Will Godley: I’m joined now by Rabbi Doron Birnbaum. Thank you for joining us on GB News. Firstly, we’ll get on to the Prime Minister and his visit here this afternoon. But I just want to ask you about when you first heard about this attack that took place yesterday. Where were you?
Doron Birnbaum: Sure, Will. I mean, I’ve just come back as a rabbi and educator who has been in high school, one of the big schools in the Jewish community. For the last four days, we’ve had 90 Jewish students in Poland, in places like Tarnow and Krakow, where you’d have a bustling Jewish community like what you can see around Golders Green. There is nothing left anymore. We visited mass graves of children. We visited camps in Majdanek. And yesterday, as we were in Auschwitz, the largest Jewish cemetery in the world, where 1.3 million of our brothers and sisters were murdered, I was in a barrack called the latrines. It’s where they used to supposedly allow the Jewish women to go to the toilet if ever allowed. My phone pings, and I get a message that two Jewish people have been stabbed in Golders Green, minutes from my home.
And out of respect, I step outside the barracks. And I’m in Auschwitz, and I want people to understand this. Because sometimes in numbers we miss the personal narrative. Everyone’s got a family WhatsApp group. As a Jew, I go on to my family WhatsApp group, and I ask, are you okay? Are my family still alive? I get pictures and videos from the community. I zoom in at the bodies, the legs, the clothes that can be seen, to try and identify, is that my own family? And every single Jew in our community did that yesterday.
I then have to take a group of 40 teenagers in Auschwitz, outside the gas chambers, sit them down, explain to them what’s happened in their community, and say, you might need to check on your parents, just to see if they’re okay. And people need to see the connection between these two things. There are Jewish communities that have been decimated and don’t exist anymore. And one day, in 80 years’ time, am I or my children going to take our grandchildren down the streets of Golders Green, Hendon, Edgware, Stamford Hill, any Jewish community in the UK, and they’re going to say, look at that marking on the wall. There was once a Jew here. Because that’s the way we’re going. The conversations we’re having around family tables are the same conversations they had in 1935, Will. And that’s the place where, unfortunately, we heard the devastating news about this terrorist attack yesterday.
