An Anti-Semite at the Helm

By Steve Rodan

Yad Vashem is embroiled in a deep controversy over .the choice of Dr. Dan Sachor for a senior post, head administrator of the library, at the Holocaust Memorial and museum in Jerusalem. Sachor is a "post-Zionist". Politically, he is on the extreme Left fringe of Israeli politics. What earns him this title? Comparing Israeli pilots to terrorist suicide bombers is an example. Another is refusing service in the Israeli army of "occupation" and accusing Israel of purposely and regularly killing Palestinian Arab children. Still another is calling for the end of American support for Israel.

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Israel National News. Aug 31, 2022

Yad Vashem's appointment of Dan Sachor does not set a precedent. Nearly 20 years earlier, Yad Vashem named a Jew-hating Israeli politician as one of its chairmen. Yosef Tommy Lapid made his career attacking observant Jews with invectives that would have made the Nazis proud. On state television, Lapid was allowed to taunt Jews with beards and earlocks.

"Get out of here, you scumbag," Yosef Tommy Lapid shouted at an Orthodox Jewish politician on state television in 1998.

For most of his life, Lapid was a favorite son of the Israeli elite. Born in 1931 to a Zionist leader in Serbia, Lapid was barely 11 when he fled with his mother to neighboring Hungary. His father, Bela Lampel, was captured and killed in the Austrian camp of Mauthausen in the last days of World War II while his wife and son found shelter in Budapest. In 1948, the two survivors arrived in the new State of Israel.

As a young adult, Lapid rose quickly up the ladder. He became a mainstay in the state-sponsored media. He worked with the much older Rudolf Kastner, the Zionist emissary who collaborated with the Germans to send more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews to their death in 1944 -- at the Hungarian daily Uj Kelet. Later, he joined the mass circulation daily Maariv and soon became the assistant to the editor. He authored several books in Hebrew that praised the one-party rule of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. One book was titled "Very Important People: One Hundred Interviews and Lots of Humor."

Lapid, who in 1979 was appointed director-general of the Israel Broadcasting Corp., played a key role in the rehabilitation of Kastner, assassinated by an agent of the Israeli secret police in 1957 after he was deemed by a Jerusalem judge a collaborator of Adolf Eichmann. In 1985, amid a state-sponsored campaign to glorify Kastner, Lapid appeared on state television and announced that his former colleague had been a hero.

"Kastner was one of the biggest Jewish heroes in the time of the Holocaust," Lapid said.

Lapid, fluent in at least five languages, sought out the rich and famous. As editor of Maariv, he was involved with owner Robert Maxwell and represented the tycoon's interests in Hungary and Yugoslavia.

During the 1980s, Lapid used his political and professional connections to help his eldest son, Yair, a high school dropout. Yair was hired as a journalist for Maariv and then was given a program on state television.

In 1992, the elder Lapid made his mark in virtually every living room in Israel. He joined a new interview and debate program called Popolitica, and distinguished himself by vilifying guests, particularly if they looked or sounded like religious Jews. He even demeaned his fellow panelist, an Orthodox rabbi and journalist who wore a beard and earlocks. The handpicked studio audience usually roared with approval.

Seven years later, Lapid, awarded Israel's top prize in journalism, took his show to the Knesset and campaigned on a platform meant to disenfranchise Orthodox Jews. A few years later, Yair, with a penchant for Cuban cigars and luxury cars, would take the exact same route, and in 2022 became prime minister.

The elder Lapid, who saw the collapse of his party, did not stay long in the Knesset. But his last official position was perhaps the most important. In July 2006, he became chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, a key part of an institution he had supported for decades.

Lapid's priority was to engineer Yad Vashem's recognition of Kastner as a Zionist hero. At a ceremony a year after his appointment, Lapid presided over a ceremony in which Kastner was called "one of the great heroes of the Holocaust." The occasion was the donation of Kastner's papers to the state institution. For Lapid, it marked the official endorsement of his former colleague.

"This event today is a small milestone in the history of our archive," Lapid said, "because we are getting his personal archive, which will be part of our archive, and will shed more light about this historical event, and will enhance the ability to make an objective historical research about the issue."

Yad Vashem went on to publish books and articles as well as convene seminars meant to whitewash Kastner. That paved the way for the Knesset to honor Kastner on Holocaust Remembrance Day in April 2018, a ceremony attended by the prime minister and president of the Supreme Court. Kastner was hailed as a rescuer of 1,700 Hungarian Jews.

Lapid did not live to see that. Less than a year after Yad Vashem rehabilitated Kastner, Lapid died in a losing battle with cancer at age 77. Nearly a decade after his death, another light shone on the man said to have controlled Israel's media. A veteran Israeli journalist claimed that Lapid tried to rape her in London in 1963. His son, Yair, was embarrassed.

“When he tried to open his zipper, I kneed him where it hurts, and when he recoiled, I added a stab with my high heels," Sylvie Keshet, then 87, wrote in a Facebook post in 2017.

Below: Yair and Yosef Lapid