Madagascar Finally Has a Jewish Neighborhood

Nadene Goldfoot                                                               
Hitler spoke with Arab leaders before WWII.


Islamic leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini,
Sherif of Jerusalem, wanted Jews out
of Palestine.  

Hitler in the 1930's blamed all the economic depression Germany was suffering from on the Jews.  Everything was their fault.  It was a rehappening of events that had been occurring for the past 2,000 years to Jews.  They had been in Germany after losing Jerusalem to the Romans in 70 CE, and they had even served in WWI two thousand years later in 1914-17.

Germany wanted France to get rid of their 10,000 Jews and be Judenrien, so on December 9, 1938, the French Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet, informed the German foreign Minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, that to do that they would have to ship them out somewhere, and where?  The Final Solution of the Germans had not yet been thought of, but were thinking along the lines of mass emigration somewhere.
                                                                     
Madagascar along the coast
Three months later  on March 5, 1938, Adolf Eichmann was put in charge of researching and creating a plan to give to the chief of the Security Police (SIPO)'s Reinhard Heydrich with a "foreign policy solution as it had been negotiated between Poland and France called the Madagascar Plan.   Then it was forgotten about and not thought of till summer 1940 after the fall of France.

A little earlier, Captain Dryfus of France  was the cause of a political scandal that from its beginning in 1894 divided France until it was finally resolved in 1906. He was accused of treason, acting for the Germans and was innocent, but suffered anyway by being found guilty. Dreyfus was imprisoned on Devil's Island in French Guiana, where he spent nearly five years. The conviction was a miscarriage of justice based upon faulty espionage and blatant antisemitism, as well as a hatred of the German Empire following its annexation of Alsace and part of Lorraine in 1871  .It caused Jews to realize that they needed their own country.  They thought of Africa, but disbanded the idea.  There was no burning desire to live there, but there was for their ancient homeland that had now been called "Palestine."  
                                                                           

Madagascar, a huge island nation off the southeast coast of Africa, is home to thousands of animal species – like lemurs – found nowhere else, plus rainforests, beaches and reefs. Near the busy capital, Antananarivo, is Ambohimanga, a hillside complex of royal palaces and burial grounds, as well as the “Avenue of the Baobabs,” a dirt road lined by massive centuries-old trees.  It is the 4th largest island in the world made up of 587,041 km2(226,658 sq mi)

The island of Madagascar had colonization possibilities he found from the French Colonial Office.  He included his evacuation plan for 4 million Jews to be shipped there over a period of 4 years.  It would be financed by a special bank that would be managing confiscated Jewish property and by contributions exacted from world Jewry, or blackmail.  He had also advocated creating a police reserve as a giant ghetto, much like the Pale of Settlement was only much worse.

The plan included compensating the 25,000 French citizens living on the island already.  The control would be transferred to Germany under a mandate.  The ports were to become German naval bases if the German navy desired.  Suitable areas of the country would be excluded from the Jewish territory and made Judenterritorium for the construction of air bases..  A German Police Governor under the administration of the Reichsfuehrer SS would be in charge of the island. Apart from this, the Jews would administer their part of the land and have their own mayors, police, postal and railroad administration.  The Jews would be jointly liable for the value of the island.  This plan was a Mandate and Jews would not get German citizenship, but those deported there lose their citizenship of European countries from the date of deportation and would be residents of the Mandate of Madagascar.
                                                                       
Tower of David in Jerusalem 
The whole idea was to prevent Jews from creating a Jewish state in Palestine.  They wanted Jerusalem to be out of the hands of the Jews and only be for the Christians and Islamic people.  American Jews would see that Jews on the island were kept alive only by the good behavior of American Jews.

Gossip caused the plan to leak out and it was published in Italy in July 1940.  by August, the 3rd Reich endorsed the plan.  The American Jewish Committee was much alarmed and they published by May 1941 a special report about this that sought to demonstrate that Jews couldn't survive the conditions on the island.

By summer 1940, the Nazis had already come up with their novel idea of a different Final Solution; their extermination program. So, by February 10, 1942, the Madagascar Plan was officially shelved and replaced with the evacuation to the East of Jews.  They expected to get all Jews out of Europe so they could control it all.  Rademacher had signed the agreement in Berlin on July 3, 1940.   Instead, they slaughtered 6 million Jews in the most despicable ways, and the utter horrid thing is that they were helped by many Europeans.
Madagascar Natives went  shopping, perhaps. 
Today, a Jewish community "was officially born in Madagascar last month when 121 men, women and children underwent Orthodox conversions on the remote Indian Ocean island nation better known for lemurs, chameleons, dense rain forests and vanilla." Of course they were not from the European Jews of WWII, as they never got the chance to live there, despite the almost impossible conditions they would have had to face.  They had a worse situation.  


These people who converted to Judaism on the island were  followers of various messianic Christian sects and had  become disillusioned with their churches and began to study Torah.  The conversions, which took place over a 10-day period, were the climax of a process that arose about five to six years ago.
Through self-study and with guidance from Jewish internet sources and correspondence with rabbis in Israel, they now pray in Sephardic-accented Hebrew and strictly observe the Sabbath and holidays.
The conversions were facilitated by Kulanu, a New York-based nonprofit that specializes in supporting isolated and emerging Jewish communities, but were initiated by the residents. 
" Rabbi Gerald Sussman of Temple Emanuel on Staten Island in New York said that   "“We are in the process of reconstituting the Jewish people, which would have been more numerous had it not been decimated by the Holocaust and had we not lost millions of Jews in Arab lands.”

Resource: http://www.israelandstuff.com/rebirth-madagascar-community-chooses-to-return-to-their-jewish-heritage
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Madagascar.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair

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