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OPEN LETTER TO RABBI MORDECHAI GUTNICK
David Brockschmidt
Rabbi Mordechai Gutnick
Kosher Australia
81 Balaclava Rd
Melbourne Caulfield 3161
1 September 2007
Dear Rabbi Mordechai Gutnick
With great interest I read your comments published in the Melbourne Age, August 7, 2007, p 4 ‘Halal meat slaughter obeys law. Muslims question kosher methods’.
Before I address the issue of Jewish ritual kosher slaughter that you comment upon in this article, I would like to applaud the Australian Federation of Islamic Council’s halal service manager, Mohammed Rahman, who said: “Muslims in Australia have no issue with animals being unconscious when they were slaughtered. According to Islam we have to respect the law of the country he said. But with kosher slaughtering they don’t accept anything which is stunned.”
Under the standard for ritual slaughter in Australia animals must be stunned before their throats are slit. The Jewish practice of ritual kosher slaughter is not doing that. The animal is fully conscious when killed and death occurs, especially in cattle, only after three minutes or even longer. The enclosed DVD, which was secretly filmed at a Jewish slaughterhouse by an animal welfare group in the USA, details the horrors of such practice.
As we all know, a picture speaks a thousand words but a film with sound showing this bloody hell of ritual slaughter speaks a million words and leaves the viewer horrified, traumatised and speechless. Your comment in The Age article, that the Jewish method of slaughter was not cruel – “We believe that the Jewish method of slaughter in itself is humane and pain-free and this belief is supported by numerous scientific studies”.
Slaughter houses are not for the faint-hearted, anyway. Everyone who likes to eat meat, as I do, should be able to kill the animal you want to eat in a fast and humane way, as I did when I lived on a farm. This can only be achieved by stunning the animal before you actually kill it. The laws in Australia regarding the slaughter of farm animals makes this crystal clear. Jewish ritual kosher slaughtering violates these laws. I cannot understand why your community and your organisation ‘Kosher Australia’ has federal and state special arrangements to slaughter animals without any form of stunning. Is your community above Australian law?
Your comment that ritual Jewish kosher slaughter of animals is “not cruel but humane and pain-free” leaves me speechless. This comment is not only an insult to your own intelligence, Rabbi Gutnick, and to the Jewish people in Australia, but to any Jew and Gentile world-wide.
Your comments made here, or should I say your unsuccessful attempt to defend the indefensible is really aimed at the strong in the heart and the weak in the head. I feel deeply offended by your comments. I know that such comments are causing anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism and are completely counter=productive for your community. After receiving my letter and the enclosed DVD, which I hope you will view in full, you are welcome to comment on this matter.
We oppose any form of violence against humans and animals, as well as any form of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. We also oppose any form of anti-Gentilic violence committed often by many extreme right/left-wing Jewish groups against non-Jewish people. I am certain that you are aware of Jewish group violence against those who oppose them, for example, the activities in the USA and elsewhere in the world of the ADL and JDL.
Unfortunately there is a lot of anti-Gentilic hate written in your Babylonian Talmud. I recommend to you and your community members the book by Professor Peter Schaefer, head of Princeton University’s Judaic program – Jesus in the Talmud. Schaefer is one of the world’s most famous academic authority on Judaism. I hope that no-one in the Australian Jewish community, and the world, would be so silly – may I even say so stupid – to call Schaefer’s work ‘anti-Semitic’, and label him to be an ‘anti-Semite’.
The usual response of labelling and vilifying critics of Judaism by calling them anti-Semites is counter productive to your community and increases anti-Semitism world-wide.
This reminds me of a comment Zahal’s (IDF) Chief Rabbi Shlomo Gorren made to me after the end of the Six-Day-War in 1967: “Anti-Semitism is good for us because it stops the assimilation holocaust, brings money into Israel and keeps our tribe together.”
This continuous defamatory labelling of those individuals or groups who criticise parts of the Jewish religion, the policy of the state of Israel, and the tradition of ritual kosher slaughter, carries the seeds of self-destruction of your community. Remember what the Jewish scholar of the Jewish religion, Professor Deborah Lipstadt said during her lectures at Mt Scopus College at Melbourne in 1994: “The destruction of the Jewish people will not come from the outside but from within.”
This means that the destruction of the Jewish people will not come from non-Jews but will be brought about by your own people.
The reason I am writing to you, Rabbi Gutnick, is not to lecture you on subjects you know about anyway but to save you and your people from yourself. Every time you use the word anti-Semite, neo-Nazi, hater, etc., every time you talk about Hitler’s henchmen, Heydrich and Himmler and the Nazi-Jewish Holocaust, it is important to bring balance into history and show the readers there is always cause and effect. We must also talk about the Judeo-Bolshevik Holocaust in Soviet Russia, the Bolshevik-Jewish henchman Trotzky-Bronstein, the henchman of Lenin and Lazar Kaganovich, the Jewish henchman of Stalin. You remember, Stalin was married to Rosa Kaganovich who was Lazar’s sister.
Every time you talk about the German Nazis who indeed committed crimes and murder, not only against your people and others, including non-Nazi Germans, we must also talk about the tens of thousands of Bolshevic Jews in Soviet Russia who in cooperation with their non-Jewish Bolshevic brothers in arms killed hundreds of thousands of non-Bolshevic Jews, including orthodox Jews like yourself in Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe and up to sixty million gentiles.
Please read Alexander Solshenitzin’s book on the relationship between Jews and Russians in Soviet Russia, which is not yet available in English but is available in Russian, German and French. The English title of his book would be Them and Us.
Out of eleven GuLag death camps in Soviet Russia, ten were designed, built by slave labour and run by Bolshevic Jews. Read Stalin against the Jews by Arkady Vaksberg, who clarifies that the Soviet GuLag death camps came long before the concentration camps in Germany. According to reliable historians and confirmed by ex-Polish president Lech Walensa, whom I had the honour personally to speak with when he visited Adelaide. He said:Bolshevism at least killed 200 million innocent men, women and children world-wide. No-body killed as many communist as communists themselves.
This Bolshevic Holocaust started in 1917 in Russia and spread across Eastern Europe until Stalin’s death in 1953.
Whenever Jewish communities ask themselves why the Gentiles hate them so much, you must not make the fatal mistake over and over again of pointing the finger at others. For your own sake, have a good look in the mirror of your own history regarding your culture and tradition – and that includes your tradition of kosher slaughter, the anti-Gentilic hate in your Babylonian Talmud, and in your Book of Esther which is directed not only against Christians and Muslims but against Gentiles as a whole. Also, have a look at the racist discrimination in Israel-Palestine against Christians, Muslims and any non-Jewish groups. After all, a people that cannot accept and correct the dark side of its own history will be history.
Do you remember what the atheist Richard Dawkins in his book, The God Delusion, said about your God:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it, a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic capriciously malevolent bully.”
If this Dawkins’ depiction of your God is true, and if I would be Jewish, I immediately would renounce Judaism, convert to Buddhism or become an Atheist.
I ask myself, who wants to worship a God who is, according to Dawkins, a racist and a hater!
In my personal experience with young Jewish people in Israel, Europe and north America, I learned that they are sick and tired of their own restrictive customs, traditions and religion. We all know that the Holocaust you fear most is the assimilation Holocaust, meaning Jews marrying Gentiles and vice versa. Any attempt to slow that process down, or reverse it, is condemned to failure.
The ethnocentric world view used by Judaism against those who denounce and leave the Jewish community is a process of defamation and intimidation. They are condemned as anti-Semites – which is a contradiction in terms – or self-hating Jews, is not helpful either but counter-productive. It will not slow down the assimilation Holocaust but it will increase it.
Jewish ritual slaughter is banned in many countries of the world – in Norway, for example, since 1930, and later in Sweden, Holland, Belgium, and now Switzerland will be a shining example of humanity by outlawing Jewish ritual slaughter and banning imports of kosher meat. This decision will be made in a referendum this year, and according to polls 76 per cent of the Swiss people will vote against ritual Jewish slaughter and support a total ban to import kosher meat into Switzerland. The Swiss are a shining light of humanity here and show the world which way to go on this issue.
Now, Rabbi Gutnick, permit me to give you an autobiographical sketch of my family. My parents Herta and Heinrich Brockschmidt are righteous Gentiles who were honoured by Yad Vashem in Israel and the German government for saving Jewish lives during World War Two – see: www.geocities.com/unlikelychildhood
My father was Oskar Schindler’s business partner. It was my father’s trucks that transported most of the Schindler Jews – of the Schindler’s List fame – from Schindler’s Krakow factory in Poland, Deutsche Metall, to his new ammunition factory Brunnitz-Bruno in Czechoslovakia.
I met Oskar Schindler in 1967 in Tel Aviv at one of the Schindler Jews parties that he held annually at the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv. He introduced me to many Schindler Jews and their offspring. Some of them remembered my father.
I lived in Israel on-and-off from 1967 onwards with some of the Jewish survivors of World War Two who had been hidden in my parents’ apartment in Warsaw, Poland, and on our farm near Berlin until March 1945 when the Soviets arrived there.
I am fairly familiar with the Middle East history including the Zionist settlement in Palestine. So let me elaborate a little on my time spent in Israel, starting in 1967 the year of the Six-Day-War where I risked my life for your real homeland, Rabbi Gutnick, which for you is Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) within its Biblical borders from the Euphrates to the Nile. The war started on 4 June and officially ended six days later like the Bush Iraq “mission accomplished”. But this war is still directly going on to this very day. Zahal (IDF) late Chief of Staff, Haym Bar-lev, informed me that the permanent occupation of the Sinai Desert, the Jordanian West Bank and the Golan Heights will be a strategic mistake for which Israel will pay dearly. It is easy to win a battle but it’s much harder to establish peace, as we can now see what is happening in Iraq. Remember, any war is a criminal matter, everyone loses, except the parasitic tribes of Wall Street – let’s abort them.
One of my friends, a Kibbutznik from a kibbutz between Natanja and Haddera, Giorrah, took me one day with a truck full of cattle from his kibbutz to a Haifa slaughterhouse. Giorrah invited me to watch the procedure of shechtiah, which is the process of Jewish ritual slaughter. This had a traumatic effect on me and my kibbutznik friend. With tear-filled eyes Giorra said, “Thank God I am a vegetarian, and I hope that anyone who knows how these poor animals are dying here and who then eats their meat should choke on it. I am ashamed that this is happening here in Israel committed by some of us, the Jewish people, who should be a light and moral guardian unto the nations.”
Giorrah continued that he hates these Orthodox Jews because they are the main cause for anti-Semitism world-wide. Rounding up his outburst he said, “Thank God, they do not run our country.” He added, “These Orthodox Jews are ha’acoll, meshuggaem, which means in English: They are completely mad.
I looked in disbelief at him and then Giorrah said: You don’t believe me? Take an Egged bus to Yerushalaim-Jerusalem, go and see for yourself how these Orthodox Jews live in the West Jerusalem district of Mea Sharim. So I took the bus to Jerusalem, stayed in En Karem and made my way to the ultra Orthodox Jewish quarter, Mea Sharim, in West Jerusalem. With my limited Yiddish I had a chance to speak with one of the ultra Orthodox Rabbis, and what I heard and what I saw shocked me.
When I returned to Giorrah in his kibbutz, I said, “Giorrah, you’re right. I saw the darkness of the Middle Ages and I saw religious extremism. I saw a totally unhealthy lifestyle in Mea Sharim dominated by neurotic religious structures. I saw and heard the hate they had for gentiles, non-religious Jews, and for the State of Israel. Their refusal to defend their country by refusing military service in the IDF, but taking all the social benefits they can get from the State that they want to destroy.
The disrespect for women is manifested in the book: The Hole in the Sheet, written by the Jewish Orthodox author, Evelyn Kaye, published by Lyle Stewart Inc. Secaruse, New Jersey, 1987. She dedicated her book to Jewish women who feel anger at the sexist discrimination of Orthodox Judaism and in special memory to Malke Lee, a Yiddish poet whose pious father burned all her work because he believed it was against God’s will for a woman to write. Giorra’s response was: “We kibbutzniks call them parasites and we hate their guts”.
May I remind you, Rabbi, this hatred has even increased today after one of the Orthodox Jews killed Israel’s Prime Minister, Itshak Rabin.
Giorra then added, “We kibbutzniks are only three per cent of Israel’s population but we produce up to 35 per cent of our total production”. In regard to Jerusalem he said, “If you would build a roof over Jerusalem, you would have the biggest madhouse in the world. All they produce there is hate and holiness. Look at our life here on the kibbutz – we work hard, we have culture, even the Israeli Philharmonics under its conductor, the Parsi Zubin Metha, played here for us. Our parents escaped the Gentile pogroms of Europe and the religious madness of Judaism coming from their self-made Jewish ghettos, mostly situated in Eastern Europe. My parents and grand parents came to Erez Israel in order to re-build the land of their forefathers and physically and mentally re-build themselves. I am a Sabra, which means born in Israel, named after a cacteen fruit which is prickly on the outside but sweet inside. Look, David,” Giorrah said, “when we stood on the top of the water tower of his kibbutz, “all the plantations we established and cultivated here through hard work and we are proud of it.”
I said, “Giorrah, I planted thousands of trees in kibbutzims myself, I took my wife there, years later to harvest the fruits from the trees I planted. I also planted trees outside Jerusalem with Kerem Kajemmed, an organisation that plants trees in order to re-forest Israel. I recognize the work you have done here, but the question remains who owned the land before your parents and grandparents came here from the Jewish ghettos of Europe? Didn’t the land belong then to the Palestinians? Didn’t they work hard, too, like you? Remember, Giorrah, you pointing out to me all the thousands of citrus trees your people planted but didn’t the Palestinians also plant citrus trees before you came here? Remember, Palestine was the largest citrus exporter in the world before Zionist settlement. Your oldest town here in Israel – 1967 - Petah Tikva, is approximately 70 years old. So you have planted citrus trees here for a maximum of 70 years, but the Palestinians have been planting fruit trees for the last 2000 years. When your kibbutz was founded in 1948 did the Jewish Agency and/or other organisations pay for the land on which you are now living? Was the land empty before you came here, was there no-one living there? Were the owners of the land and/or the Palestinians who worked on this land and were evicted off this land compensated? Do they now live in refugee camps in Gaza, Jericho and other Arab countries? What happened to the Palestinians who lived in more than 400 villages in Palestine that your fathers and grandfathers razed to the ground, and lots of Palestinians were killed in this process?”
Giorrah stared at me. In the background we could see the Arab town of Tulkarem in the West Bank. Then Giorrah screamed at me, “Maspick, maspick, Du, Du” – Enough, enough, David! This is the human condition. The history of mankind, conquer or be conquered, divide and rule like the British did. The stronger survives, and the land belongs to the ones who work on it now, regardless who worked or owned the land before.”
Later Giorrah admitted the terrible injustice and killings committed against the Palestinians by his parents’ and grandparents’ generation. He said, “If we don’t share the land with the Palestinians here, then we are all doomed, Jews and Arabs together.”
Rabbi Gutnick, before I left Jerusalem in 1967 I witnessed Jewish in-fighting at the Wailing Wall in the old city of Jerusalem. Secular kibbutzniks had punch-ups with orthodox Jews who were trying to stop the kibbutzniks from entering the Temple Mount, visiting the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aksa Mosque. Orthodox Judaism believes the Temple Mount is unclean because the Muslims built the two mosques on top of the Temple Mount where King Herod’s temple stood until the Romans destroyed it in 70 AD. The Orthodox Jews said to the kibbutzniks, “You can only go up to the Temple Mount after these two mosques have been demolished and the Jewish temple has been re-built there.”
The kibbutzniks started screaming at them in Hebrew, “You are insane and completely mad.” While the Orthodox Jews swore in Yiddish spitting and kicking them. Jews from Yemen in Israeli border police uniform then divided these two groups. While the kibbitzniks went up to the Temple Mount singing Yerushalaim shel zahav – Jerusalem the golden – a very popular Six Day War song, sung by the beautiful Naomi Shemer. The meshuggaim – the mad ones - as the kibbutzniks called them, went back to the Wailing Wall and in their trance-like prayers nearly banged their heads into it wishing the bloody kibbutzniks to hell, in Yiddish, of course.
So much for Jewish unity in this Holy City. Remember, this happened between Ashkenazims – European Jews. The fights between them and the Sephardic – Oriental Jews is another story.
So, last but not least, Rabbi Gutnick, let me end this letter to you by raising the issue about your Messiah, Rebbe Menuchim Mendel Schneerson, with which I am certain you are familiar. After the Hitler-Stalin Pact, when Soviet Russia occupied and annexed eastern Poland and Germany occupied western Poland, your Messiah was stuck with his followers in September 1939 in Warsaw, Poland. The then US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, relayed an appeal to the US Consul-General in Berlin who contacted Helmut Wohlfahrt, the chief administrator of Hermann Goering’s four-year economic plan. Wohlfahrt then contacted Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of German military intelligence. Hitler gave Canaris the green light who ordered Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler to secure passage for Schneerson and his followers out of Warsaw, Poland, via Germany and Latvia to Sweden and from there on to New York. Schneerson and his followers were all Latvian passport holders. My wife, Vita Brockschmidt, who was born in Riga in 1944, had an uncle from her mother’s side, Nikolajs Zebergs, who was born in 1903 and died in 1991 in Silver Spring, near Washington, DC. Zebergs was the charge-de-affairs in the Latvian embassy in Warsaw in 1939. He issued the exit visas for Rebbe Schneerson and his followers.
The Wehrmacht officer in charge and other protective soldiers under his command who guaranteed the safe passage for Schneerson and his group was the Jewish German Wehrmacht Lt Colonel Ernst Bloch. We must remember that over a hundred and fifty thousand Jews and half-Jews served in the German army, air force, navy, and other military organisations – according to the Jewish author Bryan Rigg who wrote the book, which I recommend you read: Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers. Here Rigg says that the number of Jews serving in the German forces between 1933 to 1945 can easily be doubled to 300,000. Research on this subject is still on-going.
In 1940 Adolf Hitler promoted Ernst Bloch, who was already a highly decorated World War One soldier, to Lt Colonel. Bloch also received the Iron Cross, 1st Class, and several service medals. According to Canadian Jewish author Alan Abrams, who wrote the book, Special Treatment, wherein he made it clear that Hitler declared more than 500,000 Jews of German blood, and/or honourable Aryans in Germany and within its occupied territories. Hitler also decorated Jewish soldiers who fought for Germany in World War One.
Bryan Rigg informs his readers that the Jewish communities world-wide does not wish to claim these Jews because it goes against everything they have been taught about the Holocaust.Riggs even exposes that some Jews joined the Waffen-SS. The reference for this comes from the Weekly Telegraph, December 11-17, 1996, p 28.
I also urge you to read the books by Lenni Brenner Zionism in the Age of Dictators, and Fifty-One Documents Zionists Collaboration with the Nazis. In these books Brenner deals with the Nazi-Zionist co-operation and collaboration between 1933 to 1944.
In regards to the exit visa obtained by Rebbe Schneerson in Poland I would just like to add that my wife and I visited Nicolajs Zebergs in Silver Springs in 1973 and he confirmed what I have stated here. I also informed your Messiah, Rebbe Mendel Schneerson about Nicolajs Zebergs whereabouts and sent him Zebergs’ address. Unfortunately Schneerson never contacted him to thanking him for issuing the exit visas for himself and his group. Schneerson also never thanked Lt Colonel Bloch who secured his passage out of war-torn Poland. You must understand that without the co-operation of the American Secretary-of-State, Cordell Hull together with the US Consul-General in Berlin, and Helmut Wohlfahrt, Goerings chief administrator, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Adolf Hitler, Reichfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler, Nicolajs Zebergs and Lt Colonel Ernst Bloch, your Messiah, Rebbe Menuchim Mendel Schneerson and his followers would have never made it to New York.
My challenge to you, Rabbi Gutnick, is: Let’s take a group of Yeshiva students from Melbourne, for example, at least 15 years old and invite the Federal Minister for Agriculture, Peter McGauran, the man who is also responsible for the welfare of Australia’s farm animals. Then bring along a television crew from our ABC, religious leaders from Christian, Muslim, Hindu and other religious groups, animal welfare groups, the RSPCA, and other interested parties, to watch the ritual kosher slaughter of animals in one of your slaughter houses in Victoria.
I will personally invite the Talmudic Scholar, New York-born Michael Hoffman, to join our group, and then we will all together have an unannounced surprise visit to one of Australia’s slaughter houses where Jewish ritual slaughter is performed, especially on cattle. This process will then be filmed and recorded by the ABC television crew, and this film should then be presented to the Australian audience during prime viewing time, like the Global Warming Swindle program by “our” ABC, which as a public broadcaster and according to its own constitution has a duty to report on matters of public interest.
In conclusion, Rabbi, I know that Jewish ritual kosher slaughter should never have been allowed into Australia because it violates the rules and laws against animal cruelty. The responsible people who made this introduction of kosher slaughter possible must be held accountable for their actions. This applies to your organisation Kosher Australia as much as to the State and Federal governments who allow these practises to operate in Australia – an outrageous scandal in itself.
Australia’s laws are based on Common Law principles enshrined within the Westminster system - the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and the fundamentals of Christianity.
The so-called state and federal special arrangements to slaughter animals according to Jewish ritual tradition is outrageous and a scandal and it must be stopped immediately.
No exception must be made to anyone, including your group regarding this way of slaughtering animals. In my opinion your methods of slaughter is not humane but anti-humane, not pain-free but extremely painful and barbaric. The enclosed DVD speaks for itself. This matter of slaughtering the traditional Jewish kosher way is not a matter that can be determined by your religious Beth-Din court in Jerusalem. Melbourne is not Jerusalem, Rabbi Gutnick, and Australia is not Israel.
Sincerely
David Brockschmidt
Skye – 5072
http://www.adelaideinstitute.org/newsletters/n354.htm