Letters to the Editor, August 30 2024

Yet not a single reference to a Jewish victim of terror.

Shylock’s powerful soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice comes to mind: “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?”

How does the UN explain its omission?

Shimon Cohen,

London N2
 

With respect to Lord Pickles, its insufficient to "give a complete account" of the UK's role during the Holocaust. Its more important to identify all the steps that led to the Holocaust, and to examine if and how interventions could have been made to stop so many deaths. For example, Nicholas Winton had to painfully negotiate with the Foreign Office to get children out of Czechoslovakia and overcome prejudicial and bureaucratic barriers. A memorial [if that is even the right term] needs to show how propaganda, prejudices and fear can drive individuals, communities and leaders into inaction or the wrong actions. It needs to show what has to happen to avoid or mitigate this. Whatever is built has to stand the test of time, has to pose questions, has to signpost the way to achieving answers and solutions. We can't afford to walk into the future just looking backwards all the time, beating our breasts and saying if only. We need to have a [memorial] which also discusses honesty, bravery, risk taking and sacrifices. A values based [memorial].

Lewis Herlitz

Leigh on Sea,

Is it not time to stop using the abstract term 'antisemitism' which relegates this attitude to theory, and does not engage with people themselves, and is it not time to use the simple descriptive phrase 'hatred of Jews'?

What do the readers of the Jewish Chronicle think?

Dr Nina Collins

Leeds

Who would imagine that a direct descendant of one of the most famous Jewish women in history, Gluckel of Hamelin, business woman and diarist, would be the subject of obituaries in the national newspapers as aristocrat and lady-in-waiting to our late Queen Elizabeth.

Virginia Fortune, the daughter of the American industrialist John Ryan and his Jewish Anglophile wife, met her future husband at a dance at the Savoy Hotel when she was sixteen years old. The late Lord David Ogilvy was a childhood friend of Princess Elizabeth, a son of a lord-in-waiting to King George the Sixth and a grandson of a lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Mary. His brother, Angus, would become the husband of Princess Alexandra, cousin to the Queen.

Virginia and David married in 1952 at St. Margaret’s Church in Parliament Square, and guests included the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Ogilvy’s brother, Angus, would become the husband of Princess Alexandra, cousin to the Queen. In 1968 Virginia became the Countess of Airlie when her husband succeeded to the Earldom.

Impressive as her husband’s pedigree was, Virginia’s was even more interesting. Her mother, Margaret Kahn, was the daughter of Otto Hermann Kahn, an investment banker and philanthropist. Born in Mannheim, Germany, Otto went to the United States as a young man and was an acknowledged organiser of the railroad system. Her mother, Adelaide, was a daughter of Abraham Wolff, a partner in the American banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb, and Lydia Wolff, who were both of German Jewish extraction, and thus Virginia was halachically Jewish.

The ancestress of the Countess of Airlie was the well known Gluckl bas Judah Leib, who was born in Hamburg in 1646, and whose diaries and commentary of German Jewish communal life can be read even today. An educated, upper class Jewish woman, Gluckl was widowed twice and had twelve surviving children, one of whom, Ziporah, was the ancestress of the Countess of Airlie.

Virginia, however, did not forget her Jewish roots. Finding that members of her mother’s family were victims of the Holocaust, in 1955 she sponsored a scheme to provide holidays for those who remained in displaced persons camps in Germany. She was a trustee of the Tate Gallery, the National Galleries in London and Scotland and served as chairman of the American Museum in Britain, besides accompanying the Queen on tour and at receptions. In 2012 she was the subject of a fine by the local magistrates after breaking a temporary speed limit in Yorkshire.

The Countess was the mother of six children and passed away at the age of 91.

Doreen Berger

Stanmore
 

Josh Kaplan asks “Why are Jews expected to put up with rampant social media antisemitism?” Perhaps a better question would be: If Jews control the world’s media, why are they doing such a bad job of it?

David Miller

Chigwell, Essex

That Hezbollah's fowl retaliation against Israel has amounted to something as poultry as blowing up a hen house is surely proof that their chickens have come home to roost.

Mark Boyle,

Renfrewshire,