocaust death toll as closer to 1 million. He told the BBC during the conference that the Holocaust was used as a “tool of commercial, military and media power.”

In a telephone interview, Friedman would not elaborate on his participation in the conference.

A Brooklyn native, Friedman grew up in the anti-Zionist Satmar Chassidic community there. The Satmar community, however, issued a statement condemning those who attended the conference.

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