Gabriel Wilensky (born April 23, 1964) is an American author, software developer and entrepreneur. He was born in
Uruguay, where his Eastern-European grandparents had emigrated to before the
Second World War. He is the author of the book
Six Million Crucifixions (2010), which traces the history of
antisemitism in Christianity and the role it played in the
Holocaust.
Research and writing Six Million Crucifixions
Wilensky spent years of research into the question of why the
Holocaust happened. He used his technical background for a methodical study of the question and then wrote
Six Million Crucifixions: How Christian Teachings About Jews Paved the Road to the Holocaust, published in 2010.
Six Million Crucifixions provides an account of the almost two-thousand-year-old
Christian teaching of contempt for
Jews, and argues that it was this relentless animosity and even hatred toward Jews and
Judaism in predominantly Christian lands that laid the foundation on which racial
antisemitism stood, and which eventually led to the
Holocaust. As Holocaust scholar
John K. Roth argued in the foreword of the book, “Absent Christianity, no Holocaust would have taken place.”
[6]
The book provides an account of how antisemitism developed from the very early days of the
Christian movement into full-blown hatred by the time of the
Crusades.
Six Million Crucifixions shows how
anti-Jewish sentiment stemmed out of
Christian Scriptures and the teachings of the
Church Fathers, until it became second-nature to European Christians. As Dr. Carol Rittner, Distinguished Professor of Holocaust & Genocide Studies at The Richard Stockton College wrote, “Too many of those hate-filled words had their origin in the Christian Scriptures and were uttered by Christian preachers and teachers, by Christians generally, for nearly two millennia.”
[7]
The book also describes the role of both the
Catholic and
Protestant churches in the period leading to and beyond the
Second World War, and sharply criticizes the Catholic Church (in particular), as well as the Protestant churches for their lack of loud and clear objection to the
extermination of the Jews, for the assistance some members of the clergy gave the
Nazisin their persecution of the Jews and the help some members of the
Vatican gave to people who should have been regarded as
war criminals to escape justice after the war. As
Holocaust scholar and Director of the Sigi Ziering Institute
Michael Berenbaum wrote, “Gabriel Wilensky’s
Six Million Crucifixions is a powerful and passionate indictment of the Vatican for acts of omission and acts of commission.”
[7]
Six Million Crucifixions further presents material that he asserts could have been used for a potential indictment of any Christian
clergy who may have been guilty of crimes of incitement and/or persecution against
Jews before, during and after World War II, had the
Allies pursued another international prosecution after the
Nuremberg Trials.
