THE TIMES OF ISRAEL: The good news? ‘Outright Holocaust denial is today a marginal phenomenon,’ says the new head of Israel’s Shoah memorial. ‘But we do have a serious problem of Holocaust distortion’
After Dani Dayan took up the mantle of the Yad Vashem chairmanship in August, for the first time Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust had a leader who was born after the end of the Holocaust. He is [the] only the third individual to helm the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, and the first former politician.
Prior to heading Yad Vashem, Dayan was the consul general of Israel in New York, an appointment he took up after Brazil rejected him as envoy there.
Dayan, a longtime activist and head of the right-wing settler movement’s Yesha Council, was born in Argentina in 1955 and moved to Israel in 1971. He is a former supporter of ex-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but in the most recent elections ran on the New Hope ticket headed by Netanyahu rival Gideon Sa’ar. Dayan, who didn’t place high enough on the party’s slate to enter the Knesset, was appointed chair of Yad Vashem by Education Minister Yifat Shasha-Biton, also of New Hope.
Despite his former political ties, Dayan declares that he and Yad Vashem are strictly nonpartisan in their work, and he is determined to combat the cynical political distortion of Holocaust history and ensure the perpetuation of an accurate record of the horrors and lives lost in the Holocaust. » | Amanda Borschel-Dan * | Thursday, January 27, 2022
* Amanda Borschel-Dan is The Times of Israel's Jewish World and Archaeology editor.
