Photographic, written and hand-drawn personal accounts of genocides from the Warsaw Ghetto and Darfur were on display at the grand opening of an exhibition at Mercer County Community College (MCCC) that will run through Nov. 5.

    Congressman Chris Smith (Robbinsville, NJ-04) was introduced by Dr. Paul B. Winkler, Executive Director at New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education as a long-standing leader in the struggle for human rights and combating anti-Semitism. Smith discussed his concerns about Darfur, a region of Sudan whose inhabitants are the victims of the central government’s genocidal policy. He also exchanged thoughts on the exhibit with Holocaust survivors and other visitors in attendance.

    “If we don’t learn from the genocides of the past we are going to see them repeated,” said Smith, co-founder and Executive Member of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission and Ranking Member of the Helsinki Commission. “That’s why we need exhibits like this to educate people. These stories must be told.”

    The exhibit, entitled “From the Warsaw Ghetto to Darfur: Photos, Text and Commentaries” is presented by the Mercer County Holocaust/Genocide Resource Center at the Gallery at MCCC. It includes drawings from children about the genocide in Darfur and photographs taken in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. Also part of the exhibit are Jerry Casciano's post-war photographs of concentration camps and survivors, displayed with accompanying narratives from the survivors, as well as photographs on loan from Doctors Without Borders’ Dr. Jerry Ehrlich, of Cherry Hill, N.J., which were taken in the refugee camps of Darfur during Dr. Ehrlich's service there in 2004.

    Smith also discussed his new legislation introduced to strengthen the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism at the Oct. 13 exhibit opening.

    “Anti-Semitism is a growing threat, especially in the Middle East and Europe, and we have to see that our government has the best tools to respond effectively,” said Smith, a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, co-chair of the Bi-Partisan Anti-Semitism Task Force, and member of the Steering Committee of the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition on Combating Anti-Semitism (ICCA). 

    In 2004 Smith authored the provisions of the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act of 2004 that created the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism within the State Department. “That office has done excellent work,” Smith said, “but this bill will prepare it to do yet more to defend the basic human rights of Jewish citizens everywhere.”

    Smith’s new bill, H.R. 6277, The Combating Anti-Semitism Act of 2010, was introduced in September with Rep. Frank Wolf, the Ranking Member of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission.  H.R. 6277 requires the anti-Semitism office at the State Department to gather information and report regularly on anti-Semitism around the world, since the U.S. government cannot fight the evil of anti-Semitism without the best information about its current manifestations. It upgrades the head of the office to ambassadorial status, so that he or she will be able to meet with the highest representatives of foreign governments. The bill also provides that the office shall have funds for hiring its own staff to ensure that it never has to double-staff with other State Department offices, and provides for Foreign Service officers to be trained on identifying and combating anti-Semitism.

    Smith said he plans to discuss the legislation in November at the Ottawa Conference on Combating Anti-Semitism, where he will chair the working group on policing and prosecuting issues, and that he has gained many ideas from witnesses at recent congressional hearings (news account) on anti-Semitism and from working with colleagues in the ICCA.

    “This bill should intensify the conversation about how to strengthen the fight against anti-Semitism,” Smith said. “In the next Congress we’ll work on getting the bill to the President’s desk.”

    Smith has long been a strong defender of Israel, (click here to watch Smith’s floor speech on the 2010 flotilla incident) and as a result of Rep. Smith’s landmark 2002 hearing, “Escalating Anti-Semitic Violence in Europe,” he led a congressional drive to place the issue of combating anti-Semitism at the top of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) agenda, as a result of which the OSCE held a series of high-level conferences on combating anti-Semitism and adopted new norms on fighting anti-Semitism for its 56 member states. Smith is the author of numerous laws, resolutions, and member letters on combating anti-Semitism. In the 1990s Smith chaired Congress’s first hearings on anti-Semitism and in the early 1980s his first trips abroad as a member of Congress were to the former Soviet Union, where he fought for the release of Jewish “refuseniks.”