A pro-Gaza walk passing a Holocaust memorial site in Berlin has been cancelled after pressure from a Jewish organisation.
The ‘Walking The Gaza Monologues’ event was due to go by some gold pavement stones commemorating victims of the Shoah.
But the WerteInitiative, a Jewish-German group, condemned the event in an open letter, and it was ditched.
Organised with the Ashtar Theatre from Ramallah, the event was advertised as an audio-guided walk through Neukölln, the Berlin district where Hamas supporters handed out sweet pastries to children on the street to ‘celebrate’ the 7th October Hamas terror attacks in 2023.
The plan was for people to pass a number of ‘Stolpersteine’ – brass "stumbling stones" embedded in pavements outside the former homes of Jews and other victims deported and murdered during the Holocaust.
As they walked the route, people would have listened to recordings of the ‘Gaza Monologues’, based on testimonies from young people in Gaza.
The organisers had said the walk, due to be part of the annual "48 Stunden Neukölln" (48 Hours Neukölln) cultural festival last weekend,
would allow "the timelines of two genocides" to develop into parallels, drawing a comparison between the Holocaust and the war in Gaza.
In its open letter, signed by Dr Elio Adler, chairman of the WerteInitiative, the group said using the memorial stones as part of the performance crossed a moral line.
“We state this in no uncertain terms: this is not art that tests boundaries. It is a calculated transgression of boundaries. Anyone who deliberately performs texts about the Gaza War at Stolpersteine is equating the Shoah with Israel’s war against the terrorist organisation Hamas.
“This equation is historically false, it is perfidious – and, according to the working definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), to which the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Berlin are committed, it is antisemitic.
“The descendants of the victims are turned into perpetrators; the commemoration of murdered Jews is turned into an indictment of the Jewish state. This is a reversal of perpetrator and victim in its purest form, carried out at the expense of the dead.”
The letter went on to state that each Stolpersteine stone, the workm of artist Gunter Demnig, commemorates an individual murdered during the Holocaust, and said these belong “to the murdered and their descendants”, and should not be the backdrop for a political message.
It also said freedom of artistic expression did not oblige publicly-funded festivals to provide a platform for material the group considered antisemitic.
The organisation slammed Berlin's cultural sector, claiming Israel-related Jew-hate has become normalised, and urged the public authorities that fund the festival to review whether taxpayers' money should be used to support this.
Finally, it called on politicians in the Berlin borough of Neukölln and across the German capital to publicly distance themselves from the event.
"Silence is not neutrality," the letter states. "It is agreement.
“Eighty years after the Shoah, memorial stones in Berlin dedicated to murdered Jews are being turned into a stage for a narrative that portrays Israel as the perpetrator of a ‘new genocide’.”
“Anyone who remains silent on this matter has learnt nothing from the history commemorated by these stones.”
The WerteInitiative is a Berlin-based Jewish organisation founded in 2014 to strengthen Jewish life in Germany, combat antisemitism, racism and extremism, and promote democratic values and German-Israeli relations.
It works with politicians, civil society groups and the public through campaigns, policy discussions and educational initiatives, and has launched nationwide pro-Israel campaigns, and organised public rallies following Hamas attacks.
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