Dani Dayan, Consul General of Israel in New York, on Wednesday held a special tour of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York with the ambassadors and consuls of various countries.
The group viewed the Auschwitz exhibition at the museum, which will open to the public next week. Dayan will hold a similar tour on Thursday with media officials and with groups of student leaders.
This is the largest exhibition ever shown in North America and it includes more than 700 original items. The exhibition includes an original freight car used for deportation to the extermination camps, a barracks from the Auschwitz camp, concrete parts that were part of the Auschwitz camp, original paintings by Alfred Kantor, and a large number of personal memoirs and items that have never before been made public.
The exhibition opens to the public on May 8 and will be open until January 3, 2020.
Dayan told the ambassadors, "The shocking documentations that we see here are not of a historical event that happened in a parallel world. The buds that were present then are present in our midst in the current reality even after the catastrophe that anti-Semitism brought upon the world during World War II."
"Modern anti-Semitism is different from the anti-Semitism we have known. It does not always wear the flags of hate, it hides them. It does not shout out its name, but is rather hidden. At times it even masquerades as conventional concepts in the Western world, such as anti-Zionism or anti-Israelism. But it's as dangerous as its predecessors, and we have to stop it at all costs. You and the countries you represent must fight with us against the anti-Semitic beast, an uncompromising war," Dayan said.