The European Jewish Association has issued an appeal to Berlin’s finance minister to urge him to convert Nazi chief propagandaist Joseph Goebbels’s mansion into a center for combatting hate propaganda.
Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the charmain of the EJA, said that “Turning the mansion of the worst of all consciousness engineers in human history into a center for political psychology, communication, and combating hate speech would be an important moral victory. EJA is ready to examine the possibility of promoting the idea and realizing it.”
Margolin, in a letter addressed to German Finance Minister Stefan Evers, expressed that the EJA would be willing to examine the possibility of accepting responsibility for the site, which the EJA claimed the Berlin government is struggling to maintain.
Why now?
Margolin wrote "91 years since the Nazis came to power and the free world is once again facing waves of hatred that are motivated by consciousness engineering of poisonous propaganda, mass enframement and the creation of virtual reality with the sole purpose of sowing destruction and violence. It is precisely these days that Dr. Goebbels' estate should not be demolished, but rather that it should be turned into a center of combating hate speech that will protect the free world from the dangerous trends that are repeating themselves in the entire Western world and in Germany in particular."
“We are interested in implement[ing] the matter together with the Berlin government" noted Margolin. "In a chilling resemblance to what is happening now in another place where the Jewish people are being sought to be destroyed, this week marked exactly 79 years since Goebbels poisoned his six children and committed suicide in his tunnel. Let us make the estate of spreading absolute evil a source of spreading good. It would be an important moral victory.”
The EJA, founded by Margolin in 2007, has operated in hundreds of initiatives across Europe, in partnership with Jewish communities and organizations seeking to combat antisemitism and encourage freedom of religion and worship in Europe.