Israel has no moral responsibility to aid Darfur refugees, and their plight must not be compared to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, Chief Rabbi of Hebron-Kiryat Arba Dov Lior said on Wednesday.
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“We have enough problems of our own with immigration absorption. We need to take care of our own ‘Sderot refugees’ and we do not have budget reserves. We have enough poor people in Israel. There are plenty of nations that can help those refugees besides us.
“The poor of one’s own country take precedence over other peoples’ poor.”
Three weeks ago, Lior first expressed his opinion on the issue after some 30 Darfur refugees, including women and children, crossed into Israel from Egypt. The IDF and the police refused to take responsibility for them. Eventually, Beersheba Mayor Ya’acov Turner agreed to provide for the refugees.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1180960626685&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFullLior said that since Israel was in a state of war and the Sudanese were known to be anti-Israel, Israel should not open its gates to the refugees.
During the Holocaust, Lior himself was a refugee. He and his family were expelled from Poland and wandered through the Soviet Union. Both his parents died of starvation.
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Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office, agreed with Lior that comparing the plight of Jews during the Holocaust to that of Sudanese refugees was inaccurate.
“Sudanese who managed to reach Israel had already escaped ethnic cleansing by entering Egypt from Sudan,” he said. “The move to Israel was an attempt to find a better haven.
“Obviously, as Jews who were victims of genocide, we have a special duty to help stop the ethnic cleansing inside Sudan. But at the same time, Israel has limited resources. We cannot possibly help all Sudanese refugees,” he said.
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