Photo: SPD Hesse
Well meant, badly done: Hesse’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) congratulated the Jews on Yom Kippur ( October 4-5) on Facebook – but showed a photo of the Dome of the Rock!
Although the building is in Jerusalem, it is one of the main Islamic shrines.
But that’s not all: according to some researchers, the Dome of the Rock was built to show the triumph of Islam over Judaism and Christianity.
On Wednesday morning, the post had already been online for 12 hours. Accordingly, many outraged commentators already commented on the post!
A selection: “The SPD probably thinks it can achieve something with provocation”, “The picture accompanying this text once again only shows that there is zero competence at work here”, “SPD Hesse, you’ve got it all wrong”, “One of the highest Jewish holidays and you illustrate it with the Islamic iconography of triumph over Judaism”, “I’m sure it was only well-intentioned. But unfortunately completely incompetent. Perhaps the criterion for the selection of the picture was ‘something related to Jerusalem'”.
Around 8.15 a.m., the party deleted the post. Christoph Gehring, head of the press office of the SPD parliamentary group in the Hesse state parliament, apologised on Twitter this morning: “Sincere apologies from the SPD Hesse and the SPD parliamentary group in the Hesse state parliament (…) As head of the press office of the SPD state parliamentary group and as press spokesperson for the SPD Hesse, I apologise personally and on behalf of the institutions I speak for for this mistake, which of course should never have happened.”
Gehring: “Where exactly in the press office, for which I am responsible, the checking and control mechanisms did not work, which are supposed to prevent incidents like this, is irrelevant for the public discussion (…) The only thing that is certain is that something stupid has happened to us, for which we are rightly being harshly criticised.”
Background: Yom Kippur (“Day of Atonement”, “Day of Atonement”, “Feast of Atonement”) is the highest Jewish holiday. It is a strict day of rest and fasting.
By SPD standards, this faux pas is still harmless. For: The SPD youth organisation maintains a close partnership with the Palestinian youth organisation of “Fatah”, whose activists regularly call for the extermination of Israel.
When Chancellor Olaf Scholz (64, SPD) recently welcomed Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas (87) and the latter played down the Holocaust, Scholz remained silent at the press conference – and only later condemned the unbelievable statement.
The Secretary General of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER), Gady Gronich (Munich), told the newspaper BILD: “It is nice when the political parties in Germany think of the Jews living here and congratulate our community on the most important Jewish holiday, the Festival of Peace. But at the same time, the choice of photos also shows how little people in this country know about Jewish life and, with such mistakes obviously made out of ignorance, congratulatory statements of this kind are more likely to be regarded as platitudes that make one wonder how serious they really are about the Jews living in Germany.”
Gronich added: “Perhaps the SPD Hesse would do better to promote a corresponding educational initiative to better and more vividly convey Jewish life in society? There is an urgent need for action here, as only a survey conducted in autumn 2021 by the Hanns Seidel Foundation and Orthodox Rabbinical Conference Germany (ORD) found:Concerning history, politics and anti-Semitism, the view of current Jewish life is lost or hardly exists.
And: “The view of Judaism often remains a view from the outside or is even anti-Semitic, often through ignorance. According to the survey, almost every second German has never had direct contact with Jewish life.