The Voice of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants
VOLUME 19 NUMBER 3
JULY 2005
Special to Together
SURVIVORS MARK 60th ANNIVERSARY OF
BERGEN-BELSEN LIBERATION
BERGEN-BELSEN, GERMANY - From all over
the world, 500 survivors of the Nazi concentration
camp Bergen-Belsen gathered there with their
children and grandchildren to mark the 60th
anniversary of the camp’s liberation. The moving
ceremony, complete with British Honor Guard,
commemorated the day British soldiers arrived at
the disease-ridden camp in northern Germany.
Upon their arrival, troops found thousands of
unburied dead bodies in piles, and tens of thousands
of starving captive Jews and other inmates. Some
70,000 people perished at the notorious camp,
including diarist Anne Frank. The occasion also
marked the laying of a cornerstone for a new
memorial museum at the site, that will depict the
Holocaust years as well as the return to life of the
survivors at the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons
Camp, established in nearby German Army
barracks after the liberation.
Over the course of the three-day commemorative
program, survivors visited the site of the concentration
camp, where recent excavations have uncovered remnants
of the camp’s structures, which were torched by the
British a month after liberation in order to stem the tide
of the infectious diseases. Shabbat services were held at
the newly rebuilt synagogue and community center,
which hosted a reception for all participants. On Saturday
evening, a moving concert, featuring choral and classical
music by Jewish composers, was performed by choral
ensembles and the NDR Philharmonic Orchestra.
The commemoration itself was held at the site of
the mass graves and the international Obelisk monument
on April 17.
Young students in the choir of the Carolinum
Gymnasium Osnabrück secondary school, directed by
Professor Andor Izsák, welcomed the survivors by singing
Psalms, and provided musical interludes throughout the
ceremony.
Christian Wulff, Prime Minister of Lower Saxony,
spoke from the heart as he officially began the ceremony,
which included speeches from a host of international
and local luminaries. Presentations were made by
Simone Weil of France, former president of the European
Parliament and a Holocaust survivor; Paul Spiegel, head
of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and Sam
Bloch, president of the World Federation of BergenBelsen Associations and the youngest member of the Jewish
Committee that organized and ran the Displaced Person Camp
American Gathering of
Jewish Holocaust Survivors
122 West 30th Street, Suite 205
New York, New York 10001
Scroll of Remembrance placed in Time Capsule
Written by Sam Bloch and Jeanne Bloch-Rosensaft
after the liberation. Also speaking was
Maria Gniatczyk, spokesperson for
Holocaust survivors from Poland. Psalms
were read by Catholic, Protestant and
Jewish clergy.
Participants laid wreaths at the inscribed
international memorial wall and then proceeded
to the Jewish monument, which was erected
by the Jewish survivors on the first anniversary
of their liberation. There, more wreaths were
laid and Chief Cantor Moshe Kraus of Ottawa,
Canada, sang El Maley Rachamim. Menachem
Rosensaft, founding chairman of the
International Network of Children of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors, a Jewish activist and son
of Josef Rosensaft, chairman of the Central
Committee of Liberated Jews in the British
Zone of Germany and of the Jewish Committee
in the DP camp, addressed the group; Kaddish
was recited by Rabbi Reuwen Unger of Hanover.
The morning’s ceremonies were capped by the
laying of the future museum’s foundation stone,
enclosing a time capsule with messages of
remembrance and hope from the survivors; addresses
were given by Minister Bernd Busemann, Chairman
of the Board of Trustees, Lower Saxony Memorials
Trust and Lower Saxony Minister of Education;
Wilfred Wiedemann, Director General of the BergenBelsen Memorial Foundation; Yoheved Ritz, Second
Generation and a leader of the Irgun She’rit Hapleta
Bergen-Belsen, Tel Aviv, and Professor Henry
Friedlander, Chairman of the International Expert
Commission, Washington, D.C.
Busemann said the new museum is intended to
store and preserve memories. The collection of
artifacts exhibited and film and text documentation
will form the stories that will be told to future
generations. The museum is being built at a time
when fewer and fewer survivors will be able to raise
their voices themselves, and he noted that survivors
and their associations have been extremely
supportive.
Architects Engel and Zimmermann from KSP
– Engel und Zimmermann – won first prize for the
building’s design in an international competition
of more than 150 architects.
cont’d on page 5
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TOGETHER 1
DAYS OF REMEMBRANCE 2005
CAPITOL ROTUNDA
Remarks by Benjamin Meed
At my age, I have walked many miles and seen
many things. But, as I look around this room, the
symbolic center of our great nation, and see the young
soldiers carrying the flags of the fighting units that
liberated the Nazi Death Camps, what I see makes
me deeply proud to be an American.
Miss Eisenhower, your grandfather personally
toured the death camps, so that he could testify to
sights of horror and cruelty that defied description.
But with the arrival of General Eisenhower’s
troops and troops marching under Allied Flags, we
survivors, too, saw something beyond description.
Something we had not known for many years,
something that we never thought to see again. We saw humanity. We saw
compassion. We saw hope…
“How can we express what your arrival meant to those awaiting death in the
camps.” How can we thank you, and especially your comrades who perished
along the way?
You, the liberators, not only saved our lives, but you treated us like people,
restoring our dignity. You offered us food, medicine, shelter, warmth, and kindness,
even in the midst of fighting this terrible war.
We are grateful to you, to the armed services, to this great land which gave
us a new home, and the opportunity and freedom to build a new life for ourselves,
for our children and our children’s children.
And today our thoughts turn also to the State of Israel, and we hope, now 60
years after our liberation, that a lasting peace for our people will be achieved.
Today we all say, Zachor! Remember!
Remember the millions who perished.
Remember their lives, their suffering, their resistance until the end.
Remember the soldiers, the righteous ones who gave their lives fighting to
return freedom and humanity to a dehumanized world.
May history long remember what we endured, and may the world learn that
it can never allow it to happen again.
Zachor! Remember!
DAYS OF REMEMBRANCE IN THE
NATION’S CAPITOL
WASHINGTON, DC – From May 1 through May 8, the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum led the nation in week-long observances in memory of the six
million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the millions of others who perished
under Nazi tyranny. This year’s national ceremony took place in the U.S. Capitol
Rotunda and commemorated the 60th Anniversary of the liberation of Nazi
concentration camps by Allied and Soviet forces. First Lady Laura Bush delivered
the keynote address. Her father, Harold B. Welch, was a World War II veteran
and served with the 555th Anti-Aircraft Automatic Weapons Battalion that was
attached to the 104th Infantry Division, liberators of the Dora-Mittelbau
concentration camp.
“Exactly sixty years ago this week, General Eisenhower’s soldiers were entering
the Nazi concentration camps, confronting what no one should ever have to
witness, let alone endure,” said Fred S. Zeidman, chairman of the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Council. “General Eisenhower and his brave men understood their
duty to be witnesses. We must understand ours. Our challenge is to be worthy
heirs to their actions. Today, we honor the memory of those who perished at the
hands of the Nazis and their collaborators, and the liberating soldiers who fought
this singular evil.”
The annual national commemoration in the Capitol recognized the American
troops who liberated the Nazi concentration camps with a procession of flags from
each liberating unit. Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of Gen. Eisenhower, and
Benjamin Meed, a Holocaust survivor, led the procession. To mark the anniversary,
this year’s program featured liberators along with survivors and members of Congress
in the traditional candle lighting ceremony. The candle lighters were:
· Senator and World War II veteran John Warner, Jack Tramiel and Betty Tott,
widow of liberator Vernon Tott. Mr. Tott, who recently passed away, liberated
Mr. Tramiel. In 2004, Mr. Tramiel had Mr. Tott’s name inscribed in the Museum’s
Donor Wall.
· Representative Jane Harman, Fritzie Fritzshall, and Manfred Steinfeld. Ms.
Fritzshall is an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor and Museum volunteer who regularly
speaks to audiences about her experiences. Mr. Steinfeld fled Germany in 1938
and returned to Europe as a U.S. soldier. He arrested a deputy commander of
Ravensbrueck who was subsequently tried and sentenced to death.
TOGETHER 2
TOGETHER
VOLUME 19 NUMBER 3
JULY 2005
c•o•n•t•e•n•t•s
60th Anniversary of Bergen-Belsen Commemorations................................ 1
Remarks of Benjamin Meed at the Capitol Rotunda..................................2
Days of Remembrance............................................................................2
Address by First Lady Laura Bush............................................................3
Address by Ruth B. Mandel.................................................................... 3
NYC Annual Day of Remembrance......................................................... 4
Bergen-Belsen Commemoration:
The Legacy of Remembrance by Sam Bloch....................... .......................5
Remarks by Christian Wulff....................................................................5
Remarks by Dr. Paul Spiegel................................................................... 5
An Inheritance of Memory by Menachem Z. Rosensaft.............................. 6
Connecting With My Mother by Rabbi Kenneth A. Stern..........................6
Address by Bernd Busemann................................................................... 6
Remarks by Jochi-Olewski......................................................................6
Opinion: Help Needed to Meet the Cost of Home Care by Roman Kent.....7
March of the Living............................................................................... 7
Holocaust Memorial Opens in Berlin.......................................................8
Special Teachers Program Resumes by Vladka Meed...................................9
Holocaust Education Around the Nation................................................11
Commemorations................................................................................13
Claims Conference News......................................................................14
Books.................................................................................................19
In Memoriam......................................................................................20
A Visit to the New Museum at Yad Vashem by Joel Fishman.....................22
Designating the Righteous by Alex Grobman..........................................22
The Piety of Pope John Paul II by Michael Berenbaum.............................23
Never Again. Not Ever! by Jeanette Friedman..........................................23
The Arts.............................................................................................24
Events.................................................................................................25
Searches..............................................................................................26
· Siegfried Halbreich and Dr. Forest Robinson. Mr. Halbreich survived six
concentration camps. A pharmacist before the war, he aided Americans in preparing
Nuremberg cases. Dr. Robinson served with the 104th Infantry Division which
liberated Dora-Mittelbau.
· Representative Nancy Pelosi, William Ungar and Dorothy Pecora. Mr. Ungar
survived the Janovska camp and later escaped another camp aided by two Christian
Poles. Ms. Pecora was an Army nurse who treated prisoners at the Penig labor camp
and Ebensee concentration camp shortly after liberation.
· Representative Mark Kirk, Adrienne Krausz, and Curtis Whiteway. Ms. Krausz,
an Auschwtiz-Birkenau survivor, immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union in
1961. Mr. Whiteway served in the 99th Infantry Division, liberators of Dachau
subcamps.
· Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Gerald Schwab, and Louis A. Cecchini.
Mr. Schwab’s family fled Nazi Germany when he was 15; he later joined the U.S.
Army and saw combat in Italy. Mr. Cecchini’s Combat Team Five of the 89th Division
attached to the 4th Armored Division entered Ohrdruf, the first camp to be liberated
by the Western Allies.
Since opening to the public in April 1993, the Museum has welcomed almost
22 million visitors, including more than 7 million schoolchildren. A public-private
partnership, the Museum is a federal institution whose educational activities and
outreach are made possible through private donations. More than 250,000 individuals,
foundations, and corporations helped build the institution and currently support its
programs and operations. For more information, visit www.ushmm.org.
TOGETHER
The Voice of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants
AMERICAN GATHERING OF JEWISH HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
122 West 30th Street, Suite 205 · New York, New York 10001 · 212 239 4230
President
BENJAMIN MEED
Senior Vice Presidents
SAM E. BLOCH
WILLIAM LOWENBERG
Chairman of the Board
ROMAN KENT
Chairman, Advisory Board
SIGMUND STROCHLITZ
Secretary
LEON STABINSKY
Treasurer
MAX K. LIEBMANN
Editor
JEANETTE FRIEDMAN
Editor Emeritus
ALFRED LIPSON, z”l
Publication Committee
SAM E. BLOCH, Chairman
Hirsh Altusky
Dr. Alex Grobman
Roman Kent
Max K. Liebmann
Vladka Meed
Dr. Romana Strochlitz Primus
Menachem Z. Rosensaft
Dr. Philip Sieradski
PRESERVING THE MEMORY
By First Lady Laura Bush
Four years ago, I accompanied my husband here when he delivered remarks
to observe the Day of Remembrance. My mother was with us that day, and
neither of us knew when we came to this ceremony that the flags of the liberating
units would be brought into the Rotunda. When we saw the Timberwolf on the
104th Infantry Division, we immediately recognized it as the symbol of my
father’s World War II unit. It was moving and it brought back a flood of memories.
I’m honored to be here again today this year to see these
proud flags of liberation.
The men and women of the Allied forces were fighting evil
and cruelty. Six million Jews perished in the Holocaust. They
were stripped of their dignity and robbed of their lives solely
because of who they were and the faith they practiced. It was
not the first time evil men had sought the destruction of the
Jewish people. Even today, we see incidences of antisemitism
around the world. The survivors of the Holocaust bear witness
to the danger of what antisemitism can become, and their stories
of survival remind us that when we are confronted by
antisemitism, we must fight it.
The scope of the horror of the death camps emerged 60
years ago as Allied troops liberated the survivors...The liberators brought freedom.
They also brought dignity. Men and women in the camps had been treated as less
than human. They were given numbers for identification. They were deployed for
slave labor and tossed aside when they could no longer work.
When the liberators came, simple acts gave rise to profound joy. A survivor
named Gerda Weissman Klein recalled her liberation in an interview recorded in
this Museum. An American soldier greeted Gerda and asked, “May I see the other
ladies?” After six years of being addressed with insults and slurs, to be called a lady
was an overwhelming courtesy. The soldier asked her to come with him, and
Gerda said, “He held the door open for me and let me
precede him, and in that gesture restored my humanity.”
...The liberators themselves remember the scenes. They
also became keepers of memories, witnesses to the evil.
Few could comprehend what they saw. Young men, many
in their teens, hardened by years of fighting their way across
Europe...wept for the people they met. One American who
participated in the liberation of Dachau recalled that with
just one look at the survivors, he quotes, “We realized
what this war was all about.” Many of the soldiers returned
home unable to talk about their experiences at the camps.
The emotions were too raw, the images too painful. Words
could not fully convey what happened.
My father’s unit, the 104th Infantry, helped to liberate the camp at
Nordhausen. My father is no longer living, but when I used to ask him about that
time, he couldn’t bear to talk about it. I think in retrospect, he couldn’t bear to
tell his child that there could be such evil in the world.
As survivors and liberators leave us, the work of preserving their memories is
all the more urgent. Staff and volunteers from the United States Holocaust Museum
have conducted thousands of interviews to gather information from eyewitnesses.
The information is available to all who seek it. Over the last 12 years, 22 million
visitors have walked through the museum. Each year, 150,000 teachers receive
training on how to educate children about the Holocaust. The museum has sent
survivors to speak to more than 15,000 members of the armed forces at more
than 40 military installations.
The museum is our national effort to honor the survivors, the liberators, the
victims and the families affected by the Holocaust. It’s fitting that it sits on the
National Mall, near great monuments to democracy. The lessons of tyranny and
liberty that lie at the heart of the Holocaust remind us that
preserving freedom requires constant vigilance…
When President Bush and I visited Auschwitz, I realized
that there are things textbooks can’t teach. They can’t teach
you how to feel when you see prayer shawls or baby shoes left
by children being torn from their mothers, or prison cells
with the scratch marks of attempted escape. But what moved
me the most were the thousands of eyeglasses, their lenses
still smudged with tears and dirt. It struck me how vulnerable
we are as humans, how many needed those glasses to see, and
how many people living around the camps and around the
world refused to see. We see today and we know what
happened and we’ll never forget.
…The voices of the survivors and liberators will one day be silent, but their
testimony will be heard forever.
Thank you, and may God bless you all.
TRIBUTE TO A RESCUER
by Ruth B. Mandel
Vice Chairman, Holocaust Memorial Council
For the Jewish people, light has always been a symbol of
remembrance. Today we continue that tradition as we remember
the victims of the Holocaust.
But today we also recall those rare moments when the darkness
of Europe—a darkness made even blacker by the apathy of the
world—was illuminated by the light of action.
We have acknowledged the actions of our soldiers who brought
freedom to the continent. The liberators.
And we must also acknowledge the actions of those very few
whose courage saved lives, one by one. The rescuers.
Theirs was an ethic not just for their moment in time, but for all time.
Their legacy is an enduring challenge that asks of each of us: What have I done
to stop injustice? What can I do to advance the cause of humanity?
Today I am honored to stand with Molly Pritchard, the granddaughter of
one who answered the challenge. Her grandmother, Marion, was a young woman
in Nazi-occupied Holland, where she helped many Jews and hid one family in
her own home. One day Marion’s dark world changed forever. As a Dutch
policeman was on the verge of discovering the family, Marion killed him in
order to protect them.
After the war, Marion married a lieutenant in the 6th
Armored Division, liberators of Buchenwald.
I am honored to stand with Molly not just for where she
comes from, but for who she is. Fortunately Molly is not trapped
in a darkened world where she must confront life and death
issues each day. But Molly is committed to ensuring that her
own generation learns from her grandmother’s legacy. Recently,
Molly hosted an electronic field trip to the Museum that shared
the story of her grandmother with 16 million other students
across the nation. As long as there are people like Marion
Pritchard, as long as they have grandchildren like Molly, there
will always be light in the world.
THE AMERICAN GATHERING AND
U.S. HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM SEEK SURVIVORS
NAMES FOR REGISTRY
The Survivors Registry maintains the single most comprehensive listing of Holocaust
survivors in the world. The Registry has existed for over a decade, and currently contains over
185,000 names of survivors and their spouses and descendants (including children, their spouses,
and grandchildren).
Visitors to the Registry’s public area at the Holocaust Museum can access basic information
about survivors and their family members via touch-screen computers. This information is
based on registration forms submitted by survivors and their relatives, and includes birthplace
and location before and during the war, as well as maiden or prewar names. The Registry is an
invaluable resource for survivors still searching for family and friends, as well as for historians
and genealogists.
Further information can be found at http://www.ushmm.org/remembrance/registry
We would be grateful—and it would be a great benefit to American Gathering members
as they continue to search for missing relatives—if you could distribute
our registration forms to your members of your families, in case some
of them are not yet listed in the Registry. Registration forms are available
in Hebrew and several additional languages as well as in English.
Contact: Laura M. Green, Collections Manager, Survivors Registry
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
202-488-6164
Please send e-mail addresses to: [email protected]
(l-r) Holocaust survivor Benjamin Meed; Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council Chairman Fred Zeidman.
Molly Pritchard (candle lighting assistant), liberator Curtis Whiteway, Holocaust Survivor Adrienne Krausz,
and Representative Mark Kirk light a candle at the Days of Remembrance observation.
(l-r) U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council Chairman Fred Zeidman, First Lady Laura Bush, and Council ViceChair Ruth Mandel stand during the Presentation of the Colors.
TOGETHER 3
ANNUAL DAY OF REMEMBRANCE
New York City
Participants in the candle lighting
ceremony at the Annual Gathering of
Remembrance sponsored by the Museum
of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to
the Holocaust and the Warsaw Ghetto
Resistance Organization (WAGRO): (l-r)
Eda Baron and her granddaughter, Cecile
Low, Regina Elbirt, and Joanna Perlman.
NEW YORK - New York City’s remembrance of the Holocaust this year
commemorated the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation
of the Nazi concentration camps. The event, held at Hunter College, honored the
survivors and their Allied liberators. It was cosponsored by the American Gathering
of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, WAGRO, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in
downtown Manhattan. More than 2,000 Holocaust survivors, their families, and
others from the greater metropolitan area packed the auditorium, and media
coverage was heavy.
Said Mayor Michael Bloomberg: “It has been 60 years since the end of the
Shoah, and yet the atrocities committed during that period remain a powerful
warning of what can result from the most extreme acts of hatred.” He added,
“There are those who want to rewrite the past. There are those who say it never
existed. That’s why traditions such as this annual gathering of remembrance become
ever more important.”
William Donat, a hidden child, whose father Alexander was one of the first
publishers of Holocaust memoirs and history books in the United States, spoke
compellingly. “Both the liberators and the prisoners were stunned by their initial
meeting,” said Donat, who was born in the Warsaw Ghetto. “The soldiers were
unable to look at the depravity that the inmates had survived.”
“Veterans and survivors share a history,” said Manhattan District Attorney
Robert Morgenthau, a World War II veteran and chairman of New York’s Museum
of Jewish Heritage, which organized the event. “We were eyewitnesses to the
degradation of the human race, but also to the strength of friendship and the
power of faith, of good triumphing over evil,” he said.
As a young congressman, Senator Charles Schumer served a district where
many survivors lived. He said, “There will be a time in the not too distant future
where the last survivor of the Holocaust has passed and goes to the reward in
heaven, and we won’t have these beautiful women to carry candles. It will be up to
the children; it will be up to us.” The senator was referring to the moving candlelighting ceremony, where women survivors dressed in black come to the stage and
light candles for the Six Million Jewish martyrs.
Others who spoke were Sam Bloch, Senior Vice President of the American
Gathering, and Ambassador Aryeh Mekel, Counsel General of Israel.
(l-r) Ann Oster, William Donat, and Rita
Lerner, chairs of the Annual Gathering of
Remembrance.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Robert M.
Morgenthau, and Dr. David G. Marwell,
Director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage
– A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.
Photographs by: Melanie Einzig
JEWISH BIKERS CONVERGE ON DC TO REMEMBER
WASHINGTON, DC - Hundreds of
Jewish Bikers from 14 States and Canada
converged in D.C. on Yom Hashoah.
From Miami to Michigan, Pittsburgh,
Chicago, and Detroit and nine states inbetween, Jewish motorcycle riders, bikers,
from across North America and Canada
met at select cities, some as part of the
Jewish Motorcyclists Alliance, (JMA), a
loosely knit association of the most wellknown and best-organized Jewish
Motorcycle clubs in the United States and
Canada. The organization represents more
than 500 motorcycle enthusiasts, along with independent riders from around the
nation who simultaneously made a thousand-mile pilgrimage for a first-ever
international motorcycle event, the “Ride to Remember.” The event was a
demonstration of solidarity, respect and honor marking the 60th anniversary of
the Holocaust and the liberation.
On the morning of May 6, the bikers all converged at East Coast Harley in
Dumfries, Virginia, about 25 miles outside
of Washington. Then, accompanied by state
troopers and local police, they rode as a group
to the National Holocaust Memorial. The
bikes were parked directly across the street
from the Memorial on the Rugby Field and
the riders were greeted in a ceremony by
Arthur Berger of the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum and others, who were
impressed with the group’s dedication and
show of respect. They were then given a tour
of the museum.
Rabbi Zachary Betesh, a/k/a Rabbi Zig
Zag, the “spiritual leader of King David Bikers,” brought along a recently acquired
surviving Sefer Torah written in Czechoslovakia in 1929. The scroll was lovingly
strapped to the front of the Rabbi’s “mitzvah motorcycle” and was read on “Shabbat
Yom Hashoah” at the Friends of Lubavitch Synagogue on Dupont Circle. Proceeds
from the event were donated to the Holocaust Memorial Museum and to the Friends
of the Israeli Defense Force.
BASKETBALL WIN FOR ISRAEL IS TRIBUTE TO SURVIVORS
MOSCOW (combined services) – As politicians grimly marked the end of World
War II in places like Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Yad Vashem, a different
group of folks representing Israel and the Jewish people was making a point
about rebirth and renewal in a unique and compelling way. Almost as if they
were haunting Europe, Jews in Moscow for a sporting occasion, took the
opportunity to say, “We’re Baaack!” and won a key basketball game in the
Euroleague playoffs. Israeli President Moshe Katzav and his wife were there to
egg them on. Perhaps, too, the team was inspired by the survivors at the poignant
events around them, who were commemorating the 60th anniversary of the
liberation. At the same time the survivors and Jewish leaders gathered in those
haunted places, 13,300 screaming basketball fans, 7,000 of them Hatikvah- singing
TOGETHER 4
Israelis, packed Moscow’s Olympisky Arena to
watch Maccabi Tel Aviv defend its crown. Later
the team won the Euroleague championships in
Spain. A rabbi in Los Angeles wonders what a
Holocaust survivor walking out of the gates of
Auschwitz would have said when told that in
exactly 60 years, an Israeli team of strapping
young Jews would win the Euroleague basketball
playoffs in Moscow. He also wonders what
Sharansky would say—so if you see him around,
please ask.
BERGEN-BELSEN
COMMEMORATION
THE LEGA
CY OF
LEGACY
REMEMBRANCE
by Sam Bloch
photos by Marilyn Seshko
President of the World F
ederation of B
ergenFederation
BergenBelsen Associations
Sixty years ago...It is spring 1945. The bloody World
War II came to an end. On that day the rescued came
out of Bergen-Belsen and the other infamous
concentration camps. The remnant came out—two
from a city, one of a village, one of a family.
They stood among the heaps of ashes and dead corpses,
a flaming stone in their hearts. They came out of this place
with its mass graves of so many thousands of victims.
Throughout Europe people celebrated the Allied victory.
The Jewish survivors did not share the general euphoria
of liberated Europe. For them victory came too late.Their families
back home were gone, their homes destroyed. Only then did
we fully realize the extent of our losses and the depth
of our pain. For those who lived to see the liberation,
it was the dawn of the full awareness of that catastrophe
that befell our people and the beginning of a superhuman
effort to pick up the shattered fragments of a life and start
anew. Still, the bitter reality of the massive graveyard of
their families, homes, towns, and villages was a terrifying
experience. But the will to live and the force of life was
strong. Emergency relief had to be provided, medical aid
for the sick, care for the orphans. This is an epic story of
resilience of the survivors, their courage, vitality and
brotherly love for one another—all that developed later
in what we often call the other Belsen, during the DP area
so close to the mass graves.
For sixty years now we carry in our hearts the
memory and the prayer that becomes alive so often in
an expression of pain and anger each time we meet at
such commemorations as this one. Ours is a prayer
that hovers over millions who don’t even have graves.
It is a prayer that emerges and so often continues without
words, most often in deadly silence.
Grass and flowers now cover the mass graves of
our perished victims—the horror and the shame of the
world. But for us, the survivors, the image is so vivid—
the sight of a million Jewish children and their fathers
and mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers, of sisters
and brothers who dreamed in darkness and did not live
to see their dreams come true. The most painful
persecutions did not extinguish the sparks of Jewish
heroism and sanctity. The hope and the vision of Jewish
survival and redemption was a shining light in the thick
darkness of those days.
The horrible sufferings that we, the survivors,
endured cannot be forgotten. When we repeatedly say
“remember,” we turn first of all to the world around
us—a cold world where so many try to minimize, to
detract, or even to deny the Jewish tragedy. Our
commandment to remember implies not only
remembrance, but a warning that such tragedies must
not be repeated anywhere in the world.
Our commemoration should help people
everywhere better understand the warning bells of
unconstrained racial and religious hatred and bigotry
that are sounding globally unchallenged in our times
now. Today, on this occasion of the 60th anniversary
of the liberation, some people say to us that it is time
to forget; it is time to heal old wounds. We reject such
statements, which are not only historically false, but an
insult to the memory of our martyrs, and a danger of
history repeating itself in a world of turmoil and strife,
hatred and terrorism. We are a small people in a wide
world, facing in our history the curse of dispersion,
hate, pogroms and massacres, while continuing to struggle
for survival. But we are also a people rich in traditions,
with a heritage of spiritual, national and universal value,
which we have contributed in full measure to mankind.
Reading the Scroll of Remembrance:
Wilfried Wiedemann and Sam Bloch
Now, with the silence of the dead over the terrible
tragedy, it is perhaps difficult to revive the sea of fear
of so much suffering, so many tears and pain which
millions of souls witnessed as the last strains of hope
and life tore apart forever and went into eternity.
We shall never forget the brotherly spirit that
prevailed in the concentration camps, a spirit which
enabled the surviving remnants to forge a moral force
of rebirth: rebuilding of lives, creating new families, of
an ongoing struggle for tolerance, freedom, human rights
and creativity.
We recall with pride the spirit and creativity in the
liberated Bergen-Belsen in the aftermath of the
Holocaust, under the leadership of our unforgettable
Yosef Rosensaft and his colleagues of whom I was the
youngest one. We recall the great miracle of rebirth
and return to life. Everything, everything—the memory
of our sufferings and the spirit of our national heritage
and faith—we shall transmit to our children, and their
children so that they should create an eternal bond
with our past and keep alive the chain of continuity.
Today is a day of remembrance but also a
celebration of life, of our liberation sixty years ago. We
did survive. We are alive here together in a spirit of
togetherness and proud of the State of Israel, which
emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust and is so
much in the center of Jewish life everywhere. We shall
again and again repeat our legacy. The spirit of sanctity
should be kept alive! Let us carry and advance in our
hearts, and with our deeds, the entire heritage which
was bequeathed to us by generations past!
From the graves around us there comes forth the
silent call from those who lie buried here: DO NOT
FORGET US! CARRY IN YOUR HEARTS OUR
MEMORY!
Remar
ks bbyy Christian Wulff
emarks
Prime M
inister of Lo
wer SSax
ax
ony
Minister
Low
axony
How do we Germans of the following generations deal
— a burden [that] cannot
with the burden of our past—
and must not be allowed to fade into oblivion? ...Young
people in particular find it difficult; that could not be
otherwise. We try to absorb our knowledge of the events
that took place here; research findings over the decades
have supplied us with increasingly precise facts and
—and yet we still cannot
revealed the overall connections—
grasp what happened. But these shameful memories
are the source of our responsibility for the present and
for the future…That defamation, segregation, and the
gradual deprivation of the rights of minority groups
were the first step towards the ultimate catastrophe.
…That is why we have to appeal to people’s minds,
not just here at this memorial site, but everywhere,
especially at our schools. We have to refute comparisons
that are intended to play down the horror of what
happened. We have to combat right-wing extremism
and antisemitism at an early stage…It is our joint
responsibility across the generations, whether in our
memories or looking to the future, to remain on
constant vigil, to be alert to any form whatsoever of
extremism and totalitarianism, to any form of
intolerance and xenophobia. These terrible events must
never be allowed to happen again…We owe it to our
children and our children’s children that they, too, learn
to commemorate the victims, to ensure that they are
willing to recognize dangers at an early stage and take
— dangers which
timely action against these dangers—
threaten human rights and our democratic constitution.
Remar
ks bbyy D
aul SSpiegel
piegel
emarks
Drr. P
Paul
Pr esident of the Central JJee wish Council of
Germany
My father was one of the survivors who returned to
Germany after the liberation of the camps. With a
supreme confidence that still amazes me today, he rejected
all plans to emigrate and elected to return to his
hometown of Warendorf. He was convinced that after
the end of the war, he would find a different, a reformed
Germany. He believed that antisemitism would have no
place in a Germany that was based on a democratic
constitution. Unfortunately, he learned otherwise before
he died…Decades later, it is with great concern that we
note that antisemitism, racism, and the discrimination
of minorities still pose a serious threat, not only in
Germany, but also in many other countries…We need
more than…sporadic gestures of sympathy and
condemnation.
cont’d on page 6
TOGETHER 5
AN INHERITANCE OF
MEMORY
by Menachem Z. Rosensaft
We stand here today on the very site from which
the horrors of the Holocaust first permeated the
consciousness of humankind. Long before Auschwitz
became the defining term of the Shoah, the films
and photographs taken here in April 1945 by British
soldiers and journalists of both the dead and the
survivors of Bergen-Belsen, and shown in newsreels
throughout the world, awakened the international
community to the genocide that had been committed
against the Jews of Europe.
When British troops entered Belsen on April
15, 1945, they found themselves in Ezekiel’s valley
of dry bones. More than 10,000 bodies lay scattered
about the camp, and the 58,000 surviving inmates
—the overwhelming majority of whom were Jews—
suffered from a combination of typhus, tuberculosis,
dysentery, extreme malnutrition and other virulent
diseases. Confronted with the emaciated, tormented
survivors moving, walking, speaking in the midst of
corpses, the liberators must
have asked themselves not
“Can these bones live?” but
“How can these bones
live?”
It is an honor for me
to stand here today beside
the Jewish monument of
Belsen which my father
inaugurated on the first
anniversary of the
liberation. I am speaking
to you today because my
parents are no longer alive.
I am one of more than
2,000 children who were
born in the Displaced
Persons camp of Belsen
between 1946 and 1950,
and I am here today in
my parents’ stead, on
their behalf.
We, the children
and grandchildren of the survivors, are proud and
privileged to be here today with our parents and
grandparents. We were given life and placed on earth
with a solemn obligation. Our parents and
grandparents survived to bear witnesses. We in turn
must ensure that their memories, which we have
absorbed into ours, will remain as a permanent
warning to humanity.
Sixty years after the liberation of Belsen,
antisemitism remains a threat, not just to the Jewish
people but to civilization as a whole, and Holocaust
deniers are still allowed to spread their poison. Sixty
years after the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau
stopped burning our families, innocent men, women
and children are murdered in a horrific genocide in
Darfur. Sixty years after the Sh’erit Hapletah, the
surviving remnant of European Jewry, emerged from
the inferno of the twentieth century, governmentsponsored terrorists continue to seek the destruction
of the State of Israel which arose out of the ashes of
the Shoah.
The critical lesson we have learned from our
parents’ and grandparents’ tragic experiences is that
indifference to the suffering of others is in itself a
TOGETHER 6
crime. Our place must be at
the forefront of the struggle
against every form of racial,
religious, or ethnic hatred.
Together with others of the
post-Holocaust generations,
we must raise our collective
voices on behalf of all, Jews and non-Jews alike, who
are subjected to discrimination and persecution, or who
are threatened by annihilation anywhere in the world.
We may not be passive, or allow others to be passive,
in the face of oppression, for we know only too well
that the ultimate consequence of apathy and silence
was embodied forever in the flames of Auschwitz and
the mass-graves of Bergen-Belsen.
Menachem Rosensaft is the founding chairman of the
International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
and president of Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan.
CONNECTING WITH MY
MOTHER
by Rabbi K
enneth A. SStern
tern
Kenneth
You need a good imagination when walking through
Bergen-Belsen to try to re-create in your mind’s eye the
hell that once stood there and took place there.
The British were forced to burn down all of the
buildings to prevent further contagion, and the main site
of the camp has been meticulously
landscaped to create a great, large open field
interrupted only by a series of mounds that
mark the mass graves. It’s a rather serene
place; we saw a few butterflies, and in the
early morning—even a gray, damp,
somewhat chilly one, the birds, ignorant
of what image the word Belsen conjures,
chirp and sing with abandon.
Step off the paths and the earth feels
eerily springy, cushioned—that’s perhaps
the only indication of the horrors that
lie concealed there. . . .
As I walked the paths on my own for
the first time, all I could do was to marvel
at the miracle of what most of those who
survived Belsen were able to do: to start
over again, to begin life anew, and to give
life to others—to re-establish families. . .
I went to Belsen...and I made
connections—to my mother.
Of the more than 200 hundred
barracks that Belsen contained, only five
have been excavated. In one location the footprint of
the foundations of two barracks have been cleared, and
further in the camp, away from the landscaped fields
with its graves and memorials, the frames of another
three barracks have reconstructed. Those three barracks
and a concrete water reservoir for fire-fighting serve as
unmistakable markers for locating the site of the
barracks that my mother and my aunt were assigned.
All that one can see is brush and bushes, but in the
variation of the vegetation—its coloration and height—
it’s possible to detect the outline of what was once
Barrack 222.
The camp was liberated two weeks after Passover
in 1945—the holiday of our once and future
redemption. Passover, the holiday on which Elijah the
Prophet is supposed to reappear. Even before Elijah’s
return, the survivors, for the most part, have already
achieved the mission envisioned by Malchi for Elijah:
“Parents shall be reconciled with children and children
with their parents.”
Rabbi Kenneth A. Stern is Rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue in
Manhattan. Both his mother and her sister were liberated at
Bergen-Belsen.
ADDRESS
by Bernd Busemann
Lower Saxony Minister of
Education
Today we commemorate the 60th
anniversary of the liberation of this
concentration camp. It is on this
day that the Lower Saxony
Memorial Trust is laying the cornerstone for a new
building on the memorial site of Bergen-Belsen. More
than 150 architects from many countries participated
in an international competition and developed designs
for a new Vistors’ Centre on this site that harbors
some many memories...
We want to rediscover the traces of this camp that
were deliberately hidden after the war and want to make
them visible again for future generations. We intend to
document how we—albeit slowly—have tried to grasp
our sad heritage in this period of six decades...
The visitors will be acquainted with the history of
three different camps in a more detailed exhibition.
This exhibition focuses on the history of the POW
camp of Bergen-Belsen between 1940 and 1945; the
history of the concentration camp from 1943 to 1945;
and, finally, the history of the Displaced Person Camp
between 1945 and 1950...
It is survivors and their associations that...have been
supportive of this project in Bergen-Belsen, and I would
like to thank them for their generous help...[Because of
them] Bergen-Belsen will remain a place of
commemoration and a place that will continue to teach
mankind about man.
REMARKS
by JJochi
ochi Ritz-O
le
wski, IIsrael
srael
Ritz-Ole
lewski,
My friends born in Bergen-Belsen, and I, symbolize the
Revival of the Jewish people. Our coming into the world
was regarded by our parents as a miracle, after all they had
been through, and symbolized for them a new beginning
and hopes for a bright future. As the representative of the
Second Generation I see in the cornerstone ceremony of
this new exhibition building an important historical step
and I expect to come and visit here with my children and
grandchildren when the work is completed...We are the
ones who now move forward filling in for the survivors.
This is most important for us and for the next
generations…The step that was taken here today, by
laying this cornerstone to the exhibition building, is
the first step on the way to a just future, with our
combined and mutual activity to promote the collective
memory of the survivors of Bergen-Belsen. Let this
cornerstone be today witness to the holy mission we
have all undertaken forever and ever.
cont’d from page 5 - Dr.
SSpiegel
piegel
emar
ks
piegel’’s R
Remar
emarks
We need more allies from all sectors of society to
exert constant public pressure and demand unambiguous
gestures of solidarity on the part of the majority of
society. Anyone who regards these demands as
exaggerated should remember that standing up for
tolerance and peaceful coexistence not only helps
potential victims…it is in fact vital for the survival of
a social order based on liberty…Let this anniversary
set a signal that we are not prepared to back down...I
again appeal to all open-minded citizens to spread the
word about all they have learned and heard from
contemporary witnesses about persecution, war and the
murder of millions of innocent people committed on
the instructions of the state. As a gesture of humility
to the murdered, please assume responsibility by passing
the memories of the survivors on to the next generation.
The legacy of the survivors will be a constant
reminder and will never permit us to forget.
HELP NEEDED TO MEET THE COST OF HOME CARE FOR SURVIVORS
By Roman Kent
Auschwitz is much more than just a part of me—
it is all of me. The same holds true for each and every
survivor.
As Holocaust Remembrance Day is commemorated
this year, 60 years after the liberation of the camps,
not too many of us are still alive. None of us is a
youngster anymore.
For many of us, unfortunately, old age has not
brought contentment. For us, time has not been the
best medicine. Now in our old age, we constantly and
vividly relive our wartime experiences, and have ailments
caused by the suffering endured decades ago.
We suffer from physical and emotional distress at higher rates than the elderly
population does as a whole. Prolonged malnutrition under the Nazis has affected
our health, triggering osteoporosis and broken bones, heart problems, impaired
vision, dental problems, and high blood pressure. There are particularly high rates
of dementia and schizophrenia among Jewish victims of Nazism. Many of us are
alone as a result of having lost our entire family during the Holocaust.
We survivors are adamant about remaining in our own homes rather than
entering a nursing home. To someone who endured incarceration by the Nazis,
the prospect of institutionalization is frightening, It triggers memories and even
induces panic. Home healthcare, therefore, has emerged as one of our most pressing
needs. As we survivors continue to age—we now average about 80—home care,
as well as medical and social services, is both crucial and critical.
Last year, following intensive negotiations with leaders of the Conference on
Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, negotiations that included myself, the
German government finally recognized this problem and allocated a direct
contribution for this urgently needed home care. Unfortunately, the approximately
$8 million allocation was a pitiful amount, the proverbial drop in a bucket.
The major portion of the funding for such services is presently supplied by
the Claims Conference, through the recovery of unclaimed Jewish property in
the former East Germany, property that had belonged to Jews for generations.
But the revenue available from the sale of these properties is finite, and is now
rapidly declining because of the ever-increasing needs of elderly survivors.
This being the case, is it too much to ask the German government to provide
Holocaust victims with the same medical care and home care given to former
German soldiers—not only members of the German army, but also the vicious
concentration camp guards and personnel who helped inflict such irreparable
pain and suffering on their victims? I have heard German politicians and people
from all walks of life express regret and shame for the brutal and inhuman acts
committed by their forefathers. However, words are not enough. Such sentiments
bring little solace to survivors in need of medical and home care assistance. It
seems to be a bit paradoxical to acknowledge guilt and shame, yet at the same
time provide medical care for the perpetrators but not for the victims.
It is high time for the German nation to not only verbally condemn the acts
of their forefathers, but also to seize a tangible opportunity to provide meaningful
help to the victims of their forefathers’ cruel misdeeds. The present generation of
Germany could be an example for history and also a role model to its children.
The task they have at hand is to rectify—imperfect as the attempt might be—
the inexcusable injustices that prevailed during the Holocaust.
Germany must do more than denounce the events of the Holocaust. Before
it is too late, it must turn words into action. The German government should
provide the funds for the home care and medical assistance required by needy
survivors. Sixty years after the Holocaust, this painful obligation remains pending.
Needless to say, it has to be fulfilled at once—while the survivors are still alive.
Roman Kent, chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, is a senior
officer of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
MARCH OF THE LIVING
General Naftalie Lavie, both of them survivors, said
that as he went through the horrifying experience, he
kept asking, ‘Why?’ The answer is not traditional
revenge. The revenge is that we are here. The revenge
is that we are home; the revenge is in that we have a
homeland; the revenge is that we have a garden of Israel;
the revenge is that we have come here with a blue-andwhite flag and a Star of David,” he said.
Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel,
said, “The truth is that in this place, we have all the
reason in the world to give up on humanity, but we
will not give up on humanity. We have all the reason in
the world to choose anger, and we shall not yield to
anger. Hope is all we have, and hope is all we can give
one another.”
OSCWIECIM - Almost 22,000 people, including
Holocaust survivors and their descendants from around
the world, took part in the 2005 March of the Living,
the 18th annual tribute to Holocaust survivors, victims
and resistors. This year marked the 60th anniversary of
the liberation and end of World War II, and the itinerary
included trips to Warsaw, Krakow, Auschwitz, Treblinka,
and other memorial sites and centers of Jewish history.
In Birkenau, marchers were addressed by world
leaders. Joined on the podium by the Polish and
Hungarian heads of state, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon said: “I am certain that all my colleagues—world
leaders—remember how the world stood by in
silence...So many perished because they could not reach
their homeland,and fell victim to the policy of the White
Paper, a policy of capitulation to Arab pressure.
“Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the former chief Ashkenazic
rabbi of Israel, brother of the former Israeli Consul
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon addresses crowd of
22,000 attending the March
of the Living
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TOGETHER 7
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL
OPENS IN BERLIN
BERLIN - Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder joined Jewish leaders and hundreds of
other dignitaries in opening the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the
Holocaust memorial in central Berlin, near the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate
and Hitler’s bunker. The controversial site covers an area the size of two soccer
fields with more than 2,700 charcoal-colored concrete slabs meant to evoke the
helplessness of the Holocaust’s victims. Designed by architect Peter Eisenman,
the museum opened after 17 years of wrangling among German politicians over
its design and message.
Parliament President Wolfgang Thierse called the opening of the memorial a
sign that the Germany that emerged at the end of the Cold War “faces up to its
history.”
The underground information center was built out of fear that a memorial
without educational context might come to be seen as a place where Germans
could expiate their guilt. It has four Subject Rooms, one of them dedicated to
the names of Jews killed in the Shoah. Its walls project the names, birth dates,
death dates, and short bios of some of the victims. The founders asked Yad
Vashem to make the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names available and
developed a German interface to allow visitors to explore the website from a
special foyer. The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names contains some 3
million names of Holocaust victims, 2/3 of which come from pages of testimony
filled out by friends and families of the victims. The remaining million come
from archival sources.
At the ceremony, Holocaust survivor Sabina van der Linden told her tale of
loss, terror and survival in Nazi-occupied Poland. “What have I learned?” asked
van der Linden, who now lives in Sydney, Australia. “I have learned that hatred
begets hatred. I have learned that we must not remain silent and that each of us
ITS KEEPS SURVIVORS WAITING
WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) – Survivors and/or their family members have
waited as long as five years for information from the International Tracing Service
(ITS), the world’s largest collection of Holocaust victims’ records, says a report
to an international task force. Others say they got no response when they sought
records. The ITS has operated for more than 50 years in the remote, central
German town of Bad Arolsen and is overseen by 11 countries, including the
U.S. The State Department has objected to the ITS’ refusal to let researchers see
more than a sliver of its records, and is leading a push to break a multination
impasse over privacy policies. Access is crucial to Holocaust survivors “because
their greatest fear is that when they disappear, their stories will be forgotten,”
said Paul Shapiro, head of the scholars’ program at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum. ITS is funded by Germany and mainly staffed by Germans, but is
overseen by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Red Cross
reports to an 11-nation commission that meets one day a year and must reach
AGENCY COMPLETES NAZI VICTIM
COMPENSATION
GENEVA (AP) - More than 80,000 survivors of Nazi work camps during World
War II have received about $500 million from a Geneva-based reparations agency,
its chief recently announced.
“It is very satisfying to help close a book on a sad chapter of human history,”
Brunson McKinley said in announcing that the International Organization for
Migration had completed the payments. The agency was handling part of the
claims for a German-funded foundation.
The agency was assigned to care for non-Jewish claimants living primarily in
Poland, the Czech Republic, and former Soviet republics. The Nazis forced them
to work in concentration camps or under extremely harsh conditions.
Separately, the IOM has also started compensating about 15,500 people who
lost property to the Nazis. It will pay out a total of $125 million for lost property.
The IOM is one of seven organizations paying out money for the German
foundation.
STREET TO HONOR HOLOCAUST HERO
American journalist Varian Fry, a resident of Ridgewood, New Jersey, who rescued
more than 2,000 artists and writers from the Nazi regime in the early 1940s,
recently had a village street dedicated to his name. It is believed to be the first
street in the United States dedicated to Fry, who was a member of West Side
TOGETHER 8
must fight discrimination, racism and
inhumanity.”
Cantor Joseph Malovany
of New York sang songs
in Yiddish and German,
accompanied by an
orchestra of young
Germans and Poles. Rabbi
Yitzhak Ehrenberg of
Berlin ended with the
Kaddish. Chairman of the
Yad Vashem Directorate
Avner Shalev also
participated.
Paul Spiegel, head of
Germany’s
Central
Council of Jews, said the
memorial failed to address
a key question: “Why
were members of a
civilized people in the
heart of Europe capable of
planning and carrying out
mass murder? The
remembrance of those
who were murdered lets
visitors avoid the
confrontation
with
questions of guilt and responsibility.” He noted that the memorial and wrenching
debate showed that “it is less a place for Jews to recall the Holocaust than for
Germans.” He hoped the memorial would touch “the heart and the conscience” of
every visitor.
Eisenman understands the memorial could not please everyone. He has said he
wouldn’t mind skateboarders, children playing hide and seek or even graffiti on the
slabs. Asked if the project would be demeaned if someone scratched Nazi symbols on
it, he was noncommittal. “Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn’t,” Eisenman said.
“Maybe it would add to it.” The next day someone did precisely that.
unanimous agreement to modify the archive’s policies. Charles Biedermann, a Swiss
national who has served for 20 years as the ITS’ director, says his 375 workers face a
backlog of 300,000 inquiries because of the complexity of combing through 47.5
million cards on 17.5 million people. He has a shrinking staff and a surge in new
inquiries. He said, “I am very sorry about that. If we had 800 people here...it would
be quicker.”
ITS’ archive includes unique lists from concentration camps, among them rosters
of everyone exterminated at Dachau and Buchenwald. There are records from forced
labor and slave labor camps, ghettos, post-World War II displaced persons camps
and Adolf Hitler’s Gestapo secret police. The collection also contains personal effects
seized during detentions. Last year, State Department officials won backing from
the international task force for a proposal to let any Holocaust museum or archive
make digital copies of ITS records.
USHMM’S MARTIN GOLDMAN RETIRES
The members of the American Gathering would like to note, with deep
appreciation, the decades of work put forth on our behalf by Martin Goldman,
Director of the Office of Survivor Affairs at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum. He has now retired, and we are sad to see him go.
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum staff joined Museum President Fred Zeidman,
Director Sara Bloomfield, and dozens of Holocaust survivors and their descendants at
a heartfelt retirement send-off. Martin created the Department, worked for 16 years at
the Museum and a total of 42 years for the U.S. government. As a farewell gift, Martin
received a framed flag that flew over the Museum and a group contribution toward
airfare for his planned trip to Israel.
Also not returning to the office is Betsy Anthony, his deputy director, who
has married and is moving on.
Martin will be missed for his big heart, his sense of humor and his total
devotion to the cause. We will also miss Betsy’s scintillating personality, and
wish them both a bright, healthy and happy future with sincere gratitude for a
job well done.
Presbyterian Church and a student at what is now George Washington Middle
School.
The event was sponsored by the village, West Side Presbyterian, and Temple
Israel of Ridgewood. William S. Bingham, the son of Hiram Bingham IV, a diplomat
who aided Fry, also attended the commemoration.
Fry died in 1967.
Participants in this year’s seminar express what
inspired them to be part of this journey of knowledge
TEACHERS TRAVEL TO EUROPE AS
THE SPECIAL TEACHERS PROGRAM
RESUMES
By Vladka M
eed
Meed
As readers of Together know, the Summer Seminar Program on
Holocaust and Jewish Resistance—initiated by the American Gathering in
1984 [under the leadership of Mrs. Meed]—held a very successful National
Biennial Alumni Conference in February 2004 in Washington, DC. We
are in constant contact with over 700 of our alumni, who share the news
of how they implement Holocaust studies in their own schools and
communities.
We did not, however, hold a Summer Seminar during the last three
years because of the dangerous situation in the Middle East. In the aftermath
of 9/11, and later the so-called second intifada, many teachers feared
traveling abroad, and especially to Israel.
We who direct this internationally acclaimed program felt that to keep
the program alive, we were forced by circumstances to make certain changes
to our Summer Seminar. This summer we resume trips to Poland and the
Czech Republic, two countries rich in pre-war Jewish culture and history,
and conclude in Washington, D.C., with a visit to the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum. Our program begins this summer in New York on July
6, and will conclude in Washington, D.C., on July 23.
The program’s goal is to advance education about the Holocaust and
Jewish Resistance in U.S. secondary schools so that students will know
and understand the causes and lessons of the Holocaust. The seminars
deepen teachers’ knowledge and strengthen their ability to implement
Holocaust studies in their classrooms. The Curriculum includes seminars
on Martyrdom and the Struggle for Survival in Jewish History; Life in the
Ghettoes and the Camps; The Final Solution; Armed Resistance and Revolt;
Spiritual Resistance; Reaction of the Free World; The Holocaust in
Literature and Art, and the Post-War Impact of the Holocaust.
In Poland, we will spend time in Warsaw, Krakow, and Lublin, where
teachers can still touch history. They can see traces of the former death
camps, gas chambers, and crematoria. They will visit the Jewish Historic
Institute in Warsaw, a worthwhile museum with important archives,
Holocaust materials, and exhibitions that attract many international
scholars and educators. Teachers will listen to prominent historians from
Yad Vashem and Lohamei HaGeta’ot, as well as to testimony from survivors
still living in Poland.
In the Czech Republic, our group will visit the infamous Theresienstadt
concentration camp, where the Nazis brought Jews from many countries.
This camp was supposed to be a German “showcase” for the International
Red Cross; in reality, it was a camp of suffering, of pain, of death and
most of all a transit stop to the gas chambers of Auschwitz for thousands
upon thousands of men, women, and, especially, children.
After Prague, we will travel to Washington, D.C., for three days of
evaluation, lectures, and workshops at the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum.
We hope that the situation in the Middle East will soon improve and
that there will be peace, so that in the future, our teachers will again be
able to travel to Israel and learn with our colleagues at Yad Vashem and
Lohamei HaGeta’ot and witness for themselves the pulsating life of t hose
who are living there.
The HOLOCAUST & JEWISH RESISTANCE TEACHERS
PROGRAM is sponsored by the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust
Survivors, the American Federation of Teachers, the Educators Chapter of
the Jewish Labor Committee, with the active support of the Atran
Foundation, Inc.; the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against
Germany, the Caroline and Joseph S. Gruss Funds, Inc., and the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
NOTE: A major part of the cost of this program is covered by
substantial scholarships arranged by the American Gathering of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors.
Jean Dickerson (Gulfport, MS):
In 1999 I planned a six-week study about the Holocaust. I started out with
two Polish survivors telling their stories (sponsored by the South Institute at
Tulane University in New Orleans). This experience
helped the unit take on “a life of its own,” and the
entire first semester was spent on it. The students
researched topics of individual interest, presented their
findings to their peers, developed original creations
in art, writing…that were presented at a memorial
service with selected works buried in a legitimately
built Time Capsule. (The students did the research
on that aspect and worked with local chemists in the
area). They raised money to buy a plaque to place in
the concrete poured around the Time Capsule. This capsule will be reopened
September 15, 2035—the 100th Anniversary of the enactment of the
Nuremberg Laws.
Debra A. P
ar
ks ((The
The Woodlands, TX):
Par
arks
I have a strong desire to integrate the past with the present
and give my students the opportunity to take it to the
future. I am constantly attempting to make sure that I keep
up with the students’ information-based world and how
they can tie the past to the present. I…take students who
“hate” history and turn them around…realizing that there
is a purpose and reason as to why it is such a part of each of
us and not just a conglomeration of dates, places, events,
etc., to memorize. I tell my students an enormous part of
my goal and my job is to make them think…[about] the Holocaust…both historically
and morally…[I make use of] a wealth of information to help me help them…
[understand the atrocities which took place during World War II]. The Holocaust was
a horrific and tragic time period that needs to be incorporated into the learning process
of our students and allowed to bring a message to our youth of today of how we need
to learn from the past in order to create a better future.
John S. White (N
k, NY
):
(Neew Yor
ork,
NY):
I have heard about your program for years and everyone who
has attended has been impacted by their experience...My
supervisor, Mr. Wilner at Midwood [an alumnus of the
program], highly recommended the seminar and I have a
great respect for his leadership. I grew up in the Midwest.
My first exposure to the Holocaust was on Public Television
when I was a junior in high school. I was shocked. Then, no
one talked about it. I can’t honestly remember a high school teacher mentioning it; of
course, we had a very small Jewish community in Bloomington, Illinois…but looking
back I find that odd. The first time I remember hearing a discussion about the Holocaust
[was] when I did a scene from Anne Frank for a directing class. I have been teaching
about the Holocaust every year for the past seven years and will continue to do so. I
would like some enrichment in this area. I am an avid reader,
and, yes, I have read much about it...It is important that
“we remember” and that we teach our children….
Rhonda JJohnson
ohnson ((JJenks, OK):
From a young age, I have had a passion for history and
teaching. I pursued those passions in college in the form
of degrees in both areas. Upon graduation, I secured
my dream job: teaching high school sophomores United
States history in a wonderful school district. While
developing my lesson plans for this curriculum, I became
deeply interested in the era of World War II...While teaching this unit and
entertaining ideas for novels for my students to read, I began to research ideas
for introducing and instructing my students in the Holocaust. Through this
interest I, along with several of my colleagues, have become active in our local
Jewish Federation’s education programs [which]...introduced us to so many
wonderful teaching tools, as well as education opportunities. The Holocaust
component of my World War II unit is now extensive and growing yearly. My
extreme interest in this subject and the need I feel to teach it in an in-depth
manner has led me to approach our district about teaching a one-semester elective
course on the Holocaust. The course…has been added to our course offerings
for next fall. I can think of no better way to bring this subject alive for my
students than spending time with artifacts, places and survivors of this major
event in history. I believe your program will give me that opportunity.
TOGETHER 9
STUDENT ART AND ESSAY CONTEST
WINNERS ANNOUNCED BY THE MUSEUM
OF JEWISH HERITAGE—A LIVING
MEMORIAL TO THE HOLOCAUST
ARCHIVAL LIBRARY OFFERED A GIANT
“PHOTO ALBUM” HONORING SURVIVORS
MINNEAPOLIS, MN – An extraordinary 35-foot-high interactive public art
project – “Archiving Memory” – was installed from February through June, visually
transforming three floors of the University of Minnesota’s Elmer L. Andersen
Library (West Bank campus in Minneapolis) into a stunning photographic
memorial celebrating cultural survival and heritage in the face of persecution,
war and exile through the family photograph.
Based on photographs and interviews with Austrian Holocaust survivors
and Nazi resisters, the walk-through project employed 12 rare, life-size family
photos from individuals who fled, survived
concentration camps, resisted the Nazi
regime and lived in hiding.
“Archiving Memory” was created by
Minneapolis
photographer/visual
anthropologist Nancy Ann Coyne, in
collaboration with Associate Professor
William F. Conway, Adjunct Assistant
Professor Marcy Schulte of Conway+Schulte
Architects, in cooperation with Timothy
Johnson, Curator of Special Collections
and Rare Books at the Elmer L. Anderson
Library, and Robert Silberman, Associate Professor of Art History.
“Archiving Memory” incorporated the library’s windows to frame images of
12 Austrian Jewish and Christian people
persecuted by the Nazis, positioning them in the
public domain—and integrating photography
with the building’s interior and exterior surfaces.
The photographs are installed chronologically,
creating a timeline from the Library’s corridors.
Each portrait represents a specific year from 1936
– 1947, the year the image was produced.
Oral history texts, accompanying each image,
recall the individual’s life history and the story
behind their photograph. As natural light shone
through the library’s windows, the survivors’ lifesize images were projected onto walls and
corridors. The photographs came into view,
receded and faded. In the evening, the Library’s
lighting, subtly backlights made the photographs appear to look out intently
over the University’s West Bank.
The purpose of Archiving Memory was to construct a temporary site of
remembrance where design materials represent—and perform—historical
experience and memory. “When people are persecuted, survive a war, or are
forced into exile, family photographs are often the only surviving fragments
from their destroyed culture,” adds Coyne. The artist discovered while living in
Vienna that Austrian archives had not actively maintained collections pertaining
to the history of Austrian Jews and, in part, other persecuted groups, during
World War II—leaving them out of the public record. “The Archiving Memory
project gives these people back a place in history,” says Coyne.
“Archiving Memory” is a partnership of the University Libraries, the Special
Collections and Rare Books Unit, the College of Architecture and Landscape
Architecture, the Department of Art History, the Center for Austrian Studies,
and the University of Minnesota’s Public Art on Campus program at the Frederick
R. Weisman Art Museum, in cooperation with Public Interest, Inc., and
Intermedia Arts.
PLEASE SEND YOUR
EMAIL ADDRESS AND THOSE OF YOUR
FAMILY MEMBERS TO
[email protected]
YOU CAN ALSO SEND MATERIAL
FOR CONSIDERATION FOR PUBLICATION
TOGETHER 10
New York, NY— The Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the
Holocaust declared Rachel Aviva Kastner of North Woodmere, NY, as the Elementary
School Grand-Prize winner, Allison Moskowitz of Woodmere, NY, as the Middle
School Grand-Prize winner, and Christina Vuong of Rego Park, NY, as the High
School Grand-Prize winner of the New York: City of Refuge student art and writing
contest.
The contest encouraged students to use creative expression to consider the
theme of immigration and was held in conjunction with the Museum’s special
exhibition, New York: City of Refuge—Stories From the Last 60 Years. The goal of
the exhibition and contest has been to educate the public about the significant
contributions of immigrants in shaping our cultural landscape, and to celebrate the
unique role of New York City as a haven for newcomers. The students were recognized
in a ceremony held April 19 at the Museum.
The contest’s winners were drawn from over 200 Elementary, Middle, and High
School entrants from as nearby as Manhattan to as far away as Chula Vista, California.
Ms. Kastner, an 8-year-old third grade student at the Hebrew Academy of
Long Beach, drew of a skyscraper of people coming together from many countries.
Ms. Moskowitz, a 13-year-old eighth grade student at Woodmere Middle School,
wrote a personal tribute to her grandfather’s immigration experience. Ms. Vuong,
a 17-year-old senior at Hunter College High School, wrote a moving homage to
her grandmother.
“These exceptional students managed to illustrate the diversity of New York
City, and in doing so, honor the immigrants who have helped shape our country
into what it is today,” said Dr. David G. Marwell, one of the contest’s distinguished
judges and Director of the Museum.
Ms. Kastner, Ms. Moskowitz, and Ms. Vuong all won a free tour of the
museum for their schools, and gift certificates to Barnes & Noble. They will also
have their work published by the contest’s media sponsor The Jewish Week, and it
will be displayed at the museum and on the museum’s website.
Julia Muller of Weston, CT, was the Elementary School Runner Up, Michelle
Duffy of Levittown, NY was the Middle School Runner Up, and Esther Leff of
Chula Vista, CA was the High School Runner Up. Oscar Bazan of Astoria, Queens
was the Elementary School Honorable Mention, Maggie McGee of Floral Park,
NY was the Middle School Honorable Mention, and Ishar Sawhney and Christine
Liu, both of Wilton, CT, tied for High School Honorable Mentions.
The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust,
located at 36 Battery Place in Battery Park City, uses a core exhibition of more
than 2,000 historic photographs and 800 historical and cultural artifacts, as well
as 24 original documentary films, to educate people of all ages and backgrounds
about the broad tapestry of Jewish life over the past century—before, during, and
after the Holocaust.
In fall 2003, the Museum dedicated its 82,000-square-foot Robert M.
Morgenthau Wing, which contains the state-of-the-art Edmond J. Safra Hall,
Andy Goldsworthy’s Garden of Stones, catering hall, classrooms, and expanded
gallery space for special exhibitions. The Museum receives general operating support
from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. The Museum of Jewish
Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust is one of 15 cultural and historic
attractions that make
up the Museums of
Lower Manhattan.
For more information: visit www.
mjhnyc.org or call
(646) 437-4200.
Caption: The winners of the New York: City of Refuge – Stories from the Last 60 years Student Art
and Essay Contest at the Museum of Jewish Heritage— A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. From
top Left: Museum Director of Education, Elizabeth Edelstein; Stature of Liberty National Monument
and Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Director of Interpretive Programs, Diana Pardue; Christine
Liu; Christina Vuong; Allison Moskowitz; exhibition contributors Elie Aslan and Liliane Dammond;
and Museum Director David Marwell. From Bottom Left: Rachel Aviva Kastner, Oscar Bazan, and
Julia Muller. Photo by Ben Asen.
HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS AT SUNY, POTSDAM
BUFFALO, NY—Two Auschwitz survivors spoke at SUNY, Potsdam in a
presentation titled “The Voices of Holocaust Survivors.” Max and Rosee Pohl, who
live in Buffalo, were interviewed by Marzena Wisniewski, a 2002 SUNY Potsdam
graduate and current Master of Arts degree candidate in the Department of English
and Communications.
The couple met before being sent to Auschwitz as teenagers and were reunited
later in their lives. Wisniewski, the daughter of Polish parents, is working on her
master’s thesis for which she has interviewed six survivors, including the Pohl’s. She
also presented a short video depicting the conditions in the concentration camps.
Parental discretion was advised. The event was sponsored by the Department of
History, Student Success Center, and Office of International Education.
THE 35TH ANNUAL SCHOLARS CONFERENCE
PHILADELPHIA, PA —The 35th Annual Scholars Conference, held in Philadelphia
this past March, was founded in 1970 by Franklin H. Littell and his Temple University
colleague, Hubert G. Locke. It is the oldest meeting of its kind in the world and the
first that brought together Jewish and Christian scholars. Its mission is “remembering,
learning and teaching the lessons of the Holocaust in tandem with the study of the
churches’ struggle and failure to confront Nazi antisemitism and the Final Solution.”
Despite the effort to create a collegial atmosphere, there were moments of tension.
The plenary session, “The Gathering Continues: Jewish-Christian-Muslim Trialogue,”
turned into a shouting match between audience members and panelists when the
representative of the National Council of Churches took the microphone. The groups’
parent body voted to divest from companies who do business with Israel.
A Methodist minister, who has attended every conference since the program’s
inception, claimed she was anti-Zionist but not antisemitic. She subscribed to agitprop
that Zionism equals racism, a slogan created by the Third Committee at the U.N in
1975 and rescinded in 1991. “It’s not right that they [The Jews] want all the land for
themselves and not leave any for the others.” For the rest of the sessions, attendees
struggled with the meaning of the Holocaust, and attempted to come to terms with
theological issues and concepts that divided Judaism and Christianity, the same
issues that have led to violence through the millennia. Among other participants
were Dr. Elizabeth Maxwell, who is head of the Remembering for the Future
Foundation in England and Dr. Michael Berenbaum of the University of Judaism in
Los Angeles. The classic film about the rescuers of Chambon by Pierre Sauvage was
shown, as was Giora Gerzon’s The Olympic Doll.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN GAINS ACCESS TO
HOLOCAUST ARCHIVES
ANN ARBOR (The Michigan Daily)—The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
has partnered with the Shoah Foundation in LA to create a repository for and
gateway to survivor’s video testimonies about their experiences in the Holocaust.
The university joins Yale, UCLA, Rice University, and others in this project.
PREPARING FOR AUSCHWITZ
PERM, Russia (AP) – In the central Russian city of Perm, it has become a longstanding annual tradition for former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps and
ghettoes to gather on April 11th. Here, they share with one another their horrifying
memories, provide each other mutual comfort and warm conversation, and pay
tribute to both those who are left with the scars of their experience and those who
never made it out of the camps alive. This year, the programs included ten Jewish
students preparing for a visit to Poland’s Holocaust sites. The two-hour meeting
gave the students a clear image of what really happened. After the discussion was
over, dinner was served, at which time the students presented humanitarian aid
packages and flowers to the Holocaust survivors.
TEACHERS USE BOOKS, FILM AND SURVIVORS TO
TEACH
New York State (Gannett)—Books, videos and teachers are essential tools to recount
the murder of six million Jews in the most systematic genocide in world history.
Educators in Putnam, Rockland, and Westchester counties show video histories of
Holocaust survivors and bring those still alive to class. They take children to a
museum in Rockland and send them to Europe to tour the camps. They remind
them how the world stood by and watched while a nation filled with hate tried to
eliminate a people.
In Spring Valley, educators at the Holocaust Museum and Study Center try to
reach children with photos, narratives, videos and art. The students also listen to
survivor guests and have group discussions about issues from then that resonate
now, like the difference between U.S. war crimes in Abu Ghraib and crimes against
humanity during the Holocaust or similarities between the Jim Crow laws in the
U.S. and the Nuremberg Laws in Germany.
In Yonkers, Clara Knopfler of Scarsdale talked with students at Gorton High
School about her experience in the Holocaust. She was deported to Auschwitz at 17
and worked in camps making gunpowder and digging anti-tank trenches, and was in
a death march.
The 78- year-old
sees it as her
obligation. She and
five other local
survivors agreed to
assist in the production of a documentary
from the Westchester Holocaust Education Center.
At Mamaroneck High School, the documentary personalizes the Holocaust and
makes it more real for the students, said Steven Goldberg, the chairman of the social
studies department. At Lakeland High School, students have spent a few days in
history learning about the Holocaust, where they listened to survivors and watched
films about the time period. Clarkstown South High School sophomore Rachel
Adler went on the March of the Living because she felt it is the role of her generation
to tell the story of the Holocaust.
WBAL-TV AIRED SPECIAL ON SURVIVORS
BALTIMORE—Many Holocaust survivors, now in their 80s, recently recounted
their stories on a special WBAL-TV program. Deborah Weiner’s special report,
Survivors Among Us, was a one-hour commercial-free special report run during
prime time. “Auschwitz is practically synonymous with the Holocaust,” she said.
“The death camp has been called ‘the largest graveyard in human history,’ and when
you talk to survivors of Auschwitz, you can’t help but ask yourself, ‘Could I have
made it out, too?’ When you see an Auschwitz survivor smile, or even dance, it just
seems bigger than just about anything else.” The survivors still have nightmares and
feel horror underneath their smiles. How do they do it? And who will tell their story
when they are gone? “It is not possible to understand what the loss of each one
survivor means—not only to the survivor group, but in the end, to the world,” said
Emmy Mogilensky.
LIBRARY RECEIVES SURVIVORS’ TAPES
WESTPORT, CT—At the Westport Public Library last week, 14 audio-taped
testimonies of Westport’s Holocaust survivors were officially donated to the archives
by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Present at the emotional
meeting were many of the survivors whose eyewitness accounts are now readily
available to the public. The program at the library was jointly sponsored by the
library, United Jewish Appeal, and Team Westport, and was held as part of the
library’s “Conversations” program. In the works are plans to train Westport teachers
to use those tapes as part of the curriculum when the Holocaust is taught in middle
school. The speakers chosen for the evening program were Carlos Eire and Aron
Hirt-Manheimer. Eire, a Yale professor and award-winning author of a memoir
called Waiting for Snow in Havana, was wrenched from his family during the throes
of the Communist revolution in Cuba. Hirt-Manheimer, who was born in a displaced
persons camp to Holocaust survivors, is a scholar and Holocaust expert.
STUDENTS WORK WITH SURVIVORS TO
IMMORTALIZE THE PAST
EAST BRUNSWICK, NJ — Several Holocaust survivors work together with students
from Hammarskjold Middle School and East Brunswick High School as part of the
“We Are Your Voice” program. In all, 160 middle school students conducted interviews
with the survivors, wrote poetry and created scrapbooks of their lives, while 16 high
school students directed the filming for a DVD that will be used throughout the
district.
The middle school students broke into groups and essentially “adopted”
eight Holocaust survivors, working with them for the entire school days on
May 13 and 20 as part of a program aimed at teaching students about bigotry,
hatred and intolerance. The middle school students came from Pomerantz’ and
Stephanie Margolies’ gifted and talented classes at Hammarskjold, and the high
school juniors and seniors came from Niel Olufsen’s advanced video production
class.
Holocaust survivor Judith Sherman, of Monroe, is
interviewed Friday by students from Hammarskjold
Middle School, East Brunswick, while high school
students tape the events for a DVD.
SONIA PILCER SPEAK AT MASS
COLLEGE
NORTH ADAMS, MASSACHUSETTS—In
honor of Yom HaShoah, two events took place
at MCLA. Students in the course, The Holocaust and the Nature of Prejudice,
hosted Sonia Pilcer, who spoke about “Living in Two Worlds: Being a Child of
Holocaust Survivors” and read from her work, The Holocaust Kid, a fictionalized
memoir about growing up the child of two survivors. Following her talk, Exodus
1947 was shown, to tell the story of the “ship that launched a nation,” when it
tried to run the British blockade of Palestine.
TOGETHER 11
U.S. CONGRESS HONORS THEODORE BIKEL
SURVIVOR GRANDPARENTS COME TO SCHOOL
TOWNSEND, MAINE — Holocaust survivors Jack and Eva Lewin, grandparents
of Hawthorne Brook pupil Travis Maider, were invited to tell seventh graders
about what it was like to be born Jewish in Germany prior to World War II and
what it felt like as the full force of hatred fell upon them. Their story left seventhgraders at the Hawthorne Brook Middle School spellbound as they told of their
lives under Hitler. The students learned from them the importance of tolerance
and justice.
COLORADO 2G’s PICK UP THEIR PARENTS’
TORCHES
EAGLE COUNTY, CO —“It’s the importance of never forgetting and how it
should never be repeated and how we have to educate our youth in the valley,”
said 2G Barbara Feldman, whose mother died in 1999 at age 74. Her father died
when he was 73. Her mother’s family had survived intact after two years in
Auschwitz. Since moving to the area six years ago, Feldman has brought survivors
and University of Colorado professors to local schools to tell their stories and
teach students about the Holocaust.
Another 2G, Wildridge resident C.J. Tenner, whose parents are also gone,
tells the story of his father, who was from Vienna and escaped Nazi work camps
to join the French resistance. “From me you just get a lot of sadness—my mother
didn’t talk much about it,” Tenner said. “But I don’t mind people knowing that
my grandparents and many aunts and uncles perished.”
Josh Lautenberg, who lives in Edwards, said Jews work hard to keep the
survivors’ stories of the Holocaust alive to prevent another genocide. “As a younger
person, and not a survivor’s child, the critical thing about keeping the Holocaust
memory alive is to educate and inform people that it’s still possible something
like this could happen in the future. It’s still something that takes place today—
look at Darfur, look at Sudan,” Lautenberg said. “An even greater indictment
against the modern world is that—unlike during the Holocaust when Americans
had less extensive knowledge of the death camps—the massacres in 1990s’ Rwanda
and today’s Sudan are shown on television and widely reported in newspapers. It’s
an insult to people who survived the Holocaust and who lost loved ones,” he
said. “If we’re going to save Iraqis from their leader, why not save people from
Rwanda or Darfur? There’s no justification for not doing anything. There’s no
excuse.”
ST
AMFORD, CT—Survivors told their stories at the annual Holocaust
STAMFORD,
commemoration. Anita Schorr, of Westport, escaped from Auschwitz at age 14,
but her parents and brother were less fortunate. For the past several years, Schorr
has shared her story with students across Fairfield County, most recently with a
class at Staples High School. Judith Altmann’s experience paralleled Schorr’s. Born
in Czechoslovakia, Altmann was a teenager when she and her family were sent to
a ghetto in Mateszalka, Hungary, because Theresienstadt was full. “For my parents
and my sisters and nieces and nephews, I light a candle because I am still here,”
Altmann said. “There’s no one here to commemorate them.”
EMER
GENCY FUNDS A
VAIL
ABLE FOR NEED
Y
EMERGENCY
AV
AILABLE
NEEDY
HOL
OCA
UST SUR
VIV
ORS
HOLOCA
OCAUST
SURVIV
VIVORS
Financial assistance is available for needy 1st generation survivors. If you
have an urgent situation regarding housing, health care, food or other emergency,
you may be eligible for a onetime grant. These grants are funded by the
Claims Conference.
If there is a Jewish Family Service agency in your area, please discuss your
situation with them as they may be able to provide an emergency grant.
Emergency Holocaust Survivor Assistance
P.O. Box 765
Murray Hill Station
New York, NY 10156
TOGETHER 12
Theodore Bikel, the beloved entertainer who is a great friend of survivors, was
recently honored by the United States Congress. Congressman Brad Sherman of
California introduced the resolution. In part he said, “Theodore Bikel, is a Renaissance
man who...has been committed to arts awareness, human rights, and Jewish activism,
and his service to the Los Angeles community and the world has been truly remarkable.
“Theodore was born in 1924, in Vienna, Austria. At the age of 13, he and his
parents fled Austria to avoid Nazi persecution. They eventually settled in Palestine,
where Theodore began to develop a deep respect for Jewish tradition and the
performing arts. He soon began acting in the
famous Habimah Theater. After a few years of
training, Theodore left for London, where he
performed in small theater productions. He
eventually caught the attention of Sir Laurence
Olivier and was cast as Mitch in A Streetcar
Named Desire.
“After his initial success, Bikel went on to
star in Broadway productions of The Sound of
Music, The Lark and The King and I, but he is
most famous for his portrayal of the character
Tevye in The Fiddler on the Roof, a role he has
played more than 2,000 times.
“Bikel later branched into film, and in
1959 he was nominated for a Best Supporting
Actor Academy Award for his role as the
Southern Sheriff in The Defiant Ones. In 1965,
he made his concert debut at the Carnegie Recital Hall, and in 1988 he won an
Emmy Award for his portrayal of Harris Newmark, an early immigrant pioneer of
the West Coast. In recognition of his inspirational work on stage, Bikel will be
honored this spring with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“Off stage, Bikel has used his talents to advance causes near to his heart. During
the civil rights movement, he helped produce the album Sing for Freedom: Civil
Rights Movement Songs. He has also dedicated himself to human rights movements
around the world, visiting and entertaining soldiers during the Yom Kippur War of
1973 and serving as a board member of Amnesty International.
“Back home, Bikel has been president of the Actors’ Equity Association and a
member of President Carter’s National Council on the Arts. Throughout his life,
Bikel has also made serving the Jewish community a priority. Most notably, he has
been involved in the Soviet Jewry movement and has served as senior vice president
in the American Jewish Congress. In the Los Angeles Jewish community, he has
collaborated with Rabbi David Baron and co-founded Temple Shalom for the Arts in
Los Angeles. Mr. Theodore Bikel, an influential leader, is a visionary artist, and a
talented individual whose spirit and activism have inspired our generation and will
undoubtedly touch generations to come.”
THE NEW CRACOW FRIENDSHIP SOCIETY
CELEBRATES 60 YEARS OF SURVIVAL
By Roman Weingarten
Celebrating the 60th anniversary of liberation, the New Cracow Friendship
Society hosted a Gala Luncheon at the Fontainebleau-Hilton Resort in Miami
Beach, FL in honor of Steven Spielberg and in tribute to the memory of Oskar
Schindler.
The event attracted 653 Holocaust survivors, accompanied by their children
and grandchildren, many of whom survived on Schindler’s list. They came from
Israel, Australia, Argentina, Costa Rica, and other places to experience what many
felt may have been the last opportunity to celebrate survival on a grand scale.
Manek Werdiger stands out as the driving force and co-coordinator of the
program that included guest speaker Douglas Greenberg, president and CEO,
Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. The honoree, Steven Spielberg,
sent greetings through a video projected on two larger-than-life screens and had
nothing but praise for the New Cracow Friendship Society and its leadership for
bringing so many of Schindler’s list Holocaust survivors together to celebrate 60
years of freedom and to pay homage to the memory of Oskar Schindler.
Roman Weingarten, the president of the New Cracow Friendship Society,
made the connection between Oskar Schindler and Steven Spielberg, without
whom all the sacrifice and heroism of Oskar Schindler would be just one line in
the history books.
Last year, the “Survivors of the Shoah Foundation” signed an historic agreement
with Yad Vashem, according to which the Foundation will provide Yad Vashem
access to all 52,000 testimonies which are in its archives and will thus become
accessible to multitudes of people around the world for generations to come.
Among the other speakers were members of the Luncheon Committee: Manek
Werdiger, Lewis Fagen, Helen Rosenzweig and Rena Finder.
NORDHA
USEN (Doha Daily, Qatar)—More than 200 Holocaust survivors
NORDHAUSEN
and 40 US veterans joined a solemn ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of the Nazis’ Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where prisoners were
forced to build Hitler’s feared rockets. Mittelbau-Dora was once a satellite of the larger
Buchenwald concentration camp where some 56,000 people—mainly Jews and political
dissidents—died between 1937 and 1945. Hundreds of survivors and German
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder joined a commemoration ceremony there in April.
ISRAEL—Minister for Defense Shaoul Mofaz declared that the significant
participation of the international community in the commemorations of liberation
and the inauguration of the new museum of Yad Vashem proved the
internationalization of the topic of the Shoah. Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon declared
in a ceremony at Kibbutz Lohamei Haghettaot: “Sixty years after Shoah, we are here
to proclaim loud and clear that the people of Israel are alive and have a sovereign
state, independent and flourishing, with a powerful army.’’ At another ceremony in
Yad Vashem, President Moshe Katzav declared, “Millions of Jews around the world,
numerous Righteous of the Nations and partisans, are taking part in remembering
the Shoah’s victims and the suffering of the survivors, but the Jewish People’s injuries
will never heal.”
LONDON (AP)—Holocaust survivors joined Jewish and military leaders at a
solemn ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the BergenBelsen concentration camp. Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, and Army Chief
of Staff Gen. Sir Mike Jackson addressed the ceremony at the Holocaust Memorial
in London’s Hyde Park. Jackson paid tribute to the Royal Artillery troops who
liberated the camp. “I don’t believe that those soldiers were the only heroes,” he said.
“The real heroes were those who suffered so in the camps. What they had to go
through is almost beyond comprehension.”
JASENO
VAC, CR
OATIA (AP)—Croatia’s prime minister and survivors of an
JASENOV
CRO
escape attempt from a Nazi-era death camp gathered on the 60th anniversary of the
confrontation and demanded “the truth” about how many died at the camp run by
Croatia’s wartime regime. Prime Minister Ivo Sanader joined several thousand
remembering those who perished during the escape. Every year former prisoners pay
respect on the anniversary of the breakout to the more than 500 prisoners who died
trying to escape from the camp in this Croatian town. About 600 tried to flee in
1945; only about 70 made it. The others were shot. “It is our obligation to determine
the real number of victims and to nurture the truth,” Sanader said.
PARIS (AP)—President Jacques Chirac, who in 1995 became the first French
president to acknowledge France’s responsibility for systematically persecuting Jews
during the war, led a national day of commemoration for tens of thousands of Jews,
political dissidents, and others deported from France to Nazi death camps in World
War II. “We have not forgotten these moments, and we will never forget them,”
Chirac told hundreds of former deportees, government officials and others at the
Human Rights esplanade overlooking the Eiffel Tower. A lone fiddler played as
children walked with elderly former deportees in front of a plaque honoring human
rights. A video on a giant-sized screen showed railroad tracks leading into blackness.
Chirac reiterated his acknowledgment of the role of the French state and many
French people in the deportations, “who assisted this work of death.” Several hundred
people took part in the ceremony preceding the continuous reading of the names of
the Jews deported from France. “We hope that Europe will have the courage to
strengthen its relations with the State of Israel,” declared Serge Klarsfeld, president
of the Association for the sons and daughters of the Jews deported from France.
ONT
ARIO—Premier Dalton McGuinty, along with the Canadian Society for
ONTARIO
Yad Vashem, honored 14 Holocaust survivors on the provincial day of remembrance,
Yom HaShoah. These exceptional Ontarians were recognized for their courage,
strength, and commitment to their communities. Among them were George Brady,
Aron Gerhard, Nathan Godfrey, Mendel Good, Anne and Mandell, Israel (Ernie)
Marmurek, Philip Rechtsman, Albert Sliwin, Bernard and Elise Kalles (née Sliwin)
and Etty Zigler.
TOR
ONT
O - More than 2,000 people gathered under a large white tent in Earl
ORONT
ONTO
Bales Park for a community Yom Hashoah commemoration, the 60th anniversary of
liberation and the end of the war. The keynote speaker was Ronald Ford (Andy)
Anderson, now in his early 80s, a paratrooper in the Canadian Air Force who was a
liberator at Bergen-Belsen, He and the others were “young, battle-hardened
paratroopers in good physical condition. We could not fathom the situation that
could cause so [many] tragic souls to be so close to death.”
LOS ANGELES - About 2,000 people, many of them schoolchildren, attended a
Holocaust commemoration in Pan Pacific Park to mark the 60th anniversary of
liberation after the Holocaust. Such events are key to educating today’s youth,
organizers say. Nathan Shapell, 83, an Auschwitz survivor who helped build the
Holocaust monument, said such Holocaust programs are a must. “The children, the
children, the children are the key,” said Shapell. “Little by little, you have to guide
them, explain what happened, and, little by little, they get it.”
Religious and community leaders paid tribute to the 6 million Jews who died at
the hands of the Nazis during World War II. They focused on the importance of
passing on the lessons of the Holocaust to children. “I’m one of the younger survivors
at 77,” said Jona Goldrich, chairman of the Los Angeles Holocaust Monument, who
fled Nazi-occupied Poland at age 14. “I’m concerned that in another 10 or 15 years,
there will be no Holocaust survivors. In high school, they teach what happened
2,000 years ago, but they don’t teach what happened 60 years ago.”
“There will always be hope,” said Rabbi Mark Borovitz of Beit T’Shuvah. “We
will take up the challenge and the commitment to make our world better, so that
what ended 60 years ago will never—will never, will never—happen again.” Mayor
James Hahn, discussed the resurgence of antisemitism in the past few years. City
Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, spoke for the City Council, urging the thousands
of students in the crowd to learn about the strength and the courage of Holocaust
survivors.
WEST R
OXB
UR
Y&R
OSLINDALE
A—Congregation Mishkan Tefila
RO
XBUR
URY
ROSLINDALE
OSLINDALE,, P
PA
Brotherhood hosted the 29th annual Yom Hashoah breakfast program on May 15
honoring the Congregation Mishkan Tefila survivor community. Members of the
Brotherhood interviewed each survivor family and the stories of their lives since
liberation were included in the program book. Event chairman Sid Lejfer noted that
as time passes, the survivor community gets smaller and “we will not have that many
more opportunities to recognize their strength, courage, and accomplishments of
overcoming a terrible time in our history.” The featured speaker was 2G Dr. Bernice
Lerner, author of The Triumph of Wounded Soul: Seven Holocaust Survivors’ Lives.
Money raised during the event is used to send Hebrew school students to the United
States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., a model now emulated by other
men’s clubs in the region.
ST
ATESVILLE, NC—Days of Remembrance were commemorated at First
STA
Presbyterian Church. The event was sponsored by Congregation Emanuel, the
Statesville Jewish congregation. Three Holocaust survivors, a local high school teacher,
and a local physician spoke at the event. Manfred Katz was a teenager when he was
deported from his village of Beiseforth, Germany, to the Riga Ghetto in 1940.
Hanna and Howard Adler lived in Nazi Germany during Hitler’s rise to power.
Howard immigrated to the United States in 1936. He served with the U.S. Army in
World War II. Hanna survived Kristallnacht and immigrated to the United States in
1940. Speaker Stephanie Heintz Wood teaches Holocaust Literature at North Iredell
High School and is a fellow from the teacher’s program at United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
SAN FRANCISCO—Hundreds of aging Holocaust survivors gathered in San
Francisco to look back at their painful past, and to spare the future from a return of
the unfathomable evil they endured. Retired plumbing contractor Max Drimmer,
85, wants the younger generation to “know every little bit so that this could never
happen again —never, never, never again.” Drimmer spoke briefly at an “Eyewitness
to History” luncheon at the Hilton Hotel marking the 60th anniversary of the end
of the Holocaust. It drew nearly 850 Bay Area survivors and their relatives and
friends. The Bay Area is home to nearly 2,000 Holocaust survivors, said Rabbi
Doug Kahn, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, which
co-sponsored the event. Other sponsors included the Holocaust Center of Northern
California and the Jewish Community Federation.
DENVER (Rocky Mountain News)—A blessing and incantation were followed
by the sprinkling of a mayoral spade of dirt at the base of a newly planted red oak
tree in Civic Center when prominent members of Denver’s Jewish community and
city officials commemorated the 60th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust and
honored those who survived Nazi Germany’s attempt to eradicate them. Cantor
Zachary Kutner, of the BMH-BJ Congregation in Denver, sang a solemn blessing
before tossing the first ceremonial spade of dirt at the base of the tree and handing
off the shovel to Mayor John Hickenlooper. “People should never forget what happened
in World War II. It’s unbelievable what they did to human beings,” said Polish
survivor, Murray Fersztendig, 87. The event began at the Webb Municipal Building
with an address from the mayor and words of remembrance from Holocaust survivors.
MONR
OE, NY (Times Herald-Record)—Hundreds of Jews at Monroe’s Temple
MONROE,
Beth El gathered solemnly to remember the Holocaust. Liberators exhorted the
audience never to forget, and vow “never again.” Survivor Alice Braun told of years
of hiding from the Nazis in what is now Slovakia. She watched as the horror escalated
TOGETHER 13
—Jews systematically driven farther and farther to the edges of society and finally
deported to death camps. Braun ended up in Auschwitz. Temple member
Evelyn Marshak begged the audience to remember, to pass on the stories they
heard to their children, to never forget. “In these stories are our hope,” she
said. “The many and the oneness of these tragedies live in their stories. Honor
the memory of all the victims by repairing our world.”
Community Center’s Benderson Family Building in Getzville for the event,
sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Buffalo, the Jewish Community
Center of Greater Buffalo, the Holocaust Resource Center of Buffalo and the
Bureau of Jewish Education. The 90-minute event included a memorial candlelighting ceremony, a cellist performing, a teen choir and a Holocaust film narrated
by WIVB-TV newsman Rich Newberg. “Every human being has a name, a life, a
history, a face,” Newberg told the crowd. “Putting a human face on this is the
first step to come to grips with history’s darkest chapter.”
WHITE PLAINS —Scarsdale resident Clara Knopfler was a 17-year-old
from Transylvania, when she entered Auschwitz with her parents and her brother.
Knopfler can still see the final smile on her father’s face, the promise that she
would see him and her brother once more after the terrible war had ended.
“We never saw them again,” she said during a solemn ceremony in downtown
White Plains at the Garden of Remembrance. More than a dozen survivors
and 200 residents came to the garden, established in 1992 as a permanent
memorial to the six million Jews and millions of others killed in the war
against Nazi Germany, along with the survivors, rescuers, and liberators. The
garden includes a pair of massive gates that feature, among other symbols, a
depiction of torn fabric bearing a prisoner’s number and the broken tablets of
the Ten Commandments. It was created by the Westchester Holocaust
Education Center, a nonprofit organization that hosted yesterday’s event. At
the conclusion of the ceremony, survivors and others entered the gates and
laid yellow flowers on top of a stone wall bearing the names of Germany’s
most infamous camps. Knopfler, now a 78-year-old retired teacher, spoke
movingly. “Remembrance is my reward and my duty,” she said. John Sweeney,
also a Scarsdale resident, was a 19-year-old infantry soldier when he reached
Dachau and saw the evidence of Jewish eradication.
LOUISVILLE, KY — Highlands resident Ann Klein said she had never
planned to live in the United States. A world war, the Holocaust, and her
marriage changed that. Klein spoke at the annual Yom HaShoah Holocaust
remembrance at the Jewish Community Center. Klein, an 83-year-old native
of Hungary, said she lost four members of her immediate family during World
War II— both parents and her two brothers.
FARMINGT
ON HILLS, MI —The Holocaust Memorial Center hosted
ARMINGTON
a ceremony of remembrance at its campus in Farmington Hills. The ceremony
included a memorial address by the center’s founder, Rabbi Charles Rosenzveig,
prayers, music and a candle-lighting ceremony by Holocaust survivors and
children of survivors.
LANSING, MI—Eighty Jews who managed to survive in Nazi concentration
camps came together for an emotional ceremony at the state Capitol Rotunda.
The survivors—some using walkers, some helped by Boy Scouts —came from
the Detroit area for the event that marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation
of the Jews. Among them were Ruth Lehman, the day’s featured speaker. Seven
candles were lit: six in memory of the 6 million Jews killed and the seventh to
honor the non-Jews who perished under Adolf Hitler’s reign.
LOS ANGELES—A new exhibit, “Liberation! Revealing the Unspeakable,”
was opened with more than 200 photographs, taken by American GIs and
others, of Nazi death and labor camps. In one photo, five survivors hail
liberators at Bergen-Belsen. “Look at these faces. In one of my favorite (photos),
the happiness, the relief—they’ve seen their savior,” said Eric Saul, curator of
the exhibit. “This is the crime of the century and the millennium.” Ron
Frydman of Sherman Oaks, former principal of Robert Frost Middle School,
was at Auschwitz for the commemoration of Yom Hashoah. Frydman, who
instructs area schoolteachers about the Holocaust for the Anti-Defamation
League, said preventing another Holocaust starts at home. “It starts at the
local level, by kids saying hateful things to others or disparaging remarks
about racial ethnicity. If it’s not controlled, if it’s not stopped, look what can
happen when you dehumanize people. It’s easy to go to the next step, which is
to exterminate people.”
B UFF
AL
O —Holocaust survivor Anna Post recently lit a candle during the
UFFAL
ALO
Yom Hashoah ceremony in the Jewish Community Center in Getzville. Born
in Bronocice, Poland, she was just 16 when the beginning of World War II
separated her from her parents and five siblings —the family she would never
see again. Her story was one of six that local Holocaust survivors and their
families told during the observance of Yom Hashoah, the annual
commemoration of the Holocaust. About 700 people filled the Jewish
TOGETHER 14
ALFRED LIPSON
by David Lipson
With deep sorrow, the survivor
community mourns the death of
Alfred Lipson (Alter Lipsyc), editor
emeritus of Together, on April 23rd.
He was born on Hanukah 1919 in
the shtetl of Glowachow, near
R a d o m , Po l a n d , a n d d i e d i n
Hollywood, FL, at the onset of
Pesach. He was 85 years old.
Alter was the grandson of Elias
Lipsyc, Chairman of the Polish
Rabbinate from 1926 to 1942, and
the son of Israel Lipsyc, a master
tanner and father of eight.
Remarkably, Israel and six of his
children survived the horrors of the
Nazi camps, including Auschwitz,
Dachau, Vaihingen, and others.
A rare wedding was held in the Radom Ghetto, where Al married Carol
Frenkel. They were soon separated, taken to different camps and almost
gave each other up for dead. Their miraculous reunion, among many other
stories of survival and inspiration, was retold at meals and family gatherings,
and captivated my brother Steven and myself! While my mother was
pregnant with me in the Stuttgart DP Camp in 1947, Al rode to
Nuremburg by US Army jeep. His testimony resulted in the execution of
SS Gen. Oswald Pohl.
After immigrating to New York in 1949 and working his way up to
success, Al retired early from his own textile firm to devote himself fulltime to Holocaust research and education. Coming to the US, he spoke
four languages fluently, but English was not among them! His self-taught
command of English became outstanding, as evidenced by his prolific
writings and articulate expression. He was often called upon to do
translations and live interpretations; he established a reputation for
definitive scholarship, often correcting the errors of editors and authors.
In 1963 he edited the first Yizkor Book in English, The Book of
Radom , and edited the bilingual Voice of Radom for 25 years. My father
used his expertise for a single-minded purpose: to serve as witness to the
Holocaust, and to share his knowledge with others.
His work was done strictly on a volunteer basis, never accepting
speaking fees or even travel expenses. His high school, college, and other
public speaking engagements were attended by an estimated 10,000 people
annually. In addition to editing Together , in 1983 Al was appointed the
founding Research Fellow at the Holocaust Resource Center at
Queensborough College, near his home in Bayside. He worked there fulltime until his final illness last year.
Al was privileged to recite the Kaddish at the US Capitol Rotunda. I
will never forget seeing him receive the coveted Louis Yavner Award for
Holocaust teaching in Albany in 1991, nor lighting a memorial candle
with him at New York’s Temple Emanuel on Yom Hashoah, April 1999.
Al Lipson is survived by Carol, his devoted wife of 62 years, two
brothers and a sister, two sons, four grandchildren and a greatgranddaughter. His life of achievement, personal humility and dedication
will never be forgotten.
CLAIMS CONFERENCE DISTRIBUTES
$820 MILLION IN DIRECT
COMPENSATION IN 2004
In 2004, the Claims Conference distributed approximately $820 million in
direct compensation payments to Jewish victims of Nazi persecution and their heirs
in more than 60 countries. This is the largest single-year distribution of compensation
payments in the Claims Conference’s history.
The Claims Conference has always maintained that the real value of these
payments, regardless of the amount, are in their symbolism to Jewish victims of
Nazism. The payments are a small measure of justice, for the money cannot restore
the losses or make up for the sufferings of Nazi victims.
The funds derive from eight different compensation and restitution programs
administered by the Claims Conference. Information about all of them is at
www.claimscon.org.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference)
has issued second payments to 2,432 Jewish victims of Nazi medical experiments.
Each survivor will receive =
C 2,450 (approximately $3,200) for a total of =C6million
(approximately $7.7 million).
These Holocaust survivors received earlier payments of approximately $5,400
each in 2004, totaling approximately $12.8 million. They live today in 33 countries,
with 962 in the U.S.
The Claims Conference effort to identify victims of medical experiments has
uncovered new information about these horrific acts committed by the Third
Reich. Research of survivors’ claims for compensation by the Claims Conference
led to documentation of experiments that had never before been recorded. From
its research for this program, the Claims Conference compiled the most
comprehensive list in existence of Nazi medical experiments. The Claims
Conference’s documentation of previously unrecorded experiments enabled many
of these victims to be declared eligible for payment.
The U.S. State Department played a leading role in ensuring that this second
payment to victims of Nazi medical experiments was made. “The U.S. government
has been a critical partner for us in the effort to ensure some acknowledgement for
these Holocaust survivors,” said Gideon Taylor, executive director of the Claims
Conference.
“The amount is not large but this is not about money. It is about acknowledging
what happened to us. That is why it is important,” said Jona Lacks, a survivor
who lives in Tel Aviv and heads the Organization of Mengele Twins of Auschwitz.
“Even though this is a small amount of money, it is a big help to those
survivors who are in need of assistance. And more importantly, this shows that
Germany has recognized what was done to the victims and has not forgotten their
suffering,” said Eva Kor, founder and president of C.A.N.D.L.E.S. (Children of
Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors). Her museum in Terre Haute,
Indiana, which was burnt to the ground last year by an arsonist, reopened on April
3, 2005.
As part of its effort to educate the wider public about this little-known part of
the Holocaust, the Claims Conference has made available testimonies of the people
who were subjected to medical experiments. The Claims Conference will be giving
the new historical information and the testimonies to the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and to Yad Vashem in Israel. Some
testimonies have been posted on the Claims Conference website.
About 178 different types of medical experiments were identified as a result of
this program. They took place in more than 30 camps and ghettos. The Nazis’
actions were gruesome, and include Dr. Josef Mengele’s infamous experimentation
on twins and dwarves. Other examples of experiments, sometimes performed
without anesthesia, include injections to attempt to change the color of people’s
eyes, sterilization, injection of infectious diseases and poisons, and unnecessary
amputations and organ removal, among many others.
The Claims Conference initially negotiated with German government and
industry to establish the Foundation and to include DM50 million for Jewish and
non-Jewish victims of Nazi experimentation and for children of forced laborers
who were in special homes (Kinderheim). All applications were reviewed and
matched up to historical material about medical experiments conducted in
concentration camps and ghettos between 1942 and 1945. In addition, an
independent reviewer, Judge Jacob Bazak of Israel, approved the cases.
AFTER 25 YEARS, 300,000 “DOUBLE VICTIMS” OF NAZISM AND COMMUNISM
HAVE RECEIVED PAYMENTS THROUGH HARDSHIP FUND
More than 300,000 Jewish victims of Nazi persecution have been paid a total of
approximately $800 million from the Claims Conference Hardship Fund, a program
founded in 1980. The Hardship Fund was negotiated in order to bring a small
measure of justice to Jews who were “double victims” of Nazism and Communism
but whose residence in Soviet bloc countries made them ineligible for postwar German
compensation payments.
The Hardship Fund was the first Holocaust compensation program directly
administered by the Claims Conference. In the 25 years since the fund’s creation,
the Claims Conference has paid approximately $4 billion to Jewish victims of Nazi
persecution in more than 60 countries under eight separate programs. This is in
addition to the more than $50 billion in German government compensation
negotiated by the Claims Conference in the 1950s.
West German compensation laws enacted in 1953 and thereafter excluded from
eligibility victims of Nazi persecution resident in the Eastern Block countries and
the Soviet Union, i.e., behind the “Iron Curtain.” Beginning in 1975, following the
agreement of the Soviet Union to allow Jewish emigration, the Claims Conference
began negotiating for compensation to be made to Jewish victims of Nazism from
Soviet bloc countries who had emigrated to the West and Israel after 1965, the filing
deadline for West German government compensation. Following these negotiations,
in 1980, West Germany created a “Hardship Fund” of DM 400 million. Eligible
Jewish Nazi victims would each receive one-time payments of DM 5,000 (approximately
$2,500), with five percent of the amount set aside for grants to institutions aiding
needy Jewish Holocaust victims.
The Hardship Fund compensates primarily Jewish victims of Nazism from
Soviet bloc countries who suffered considerable damage to health during the
Holocaust and emigrated to the West after 1965.
West Germany created this fund only on the condition that the Claims
Conference, rather than the government, administer applications and payments
pursuant to German government guidelines.
Based on the original size of the fund, it was estimated that 80,000 Holocaust
survivors would benefit from it. The collapse of Communism and subsequent
Jewish emigration from Soviet bloc countries greatly increased the number of
Jewish victims of Nazism eligible for payments.
The Claims Conference continues to approve approximately 700 applications
per month for Hardship Fund payments.
The Claims Conference is negotiating with the German government for the
creation of a similar compensation program for Jewish victims of Nazism who
suffered the same experiences as those paid under the Hardship Fund but who
still reside in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims
Conference) represents world Jewry in negotiating for compensation and restitution
for victims of Nazi persecution and their heirs. The Claims Conference administers
compensation funds, recovers unclaimed Jewish property, and allocates funds to
institutions that provide social welfare services to Holocaust survivors and preserve
the memory and lessons of the Shoah.
CLAIMS CONFERENCE TELLS GERMAN GOVERNMENT OF PROBLEMS IMPLEMENTING
“GHETTO PENSION” LEGISLATION
A Claims Conference delegation recently met with Heinrich Tiemann, Secretary
of State of the German Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, and outlined a series
of problems with the implementation of the ZRBG (Ghetto Pension law). The State
Secretary indicated that the Ministry would follow up with the relevant authorities
on these issues concerning implementation of the law.
The delegation was led by Israel Singer, Claims Conference president and was
composed of Noach Flug, chairman of the Organization of Holocaust Survivors in
Israel; Roman Kent, chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust
Survivors; Ben Helfgott, of the Board of Deputies of British Jews; and Gideon
Taylor, Moshe Jahoda, Saul Kagan, Karen Heilig and additional staff of the
Claims Conference.
The Claims Conference is also holding regular meetings with parliamentarians
from the different parties in the German Bundestag to brief them on the problems
with the implementation of the ZRBG.
TOGETHER 15
GERMANY AGREES TO SECOND ALLOCATION
FOR SURVIVOR HOMECARE
The German government has agreed to provide $8 million for home care for
Holocaust survivors around the world, following negotiations with the Claims
Conference. This is the second year that the Claims Conference has brought up
this issue in talks with Germany, following last year’s government agreement to
provide $12 million.
With the health needs of aging Holocaust survivors becoming increasingly
urgent, the Claims Conference has been pressing Germany to provide funds so
survivors may receive the assistance they need to remain in their own homes, a
matter of great importance to many.
The funds from last year’s agreement were allocated by the Claims Conference
to 43 agencies assisting needy Jewish victims of Nazism in 17 countries.
Also during Claims Conference talks, the German government agreed to
include survivors incarcerated for at least six months in certain labor camps in
RAVENSBRUCK REVISITED
FUERSTENBERG, Germany (AP) - Hundreds of survivors of Nazi concentration
camps marked the liberation 60 years ago of three of the most notorious camps in
the Third Reich's vast system: Ravensbrueck, Sachsenhausen, and Bergen-Belsen.
Judith Sherman, 75, brought her two sons and
grandchildren to Ravensbrueck so she could tell them
the story of her struggle to survive.
“I wanted to protect them, I didn't want them
to feel sorry for me,'' said Sherman, of Cranbury,
N.J. But now, she said, “I'm ready to do it because
I'm old and the story should be told.''
Though she kept her feelings inside for 60 years,
the memories of climbing over bodies to use the
bathrooms and struggling to keep from getting sick
were never far from the surface, she said.
“I think of Ravensbrueck every time I feel hungry. I think of Ravensbrueck every time I feel cold,”
she said. “Every time my grandchildren cry, I think
of Ravensbrueck.''
Sherman was among 300 survivors from around
the world who attended the ceremony at
Ravensbrueck, some 60 miles north of Berlin near
the town of Fuerstenberg, which gained infamy as
the Nazis' camp for women prisoners, though some men also were held there.
Following speeches, people threw roses into a pond used by the Nazis to dump
the ashes of the camp's cremated victims.
Pierette Pierrot, a French resistance fighter captured in 1944, was pregnant
when imprisoned by the Nazis. The 88-year-old Pierrot said she was only able to
Hungary, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria in the Article 2 pension program, provided
they meet the other German-mandated eligibility criteria.
The Claims Conference will continue to negotiate with Germany for inclusion
of Holocaust survivors in compensation programs who were in forced military labor
battalions and in concentration camps not currently recognized as such by Germany;
were subjected to persecution for periods of time less than currently stipulated and
were confined in open ghettos, and have income in excess of the current income
ceiling (for the Article 2 Fund).
Among others, the Claims Conference is pressing the issue of applicants to the
Hardship Fund who had not been able to meet eligibility criteria at the time of
application and wish to reapply for payment, and the establishment of a Hardship
Fund for residents of Eastern Europe who did not emigrate to the West like current
recipients of payments from the Hardship Fund.
hide her pregnancy from the Nazis with her baggy prison clothes and the help of
others.
“There was a lot of friendship between all of the prisoners and a lot of help, and
only through that could I keep my child,” Pierrot said in French. When her son,
Guy, was born March 11, 1945, in the camp, she had to lean even more on others—
including a German camp nurse who knew her secret. A month later, as the Third
Reich crumbled, the SS allowed the Red Cross to evacuate some 7,500 prisoners to
Sweden—presumably to curry favor with the Allies. Pierrot was one of those chosen
to go and remembers bundling her son up in rags and stuffing him under a seat to
smuggle him out with her. She worried throughout the slow trip that the bus would
be stopped and she would be caught by the SS.
“I only really felt saved when we made it
Denmark,” said Pierrot, whose son came with
her for the ceremonies.
Tens of thousands of women were not as
lucky and were marched north by the SS, with
scores dying along the way. When the Russian
soldiers liberated Ravensbrueck on April 30,
1945, they found 3,000 sickly prisoners who
had been unable to make the march.
The Nazis built all of their death camps,
like Auschwitz, in occupied Poland, but the
slave labor camps in Germany also were places
of death.
Between 1939 and 1945, some 132,000
women and children, 20,000 men and 1,000
female youths were deported to Ravensbrueck,
and tens of thousands of them died from hunger, disease, exhaustion, or medical experiments. A gas chamber built at the end of 1944
claimed some 6,000 victims as well.
Sachsenhausen, on the northern outskirts of Berlin, was liberated April 22, 1945,
by the Soviet army. One of the first Nazi concentration camps, it was initially meant
mainly for political prisoners, but inmates later included Jews, Poles, Soviets, and
other POWs.
EXHIBIT OPENS ON FEMALE RESISTANCE DURING THE HOLOCAUST
By Danica Kirka
VIENNA, Austria —An exhibit on women who defied the Nazis opened recently in
Austria, highlighting the efforts of resistance fighters and those who smuggled Jewish
children to safety during World War II.
The exhibition in an old Jewish theater features photographic panels outlining
individual acts of heroism. “There are so many special women,” said Yonat Rotbain,
the exhibition curator. “It’s important to tell their story.”
The core of the exhibition, “Faces of Resistance: Women in the Holocaust,”
was drawn from Israel’s Moreshet Archive. A section outlining resistance efforts in
Austria was added for the showing in Vienna, which was timed to coincide with the
60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe.
Women were depicted behind—and on—the front lines. Gisi Fleischmann,
from what is now Slovakia, found shelter for Jewish refugees. Marianne Kohn of
Germany smuggled Jewish children into Switzerland.
Haviva Reik emigrated from then-Czechoslovakia to Israel but felt compelled
to return to Europe to fight the Nazis. Enlisting in a British parachute regiment,
she eventually made her way back home and joined with partisan fighters, only
TOGETHER 16
to be executed. An Israeli educational institution —Givat Haviva—was founded
in her memory and the group’s branch in Austria helped organize the exhibition.
Though the exhibit focused on well-known heroes, the organizers stressed they
also wanted to draw attention to the struggle of those who performed smaller acts of
bravery: keeping children in the middle of a war safe and foraging enough food for
the table. “Every woman who is represented stands for thousands of others,” Rotbain
said.
As she walked among the panels, Rotbain described how the accomplishments
of women were overlooked. In one case, she noted that scholars had taken note of
Mordechai Anielewicz, a hero in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, but neglected Tossia
Altmann, who worked for an underground newspaper. Among partisan fighters, she
pointed out a photo of Witka Kovner, who smiled shyly from behind her rifle. But
her role was overshadowed by that of her husband, Rotbain said.
Organizers are particularly hoping the exhibit, which also has traveled to the
United States, Canada, and Israel, will inspire youths.
KATSAV ADDRESSES GERMAN
PARLIAMENT
BERLIN (JPOST)—Israeli President Moshe Katsav addressed Germany’s two Houses
of Parliament in a special session marking the 40th anniversary of diplomatic ties
between Germany and Israel. He praised David Ben Gurion and Germany’s first
postwar chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, who together built the foundations for relations between their two countries, as well as Germany’s young generation of the
1960s that demanded that the conspiracy of silence be broken so that the truth
about the horrific period of Nazi tyranny could be revealed.
He also said. “The Holocaust is the formulating event in the lives of both the
Jewish and the German people.. The trauma of the Holocaust will accompany the
Jewish people forever. There are still many Jews throughout the world who bear
numbers on their arms. The emotional scars inflicted at that time have been passed
on to second and third generations. Families of the victims and survivors of the
Holocaust continue to mourn and to weep.”
He pointed to the increase in antisemitism, propelled and disseminated by
modern technology that symbolized moral failure on the part of humanity, world
leaders and the free world, and commended Germany for trying to fight the spread
of hatred, and added that they were not doing enough, and must work with greater
intensity in the fields of law, education and public opinion.
“GOLD TRAIN” SETTLEMENT WILL FUND SERVICES FOR HUNGARIAN
HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS: AUGUST 1, 2005 DEADLINE
A Settlement has been preliminarily approved by U.S. District Judge Patricia
Seitz in a class-action lawsuit brought by Jewish Hungarian victims of Nazism and
heirs of Hungarian Nazi victims against the United States government regarding the
handling of property contained on the “Hungarian Gold Train,” in the U.S. District
Court for the Southern District of Florida. The case, known as Rosner v.United
States, was originally filed in May 2001.
The Hungarian Gold Train consisted of approximately 24 freight cars that
contained personal property stolen or otherwise taken from Hungarian Jews during
World War II by the Nazi regime and its collaborationist Hungarian government.
The train came into the custody of the U.S. military in Austria at the conclusion of
the war. The lawsuit alleged that the United States mishandled the contents of the
train, but the United States denied any legal liability in the handling of the Hungarian
Gold Train property.
As part of the Settlement, the U.S. government has agreed to pay up to $25.5
million, of which approximately $21 million will be used to fund social service
projects benefiting eligible class members. A proposed plan of allocation will be
developed by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, in
consultation with lawyers involved in the class action, appropriate social service
agencies, and Class Members, and submitted to the Court for its approval.. If the
Settlement is approved, Hungarian Jewish victims of Nazism may be able to receive
assistance from Jewish social service agencies. The Settlement does not provide for
direct payments to Class Members as compensation for property lost on the Hungarian
Gold Train.
The U.S. government will pay another $500,000 to create an archive of documents
and materials relating to the Hungarian Gold Train and the looting of the Hungarian
Jewish community. The archives will be available for scholarly research, educational
purposes, class members’ use, and for the benefit of future generations. In addition,
the U.S. government represented that, to the best of its knowledge, all documents
relating to the Gold Train have been declassified. If the government finds that there
are documents that have not been declassified, it will review them to determine if
they can be declassified. If the Settlement is finally approved, the United States will
issue a statement of acknowledgment about the events concerning the Gold Train.
Additional information about the Settlement is located at the website of the
Hungarian Gold Train Settlement, www.HungarianGoldTrain.org, in several languages.
Class Members included in the Settlement are Jews that were born before May
8, 1945 who lived in the 1944 borders of Greater Hungary some time between 1939
and 1945 and the heirs of Hungarian Jewish Nazi victims. Class Members may
comment on, object to, or exclude themselves entirely from the Settlement by
informing the Court. Comments or objections to the Settlement that are filed with
the Court will be available for the Court’s review prior to any final decision regarding
the Settlement.
Objections to and requests for exclusion from the Settlement must be in writing.
They must include the specific information that is detailed at
www.HungarianGoldTrain.org or available from the Notice Provider, either through
e-mail at [email protected], or by regular mail at: Hungarian Gold Train Notice
Provider, P.O. Box 1570, New York, NY 10159, USA.
Objections and rrequests
equests for ex
clusion must be mailed to the N
otice
exclusion
Notice
ked no later than A
ugust 1, 2005
Provider and must be postmar
postmarked
August
2005. Class Members
appear personally in Court. Objections and requests for exclusion cannot be done by
telephone or e-mail.
Class Members who do not exclude themselves from the Settlement will be
legally bound by it and not able to sue the United States concerning the legal claims
resolved in the Hungarian Gold Train lawsuit.
Class Members who ask to be excluded will not be eligible for any benefits from
the Settlement, nor can they object to the Settlement. They will not be bound by
anything that happens in this lawsuit.
The Court will hold a fairness hearing on this proposed Settlement on September
26, 2005, at 10 a.m. in Miami, at which time it will consider whether to approve
the Settlement. Class Members may appear through counsel of their own choosing
at their own expense.
To see the full terms, or to request instructions for exclusion from, commenting
on, or objecting to the Settlement please go to www.HungarianGoldTrain.org, or
email [email protected], or write to Notice Provider P.O. Box 1570, New York,
NY 10159, U.S.A.
The plaintiffs were represented by the law firms Cuneo Waldman & Gilbert,
LLP (Washington, D.C.), Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, LLP (Seattle, WA) and
Dubbin & Kravetz, LLP (Miami, FL). To contact attorneys for the plaintiffs, please
e-mail: [email protected].
Please check the website periodically for updates.
PLEASE DO NO
T WRITE OR CALL THE COUR
T OR THE CLERK’S
NOT
COURT
TION.
INFORMATION.
OFFICE FOR INFORMA
For mor
ettlement, call:
moree information about the SSettlement,
In N
or
th America:
Nor
orth
In Israel:
In Hungary:
In Australia:
In all other countries:
1-800-562-0831
1-80-921-4806
00-800-737-47576
1-800-35-7208
Please make a collect (reverse charge)
call to the United States at: 646-519-8701
Appeal for E-mail A
ddr
esses of
Addr
ddresses
Sur
viv
ors and Their D
escendants
urviv
vivors
Descendants
The American Gathering is collecting e-mail addresses of survivors
and their descendants in order to communicate with them in a
more cost-efficient and effective way.
Please send your e-mail address to [email protected]
wishing to object to or exclude themselves from the Settlement will not have to
TOGETHER 17
survivor soldiers located between Yad
Vashem and the military cemetery on
Mount Herzl.
SCHROEDER RIVAL
VOWS TO SUPPORT
SURVIVORS
Ha’aretz —Angela Merkel, leader of
Germany’s Christian Democratic Party,
promised a delegation from the World
Jewish Congress that if her party wins
the upcoming elections, she will
promote a favorable policy toward the
claims of the survivors. Merkel faces
off against Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder in September, and polls
indicate she has a substantial lead.
HOLOCAUST DAMAGE
COST UP TO $330B
JERUSALEM (AP) — An Israeli
government report has set material
damage to the Jewish people during
the Holocaust at some $240 billion
to $330 billion. The Israeli government
calculation includes lost income and
wages, as well as unpaid wages from
forced Jewish labor. The new document
is an extrapolation of information
drawn from more than 100 sources and
involves no original research, said
Aharon Mor, a Finance Ministry
official who headed a committee that
spent seven years compiling the report.
SERBIAN BANK
SCORED BY SURVIVORS
BELGRADE, Serbia - (ArriveNet) —
Hundreds of protestors gathered before
the Belgrade headquarters of HYPO
Bank, the Alpe Adria bank of Austria,
to protest the Serbian government’s
lack of property restitution laws to
return real estate expropriated by the
Nazi and Communist parties to
original owners. Valuable property was
nationalized in the 1940s from the
Galich family, now American citizens,
whose families were Shoah victims and
who have been working with the US
Embassy in Belgrade to help them
protect their claimed property from
developers. In protest, HYPO board
member Boris Ignatovic complained to
the U.S. State Department that, “...the
USA Embassy has, in our opinion,
needlessly been drawn into this
situation.” Prior to World War II, a
landmark Belgrade building was owned
for generations by the Galich family.
The bank sold the property without
their consent.
UKRAINE CONFRONTS
JEWISH ISSUES
KIEV ( Jewish Times) — Viktor
Yuschenko, president of Ukraine,
recently visited the United States to
discuss the restitution of Jewish
communal property and Ukraine’s
“graduation” from the 1974 Jackson-
TOGETHER 18
Vanik Agreement, which linked trade
restrictions to Ukraine’s treatment of
its Jews. The two issues are
intertwined. Yuschenko, whose father
was a POW in Auschwitz, visited the
Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington. He met with Mark Levin,
executive director of NCSJ: Advocates
on Behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine,
the Baltic States & Eurasia. President
Bush appears ready to allow Ukraine
to graduate from Jackson-Vanik, but
the decision is up to Congress. Jewish
leaders in Kiev realize how important
lifting Jackson-Vanik could be for
Ukraine’s economic development. Yet
they insist that the Jewish community
must press the issue of restitution for
communal properties confiscated
during the Holocaust. Large-scale
restitution may play a crucial role for
Jewish life in Ukraine, which largely
depends on overseas donors and a tight
circle of wealthy domestic sponsors.
SWISS JEWS DEMAND
ACTION VS. HATERS
— Jews in
GENEVA, Switzerland—
Geneva have asked police to protect
Jewish buildings and the community
after a rise in antisemitic attacks
around the country. The Grand
Synagogue in Geneva was recently
defaced with swastikas and neo-Nazi
slogans, a month after the firebombing
of a synagogue and a Jewish-owned
fabric shop in the city of Lugano, and
in 2001, a rabbi was murdered. The
Geneva-based Intercommunity Centre
for Coordination against Antisemitism
and Defamation recorded 34 antiSemitic attacks in western Switzerland
last year. Johanne Gurfinkiel at the
Centre added that it was clear that
education was needed to preach the
virtues of tolerance. “I am worried
about the number of young people
who are expressing extreme right-wing
ideologies,” he said.
ISRAELI POST OFFICE
HONORS HOLOCAUST
SURVIVORS
JERUSALEM - This year’s Yom
Hazikaron (Memorial Day) stamp is
dedicated to Holocaust survivors—the
last remnant of their families—who
settled in Israel
and fell in its
wars. The NIS
1.50
stamp,
issued by the
Philatelic
Services and
designed
by
Jaimi Kirkovitz,
includes the
photo of a monument to Holocaust
WORLD LEADERS
MEET IN ANCIENT
PETRA
PETRA, Jordan (AP)—Nobel Laureate
Elie Wiesel, the Dalai Lama, Bill
Clinton, Richard Gere, 25 Nobel Prize
winners, and others recently met in the
2,000 year-old city of Petra, Jordan,
to discuss challenges facing the modern
world. Host King Abdullah II
challenged participants to find a fresh
approach to fighting terrorism,
extremism, and violence. The two-day
conference, “A World in Danger,” was
co-sponsored by Wiesel’s Foundation
for Humanity and brought together
politicians, scientists, economists, and
humanitarians.
HOLOCAUST
SURVIVORS LOBBY
DOWNING STREET
OVER DARFUR
SCOTLAND — Sur vivors of the
Holocaust from Scotland and other
parts of Britain and survivors of the
genocide in Bosnia were among
thousands of protesters converging on
Downing Street recently to lobby for
protection for the people of Darfur.
Campaigners say too little has been
done to help those living in the
Sudanese province, where an estimated
400,000 have been killed in the last
two years.
NEW POPE REACHES
OUT TO JEWS
VATICAN CITY (AP—Although 78
and seen by some as a transitional
figure, Pope Benedict XVI moved
quickly to stand firm on the moral
code for his flock while reaching out
to Jews, non-Catholics, and the
Chinese. Benedictine XVI, the former
Cardinal Ratzinger, who was the
Grand Inquistor at the Vatican until
he was elected Pope, is from Germany.
Acknowledging he served in the Hitler
Youth as a teenager during World War
II, he sought to reassure Jews that he
intends to continue John Paul’s
commitment to close relations. He
personally invited Rome’s chief rabbi
to his installation, sent a message for
the 90th birthday of a former Rome
rabbi, and accepted an invitation to
visit the synagogue in Cologne,
Germany, during a visit to his
homeland for World Youth Day in
August.
GERMAN FAR-RIGHT
RALLY PROTESTS
‘GUILT’
BERLIN (AP) — About 3,000
supporters of an extreme-right party
rallied recently to lament what they
called Germany’s “cult of guilt” about
World War II, but they were kept from
marching in downtown Berlin by
thousands of counter-demonstrators.
National Democratic Party supporters
were ringed by riot police on the
Alexanderplatz square and after a
several-hour rally agreed to scrap the
march through Berlin, police
spokesman Bodo Pfalzgraf said. At least
5,000 opponents had headed toward
them to block the planned route. The
day of the rally was May 8, the
anniversary of the day Germany
surrendered to the Allied Forces. On
that day, Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder and other top politicians
attended a wreath-laying at Berlin’s
monument to the victims of war and
Nazism, which contains the remains
of an unknown soldier and an
unknown concentration camp victim.
DENMARK
APOLOGIZES FOR
SENDING REFUGEES
TO THE CAMPS
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) Denmark’s apologized for sending 19
German Jews who sought refuge in
Denmark during World War II to
Nazi concentration camps. “Today,
we know that Danish authorities in
some cases took part in sending back
people to suffering and death in
concentrations camps,” Prime
Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen
told a crowd of about 5,000 people
gathered for a ceremony marking the
60th anniversary of the surrender of
Nazi troops in Denmark. “On behalf
of the government and the Danish
state, I would like to take this
opportunity to regret and apologize
for these acts,” Fogh Rasmussen said.
Queen Margrethe and Danish
and British war veterans also took
part in the ceremony.
GERMAN NEO-NAZI
CONVICTED FOR
ATTACK PLAN
MUNICH (AP) — A prominent
German neo-Nazi was convicted and
sentenced to seven years in prison
for leading a terrorist group that
discussed attacking the dedication of
a Munich synagogue. A Bavarian
state court found Martin Wiese, 29,
guilty of membership in a terrorist
organization for heading the far-right
Kameradschaft Sued extremist group,
which collected weapons and
discussed how it could stop the
November 9, 2003, groundbreaking
ceremony, attended by Germany’s
president and Jewish leaders. He and
his three co-defendants were
convicted of the same terrorism
charge. Sentences for the others
ranged from nearly five years to 27
months.
cont’d on page 19
JUDGE SIGNS OFF ON
$21.9M HOLOCAUST
AWARD
NEW YORK (AP)—Judge Edward R.
Korman, the federal judge in New York
disbursing the Swiss Bank settlement,
approved a $21.9 million award to heirs
of two wealthy families, more than 65
years after a Swiss bank passed their
fortune to the Nazis. The award was the
largest single claim paid thus far in a case
against the Swiss banks. The previous
high for an award was about $4 million.
The payment was based on the
recommendation of a court-appointed
tribunal and stems from a claim by Maria
Altmann, 89, of Los Angeles, and about
two dozen unnamed heirs of Ferdinand
Bloch-Bauer and Otto Pick, major
shareholders in a large sugar refinery in
Austria before World War II. The
tribunal report noted that the case
demonstrated that “having marketed
themselves to the Jews of Europe as a
safe haven for their property, Swiss banks
repeatedly turned Jewish-owned property
over to the Nazis in order to curry favor
with them.”
HOLOCAUST
SURVIVORS CAN SUE
VATICAN BANK
SAN FRANCISCO (The Recorder)—
A federal appeals court reinstated a
lawsuit brought in 1999 by Holocaust
survivors from Croatia, the Ukraine and
Yugoslavia who allege the Vatican Bank
accepted millions of dollars of their
valuables stolen by Nazi sympathizers.
A 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals
gave the go ahead for them to sue the
Vatican Bank for profiting during the
Nazi regime. After the Croatian
Government collapsed at the end of the
war, its leaders fled to Italy and some
assets went into Vatican control,
according to a State Department report.
Plaintiffs alleged that the Vatican Bank
laundered the money and hope the
Catholic Church agrees to settle the
case. Claims could exceed $100 million.
NEEDY SURVIVORS
FIND CHAMPIONS IN
CLEVELAND
CLEVELAND (CJN)—Needy Holocaust
survivors in the Cleveland area have
prompted the creation of the Holocaust
Survivors Life Needs Initiative, a project
of Second-Generation Kol Israel. They
seek to raise $3 million within the next
three years to provide financial assistance
to needy Cleveland Holocaust survivors.
“There could be up to 900 indigent
elderly Jewish Holocaust survivors, out
of the approximate 1,800 - 2,000
survivors in Cleveland, living at or below
the poverty level,” says Sam Hoenig,
chair of the Initiative. “This is appalling
and totally inexcusable.”
Fundraising is an uphill battle,
admits Hoenig. This, despite the fact
that his committee is comprised of
widely recognized Holocaust educators
and advocates. “I have been involved in
fundraising activities for 30 years,” notes
Hoenig, founder and president of the
Negev Foundation. “But of all my past
efforts, this, by far, is the hardest one
ever, and I can honestly say I don’t know
why.” To find out more about the
Initiative, contact Hoenig at 216-6919997.
EX-GERMAN TROOP
SUES OVER NAZI
ALLEGATIONS
PITTSBURGH (AP) — A former
German soldier has filed a defamation
lawsuit over accusations that he was a
member of the Nazi SS during World
War II. Rupert Aumer, who has lived in
Pittsburgh since 1950, said the allegation
that appeared on an international
newspaper’s website harmed his family’s
reputation and made him fear for his
life. Aumer, 79, alleged he was wrongly
called a former Nazi in an online
question-and-answer session featuring a
Nazi hunter and is seeking at least
$100,000 in damages against
businessman Bernardo Katz and
Palestine Post Ltd., which publishes The
Jerusalem Post. According to the lawsuit,
Katz alleged Aumer was a former SS
officer in a story on the JPost’s website
from December to April. The online
Q&A featured Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi
hunter and director of the Israel office
of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los
Angeles-based Jewish human rights
group. Rabbi Abraham Cooper,
associate dean of the Wiesenthal
Center, said the center forwards
allegations of possible Nazis in the
United States to the Justice Department
but discourages people from going
public with allegations.
TASK FORCE TO
IMPLEMENT
HOLOCAUST, GENOCIDE,
HUMAN RIGHTS, AND
TOLERANCE EDUCATION
MARYLAND-A bill introduced by
Maryland State Senator Leonard H.
Teitelbaum establishing the Task Force
to Implement Holocaust, Genocide,
Human Rights, and Tolerance
Education; requiring the University
System of Maryland to provide staff for
the Task Force; establishing the duties
of the Task Force; requiring the Task
Force to submit an interim and a final
report; etc., was signed into law by
Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich.
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RIGHTEOUS
AMONG THE
NATIONS
FROM POLAND AND
HOLLAND RECOGNIZED
JERUSALEM-A ceremony posthumously honoring three Righteous
Among the Nations took place at Yad Vashem on June 1, 2005. Awards were
bestowed upon Zofia Wroblewska-WieWiorowska, who rescued three Jews in
Poland during the Holocaust, and Albertus and Margaretha Haverkort from
Holland, who rescued six people during the war.
The ceremony was
conducted in He b rew,
Po l i s h , a n d D u t c h .
Kazimierz Laski, one of
the survivors from
Poland who came from
Austria, was present,
along with family and
friends of the survivors
and the rescuers. Zofia
W r o b l e w s k a Wi e Wi o r ow s k a’s a n d
Albertus and Margaretha
Ha v e r k o r t’s c h i l d re n
received the awards on
behalf of their late
parents from Chairman
o f t h e Ya d Va s h e m
C o u n c i l , Pr o f e s s o r
Szewach Weiss.
Z ofia Wr oble
wska-W
ieW
ior
o wska
oblewska-W
wska-WieW
ieWior
ioro
From the Fall of 1940 until September 1942, Anna Wolfowicz and her
daughter Irena lived in the house of Anna’s father, Dr. Tendler in the
Ghetto of Zelechov, which is near Garvolin in Poland. In September
1942, at the time of the liquidation of the Zelechov Ghetto, the
grandfather was murdered and Anna and Irena fled to Warsaw and found a
hiding place in a Women’s Shelter with the aid of a school friend of Anna’s,
Zofia Wroblewska-Wie Wiorowska from Czestochowa, who worked at the
shelter.
Zofia hid Anna and her daughter in the Women’s Shelter for two
years and also helped Kazimerz Laski, Irena’s boyfriend —and eventual
husband —to acquire forged Aryan papers and a hiding place in their
basement in Warsaw.
In the Fall of 1944, with the start of the Warsaw Uprising, the shelter
was closed and Anna was moved to a forced labor camp, and managed to
survive the war. Her daughter Irena remained in Warsaw and was saved
due to her forged papers. Kazimerz Laski, was wounded in the battle of
Warsaw when he fought in the Ludova Army, yet he survived the war.
According to his testimony, Zofia also helped other Jews.
Albertus and Margaretha Haverkort
Albertus and Margaretha Haverkort lived in the city of Sassenheim in
the center of Holland. Albertus, who was a member of the local
underground movement in Holland, helped Jews in many ways including
finding hiding places for them. He also hid six Jews in his family’s house
and looked after their needs. In June 1943, Albertus was arrested for his
underground activities and taken to the Vught concentration camp, where
he was tortured and killed in August 1944. Of the six Jews whom he
hid, only three have been identified: Jo Karp, who stayed there until
Albertus’ arrest, and Ida and Abraham Faerber, who hid there until the
end of the war.
Recently, the Haverkorts’ son, Henk, found a Certificate of
Appreciation from Keren Kayemet L’Israel in his parents’ house which
was awarded for a tree that was planted in the Land of Israel immediately
—
after the war in the name of Albertus Haverkort by Abraham Faerber—
dedicated to “the help that the Haverkorts provided in those dark days
of the Nazi occupation.” Henk decided to try to locate the Faerber
family, and with the help of Mrs. Ruth de Jong, placed an ad in the
newspaper of the Dutch community in Israel. Alice Lieberman-Faerber,
the daughter of Abraham and Ida Faerber read the advertisement and
contacted the Haverkort family.
TOGETHER 19
Hiding in Plain Sight: The Incredible True Story
of a German-Jewish Teenager’s Struggle to
Survive in Nazi-Occupied Poland
The Origins of the Final Solution:
The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March
1942
by Christopher R. Browning (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska
Press, 2004) 615p., US$39.50. CAN$52.00.
Browning, a professor of history at the University of
North Carolina–Chapel Hill, and the author of a number
of important works on the process of destruction of
European Jewry, here examines the period from September
1939 through March 1942, because it was during this
time that the Nazis decided to implement the Final
Solution. Hitler did not have to ask for a specific plan to
solve the “Jewish Question,” he simply had to articulate
the problem and reward those competing to provide
various solutions. Each ministry affected by Nazi Jewish
policy had its own “Jewish desk” to advise about the impact
of anti-Jewish legislation. The experts also participated in
interministerial meetings to defend their approach, and to ensure their views
would be taken into consideration. The cumulative effect of all these “Jewish
experts” created a momentum and a steady stream of anti-Jewish measures.
Even as the Jews were being deported to the ghettos and extermination camps,
the bureaucracy was churning out new anti-Jewish decrees. When the war broke
out in September 1939, solving the Jewish question became an “opportunity
and an obligation,” that the Nazi bureaucracy eagerly and enthusiastically
assumed.
A Wolf in the Attic: The Legacy of a
Hidden Child of the Holocaust
by Sophia Richman (Binghamton, New York: Haworth
Press, 2002) 240p., US$49.95 CAN$65.00.
Today, Sophia Richman is a practicing psychologist and
psychoanalyst licensed in New York and New Jersey. Born
in Lwow on January 28, 1941, she was five months old
when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, and the
systematic murder of the Jews of Europe began. During
the Second World War, she was hidden along with her
mother among Christians in a village not far from Lwow.
In the forward to this book, her husband notes that this account of her life
during the war is about the effects of trauma, of the search for her identity
at time when the world would like to forget the Holocaust. She is now a wife
and a mother, but not a victim. This memoir is Dr. Richman’s attempt to
understand how the traumatic experiences of her youth shaped her life and her
effort to deal with them.
For years, the trauma of the hidden children was minimized because they
had not experienced the concentration camps. Parents also urged their children
to forget their past. For many years Sophia Richman did not consider herself a
survivor. But as the older survivors are dying out, the hidden children are being
asked to assume the responsibility of witness. Writing her story has enabled her
to take one more major step to come out of
hiding. Fortunately, other hidden children are confronting
their pasts providing us with another dimension of life
during the Holocaust.
Ben’s Story: Holocaust Letters With
Selections From The Dutch Underground
Press edited by Kees W. Bolle (Carbondale, Illinois:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001) 150 p.,
US$24.95 CAN$33.25
In the 1930s, Kees Bolle, a professor emeritus of history
from UCLA, and Ben Wessels were boyhood friends in Oostvoorne, a village in
the Netherlands. Ben died at Bergen-Belsen a month before the camp was
liberated in April 1945. While visiting a friend in Oostvoorne many years
after the war, Bolle found Ben’s letters describing his family’s tragic experiences
during the Holocaust. Bolle translated Ben’s letters and the reports from the
Dutch underground press such as Vrj Nederland (The Free Netherlands) and
Het Parool, and reconstructs a different perspective of life in the Netherlands
during the Second World War than is generally portrayed. As Bolle notes,
whatever else can be said about the book, Ben’s story touches us on the
“deepest level.”
TOGETHER 20
by Betty Lauer (Hanover, New Hampshire: Smith and Kraus
Global, 2004) 561p., US $27.95. CAN$36.35.
In October 1938, 12-year-old Bertel Weissberger was living
in Hindenburg, Germany with her mother and sister waiting
for American visas. They were to join father Oskar who had
been expelled from Germany in March 1938 and now living
in the U.S. In October, the Germans entered Hindenburg,
and Bertel and her family were deported to Poland.
Until the Nazis invaded the country on September 1, 1939, the Weissberger’s
were able to live in Poland as Jews, but with many restrictions. Then they were
forced into ghettos and concentration camps. Eva and her mother succeeded in
obtaining fake Polish papers enabling them to pass as Polish Christians.
In an attempt to evade being caught by the Nazis, they hid in plain sight.
Their roller-caster ride of harrowing experiences, near misses of being caught
and her escape to Sweden stowing away on a ship make this an exciting and
thrilling memoir.
Auschwitz: A New History
by Laurence Rees (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005),
327p., US$30.00 CAN$39.00
Through the prism of Auschwitz, Laurence Rees, the
Creative Director of History Programs for the BBC, explains
how human beings behaved in such an extreme manner against
the Jews during the Holocaust. His research involved
interviewing about 100 survivors, Nazi perpetrators and many
former members of the Nazi Party. Significantly, Rees found
that a number of Nazis justified their participation in “one of
the worst crimes in history” because they thought they were doing the “right
thing,” instead of “I was ordered to do it.” Not one member of the SS at
Auschwitz, he notes, was prosecuted for refusal to engage in the killing process.
Yet there is abundant evidence that stealing by the SS at the camp was a real
problem. An interesting look into the outlook of the perpetrators.
Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and
America’s Most Important Newspaper
by Laurel Leff (New York: Cambridge University Press),
university Press, 426p.,
US$29.00. CAN $35.00.
A number of books and articles have been written about
what was reported in the American press about the
Holocaust. Laurel Leff, a former reporter for the Wall Street
Journal who teaches journalism at Northeastern University
in Boston, has written an excellent study on how The New
York Times reported about the Shoah throughout the war.
Leff explains that from the advent of the war in Europe
on September 1, 1939 until it ended six years later, the Times
considered the persecution and mass murder of the Jews in Europe as of secondary
importance. There were 1,186 stories about the Jews, or about 17 stories a
month-but the “story never received the continuous attention or prominent
play that a story about the unprecedented attempt to wipe out an entire people
deserved.”
A fascinating and important book. A sad commentary on the Jewish owners
of the Times who were reluctant to inform their readers about the greatest
crime against their fellow Jews.
Elka’s Growing Up in a Changing World by Elly Berkovits
Gross, with illustrations by Steven Myerson (New York: Elly Berkovits Gross,
2005).
Designated as a book for children 7 years old and
up, this is a child’s tale of the author’s travails growing
up in Simleul-Silvaniei, Romanies, Transylvania. It is
hard to characterize this work as a children’s book because
it is essentially a pre-Holocaust autobiography told on a
very simplistic level. There are lessons learned,
confrontations with antisemitism, and responsibilities
assumed upon the illnesses of her father and brother.
But the story ends before the Holocaust takes place (while
she is but 12 years old) and then concludes with some
poems. This is definitely a different way of telling one’s
story.
including losing their youngest daughter, Ann, to cancer, on the eve of Rosh
Hashanah, 1979. They lived life to the fullest and remained very active to the
very end of their lives. Frieda passed away January 3, 2003, and Simon passed
away February 20, 2003. They were laid to rest at New Montefiore Cemetery
together with a memorial for their loved ones lost in the Holocaust and daughter
Ann.
Israel Harold Eisenberg
Ann Frajlich Szedlecki
Israel Harold Eisenberg died on July 13, 2004. Uncle Harold was in a concentration
camp during his teenage years. He lost an entire family and extended family during
that horrific time in his young life. He witnessed the death of his father being shot
by a Nazi just two days before being liberated. Although the atrocities of the Holocaust
took Uncle Harold’s entire family and so many friends from him, the Nazi’s were
defeated in killing his love of God and Judaism. Following the Holocaust, Uncle
Harold became a loyal Zionist and successful businessman. He gave regularly and
generously to many different Jewish organizations. He was a devoted supporter
of Israel and made numerous contributions to Israel throughout his
lifetime. Furthermore, on the occasion of my son’s bar mitzvah, the rabbi relinquished
his temple tradition of leading the congregation in reciting the Kaddish. Instead, Uncle
Harold was invited to recite the Kaddish which included mention of the 100 family
members that had perished in the Holocaust. Finally, Uncle Harold’s personal story
has been documented by the Shoah Foundation. The only belonging he had in his
possession during his liberation from the concentration camp—a metal tag with his
prisoner identification number—is preserved in the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C. — Sheri Sand
Kalman Ferenczfalvi
Kalman Ferenczfalvi, credited with saving the lives of some 2,000 Jews during the
Holocaust. Ferenczfalvi, 84, died April 8 in the eastern Hungarian city of Debrecen
after suffering a brain hemorrhage, said Balazs Kiss, a filmmaker who directed a
documentary featuring testimony about his lifesaving acts during World War II. In
1988, Ferenczfalvi was granted the title of “Righteous Among The Nations” by Yad
Vashem. During World War II, Ferenczfalvi worked as an administrator of a labor
brigade, which many Jews were forced into during the latter stages of the war.
Disregarding orders, Ferenczfalvi designated the workers to guard the Budapest
headquarters of the International Red Cross, thereby protecting the brigade members
from deportation and likely death. He also forged papers for Jews and others being
persecuted by the Nazis and their Hungarian allies. After World War II, Ferenczfalvi
worked as a bookkeeper for several state companies during the Communist regime.
He is survived by a son and daughter.
Simon and Frieda Lipschitz
Simon and Frieda Lipschitz were both born
in the town of Chzanover, Poland, near
Krakow in 1924. They were both raised in
Orthodox families. Simon’s parents were
Moshe and Gila, and Frieda’s parents were
Chaim and Rivka. Both families owned and
operated industrial supply businesses. Simon
was the youngest of eleven and Frieda was
the oldest of five. Simon survived the
Holocaust, together with five of his siblings.
Frieda survived along with three others. After
the war, Simon cared for Frieda and six other
women (sisters and sisters-in-law) in
Antwerpen, Belgium. Both Simon and Frieda
acted heroically endless times throughout the many concentration camps that they
were each subjected to, helping to save the lives of their siblings and others. Simon
was liberated at Buchenwald by a unit of the U.S. Seventh Army, one hour prior to
his scheduled hanging; Frieda was liberated from Bergen-Belsen by a unit of the
British Army. After spending time in Europe and in Israel, they emigrated to the
U.S. via Ellis Island, in 1956, to Columbus, Ohio, with help from a Jewish agency.
In 1962 they moved to Brooklyn, New York, and then Bellemore, Long Island in
1971, and then Cranbury, New Jersey to an adult community center in 1990. During
those years in the U.S., they raised five children, and helped them through college.
Simon owned and operated a plumbing business in New York, while Frieda was a
stay-at-home mother and very much involved in many community and artistic
activities. She spoke five languages fluently and authored many poems. Simon was
an expert chess player and extremely well-read and knowledgeable of World War II
history, as well as current global geopolitical events. They both actively supported
Israeli and Jewish causes. In their later years, besides being socially active, they
enjoyed their children and ten grandchildren greatly. Simon and Frieda wanted their
children and grandchildren to never forget the Holocaust nor their heritage. Simon
and Frieda stayed together and endured many hardships throughout their lives,
Ann Frajlich Szedlecki of Toronto passed
away peacefully early on May 7, after a 10month battle with colon cancer. At the time
of her passing, she was surrounded by her
only daughter and several close friends. Born
in 1925 in Lodz, Poland, Ann Frajlich first
lived in the Bialystock Ghetto from where
she and her brother Shoel escaped to the Soviet Union and then to Leninogorsk,
Kazachstan. Her brother was arrested and sentenced to hard labor and died in
1943. She was also sentenced to hard labor for six months for taking a day off
from school to give him a Jewish funeral. The sole survivor of her large family,
she moved to Canada in 1953 after spending several years in Israel. She was a
popular lecturer for the Toronto Holocaust Committee, a contributor to the
Canadian Jewish News and other publications, and a Jewish Meals on Wheels
volunteer for 15 years. She leaves behind her husband Abraham Szedlecki, daughter
and son-in-law, Lynda and Marty Kraar of Teaneck, NJ, and two grandchildren,
Miriam Malka and Yona Sarah. Donations can be made to the Temmy Latner
Center for Palliative Care or the Holocaust Committee of the Jewish Federation
of Greater Toronto.
JOHN KLEIN
In Memoriam
By Sam E. Bloch
It is very difficult to reconcile ourselves with the
sad fact that our dear friend, John Klein, is no longer
with us. I write these lines, on behalf of all his friends
gripped by years of memory, emotion and nostalgia.
How much do we miss our “Yanek”—this wonderful
human being and remarkable man of action and loyalty
who inspired us all with his personality, passion, and
idealistic devotion to so many causes which are dear
to us. We always admired his courage, his judgment,
integrity and dedication to the cause of Holocaust
remembrance and commemoration, and fruitful work
for the well being of Israel’s soldiers. He had such an incredible energy, resulting in
so many significant achievements.
John emerged from the abyss of the Holocaust as a fighter for life and survival,
with a vibrant tenacity to rebuild his life with so many talents and a seemingly
boundless drive. As a Holocaust survivor he exemplified the proud Jew who dedicated
his life, since the liberation from Nazi hell, to the heritage and essence of remembrance.
He was inspirational with creative leadership that reached out to others, galvanizing
them to do what is right for the Israel Defense Forces, for the memory of our
victims that perished during the Holocaust, with personal warmth, wisdom and
modesty. He communicated but also listened. His unflagging devotion to the Jewish
people, to our tradition and faith, and his selflessness and determination in promoting
his objectives, influenced others near and far. John’s personal charm was heartwarming
to all who knew him, bringing to his work, knowledge, understanding, deep
commitment and also a pleasant way of dealing with others. His actions were a
guiding light and inspiration to all his friends to follow him.
John’s crowning achievement has been his tireless effort, over the years, on
behalf of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. His heart was always with the
Israeli soldiers in whose hands Israel’s safety and future rest. He took so much
pride in visiting with them so frequently and bringing them our love, support and
concern for their welfare. He conducted every campaign with wisdom and dignity,
integrity and loyalty to his friends and associates. All of us owe him a tremendous
debt of gratitude.
We have always been impressed by the way in which John has managed to instill
his love to his family and his life’s example of steadfast devotion to them. It is often
said “one man can make a difference.” All of us certainly know how true it was with
John Klein in our midst. We remember him with our pledge to continue and
advance his efforts on behalf of Israel and its glorious Defense Forces. By his shining
example he brought honor to all of us. He was a pillar of strength and a living
witness of the triumph of the human spirit. His wisdom, resolve and sense of deep
commitment to our goals, and above all his close friendship will live in our hearts
forever.
TOGETHER 21
DESIGNATING THE RIGHTEOUS
By Dr. Alex Grobman
A VISIT TO THE NEW MUSEUM AT YAD VASHEM
By Joel Fishman
MAKOR RISHON - I had the opportunity to visit the newly dedicated museum
of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem, a museum that is beautifully built and designed.
Its surroundings are modern and aesthetic. There is an enormous amount of
visual information in the form of artifacts, photos, posters, paintings, and
films, including visuals of the era and sincere personal testimonies of Holocaust
survivors. One’s first impression upon entering is a view into several adjoining
brick mansions with large windows. Through each window, one looks at
prewar Jews going about their daily lives and doing their jobs. Among the
exhibits are the interiors of the home of a middle class German Jewish physician,
a cobblestone street in Poland with tracks for trams, and a German railway
freight car cut in half. Walking from room to room, different loudspeakers fill
the air with sounds of the period: the roaring masses at the Nuremburg rallies,
Jewish musical performers, and railway cars being joined. Above eye-level,
there are displays of signs of various municipalities stating that Jews were not
wanted. One of the last displays is the Hall of Remembrance that has a large
dome suspended over a platform. Looking up, one sees the faces of many Jews
who are no more, and, looking down the center of the platform, several stories
beneath, there is an approximately eight foot hole quarried in bedrock to the
water level. On the surrounding walls, are yards upon yards of Yad Vashem files
containing the names of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. When one leaves
the museum, one is hit with the beautiful view of the pastoral hills of Jerusalem.
The purpose of Yad Vashem is to preserve the memory of the victims and it
has ably done so with honor and dignity. Every museum has a message, and
despite a surfeit of information, some important parts of the historical account
have not yet received sufficient emphasis here. A display on North African
Jewry during the Holocaust is a welcome addition. Yet, though the assimilated
Jewish middle class is well represented, one doesn’t get a sense of the proletariat
life of Amsterdam or the vital but poverty-stricken life of the religiously-observant
Eastern European Jews. There is a striking display of portraits of Jewish thinkers,
such as Leo Baeck, but no corresponding representation of the great rabbis of
Eastern Europe. Missing is a genuine awareness of the world of the Torah. One
misses, particularly, the images of such outstanding contemporary photographers
as Roman Vishniac and Tim Gidal.
The story regarding those who could have helped the victims but did not,
or the evil ones who prevented rescue of the persecuted and thus sealed their
fate could be told more comprehensively. There is a circumspect reference to
Pope Pius the XII, who failed to speak out against genocide, leaving the clergy
of the Church without guidance. Aerial photos of Auschwitz raise the question
of why the Allies did not bomb the camp, despite the fact that it was within
their reach.
The Yad Vashem Museum is world class and unique. Its designers and
curator have given careful thought to the natural setting of the Museum and
created a memorable experience for the visitor. It is fitting and appropriate
that the State of Israel should have this dignified and tasteful public monument.
Joel Fishman is a Fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
TOGETHER 22
Ma’ariv recently reported that Yad Vashem is
considering making Pope John Paul II a Righteous
Gentile. It would have been nice to give to him during
his lifetime. There is much confusion about how the
Righteous are chosen, so it might be instructive to
review how Yad Vashem designates this award.
In 1953, the Knesset passed the Martyrs and
Heroes’ Remembrance Law creating Yad Vashem in
Jerusalem, Israel’s national memorial to the six million
Jews. As part of its mandate, Yad Vashem established
a Commission for the Designation of the Righteous to honor “the high minded
Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews.” The commission is chaired by a
member of the Supreme Court of Israel.
To be granted the title “Righteous Among the Nations,” the rescuer must
have:
a. On his own initiative been actively and directly involved in saving a Jew
from being killed or sent to a concentration camp when the Jews were trapped in
a country under the control of the Germans or their collaborators during the
most dangerous periods of the Holocaust and totally dependent on the goodwill
of non-Jews.
b. Risked everything including his life, freedom, and safety.
c. Not received any form of remuneration or reward as a precondition for
providing help.
d. Offered proof from the survivor or incontrovertible archival evidence that
the deeds had “caused” a rescue that would not otherwise have occurred and thus
went beyond what might be regarded as ordinary assistance.
Risk is the basic criterion for granting this award — not altruism. Those
who aided Jews in countries that were not under Nazi rule or who had diplomatic
immunity where there was little or no risk are not eligible for consideration. Jews
also cannot be proposed for this honor. The three basic criteria are thus: risk,
survival, and evidence.
A candidate is nominated by those who were saved. Notarized applications
are sent directly to Yad Vashem through an Israeli embassy or consulate. Data
requested by Yad Vashem about the rescuer include the individual’s name,
approximate age at the time, present address, occupation, and marital status
during the war.
In addition to these questions, the witness-survivor is asked:
a. To describe briefly his or her life before the start of the rescue story.
b. How and when the rescuer was met.
c. Who initiated the rescue.
d. Dates and places of rescue.
e. The nature of aid given and if this involved hiding, what were the
conditions.
f. If there were any financial arrangements.
g. The rescuer’s motivations.
h. The risks involved.
i. How the cover-up story (presence of the witness) was explained to others.
j. The relations between the witness and rescuer at the time.
k. The name and age of others in the rescuer household who helped and the
nature of assistance provided by each individual.
l. The nature of the departure from the rescuer.
m. The names and addresses of others who helped the rescuer.
n. The type of incidents that occurred during the stay at the rescuer’s home.
Finally, the witness is asked to nominate the individual or individuals in the
rescuer’s home for the title of “Righteous Among the Nations.” The commission
is composed of thirty members. Practically all are survivors who come from
various social strata of Israeli society. Some, for example, work in the public
sector; others are professionals. The commission meets between twenty to twentyfive times a year, sometimes as many as thirty. They are divided into three
subcommittees with ten in each. At every session they consider at least twelve
cases.
Each case is meticulously examined witnesses are interviewed, testimony is
heard, and documents are reviewed. Certain cases are fairly straightforward; others
are complex. In a situation where there is a dispute, a plenum is convened to
resolve the issue. The commission works on precedent and guidelines established
over the years. In this way, they avoid codifying the criteria. Common sense
plays a major role in all their decisions.
Dr. Grobman is an historian, whose most recent book is Battling for Souls: The Vaad Hatzala
Rescue Committee in Post War Europe [KTAV]. He is also co-author of Denying History:
Who Says The Holocaust Never Happened And Why Do They Say It? (University of California
Press, 2000).
THE PIETY OF POPE JOHN
PAUL II: A Jewish Appreciation
By Michael Berenbaum
It is a paradox of the Holocaust that the innocent feel
guilty and the guilty innocent. Nowhere is this paradox
more pronounced that in the post-Holocaust behavior of
the Roman Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II made
confronting the Shoah and the fight against antisemitism a
centerpiece of his papacy. He brought Roman Catholic-Jewish
relations to a new level of respect. Like his predecessor, Pope
John XXIII, the late Pontiff was directly touched by the Holocaust and assumed
responsibility for its memory.
With Vatican II, Pope John XXIII accepted the ongoing life of the Jewish
people after the arrival of Jesus, rejecting supercessionism—the doctrine that
Christianity had come to replace Judaism. He eliminated the charge of deicide
and removed it from Catholic teaching and liturgy; he stopped to greet Jews
leaving a Rome synagogue on Sabbath, yet neither he nor his two immediate
successors accepted the renascent State of Israel. Enter Pope John Paul II, who as
a young man in Poland witnessed the Shoah. The Pope’s hometown was the site
of a large ghetto whose Jews were deported to death camps.
As a young university student, and when he worked in the theater, Karol
Wojtyla had Jewish friends. Later, as a newly ordained young priest, he was asked
to baptize Jewish children raised by Polish Catholics, who sheltered them during
the Shoah. When their Jewish parents did not return, the families that raised
them wanted them to be Catholics. The future Pope insisted that Jewish children
first be informed of their Jewish origins and only then could they be baptized. It
was an act of courage—political, religious and pastoral in postwar Poland, a deed
of profound respect for memory. Many were reluctant to tell their charges who
they were, fearing reprisal from the local antisemites.
As Pope John Paul II, Wojtyla recognized the State of Israel. He visited a
synagogue for prayer and treated the rabbi and the congregation of Rome with
every religious courtesy. Instead of dividing the world between Christians and
Jews, he spoke of the commonality of religious traditions. And he spoke out
against antisemitism again and again. He visited the sites of Jewish death camps,
and on numerous occasions, acknowledged the centrality of the Shoah.
In March 2000, Pope John Paul II visited Israel—and not just the Holy
NEVER AGAIN. NOT EVER!
by JJeanette
eanette F
riedman
Friedman
Second Generation North Jersey was founded in 1979,
but its original name was Group Project for Holocaust
Education. We naively thought I would find people from all
walks of life who would sign on. No such luck. It became a
social action and rap group for the children of Holocaust
survivors in Bergen County. No one else seemed to care
much, so we started by getting the local synagogues to
commemorate the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah. “Never
Again!” was our motto.
But whenever we said “Never Again!” we weren’t really
clear on what that meant. Did it mean Never Again should genocide ever happen?
Or did it mean Never Again a genocide of the Jews? I remember at least five
genocides in my lifetime...and basically, the world stood idly by. Some of us went to
Macedonia during the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans to help some refugees in
1999. It was less than a drop in the bucket and very late in the game.
Every Yom HaShoah, we Jews remind the world that it stood idly by as the
blood of the Six Million soaked into European soil. Yet when we see other people
murdered by their governments and neighbors for being “outsiders,” most often we
remain silent. We conveniently forget that even American Jewry didn’t really
understand the process of the extermination of their brethren in Europe. So they
were silent—but there were also two small points of light: A protest against the
destruction of Europe’s Jews in Madison Square Garden and the ultra-Orthodox
Rabbi’s March on Washington.
About an hour after Shabbat, the night before Mother’s Day, award-winning
filmmaker, Menachem Daum, also a child of Holocaust survivors, called and asked
me to accompany him to protest the genocide in Darfur. It was sponsored by a
group of college students from Yeshiva University and www.notnownotever.org. So
on Mother’s Day, we met at Cherry Hill in Central Park and found hundreds of
Jewish students listening to Jewish leaders and leaders who happen to be Jewish
talking about the importance of stopping genocide—because they’d learned something
from the Holocaust.
Yet of the hundreds who were there—most of them students from Yeshiva
University—there was but a tiny handful of African Americans and people of color.
Of the handful, three were from Darfur. When I questioned an African American
Land. From the moment he arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport to the moment he
departed, it was clear to Roman Catholics and Jews—and the international media—
that this was an extraordinary gesture of reconciliation in the shadow of two
millennia of Christian antisemitism and the massive shadow of the Holocaust.
Even if Pope John Paul II did not say everything that could be said—he apologized
for the antisemitism of Christians—not of Christianity—his bowed head at Yad
Vashem and his note of apology inserted into the Western Wall—said more than
could be said by words alone. An eyewitness to the Holocaust, he had come to
make amends.
He took all-important steps to make certain that the full authority of the
papacy was brought to bear against antisemitism. His theology was quite simple:
antisemitism is anti-Christian and a sin against God. Every Jew welcomed these
words and one could sense their power by the manner in which the Israelis received
him. Even ultra-Orthodox Rabbis, opposed by conviction to anything ecumenical,
were deeply impressed by the Papal visit to the offices of the Israel’s Chief Rabbis.
Pope John Paul II’s record was not perfect. He attempted to canonize Pope
Pius XII, the wartime Pontiff. He did not open the Vatican Archives from World
War II for researchers on the Holocaust. He canonized Pope Leo IX, who forbid
the return of a forcibly baptized Jewish child to his family; he welcomed PLO
terrorist Yasser Arafat and President Kurt Waldheim to the Vatican, the former
before he recognized Israel, and the latter after his Nazi past was exposed. Yet
none of this can obscure the overriding substance of his papacy. He demonstrated
that true religiosity need not demonize other religions, disparage other faiths or
demean their right to worship God in their own ways.
The innocent ones who felt guilty have led contemporary Roman Catholicism
to renounce antisemitism and to accept the integrity of the ongoing religious life
of the Jews. This behavior should serve as a model for Jews and Muslims as well as
for other religious leaders as to the ethical requirements of religious doctrine.
It is our prayer that Pope Benedictine XVI, who was once a member of the
Hitler Youth in Germany, will revere the religious ethic that sees all people as
created in the image of God, an ethic Pope John Paul II incarnated in his very
being. The world badly needs such a demonstration.
Michael Berenbaum is a Professor of Theology [Adjunct] at the University of
Judaism and Director of its Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and
Religious Implications of the Holocaust. He is the co-author of After the Passion
Has Gone: American Religious Consequences.
college student, who was wearing a kippah, about why the black community hadn’t
joined the protest, he couldn’t really say—and suggested that perhaps they are too
self-absorbed.
Then I spotted a Jewish leader in the crowd. He is with an umbrella organization
in the city, and I asked him, as the editor of a Holocaust survivors’ newspaper, if he
would do a piece about Darfur and why Never Again applied to everyone. I also
asked him why his peers and colleagues from the black community weren’t there.
And he said something interesting, something important, something we ought to
think about...
He said he wasn’t “up there,” meaning the podium, precisely because the black
community hadn’t joined with the Jews to protest the genocide of black people by
their Arab neighbors. It was not the job of the Jews to take the lead all the time.
Others also had to show responsibility and leadership in their own communities,
responsibilities they continued to shirk. The only group who was really trying to
stop the genocide in Darfur, he noted, was the U.S. Congress!
Richard Joel, president of YU, got up and quoted Pastor Niemoller. Ruth
Messinger talked about the suffering and pain she witnessed when she visited with
the Darfur refugees from the Sudan in their camps. Human Rights Watch speaker,
Manu Krishnm, noted how Sudan sits on the Human Rights committee, and how
the U.N. refuses to label the murders as genocide. All of it had a familiar ring.
I asked a member of the NYPD if he’d ever seen a protest by college students
that looked like the one he was watching. He said it wasn’t a protest, it was a rally.
How do you rally for genocide? I asked. It’s a protest against genocide. But it was a
protest where no one was hurling curses or smoking weed—and therefore it was
boring to the media.
So Daum asks, “Why are we here on Mother’s Day, when we could be with our
families? What will we accomplish here today? Will we sleep better because we
didn’t do ‘nothing’? Did we do this so that when someone says to us, children of
survivors, where were you during the genocide in Darfur? I can say, ‘I was in Cherry
Hill, with a few lonely Jews. At least we tried to do something.’”
We heard a few speeches, talked to people in the crowd (many of them from
Teaneck, many of them descendants of Holocaust survivors) signed a few postcards
to legislators, handed over a few dollars and went to dinner at the Kasbah, where
you were greeted by a huge sign, Welcome Moshiach—and the Lubavitcher Rebbe
endlessly handed out dollars on a closed circuit TV set.
So much for being a tiny point of light. Moshiach will have to wait until we get
it right.
TOGETHER 23
“PLOWING STONES”
THE PARTISANS OF VILNA
B
egina Weinr
eich
Byy R
Regina
einreich
One should not ask why was there no resistance. Rather wonder, how was there any
at all. Symposium, CUNY Graduate Center
A sculpture in relief at the entrance to Yad Vashem shows anguished figures
walking into ovens. This was the widely held perception of the Jews of Europe
during my childhood, that they, docile and abject, could easily be led to death.
Images of victims dominated the media: Skeletons in striped pajamas. Naked bodies
piled in shallow ditches. Airless trains with groping disembodied limbs. Children
behind barbed wire. News that there had been a Jew there to say no to all that had
not yet surfaced for the mainstream in the silence that surrounded the Holocaust.
Resistance with its implied defiance and empowerment seemed out of the question
for me, observing my parents—each a sole survivor of a large family living in Lodz—
and the other refugees I knew as a child. One, my “tante” Rosa [Rosa Schachter who
is really my mother’s cousin] escaped the concentration camps’ claw pretending to be
a regular Polish Catholic girl, and who with pluck and luck survived and ended up
helping Jews make illegal transports to Palestine. So beyond the public eye, such
stories became legend. Historians had already recorded the Warsaw Ghetto uprising
and the four girls at Birkenau, Rosa Robota among them, who amassed enough
gunpowder to bomb the crematoria, derailing the murder of Jews for a day or so.
They were tortured and hung in the camp square. And then there was Sobibor,
where camp operations were halted altogether by teenaged boys who hacked to
death their Nazi torturers. Such a story existed too.
When the information began to unravel, when debates over whether or not the
untoward events of the Holocaust should or should not be the fodder for fiction, a
paradox of how never to forget warred against how to remember with the conclusion
that the best, most authentic testimonies are from the survivors themselves. Gathering
these was tricky as the survivor population was already dwindling.
Surprisingly few documentaries were made of eyewitness accounts. One thinks
of Shoah, Hotel Terminus, some Spielberg efforts woven of interviews his Shoah
Foundation for Visual History accumulated after he filmed the Oscar winning
Schindler’s List. And there was also a gem of a documentary, Partisans of Vilna
(1986), now out in DVD, featuring the story of a commando unit comprised of
brave teenagers who conducted sabotage missions against the Nazis. Archival footage
and interviews with the remaining resistance fighters provide the core of this small
yet epic historic moment. Chief among the heroic men and women was Abba Kovner,
still charismatic and eloquent in his later years. By any standards of fiction or nonfiction storytelling, the filmmakers Josh Waletsky and Aviva Kempner have created a
riveting, thrillingly suspenseful film. Screened recently at YIVO, the film brought
cheers from the audience. I could imagine though, this film being as compelling for
everyone.
As a child growing up in the comforts of middle class Brooklyn having made the
voyage by boat with my parents from Bremenhaven, I knew a wealth of private acts
of courage. Foraging for that life saving potato peel, a momentous crust of bread.
Always for me, who by a fluke of history ended up here and not there, there is the
haunting question, who would I have been under those circumstances? A fighter? A
rescuer? A cry baby? Now revisiting the Holocaust through a vision of possibilities
offered by this documentary, I must ask again.
They were alive
By Borys Zinger
It’s some were like twinkling
In my eyes vision
But my eyes are closed,
In dark faces are blinking
Many many in disorder.
To me they turn with question
Not much sense my lips mention,
Unable to prenounce
Anything in order...
Faces various faces.
Girly faces, teary faces
Why are you here why
I wish my sleep is a lie.
TOGETHER 24
Those visions I often met
But all of those human faces
Are not more around
Thrown alife deep into ground
Half naked —unshod,
The ground soaken with living blood
—
I woke up with a scream ;
O god! where am I?
O god all—mighty;
Lash out your revenge
On those who embarassed
your name
Punish and enlighten
Those who are to blame
Let it not happen ever again.
HOUSTON, TX – Holocaust Museum Houston presents a unique view of
one of history’s darkest periods in a new exhibit opening July 22, from an artist’s
abstract conception of the emotion, drama, and courage the period fostered.
“Plowing Stones” will be the first exhibition of 28 new works from the “Holocaust
Series” by abstract expressionist Saúl Balagura and includes a 24-foot installation
and works in oil, acrylic, and watercolor on paper and canvas. Accompanying the
exhibition is the debut of a book of poetry and prose by Balagura under the same
name.
Balagura will complete one work, a 7-foot by 11-foot mural, during the
opening reception on July 21. Unique to the exhibit is the fact that, unlike other
artists who depict Holocaust themes, Balagura is not a Holocaust survivor and
has not even visited a concentration camp, drawing instead from his own mind
to depict both the horror and the hope of the period. “I had been painting and
writing for 40 years before I ever started the Holocaust Series,” said Balagura.
Of his motivation, he says simply, “These are memories of something I never
saw. It’s like something cast in my mind, in my imagination, that I felt compelled
to do.” Of critics who might question works of art based on the Holocaust, he
says, “I see the Holocaust like Chagall saw his ‘little village.’ It is the same
philosophy, no difference. These are my landscapes.”
His interest in the Holocaust began in the 1940s when the future Israeli
Prime Minister Menachem Begin visited Balagura’s childhood home in Colombia
and talked of the displaced people who needed a homeland. Later, Balagura
remembers learning that a close childhood friend who had died had once been a
prisoner at the concentration camp in Buchenwald, Germany.
“I never knew what she must have lived through until after she died. She
never talked about it. That event started a thought process that never ceased
from that day on,” he said.
Emotion is a common theme of his works. The painting and poem “Go
Away,” are intended to depict the horrible moment when parents had to make a
decision to part with their children to save them. “One can say that such a
terrible psychological conundrum that so many parents had to experience during
the war may symbolize the inhumanity mankind can inflict upon itself. There are
symbolic aspects in the painting that raise the question of survival for those
parents that stay as well as for the children that are leaving,” Balagura said.
“Death Posing for the Artist,” the 24-foot installation, was conceived as a
long roll of paper symbolizing the Torah. Over a three-year period, its content
emerged as Balagura’s conception of what must have been the last thoughts of a
man just before dying. Balagura says the title of his exhibition, “Plowing Stones,”
reflects the change in consciousness of the dangers of intolerance and violence, as
exemplified by the Holocaust, that he hopes patrons will undergo. “When you
plow a field of stones, you hope that by moving the stones, you will expose some
earth and that something good will grow from it,” he said.
Balagura was born in Cali, Colombia, in 1943, almost a decade after his
parents emigrated from Romania. His first solo painting exhibition was at age
17. Throughout his life, he has moved in parallel universes of arts and sciences.
The self-taught artist is also an M.D. with a degree from Universidad del Valle
and holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Princeton University and a neurosurgery
degree from Albert Einstein Medical Center. In 1994, he retired from the world
of science and opened a studio in Tesuque, New Mexico, where he now pursues
painting and writing. His expressionistic work is a direct result of the interaction
of his scientific background with artistic influences from artists as varied as Willem
de Kooning, Eduardo Guayasamin, el Greco, Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García
Márquez. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the
United States.
Underwriting for Balagura’s poetry book, “Plowing Stones,” was provided
by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
Also at Holocaust Museum Houston from July 15 through Oct. 9 is “In the
Shadow of the Swastika: Hermann Wygoda,” which chronicles the life of Hermann
Wygoda, a Polish Jew whose parents, siblings and son were murdered in the gas
chambers of Nazi death camps and who, himself, ended up commanding an
Italian partisan unit.
PLEASE SEND YOUR
EMAIL ADDRESS AND THOSE OF YOUR
FAMILY MEMBERS TO
[email protected]
YOU CAN ALSO SEND MATERIAL
FOR CONSIDERATION FOR PUBLICATION
Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Applicants should consult the Archival
Guide to the Collections on the Center’s home page at www.ushmm.org/research/
center.
Yad Vashem
ifth JJee wish E
ducators SSeminar:
eminar: ‘‘T
Teaching A
bout the
ashem’’s F
Fifth
Educators
About
Holocaust’
World F
ederation of JJeewish Child SSur
ur
viv
ors of the H
olocaust
Federation
urviv
vivors
Holocaust
“Still Going Strong 1945-2005”
Amster
dam, N
etherlands
Amsterdam,
Netherlands
August 19-22, 2005
This conference is held under the auspices of the World Federation of Jewish Child
Survivors of the Holocaust. This is open to child survivors and all children and
grandchildren of survivors, regardless of the age their parents were during the Shoah.
For more information please visit www.congres2005.nl
Women and the H
olocaust: The Thir
d IInternational
nternational Confer
ence
Holocaust
Third
Conference
Gender Issues in Holocaust Studies
September 5 - 7, 2005 Israel.
September 5 in Beit Berl College
September 6 in B
eit Ter
ereezin
Beit
eit Lochamei H
aG
eta
’ot
September 7 in B
Beit
HaG
aGeta
eta’ot
The conference will focus on issues of gender and sexuality. It will examine the ways
women and men coped with significant changes they went through during the
Holocaust, how they viewed these changes and the insights they attained. Sessions
will be held in Hebrew and English. For more information contact Anita Tarsi
[email protected].
The SSev
ev
enth H
olocaust SStudies
tudies Confer
ence at M
iddle Tennessee SState
tate
eventh
Holocaust
Conference
Middle
ersity - “F
uschwitz.”
Univ
niversity
“Frrom Liberation to Life: 60 Years after A
Auschwitz.”
October 27-29, 2005
Papers or panels by researchers, faculty members, and advanced graduate students on
all aspects of Holocaust studies will be considered, but those on the liberation of the
camps and the camps as memorial sites are especially solicited. Panels should consist
of 2-3 presenters and a moderator. Please send an abstract and a short vita for each
presenter. Please send one-page paper or panel proposals and a vita of no more than
200 words by June 15, 2005 to:
Dr. Sonja Hedgepeth, Conference Chair
Dept. of Foreign Languages & Literatures, Box 467
Middle Tennessee State University
Murfreesboro, TN 37132 USA
E-mail: [email protected]
Bey
ond Camps and F
or
ced Labour - 60 Years O
n
eyond
For
orced
On
The IImperial
mperial War M
useum, London
Museum,
January 11-13, 2006
The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines
that are engaged in research on all groups of survivors of Nazi persecution. For the
purpose of the conference, a SURVIVOR is defined as anyone who suffered any
form of persecution by the Nazis or their allies as a result of the Nazis’ racial,
political, ideological or ethnic policies from 1933 to 1945. For more information:
www.secolo-verlag.de.
March of the Living, 2006
April 23 – May 7
The 2006 March of the Living will include interfaith adult groups as it did this year.
For more information: [email protected]
The JJeewish E
xperience in P
oland
Experience
Poland
Krako
w, P
oland
Krakow
Poland
July 3-17, 2005
Dr. Bob Cohn, Department of Religious Studies at Lafayette College, Easton, PA,
USA, is offering a two-week course in English. This is for professors and students of
the Holocaust, second-generation survivors and others you know who might be
interested. Full description and info at the site below: http://www.polishsummer.com/
jewish_experience_poland.htm
The H
olocaust in P
oland: Antecedents, E
Holocaust
Poland:
Exxecution, Aftermath
July 5-15, 2005
This international scholarly workshop for Ph.D. candidates, early postdoctoral
researchers, and junior faculty members is sponsored by The Center for Advanced
Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Skirball
Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies of New York University, and the Center
for Research on the History and Culture of Polish Jews of the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem The first week of this workshop (July 5-8) will take place at New York
University. The second week (July 11-15) will take place at the United States Holocaust
July 18 - A
ugust 4, 2005
August
Yad Vashem will host a seminar for Jewish educators working in Jewish education
around the globe at its International School for Holocaust Studies in Jerusalem.
For more information, visit www1.yadvashem.org/education/jes05.html or email
[email protected].
Ours To F
ight F
or: American JJee ws in the SSecond
econd World War
Fight
For:
Museum of JJeewish H
eritage, N
k, NY
Heritage,
Neew Yor
ork,
anuar
anuaryy 1, 2006
Now - JJanuar
This award-winning exhibition explores the roles of Jewish men and women who
were part of the American war effort in Europe, the Pacific, and at home. Ours To
or honors WWII veterans who tell their stories through video testimony,
Fight F
For
artifacts, letters, and photographs. An interactive gallery presents the experiences
of other ethnic groups who contributed to the Allies’ fight to preserve democracy.
Visitors are invited to bring photos of themselves or their loved ones in uniform
during World War II to be scanned and eventually displayed in the exhibition.
Roberson M
useum and Science Center
Museum
Binghamton, NY
Now - SSept.
ept. 24, 2005
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum traveling exhibition: R emember the
Childr
en: D
aniel
tor
Children:
Daniel
aniel’’s SStor
toryy . For more information: www.ushmm.org.
G. Roy Levin Art Exhibit
Virginia H
olocaust M
useum, Richmond, VA
Holocaust
Museum,
June 5 –D
ecember 2005
–December
G. Roy Levin created beautiful masterpieces on found objects such as fruit crates
and boxes using Holocaust photos. After his death in June 2003, his estate gifted
this artwork to the Virginia Holocaust Museum. The works will be on display in
the Museum’s art gallery until December 2005. [email protected]
Holocaust M
useum H
ouston, H
ouston, T X
Museum
Houston,
Houston,
Mid-J
uly - mid-S
eptember
id-July
mid-September
eptember,, 2005
In the Shadow of the Swastika
Swastika: An exhibit that chronicles the incredible story of
the life of Herman Wygoda
ygoda, a Polish Jew, whose parents, siblings, and son had
been murdered in the gas chambers of Nazi death camps and who, himself, ended
up commanding an Italian partisan unit.
From the Klein F
oundation
Foundation
TIME Classr
oom and U
nited SStates
tates H
olocaust M
emorial M
useum
Classroom
United
Holocaust
Memorial
Museum
In SSeptember
eptember
oundation
ogram: “S
tand U
p,
eptember,, 2005, the Klein F
Foundation
oundation’’s educational pr
program:
“Stand
Up
Speak O
ut, Lend A H
and,” will be sent to 7000 teachers acr
oss the countr
Out,
Hand,”
across
countryy,
including all 6000 educators who hav
olocaust M
useum
havee been trained at the H
Holocaust
Museum
over the past ten yyears.
ears. This rrepr
epr
esents one of the first times that the M
useum will
epresents
Museum
oundation
distribute outside materials to its cadr
cadree of national educators. The Klein F
Foundation
tment of E
ducation
is grateful to SSenator
enator Arlen SSpecter
pecter and the U
nited SStates
tates D
epar
Depar
epartment
Education
United
for helping to suppor
oject. P
lease contact us at the Klein F
oundation if
Foundation
supportt this pr
project.
Please
there are high schools you would like to receive this unique educational program.
Teaching Tolerance
olerance: The Klein Foundation will partner with The Southern Poverty
Law Center in the creation of an educational kit based upon the Academy Award
winning documentary, “One Survivor Remembers.” SPLC is the premier tolerance
organization in the country with a distribution network of 100,000 schools
(which translates into MILLIONS of students). Look for more information about
this exciting project in the fall on the Klein Foundation website: http://
www.kleinfoundation.org/
Hebr
nion College-J
nstitute of R
eligion M
useum
ebreew U
Union
College-Jeewish IInstitute
Religion
Museum
Waldsee 1944
July 19 - A
ugust 19, 2005
August
An exhibition in memory of the annihilation of Hungarian Jewry during the
summer of 1944, when Jews deported by the Nazis to their deaths at Auschwitz
were required to write deceptive postcards from “Waldsee” to their families,
reassuring them that all was well. Seventy international artists have created their
own visual symbolism, in the form of a postcard, to commemorate the Hungarian
Holocaust.
Location: One West 4th Street, New York, NY
Tours/Information: 212-824-2205
Hours: Monday-Thursday, 9 am - 5 pm; Friday, 9 am - 3 pm
TOGETHER 25
Respond to: [email protected] or send snailmail
inquiries and replies to:
Together SSear
ear
ches
earches
c/o The Wor
dsmithy
ordsmithy
P.O. Bo
Boxx 224
New M
ilfor
d, NJ 07646
Milfor
ilford,
SEARCHING CAN BE WORTH THE EFFORT
As the granddaughter of two Holocaust survivors, I always felt that someone
from my grandmother or grandfather’s past was alive; a family member...a friend...
someone...anyone. Whether my feeling was real or just wishful thinking, I didn’t
know. But I researched and researched and I dreamed that I would one day be
able to reunite my grandparents with a family member or a friend from prewar
Poland. Well, miracles happen.
Several weeks ago, I emailed a “searching” ad with all of my grandparent’s
information to Jeanette Friedman, to be placed in this issue of Together. Soon
after, Jeanette emailed me back saying that her mother, Peska Friedman, was
from the same town that my grandfather Mike/Munish Morgenstern was from:
Siedlice, Poland. She gave me her family name, Rabinowicz, and I asked my
grandfather about them. My grandfather’s response was, “Rabinowicz! Of course.
He was the rabbi.” So, I asked Jeanette if this was her family, and indeed it
was. Her grandfather was the famous Partzever Rebbe of Siedlice. Through more
emails and conversations with family members, we learned that my grandfather’s
grandfather was the gabbai to the Partzever Rebbe and that the Morgenstern
family lived in the same apartment building as the Rabinowicz family.
As it turns out, Peska Friedman wrote a book entitled Going Forward, in
which she talks about my grandfather’s family and growing up in Siedlice. When
she told me this, I immediately ordered a copy for my mother, my grandfather
and myself. I’ve been told that I won’t be able to put it down. It is my weekend’s
activity, and when I am finished I am going to meet Peska. I can’t wait. She lives
in Brooklyn and I live in Manhattan. It’s amazing what treasures you can find in
your own backyard.
My grandfather is also thrilled that Peska’s older sister, Devorah, who left
Poland in 1933, is still alive and living in Tel Aviv. They hadn’t been in touch in
73, yes 73 years.
May this story inspire and encourage you all to keep searching!
Lauren Lebowitz
[email protected]
unish) M
orgenstern of
I am the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors Mike (M
(Munish)
Morgenstern
oland and Renia D
iament of Lodz, P
oland
Poland
Diament
Poland
oland. I am always searching for
Siedlice, P
anyone who may be related to them or friends with them. Please contact me at
[email protected] or 917-744-9898 if you have any information. Before the
ittel 70 in Lodz, P
oland
war, my grandmother lived at M
Mittel
Poland
oland. My grandmother’s
oszyko
wa 16 or Korb G
asse
immediate family’s last known address was either K
Koszyko
oszykowa
Gasse
16 Flat 9 in the Lodz Ghetto before they were taken to their deaths at Chelmno
Concentration Camp
Camp. Would anyone have known them or have any information?
orgenshtern from Siedlice who died while
Morgenshtern
Would anyone have known a Yosef M
imprisoned in the Komi Republic of Russia
Russia? Also does anyone know a Mosze
Roz
encwajg from Lodz? We believe that he settled in Israel. What about Efraim
ozencwajg
Leibowicz
Leibowicz?
M
While there are still some of us survivors left, I beg you to search in your
heart and memories if you ever came in contact with these individuals. I am
looking for my two brothers and I was never successful in finding any information
about them.
ester (aka Wr umek B
arber)
zano
w,
Brother Wr umek B
Bester
Barber)
arber), was born in Chr
Chrzano
zanow
Poland, in 1917; he was 21 when he returned from fighting with the Polish army
in 1939. He then left for Russia. He did not want to see the Germans again. He
was afraid of them and rightly so.
ester was born in Chr
zano
w, P
oland, in 1923; was taken to
Brother Gecek B
Bester
Chrzano
zanow
Poland,
Arbeitscamp in 1941. The name of the camp was Sacrau. He was 18 at the time.
In all the years, I have not met anyone who has seen or knows them. Please
answer me if you know anything.
Bella Bester Leveen
805-482-7607
or [email protected]
TOGETHER 26
Jewish partisans — tell your story and make a difference in the lives of Jewish
youth! The Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation (JPEF) is looking for Jewish
partisans to participate in filmed interviews about their lives as partisans. To date,
over 40 Jewish partisans have shared their stories with JPEF. These interviews are
used to create educational materials for teens. If you or someone you know was a
Jewish partisan please contact Julia Ellis, JPEF Outreach Director, at (415) 5632244.
M
raunshtein?). He
We are trying to gather information about Yosef B
Brronshtein (B
(Braunshtein?).
was born in Bisurabia Lipkin (Russia) to Batya and Moshe Bronshtein
Bronshtein. His
eli
father was a fruit salesman. He had two brothers, Shmuel and Z
Zeli
elig. Yosef left
home around 1938, and worked as a coal minor before joining the Russian army.
Batia, Moshe & Zelig perished in the Holocaust; Shmuel survived and lived in
Israel until he died 4 years ago. Shmuel is pictured upon his arrival to Palestine in
the book “Pillars of Fire”, on page 193 of the English version. (although he was
incorrectly identified as “Herrman Iwanir” in the old printings, this has been
rectified in the more recent printings.) Someone said they saw Yosef after the war
working in a factory. If anyone has any information, about Yosef or his family,
please e-mail me at [email protected].
M
eck
My grandfather, Karl B
Beck
eck, born in Prague, lived in Chemnitz, Germany. I have
oktor
Doktor
oktor, living in
letters in my possession, sent to my grandfather by a Mr. Eugen D
Prague and being a lawyer, who called my grandfather “uncle.” Eugen Doktor,
together with Emanuel and Samuel Doktor, were murdered in Treblinka in 1942.
Regrettably I have not succeeded in finding a “Doktor-Beck” family link. Neither
did I find any female members of the Doktor family; nor did I find any survivors.
My request to Together readers is does anyone know any details concerning Eugen
Doktor, born 01.01.1873, last known address Jungmannova Nam Nr.10
oktor
(Thonetsches Haus) Prague; Emanuel D
Doktor
oktor,, born 20.05.1862, last known
address Caslav/Tschec Republic; or Rudolf Doktor, born 29.08.1900, last known
address Caslav/Tschec Republic?
Siegmund Beck
[email protected].
M
“My nephew is designing a new outdoor public sculpture for a show this summer
and is incorporating the number that was tattooed on my mother’s arm. He
would like to use the seven people who were behind her in line for the tattoo. Her
number is A-12248.” If anyone has numbers near this number, please contact me
with any information (number, name and any other information you wish to
include). Please hurry, as time is short.
Sam Grussgott
[email protected]
M
1. I am a 2nd generation looking for my father’s family. He was born in Darmstadt,
Germany. His name was JULIUS SCHWARZ. His father’s name was SIMON,
and his mother’s name was FRIEDA (maiden name KASTLE) . My father was a
baker. He was interned in Sachsenhausen in 1938. He had several brothers.
He survived and went to Australia on the “Dunera”. Perhaps some family survived
or made their way to Israel.
2. Would anybody know of the “PILZNER” family from Lodz, Poland. Greatgrandfather’s name was Nathan Hirsh Pilzner. He did not survive the Holocaust.
Some Pilzner family went to Argentina.
3. I am a Hidden Child Survivor born in VINKOVCI, CROATIA. My parents
were DAVID HOPNER and KLARA (maiden name BLUMANSTOCK). My
father was a watchmaker. My father was sent to Jasenovic and my mother to Stara
Gradiska. I would be interested to know if there are survivors from Vinkovci
who would have remembered my family.
IF YOU HAVE INFORMATION ON ANY OF THE ABOVE, PLEASE CALL
OR WRITE: ANITA AND VLADIMIR HOPNER, RICHMOND, B.C.
CANADA
M
An appeal for help…
I am attempting to substantiate information I have gathered about a heroic
Dutch family who hid 10-15 Jews (mainly children and youths) in their home in
The Hague over the course of World War II. The family name is Boukes (fatherOnno Jan Boukes
Jacoba Boukes
Boukes; mother-Jacoba
Boukes. Daughters: Anne and Beth
Beth. Sons:
A drian
drian, O nno and B enjamin
enjamin). The family lived at 106 Tyler Street in The
Hague.
It is my understanding that the family were devout members of the Dutch
Reformed Church and may have been involved with (or at least sympathetic to)
the Dutch underground and that, through the underground, Jews-usually childrenwere moved into and out of their home.
The contacts from the family to the underground were a man and woman
named ‘Jan’ and ‘Mieps’ although I strongly suspect these to be pseudonyms. I do
not have the names of any of those hidden/saved.
I am currently preparing a story for The Jewish Free Press (Calgary, Alberta,
Canada- Editor Richard Bronstein; e-mail [email protected].
Based on my interview of a member of the Boukes family. I would appreciate
any assistance you can provide in corroborating the information I have already
received. If the Boukes family did, in fact, help save Jewish children then they
truly deserve to have their story known. Thank you for your help.
Hal Joffe
[email protected]
M
As a Holocaust survivor who lost all her family in Ostrava, Czech Republic
[Mahrisch Ostrau in German) during the war years, 1 wonder if some of my
friends and classmates might have survived. I went to the Jewish elementary school
1930-1935 to the yladchen-Reform-Real-Gymnasium 1935-38, and the Czech
gymnasium in Slezka Ostrava (Schlesisch Ostrau) 1938-39, before leaving for
Vienna. I was living with my grandparents, and their name was Silberstein
Silberstein, my
maiden name Welt
elt. Hoping against hope...
M
In connection with research involving the subject, Laur
Laurence
ence Weinbaum of the
WJC in Jerusalem is interested in contacting survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto who
were members of the Betar Resistance in the ghetto (ZZW), and survivors who
are familiar with that resistance. Such survivors are requested to contact him and/
or me. His e-mail address is [email protected]. His fax number is: 011972-256-35544. My e-mail address is [email protected]; and also
[email protected].
Thomas Field
M
I’m looking for any person who knew my grandfather, Herber
erbertt Schermann
Schermann, his
parents Julius & S elma Schermann or his sisters, Henny & Regina - during the
1920’s in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Herbert Schermann, born in 1914, studied at the Philanthropin school in
Frankfurt am Main, Germany, between the years 1920-1929, immigrated to Paris,
France in 1931 and was deported to Auschwitz in 1942.
A summary of the information I have so far:
• Herbert Schermann was born on January 16, 1914 in Frankfurt am Main.
• His parents were Julius Schermann and Selma Schermann (maiden name
Stern) and he had two sisters Henny (born 1912) and Regina (born 1916).
• Julius Schermann’s profession was portefeuillenfabrikant manufacturer of
leather products.
• Herbert Schermann went to the PHILANTHROPIN School in Hebel
Strasse, between 1920 and 1929. During these years the family lived in
Heiligkreuzgasse 13.
• In 1931, Herbert immigrated to Paris France, with his father, Julius, married
Helene Beitch (or Baitch) and had one son Max Schermann.
• In 1942 Herbert Schermann was arrested, sent to Drancy and deported to
Auschwitz where he died on September 23, 1942.
• Selma and Regina were deported from Frankfurt to Lodz where they died.
Henny died in Ravensbrueck concentration camp.
• Julius, Helene and my father Max Schermann escaped from Paris with the
help of the French resistance and survived the war hidden in a small village.
Ori Schermann, Israel
Email: [email protected]
M
inasohn
I am an escapee of the Holocaust when my parents, Alexander and Frieda SSinasohn
inasohn,
shipped me out of Prenzlau, Germany, on a Kindertransport when I was 11 years old
on January 31, 1939. They were subsequently deported to Warsaw where their
address was on Garton Strasse. I believe the number was 27. I wonder if you have
any information on surviving Ghetto residents from the period 1942-43 who have
any recollection of that location and, perhaps, of my parents.
John Sinasohn,
Encino, California
M
My name is Fanny Aizenberg. I am a survivor and a volunteer in the Survivors
Registry at the Holocaust Museum. I read the notice from Rudy Rosenberg
asking for information on Le Gros Jacques in Belgium. I am a survivor of
Auschwitz originally from Brussels. I recently read a book called the 20th Transport
that has a significant portion dedicated to this person. I feel this book is very
well done focusing on the Nazi occupation of Belgium and details the Jewish
community and their suffering including the story of Jacques who betrayed so
many.
If there is anything else I can help with, please contact my colleague Steven
Vitto listed below and I will get this information and help in any way.
Steven Vitto
Registry of Holocaust Survivors
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
100 Raoul Wallenberg Pl. SW
Washington, DC 20024-2150
(202)479-9712
[email protected]
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A story on the six million pennies:
Yesterday a Christian school in our area presented us with a check for almost
$1,200.00. It represented the net proceeds of an Anne Frank play the school had
done this year and after expenses that amount was donated to us for the pennies
project. The project has raised so far about $2,500 in pennies and we have not
started the whole matter officially and will not until the fall. The project has
adopted a life of its own and I am convinced we will make the 6 million within
the next 24 months.
Gerd Strauss, Tuscon, AZ
TWO HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS, TWO COUSINS
REUNITED
When Henry Stern left Nazi Germany in 1937, he left behind family he thought
he’d never see again. That was the case until 67 years later when he found his
cousin, Fred Hertz.
“It’s unbelievable. It’s unbelievable. I thought everybody on my father’s side
had been killed in concentration camps. I didn’t know about Fred and his family
living in Palenstine,” said Stern, a Jewish Holocaust survivor.
Stern found Hertz through a web site with the names of over three-million
Jews killed in the Holocaust.
“It was the same information that I had submitted in 1999, but this was
dated 1994,” Stern said.
Hertz said he remembers Stern as a child.
“His grandmother was my aunt, was my father’s sister. We always, as far as
I can remember, were very, very close to them,” said Hertz.
Stern said he recognized himself, his sister, grandmother, and uncle in a
picture. He e-mailed it to Hertz to see if he knew who the other people were.
“About an hour later, he called me and said, ‘Are you sitting down?’ I said,
‘Yeah, why?’ He said, ‘I’m in that picture,’”said Stern.
Hertz, who now lives in Durham, North Carolina, invited the Sterns for a
visit. After months of calls and e-mails, the Hertz family finally came to Opelika.
Hertz said he can’t imagine he’s sitting here after all these years.
“It’s still unbelievable. He thought all of us were among those deported and
killed at Auschwitz,” said Hertz.
PLEASE SEND YOUR
EMAIL ADDRESS AND THOSE OF YOUR
FAMILY MEMBERS TO
[email protected]
YOU CAN ALSO SEND MATERIAL
FOR CONSIDERATION FOR PUBLICATION
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Special “Matzevah Marker”
Available for Survivors’ Graves
Survival has placed upon us the
responsibility of making sure that the
Holocaust is remembered forever. Each
of us has the sacred obligation to share
this task while we still can. However,
with the passage of each year, we realize
that time is against us, and we must
make sure to utilize all means for future
remembrance.
A permanent step toward achieving
this important goal can be realized by
placing a unique and visible maker on
the gravestone of every survivor. The
most meaningful symbol for this purpose
is our Survivor logo, inscribed with the
words HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR. This
simple, yet dramatic, maker will re-affirm
our uniqueness and our place in history for
future generations.
Our impressive MATZEVAH marker is
now available for purchase. It is cast in solid
bronze, measuring 5x7 inches, and can be
attached to new or existing tombstones. The
cost of each marker is $100.00. Additional
donations are gratefully appreciated.
Let us buy the marker now and leave
instructions in our wills for its use. This will
enable every one of us to leave on this earth
visible proof of our miraculous survival and
an everlasting legacy of the Holocaust.
Name ____________________________________________________
Address ___________________________________________________
City ____________________________State _______ Zip __________
Number of Markers ___________________
Total Amount Enclosed ________________
The cost of each marker is US $100
including shipping & handling.
Make checks payable to:
American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
and mail to:
American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
122 West 30th Street
New York, NY 10001
Please allow sixty (60) days for delivery.
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