VILNIUS, August 24, BNS–Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Ponar Friday, part of Vilnius where over 100,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed during World War II.
After laying a wreath at the Ponar memorial, Netanyahu said that his grandfather had been severely beaten near what he called “a forest of death.”
The Israeli prime minister said that he had learned two lessons from the Holocaust.
“First, we must fight barbarism or it will burn all of us. The second for us, Jews, is that we must never be defenseless again,” Netanyahu said.
“I want to say to my grandfather today: saba, I am back here today and this is a forest of death. As the prime minister of Israel. We will never be defenseless again,” he said.
“We have a state, we have an army and we are capable of defending ourselves by ourselves”.
Netanyahu’s grandmother Sarah Mileikowsky, née Lurie, was born in Šeduva, a town in Lithuania, and his grandfather Nathan Mileikowsky was born in Kreva in what is now Belarus.
§§§
According to information available to the Lithuanian Jewish Community, Israeli prime minister Binyamin (Benjamin) Netanyahu’s grandmother was Sara Lurie who was born in Šeduva, Lithuania, in 1885. She married Natan (Nathan) Mileikowsky, son of Zvi, from Kreva, within the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. Mileikowsky was highly educated, spent 8 years at the Volozhin yeshiva, and became a rabbi, teacher, writer and Zionist political activist. The had a son Benzion Mileikowsky (later Benzion Netanyahu) in 1910 and father Natan moved the family to Mandate Palestine in 1920, where the family name was changed from Mileikowsky to Netanyahu, the Hebrew version of the name which Natan used in some of his writings. While Natan studied and wrote on religious themes, his son Benzion was of a more secular bent, although he did important work on classics of Judaism, and joined the Revisionist Zionism branch, becoming secretary to Revisionist founder and leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
n 1940, Beznion Netanyahu went to New York to be secretary to Jabotinsky, who was seeking to build American support for his militant New Zionists. Jabotinsky died the same year, and Netanyahu became executive director of the New Zionist Organization of America, the political rival of the more moderate Zionist Organization of America. He held the post until 1948.
As executive director, Benzion Netanyahu was one of the Revisionist movement’s leaders in the United States during World War II. At the same time, he pursued his PhD at Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia (now the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania), writing his dissertation on Isaac Abrabanel (1437–1508), the Jewish scholar and statesman who opposed the expulsion of Jews from Spain.
Binyamin (Benjamin) Netanyahu was born in 1949 in Tel Aviv, Israel. He claims descent from the Vilna Gaon, a claim which is borne out by research. Netanyahu has multiple degrees from a number of prestigious universities in the United States and served as prime minister of Israel from 1996 to 1999 and from 2009 to the present as a member of and leader of the Likud Party following the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.
