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