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From: martillo@ihuxt.UUCP (Yehoyaqim Martillo)
Newsgroups: net.politics,net.religion.jewish
Subject: Re: Holocaust and Jewish Resistance (long article)
Message-ID: <462@ihuxt.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 4-May-84 01:30:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihuxt.462
Posted: Fri May  4 01:30:19 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 5-May-84 01:01:27 EDT
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While this article makes some good points, there is some factual
inaccuracy.  The vast majority of Eastern European Jews were not orthodox.
The largest concentrations of Eastern European Jews were in Poland,
Hungary, and Rumania.  There were more bundists in Poland than orthodox
Jews.  80% of Hungarian Jews were status quo which is essentially the
equivalent of conservative Judaism in the U.S. and the Ashkenazi
population of Rumania was approximately 60% assimilated to German culture.

While many religious Ashkenazim tended to screw themselves in terms of
resistance, likewise the Eastern European Jewish left tended to screw
themselves by persistently waiting for the non-Jewish left to rise up and
help the Jewish left.

Kerets, Hakam Bashi (Chief Rabbi) of Greece was supposed to have lead a
rebellion in Auschwitz.  Greek Jews who were much more religious on the
average than Eastern Europeans (never having been truly emancipted)
invariably rebelled in the concentration and death camps.

My father's family who are religious were partisans in Yugoslavia and this
was hardly unusual.  In North Africa local resistance to the Germans was
wholly Jewish, and droves of young Jews joined the free French for the
purpose of killing Germans.  In the battle of El Alamein, 60% of the free
French soldiers were North African Jews.  5 of my uncles fought at El
Alamein.

This resistance to the Germans took on Messianic proportions because North
African Jewish services often  include a prayer pleading to God that
Armelius should not be permitted to kill the Messiah.  Armelius is Aramaic
for Romulus which in German is Rommel who was threatening the Jewish
settlements in Palestine which many North African Hakamim (rabbis) were
equating with the coming of the Messiah (how little did they know). 
Fighting the Germans was considered a milhemet mitswah (jihad).