A Jewish prayer shawl worn by Levi Simon, a British man fighting for the Israeli army in Gaza who filmed himself rummaging through women’s underwear in an abandoned Palestinian home, belonged to a celebrated Holocaust survivor who warned of the dangers of hatred and racism.
Social media footage posted in November shows Simon wearing the shawl, known as a tallit, in a building in Gaza.
“This tallit I am wearing belonged to a Holocaust survivor by the name of Zigi. I am right now inside of Gaza writing ‘Am Yisrael Chai’ to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again,” Simon says in the clip, drawing a Star of David and writing the Hebrew phrase meaning “the people of Israel live” on the wall.
According to the accompanying text, the tallit was donated by the family of Zigi Shipper, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Nazi camps from Lodz, Poland, who moved to the UK after the Second World War and died last January aged 93.
But a close friend and fellow survivor told Middle East Eye he believed Shipper would have been "astounded and upset" to learn of the way in which his tallit had been used in Gaza.
“He would have been as heartbroken as I am because neither of us imagined anything like that would be witnessed by us,” Manfred Goldberg, who met Shipper in 1944 when both were working as slave labourers at a camp in modern-day Poland, told MEE.
Asked whether he would have been concerned by the conduct of Israeli forces, Goldberg added: “How can you ask such a question? Who is not upset? Zigi was a very outspoken person. He made a lot more noise than I did. He would have been beside himself.”
[...] “Zigi and I had an unbreakable bond because of our experience in the camps. I know him better than I know more or less any person on earth,” said Goldberg.
In his later life, Shipper was renowned for his decades of work promoting awareness of the Holocaust in countless talks to schoolchildren and through media interviews. In 2017, he was among 112 Holocaust survivors whose testimonies were recorded as part of a United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial project.
“I want young people to know, especially young people, what happened because of racism and most importantly, hatred,” Shipper has been quoted as saying by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
In one clip, Simon waves an Israeli flag in a school where, he says, “they teach terrorism”, adding: “We’re here, we’re here to stay, we’re not going to take your terror, and they’re going to start teaching Hebrew in this school soon."
In another clip, he says he is going through “terrorist houses” looking for guns and explosives and then opens a drawer and starts pulling out and displaying women’s underwear, which he describes as "exotic lingerie".