Israeli Education Minister Rafi Peretz has distanced himself from his remarks during a cabinet meeting that compared the rate of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews in the U.S. to a “second Holocaust.”
In a letter to Isaac Hertzog, the chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the 63-year-old Peretz said he wished to convey regret about the comment to Jewish communities around the world, Axios reports.
Peretz, a former chief rabbi in the Israeli army, is the leader of a conservative-religious political bloc called United Right, which includes the Jewish supremacist Jewish Power party. The initial remarks came during a July 1 cabinet meeting where he said the matter of the intermarriage among U.S. Jews and non-Jews was akin to “a second Holocaust.” He also said that over the past 70 years, the Jewish community “lost 6 million people” because of intermarriage.
The letter was in response to a request from Hertzog to clarify his comments.
“Out of great anxiety to the fate of the Jewish people I used the word Holocaust — a term which was meant to describe the depth of my pain and might have been inappropriate. I had no intention to offend any Jew in the diaspora. I want to stress that I respect the entire Jewish people in Israel and in the diaspora,” the letter reads.
