Pop Quiz: Who said the following: “The truth is that not even one million Jews were killed” in the Holocaust.
- A) Fred Leuchter B) David Duke C) Mark Weber D) Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi
If you chose A, B, or C you can be forgiven your mistake. True each of these men is a notorious Holocaust Denier, but the right answer is “D,” Rabbi Yosef Mizrahi from New York.
His reasoning is simple: “If you look at the percent of assimilation that there was in Europe which already reached 80%, it’s reasonable to assume that 80% of the 6 million were not Jews… The truth is that not even 1 million were killed.”
Rabbi Mizrachi isn’t dismissing the one million as insignificant, nor is he dissing the millions of others who died because the Nazis mistook them for Jews. All the rabbi seems to be saying is that only those who meet the halachic standard of Who is a Jew are Jews. If your mother is Jewish or you convert to Judaism under a recognized (recognized by Rabbi Mizrachi at least) halachic authority, then you are a Jew; otherwise not. “There are thousands of people in the U.S. named Cohen and Levy who are total non–Jews… That’s how it was in Europe,” the rabbi said.
Now this is good news for those of you who harbored guilt over eating a ham sandwich with a glass of milk, and also those parents whose kids, now no longer Jewish, didn’t want to go to synagogue anyway. If you don’t meet Rabbi Mizrahi’s definition and you were struggling to come of with the thousands of dollars needed to pay synagogue dues, day school tuition, and JCC membership, now you can quit all of these institutions and save for your kid’s college education instead.
It is odd that while the Nazis would be only too happy to murder my grandson as a Jew; Rabbi Mizrachi would let him date his granddaughter. Of course I too have a definition of Who is a Jew that also leaves thousands of Cohens and Levis and perhaps even my grandson out of the fold. To me a Jew is a person who identifies herself as a Jew, who uses the texts, teachings, and traditions of Judaism as a vital resource for meaning–making, spiritual inquiry, and marking major life events, and who takes upon herself the Jewish mission to be both a light unto the nations and a blessing to all the families of the earth. I think this would still have gotten you killed in Nazi Germany, if not welcomed into Rabbi Mizrahi’s family, but at least you would die for something more substantial than blood.