Keeper of memories
'The Holocaust cannot be compared to anything. Anything,' declares Rabbi Israel Meir Lau. Clad in the Orthodox Jew's trademark black suit, hat and luxuriant beard, he directs a penetrating gaze at me to emphasise the point.
We are sitting in a well-appointed hotel room; Wan Chai buzzes outside. Both are a world away from the Polish shtetl village where the rabbi was born, in 1937, into a Jewish world that literally went up in smoke during the second world war.
Lau and one brother survived the Buchenwald concentration camp. A half-brother escaped to British Palestine. The rest of Lau's family - including his father, 37th in a continuous rabbinical lineage - perished in various Nazi death camps.
Lau escaped to the nascent state of Israel in 1945, studied the Hebrew Bible and its commentaries for years, and became the 38th rabbi in his line. Rising through official religious posts in Israel, he became chief rabbi of Tel Aviv and then, from 1993 to 2003, chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel. Besides clarifying aspects of ethics and conduct for religiously observant Jews, Israel's chief rabbis comfort victims of violence and represent the Jewish state's religious establishment to the outside world.
Lau is again chief rabbi of Tel Aviv. He has also become chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial and museum of the Holocaust, so it could be said he is the nation's rememberer-in-chief.
In Hong Kong for just a day, Lau is opening the Holocaust and Tolerance Centre in Shau Kei Wan and attending a ball marking the 65th anniversary of the Hong Kong Jewish Women's Association. At the moment, though, his mind is back in Buchenwald; he was the camp's youngest survivor. Asked what lessons the Holocaust holds for a continent that has seen its share of war, genocide and famine, Lau is at pains to stress the uniqueness of that particular genocide.
'The Holocaust occurred after a decision made by the leadership of a nation. A very cultured nation in the centre of Europe: Germany. A decision was made for a 'final solution' for [the Jewish] nation. This has never happened in history. It wasn't a [natural disaster]. It wasn't a war between two enemies: Japan, America, whatever. There was a decision made at the Wannsee conference, exactly 70 years ago, to liquidate a nation. Why? We were not the enemies of Germany. We never threatened the existence of Germany. We didn't have a state, we didn't have an army, we didn't have weapons. Just the contrary, we served them. Look what Jewish Germans produced for Germany! Professor Albert Einstein - born in Germany, served Germany. And yet he fled. What did he do that was bad? He was Jewish.