Israel donates Anne Frank diaries to Tokyo
Israeli embassy in Japan offers donation after hundreds of copies of diary written by Jewish girl during Holocaust were damaged in public libraries.
News of the defacement of the books, which tells the tale of a young Jewish girl who fell victim to the Holocaust, sent shockwaves worldwide and sparked alarm amid a rightward shift in Japan's politics.
The embassy and the Jewish community of Japan were to present the copies on Thursday to the capital's residential ward of Suginami, whose libraries were a main target of the vandalism, embassy officials said.
"We have offered the donation that can make up for the copies damaged," the embassy said in a statement.
"Her diary is useful to deepen understanding of humanitarian views concerning the Holocaust and related incidents," it said. "We believe that the people who took the hideous action will be brought to justice."
Local media said pages in at least 308 copies of the diary, or in publications containing biographies of Anne Frank, Nazi persecution of Jews and related material had been torn.
A total of 121 books were damaged at 11 of 13 public libraries in Suginami, a library official said.
'Warm offer'
"It was sad to see the books torn," said Toshihiro Obayashi, deputy director of the central library in the Suginami area.
"But we are pleased to receive a warm offer that encourages us," Obayashi told AFP.
The diary, written by a Jewish girl who lived in Amsterdam during the time of the Holocaust, was added to the UN Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization's Memory of the World Register in 2009.
Anne Frank, a German Jew born in Frankfurt in 1929, documented her family's experiences hiding in concealed rooms during the German occupation of the Netherlands where they settled in 1933.
They were caught and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Anne and her sister died of typhus in 1945.
The vandalism spree comes amid criticism of a rightwards shift in Japanese politics under nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, with a recent volley of provocative comments about Japan's wartime past that have sparked accusations of revisionism by China and South Korea.
Largely homogenous Japan does not have a very big Jewish community, with the vast majority of people believing in an admixture of imported Buddhism and indigenous Shintoism.
In 1995, a Japanese physician was censured by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Israeli embassy for writing in a domestic monthly magazine that the gas chambers Nazis used to exterminate Jews in concentration camps did not exist.
The publisher of the magazine "Marco Polo" discontinued its publication and fired its editor.
