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(Jerusalem) Israel's new museum dedicated
to victims of the Holocaust features a special exhibit dedicated to gay and
lesbian victims of the Nazis.
The Yad Vashem Museum was officially opened
Tuesday in Jerusalem.
The inclusion of gays was not part of the
original plan. Several months ago while the museum was still under
construction Jerusalem City Council member Sa'ar Netanel toured the
facility honoring Jews killed by the Nazis.
He said he was surprised there was no mention of
gay Holocaust
victims and mentioned it to the museum's director.
"The Jewish people has a moral obligation to remember all
the victims of World War II," Netanel told the Haaretz
newspaper.
"The state of Israel should be
the first country in the world to mention all the victims," he said.
Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem wrote Netanel in
response, "Jews indeed were not the only victims of the Nazi regime,
but they were the only group that it aspired to completely wipe out. It is
clear that in dealing with the Holocaust we also touch on its contexts and
related areas, among them the subject of other victims of the regime.
Accordingly, the new museum will present the subject of other victims,
including homosexual victims, of the Nazi regime, in a relevant
place."
There are monuments to the gay victims of the
Holocaust in San Francisco and San Sabba, Italy.
Under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code,
which banned sexual intimacy between members of the same gender, an untold
number of gays were rounded up by the Nazis and send to concentration camps
where they were subjected to medical experiments including lobotomies, and
forced to work in labor camps.
The number of gays sent to the camps ranges from
5,000 to 15,000, many of them sent to the gas chambers.
The American Holocaust Museum in Washington also
has an exhibit dedicated to gays and lesbians. A portion of the exhibition
toured the country last year.
But still, many Americans do not know that the
Nazis also targeted gay, gypsies and other groups.
In 2003 Minnesota state Rep. Arlon Lindner during
debate on two bills he had brought forward to repeal gay rights laws in the
state, said gays were lying when they cited thousands of homosexuals who were
exterminated or sent to concentration camps by the Nazis.
"It never happened," Lindner told the
House.
"I was a child during World War II, and I've
read a lot about World War II," he said. "It's just been recently that
anyone's come out with this idea that homosexuals were persecuted to this
extent. There's been a lot of rewriting of history."
The remarks shocked the legislature, but attempts
to censure him failed. (story)
©365Gay.com 2005
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