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<\/a><\/p>\nThe entrance to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp Memorial, July 30, 2025. (Martin Schutt\/picture alliance via Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The rally was slated for April 12, marking the 81st anniversary of Buchenwald\u2019s liberation by U.S. troops. But the city of Weimar said on Monday it would ban the event on the memorial grounds and offered a square downtown as an alternate location.<\/p>\n
Kufiyas in Buchenwald, the group behind the campaign, announced it was challenging the ban in court. The group said it aimed to \u201ccommemorate victims of genocide and fascism\u201d and \u201cuplift the fundamental duty to fight against all genocides, particularly the genocide currently taking place in Palestine.\u201d<\/p>\n
The planned event had been heavily criticized by German leaders, such as federal antisemitism czar Felix Klein. In an interview with the J\u00fcdische Allgemeine, Klein said he viewed the rally as \u201cdisrespectful self-promotion and a perfidious attempt to relativize the murder of over 11,000 Jews in the Buchenwald concentration camp by comparing it to Israel\u2019s actions in the recent Gaza war.\u201d<\/p>\n
The campaign was also protested in a joint statement by a coalition of 17 organizations, including several Jewish communal and academic groups. They accused the organizers of \u201cinstrumentalizing the Buchenwald memorial site as a platform for anti-Jewish agitation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kufiyas in Buchenwald had support from the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the German group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Rachael Shapiro, an organizer with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, said the memorial foundation\u2019s \u201cinsistence on the singularity and exceptionalism of the Nazi genocide of European Jews\u201d served to \u201cactively provide cover for Germany\u2019s participation in and funding of the mass murder of Palestinians.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAs Jewish, queer and other anti-fascists, many of us the children and grandchildren of survivors of and those persecuted and murdered in the Nazi genocide, we wholeheartedly reject the German state dictating conditions around commemoration,\u201d Shapiro said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The event originated as a protest against a German court\u2019s decision that Buchenwald could refuse entry to visitors who wear a Palestinian keffiyeh. Kufiyas in Buchenwald also said the memorial had suppressed other voices that criticized Israel. They cited the treatment of Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm, the grandson of Holocaust survivors and a critic of the Israeli government, who was disinvited from giving a commemoration speech at Buchenwald after pressure from the Israeli embassy in Berlin.<\/p>\n
Kufiyas in Buchenwald said it continued to call on the memorial foundation to \u201copenly address the genocide in Gaza\u201d and lift restrictions on pro-Palestinian symbols and speech at the site. The group said its demands honored the \u201cOath of Buchenwald,\u201d a promise spoken by survivors of the camp during a memorial ceremony on April 19, 1945.<\/p>\n
These survivors said in six languages, \u201cWe will only give up the fight when the last guilty has been judged by the tribunal of all nations. The absolute destruction of Nazism is our device. The building of a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal.\u201d<\/p>\n