A member of the D.C. Council who claimed a prominent Jewish family controls the weather visited the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, but left the tour early, according to a report.
D.C. Councilman Trayon White Sr., a Democrat who represents Ward 8, toured the museum with Rabbi Batya Glazer of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington. The tour was supposed to last 90 minutes, but White left halfway through, according to the Washington Post.
White pushed the conspiracy theory that the Rothchilds, a wealthy Jewish family that has been the target of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, made it snow in Washington in March. He later apologized for his comments, and has since attended a Passover Seder, as well as a breakfast with local Jewish leaders.
During the tour Wednesday, White looked at an image showing a woman surrounded by Nazi stormtroopers and wearing a sign around her neck that said, “I am a German girl and allowed myself to be defiled by a Jew.”
White then asked whether they were “protecting her?”
Lynn Williams, who oversees the Holocaust Museum’s programs for professionals and student leaders, said the Nazis were “marching her through.” White replied that “marching through is protecting.”
“I think they’re humiliating her,” Williams said.
White later disappeared after his group stopped before photos of Catholic clergy in Poland being executed by firing squad by German troops. Glazer texted White to ask where he was, and White told her he had to depart for an event.
Glazer later said White was “very sincere in wanting to come here,” but found his departure “confusing.”
The Washington Post later found White alone on the sidewalk outside the Holocaust Museum.
“I’ll be coming back to see more of the museum,” he told the Washington Post. “I didn’t get a chance to see the whole thing. But I think it’s a lot of education here, a lot of synergy here between what happened to the Jewish community and the African community.”
When the Post inquired as to why White left the tour early, he raised his cellphone to his ear.
Several members of the council member’s staff remained with the guide through the tour. When the guide showed them an exhibit on the Warsaw Ghetto, one of the aides asked if the walled-in ghetto was akin to “a gated community.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t call it a gated community,” Glazer, the rabbi, said. “More like a prison.”
