The child’s notebook, filled with poems, was crumbling with age by the time Eliezer Grynfeld found it in an attic corner reserved for family relics that survived the Holocaust.

The child did not. Abramek Koplowicz, a blond, blue-eyed boy, was killed in an Auschwitz gas chamber in 1943 at the age of 14.

Sixty-five years later, Mr. Grynfeld found an unlikely place to publish his younger brother’s writings: An Israeli website, written in Farsi, aimed at convincing the people of Iran of the Holocaust’s historical truth.

As Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vows to press ahead with his country’s nuclear program, continues to call for an end to Israel’s existence and is accused by the West of girding for war, the new website designed by Israel’s Holocaust museum is an attempt to sway Iranian public opinion in the face of a growing nuclear threat.

“Ahmadinejad is using Holocaust denial as a concrete tool to pave the way for nuclear strikes,” said Avner Shalev, director of Yad Vashem, a sprawling, tree-lined memorial on the edge of Jerusalem dedicated to the six million Jews slaughtered by Nazis.

A conference organized by Mr. Ahmadinejad in Tehran in December that drew some of the world’s most notorious Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis raised alarm across Israel.

“I’m afraid he is building up a wave of hatred and this is one of the only ways I can think of breaking it down,” Mr. Shalev said.

Source: The Globe and Mail