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As Qatar Emir Visits Canada, Just What is Doha Up To?
By HENRY SREBRNIK (Sept. 19/24) Qatar…home of Hamas leaders, Al-Jazeera, host of soccer’s 2022 World Cup, and wealth beyond measure. And everyone’s favourite centre for “negotiations” to end the war Hamas unleashed on Israel a year ago. It’s become everyone’s go-to country, a veritable “light unto the nations.”
However, as the 1946 song “Put the Blame on Mame” has it, in a different context, of course, “That’s the story that went around, but here’s the real lowdown” … about this duplicitous Persian Gulf emirate.
Even before the Gaza war began, there was an upswing of commentary celebrating a shift in the policies and behavior of Qatar: away from promoting and subsidizing radical Islamist groups, and towards “deconfliction” and moderation.
Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the country’s emir, has been basking in the glow of international approval, depicting the country as a global influencer and peacemaker. The Qataris want to make themselves indispensable.
It plays into Doha’s ongoing attempts to create an illusion of rebranding as a moderating actor in the Middle East and beyond, pushed by various propagandists in the West on Qatar’s payroll, including more than a few American university centres and departments awash in Qatari money.
The emir and other officials spent two days in Canada Sept. 17-19, meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and cabinet ministers. The Gaza war was on the agenda, of course. Indeed, Jewish-Canadian leaders urged Trudeau to criticize him over his patronage of Hamas. But being able to tap into Qatar’s wealth via business and trade was more likely on Trudeau’s mind.
Qatar has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, at $110,000 a year. And while its total population is some 2.7 million, most of these are guest workers, including European lawyers and consultants at the top of the scale, and at the bottom South Asian labourers. Only some 313,000 are native Qataris, the ones who benefit from the riches it derives from the sale of oil and gas.
The Peninsula, an English language daily newspaper published in Doha, ran an article on the occasion of the emir’s visit by noting the expanding trade and investment cooperation between Canada and Qatar, especially with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in June between the Qatar Financial Center and the Canada Arab Business Council, a non-profit organization that aims to enhance trade and investment relations between Canada and the Arab world.
The MoU “aims to establish an integrated framework for cooperation and coordination in specific sectors through joint initiatives and the exchange of information and expertise, with a focus on stimulating growth and promoting innovation in areas such as financial services and professional business services.” Ahmed Hussen, Minister of International Development participated in a signing ceremony with Lolwah bint Rashid Al-Khater, Qatar’s Minister of State for International Cooperation.
More than 9,000 Canadian expatriates live in Qatar, working in Canadian and Qatari companies and institutions. From January to July, Canada exported goods valued at $103.45 million to Qatar, while Qatar’s exports to Canada amounted to $90.27 million.
There is also a partnership in academic programs, as the University of Calgary has been in Doha since 2006, offering a Bachelor of Nursing program, along with the College of the North Atlantic, which transformed into the University of Doha for Science and Technology. Furthermore, there are several Doha-based schools that offer Canadian curricula.
In their meeting, Sheikh Tamim expressed his aspiration to work with Trudeau to advance their bilateral cooperation across multiple sectors in order to “contribute to enhancing regional and global peace and stability.” Bilateral relations between the two countries were discussed, especially in the fields of investment, economy and international cooperation, “in addition to developments and situations in the Gaza Strip and the occupied Palestinian territories.”
Qatar has been very successful in its efforts to shape public opinion in Canada, as well as in the far more important United States. The amount of money that Qatar has poured into universities, schools, educational organizations, think tanks, and media across America, and the number of initiatives that Qatar uses to influence American opinion, is overwhelming.
According to a 2022 study from the National Association of Scholars, Qatar is the largest foreign donor to American universities. It found that between 2001 and 2021, the petrostate donated a whopping $4.7 billion to U.S. colleges. The largest recipients are some of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. They include Carnegie Mellon University, Ivy League Cornell University, Georgetown University in Washington, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Texas A & M. These schools have partnered with the regime to build campuses in Doha’s “education city,” a special district of the capital that hosts satellite colleges for American universities. (Texas A&M decided earlier this year to shutter its branch campus in Qatar.)
Georgetown University in Qatar, for instance, was hosting the “Reimagining Palestine” conference Sept. 20-22. The event engages scholars, experts, and the public “in timely and relevant dialogues on globally significant issues,” according to a description of the gathering. One of the speakers, Wadah Khanfar, “was active in the Hamas movement and was one of its most prominent leaders in the movement’s office in Sudan,” the Raya Media Network, a Palestinian outlet, tells us. In the months following Oct. 7, the campus has hosted a variety of seemingly anti-Israel events.
Since 2008, Qatar has donated nearly $602 million to Northwestern University, whose journalism school is ranked as one of the best in the world, to establish a school of journalism in Qatar. The Northwestern University campus in Qatar and Qatari broadcaster Al-Jazeera in 2013 signed a Memorandum of Understanding to “further facilitate collaboration and knowledge transfer between two of Qatar’s foremost media organizations.” Are Northwestern’s interests really aligned with Qatar?
Qatari state-financed entities also often fund individual scholars or programs in the United States without official disclosure or being directly traceable to a government source, thus avoiding public scrutiny. For example, Ivy League Yale University disclosed only $284,668 in funding from Qatar between 2010 and 2022. Researchers at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) in a report released in June, though, found that this amount reflected only a small fraction of the money and services the university and its scholars had in fact received over that period. The most common channel for hard-to-track Qatari support for Yale came from individual research grants originating from the Qatar National Research Fund, and their report found 11 Yale-linked QNRF grants which came to at least $15,925,711.
Recent research from the Network Contagion Research Institute indicated that at least 200 American universities illegally withheld information about approximately $13 billion in Qatari contributions. Also, according to the report, from 2015 to 2020 institutions that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than those institutions that did not.
Overall, the report found that “a massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry and free expression.”
Much of Doha’s engagement with the world is run out of the Qatar Meeting, Incentive, Conference and Exhibition (MICE) Development Institute (QMDI), which promotes Qatar as a good place for business. The annual Doha Forum gathers major policymakers from around the world.
Qatar’s influence-buying strategies are a textbook example of how to transform cash into “soft” power. The relationship between one of Washington, D.C.’s top think tanks and Qatar, for example, began in 2002, when the emirate underwrote a Doha conference featuring then Qatari Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassem Al Thani and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, at the time the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. (Hamad oversaw Qatar’s $230 billion sovereign wealth fund until 2013.) In 2007, Brookings followed up by opening a centre on Doha. It didn’t end well. In 2021 the institute ended its relationship with Qatar amidst an ongoing FBI investigation.
Still, Washington treads carefully when it comes to criticizing Qatar. It’s not just about money. After all, the Al-Udaid Air Base is home to the U.S. military’s Central Command (CENTCOM), and the country is just across the Persian Gulf from Iran. In fact, Washington’s relationship with Qatar is so close that in 2022 the White House officially designated the emirate a “major non-NATO ally.” The Qataris, realizing that their very existence would be threatened were the U.S. to relocate its CENTCOM operations to the UAE or Saudi Arabia, in January hastened to nail down the agreement for another decade.
Yoni Ben-Menachem, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told the Jewish News Service (JNS) that the Gulf country is more dangerous than Hamas or Hezbollah since it is extraordinarily wealthy and thus in a position to influence U.S. administrations.
Qatar has for many years been involved in financing the campaigns of the Democratic Party, he claimed, “especially Hillary Clinton’s campaign” in 2016. He added that former U.S. President Bill Clinton is known to have flown to Qatar to bring back suitcases full of cash.
According to Jonathan Ruhe, director of foreign policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), Qatar has portrayed itself as “indispensable to U.S. interests in the Middle East, including negotiations with the Taliban, reconstruction aid for past Gaza conflicts, and building the massive Al-Udeid base for U.S. forces.”
Yet although it hosts the Pentagon’s regional command, Qatar has long supported terrorism. For decades, it has opened its doors to Islamist terrorists, Taliban warlords and African insurgents. Doha housed the Taliban’s political office before that group returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021.
Beginning in 2012, the Israeli government allowed Qatar to deliver cash to Gaza. Over the next nine years, Qatar provided $1.5 billion. Prior to the outbreak of the present conflict, Doha subsidized Hamas to the tune of $360 million to $480 million a year. With one third of that money, Qatar bought Egyptian fuel that Cairo then shipped into Gaza, where Hamas sold it and pocketed its revenue. Another third went to impoverished Gazan families, while the last third paid the salaries of the Hamas bureaucracy.
The leaders of Hamas, including Khaled Mashaal and the late Ismail Haniyeh, who was chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau until assassinated by Israel in July, have been regular guests in Doha, living in luxury. (The emir sat in the front row with mourners during Haniyeh’s funeral in Doha.) Qatar has defended Hamas’s presence in the country.
“This was started to be used as a way of communicating and bringing peace and calm into the region, not to instigate any war,” Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken last October. “And this is the purpose of that office.” Blinken seemed to buy this. At a press conference in Doha in February, he asserted that “we’re very fortunate to have Qatar as a partner.”
As far back as 2007, when Hamas seized control of Gaza, Qatar recognized that “adopting” the group would be a worthwhile opportunity: connections with Hamas in Gaza grants Qatar influence and status in the Middle East and beyond. In addition, they bolster the popular Arab perception of Doha as working for the Palestinian cause. In 2012, the emir became the first head of state to visit Gaza, pledging $400 million to Hamas. At the same time, the Qataris became the exclusive mediators between Israel and Hamas.
The U.S. has accused the Qataris of harboring members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC). But at the same time the Qataris are an important intermediary between America and Iran. Doha has enjoyed good relations with the Biden administration, which it helped in the American hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago.
While organized as a private company, the Al-Jazeera television network is the voice of Qatar’s regime. Founded in 1996 and financed by the then-emir of Qatar, it has described terrorist attacks that killed Israeli non-combatants as martyrdom operations and even posted articles describing Israel as “the Zionist entity.” For years, Al-Jazeera aired all of Osama bin Laden’s speeches. The late Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf Al-Qaradawi was based in Doha and for years hosted a prime-time program on the network. The war on Israel was declared on Al-Jazeera by Hamas military commander Muhammad Deif last October 7. Its operations in Israel were finally terminated by Jerusalem in May.
Qatar has been using the immense wealth it has accumulated to turn Al-Jazeera into an international media conglomerate, spreading Muslim Brotherhood propaganda, Hamas’ original sponsor, on a global scale. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by the cleric Hassan al-Banna as a reaction to his perception that the Muslim world had become week in relation to the West. The royal family of Qatar has since been using the Muslim Brotherhood to minimize political opposition against them. In exchange for allowing the Brotherhood to use the country as a base for its international operations, the Brotherhood makes sure that there is no political threat based on organized religion against the Qatari monarchy.
A major shock to Qatar’s economy occurred when some Gulf Cooperation Council members — Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — imposed an embargo on Qatar from 2017 to 2021. The reason for the embargo was Qatar’s support for the Brotherhood.
Qatar owns other news media that are equally awful. The London-based daily newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi in June published an article entitled “War Criminal Blinken Wages Diplomatic Campaign to Eliminate Palestinian Resistance and Buy Time for Israeli War in Gaza.”
Qatar is not a neutral agent, despite its attempts to portray itself as such. Time and again, it has supported the region’s most radical nations and paramilitaries, all to the detriment of American and Western interests. Its malign influence activities the United States reflect the broader issue of foreign manipulation in America’s political landscape.
“Qatar has been playing a dual role since the beginning of the Gaza war. On the one hand, it is a well-known supporter of Hamas, and even finances it with a lot of money, and on the other hand, it is trying to help in the deal for the release of the Israeli hostages,” remarked Dr. Udi Levy, a former senior official of Israel’s Mossad spy agency in April. But the U.S. relationship with Qatar will continue as long as the American government finds it useful in the on-again off-again negotiations to have Hamas release the remaining Israeli hostages.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
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The Trump administration’s latest affront to Jewish history
President Donald Trump’s administration either does not understand or does not care about the point of the International Criminal Court.
In announcing that the United States would try to “dismantle” the ICC, Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “the ICC and its allies seek a standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the U.S. and other sovereign states — and to prosecute and arrest our citizens.”
As examples of the court’s potential overreach, he cited the possibility of it taking action in response to activist pleas to prosecute Trump administration officials for deporting people to a notoriously inhumane El Salvador prison — regardless of their country of origin — and calls to treat the administration’s airstrike campaign against alleged drug smuggling boats as a crime against humanity.
The ICC is an imperfect institution. But to argue against its necessity is an affront to Jewish history, which has taught us, over and over again, that a country sometimes needs to be held to international account over its treatment of disempowered minority groups.
Because while the ICC is the self-described court of last resort, meant in large part to complement national courts, it exists at least in part because there are times that national courts — like nation states more generally — do not consider everyone within their borders to be worthy of their protection, and when words like “sovereignty” are used to bludgeon individual human rights and dignity.
The proof of the court’s importance lies in how deeply tied its origin story is to the crimes of the Holocaust, even though the ICC itself was only formally established in the 1990s.
Aryeh Neier, whose family fled Nazi Germany when he was a small child, was instrumental in the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia — the development of which was an important stop on the way to the creation of the ICC. Ben Ferencz, top prosecutor against the Einsatzgruppen at Nuremberg, was a prominent advocate both for the creation of the court and for the adoption of the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court and the court’s jurisdiction over four core crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. (The U.S. has never ratified that treaty.)
Theodor Meron, who was born in Poland in 1930 and survived the Holocaust before becoming an Israeli diplomat, spent decades as a judge both for the ICTY and for a similar special tribunal for Rwanda. He was part of the delegation that led to the ICC’s establishment in the 1990s, and in 2024, he recommended that the ICC consider issuing warrants for the arrest of both Israeli and Hamas leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity as a result of the Oct. 7 attack and the subsequent Gaza war.
It’s not coincidental that all these men were Jewish, and aware from firsthand experience of the dangers of unchecked national power.
Ben Ferencz deliberately drew a connection between the two in 2011, when he delivered the closing prosecution speech at the first trial ever heard by the ICC at its home in the Hague. “The case we present is a plea of humanity to law,” he said — the same statement he used in his opening statement at the Einsatzgruppen trial.
In a Prospect UK interview in 2024, Meron said he has always been driven by the desire to bring ours closer to being “a world with no holocausts.”
Neier, for his part, has criticized the ICC for its ineffectiveness, despite being one of its leading proponents. But writing in The New York Review of Books over the weekend, Neier — who suggested that Rubio’s announcement may be motivated by the coming Israeli elections — pointed out the court’s continued significance.
“The trial in the International Criminal Court of former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines is scheduled to get underway this fall. While in power, Duterte presided over the summary executions of many thousands of Filipinos, most of them poor people, because they were suspected of using contraband drugs,” he wrote. “It is a shame to see the United States try to destroy the ICC — the only global institution with a mandate to address such horrors — merely because those subject to its jurisdiction may be Americans or their friends.”
There are those who see the ICC itself as an affront to Jewish history, including prominent Jews who have condemned the ICC over its outstanding warrant out for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest. They, too, point to Jewish history to make their case: Netanyahu’s office called the warrant a”modern Dreyfus trial,” and Israeli President Isaac Herzog said that “the outrageous decision at the ICC has turned universal justice into a universal laughing stock.” Meanwhile, attorney Alan Dershowitz posted, “The ICC has never indicted Assad. Of course not because he’s neither Israeli nor Jewish.”
Their common argument: that the ICC has become yet another venue for international antisemitism.
But Neier, Ferencz and Meron’s arguments in favor of the court are more persuasive. They didn’t just think the court was important; they saw international law as so necessary that they dedicated their lives to trying to make it matter, in part through the ICC. Meron said he was working for “a universe in which injustice and violence and mistreatment of people on ethnic and religious grounds is less likely.” That vision is only a threat to sovereignty when sovereignty is interested in injustice.
This does not mean that the U.S. government needs to agree with every ICC decision. Nor does it mean that every individual associated with the ICC is above censure. (Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, was accused of sexual misconduct and is now facing a vote as to whether he will keep his role; Ken Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, noted that the accusations — and the fact that the ICC Executive Bureau found Khan’s denials lacking credibility — seriously challenge Khan’s ability to do his job.)
What it does mean is this: The ICC does not exist to be friendly — or, for that matter, to be unfriendly — to any country. Nor does it exist to undermine sovereignty, or to treat sovereignty as sacrosanct. To only think of the court in terms of protecting or violating sovereignty is to overlook its real purpose: to protect our shared humanity, and bring justice to people who are no less worthy of dignity or justice than Netanyahu, Rubio or Trump.
The post The Trump administration’s latest affront to Jewish history appeared first on The Forward.
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75 artifacts tell the fitful, inspiring, unfinished story of Jews in America
In May 1818, Mordecai Manuel Noah, a prominent Jew of his time and a member of the Madison administration, delivered a discourse on Jewish history on the occasion of a synagogue consecration. One man read Noah’s words with interest, and took pen to paper to say so.
“Your sect by its sufferings has furnished a remarkable proof of the universal spirit of religious intolerance,” the correspondent noted, in elegant cursive. “Our laws have applied the only antidote to this vice, protecting our religious, as they do our civil, rights by putting them all on equal footing. But more remains to be done, for although we are free by the law, we are not so in practice.”
The letter’s author was Thomas Jefferson. 200 years later, there’s still work to do.
The Jefferson letter is one of 75 objects on view at All We Have Standing Between Us: 250 Years of Jews and American Democracy, the American Jewish Historical Society’s new exhibit at the Center for Jewish History. Arranged in chronological order, from the outbreak of the Revolution to the tiki torches of Charlottesville, the survey takes stock of the at times harmonious but very often discordant, relationship between American Jews and the country, and among themselves.
“One of the throughlines is that for 250 years, American Jews have certainly not been a monolithic community in terms of how they’ve approached key issues,” said Gavriel Rosenfeld, president for the Center for Jewish History.
To that end, visitors can see Shearith Israel’s hazzan Gershom Mendes Seixas’ patriot prayer for the Continental Congress and, a vitrine or two away, a sampler from the loyalist Hendricks family of Psalm 78, whose words were associated with a pro-monarchist sentiment.
Most Jews lived in the Union at the outbreak of the Civil War, but currency with Judah Benjamin’s face, from the Confederate Secretary’s own collection, is proof of just how embedded Southern Jews were in their communities. A telegram nearby, denouncing General Grant’s wartime expulsion order for the Jews of Kentucky, shows how tenuous Jewish belonging was.
The story was never only one of brother against brother. Moving into the 20th Century, with wall text addressing the Gilded Age, we see how American Jews confronted the revival of the Klan and the “Cross of Gold” populism of William Jennings Bryan with the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe. (An explanation of Woodrow Wilson’s veto of a literacy test for immigrants is displayed, as is a scroll inviting well-heeled Jews to a Purim benefit for new arrivals.)
The Anti-Defamation League, a copy of whose founding charter is on display, was formed after the conviction of Leo Frank. But by the 1950s, with the Red Scare gathering storm clouds, the ADL Bulletin dismissed the claim that the Rosenberg trial was animated by antisemitism.
“This is the latest propaganda tactic with which the Communist Party hopes to bludgeon the Jewish community to its support,” Oliver Pilat wrote in March 1952.
Fissures in the community continued with the Civil Rights Movement.
That Jews played an outsized role in the push for Black equality — attested to by Ben Shahn’s lithographs of James Chaney and Northern Jews Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — is contextualized with the objections of their Southern coreligionists, who feared the blowback of their neighbors.
Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, and Midge Decter savaged it in Commentary. The so-called culture wars that dominate our discourse today are nothing new.
Among the more recent acquisitions are former U.S. Representative Steve Israel’s handwritten notes on a Sept. 13, 2001 FEMA briefing, marking the start of a new American reality. But one is struck by how much remains the same.
A signed photo of Nita Lowey shaking hands with Barack Obama — a Jewish congresswoman and a Black president— was unthinkable in the days of Jefferson and Noah, but their dynamic was not dissimilar from those two men. The intolerance Jefferson wrote about has not abated, only shifted its focus. A Time report on the Unite the Right Rally tells the tale.
The exhibit stops short of the pandemic, Oct. 7 and the emerging rifts among American Jews and their neighbors. That history is still in progress.
“Longer than there’s been a country, there have been Jews,” said Gemma Birnbaum, executive director of the AJHS. At first it was only 23 off the boat to New Amsterdam, she said, but the Jewish story has always been a part of the American one.
Birnbaum and Rosenfeld want visitors to recognize continuities in the unfinished American Revolution, both the progress and the work that remains. Sometimes, this means reassuring visitors. One thing they’re asked a lot: “Does it ever get better?”
“What is better?” Birnbaum asks. “There are times when things are really difficult, and there are times when things feel a little less difficult. And if you can take inspiration from that — to me, I find it grounding.”
The American Jewish Historical Society’s exhibit All We Have Standing Between Us: 250 Years of Jews and American Democracy is on view at the Center for Jewish History through Dec. 31, 2026.
The post 75 artifacts tell the fitful, inspiring, unfinished story of Jews in America appeared first on The Forward.
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Diary of a Jewish ghetto refugee, written in a pigsty
אין דער װעלט פֿון ייִדיש איז בערל כּהנס נאָמען גוט באַקאַנט צוליב זײַנע היסטאָרישע און ביבליאָגראַפֿישע שטודיעס, צװישן זײ — דער צוגאָב־באַנד צו דעם „לעקסיקאָן פֿון דער נײַער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור“ און „ייִדישע שטעט, שטעטלעך און דאָרפֿישע ייִשובים אין ליטע ביז 1918“.
אָבער זײַן ערשט בוך איז געװען דער חורבן־טאָגבוך „אַ ייִד אין װאַלד“, װאָס איז אַרױס אין ניו־יאָרק אין 1955. דאָ דערצײלט כּהן װעגן צען חדשים אונטער דער דײַטשישער אָקופּאַציע פֿון ליטע צװישן אָקטאָבער 1943 און אױגוסט 1944. די דאָזיקע צײַט האָט ער, אין אײנעם מיט זיבן אַנדערע פּליטים פֿונעם קאָװנער געטאָ, פֿאַרבראַכט אין אַ באַהעלטעניש טיף אין ליטװישע װעלדער.
איצט, העכער װי 70 יאָר נאָך דער פּובליקאַציע פֿון דעם ייִדישן טאָגבוך, איז עס סוף־כּל־סוף אַרױס אױף ענגליש מיטן טיטל, „אַ ייִד אין וואַלד: זײַטלעך פֿון אַ טאָגבוך“.
פֿאַר דער מלחמה איז כּהן געװען אַן אַקטיװער לינקער ציוניסט און האָט געשריבן פֿאַר קאָװנער ייִדישע צײַטונגען. װען די דײַטשן האָבן פֿאַרכאַפּט די שטאָט, האָט ער זיך געפֿונען אינעם געטאָ אין דער ייִדישער פֿאָרשטאָט סלאַבאָדקע.
„אין דער צװײטער העלפֿט פֿון 1943 זײַנען די אילוזיעס פֿון די פֿאַרשפּאָרטע ייִדן אין סלאַבאָדקער געטאָ אַריבערצולעבן היטלערן געװאָרן אַלץ שװאַכער.“ אַזױ הײבט כּהן אָן די דערצײלונג װעגן זײַן ראַטעװען זיך פֿונעם חורבן.
כּהן, זײַן פֿרױ ראַיע און איר שװעסטער נחמה זײַנען אַנטלאָפֿן פֿונעם געטאָ מיט דער הילף פֿון אַ ליטװישן פּױער טאַדעוש. ער האָט זײ פֿאַרבאַהאַלטן אינעם חזיר־שטאַל בײַ זײַן שטוב אין אַ װײַטן דערפֿל אין מיטן װאַלד.
אין זײַנע נאָטיצן האָט כּהן פֿאַרפֿיקסירט פּרטים פֿון זײער טאָג־טעגלעכן לעבן מיט אַלע דאגות, אַנגסטן און האָפֿענונגען. ער האָט אױך געפּרוּװט צו באַזיניקן דאָס, װאָס עס קומט פֿאָר מיט זײ און מיט אַנדערע ייִדן, כאָטש קײן פֿאַרלאָזלעכע ידיעות פֿון דער ברײטערער װעלט האָט ער ניט געקענט קריגן.
פֿאַרװאָס האָט אַן עלטערער ליטװינער באַשלאָסן צו ראַטעװען ייִדן? טאַדעוש האָט דערקלערט: „איך טו עס ניט דערפֿאַר, װאָס איך װיל פֿאַרדינען געלט. איך בין שױן אַלט – און דאָס געלט אין דער ערד װעל איך סײַ װי ניט מיטנעמען. איך װיל אָבער, אַז ס׳זאָל ניט פֿאַרגאָסן װערן נאָך אומשולדיק בלוט. װאָלט איך געקענט װאָלט איך געראַטעװעט נאָך ייִדן, קען איך עס ניט, װעל איך באַשיצן די, װעמען איך האָב יאָ געראַטעװעט.“
אינעם טאָגבוך ווײַזט כּהן אַרויס אַ סך דרך־ארץ פֿאַר טאַדעוש און זײַן פֿרױ באַרבאַראַ, װאָס שטעלן אײַן זײער לעבן פֿאַר פֿרעמדע מענטשן. ער פֿרעגט זיך: „װיפֿל ייִדן װאָלטן געווען פֿעיִק אַזױנס צו טאָן?“
יעדע מינוט קען װערן די לעצטע פֿאַר די ייִדישע פּליטים אינעם שטאַל. אָבער כּהן איז געװױר אױך פֿונעם שװערן מצבֿ פֿון די ליטװינער: „פֿון דײַטשן װילן זײ פּטור װערן, אָבער דעם רוס װילן זײ אױך ניט האָבן.“
די גרעסטע סכּנה פֿאַר ייִדישע פּליטים קומט טאַקע ניט פֿון די דײַטשן, װאָס באַװײַזן זיך זעלטן אין יענע טיף־באַגראָבענע מקומות, נאָר פֿון די שכנישע פּױערים און פֿון די ליטװישע פּאַרטיזאַנער, װאָס הרגענען ייִדן.
אָבער די מיאוסטע פּאַרשױנען אינעם בוך זײַנען ניט קײן דײַטשן און ניט קײן ליטװינער, נאָר צװײ מיטגלידער פֿון זײער גרופּע — דער „אַמאָליקער פּריץ“ און זײַן פֿרױ. פֿאַר דער מלחמה האָט דער דאָזיקער ייִד געפֿירט געשעפֿטן אין דער געגנט און איצט האַלט ער, אַז די אָרטיקע פּױערים זײַנען אים מחויבֿ צו העלפֿן.
זײַן אַני־מאמין איז געװען „כּל־זמן מע לעבט, דאַרף מען מאַכן געשעפֿטן.“ און ער האָט טאַקע געװאָלט באַקומען רװח אַפֿילו פֿון די פּליטים אינעם אײגענעם שטאַל.
אָבער װאָרעם זײ האָבן ניט געהאַט מיט װאָס צו באַצאָלן, האָט זיך דער פּריץ ניט געטײלט מיט זײ מיטן עסן, װאָס ער האָט געקױפֿט בײַ די פּױערים: „די אַמאָליקע ייִדישע פּריצים עסן פֿאַר אונזערע אױגן פֿלײש און אַלדאָס גוטס – און מיר זיצן און חלומען װעגן אַ שטיקל טרוקן ברױט“, פֿאַרשרײַבט כּהן אינעם טאָגבוך.
אַפֿילו אין יענע ביטערע באַדינגונגען האָט כּהן אָפּגעהיט אַן אײגנאַרטיקן חוש פֿון הומאָר. דאָס קומט פֿאָר למשל אין זײַנע שילדערונגען פֿון די באַציִונגען צװישן ייִדן און דעם חזיר: „אונדזער אײנציקער ׳ניט־ייִדישער׳ שכן אין שײַער איז – דער חזיריוק. אַזױ װי מע קען דאָך ניט פֿיר און צװאַנציק שעה אין מעת־לעת טראַכטן װעגן טױט – קוקט מען גאָר אָפֿט אױפֿן קלײנעם חזיר. די עקלדיקסטע באַשעפֿעניש פֿאַר אַ ייִד […] װאַקסט ברוך־השם פֿון טאָג [צו טאָג].“
מאַקס ראָזענפֿעלדס ענגלישע איבערזעצונג פֿונעם טאָגבוך איז גאַנץ פּינקטלעך און פֿליסיק, אָבער זי גיט ניט איבער דעם אײגנאַרטיקן טעם פֿון כּהנס פּראָזע.
אָט איז אַ משל: אײן טאָג אַנטלױפֿט דער חזיר פֿונעם שטאַל און ייִדן מוזן זיך יאָגן נאָך אים כּדי צו ברענגען אים צוריק. כּהן באַשרײַבט דאָס בזה הלשון: „מיר פֿירן דעם דבֿר־אחר צו זײַן מקום־מקלט“. אָבער אױף ענגליש קלינגט דאָס פּשוט: „we are taking him back to the barn“. דאָ איז ניטאָ קײן שפּור פֿון כּהנס איראָניע, װאָס שטאַמט פֿון זײַן שפּיל מיט לשון־קדוש.
דער חורבן־היסטאָריקער יצחק ארד האָט אָפּגעשאַצט, אַז בערך 25,000 ייִדן זײַנען אַנטלאָפֿן פֿון די געטאָס אין װעלדער בעתן חורבן. אַרום 15,000 פֿון זײ האָבן זיך צוגעשטאַנען צו די סאָװעטישע פּאַרטיזאַנער, בעת 10,000 האָבן געפּרוּװט איבערלעבן אין קלײנע גרופּקעס, אָפֿט מאָל מיט דער הילף פֿון ניט־ייִדישע פּױערים.
די גענױע צאָל פֿון די, װאָס האָבן זיך געראַטעװעט אונטער אַזעלכע ביטערע און געפֿערלרכע באַדינגונגען, װעט מען קײן מאָל ניט װיסן, זאָגט ארד. װאָס איז יאָ זיכער, איז אַז זײער צאָל איז געװען אַ סך קלענער אײדער די צאָל פֿון די, װעמען עס האָט זיך אײַגעגעבן צו אַנטלױפֿן פֿון די געטאָס.
כּהנס טאָגבוך איז ניט נאָר אַ ביז גאָר װיכטיקער היסטאָרישער מקור װעגן דער דאָזיקער דערפֿאַרונג, אָבער אױך אַ מערקװירדיקער מענטשלעכער דאָקומענט און אַ פֿאַרכאַפּנדיקע לעקטור דערצו.
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