Today's Shoah

Alex Hershaft was five years old when the Nazis invaded his native Poland, and half a million Jews were crowded into the Warsaw ghetto.  Some died from disease or starvation, others went to Treblinka death camp, and those left in the Warsaw Ghetto put up a heroic fight, against the Nazis who ultimately destroyed the entire ghetto.   Alex and his mother survived because of the kindness of gentiles; his father was killed by Nazis.

“Why was I spared? Is there a lesson we can learn from this terrible tragedy?”

Dr. Alex Hershaft has a Ph.D. in chemistry and worked as an environmental consultant, when he was sent to a slaughterhouse in the Midwest.  Dr. Hershaft turned a corner and saw piles of body parts – hearts, heads, and hoofs.  Horrified, he remembered the extermination camps, and could not get the images out of his mind.  He began to see other similarities between animal agriculture and the death camps in Europe: 

farm animals are branded with numbers,

separated from their families,

taken to their death in rail cars,

and murdered.

The parallels are not about the victims, but about the perpetrators. 

It was the arbitrary nature of the cruelty that struck him. Their actions are made possible because of arbitrary distinctions that enable cruelty, “The Christian lives, and the Jew dies; the dog lives, and the pig dies.” 

Dr. Alex Hershaft is the co-Founder of FARM, Farm Animal Rights Movement, the nation’s oldest, and the world’s first, organization devoted exclusively to promoting the rights of animals not to be raised for food.  In addition, he is the Founder of A Well Fed World.  He works closely with Jewish Veg, an organization that encourages Jews to embrace plant-based diets “as an expression of the Jewish values of compassion for animals, concern for health, and care of the environment.”

Why work on behalf of animals when humans suffer? 

“Animals are the most defenseless, the most vulnerable, therefore the most oppressed sentient beings on earth.  Oppressing animals is the gateway to oppressing humans”, says Dr. Hershaft.  “Everyone has the awesome power of life and death over animals.  Every time we shop for food, we literally make a choice between subsidizing life or subsidizing death”. 

Dr. Hershaft quotes Deuteronomy, chapter 30, verse 19:                        

“I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life.”