44 June 20 • 2019
jn
soul
of blessed memory
Ousted Egyptian President
Mohamed Morsi Dies
According to State
TV in Egypt, ousted
president Mohamed
Morsi died during a
court hearing June
17, 2019. He was 67.
Morsi, a member
of the now-out-
lawed Muslim
Brotherhood, was
elected president
of Egypt in 2012 in the country’
s first
free elections following the ouster the
year before of longtime leader Hosni
Mubarak.
He served as president from June 2012
to July 2013, when the military removed
him from office in a coup d’
état after the
June 2013 Egyptian protests.
Egyptian prosecutors charged him
with various crimes and sought the
death penalty. His death sentence was
overturned in November 2016 and a
retrial ordered.
On June 13, several hundred
people gathered at a church in
Frankfurt, the city of Anne Frank’
s
birth, on the occasion of the teen-
age diarist’
s 90th birthday.
The event, organized at the
iconic St. Paul’
s Church by the
municipality of the German city
and the Basel-based Anne Frank
Foundation, featured an address
by philosopher Agnes Heller, a
Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust sur-
vivor who was born one month
before Frank.
After surviving the Nazi death
machine, Heller was inspired as a
young woman when she read Anne
Frank’
s Diary of a Young Girl. The
book chronicles Anne’
s two-year
stay at a secret annex in Nazi-
occupied Amsterdam with her
family and several other Jews. The
family was caught in 1944 and sent
to death camps. Only Anne’
s father,
Otto, survived.
“She was like one of the relatives
and friends I lost, kids killed by
the Hungarian Nazi Arrow Cross,”
Heller said. “Her story belonged to
all of us.”
Audrey Azoulay, the direc-
tor-general of UNESCO, the
United Nations agency for educa-
tion and heritage, in her speech
touched on an ongoing debate
concerning Anne Frank’
s legacy
and whether it should be taught as
a specifically Jewish story or a uni-
versal one.
The diary “is an intimate story of
a teenager and that of the Shoah,”
said Azoulay, who is Jewish, using
the Hebrew-language word for the
Holocaust.
Separately, a spokesman for the
Israeli foreign minister criticized
German Foreign Minister Heiko
Maas for a statement on Anne
Frank’
s birthday that did not men-
tion Jews. Her story, Maas said, is
a “warning against discrimination,
marginalization and persecution
and as a symbol of humanity.”
Emmanuel Nahshon, the top
spokesman of the Israeli Foreign
Ministry, responded on Twitter.
“
Anne Frank’
s diary is NOT a
warning about wishy-washy pseu-
do universal values!” he wrote.
“
Anne Frank’
s legacy is a warning
against the hatred and persecution
of JEWS. The attempt to ‘
univer-
salize the lessons of the Shoah’
is nothing less than a dishonest
rewriting of history.” ■
Hundreds Mark 90th Birthday of Anne Frank
in her Birth City of Frankfurt
CNAAN LIPHSHIZ JTA
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
WILSON DIAS/ABR - AGÊNCIA BRASIL, CC BY
3.0 BR, WIKIMEDIA
Mohamed Morsi