Miriam comments: “The holocaust is a sensitive subject that baffles human comprehension, only Hashem can explain this, humans should not give their opinions about it as 6 million Jews murdered is a tragedy beyond our logic.”
Luke: Is it more or less beyond logic than any of a hundred other genocides? Is the Ukrainian genocide beyond logic? The Armenian genocide? The Chinese genocides? Is it a sacrilege to study genocide objectively?
(JTA) — A New York-based haredi Orthodox rabbi who has posted thousands of popular outreach lectures online said only about 1 million halachic Jews died in the Holocaust.
Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi in a video posted Tuesday on his YouTube channel, cited high assimilation rates in Europe before World War II to make his claim that 80 percent of those identified as Jews killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust were not Jewish according to halachah, or Jewish law.
“If you look at the percent of assimilation that there was in Europe, which already reached 80 percent, it’s reasonable to assume that 80 percent of the 6 million were not Jews,” said Mizrachi, who teaches at a yeshiva in Monsey.
“The truth is that not even 1 million Jews were killed. Not that this is, God forbid, an insignificant number, it’s massive, but there is a difference between 1 million and 6 million.”
Mizrachi also posts his videos on Divineinformation.com, his outreach website launched in 2004.
“These lectures and videos have created an enormous amount of followers in more than 50 countries, mainly in the USA, Israel, Canada, England,” the website says.
Mizrachi was born in Israel and moved to the United States in his 20s, where he received ordination.
