Dec. 9
POLAND:
Polish president reunited in Washington with Jew saved from Holocaust
Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski made public for the first time Wednesday
that his family was one of many in World War II Poland that sheltered Jews from
Adolf Hitler's Nazis.
At the start of an official visit to Washington, Komorowski was reunited in a
moving ceremony at the Holocaust Museum with Zeev Baran, who, along with his
mother and a sibling, were hidden by the Komorowskis when the Nazis invaded
Poland in 1939, triggering World War II.
Baran, who moved to Israel after the war, emotionally recalled how his father
had been killed alongside the uncle of Komorowski, whom he referred to as
Bronek, the diminutive of his first name, usually used by close friends and
family.
Komorowski began a two-day visit to the United States with a visit to the
Holocaust Museum, which stands as a memorial to the six million Jews who died
at the hands of the Nazis in World War II.
More than half the Jews who died in the Holocaust were Polish. Many Holocaust
victims were killed in death camps built by the Nazis on Polish soil, including
the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau camp near Krakow.
Komorowski was due later Wednesday to meet with US President Barack Obama amid
a brewing storm over the diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks, which Polish
Prime Minister Donald Tusk said have eroded the trust between Warsaw and
Washington.
(source: Agence France-Presse)
ISRAEL:
Rabbis tell Israeli Jews not to rent to Arabs; even Holocaust museum frowns
The call from hundreds of rabbis on Jews not to rent or sell real estate to
Arabs, a 20 percent minority, has sparked a heated debate over Israel's dual
ideals of Judaism and democracy.
Hundreds of prominent Israeli rabbis have signed a religious opinion calling on
Jews not to rent or sell real estate to Arabs, sparking public uproar and
debate over the essence of Judaism and its place in Israel's democracy.
The statement, supported by many state-employed municipal chief rabbis, insists
there is a Torah ban on land transactions with "foreigners'' in the Land of
Israel. Peppered with biblical citations, it includes a passage warning of a
negative impact on property values from selling to non-Jews. "Their way of life
is different from ours, and our oppressors are among them," the statement says.
The religious opinion reflects a confluence of several related trends: growing
alienation between Jews and the country's one-fifth Arab minority, a shift of
public sentiment toward ultra-nationalist political parties, and growing
radicalization among the leaders of Israel's nationalist religious movement who
challenge the secular foundations of the government.
RELATED: Q&A: Why only 51 percent of Israelis support equal rights for Arab
minority
"These things in the past wouldn't be acceptable in Israeli society,'' says
Yair Ettinger, a reporter for the liberal Haaretz newspaper who covers the
Orthodox religious community. "But now even though it's not politically
correct, people allow themselves to say things in public that you wouldn't even
dare to say in a private synagogue. It's a big change."
Holocaust memorial denounces the letter
Publication of the opinion sparked denunciations from leading Jewish
institutions such as the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial authority and top
functionaries, while philosophers and jurists have taken to the airwaves to
argue that the rabbis were perpetuating discrimination while ignoring many of
more universal concepts in Jewish tradition.
"Their statement shames the Jewish people," said parliament speaker Reuven
Rivlin. "A person cannot say that, in the name of the Jewish state, he is
permitted to discriminate or set up a dividing line between one citizen and
another, or between a citizen and a resident, or even between a citizen and a
guest."
Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein on Thursday launched a legal
assessment to determine whether the letter is criminal, while Yad Vashem
criticized it as a "severe blow" to Jewish values.
"We know that the Jewish people, that knew suffering and persecution and
experienced ostracism and the revocation of basic rights, has expressed its
stance on matters such as these with voices different than those we have heard
today with this [ruling]," said Yad Vashem, also on Thursday.
How the letter began
The move to discourage transactions with Arabs began in October in the northern
Israel city of Tzfat, where the chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, called on
residents not to rent apartments to Arab students enrolled at a college in the
city. That call was formalized into a religious ruling distributed among
clerics in public positions.
Rabbinic signatories to the letter insisted that the legal opinion does not
promote discrimination, but rather aims to protect Jews' hold on cities and the
country from non-Jewish encroachment. They argued that in a case of a clash
between the religious law and secular laws of the state, the former should
prevail.
"I have a vision that there will be a Jewish state. There can be non-Jews and
we need to treat them nicely, but we need to maintain a big Jewish majority,''
says Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a signatory who rejects allegations of racism. "We
don't need to strengthen their hold on the land. It's not a secret that they
want to annex our state. Just like America is for the Americans, England is for
the English, I want the Jewish state to be for the Jews.''
Rabbi Yuval Sherlow, the head of a religious seminary, criticizes the letter,
saying it reflects a drive to challenge Israel's secular democratic principles
while emphasizing the religious character of the state. "One of the ways to do
that is to isolate non-Jews.''
Only a limited number of prominent rabbis have come out against the letter.
Mining Jewish tradition
The theological debate is rooted in the vast canon of texts and rabbinic
commentary that can be employed in support of both universalist and
chauvinistic values, says Yossi Klein Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman
Institute in Jerusalem, which promotes pluralistic Jewish thought in Israel.
"The job for Jewish spiritual leaders in Israel," he says, "is to mine Jewish
tradition and find a stream of thought that will substantiate a modern Israeli
Judaism that is worthy of a people with sovereignty and power rather than a
helpless ghettoized people sustaining itself on fantasies of revenge against
the Gentiles.''
(source: Christian Science Monitor)
Dec. 8
USA----CALIFORNIA:
"Jewish Witness to a European Century" An Exhibit Out of Time; Rediscovering
Poland's lost Jewish civilization at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center
The emotional force of the "Jewish Witness to a European Century" exhibit at
the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center through mid-December, does not hit you
all at once. Instead, the 30, six-foot-tall panels featuring images and
corresponding text about the lives and deaths of Poland's 20th century Jews,
crackles across the years like the telephonic voice of long-lost cousins
calling to let you know they had survived the camps.
The exhibit is organized and funded by Centropa.org, a Vienna- and
Budapest-based nonprofit and created to preserve the memories of annihilated
Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe. Over the last decade,
Centropa.org has interviewed, transcribed and translated the remembrances of
more than 1,250 elderly Eastern European Jews who survived and sometimes even
flourished in what was at once the most bitter and most consequential centuries
in the five-millennium history of the Jewish people.
Considering that the youngest of Holocaust survivors are now in their
mid-seventies, Centropa cannot be called "a work in progress." In the case of
Centropa.org's work on the Polish Holocaust, however, the race against time can
be considered a success, with sufficient material "in the can," to enable
future researchers to gain direct knowledge of places like Kovel, Vladikavskaz,
Bashkiria, Golovchin and hundreds of other of Eastern Europe's lost Jewish
communities the memory of which would, without Centropa, exist only in fading
memories.
In the case of so many of Eastern Europe's Jewish villages, neighborhoods and
towns, something as equally debilitating as the march of time has prevented a
flesh and blood understanding of the last 10 centuries of civilization and
culture that marked the Jewish habitation in Eastern Europe.
Of these nations within nations, Poland was the largest and richest and, thus
the most thoroughly and tragically destroyed. Polish Jews accounted for half of
the Holocaust's six-million dead, and in four years, the Jewish population of
Poland was reduced from 3.5 million to a half million, with communist pogroms
and officially encouraged emigration leaving something like a miniscule 20,000
Jews remaining in Poland today.
So heinous was the destruction that it is responsible for something like a dark
curtain that descended between Poland's murdered Jews on one side and history's
concerned onlookers on the other. It can be argued that that such a chasm was
necessary if only to shield we-the-living from a crime so monstrous that for
many years it could only be whispered about as if the victims were somehow
duplicitous in their own destruction. Only decades later was the event granted
a universal identifier as "The Holocaust" or "Shoa."
"Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument," Auschwitz survivor
Primo Levi wrote in his 1986 work, "The Drowned and the Saved." Levi, a
fastidious chronicler who finally could not transcend his own injury and
committed suicide in1987, recognized both the import and difficulty of
remembrance. He noted that "the further events fade into the past, the more the
construction of convenient truth grows and is perfected." The "convenient
truth," in this case, was the monstrous lie in the face of an act so
unbelievable that denial became a cynical possibility.
Here is where Centropa's "Jewish Witness" exhibit became a critical tool of
remembrance. By addressing the entire span of 20th century's Eastern European
Jewish civilization, rather than confronting numbers or abstractions, we are
enabled to view normal, everyday lives. Rather than numbers or mere
abstractions, they instead become the friends and cousins who look, sound, feel
and suffer as we would. We do see the grainy, secretly shot photos of refugees
being forced from their homes in a Polish-Jewish village, residents lined up,
pathetically hopeful as they carry their luggage to the train to the Warsaw
Ghetto and, as we know and they could not, on to extermination. We also see
beyond the Holocaust, however, to other happier life categories including
"People," "Places," "Leisure Activities," and even, "Military."
In the latter category, we are transported back to the beginning of the 20th
century represented by a touching 1915 photo of wounded Jewish soldiers of the
Austro-Hungarian Army, enjoying a Passover Seder in the suburban Cracow home of
a Jewish merchant. Hung behind the host is a photo of Emperor Franz Ferdinand,
a testimony to just how integrated into public affairs and culture Eastern
European Jews were. Stretching through the early decades of the 20th Century
are touchstones like the 1928 snapshot of Julian Gringras and his non-Jewish
classmates posing in gym clothes in a high school in Kielce Poland. There are
other haunting photographs, for example, the one taken in 1938 by Jerzy
Pikielny at a beach resort on the North Sea, near the city of Danzig, the city
that, the following summer, would be used by the Nazis as a pretext to attack
Poland.
The exhibit portrays as well post-war Polish life as it emerged from the ashes.
There is a photo of Tomasz Miedzinski, one of 120 orphans in a boarding school
in Wroclaw, Poland in 1947. In the text, Tomasz does a little youthful bragging
about his interrupted education; "we enrolled in Polish schools, completed
grammar school in one year, and high school the next.
In the end, it is the very sense of the ordinary that transfixes the exhibit
with so much of its pathos. In the "Jewish Witnesses" exhibit, we are able to
meet people who are members of our own extended family; the Weinryb's of
Zamosc, the Gringras of Kielce, the Fiszgrund's of Warsaw and so many others.
We see Michal Friedman, in his Polish Army uniform, proud and victorious in the
year of victory, 1945, along with other Jews who fought to defeat Nazism.
Finally, what can be said about the "Jewish Witness to a European Century"
exhibit is that it reaches across one of history's yawning chasms to show
finally that we are them and they are us.
In January 2011, the Centropa Polish Exhibition will open in Congregation Beit
Tfiloh in Baltimore and in May, move to the Barrack Day School in Philadelphia.
(source: San Rafael Patch)
*******************
USA----NEW JERSEY:
As survivors age, preservation grows more vital to Holocaust center at Stockton
The faded fabric Star of David carries a story of hatred, genocide and
survival.
Hanna Ehrlich, 86, of Margate, saved the star for decades, a reminder of her
life in a concentration camp during World War II. She had donated it and other
items to the National Holocaust Museum in Washington so that they could be
preserved for history, but then decided instead to give them to the Sara and
Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center at Richard Stockton College; they will
become part of the legacy of southern New Jersey's Holocaust survivors.
"I said to my son, 'We have something here. Why send them to Washington?'"
Ehrlich said Tuesday at a Hanukkah luncheon for Holocaust survivors at Jewish
Family Services in Margate. "It was a miracle they were saved."
Gail Rosenthal, director of the center, said the items will be displayed so
that students and teachers can see them and incorporate them into classroom
lessons.
"We are honored to receive them," Rosenthal said of the items, which also
include Ehrlich's card identifying her as "Jude" or Jewish. "Not many of these
were saved. Many were burned."
Established in 1987 by then-Stockton President Vera King Farris, the Holocaust
Resource Center opened in October 1990 as a joint project with the Jewish
Federation of Atlantic and Cape May counties. Its historical focus is the
Holocaust, but its lessons include the timeless topics of tolerance, genocide,
courage, resilience and survival, sometimes seen through the eyes of local
survivors.
But those survivors are aging, and their numbers are dwindling. While education
is its primary mission, the center has also made it a priority to preserve the
stories of local survivors so they can continue to teach and inspire. Staff
will host an open house from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday so teachers and the
community can learn how to bring the lessons of the Holocaust to a new
generation.
A $1 million expansion and renovation completed in 2009 has provided the center
with more room for exhibits. Photos and biographies of 28 now deceased
Holocaust survivors look down from the walls of the new classroom. Last week
Donald Berkman shared his story with a group of high school students from Cape
May County, his life projected as a timeline on the white board.
"Their resilience and strength really make them role models, especially today,
when so many families are losing their jobs and homes," Rosenthal said.
Paul Winkler, executive director of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust
Education, said Stockton's center is one of the most active of the 16 such
centers in the state. For the 2009-10 school year, the Stockton center ran 86
programs reaching more than 4,000 students and 1,600 educators. The primary
goal of the center is to help teachers meet the state Department of Education
requirement that children learn about the Holocaust and genocide.
As schools grapple with financial cutbacks and fewer teachers come to
workshops, Winkler said the commission is looking for new ways to reach out
through books, videos, open houses and trips to schools.
Leo Schoffer, whose family donated $500,000 to the center, now named for his
parents, said he is impressed by how many students will take at least one
course about the Holocaust as a result of exposure to the center. He said
including the stories of local survivors creates a bond between the college and
the community.
"Look at the books that have been written by survivors," he said. "It is very
special for the college to do this."
Phillip Goldfarb, 89, of Egg Harbor Township, said he did not plan to write a
memoir, but is now glad he did. He said with a little laugh that it serves as a
reminder to him sometimes of the people and events in his past.
"I don't even remember everything now," he said.
Stockton professor Maryann McLoughlin, who has helped write 33 memoirs, is
currently working on eight more and has another half-dozen planned. She said
the books are personal, and include the time before, during and after the
Holocaust.
"I always start with their families, to show they are not just victims, and
that they survived and were successful despite the odds," she said. Some were
just children or teenagers during the war, and their stories often resonate
with modern students, some of whom may be immigrants themselves adjusting to a
new life.
No one knows exactly how many survivors live in southern New Jersey. A book,
"Portraits of Resilience," published by the center tells the stories of 83
survivors, but Rosenthal knows there are more who prefer to remain anonymous.
"More are telling their stories now that they are older," she said. "Or they
are telling their grandchildren and great-grandchildren and they call us. They
didn't tell their own children because they wanted to protect them. But now the
windows of opportunity are closing. In five years, I don't know how many more
will be able to come in to talk."
Rosenthal is acutely aware of the sensitivity of the topic. She will never ask
a survivor to speak to more than one group a day, and she tries not to call on
them too often.
"Every time it is like opening a wound," she said. "Some will go home and have
nightmares."
But Rosenthal and the survivors have seen the impact their stories can have.
Amelia Martinez, 21, came to the U.S. from Cuba when she was 9. She remembers
Holocaust survivors visiting her school in Miami. Now she is a senior at
Stockton, majoring in biology, minoring in Jewish Studies, and doing an
internship at the Holocaust Center.
"There was a strong program in the schools in Miami and survivors would come,
even in middle school," Martinez said. "Our generation is the last that will
have this chance. We will be the last to meet with them and hear them
personally."
Survivors said talking about their experiences can be difficult, but is
necessary.
"Maybe I survived to tell the story," Ehrlich said. She was able to save some
photos from her life before the war, and they remind her she did have a good
life and a loving family before the war.
Survivor Rosalie Simon, 79, of Margate, said the response of students is so
rewarding it makes up for any sadness she may feel. She remembers a student who
wrote her, saying that her grandmother had always told her that the Holocaust
did not happen, but after Simon's visit she realized it did.
"I'm one of the youngest survivors now," Simon said. "But it is the students
today who will take the message of tolerance into the future."
(source: Press of Atlantic City)
**************************
USA----NEW YORK:
Holocaust Memorial Proposed for New RochelleThe sculpture could be placed in a
city park.
A proposal to erect a Holocaust Memorial sculpture in a city park was embraced
by the New Rochelle City Council.
New Rochelle resident Michael Brown came to the council meeting Tuesday with a
scaled down model of a sculpture done by his mother, Anita Vogler Brown, also
of New Rochelle.
"Growing up in New Rochelle, there were a lot of Holocaust survivors," Michael
Brown said. "Many of them contributed to the city during its largest growth
period."
He said the survivors are aging and many of them are now gone, adding even
their children are dying. His idea was to place the memorial in a city park.
"My one goal is to get this done before there are no witnesses," Brown said.
Haina Just-Michael, of New Rochelle, said people to whom she has spoken don't
want a memorial just specifically about the Jews.
"It's more for an educational remembrance of what had happened," she said.
Many on the council felt the memorial should be in a place that is highly
visible and heavily trafficked.
Councilwoman Roxie Stowe agreed.
"It should be downtown so everyone could see it," she said.
"This is a learning thing," said Councilwoman Marianne Sussman. "It should be
in a more central location."
Mayor Noam Bramson said he was a little uncomfortable with the notion of
memorializing the Holocaust. He said the idea of doing so should be done with
sensitivity.
"I think whatever discomfort I feel would be resolved if this were offered as a
tribute to the survivors," he said.
Brown said that unfortunately the survivors are aging and dying.
He mentioned a woman with a tatooed number on her wrist he had seen at a store.
"I don't know her name," Brown said.
"I have no problem if it's going to be dedicated to the survivors," he said.
"But there needs to be a component dedicated to those who didn't survive."
Bramson said the memorial would have to be approved by the Municipal Arts
Commission, which oversees public art projects within the city.
He said they could choose to have a competition to select the sculpture for the
memorial.
(source: New Rochelle Patch)
INDIA/GERMANY:
Hindus laud Germany for doubling aid to Holocaust survivors
Hindus have applauded German government for reportedly agreeing to double the
funding for home care of Holocaust survivors, raising it to about $147 million
annually.
Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA) today, said that "it
was the right thing to do". Hopefully it would cover the rising cost of home
care for these victims who were elderly and really needed to be looked after.
This fund is reportedly distributed among Holocaust survivors scattered around
32 countries through a New York (USA) based organization and goes into home
nursing-eating-dressing-bathing-etc. of the Holocaust affected.
Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, however, urged Germany
and its Chancellor Angela Merkel to show more tolerance to "outsiders". Instead
of blaming multiculturalism as a failure, Merkel and other German leaders
should make more efforts to create a society where all Germans could learn to
live together in peace and mutual trust despite seriously different traditions,
beliefs and backgrounds.
In a speech in Potsdam (Germany) on October 16, Merkel reportedly said that the
so-called 'multikulti' concept, where people would 'live side-by-side' happily,
utterly failed; and anybody not speaking German was not welcome. Horst
Seehofer, Prime Minister of Bavaria, Germany's largest and oldest state, was
quoted as saying in the recent past that 'multikulti' was dead and there was no
room in Germany for more people from alien cultures. Various other German
politicians have also expressed strong anti-immigrant feelings recently.
Rajan Zed further said that Merkel and others should show more maturity and
responsibility when talking about "others" who were simply different, and not
give in to unnecessary hysteria. It was simply irresponsible to stigmatize an
entire ethnic community. Germany needed to stay away from the racist sentiment
and chauvinism and check the facts on immigration more closely. "Others" living
in Germany were also human beings and should have the same rights as any
German.
Zed quoted "Leviticus 19:33-34": "When an alien resides with you in your land,
you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you
as the citizen among you. You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were
aliens in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God."
Rajan Zed argued that Germany; the country of Beethoven, Martin Luther,
Einstein, and Goethe; needed to learn to be more inclusive, seek a unity that
celebrated diversity, and create a national dialogue based upon mutual trust
and understanding. According to reports, about 30 percent of Germans aged five
years and younger have at least one parent who was born abroad and about 20
percent of its population had immigrant roots. Christian Wulff is German
President.
Holocaust (Sho'ah) refers to systematic destruction of European Jewry between
1933-45. Exact numbers are hard to be calculated but estimated losses are given
around six million.(ANI)
(source: Asian News International/DailyIndia.com)
Dec. 6
GERMANY:
Germany doubles survivors' aid
Committee handling Holocaust survivors' claims says Germany dealing with
past in model fashion
The committee handling Holocaust survivors' claims reached an agreement
Monday with the German government to double the assistance granted to
survivors for the year 2011. The funds for the year will total €110
million (some $145 million), and are intended to finance essential welfare
services to Jewish Holocaust survivors around the world.
This is the highest figure the committee has so far succeeded in
negotiating in the framework of its talks with Germany, and will go
towards home nursing and the purchase of food and medicine and other
essentials. This figure is double the sum allocated by Germany for this
purpose for 2010.
The German aid is intended to answer urgent needs among Holocaust
survivors who are growing old, requiring increased services, and comes as
sources of funding from unclaimed Jewish assets grow thin.
The head of the committee's negotiating team, Stewart Eisenstadt, welcomed
the agreement, saying he promised that survivors needing treatment and
assistance will have no cause to fear they have been forgotten. Germany is
dealing with its past in an exemplary fashion, he added, and its
government is proving its commitment to easing the suffering of survivors.
The committee represents Jews throughout the world in negotiating for
compensation and the reinstatement of property to the victims of the Nazis
and their heirs. The committee manages the compensation funds, handles
unclaimed assets, allocates grants to organizations providing welfare
services to Holocaust survivors, and preserves the memory of the
Holocaust.
In April the Welfare Ministry approved an arrangement which granted
survivors living in Israel a discount of 90% on medication purchases at
pharmacies. The arrangement, which came after many bureaucratic and
political hurdles, offers those above the age of 75 (more than 80%) up to
NIS 100 for medication required on a regular basis. The younger survivors
have to pay up to NIS 125. The arrangement is expected to cost some NIS 50
million ($14 million).
(source: YNet News)
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