A leader of Denmark’s Jewish community criticized local politicians who raised money for Gaza at a Holocaust memorial event.
Donations raised at the Nov. 9 event in Copenhagen’s Norrebro district commemorating the victims of Austria and Germany’s 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms against Jews would help buy ambulances in Gaza, organizers from the Red-Green Alliance party said.
“When the profits from the Norrebro event go to Gaza, whose government is at war with Israel, I think that there is an inappropriate confusion,” Dan Rosenberg Asmussen, president of the Jewish Community in Copenhagen, told the Kristelig Dagblad newspaper.
Allan Ahmad, a member of Red-Green Alliance who spoke at the event, said it was meant as a statement against all discrimination. Organizers invited Jews to speak at the event but they declined, he added.
Uffe Ostergaard, a historian and former director of Denmark’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, saw the event as an “attempt to profit from Jewish suffering,” he told the newspaper. “Considering how Jews feel about this date, the [Norrebro] event was in bad taste.” — jta