VOLUME 26 NUMBER 1
JANUARY 2012
Jewish Foundation for the Righteous
Annual Dinner: Remarks by Rosie Sansalone Alway
November 29, 2011
Good evening. It is a distinct honor and privilege to speak with you this evening as the recipient of the Robert I. Goldman Award for Excellence in Holocaust
Education. I would especially like to thank Stanlee Stahl and the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous (JFR). Stanlee’s tireless efforts with the JFR and its mission have certainly paved the way for my standing before you this evening, as
well as ensuring my ability to effectively teach the lessons of the Holocaust to
my students.
As an English teacher I have found that the most effective tool to use with
students is the telling of stories. I teach my students to look past the surface of
the words, and to search for the author’s intent. What is the author revealing to us
beneath his words? When we as readers are successful in finding this understanding we are given a gift: we discover again what it means to be human. This is my
approach to teaching the Holocaust, the ultimate example of man’s inhumanity
against man. I fight against the dehumanization. I teach life. I tell stories about
what it means to be human.
.. .the story of 39 red roses
.. .the story of a dog named Lala
.. .the story of a young boy from Hungary who has taught me that “Every name
has a story” and that “indifference is never an option.”
These stories, these lessons of the Holocaust have woven themselves into every novel I read with my students, every lesson I construct, and every interaction
I have with my students and colleagues. I wear my amber bracelet from Poland
as a constant visual reminder of these lessons, so that I may incorporate a human
touch in all I do.
I am blessed to have the opportunity to teach at an incredible school: The
Summit Country Day School in Cincinnati, Ohio. It is a Catholic Independent
School that encourages me as a teacher to follow my passions, to teach from my
heart, and to inspire my students “to share fully the gifts given to them by God; to
grow in grace and wisdom; and to become people of character who improve the
world they inherit.” Father Philip Seher, our school chaplain, recently told me the
story of his decision to become a priest. He was a young boy growing up in postWorld War II Europe. He would often ride his bike to an abandoned concentration
camp to ponder and pray. It was on this site—a place which had inflicted so much
horror and agony—where he decided to become a priest. He wanted to make the
world a better place. He has.
In addition, the JFR and the incredible men and women I have met as a result
of my association with this organization have reinforced this lesson of humanity.
I had the privilege of meeting Jadwiga and Jerzy Sliwczynska at the Rescuers’
Luncheon hosted by the JFR in Warsaw Poland in the summer of 2010.1 can still
feel the soft touch of Jadwiga’s hand in mine as we greeted each other. Their
example gives me the courage to lead my life following the example of the righteous... with a human touch.
This “human touch” is the core of my educational philosophy. I tell my students that certainly my lessons in grammar, vocabulary, writing, poetry, and literature are important; however, it is my primary goal to teach them to be human
beings with a solid character and integrity, and more importantly righteous human beings who refuse to be indifferent.
This is what we must teach our students. This is the primary lesson of the
Holocaust. When we teach our students to see each other as human beings, indifcont’d on p. 3
(JTA)—Holocaust survivors Elie Wiesel and Roman Kent, and Rwanda genocide survivor Clemantine Wamariya are among five new appointees to the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Council.
President Obama appointed the members, who were announced Oct. 28. Other
new members are Joseph Gutman and Howard Unger.
“These fine public
servants both bring a
depth of experience
and tremendous dedication to their new roles,"
Obama said.
Professor
Wiesel,
the Nobel Prize-winning writer and activist,
has been on the council
since he was its founding chairman in 1980.
Elie Wiesel
Roman Kent
Kent, the president
of Namor International Corp., is chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants and treasurer of the Conference
on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. He is also president of the Jewish
Foundation for the Righteous and the International Auschwitz Committee.
Wamariya is an undergraduate student at Yale University.
Gutman, managing director of Grosvenor Capital Management, is the son of
a Holocaust survivor. He is an active member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum’s Chicago office and the Birthright Israel executive committee.
Unger, founder of the investment firm Saw Mill Capital, is a member of the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience, the arm of the
council tasked with stimulating worldwide action against genocide and other
crimes against humanity.
Soviet Refugees To Get Hardship Payments
By Stewart Ain, Jewish Week
Thanks to the efforts of representatives of the American Gathering, one-time
Hardship Fund payments of about $3,300 will now be available to certain Jews
who fled areas of the Soviet Union ahead of the advancing Nazi army and whose
homes were never occupied. Those eligible will include certain Jews who fled
from Moscow, Stalingrad and Leningrad during specific time periods.
It is the first time that the experiences of these Jews who fled for their lives
from the Nazis is being recognized by Germany, according to the Conference on
Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which negotiated for the payments.
Nazi victims still living in former Soviet block countries are not eligible for the
payment.
Hardship Fund payments are also now being made available to eligible applicants who never received German reparations and were citizens of certain Western European countries at the time of Nazi persecution and also at the time of that
country's Global Agreement with Germany.
In addition, a one-time payment of about $2,500 is for the first time being paid
to those born in 1928 or later who lived in former Soviet bloc countries, whose
parents were murdered due to Nazi persecution and who have never received any
German reparations.
To apply, call 646-536-9100.
American Gathering of
Jewish Holocaust Survivors
122 West 30th Street, Suite 205
New York, New York 10001
NON-PROFIT
U.S. POSTAGE
PAID
NEW YORK, N.Y.
PERMIT NO. 4246
January 2012
NEW APPOINTEES TO HOLOCAUST COUNCIL
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
TOGETHER 1
Those who desecrate the Holocaust should
have no place in society
By Menachem Z. Rosensaft, The Jerusalem Post
TOGETHER
Volume 26 Number 1
January 2012
The abhorrent rally in Jerusalem’s Shabbat
Square on December 31, 2011, featuring haredim
wearing yellow stars and simulated concentration
camp uniforms brings to mind Walt Kelly’s observation in the classic “Pogo” comic strip: “We have
met the enemy and he is us.”
“It’s like how it started with the Nazis—very
slowly,” said one ultra-Orthodox demonstrator, an
American yeshiva student named Salomon Hoberman, steadfastly insisting on his and his cohorts’ right to discriminate against and
even physically abuse women and girls.
It is important to recognize that this latest misuse of Holocaust imagery and
Nazi analogies did not occur in a vacuum. In 1995, posters of then-prime minister
Yitzhak Rabin in a Nazi uniform were displayed at right-wing demonstrations opposing any political accommodation with the Palestinians. In December of 2004,
Gaza Strip settlers compared then-prime minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to pull
out of Gaza to the Holocaust and announced that they would start wearing orange
stars (orange being the color of the antidisengagement movement) in protest.
Eight months later, IDF soldiers were confronted in the Gaza settlement of
Kerem Atzmona by Jewish children with yellow Stars of David pinned to their
chests, intentionally evoking images of Jews being deported to their deaths by
the Nazis.
Nor is the use of Nazi imagery limited to the right wing. Last May, a group of
left-wing Israeli, Palestinian and Polish activists, including a former Israel Air Force
pilot named Yonatan Shapiro, sprayed the words “Liberate all ghettos” in Hebrew
and “Free Gaza and Palestine” in English on remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto.
No one should be surprised, therefore, when the ultra-Orthodox, some of
whom have long compared Israel to Nazi Germany at anti-Zionist demonstrations in New York and elsewhere, chose to up the ante by employing ever more
provocative and evocative tactics.
Even more troubling than the December 31 rally is the silence of so many
ultra-Orthodox religious leaders in its aftermath. While certain Jewish religious
leaders have voiced their dismay, most of the prominent Hasidic and other haredi personalities seem to have developed convenient laryngitis.
Unfortunately, we have reached a point at which politicians and media commentators, eager for a sound bite on the evening news, think nothing of exploiting the Holocaust and Nazi terminology—and apparently, the crasser the better.
In the United States, reactionary radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has
repeatedly likened President Barack Obama to Hitler, with virtually no one in
the Republican Party taking him to task. In Limbaugh’s own words, as broadcast
to his nationwide audience, “Obama’s got a healthcare logo that’s right out of
Adolf Hitler’s playbook”; “Obama is asking citizens to rat each other out like
Hitler did”; the president “is sending out his brownshirts to head up opposition
to genuine American citizens who want no part of what Barack Obama stands for
and is trying to stuff down our throats”; and “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama,
also ruled by dictate.”
Others are no better. Participants in Tea Party rallies have brandished images
of President Obama with a Hitler-like mustache and signs with “Obama” written under a swastika. The president of the Republican Women of Anne Arundel
County in Maryland wrote on the group’s website that “Obama and Hitler have
a great deal in common.”
The head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty
Commission declared that the Obama administration’s healthcare reform “is not
something like what the Nazis did. It is precisely what the Nazis did.”
And Glenn Beck, another well-known talk show host, disparaged the president’s plan to expand the Peace Corps and its domestic counterpart, AmeriCorps,
as “what Hitler did with the SS.”
Not to be outdone, former House speaker Newt Gingrich has declared that the
Obama administration’s policies represent “as great a threat to America as Nazi
Germany or the Soviet Union once did.” Really? Death camps? Gas chambers?
Gulags?
The brutal massacre of millions? To be fair, Democrats and liberals have not
been blameless in this regard. In September 2009, Alan Grayson, then a Democratic congressman from Florida, called the healthcare crisis “this Holocaust in
America.”
Last January, another Democratic congressman, Steve Cohen from Tennessee, who, like Grayson, happens to be Jewish, called the Republican rhetoric on
healthcare “a big lie just like Goebbels. You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you
repeat the lie, and eventually people believe it. Like blood libel... The Germans
c•o•n•t•e•n•t•s
Remarks: Jewish Foundation for the Righteous by Rosie Sansalone Alway....................1
New Appointees to Holocaust Council.............................................................................1
Soviet Refugees to Get Hardship Payments by Stewart Ain............................................1
Desecrating the Holocaust by Menachem Rosensaft........................................................2
Partisans Honored by Hillel Kuttler.................................................................................3
Judge Who Ruled Holocaust a Fact Dies.......................................................................3
Names of 30,000 SurvivorsNow Searchable.........................................................................4
Haredi Protestors’ Use of Holocast Imagery Condemned................................................4
Window Opening on Nazi Prosecutions by Steve Lipman............................................4
Rosensaft Profiled by New York Times.........................................................................5
Israel Marks 70 Years Since Babi Yar ...........................................................................5
Albanian PM: Ahmadinejad is the New Nazi by Itamar Eichner....................................6
Conference Calls on Romania to Acknowledge WWII War Crimes...............................6
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum by Morris J. Vogel..........................................7
USS St. Louis Redux by Sergio Carmona....................................................................7
“Hitler Wasn’t All Bad” by Allan Hall..........................................................................8
Claims Conference Negotiates New Pensions.................................................................8
Israeli Museum Refuses to Return WWII Spoils..............................................................8
Charity Team Runs Marathon for Holocaust Survivors by Renee Ghert-Zand................9
Construction of Holocaust Memorial Starts in Nashua by Jake Berry...........................9
First Graduate Program in Israel for Holocaust Studies by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu............9
Prague Jewish Museum Marks 70th Anniversary of Terezin Deportations....................10
Swiss AcknowledgeThose Who Helped Jews Flee Nazis...................................................11
Warsaw Jews Debate Demolition of Holocaust-era Building by Roman Frister ..........11
It’s Never Too Late to Find Missing Family by Susan Kent Avjian................................11
Florida’s Holocaust Survivors Win Battle Against French Railroad by Scott Travis.....12
Renault Heirs Revisit Company’s Link With Nazis by Angelique Chrisafis.................12
Israel Puts Eichmann Items on Display by Aron Heller .............................................13
UNESCO Cuts Funds for Palestinian Magazine by Matti Friedman.............................13
National Library of Wales Scandal by Sion Morgan......................................................14
Return of Books Stolen By Nazis by Brian Rapp.........................................................14
Journey of Self-Discovery by Vanessa Gera................................................................15
BND Destroyed Files on Former SS Members by Klaus Wiegrefe................................16
Holocaust Survivor Gets the Diploma Nazis Denied Him by Valerie Hauch................16
Education Budget Cuts in North Carolina byAmanda Greene.......................................17
Cardinal Claims Jews Want Sainthood for Paul II by Paul Berger................................17
“All Minds Blurred and Darkened” by Madeline Chambers..........................................18
Researchers Expose a Nazi Past by Nir Hasson.............................................................19
In Memoriam..................................................................................................................20
Searches (contributing editor Serena Woolrich).............................................................23
“Searches” is a project of Allgenerations, Inc.
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American Gathering Executive Committee
SAM E. BLOCH • ROMAN KENT
MAX K. LIEBMANN
MENACHEM ROSENSAFT • ELAN STEINBERG
TOGETHER
AMERICAN GATHERING OF JEWISH HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
AND THEIR DESCENDANTS
122 West 30th Street, Suite 205 · New York, New York 10001 · 212
Founding President
BEN MEED, K”Z
Honorary President
VLADKA MEED
President
SAM E. BLOCH
Honorary Chairman
ERNEST MICHEL
Chairman
ROMAN KENT
Honorary Senior
Vice President
WILLIAM LOWENBERG, K”Z
Senior Vice President
MAX K. LIEBMANN
Vice Presidents
EVA FOGELMAN
ROSITTA E. KENIGSBERG
ROMANA STROCHLITZ PRIMUS
JEAN BLOCH ROSENSAFT
MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT
STEFANIE SELTZER
ELAN STEINBERG
JEFFREY WIESENFELD
Secretary
JOYCE CELNIK LEVINE
Treasurer
MAX K. LIEBMANN
Regional Vice-Presidents
VIVIAN GLASER BERNSTEIN
BERNARD KENT
MICHAEL KORENBLIT
MEL MERMELSTEIN
SERENA WOOLRICH
239 4230
Publication Committee
SAM E. BLOCH, Chairman
HIRSH ALTUSKY, K”Z
ROMAN KENT
MAX K. LIEBMANN
VLADKA MEED
ROMANA STROCHLITZ PRIMUS
MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT
ELAN STEINBERG
Managing Editor
PHILIP SIERADSKI
Editor Emeritus
ALFRED LIPSON, K”Z
Counsel
ABRAHAM KRIEGER
cont’d on p. 6
TOGETHER 2
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
January 2012
55 Jewish partisans honored for “extraordinary measures” in resisting Nazis
By Hillel Kuttler, JTA
Allen Small, 83, and Leon Bakst, 86, hugged each
other so tight, Small said, “I couldn’t let go.” Their
embrace at a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East
Side was 65 years in the making.
Small and Bakst grew up a few houses apart in
Reunion of Jewish partisans in New York.
Ivye, Belarus, attending the same school and synagogue before reality turned black, back when their
names were Avraham Schmulewitz and Leibel Bakst,
and Ivye belonged to Poland and the Nazis had not
yet invaded. They last saw each another in 1946 at a
displaced persons camp in Munich.
During the two years preceding their liberation by
the Red Army in 1944, the then teenagers fought the
Nazis in separate brigades in the vast Nalibotskaya
Pushcha forest. For their daring. Small, now living
in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., and Bakct, of Dallas,
along with 53 other Jewish partisans from across
the United States, were honored here at a synagogue
reception Nov. 6, 2011 and a gala dinner the next
evening.
Like many partisans interviewed, Bakst downplayed his role, saying that sheer survival was the
great motivator. Some had carried rifles, sabotaged
German supply trains and attacked the enemy. Others served as scouts, guides and cooks. Bakst and his
older brother, Yehoshua, were deployed to secure
bread, butter, cheese, potatoes and meat from neighboring farmers; anything not given was taken. The
boys were intimately familiar with the region from
traversing the woods every year to visit their grandmother, Bakst explained.
“Even if we saved a few lives and shortened the
war, we made a contribution,” he said.
The nearly 350 relatives, friends and admirers
who gathered in a converted theater for the dinner
were lauding the 55 partisans and their absent or deceased comrades for being “ordinary men and women taking extraordinary measures to protect Jewish
lives,” said local newscaster Dana Tyier, the dinner’s
mistress of ceremonies.
The event marked a high point for the San Francisco-based Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation,
the sponsoring organization whose executive director, Mitch Braff, admitted knowing nothing about
partisans until meeting
a fighter from Lithuania and founding JPEF
11 years ago.
The November 7
dinner combined strong
elements of reunion,
tribute, historical preservation and education. Both the partisans
and JPEF’s U.S.-born
officials emphasized
the importance of adjusting World War II’s
record to account for
Jewish heroism amid
the Shoah’s slaughter.
“Tonight we honor your bravery and your courage,”
said television actor Edward Asner, representing his
cousin Abe, a 95-year-old partisan from Eishyshok,
Belarus, who lives in Windsor, Ontario. “Thank you
for putting the lie to the [claim] that Jews didn’t fight
back. For inspiring all of us to stand up against tyranny, I salute you and I applaud you. We all applaud
you.”
Attendees ignored Asner’s request to stifle clapping while portraits of each partisan appeared onscreen. When the lights returned, Asner uttered somberly, “The list is too short. I’m sorry that there aren’t
more with us.”
With central roles assigned to partisans’ descendants—Matthew Bielski, grandson of the late Zus
Jewish Foundation for the Righteous
Annual Dinner
cont’d from p. 1
Allen Small (center) with American Gathering President Sam
Bloch and his wife Lilly.
Bielski, leader of the eponymous brigade featured in
the 2008 film Defiance, recited the HaMotzi prayer,
and Shira Ginsburg, a Manhattan cantor whose paternal grandparents were partisans, sang “Hymn of
JUDGE WHO RULED HOLOCAUST A FACT DIES
LOS ANGELES (JTA)—Thomas Johnson, a California judge who ruled that the Holocaust was “a fact and
not reasonably subject to dispute,” has died in Pacific Palisades, Calif. He was 88.
As a Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge, Johnson imposed a major setback to Holocaust deniers
in 1981 with his ruling in a case pitting Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, against
the Institute of Historical Research in Torrance, Calif. In 1980, the institute, which labeled the Holocaust as
a myth, had offered a $50,000 reward to anyone who could prove that Jews had been gassed at AuschwitzBirkenau. Mermelstein submitted a notarized account describing how he saw Nazi guards take his mother
and two sisters to what he later learned was the Birkenau gas chamber. When the institute reneged on the
payment, Mermelstein sued for $17 million.
During the trial, Johnson resolved the most controversial aspect of the case by applying the doctrine of
cont’d on p.8
January 2012
the Partisans” in the original Yiddish—the dinner
underscored a central theme of transmitting the resistance’s history to subsequent generations.
Some 5,000 American educators utilize JPEF-developed curricula and programs in their classes, said
Braff, who reported being pleasantly surprised at a
2010 conference for soda! studies teachers at which
450 teachers signed up with JPEF. Board president
Elliott Felson said that JPEF over the next decade
hopes to reach 100,000 educators and 2 million students with the lessons of the partisans’ heroism.
Family members of honorees concurred in being thrilled to witness the evening’s tribute to their
loved ones.
Helene Gradow Kingston, who accompanied her
86-year-old father, Jeff Gradow, a Los Angeles resident, said the event “makes me very proud.” Gazing
at her son Elliott, 17, she added of her father, “He
was [a partisan] at my son’s age. These were amazing
feats of courage.”
Paula Berger, 77, of Denver, as a young giri from
Novogrudek, Belarus, was sheltered in the Bielski
brigade.
“If there’s anything any of us ever wanted, it’s
that someone would tell our story because we didn’t
think we’d survive. It was such a horrific time,” said
Berger, whose two daughters, son and granddaughter
accompanied her to the dinner.
“The people who are putting in the time and
money to keep the story alive and retold—I think
it’s wonderful. It’s another Chanukah nes [miracle]
or Purim nes because Purim was about saving Jews’
lives and Chanukah was about saving our spirit,” she
said. “This was both.”
The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust
Survivors and Their Descendants was represented by
its president, Sam Bloch, and his wife Lilly.
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
ference becomes an impossibility.
In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Elie
Wiesel said that “action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all..there is so
much to be done, there is so much that can be done...
one person of integrity can make a difference.”
One person of integrity can make a difference.
This is what the story of Egle Bimbiriene, Aurimas
Ruzgys and Mary Eriich has taught me. Thank you
to these courageous individuals who inherently understood this lesson of refusing to be indifferent by
seeing each victim as a human being. They took action, and thus saved a life. I shall share your story
with my students whom I have here with me tonight
in my heart, and it is my sincere hope that they listen,
they leam from your example, and they accept my
challenge to carry forward the stories and the lessons
into the next generation.
Thank you for the honor of standing before you
this evening. I take to heart the words of Roman Kent
which he said to group of JFR teachers during the
Summer Institute for Teachers in July of 2009, “In
your hands is the future of mankind. It is up to the
teachers.” I think of his words every morning when I
walk into my classroom. Thank you.
Rosie Sansalone Alway is a teacher at Summit Country
Day School, Cincinnati, Ohio
TOGETHER 3
Names of 30,000 Holocaust
victims now searchable
Haredi Orthodox protesters’ use of Holocaust imagery
condemned
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- The names of 30,000 Holocaust victims are now searchable online through the
World Memory Project.
The joint venture of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Ancestry.com announced Wednesday that four collections of names from the museum
would now be available on Ancestry.com at no cost.
"The collections contain information on thousands
of individuals including displaced Jewish orphans;
Czech Jews deported to the Terezin concentration
camp and camps in
occupied Poland; and
French victims of
Nazi persecution," a
statement said.
The World Memory Project aims to
expand the accessibility of the museum’s
archival collection, which contains information on
well over 17 million people targeted by Nazi racial
and political policies, and enable millions to conduct
online searches.
The project is built in part by volunteers who transcribe historical records into the database.
"To date, more than 2,100 contributors from
around the world have indexed more than 700,000
records," the statement said. "Anyone, anywhere can
contribute to the project by simply typing information from historical records into the online database."
JERUSALEM (JTA) -- Israeli leaders criticized a
haredi Orthodox demonstration in which protesters
wore yellow stars to indicate that they are being oppressed like the Jews in Nazi Germany.
More than 1,000 haredi Orthodox protesters gathered in Jerusalem New Year’s eve to protest what
they described as persecution against their way of
life, including separation of the sexes.
Many of the protesters wore yellow stars with the
word “Jude” written on them, using Holocaust imagery to hammer home their point. Young haredi Orthodox children were also brought on a makeshift stage
wearing striped prison garb along with their yellow
stars. One child held up his hands in an imitation of a
famous image from the Warsaw Ghetto.
“Zionists are not Jews, they are racists,” read one
sign in English. Protesters also shouted “Nazis” at
police securing the demonstration.
“Prisoner uniforms and yellow patches with the
word ‘Jew’ written on them in German are shocking
and appalling,” said Israeli Defense Minister Ehud
Barak in a statement. “The use of yellow patches
and small children raising their hands in surrender
crosses a red line which the ultra-Orthodox leadership, who are largely responsible people, must not
accept,” he said.
“With all due respect to the right of groups in the
haredi community to protest, and that is their elementary right, to put a yellow star on their children does
serious injury to the memory of those killed in the
Holocaust,” said opposition leader Tzipi Livni.
Eli Yishai, of the haredi Orthodox Shas Party,
condemned the use of Holocaust symbolism. But, he
added, while only a small minority of haredi Orthodox people are involved in the controversial actions,
there has been “incitement” against the entire haredi
Orthodox community.
Condemnations also came from Holocaust survivor organizations.
“Holocaust survivors express their utter contempt
at this disgraceful exploitation of these dramatic and
tragic symbols of the brutal effort to destroy the Jewish people,” said Elan Steinberg, vice president of
the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and
their Descendants, in a statement. “The Nazis made
no distinction in their murderous treatment of our
people—whether one was ultra-Orthodox, traditional, or non-believer, you were marked for cruelty and
death. We who survived and witnessed these Nazi
crimes are particularly offended that demonstrators
so blithely used children in this public outrage. They
have insulted the memory of all the Jewish victims,
including those who were ultra-Orthodox.”
Avner Shalev, director of Yad Vashem, told Israel
Radio Sunday that he condemns “in the strongest
possible manner the phenomenon of using symbols
of the Holocaust. It is unacceptable. This comes from
an extremist attitude and a clear desire to provoke.”
against whom a specific crime could not be proven,
which made it difficult, if not impossible, to bring to
justice many thousands of those who murdered Jews
during the Holocaust.”
Zuroff, author of Operation Last Chance: One
Man’s Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice
(Macmillan, 2009), announced last week the launch
of “Operation Last Chance II,” a Wiesenthal Center
project (operationlastchance.org) that will “focus primarily on the new cases—those of the people who
served in the Einsatzgruppen [SS mobile killing
squads] and the ‘pure’ death camps, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno.”
How many people who served in SS killing units
are still alive?
“Approximately 4,000 men served in these units.
Even if only 2 percent are alive, that’s 80 persons,”
Zuroff said. “Assuming that half cannot be prosecuted for medical reasons, that still leaves at least 40
who can be convicted and punished.” He declined to
name the leading targets of such prosecutions. “The
higher the rank, the bigger the priority.”
Zuroff, in an e-mail interview with The Jewish
Week, said he is coordinating his work with Kurt
Schrimm, head of Germany’s Central Office for the
Investigation of Nazi War Crimes.
“We stepped onto virgin territory, and the court in
Munich validated us,” Schrimm told The New York
Times, explaining his legal victory.
The application of the precedent by other countries’ judicial processes — including the U.S. Justice
Department’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, which handles Nazi war criminal cases
— is unclear so soon after the German decision.
“The cases in Germany might be used as precedent
in future trials [abroad],” said Thane Rosenbaum, author and lecturer in law at Fordham University. “Of
course, nations are not bound by the legal precedents
of other nations.
“What the German prosecutor ultimately did is
exactly what the Nuremberg prosecutors had done at
their postwar trials: assign guilt according to organizational membership [whether one had joined the
Nazi Party], or, in this case, whether one served as a
guard in a death camp,” Rosenbaum said. “It merely simplifies the burden of proof: all the prosecutor
must show is that the defendant wore a uniform and
carried a gun in a death camp, regardless of what he
or she might have actually done while serving in that
capacity.”
“It certainly has symbolic significance,” said Menachem Rosensaft, who teaches law at Cornell University and Columbia University, and is a leader in
“Second Generation” activities of children of Holocaust survivors. He called the expansive German
verdict “a very positive development, many decades
too late …[it] should have been made many years
ago. Other countries may follow suit — I don’t think
they’re likely to.”
The precedent of convicting a war criminal on
the basis of organizational affiliation not of proven
crimes “is clearly not a novel move,” Rosensaft said.
The German precedent, he said, is similar — but not
identical—to the standard employed in the Justice
Department’s three decades of denaturalization and
deportation proceedings against accused war criminals and collaborators. Someone proven to have lied,
when applying for U.S. citizenship, about his or her
membership in a banned wartime organization is
subject to deportation from this country.
“All [American prosecutors] have to establish
is that they [the accused naturalized] citizen lied,”
Rosensaft said.
Window Opening On Nazi
Prosecutions
By Steve Lipman, Jewish Week
In the years since the Holocaust, fears have increased
that the window of opportunity to bring Nazi war
criminals to justice is closing — perpetrators and
witnesses are dying, and many countries’ political
will to bring charges against old men and women is
diminishing.
Recently, the window opened a little.
Germany, following the conviction in May of accused death camp guard John Demjanjuk, announced
that it would reopen dormant investigations of hundreds of other people, mostly men, who also served as
guards at death camps during World War II. Because
of a precedent set in the Demjanjuk verdict, German
courts will for the first time seek convictions of individuals who are proven to have served as guards,
even if there are no witnesses or other evidence to
link them to specific criminal acts.
The German precedent, observers say, will increase the government’s ability to prosecute accused
war criminals, may be used in the court cases of other countries and will certainly carry symbolic value:
Germany, where the Final Solution originated, is still
the home of the world’s greatest number of people
who participated in mass murder under the swastika.
“There is no question that the legal precedent set
in the Demjanjuk conviction”—Demjanjuk, 91, is
free, pending appeal — “can pave the way for the
conviction of numerous Nazi war criminals who
otherwise would never have been prosecuted,” said
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center’s Jerusalem office and coordinator of a longterm, worldwide effort to locate Nazi war criminals.
“Until now, the German prosecutors ignored anyone
TOGETHER 4
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
January 2012
Menachem Rosensaft Profiled by New York Times and Honored by NYC College of Technology
American Gathering vice president Menachem
Rosensaft was profiled in a New York Times feature
article on November 5, 2011, about the course on the
law of genocide he teaches at Columbia Law School.
“The law often tries to weigh matters clinically,”
wrote Richard Pérez-Peña, “but a class that dwells
on atrocities cannot escape emotion. And it cannot
help being personal when the professor is the Jewish
son of two Holocaust survivors whose families were
wiped out.
“Yet Mr. Rosensaft, 63, who is teaching the class
at Columbia for the first time, manages to take an almost dispassionate approach, as if to say that outrage
is fine, but then what? He peppers his lectures and
conversation with hypothetical questions devised to
avoid easy answers.
“’Where are the lines separating free speech, hate
speech and incitement to genocide, which was a major factor in Rwanda?’ he asked his class recently.
‘Which one is it when Ahmadinejad calls for the
eradication of Israel?’
“Noting that at Nuremberg, the Allies imposed
new laws retroactively, to prosecute people who
could claim that their actions were allowed under
wartime German law, he asked, ‘How is that different
than if the Union had prosecuted Southerners after
the Civil War for having been slave owners?’
“He draws students’ attention to inconsistent verdicts and sentences at Nuremberg, and the fact that,
decades later, nations pivoted quickly from treating
Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president, as a dignitary, to calling him a war criminal.
“’There are always political elements to these cases’ he said. ‘There are always ambiguities.’”
The article points out that Rosensaft, general
counsel of the World Jewish Congress, also teaches
similar at the law school of Cornell and Syracuse.
“His Columbia students say his experience gives an
(l-r) Pete Hamill, Menachem Rosensaft and City Tech President
Russel K. Hotzler.
immediacy to an already powerful subject. ‘In this
class, you can’t be detached from what you’re talking
about,’ said one student, Sira Franzini, who is from
Italy — especially when ‘the professor is part of that
history.’”
Most significantly, according to Mr. Pérez-Peña,
“Mr. Rosensaft stresses that the field his class covers is new, and still evolving. Until the Holocaust,
the term ‘genocide’ did not exist, ‘crimes against humanity’ was not yet a legal term, and international
courts did not try national leaders. It was generally
understood that if a nation slaughtered people within
its own borders, neighboring countries would not intervene.
“’Each instance of genocide has its own characteristics, and each time we learn how the law can be
flexible and adapt,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, we’re
still learning.’”
Several days later, November 9, 2011, the 73rd anniversary of Kristallnacht, was formally proclaimed
Menachem Z. Rosensaft Recognition Day in Brooklyn, NY, by Borough President Marty Markowitz on
the occasion of Rosensaft receiving the 2011 Distin-
Israel marks 70 years since Babi Yar massacre
By Aron Heller
JERUSALEM (AP) — With tears in his eyes, Michael
Sidko laid a wreath of flowers at Israel’s official
Holocaust memorial during a solemn ceremony
marking 70 years since a World War II massacre he
barely escaped.
Sidko was six when he was taken with his family to
the Babi Yar ravine outside Kiev, Ukraine — then part
of the Soviet Union — to be murdered along with the
rest of that city’s Jews. In the two-day killing spree in
September 1941, Nazi troops gunned down more than
33,000 Jews and buried them in mounds of dirt.
Among those murdered were Sidko’s mother and
two of his siblings. He and his older brother, Grisha,
were among the few who managed to escape the
killing fields.
“How is it that everyone was killed and only we
survived?” he asked, hands quivering. “I still can’t
believe what happened there and how I managed to
get away. I thank God I am here today.”
At 76, he is one of the only living survivors of an
atrocity that has become one of the defining events of
the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews.
The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June
1941 marked a turning point in the German plan
to “solve the Jewish problem.” Einsatzgruppen
paramilitary death squads were sent out to follow the
German armies. Babi Yar was one of the first mass
killing sites.
Of the 160,000 Jews in Kiev prior to the Nazi
invasion, some 100,000 managed to flee. The rest
January 2012
were ordered to be murdered.
At Babi Yar, the Jews were forced to hand over
valuables, strip and line up on the edge of the ravine.
They were then shot with automatic fire and covered
by dirt. The Nazis gunned down 33,771 Jews over two
days. Similar mass murders took place throughout
the former Soviet Union.
After the war, a 1961 poem about the massacre
by Yevgeni Yevtushenko was turned into music, and
Babi Yar became a symbol of Nazi evil.
“At that area, the mass murder systematically
started and for many years it was denied,” said Avner
Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust
Memorial. “That very famous piece of poetry started
a new process and immediately it caught the minds
and hearts of so many people in the world.”
Babi Yar also served as a slaughterhouse for nonJews, such as Gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war.
According to a Soviet estimate, 100,000 people were
murdered there.
Sidko said he was gathered along with a small
group of children while the adults were being
slaughtered. For some inexplicable reason, a German
guard allowed him and his 13-year-old brother to
break off from the group, and then they fled.
They returned home, but a Ukrainian neighbor
reported them to the Gestapo and they were sent to
a concentration camp. The brothers escaped that as
well and were on the run for two more years, until
the end of the war. Michael Sidko’s brother Grisha is
no longer alive.
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
guished Humanitarian Award from the Jewish Faculty & Staff Association of New York City College of
Technology for his lifelong “endeavors in sustaining
the memory of the Holocaust.”
At the City Tech ceremony, Rosensaft was introduced by the renowned novelist and journalist Pete
Hamill who spoke about their more than two-decades-long friendship. Hamill recalled how Rosensaft had been his consultant on Yiddish pronunciation
and Jewish religious practices during the writing of
Hamill’s 1997 novel, Snow in August.
Professor James Goldman, the Former Acting
Dean of Continuing Education at City Tech, said that
“If Elie Wiesel deservedly is considered the preeminent voice of Holocaust survivors, then Menachem
Rosensaft is surely among the foremost eloquent
voices of the children of Holocaust survivors, that is,
the Second Generation.”
Borough President Markowitz’s proclamation
noted that Rosensaft, “born in the displaced persons
camp of Bergen-Belsen,” has become “a leader in
Holocaust remembrance activities” as “founding
chairman of the International Network of Children of
Jewish Holocaust Survivors, chairman of the editorial board of the Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project and vice president of the American Gathering of
Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants
among so many other endeavors.” Last year Rosensaft was appointed by President Obama to the United
States Holocaust Memorial Council which oversees
the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC (he had previously been named twice to that
body by President Clinton), and is also the immediate past president of Park Avenue Synagogue in New
York City as well as a former national president of
the Labor Zionist Alliance.
SAVE THE DATE
SUNDAY
APRIL 22, 2012
AT
2:00 PM
“2012” ANNUAL
GATHERING OF REMEMBRANCE
IN OBSERVANCE OF YOM HASHOAH
HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY
TEMPLE EMANU-EL
OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
FIFTH AVENUE AND 65TH STREET
NEW YORK CITY
TOGETHER 5
Albanian PM: Ahmadinejad is the new
Nazi
By Itamar Eichner, Israel News
When Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha talks about Israel, one might mistake him for a Zionist leader who could easily fit into the Likud or Yisrael Beiteinu parties. But when these statements are made by a Muslim leading a moderate
European Muslim country – they are definitely surprising.
The highlight was at the United Nations General Assembly, after the famous
clash between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas over the Palestinian statehood bid.
When it was Berisha’s turn to talk, he openly criticized the Palestinian move.
His General Assembly address did not exactly benefit Albania’s relations with
Muslim countries, especially Iran, but he refused to take it back.
“Iran and its leader, (President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad, are the new Nazis,
and the world must learn from the Holocaust and stop them before it’s too late,”
Berisha says in an interview to Yedioth Ahronoth. “The Holocaust taught the free
world’s conscience not to let such a scenario repeat itself.”
When asked if Albania, as a NATO member, will join a military strike against
Iran if and when such a decision is made, he immediately replies: “We’ll support
such a move and join it, just like we supported the operation in Libya. It won’t be
against the Iranian people, but against the nuclear facilities.”
It’s no wonder that during his recent visit to Israel, his third, Berisha held
meetings with the president, prime minister, Knesset speaker and foreign minister, and was praised for his courageous opinions. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman even informed him of his decision to open an Israeli embassy in the
Albanian capital of Tirana.
Berisha did not settle for these meetings and even visited the Western Wall,
where he received a blessing from the holy site’s rabbi, Shmuel Rabinovitch. He
didn’t visit the Temple Mount mosques.
Why did you oppose the Palestinian UN statehood bid?
“The unilateral Palestinian move does not advance a political solution, but
sabotages the peace process. The attempt to bypass Israel and the US is a mistake.
Peace between Israel and the Palestinians must go through direct negotiations
and by guaranteeing the security of both states. Shortcuts will do no good.”
Were you pressured by Arab countries or Iran because of your stance?
“We are in no way against the Palestinians. Whoever says that is completely
wrong. But we have our own opinion, and we believe it’s the right way. Some
countries, which have pushed the Palestinians to take radical steps, have taken an
unacceptable stand against Israel. The solution must bring full security to both
states, but I have not seen any support for the acceptance and recognition of the
Conference calls on Romania
to acknowledge WWII war
crimes
(JTA)—A conference focusing on Romania's
Holocaust-era war crimes in Ukraine and Moldova
called on Romania to acknowledge and apologize for
the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews.
The conference, which ended on the anniversary
of Kristallnacht, was convened to bring the full scope
of World War II Romania’s fascist state-sponsored
genocide to light. The conference examined
Romania’s role in the Holocaust in Ukraine and other
countries of the former Soviet Union, particularly
Moldova.
Convened
by Ukrainian
lawmaker
Oleksandr
Feldman and
the Ukrainian
J e w i s h
Committee,
Oleksandr Feldman
which Feldman
serves
as
president, the conference brought together some 70
participants from Ukraine and Moldova comprising
a mix of Holocaust survivors, scholars and public
figures.
The Romanian ambassador to Kiev initially
accepted the conference’s invitation but at the last
TOGETHER 6
State of Israel.”
Will you vote against a unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN General
Assembly?
“We have yet to decide whether to abstain
or vote, but we definitely won’t vote in favor.”
What is your stand regarding the Iranian
threat?
“A nuclear Iran is the biggest threat to peace
in the Middle East and in the entire world. It’s
not just against Israel. The latest IAEA report
showed that Iran is working to acquire a nuclear weapon and won’t allow its facilities to be
supervised. The Security Council must take all
steps necessary to prevent a nuclear Iran.”
If diplomatic efforts fail and Iran acquires a
nuclear bomb, will you support a military strike Albanian Prime Minister
Sali Berisha
on Iran by NATO?
“We’ll support any NATO decision.”
And if Israel decides to attack?
“I believe it has to be coordinated. At the moment there is an international
document, and the best way is through Security Council resolutions.”
You must have supported the Arab Spring.
“Regimes based on religion have no future. Those who protested on the streets
in Arab countries were fighting for freedom and values shared by all human beings, regardless of their religion. Western countries must reach out and help them
build their democratic institutions.”
Is Albania a good example of how a moderate Muslim country should look
like?
“Albania is a country of religious tolerance. We are a multi-religious country.
The majority of the population is Muslim, but never in our long history have we
had inter-religious incidents. Religion has no influence on politics.”
Israelis have stopped traveling to Turkey because of the crisis, and many are
going to Greece and Bulgaria instead. Perhaps they should come to Albania.
“I believe Israelis will return to Turkey, but they’re more than welcome in
Albania. In the past year we have seen a significant increase in the number of
Israeli tourists. This year we were picked by Lonely Planet as the No. 1 tourist
destination, and we have a lot to offer Israeli tourists.
“In general, many Israeli companies invest in Albania, and I call on Israelis to
continue doing business with us.”
moment declined to attend. There was, however,
official representation by the embassies of Austria,
Azerbaijan and Israel, as well as lawmakers from
Ukraine and Moldova.
“We are not demanding financial compensation
from Romania,” Feldman said. “They cannot bring
their victims back to life. Even though the Romanian
ambassador did not attend the conference, we are
pushing forward with this process until justice is
achieved.”
The conference adopted a series of three
resolutions that Feldman called “a small first step of
a long journey before us.”
The resolutions call on Romania to recognize
publicly and officially its role in the murder of
hundreds of thousands of Jews from the territories of
present-day Ukraine and Moldova; to issue a formal
apology to the Jewish communities of Ukraine and
Moldova; and to play an active role in cooperating
with Ukrainian and Moldovan governmental
and nongovernmental organizations in programs
designed for memorializing Holocaust victims of
Romania-occupied territories.
Next to the Nazis, Romania was responsible for
the deaths of more Jews during the Holocaust than
any other German-allied country. During World
War II, the Nazi-allied Romanian government was
complicit in the murder of approximately 400,000
Jews, both on Romanian soil and in villages and
forests throughout Ukraine and Moldova.
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
Holocaust Desecration
cont’d from p.2
said enough about the Jews and people believed it—
believed it and you have the Holocaust.”
All of these blatantly inappropriate Nazi and Holocaust analogies, whether made in Israel, the United
States or anywhere else, undermine our ability to
bring the moral authority of Holocaust memory to
bear when it really matters. The Holocaust and all it
represents should only be invoked in our contemporary political discourse when human beings, Jews or
non-Jews, are actually persecuted or threatened with
destruction.
It is not enough to condemn the haredim who
compared themselves to Jews in Nazi Europe at the
December 31 rally and then allow the incident to be
dismissed and forgotten as merely another outrage in
a succession of many outrages.Those who organized
or took part in this obscene demonstration should be
made permanent pariahs, as should the ultra-Orthodox rabbis and other leaders who refuse to denounce
it. Desecrating the memory of the Holocaust is as
reprehensible as spitting on a girl, and the social degenerates who do either of these things have no place
in a civilized society.
The writer’s parents survived the Auschwitz and BergenBelsen concentration camps. He is an adjunct professor
of law at Cornell Law School, lecturer in law at Columbia
Law School, and vice president of the American Gathering
of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.
January 2012
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum: Telling the Stories of Survivors
By Morris J. Vogel
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum tells the
story of the great wave of turn-of-the-20th-century
immigration through its interpretation of 97 Orchard
Street, a tenement that housed 7,000 people from
20 nations between 1863 and 1935. The Museum
has transformed this once-abandoned building into
a symbol of the immigration experience, turning
the stories of the immigrant families who lived here
into America’s story. The Museum has twice been
honored for this achievement at the White House,
with the National Medal for Museum Service and the
Preserve America Presidential Award. The Museum
is also a National Park Service affiliated site, paired
formally by Congress with Ellis Island and the
Statue of Liberty. The National Trust for Historic
Preservation identified the Lower East Side as “the
most culturally important square mile in the United
States.” The Trust’s citation noted that, “More of
almost everything that is distinctively American has
its roots here than anywhere else.”
The Museum’s flagship building is a National
Historic Landmark. The Museum hosts 175,000
visitors annually; it is an iconic institution telling the
story of what gave New York’s Lower East Side its
special character as freedom’s portal.
If anything is missing from this success, it’s that
the Museum has thus far not been able to tell the
story of the Lower East Side’s second life as a refuge
in which Holocaust survivors built families and
homes after the war. That’s because the Museum’s
landmark tenement was condemned as unfit for
human occupancy and shuttered in 1935. Now, the
Museum has acquired a second property, an 1888era tenement at 103 Orchard Street, on the corner
of Delancey, that housed newcomers in the decades
after the war. This building will allow the Museum to
highlight the story of post-World War II immigration
and to interpret it with the same emotional power that
it devoted to the earlier waves of newcomers who
USS St. Louis Redux
By Sergio Carmona, Florida Jewish Journal
A United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
representative recently revealed a once unsolved
mystery to the local community.
Scott Miller, the USHMM’s director of curatorial
affairs, discussed the museum’s ten-year project to
uncover the fate of every refugee aboard the passenger liner S.S. St. Louis at Aventura Turnberry Jewish
Center and Valencia Reserve in Boynton Beach. In
1939, the St. Louis, which carried 937 people, most
of them Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, was refused
save haven by both the Cuban government and the
United States and returned to Europe.
In an interview, Miller said that when the passengers went back to Europe, there was a gamut of Holocaust experiences and individual stories.
“There were close to 250 [passengers] that were
deported to Auschwitz and Sobibor and there were
those who survived in hiding by faking their identities and there were those who made their way to
the U.S. but it’s stunning to think that this group of
people was off the coast of Miami Beach,” Miller
said. “This shouldn’t have been a Holocaust story;
this should’ve been an immigration story.”
Miller remarked during the ATJC discussion that
in the mid-90s, a man went to the museum’s survi-
January 2012
followed their dreams to this country and built new
lives here.
The Museum will use its time-tested and highly
successful exhibit format, displaying apartments in
which actual families lived in order to present their
stories to visitors. It hopes to start with the story
of Kalman and Regina Epstein, who were among
the handful of refugees from Nazism admitted
under President Truman’s Emergency Directive of
December 1945, which temporarily suspended the
immigration quota system; the Epsteins created new
lives at 103 Orchard Street after resettlement by the
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS).
The Museum would very much to locate and
interview children and grandchildren of the Epsteins.
There is also much useful information in the public
record, and museum researchers have uncovered
significant elements of the Epstein story in the
HIAS records, Ellis Island Arrival Records, U.S.
Naturalization Records, NYC Board of Elections
Records, and NYC telephone records. We know, for
example, that shortly after the Epsteins arrival in 1947,
Scott Miller, United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum’s director of curatorial affairs, discusses the museum’s
project to uncover the fate of
every refugee aboard the passenger liner S.S. St. Louis.
(Staff photo/Janeris Marte /
December 14, 2011)
vors’ registry and said he was a child on the ship
who’s looking for other children he played with and
that at that moment, they knew they wanted to uncover what became of these passengers. As a starting
point, he said the museum had a list of passengers,
names, what year they were born and what country
they were sent to in its archives. Through this research, he found out that a couple hundred passengers made their way to the U.S. and survived the war.
The museum even put out advertisements looking for
passengers.
“We put ads in the newspapers and also went to
radio and we even went to television,” he remarked.
“The Holocaust Museum even sent me to media
training to be on television.”
Miller said that although the museum was originally skeptical this could work, early on in the search,
a man named Michael Barak, who was known as Michael Fink as a five-year-old aboard the ship, told
them he read an ad in a Tel Aviv German language
newspaper.
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
they were self-sufficient and needed no additional
support from HIAS. Like an earlier generation of
Jewish immigrants to the Lower East Side, both
Kalman and Regina Epstein worked in New York
City’s garment industry. Their children enrolled
at P.S. 42 and Seward Park High School, studying
alongside children of other recent newcomers to the
Lower East Side, including Puerto Ricans who had
begun to settle the neighborhood at the same time.
The Epsteins registered to vote for the first time
while they lived at 103 Orchard.
Museum research in the records of HIAS, the
United Service for New Americans and the New
York Association for New Americans, and the
National Council of Jewish Women documents the
general experiences of Holocaust survivors drawn to
the Lower East Side for jobs in the garment industry
and opportunities in small retail shops. Museum
researchers would like to conduct oral history
interviews with survivors and their children who
lived and worked on the Lower East Side in the late
1940s and 1950s.
There is a larger story in this presentation as well.
America’s restrictive quota laws contributed to the
horror of the Holocaust. The admission of Jewish
refugees from post-war Europe, which subsequently
included major refugee acts in 1948 and 1949, spelled
the beginning of the end of the notorious quota
system even as it shaped a new and more generous
policy towards refugees and asylum seekers. Ending
race-based immigration quotas allowed America
to re-establish its oldest dream as a refuge for the
persecuted of other lands. This new exhibit will help
tell the story of the lives these survivors and their
children made in America.
Morris J. Vogel is President of the Lower East Side
Tenement Museum.
“That was an incredible moment for me personally and for our search,” Miller remarked. “It was our
first success story using the media.”
When asked how many passengers are still alive
in an interview, Miller said there are approximately
50-60. One of these passengers, Herbert Karliner,
resides in Aventura. Karliner shared his story at the
ATJC presentation. When asked about his goals in
sharing his experiences, he replied “I think it’s important that we talk about this because we should
learn a lesson and tell the new generation what happened to us.”
Jack Karako, director for the museum’s Southeast
Regional Office in Boca Raton, said the highlight of
the discussions was the commitment the museum has
in remembering the Holocaust’s history and its individual stories.
“As
he
[Miller] said,
it
wasn’t
just 937 passengers, but
937 individual stories,”
Karako added.
S.S. St. Louis
TOGETHER 7
“Hitler wasn’t all bad”: One
in ten Austrian teens think
Nazi leader did “good things,”
shock survey reveals
By Allan Hall, MailOnLine
Austrians are shocked by a new survey which
shows that one in ten young people think Adolf Hitler
was not all bad and that he did some “good things.”
Many are also anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner
despite years of multicultural teaching in schools.
The country”s Kurier newspaper called the findings by the Youth Culture Research Institute “frightening”—particularly as it is coupled with the general
mistrust and dislike of non-Austrians.
Austria’s Kurier
newspaper
called the findings by the Youth
Culture Research
Institute “frightening.” Above, a
group of young
Austrian neo-Nazi youth.
neo-nazis attend
an annual military festival in Karnburg, south of Vienna.
Austria has struggled with its relationship to Nazis in general and Hitler in particular ever since 1945.
The country was taken over by Hitler—himself an
Austrian by birth—in 1938.
Welcomed by euphoric crowds at the time, postwar Austrian retreated to a psychological comfort
zone whereby they classified themselves as the “first
victims” of the regime.
The new survey asked youngsters aged between
16 and 19 what they thought of the dictator.
Pollsters were astonished when 11.2 per cent of
them said that Hitler “did many good things for the
people.”
And one in four of them believe there are “too
many Turks” in Austria, the predominant immigrant
group.
JUDGE WHO RULED HOLOCAUST A FACT DIES
cont’d from p. 3
judicial notice, which allows courts to recognize as
fact information that is common knowledge.
“The court does take judicial notice that Jews
were gassed to death in Poland at Auschwitz in the
summer of 1944,” when Mermelstein and his family
were there, Johnson ruled.
William John Cox, Mermelstein’s attorney, described the judge’s “courageous decision” as “the
greatest ruling I could have hoped for.”
“This was the first case to confront Holocaust deniers head-on, and we were fortunate to have a judge
who could not be bullied by these characters,” Mermelstein said in a phone interview.
Johnson, a native of Kentucky and a World War
II veteran, presided over a number of headline-grabbing cases, however, none of these cases, the Los
Angeles Times commented, “matched the historical
significance of the lawsuit that asked him to decide
whether the Holocaust actually took place.”
Mermelstein, who is still the active owner of a
pallet-manufacturing company, ultimately won a
$90,000 settlement and a formal apology from the
institute.
The trial was dramatized in 1991 in the television
movie “Never Forget,” with actor Leonard Nimoy in
the role of Mermelstein, and described in detail by
Mermelstein in his autobiography, By Bread Alone.
TOGETHER 8
“Young, open, tolerant? The ideal of an open, socially minded younger generation remains, as a current study shows, an illusion,” said Austria”s Standard newspaper.
“Youth are openly hostile to foreigners and are
anti-Semitic to an amazingly large degree.”
“Too many Turks live in this country,” said 43.6
percent of the respondents.
Perhaps more sinisterly, in a statement that harks
directly back to the Nazis, 18.2 per cent of them declared that “Jews have now, like before, too much
influence over the world economy.”
It was feeding on prejudice like this in the socially
depressed atmosphere of the 1920s and 30s that allowed the Nazis to demonise Jews, isolate them and
finally exterminate them on a massive scale.
The Youth And Zeitgeist study was carried out
among 400 young people in the capital Vienn—the
city where Hitler lived as a down-and-out in the days
before WWI and where his hatred of Jews flourished.
Those who carried out the survey said that the
most extremist views were expressed by the less educated—but they said that even well-educated youngsters harboured extremist viewpoints but expressed
them in more “subtle” ways.
In total, 40.5 per cent of respondents agreed with
the statement that “for many immigrants, the Austrians are viewed as a lesser people”.
This, again, is a viewpoint straight from the textbook of the original Nazis.
They expressed great fears for future job prospects and felt that Turkish immigrants were rivals to
them for work, said study author Beate Grossegger.
“Political education has failed,” she said while
Bernhard Heinzlmaier, chairman of the institute, said
xenophobia had “arrived” among the well-educated
young people of the middle classes.
“They do not express themselves politically incorrectly in public but they are coolly amoral entrepreneurs for whom others are not fellow human beings
but competitors.”
He blamed years of “neo-liberally brainwashing”
for their viewpoints.
Israeli museum refuses to
return WWII spoils
Dutch News.nl
The Israel Museum in Jersusalem is refusing to return a Torah cover stolen by the Nazis during World
War II to the Jewish community in Leiden, the NRC
recently reported.
The 17th century cover for religious scrolls has
been at the center of a dispute over ownership for
years and the Leiden community now hopes the
Dutch government will get involved, the paper says.
The Torah mantle had been given on loan to the
Jewish Historical Museum in 1936 and was stolen by
the Nazis during the occupation. Four years ago, the
Israel Museum admitted it had been given the cover
by the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, an organization established in 1947 to deal with the collection and
redistribution of unclaimed Jewish cultural property.
Julie-Marthe Cohen, curator of the Amsterdam
Jewish museum, told the NRC it took until 2007 for
the Israel Museum to give in to pressure and produce
a list of over 700 items given it by Jewish Cultural
Reconstruction and without a clear provenance.
“In addition, there are not enough photos and the
descriptions are limited,” she said.
According to the NRC, Israel Museum director
James Snyder says its role is to preserve the cultural
heritage of the pre-war Jewish community.
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
Claims Conference
Negotiates Pensions for
Additional Survivors
Thanks to the efforts of representatives of the
American Gathering, certain Holocaust survivors
who have been denied German compensation
pensions will now be eligible to receive them as a
result of Claims Conference negotiations with the
German government.
Prior to the negotiations, certain survivors were
only eligible for pensions from the Claims Conference Article 2 Fund and the Central and Eastern European Fund (CEEF) if they had been in a ghetto, in
hiding, or living under false identity for at least 18
months during the Nazi era. This minimum time period of persecution was part of the eligibility criteria
established by the German government, and which
the Claims Conference for years has been working
to change.
As of January 1, 2012, the minimum time period
for having lived under any of these conditions will be
reduced to 12 months.
The Article 2 Fund makes monthly payments of
€300 and the CEEF makes monthly payments of
€260 to certain Holocaust survivors who meet all eligibility criteria, which encompass factors other than
persecution history:
Further, as of January 1, 2012, those survivors
age 75 and over who were in a ghetto for less than 12
months but a minimum of three months will be entitled
to a special monthly pension of €240 if they live in the
West or €200 if they live in the countries of the former
Soviet bloc, if they meet the other eligibility criteria
of the programs.This liberalization will drastically
change the compensation programs, especially for
those who endured the Budapest Ghetto.
These liberalizations will largely affect child
survivors, whose special plight has been a primary
focus of recent discussions between the Claims
Conference and the German Ministry of Finance.
The above liberalizations, especially for victims who
survived in hiding, will have a substantial impact
on heretofore uncompensated child survivors. The
Claims Conference and the German government
have agreed to establish a working group to review
the special plight of child survivors, defined as those
born in 1928 or later.
Together, the Article 2 Fund and CEEF have paid
pensions to more than 109,000 Holocaust survivors
since 1995. Both programs were created as a result
of intensive Claims Conference negotiations with the
German government.
The Claims Conference meets regularly with
German government officials to negotiate changes to
these and other programs so that additional Holocaust
victims may receive compensation payments.
Negotiations focus on expanding the criteria for
compensation programs, so that the experiences
of more Holocaust victims are recognized, and on
increasing payment amounts.
The Claims Conference will continue to press
other issues of concern in future negotiations with
the German government.
The information here does not constitute a full
and comprehensive description of the criteria of the
Article 2 Fund or CEEF or of any amendments to this
program. Eligibility criteria for Article 2 and CEEF
payments are determined by the German government.
January 2012
Charity Team Runs NYC
Marathon for Holocaust
Survivors
far raised $600,000 this way, with the bulk of it from
the NYC Marathon. It aims to raise $200,000 for the
November 6 race, which would account for about 8%
of the organization’s total annual fundraising of $2.3
million. All fundraising revenue goes directly to the
Holocaust survivors, with overhead covered by legacy
revenues and investment income.
This was The Blue Card’s third NYC Marathon,
and it has also fielded charity teams in marathons in
Miami and Atlanta. Just this past March, runners ran
for The Blue Card in the first ever Jerusalem Marathon, and Rubinstein is planning to recruit runners for
Rome in March 2012. The Minsk-born Rubinstein, 46,
participates when he can, but not by running. “I’m a
walker,” he told The Shmooze unapologetically.
Among The Blue Card team’s NYC Marathon
runners, including some from South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Australia and Israel, is Dr. Arnold Breitbart. The 52-year-old plastic surgeon from Great
Neck with practices in Manhattan and Long Island
will be running his 25th marathon, and his 8th NYC
one. He began running seriously back in medical
school, and has used his participation in marathons as
a way to raise money for causes that are dear to him.
The Blue Card’s mission of supporting the dayto-day medical and living needs of poor Holocaust
survivors is one especially close to his heart. His
parents and his maternal grandparents are Holocaust
survivors. His father, who survived on the run and in
hiding, lost his entire family during the war. He kept
a diary while in hiding, however, and years later Breitbart used it as a guide when he went back to Poland
to retrace his father’s footsteps. He recently published his father’s diary along with additional material from his trip under the title, Awaiting a Miracle.
For needy Holocaust survivors throughout the
U.S., it was miraculous that they survived the Nazi
genocide. Breitbart and his fellow runners believe it
is only natural that they, who enjoy good fortune and
health, run to help others live with dignity in their
old age.
By Jake Berry, Nashua Telegraph
NASHUA – Plans have been coming together for
years for a Holocaust memorial in downtown Nashua, but the foundation is just now taking shape.
Construction crews took the first steps toward
building the memorial, setting a frame for the concrete foundation next to Rotary Common on Main
Street.
The memorial is still years from completion.
Workers will return shortly to pour the concrete, and
the body of the statue by local sculptor John Weidman won’t be constructed until the spring at the earliest.
“This is the start,” said Weidman, who was recruited by former Nashua Alderman Fred Teeboom
to take part in the project. “It’s the start of a long
process, but it’s good to get it going.”
Teeboom, who lost much of his extended family
during the Holocaust, first conceived of the project
in 2009, and he quickly enlisted Weidman, director
of the Andres Institute of Art in Brookline, for the
sculpture.
Together, the two developed the design – six granite walls representing the six death camps operated
by the Nazis during the Holocaust, among other pieces. And they set about raising funds for the $150,000
project.
Last year, the Board of Aldermen agreed to pay
about $6,500 for general site work and to create four
parking spaces on the site, next to Steve King Auto.
But the remaining funds will come from private donations, said Teeboom, who grew up in Amsterdam
during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
Members of Holocaust Memorial in Nashua have
raised about $40,000, Teeboom said. That money
has gone to the initial design and a preliminary engineering study, and it will cover the laying of the
foundation.
Once the concrete is poured, construction will
stop until the spring, when planners hope to have
enough money to continue the work.
The basic construction should be complete next
year, with landscaping and other final touches to follow in 2013, Teeboom said.
“When people see it going up, they’ll see it’s not
just a paper thing,” Teeboom said. “Hopefully that
will help” raise money.”
When it’s complete, the monument will be 28 feet
in diameter. It will consist of the granite walls, each
engraved with barbed wire and the name of a camp
on the back. A black cube will sit in the center, showing the reflection of all who come to visit.
“We see ourselves in that,” Weidman said of the
cube. “It’s a dark period in our history that we have
to acknowledge.”
The message of the memorial “is we can’t withdraw from the things going on around us,” he said.
European Union Funds
Preservation of Auschwitz
First Graduate Program in
Israel for Holocaust Studies
(JTA) The European Union has donated more than
$5 million to preserve the site of the Auschwitz Nazi
death camp.
Auschwitz authorities announced Wednesday that
the $5.3 million awarded by the European Commission, the executive body of the EU, will be used to
preserve the women’s barracks at the Birkenau site of
the camp, improve security and expand the database
system.
The funds came after talks between French Prime
Minister Francois Fillon and European Commission
President Jose Manuel Barroso.
“Holocaust survivors welcome the European
contribution as a tangible expression that the horrors of the Nazi era must remain a lesson for future
generations,” Elan Steinberg, vice president of the
American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and
their Descendants, said in a statement. “The protection of Auschwitz represents more than the physical
preservation of a site; it is a symbolic preservation of
memory.”
By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, ArutzSheva
The first Israeli graduate studies program in
Holocaust studies is opening next at Haifa University
for students from around the world.
The three-semester program for English speakers
allows students to access to Holocaust archives
in Israel, Germany and Poland. The program is
being headed by Prof. Aryeh J. Kochavi, head of
the Strochlitz Institute for Holocaust Studies at the
University of Haifa and a prominent scholar of World
War II, diplomatic history of the 20th century and
prisoners of war.
Holocaust Studies has emerged as a central
field of scholarship in the Humanities and Social
Sciences as Holocaust memory has become a global
phenomenon, while many questions in Holocaust
Studies still remain unanswered.
The recent opening of archives in Eastern Europe
of newly uncovered documents has opened up
opportunities for further research of the Holocaust as
the number of survivors is rapidly dwindling and the
number of Holocaust deniers grows.
The Haifa program will include study tours to
Germany and Poland where the students will visit
museums, archives and historical sites.
The course includes the history of World War II
and Nazi Germany, the Nazi policy of extermination,
Polish Jewry in the interwar period; social history
during the Holocaust period, psychological aspects
of Holocaust trauma, international law and genocide,
and representations of the Holocaust in European
novels and movies.
The Yad VaShem Holocaust Memorial Center,
the Ghetto Fighter’s House museum in Israel and
academic institutions in Poland and Germany are
participating in the Haifa University program.
By Renee Ghert-Zand, The Shmooze
Organizers of this year’s ING New York City
Marathon run on November 6 hoped that runners
would raise $1 million per mile. That’s a total of
$26,200,000 for charity. Among the official charity
teams this year were 70 runners raising money for
The Blue Card, a non-profit organization that supports the everyday financial needs of 2,000 destitute
Holocaust survivors in the United States.
“Some survivors have commented about how they
are honored and find it interesting that while they
were once on death marches, now younger people
are raising money for them by running,” noted The
Blue Card’s executive director, Elie Rubinstein. “It’s
not ‘run for your life,’ as it was for the survivors during the Holocaust, but rather ‘run for someone else’s
life.’”
This will not be the first time that the organization,
whose history dates back to 1934 in Germany, fielded
a running team. In fact, it has been using marathons
as “an alternative revenue stream,” as Rubinstein
put it, for the past three years. The Blue Card has so
Construction of Holocaust
memorial starts in Nashua, NH
January 2012
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
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TOGETHER 9
Prague Jewish Museum marks 70th anniversary of
Terezín deportations
Jewish Detention Camps in
Cyprus Remembered
Nov. 24 marks the 70th anniversary of the first
deportation of Jews from Bohemia and Moravia to
Terezín, from where many of them were sent on to
Auschwitz and other death camps. Prague’s Jewish
Museum is commemorating the occasion with lectures, concerts and assorted events with Holocaust
survivors and historians offering valuable insights to
put the tragic events into a contemporary perspective.
“I think it’s important to understand that the 70th
anniversary, like any round anniversary, is a kind of
checkpoint, in the sense that you have the possibility
to rethink what you are doing and what the memorial
of the Holocaust is about,” Michal Frankl, the head
of the Shoah History Department at the Jewish Museum, told Czech Position.
Frankl says that ideally we could reinterpret and
reconsider the Holocaust without needing anniversaries, but society needs landmark dates to focus
on history. In the case of this round anniversary it
is even more relevant, as in all likelihood it will be
the last round anniversary that Holocaust survivors
themselves can mark.
During WWII, the Gestapo turned the garrison town of Terezín (Theresienstadt) into a Jewish
ghetto. More than 33,000 of the 150,000 Jews sent
there from Czechoslovakia and abroad died within
its walls, mainly due to the appalling conditions arising out of extreme population density. About 88,000
inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. At the end of the war there were
17,247 survivors of Terezín.
The first time former prisoners met at the site itself was in 1991, but Frankl says that it was hardly
seen as big news at the time. Times have changed,
and the 60th anniversary in 2001 resulted in much
greater interest from the media as well as among students and educational projects, municipalities installing plaques and changes in Czech textbooks.
“We all are totally sure that it’s very relevant, but
we cannot avoid giving it a new meaning. Theoretically, it would be nice if we could do this without
any anniversaries, but the way societies function we
need anniversaries to do this,” Frankl said. “This is a
story of partial successes, but also some failures. I’m
not sure it always leads us to rethink alternative ways
to the tell what happened in the Second World War,
especially how we tell the Czech story of the war.”
Frank cited recent mainstream examples of Czech
publications that deal with the war as showing more
tolerance and openness towards minorities while
remaining highly ethnocentric. “It’s a strange combination of talking about minorities only in certain
contexts and means that they are not that essential to
the core of the story.”
A public space
One of the events meant to reach out to the Czech
public was the opening of the Pinkas Synagogue. The
site of the memorial to the Czech Republic’s 80,000
Holocaust victims was one of major projects of the
postwar Jewish Museum in the ’50s and one of the
ways it tried to cope with the legacy of the Holocaust.
Frankl says how the director of the Jewish Museum at the time, Hana Volavková, was close to artistic circles and brought in two painters, Václav Boštík
and Jiří John, to hand paint the 77, 297 victims’ names
Cyprus Mail
The University of Cyprus recently hosted a lecture by Professor Emanuel Gutmann entitled, “The
Jewish Detention Camps in Cyprus (1946-1949): the
Memories of a Contemporary Witness.”
In the second half of the 1940s Cyprus become
the temporary refuge for tens of thousands of Jews.
These events have been well documented in Israeli
history but relatively untold in the history of Cyprus.
The camps played a role in both the independence
movement of Cyprus and the creation of the state of
Israel. In this light, the testimony of Prof. Gutmann
is of great interest in understanding the history of the
detention camps.
Fleeing post-war Europe, survivors of the Holocaust found themselves barred from entering Palestine due to British quotas. Forced to immigrate
illegally, they boarded ships and ventured into the
Mediterranean unsure of their fate.
The British Navy overtook 39 of these ships,
carrying a total of 52,000 passengers, and sent the
people to Cyprus. On the island, the British government created a series of
detention camps in order to prevent Jewish
refugees from another
attempt at entering Palestine. These detainees,
the vast majority HoloA Cyprus detention camp.
caust survivors, endured
deplorable conditions in
Cyprus, some for a period of years. At its peak there
were nine camps in Cyprus, located at two sites about
50km apart. They were Caraolos, north of Famagusta, and Dekhelia, outside of Larnaca.
Emissaries from Palestine lived with the refugees
in the camps as representatives of various Zionist
movements including the underground strike force of
the Haganah. Gutman, who had emigrated from Germany as a youth, was a member of the Haganah (he
also served in the British armed forces during the war
in His Majesty's Jewish Brigade) and it was his job to
lead refugees from Europe to Palestine.
Eventually, through the intervention of the Israeli
government, the British slowly allowed detainees to
leave the camps and head for Palestine. On February
10, 1949 the last Jews finally were freed from the
confines of the camps, 267 days after the establishment of the state of Israel.
Gutmann was born in Munich in 1924 and immigrated with his parents to Palestine in 1936. After his
stay in Cyprus he studies Political Science at Columbia University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1958. He went
on to an illustrious career first working in the Israeli
consulate in New York and later as a much published
professor at Hebrew University, where he taught until his retirement in 1991.
© ČTK
A meeting of former prisoners of the Terezín ghetto, held by the
Terezín Memorial in association with the Terezín Initiative.
on the synagogue walls. “They created this memorial
concept, which is unique in many respects. It’s not
only a list of names, it’s a work of art,” Frankl said.
The painters spent much of the ’50s painting the
names on the wall of the synagogue and the memorial was opened in 1959. Frankl points out the discrepancy of a Holocaust memorial being allowed during
a highly anti-semitic period in communist Czechoslovakia, following the show trial and execution of
Rudolf Slánský and other party officials, the majority
of them Jewish.
“In this context, talking about the Holocaust –
or anything Jewish – might even be dangerous and
hardly anyone did it, but my interpretation of this is
that the Pinkas Synagogue was seen as a purely religious space that belonged to the Jewish community
but didn’t belong to or speak to the public space.”
Opening up the synagogue today is an attempt to
make it a part of the Czech public space and thus
make the names memorialized within it part of the
larger Czech story.
Postwar years
The Jewish Museum is also intent on broadening
the Holocaust dialogue to include the postwar experience of survivors. ‘I think in some respects it’s
important to realize that, on a personal level, the Holocaust didn’t end in 1945.’
“I think in some respects it’s important to realize
that, on a personal level, the Holocaust didn’t end in
1945, and that these people are not only survivors
who suffered during the Holocaust but that they have
their stories after the war. They generally were living in an environment that wasn’t open and friendly.
They also had to cope with the fact that their families
were incomplete, as their family members had usually been murdered,” Frankl said.
Frankl also sees their situation as a good starting
point for thinking about the postwar period. With the
country virtually cleansed of its minorities through
both the Holocaust and the subsequent expulsion of
Germans the situation for the members of minorities
who remained or came back was all the more tenuous.
The Jewish Museum is not confining its interest
in this topic to the anniversary, but has been working for the past two years on an oral history project
focusing on the postwar experience of survivors, revisiting with previous interview subjects and asking
them to elaborate on issues such as postwar memories of the Holocaust and their relations with the Jewish community after the war.
HASHAVA SEEKS SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS
Hashava, The Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims' Assets in Israel was established in 2007 to provide historical justice to victims
TOGETHER 10
of the Holocaust. They have more than 60,000 assets
located in Israel available to the legal heirs of those
who owned those assets and were murdered by the
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
Nazis and their collaborators.
If you are a Holocaust survivor, descendant or
relative and you have information regarding assets of
relatives or acquaintances that died in the Holocaust;
if you would like to locate and claim the assets of
your loved ones in Israel, please visit Hashava’s website to see if your family members are listed. Apply
through the Hashava website. Documents are very
helpful, but not required. If necessary, Hashava will
assist you with research.
In the U.S. call 1-800-475-1049, or call the Tel
Aviv office at +972-3-516-4117
January 2012
Swiss acknowledge those who
helped Jews flee Nazis
GENEVA (AFP) — Switzerland said it had finally
finished the process of rehabilitating more than a
hundred people punished during WWII for having
helped Jews escape Nazi persecution.
But only one of the 137 people vindicated by the
report actually lived to see their name cleared.
“All these people are today dead,” Alexandre
Schneebeli, the secretary of the Swiss parliament's
rehabilitation commission, told AFP. And of them
only Aimee Stitelman lived to see her name officially
cleared, several years ago.
In 1945, a Swiss military court ordered her detained
for 15 days for having helped 15 Jewish children who
were fleeing the Nazis, some of them orphans, enter
Switzerland. The rehabilitation commission struck
down the conviction in March 2004, when she was
79 years old. She died a year later.
The committee was set up in 2004 to acknowledge the injustice done to people in Switzerland who
Warsaw Jews debate demolition of Holocaust-era building
By Roman Frister, Haaretz
Sixty-six years after the end of the Second World
War, Warsaw’s Jewish community is debating whether or not to destroy a building on old ghetto territory,
in order to replace it with a 180-meter-tall tower.
The old office block in question is situated in the
heart of the city. Plans are in place to demolish the
historical building, and replace it with a tower that
would include residential and office spaces, as well
as a hotel for ultra-Orthodox Jews – a project that is
expected to attract significant revenues.
Heads of the community maintain that the building, which underwent certain changes in the 1990s,
has practically lost its historical value, and it no longer fulfills the needs of its institutions. According to
Poland’s virtual exhibition of Jewish heritage (under
construction) the building was built in the mid-19th
century and in addition to housing the community offices, which served about 300,000 people, it was a
medical clinic for the poor. During the Holocaust it
also served as a temporary hospital.
It’s Never Too Late to Find
Missing Family
By Susan Kent Avjian
I still have the chills thinking about it. June 1,
2010 a typical day on the phone with my father who
lives in New York that turns out to be anything but
typical. Some background information:
My father is a Holocaust survivor from Lodz, Poland. He has lived in the United States since transported here in 1946 after liberation from Flossenberg.
An active businessman and philanthropist who has
dedicated his life to helping Rightgeous Gentiles, fellow survivors and the education of youth about the
Holocaust. His surviving family had consisted of his
sister, brother and one first cousin. Unfortunately
both his brother and cousin have since passed away.
Dad is in his 80’s and has watched his surviving family dwindle away.
Earlier that June day my father had received an
email from Russia. The email came to him through
an organization in which he is active and stated, “I
have information that shows that we are family.” He
called me with excitement and shock in his voice,
so many years after the war, could this be possible?
Since the hour was late and it would be the middle of
the night in Russia he was unable to follow up until
the next day. A phone conversation and picture the
January 2012
took it upon themselves to help Jews escape Nazi
persecution. The Swiss courts punished those they
caught on the grounds that their actions had violated
Swiss neutrality.
According to historians, several hundred people
lost their job, were fined and in some cases even jailed
for having sheltered Jews hiding from the Nazis. Thus
a 25-year-old commercial traveller was jailed for two
and a half months by one court for having helped a
Viennese Jew get into the country. The Jew he helped
was also jailed for two months —and then sent back
over the border.
While Switzerland helped nearly 300,000 refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe during the war
years, it also turned back 20,000 of them, most of
them Jews. A committee of historians concluded in
2001 that the policy pursued by the Swiss between
1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany and
1945, when he was finally defeated by the Allied
forces, had been “excessively restrictive.”
The Swiss parliament adopted the rehabilitation
law as a result. But the official recognition that their
actions were right and proper does not include any
compensation.
Of the 137 people rehabilitated, 59 were Swiss,
34 French, 24 Italian, six German, three Polish, with
one Czech, one Hungarian, a Spaniard—and several
others who at the time in question were stateless.
According to the work of the researchers some of
them acted for purely humanitarian reasons and others out of a sense of patriotism, while some were also
motivated by the money that refugees offered them.
The commission completed its work after eight
years, having started in 2004, Wednesday's statement
from parliament said.
Its research had brought an important chapter of
the country's history to public attention, publicising
the actions of people who until now were unknown,
Wednesday's statement said.
"This recognition was essential in the eyes of the
people concerned and those close to them," the statement added.
A group of Polish and Jewish architects and intellectual businessmen see the building set for demolition as a crucial part of the site, which is also
home to a Jewish theater and the only synagogue that
survived the Nazi rule. Today, in addition to being
the central place of prayer in Warsaw, the synagogue
hosts concerts and exhibitions.
Warsaw’s city council has an encouraging approach
to the center and its surroundings, which are currently
undergoing a process of renovations intended to return
their historical character. Those who oppose the demolition are trying to get the building heritage listed,
which would prevent any changes being made to it.
Community chairman Piotr Kadltz’ik said in an interview with the magazine Midrash that he sees the attempt to preserve the building in its current form as an
act that counters the basic interests of the city's Jewish
population. Kadltz’ik filed an objection, opposing the
request for heritage listing.
The community has been granted an extension of
three months to explain its position. The final decision on whether or not to demolish the building will
be made early in the coming year.
American Gathering applauds
David Duke's arrest
next day made it official. Elena’s great grandmother
had been my father’s aunt, an aunt he never knew
existed! She had been killed by the KGB. Elena had
been researching her genealogy and when the KGB
files were opened she found the picture and various
correspondences. It turns out there was an additional
sibling, an aunt who had lived in Germany that had
also been previously unknown to my father.
Through translators, email and Skype have
opened up a world of new found family. This in itself is quite unbelievable but it gets better. Late December I receive yet another call from my father; he
is again speaking fast and excitedly. He had just received a phone call from a gentleman in Maryland,
my state of residence, and it turns out he, too, is family! His grandfather had been Dad’s uncles. Immediately after hanging up with my father, I was on the
phone with Feliks and we discover that we live only
15 minutes from each other and less than 30 from
his daughter and her family! We have had many gettogethers since that call.
We have been riding a whirlwind of discovery.
Our “dwindling family” has now grown exponentially, something we would never have believed
could happen. The Holocaust tore families apart but
it is heartwarming and chilling to see and know that
even now, more than six decades after the war ended, discovery and growth of family is still possible!
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
(AP) The American Gathering is applauding German police for taking former Ku Klux Klan leader
David Duke into custody before he could address a
far-right gathering.
Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American
Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, said the move “sends an important signal that
firm action against those who advocate hate must remain central to Germany’s moral and legal agenda.”
Cologne police say Duke, 61, was taken into custody before his speech for breaking a travel-ban to
many European nations including Germany.
They say the US resident was released and forced
to leave the country and that they do not know where
he is now. Duke’s website called the incident “thuggish communist-style oppression to suppress the
right-wing.”
Magen Dovid Adom Aids Survivors
Holocaust survivors living in Israel and in need of
emergency medical care will no longer have to worry
about finding the money thanks to the efforts of Magen Dovid Adom donors in Britain and France.
The contribution, which affects the more than
240,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel, was recently
revealed at Britain’s annual MDA dinner in London.
Stuart Glyn, the chair of the UK branch, explained
that the organization and its French partner would
now underwrite all MDA-related costs incurred by
survivors. At present, those expenses are paid for
from insurance or individual savings, yet more than
half of the survivors live below the poverty line and
struggle to pay bills.
Israel does not have a national health service, and
individuals often have to pay when MDA, which is
largely staffed by volunteers, is called out to their
rescue. “Over half [of survivors in Israel] are unable
to pay for the most basic of medical services,” Glyn
said. “We believe this situation to be unacceptable.”
The plans chime with those of the British ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould. Earlier this year Mr
Gould announced plans to help combat loneliness
amongst survivors by raising £2 million for social
projects.
He called the MDA UK plans a “wonderful gesture. We owe it to the survivors to ensure that they
live out their lives in comfort and dignity. This announcement is an important step towards that goal.”
TOGETHER 11
Florida’s Holocaust survivors win battle against French railroad
By Scott Travis, Sun Sentinel
A French railroad that helped shuttle thousands of
Jews to their deaths in Nazi Germany will have no
part of teaching Florida’s children about the Holocaust, the state education commissioner has decided.
SNCF America, the U.S. subsidiary of the French
National Railroad, had agreed to pay $80,000 to
the state for a program focusing on France’s role in
the Holocaust. But Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson told an SNCF administrator in a letter last week he was terminating its partnership after “thoughtful consideration of numerous concerns
raised.”
Holocaust survivors, who fought a passionate
battle against the railroad, which transported about
76,000 Jews during World War II. The survivors said
the company hasn’t taken full responsibility for its
role in the Holocaust and should have no part in the
state’s Holocaust education efforts.
Their fight received support from Florida Sens.
Bill Nelson and Marco Rubio as well as 11 U.S.
House members. In September, they wrote a joint letter to Robinson criticizing the department’s involvement with SNCF.
“We are told again and again that all it takes for
evil to succeed is for people to do nothing,” said Rita
G. Hofrichter, 84, of Sunny Isles Beach, who lost
her parents and other relatives in the Holocaust. “We
have done something, and I’m very proud of that effort.”
The survivors said SNCF hasn’t paid reparations
to victims, and they saw SNCF’s donation as a public
relations ploy in its efforts to secure billions of dollars worth of U.S. rail contracts.
Furor as Renault heirs revisit
company’s link with Nazis
By Angelique Chrisafis, The Sydney Morning
Herald
PARIS: It was one of the most shameful and shady
chapters of French history: the collaboration of industrialists and business owners with the Nazis during the German occupation.
A historical can of worms was reopened in a Paris
court recently when the grandchildren of the inventor and car maker Louis Renault began a legal battle
claiming his famous company was unfairly confiscated by the state as punishment for allegedly collaborating with the occupiers.
Mr Renault, who founded the car maker in 1898
with his brothers, died in prison while awaiting trial
for collaboration in 1944, two months after the liberation of France. In January 1945 Charles de Gaulle
and the provisional government signed a decree confiscating the company and nationalizing it, accusing
Mr Renault of working for the Germans and providing their armies with vehicles and services to help the
Nazi war effort.
Mr Renault’s seven grandchildren have now
seized on a new law introduced by President Nicolas
Sarkozy to argue that the confiscation did not abide
by the French constitution. Their lawyers argue that
no other company was subjected to the same treatment as Renault and that it was unfairly nationalized
as punishment without Louis Renault ever going to
trial. They are demanding financial compensation
from the state.
The case has sparked outrage from the Communist Party, communist trade unions, deportee groups
and some historians, who accuse the family of trying
TOGETHER 12
“They want to whitewash history. I just don’t feel
this is a company that should teach about the Holocaust in our Florida schools,” said Rosette Goldstein,
73, of Boca Raton, whose father was forced onto on
an SNCF train and ultimately killed. “Until SNCF
comes out and apologizes and pays reparations for
what they did, I think they should not be allowed to
do any work here in the U.S.”
SNCF issued a statement of regret last year about
the Holocaust, adding the trains were commandeered
by the Nazis. The company also said it’s part of the
French government, which has reparations programs,
and that it wanted to support the Florida program as
part of its commitment to education.
“We believe that while history cannot be unlived,
it need not be repeated. The best way to accomplish
this objective is through the education of future generations,” SNCF America spokesman Jerry Ray said.
Ray said the curriculum was being drafted by the
Shoah Memorial of Paris, a Holocaust museum and
documentation center. SNCF’s only role was paying
for the program, he said.
“It is important, in France and in Florida, that the
teaching of the history of the Holocaust be held to
the highest standards of scholarship and accuracy,”
he said.
In his letter, Robinson said the Holocaust education program is committed to teaching “tolerance and
good citizenship,” and he left the door open for possible future collaborations with SNCF.
“While we are declining to continue our partnership at this time, we sincerely hope that, in the future,
different circumstances will enable partnerships such
as this one to succeed,” Robinson wrote.
to rewrite history. The Communist Party said it vehemently opposed ‘’any attempt to rehabilitate Louis
Renault.’’
One of the grandchildren bringing the case, Helene Renault-Dingli, said the battle was about how
unfair and unconstitutional the state had been in
confiscating the company. “This is not a re-reading
of history,” she told TV channel TF1, and said she
welcomed a new debate among historians about what
really happened in Mr Renault’s factories during the
Second World War.
There is no doubt among historians that Renault provided motors, vehicles and technology for
the Nazi occupiers during the war. The question is
whether the company did this willingly or whether,
as the family suggests, it had no choice.
The celebrated war historian, Henry Rousso, told
Le Figaro: “Renault worked for the German war
economy. With what degree of enthusiasm or constraint? That remains largely to be studied.”
Some historians point out that other big French
industrial groups, Peugeot and Citroen, who also
worked for the Germans, chose to support the resistance and Allies from 1942 to 1943.
Louis Renault (center) presents a car built by his group to, from
left, Luftwaffe chief Herman Goering and the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, in 1937. Photo: AFP
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
Ray said SNCF also hopes to work with the education department in the future
State law requires public schools to teach students
about the Holocaust. Students read materials in class,
watch videos and listen to speakers who share lessons from the era.
SNCF became involved with Florida last year
when it sought to bid on a planned $2.6 billion, highspeed rail project. During that time, it proposed the
Holocaust education sponsorship and agreed to continue its support after Gov. Rick Scott killed the train
proposal.
Linda Medvin, a Broward school district employee who chairs the state’s Holocaust Education Task
Force, supported SNCF. She had traveled at the company’s expense to Paris, visited the Shoah Memorial
and learned about the railroad’s Holocaust education
efforts.
But other members of the task force, including
several Holocaust survivors, said the agreement
was made without proper discussion, and they only
learned about it after it had been signed. These opponents sent letters and emails to lawmakers and Department of Education officials in hopes of reversing
the decision.
Medvin couldn’t be reached for comment, despite
calls to her work and home.
Goldstein said it’s tough for average people to
take on giant companies such as SNCF, but she’s not
surprised she and others prevailed.
“This is the United States of America. I came here
as a young girl, and this country opened up its arms,”
she said. “My home country of France failed me. But
here in America, I had the chance to fight this, and we
have people who represent us and listen to us. This is
wonderful. It’s democracy in action.”
PLEASE KEEP US IN
MIND WHEN YOU
THINK OF THE FUTURE
Our mission as members of The American
Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
& Their Descendants is to perpetuate the
remembrance of the Shoah through education
and commemoration.
We educate our future generations while
remembering and commemorating our past.
In order to leave a lasting legacy to show that
our lives have made a difference, each of us
can be a part of ensuring that our sacred task of
remembrance will continue in years to come.
As you plan your legacy, we would be
honored if you would consider The American
Gathering as a part of your “future.” You can
arrange to leave a bequest to The American
Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors &
Their Descendants in your will. The following
wording is recommended:
“I give and bequeath ______ to The
American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust
Survivors & Their Descendants, a not-for-profit
corporation, with its principal office located at
122 West 30th Street, Suite 205, New York,
New York, 10001”
We are humbled by the task ahead of us and
grateful to each of you for your confidence and
support as we begin the second decade of the
21st Century.
January 2012
Israel puts Adolf Eichmann
items on display
Germany marks “day of shame”
on pogrom anniversary
UNESCO cuts funds for
Palestinian magazine
By Aron Heller, Associated Press
JERUSALEM (AP) — Fifty years after Holocaust
mastermind Adolf Eichmann was convicted in an
epic trial that helped shape Israel's national psyche,
the Israeli parliament put on display for the first
time dozens of artifacts from the daring 1960 operation in Argentina that captured the Nazi criminal.
The gripping public testimony during the trial by
more than 100 Jews who survived torture and deprivation captured world attention and vividly brought
to life the horrors of the Holocaust. It also brought
to light stories of Jewish bravery and resistance that
shattered the myth of Jews meekly walking to their
deaths. As a result, more survivors went public with
their experiences, which greatly helped research
and commemoration efforts.
“We carried out justice, partial, reduced, even
minuscule compared to the crime, but of tremendous symbolism and the symbolism is that those
who murder millions and those who plan the murder
of millions will pay the price,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the opening of the exhibit.
“The capture and the bringing to trial of Eichmann
was a turning point in which the state of Israel and
the Jewish people began carrying out justice against
their tormentors.”
Known
as the “architect of
the Holocaust” for
his
role
in coordinating the
Nazi genocide policy, Eichmann fled Germany after World
War II and assumed the name Ricardo Klement in
Argentina. He was hunted down and captured by
Israeli Mossad agents in an operation that remains
one of the most defining episodes in the country’s
turbulent history. Eichmann was hanged after his
1961 trial in Jerusalem.
The exhibit, which will be on display in parliament for three weeks before moving to a Tel Aviv
museum, showcases items that had been classified
and stashed away for decades: the cameras used by
Mossad agents to track Eichmann, the briefcase in
which they carried fake license plates, the keys to
Eichmann’s Buenos Aires apartment and the forged
Israeli passport — with the alias Zeev Zichroni —
his captors used to smuggle him out of Argentina.
There are also original photos, documents and
the gloves used to nab Eichmann, as well as personal effects found on Eichmann’s body — a comb,
a pocket knife and a plastic cigarette holder.
The agents who participated in the operation
slipped into Argentina as part of an official Israeli
delegation that arrived for Argentina’s 150th anniversary celebrations, said Neomi Izhar, the exhibit’s
historian.
Rafi Eitan, who headed the operation, said he
identified Eichmann by searching his body for distinctive scars on his arm and stomach.
“Notice how back then with primitive means we
carried out an operation like this,” Eitan, 85, told
The Associated Press. “There were no communications, there was no Internet, there were no computers, no weapons and this exhibit shows that even
with primitive means you can do great things.”
BERLIN (AFP) — Germany recently marked the
73rd anniversary of the Nazi pogrom that paved
the way to the Holocaust with solemn ceremonies
throughout the country and the opening of a new
synagogue.
By Matti Friedman, AP
January 2012
The Kristallnacht pogrom, also known as the
Night of Broken Glass, saw Nazi thugs plunder
Jewish businesses throughout Germany, torch about
300 synagogues and round up some 30,000 Jewish
men for deportation to concentration camps.
Chancellor Angela Merkel called November 9,
1938 a “day of shame.”
“Germans hunted Germans because they were
Jews,” she told a conference in Berlin.
“This insanity culminated in an unprecedented
crime, it ravaged the continent and it cost the lives
of millions around the world. When we talk here
and today about the future, we do it thinking about
the victims of this insanity that broke out in our
country, in Germany.”
Some 90 Jews were killed in the Kristallnacht
orgy of violence, the pretext for which was the murder of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris by
a student, Herschel Grynspan, who sought revenge
for the expulsion of his family from Germany with
about 15,000 other Polish Jews.
Throughout the country commemorations took
place at Jewish community centers and the sites of
former synagogues.
During the 1961 trial, Eichmann sat on a wooden
chair inside a bulletproof glass booth — also on
display in parliament — and calmly listened to the
testimonies of Holocaust survivors.
Eichmann’s defense was that he was merely following orders. Covering the trial for The New Yorker, the political theorist Hannah Arendt famously
coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe
Eichmann.
Six million Jews were killed by the German
Nazis and their collaborators during World War
II, many of them following Eichmann’s blueprint
drawn up for liquidating the entire Jewish population of Europe.
Eichmann was convicted in December 1961 of
war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was
hanged the following year — the only time Israel
has carried out a death sentence.
Until they heard the public testimony of Jews
who survived torture and deprivation, many Israelis
looked down on the survivors as weak victims, at
odds with the macho image of the “new Jew” of Israel. The emotional descriptions of the horrors they
survived changed the perception for many Israelis
and allowed more survivors to go public.
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
JERUSALEM—The U.N.’s cultural agency
recently announced that it is pulling funding for a
Palestinian youth magazine that published an article
suggesting admiration for Hitler.
The magazine, Zayzafouna, published an article
in February written by a teenage girl who presented
four role models: a medieval Persian mathematician,
a modern Egyptian novelist, the Muslim warrior
Saladin, and the Nazi leader.
UNESCO said in a statement it “strongly deplores
and condemns” the “unacceptable” material and
would cease funding the magazine. UNESCO also
said it funded three different issues later in 2011,
and not the one in question.
The magazine also receives funding from
the Palestinian Authority, the Western-backed
Palestinian government in the West Bank.
In the article, the author has Hitler telling her in
a dream that he killed Jews “so you would all know
that they are a nation which spreads destruction all
over the world.” He advises her to be “resilient and
patient concerning the suffering that Palestine is
experiencing at their hands.”
“Thanks for the advice,” the narrator replies.
A translation was made public by Palestinian
Media Watch, an Israeli organization that tracks
incitement in Palestinian media.
The magazine’s director, Shareef Samhan, did
not dispute the translation, though he said the girl
was “accusing” Hitler and not praising him. He said
he had not been aware of the text and noted that
UNESCO was not a central backer of the magazine.
He defended the publication. “We depend in
the content of our magazine on the participation of
school students, and it’s not our job to prohibit the
freedom of speech,” he said.
The publication sparked a written protest by
the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a U.S.-based Jewish
group, to UNESCO, and that protest appears to have
triggered the U.N. agency’s decision and public
statement.
“UNESCO strongly deplores and condemns the
reproduction of such inflammatory statements in
a magazine associated with UNESCO’s name and
mission and will not provide any further support
to the publication in question,” read the statement
issued from the agency’s Paris headquarters.
The statement also said UNESCO “is deeply
committed to the development and promotion of
education about the Holocaust.”
A spokesman for the Palestinian Authority,
Ghassan Khatib, said the article was “not
acceptable.”
“We educate young people in our textbooks about
the Holocaust and the massacres of Hitler against
Jews and against others, and we refer to these
massacres as crimes against humanity,” Khatib said.
“This instance is exceptional, and the editor will try
to be more careful in the future.”
A U.S. group, the American Gathering of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants,
released a statement praising UNESCO’s decision.
“As victims of the horrors of Nazi brutality, we
learned with deep shock that a Palestinian children’s
magazine could approvingly speak of Hitler’s
extermination of Jews as an example to be emulated.
This was monstrous and grotesque,” the group said.
TOGETHER 13
National Library of Wales “risked reputation” by accepting
£300,000 donation from Nazi collaborator
German project returns to Jews
books stolen by Nazis
By Sion Morgan, WalesOnline
By Brian Rupp, m&c news
Leipzig, Germany—A team in the German city of
Leipzig has scoured the local university library, going through endless obscure records to return books
stolen by the Nazis to their rightful heirs.
Germany’s 1933-45 Nazi regime not only plundered
art and other valuables from Jews, but also books.
Searching for books seized by the Gestapo proved
hard work, explains librarian Cordula Reuss, who
heads the project in Leipzig.
For more than two years, the librarian deciphered
faded handwritten lists, went through boxes of indexes and examined thousands of books dating back to
the pre-1945 period.
Reuss knows her way around the winding corridors of the Biblioteca Albertina, as Leipzig University library is called.
She stops at one of the many archives, yanks the
handle of the sliding shelves, and takes out a book.
The first page bears a stamp reading Institutum Judaicum Leipzig. This volume was confiscated by the
Gestapo during Adolf Hitler’s rule and ended up here
shortly after World War II.
“We found in our archives a total of 3,409 books
that had been seized illegally from institutions or private libraries run by Jews or resistance fighters during the Nazi era,” Reuss says.
The Nazi-Looted Assets Project aims to return the
largest possible number of the works to heirs or their
legal successors.
Reuss and her team of two had to do true detective
work at first, as the Gestapo book records were often
obscure.
“Frequently, the title of the book had not been entered, but they had written things like, ‘A bundle of
172 Marxist brochures,’” Reuss explains.
The researchers were luckier with books classified
as “banned and damaging literature,” which had been
documented more thoroughly on extra lists by police.
A total of 81 different institutions or persons have
now been identified as the legal owners of some of
the books in the library.
Research into the origins of property stolen from
Jews has been carried out more intensively since the
1998 Washington Declaration. In that document, Germany and 43 other nations agreed to identify in their
collections art works and other assets confiscated by
the Nazis and to restitute them to their rightful owners.
The former West Germany “felt that individual
restitutions and compensations had been sorted out
in the post-war era,” says Uwe Hartmann, head of
the Bureau for Provenance Investigation, which was
established in Berlin three years ago.
“But lots of looted items have still been found in
the archives of some institutions,” he adds. As the
former East Germany had blocked all demands by
war victims for restitution, that part of the reunited
Germany —where Leipzig is located—is now proving a treasure trove for property stolen by the Nazis.
The Berlin bureau helped to fund the two-year
project in Leipzig, the results of which will be presented in an exhibition in November.
The owners of the stolen books included Victor
Armhaus, a Jewish interpreter from Leipzig who died
in the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp in
1942. Two nieces of his in Israel have made contact.
“It is very moving when there is an heir who remembers a person,” Reuss says. Some of the 59 volumes in Armhaus’ private collection will now be sent
to his nieces.
THE Welsh Government has accused the National
Library of Wales of putting its reputation “at risk”
after accepting a £300,000 donation from a known
Nazi collaborator.
The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth
Louis Feutren was a leading member of Breton
groups who worked with the Nazis after their invasion of France during the Second World War.
After he died in 2010, he bequeathed a collection of papers and tapes to the National Library of
Wales in Aberystwyth, along with a financial donation worth £300,000.
After leaving Brittany, Feutren had traveled
through Wales on his way to Ireland, where he eventually settled.
The library claims the archive sheds light on the
life of a Breton who was a member of the Gwenn-haDu and Bezen Perrot movements during the Second
World War.
But the Welsh Government, from which the library had sought advice over whether to accept the
donation, condemned the move.
Heritage minister Huw Lewis said: “This was a
decision for the trustees of the library to take.
“However, the Welsh Government was approached about this matter and our view was sought.
“I made our position perfectly clear that we felt
the acceptance of this bequest could affect the reputation of the National Library of Wales, one of our
most respected cultural institutions.
“Louis Feutren was a Nazi collaborator and a
member of the SS. That is an abhorrent fact of history.
“I am therefore disappointed by the decision of
the National Library to accept these funds and do not
believe that anyone in Wales would have challenged
them if they had chosen not to accept the bequest.”
He added: “I now very much hope that this legacy
can be used in a suitable fashion.
“I feel that the creation of an educational resource
for children in Wales that will highlight the terrible
impact of war, intolerance and fascism would be an
appropriate use for this funding.”
The Bezen Perrot movement was a Breton collaborationist force during the Nazi occupation of
France.
Led by Célestin Lainé and Alan Heusaff, as many
as 70 to 80 people joined the ranks of the group.
Before the second world war Lainé had created
the organisation Gwenn ha du as a Breton nationalist
direct action unit modelled on the IRA.
The activists behind this were defined as members
of a group called Service Spécial.
While a member of that group it has been claimed
that Louis Feutrent was an enthusiastic young collaborator who participated in arrests and conversed
in German with Nazi officers in 1944.
In the later stages of World War II under a rapid
TOGETHER 14
American advance from Normandy into Brittany, the
group were forced to retreat along with the German
army.
Many members were provided with false papers
and following the war many of the organisation’s
members fled to Ireland.
Feutren left Brittany and travelled through Wales
on his way to the Republic of Ireland where he settled and married.
He taught throughout his career and his wife
worked as a nurse.
His wife died in 2008 and he died in 2010.
Minutes taken from a National Library Board
meeting in September, which the Western Mail has
seen, reveal that the National Library took legal advice before accepting the bequest.
Giselle Davies, from law firm Geldards LLP, told
the board that there was no evidence to suggest that
the money donated had been generated from involvement with the Third Reich.
The board meetings also state: “Giselle Davies
emphasised that the reputational risk to the Library
should be considered purely in financial terms, i.e.
the question to be asked was, would acceptance of
the legacy give rise to more financial loss to the Library than the sum it would gain by accepting it.”
Defending the decision to accept the bequest,
Lord Dafydd Wigley, President of the Library said:
“This is a notable collection that includes material of
significant historical importance.
“Though I utterly condemn his political leanings and activities during the War, we had no right,
as Board members, to allow our feelings to interfere
with our decision.”
The library said the archive and the financial donation had been received in accordance with the Royal Charter and the Library’s collection policy, which
identify the need to collect, and ensure public access
to, material of Celtic interest.
It said its board had also acted in accordance with
the requirements of the Charity Commission and followed expert legal advice in coming to this decision.
The library said a portion of the funds received
will be allocated towards projects associated the destructive effects of war and fascism.
A spokesman said: “Feutren’s archive is the latest
in a series of archives of Breton authors and politicians which have been kept safely in the National
Library of Wales over the years.
“This is compatible with the Library’s Charter,
which states that some of the Library’s objects are:
to collect, preserve and give access to all kinds and
forms of recorded knowledge, especially relating to
Wales and the Welsh and
other Celtic peoples, for
the benefit of the public,
including those engaged
in research and learning.
The spokesman added:
“The Library also has a
duty to collect in the field
of Celtic Studies and we
will continue to do this
whilst at the same time
reducing the purchase of
printed works which are
more marginal to our usLouis Feutren
ers’ needs.”
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
January 2012
A Polish woman’s heroic journey of self-discovery
By Vanessa Gera, AP
WARSAW, Poland—As Nazi troops imposed their terror on Warsaw, an 18-yearold Polish girl slipped into a Warsaw church with an elderly rabbi to teach him
how to dip his hand in holy water and cross himself. The rabbi, his newly shaven
beard leaving his cheeks white, approached the lesson with gravity, skimming the
water in the church font and crossing himself with slow reverence, hoping this
would help him pass as Catholic.
“You’ve already exposed yourself! You’re dead already!” the teenager whispered in his ear, and showed him how to perform the sacred gestures the way she
and other Catholics did, so quickly and automatically that she barely touched her
head and chest.
“Without respect?” the rabbi asked.
“Without any respect!” the girl replied.
It was 1943 in Nazi-occupied Poland and any mistake could cost him his life,
and hers, too. The Nazis would have killed her for helping a Jew.
What she did not know back then: She was a Jew herself.
-----Magdalena Grodzka-Guzkowska’s journey of self-discovery is pieced together from interviews with her and people close to her, emails made available to
The Associated Press, information provided by Yad Vashem, her memoir Lucky
Woman, and documentary footage.
-----Decades after she helped save the rabbi and about a dozen others, mostly children, by teaching them Christian customs, Grodzka-Guzkowska discovered documents in an old suitcase showing that her father and other close family members
were Jews. Growing up she knew vaguely that one of her great grandmothers was
Jewish but nothing more about those roots.
Shared humanity, not ancestry, impelled her to heroism.
“I remember running with children through the city. It was horrible,” the now
frail Grodzka-Guzkowska told The Associated Press, her hand trembling as she
sat in a wheelchair.
“And I felt I had to help.”
Grodzka-Guzkowska knew Catholic prayers and customs so well that the anti-Nazi resistance tasked her with teaching them to Jews. Today, at age 86, she’s
living out her last years waiting to be buried in a white shroud according to the
ancient customs of her ancestors.
The discovery of Jewish roots is a growing phenomenon in Poland, where
increasing numbers of Catholic or secular Poles in recent years have learned,
often from deathbed confessions of loved ones or from chance discoveries of
documents, that they are of Jewish descent.
Poland, for centuries a refuge for Jews in a largely hostile Europe, once was
home to Europe’s largest Jewish population. Many Jews became culturally assimilated before World War II, while some sought survival through baptism during the German occupation of 1939-1945.
Such knowledge was often repressed due to the trauma inflicted by the Hitler
era and anti-Semitic persecution during the communist decades that followed.
Today, as democracy here matures, many Poles who discover their Jewishness
have turned from hiding their Jewish roots to celebrating them, and non-Jews
also are finding themselves drawn to the rich Polish-Jewish past.
For Grodzka-Guzkowska, a true understanding of her identity, and the danger
it could have posed, came late in life. It inspired her to immerse herself in the Torah, dream of visiting Israel and ask Poland’s chief rabbi to bury her in Warsaw’s
Jewish cemetery.
Like many Jews in prewar Poland, Grodzka-Guzkowska’s Jewish greatgrandmother, a pediatrician, intermarried. Her descendants were so well integrated into Catholic society that the matriarch’s Jewishness meant little to GrodzkaGuzkowska when she was growing up.
“The most important fact about my great-grandmother was that she was a
doctor, not a Jew,” Grodzka-Guzkowska said in 2007 in an interview for a documentary in progress, I am a Jew, by filmmakers Slawomir Grunberg and Katka
Reszke.
“During the war I saved Jewish children while not being aware that I was Jewish,” she recalled. “I saved them because that is what had to be done.”
One landmark on her path to a new identity came during a dinner at the home
of a Jewish friend in the 1990s, when she mentioned her Jewish great-grandmother—her mother’s mother’s mother.
The friend, Konstanty Gebert, explained to her that this precise lineage was
significant because Jewish law traces Judaism from mother to child, meaning that
technically speaking, she was Jewish, too.
“This means that instead of saving those children, I should have been protect-
January 2012
ing myself?” Gebert recalled her saying. The realization made her giggle like a
teenager.
After that evening, she began to cultivate a relationship with Warsaw’s Jewish
community and to attend services at Warsaw’s Nozyk synagogue.
It was another discovery five years ago that confirmed her sense of Jewishness completely: the discovery of documents showing that her father was Jewish.
Grodzka-Guzkowska had grown up attending a private Catholic school for girls,
and her father’s parentage had never been discussed in the family.
As she was sorting out old stuff cluttering a closet, she found identity documents in a suitcase that showed both her paternal grandparents were Jewish. This
revelation, more than anything, caused a profound shift in her identity and made
her finally think of herself as a Jew.
She learned a few Hebrew words and delved into reading the Old Testament.
She envisioned herself wrapped in a simple white shroud with mourners placing
stones on her tomb, rather than the flowers found in Catholic cemeteries.
“I will be buried in the Jewish cemetery as a Jew,” she said. Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich confirms her wishes will be carried out.
Grodzka-Guzkowska’s gradual embrace of Judaism paralleled cultural shifts
within Poland after the 1989 collapse of its communist government, as it began
its painful but ultimately successful transition to democracy.
These days, although there is occasional vandalism of Jewish cemeteries and
some anti-Semitism persists, Polish Jews sometimes say they feel safer walking
the streets of Warsaw in a yarmulke, or skullcap, than they would in many Western European cities.
As Poles with Jewish roots feel freer to explore a heritage that once spelled
death, the nation’s Jewish traditions also are going mainstream, with students
packing Jewish history and Hebrew courses and all kinds of people flocking to
Jewish festivals held in Krakow, Warsaw and even in smaller towns.
In 1939 Poland’s Jews numbered nearly 3.5 million, about 10 percent of the
population. Today, there are no firm statistics on how many people in this nation
of 38 million identify themselves as Jewish. The Conference of European Rabbis
estimates that Poland’s Jewish population has grown from just a few thousand to
more than 20,000 over the past 30 years.
Many of the prewar Jews were traditional Orthodox believers who lived in
villages or shtetls that formed the archetypal image made famous in Fiddler On
The Roof. Many others became fully integrated into mainstream Polish society:
doctors, writers, military officers, scientists.
Amid Poland’s cultural changes, aging Poles with family secrets feel it is finally time to pass them on to the next generation. In some cases, such discoveries
spark personal transformations, inspiring adult men to undergo circumcision or
to take on new names.
Most of those who decide to live as Jews are in their 20s or 30s, with the older
generations often still too fearful of antisemitism to want to live openly as Jews.
Grodzka-Guzkowska is a prominent exception.
“It’s an amazing story,” said Rabbi Stas Wojciechowicz. “Three generations
after the war people are rediscovering their Judaism and some are undergoing formal conversion. ... It’s the third and fourth generation that is closing this cycle.”
He said he also has been struck by how so many Polish Jews belong very
much to the Jewish and Catholic worlds simultaneously. His synagogue, for instance, practically empties of worshippers around Christmas and All Saints Day,
a major Catholic holiday when Poles visit the graves of ancestors.
“They say they are sorry but they need to be with their parents at those times,”
he said. “Almost everybody has this story of a divided family, with one part Jewish—mostly the younger generation—while the older one isn’t.”
Not long after Grodzka-Guzkowska embraced her Jewishness, it proved an
obstacle to her being honored for her wartime heroism.
A Jewish boy she had rescued was reunited with her in 2007 as a grown man.
William Donat petitioned Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial to name her a
“Righteous Among the Nations” in recognition of her wartime heroism.
But Yad Vashem hesitated on the grounds the award only recognizes nonJews.
As Yad Vashem wavered, Chief Rabbi Schudrich and her friend Gebert, a
prominent member of Warsaw’s Jewish community, made the case that she should
be given the award because she had acted during the war with the consciousness
of a Catholic, not a Jew.
“Magda decided in a moment to save Jewish children,” Schudrich wrote in a
2008 email to Yad Vashem. “Why are we taking so long?”
The Jerusalem-based institute ultimately ruled in her favor: It honored her in
2009.
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TOGETHER 15
Intelligence Agency Destroyed
Files on Former SS Members
By Klaus Wiegrefe, Der Spiegel
Historians conducting an internal study of ties between employees of the German foreign intelligence
agency and the Third Reich have made a shocking
discovery. In 2007, the BND destroyed personnel
files of employees who had
once been members of the SS
and the Gestapo.
Preparations have already
been made for Ernst Uhrlau’s
retirement party next Wednesday when he steps down from
his post as the head of the
Bundesnachrichtendienst
(BND), Germany’s foreign
intelligence agency, on his
65th birthday. The office of the chancellor has selected a posh location in Berlin for his farewell party and
Angela Merkel herself is expected to attend. Uhrlau,
a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), will be turning over his post to Gerhard
Schindler, a member of the business-friendly Free
Democratic Party.
At events like this, the successes of the person
retiring are usually celebrated. In Uhrlau’s case, topping the list are his efforts to review the problematic
history of the BND’s creation after World War II. It
has long been known that around 10 percent of the
employees at the BND and its predecessor organization once served under SS chief Heinrich Himmler
in Nazi Germany. In 2011, Uhrlau appointed an independent commission of historians to research the
agency’s Nazi roots.
Now, just before Uhrlau’s retirement, the commis-
sion has uncovered what is a true historical scandal.
The researchers have found that the BND destroyed
the personnel files of around 250 BND officials in
2007. The agency has confirmed that this happened.
The commission claims that the destroyed documents include papers on people who were “in significant intelligence positions in the SS, the SD (the
intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party) or
the Gestapo.” They added that some of the individuals had even been investigated after 1945 for possible
war crimes. Historian KlausDietmar Henke, spokesman
for the commission, told
SPIEGEL ONLINE he was
“somewhat stunned” by the
occurrence.
Did Agency Employees
Seek to Sabotage Investigation?
The incident inevitably raises suspicions that
agency employees have deliberately tried to obstruct
Uhrlau’s efforts to investigate the organization’s history. The historical commission had not yet been appointed at the time of the documents’ destruction,
but Uhrlau had already announced that he planned to
look into his agency’s Nazi past.
It is no secret that some people within the BND
are unhappy about Uhrlau’s project. Some employees are fundamentally opposed to the agency shedding light on its own past. Others are worried about
the reputations of their own families -- for many
years, the BND deliberately recruited new staff from
among the relatives of existing BND employees.
Within the BND, a working group headed by
Bodo Hechelhammer is responsible for cooperation
with the historical commission. The group is currently trying to shed light on the circumstances surround-
ing the destruction of the documents. Hechelhammer
told SPIEGEL ONLINE that he regretted the loss of
the documents.
There have already been several curious incidents
involving the BND archives in the past. SPIEGEL
recently requested access to BND documents relating to the former SS Captain Alois Brunner, who was
once a close associate of Adolf Eichmann, the chief
logistics organizer of the Holocaust. The agency informed SPIEGEL that the 581-page files on Brunner
had been disposed of in the 1990s. That incident also
appears to have been carried out behind the backs of
the BND leadership.
The historical commission is now demanding
that the BND consult it before any more “potentially
valuable historical records” are destroyed. The historians are also insisting that the 2007 incident be thoroughly investigated. Commission spokesman Henke
says the agency’s reaction will be “a test of how seriously the BND is really taking the investigation into
its past.”
Historians have discovered that the BND, Germany's foreign intelligence agency, destroyed files of employees who had once
belonged to the SS and the Gestapo. This photo shows Reinhard
Gehlen, the legendary founder of the BND, in 1972. Many former Nazis worked for him. (AP)
Holocaust survivor gets the diploma Nazis denied him
By Valerie Hauch, thestar.com
Sure, everyone was happy to be getting their high
school diplomas at the traditional cap and gown
graduation ceremony in early November at Kitchener’s Eastwood Collegiate.
But only one grad — the sole male in the bunch
whose tasselled cap was fringed by white hair — was
truly moved by
the event.
Howard
Chandler, 82,
had waited a
long time.
As a Jewish
boy of 10 years,
he was living in
Howard Chandler celebrates receiving Poland and just
an honorary high school diploma with entering Grade
history teachers Darryl Weber, left, and
Henry Winter, at Kitchener's Eastwood 4 when World
Collegiate, where he has often shared his War II broke
story with students.
out. Jews were
prohibited from
attending school and that was the end of his formal
education. In his early teens, he was sent to the labour and concentration camps of Auschwitz (in Poland) and Buchenwald (in Germany). The Nazi regime would eventually claim the lives of his parents,
a sister and one of his two brothers.
When the war finally ended and an emaciated
Chandler and his elder brother, who had been close
to death, were liberated, they were sent to England
TOGETHER 16
and taken care of by the Jewish community. Chandler
got a job in a diamond factory and learned that trade
— there was no time or opportunity for education.
In 1947 under a special provision for refugees —
you had to be under 18 and orphaned — he was able
to immigrate to Canada where he lived with an aunt
in Toronto and found work as a jeweller, a career
which sustained him for the rest of his working life.
Chandler met his future wife, Elsa, also a Holocaust survivor, and they got married and had four
children. His wife was able to go back to school here,
getting her high school diploma, going on to become
a school trustee and eventually the chair of the North
York Board of Education. The couple’s 60th wedding
anniversary was Nov. 4, also the day that Chandler
“graduated’’ from Eastwood.
His diploma is “honorary’’ but it’s really Chandler
who has done Eastwood the honour of speaking to
many Grade 10 students, over the years, of his experience as a Holocaust survivor and shining a light on
“one of the darkest moments in history,’’ said history
teacher Darryl Weber.
“We have adopted him as one of our own,’’ Weber
said in a speech at the graduation ceremony.
Chandler’s classroom visits always leave students
“captivated,’’ Weber told the Star. “It’s really history
coming alive for them,’ he says. “His story of survival ... teaches them about discrimination, tolerance
and acceptance and makes it relevant to today. They
become a secondary witness — it becomes their responsibility to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’’
During a year, the now-retired Chandler gives
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about a dozen talks at schools, in the GTA and nearby,
about the Holocaust and his experiences, arranged by
the Holocaust Education and Memorial Centre of Toronto.
“We are getting to be a smaller and smaller community,’’ he said, referring to how death has claimed
some of the aging Holocaust survivors.
“Students have to be made aware...They say you
can learn more from a survivor than a book,’’ he says.
“I tell them (the students) what I remember. I use
plain language, I don’t have fancy language. They
ask me questions, they want to know different things
... it’s hard to tell them when I was their age, I was an
old man already.’’
When asked if he found it hard to repeat painful
memories, Chandler said, “no. Maybe it’s in my nature. I am able to detach myself.’’
His speech at Eastwood the day he received his diploma won a standing ovation. He told the gathering,
also attended by members of his proud family, that
even though the simple fact of being Jewish robbed
him of the opportunity of a formal education, he has
“never stopped learning. To me every day is a learning experience.
“I have learned that education is the only thing
that nobody can deprive you of.’’
Chandler laughs a little, on the phone, remembering the pleasure of that evening.
“It was a great honour for me,’’ he says. “From
practical terms it may not mean anything. But my
satisfaction is that they had the faith in me to give it
to me. It made me feel really great.’’
January 2012
Teaching about holocaust
endangered by state
budget cuts
By Amanda Greene, StarNewsOnline.com
Since 1995, teaching the history of the Holocaust
to middle school students—and teaching other teachers that curriculum—has become Angela Eichhorn
Perry’s personal passion.
The Penderlea Elementary School media specialist didn’t have ancestors who died in the Holocaust.
Instead, a professional development course on the
Holocaust she took through the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT) 16
years ago sparked the fire in her to dig deeper.
That course and the center’s other areas of instruction for teachers, however, are now being threatened
by the state’s tight finances.
Along with the Holocaust program, the center also
offers teachers with at least three years of classroom
experience courses on the state’s new Common Core
Standards, the Outer Banks wetlands, ways to create a physically active classroom or how to promote
Top Cardinal Claims Jews
Want Sainthood for Nazi-Era
Pope
By Paul Berger, The Forward
The Vatican’s new chief liaison to world Jewry
met mixed reviews during his debut visit to the United States, thanks in part to statements on the pending
canonization of Catholicism’s World War II-era pope.
In what turned out to be a bumpy start, Cardinal
Kurt Koch angered some Jewish and Christian leaders when he told an audience at Seton Hall University, in South Orange, N.J.
that many Jews approve
the potential canonization
of the controversial Pope
Pius XII.
Koch added that the
long-demanded opening
of the Vatican’s Holocaustera archives — which
many historians believe
will help resolve allegations that Pius did not do
enough to protect Jews —
Cardinal Kurt Koch
would shed no more light
on the question.
“The very important things [that need to be] said
are said and on the table,” Koch said. The cardinal’s
assertions — plus a few others such as that Jews can
look upon the cross as “a symbol of reconciliation”
— were met with either blank expressions or grumbling from the audience of about 60 rabbis, priests,
theologians and specialists in interfaith dialogue.
Earlier in the day, members of this interfaith audience were among hundreds who gathered at Seton Hall to hear the cardinal deliver the 18th annual
Oesterreicher Memorial Lecture titled, “Theological
Questions and Perspectives in Jewish-Christian Dialogue.”
Rabbi Eric Greenberg, director of interfaith affairs
for the Anti-Defamation League, said the cardinal’s
opinions raised issues that demonstrate “the continuing challenges facing Catholic-Jewish relations.”
Greenberg said the cardinal’s views on Pius XII
were of particular concern because they “espoused
the viewpoint of Pius XII apologists, rather than the
majority of noted Jewish and Catholic scholars.”
Koch said some Jews have told the Vatican “don’t
January 2012
financial literacy.
Perry now runs several Holocaust teacher trainings with retired school librarian Sandra Malpass at
the county and state level including “Teaching the
Holocaust through Literature” and “Teaching the Holocaust Through Picture Books.”
She even started a Holocaust Lending Library
section at the Burgaw branch of the Pender County
Public Library.
“Most teachers think that if they’ve read Anne
Frank, they’ve done their part. But there’s so much
more to what people in the Holocaust experienced
than that,” she said. “NCCAT was absolutely wonderful and opened my eyes to a lot of things you
don’t know about the Holocaust.”
Courses are taught at NCCAT facilities on Ocracoke Island and Cullowhee, and the organization
covers the cost of a substitute while a teacher is in
class.
But part of the General Assembly’s education cuts
this year included slashing half of the $6 million NCCAT budget.
So Perry and other community leaders are coming
avoid canonization of this pope. And we have other
Jews who come and say, ‘declare this Pope as Righteous among the Nations,’” Koch said, referring to
the Israeli title bestowed on non-Jews who saved
Jews during the Holocaust.
The ADL’s Greenberg said he was concerned that
the cardinal “cites opinions of solitary or fringe Jewish voices to validate perspectives on these issues,
giving them the same weight as mainstream Jewish
positions, which disagree.”
Greenberg found other statements made by Koch
troubling. “What does Koch mean that there is only
‘one people of God’ and not ‘two peoples of God?’”
Greenberg said. “Why does he choose to describe
Jews and Christians as ‘thorns’ in one another’s
‘sides?’ This is the language of the Crucifixion.”
The cardinal was chosen by Pope Benedict to
head the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with Jews in July, 2010.
This past July, he came into conflict with Rome’s
chief rabbi, Riccardo Di Segni, when he wrote in the
Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, that the
cross is “the permanent and universal Yom Kippur”
and a symbol of reconciliation.
Di Segni responded in a subsequent edition of
L’Osservatore Romano, “If the terms of the discussion are those of pointing Jews to the way of the
cross, it is not clear why there should be dialogue.”
Di Segni’s response was reported in English on the
website Spero News.
Similar tensions involving language and sacred
vocabulary arose in New Jersey during the hour-long
question-and-answer session, which was organized by
the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations.
The cardinal answered questions slowly and deliberately. But his English was shaky and there was
a palpable sense of frustration as the cardinal gave
either opaque or rambling responses. At one point,
he was pressed a couple of times on the question
of whether the Church believed that Jews could be
saved without accepting Jesus Christ. He offered a
long and winding reply that appeared vague until
an aide, Father Norbert Hoffman clarified that Jews
would ultimately be “safe,” though just how would
only be known in “the last days.”
Shortly before the question-and-answer session,
Deborah Weissman, president of the International
Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), said one of
the major problems of Jewish-Christian dialogue is
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together across the state to raise money for NCCAT
programs, like the Holocaust course, to continue.
Perry was part of a reception fundraiser for the Holocaust Education Program at the City Club at de Rosset, 23 S. Second St. Alfred Schnog, a Holocaust survivor and NCCAT board member, hosted the event.
“The influence of that teacher is paramount in a
child’s later career and in passing knowledge onto
their own children,” he said, adding that teaching
about the Holocaust now gives him hope that something similar will never happen again.
Many North Carolina teachers who have experienced the trainings wrote letters to legislators, imploring them not to close NCCAT’s completely.
“I have been telling other teachers at my school
how excited I am about the session I am about to attend because it is all about current brain research and
understanding the factors that affect children’s learning,” one teacher wrote. “As a reading specialist who
works with children who are reading below grade
level, what could be more relevant to my job?”
that certain words familiar to both groups have totally different connotations. “It is precisely because
we share so many of the same terms and use them
in such different ways that it creates difficulties,”
Weissman said.
When Koch was asked about his statement regarding the cross as the eternal Yom Kippur and the
cross’s connotation to Jews as a symbol of persecution, he said, “I know the history what Christianity
have made with the cross and I think that it is our
duty to show that the cross isn’t a motive for hate. In
the Christian view the cross is an invitation of reconciliation and I can’t understand because Jews can’t be
content with this invitation.”
After the talk, Rev. John Pawlikowski, former
president of the ICCJ, said the cardinal failed to answer questions “fully” and sometimes appeared to
skirt them altogether.
“I don’t think he’s quite on a par with his predecessor,” Pawlikowski said, referring to Cardinal Walter Kasper, who left the post in 2010.
During the discussion, Cardinal Koch frequently
quoted the work of Rabbi Jacob Neusner. Neusner,
a prolific author on rabbinic Judaism, is a favorite of
Pope Benedict.
But audience members protested that Neusner’s
work on Catholic-Jewish history is not as highly regarded outside the Vatican as it is within.
Pawlikowski, a founding member of the board of
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, interrupted one of the cardinal’s answers in which he
was quoting Neusner. “I hate to say it,” Pawlikowski
said, “but you are barking up the wrong tree.”
Koch’s meetings the following day went more
smoothly. The cardinal appeared at the Jewish Theological Seminary for an invitation-only luncheon.
Burton Visotzky, JTS professor of Midrash and
interreligious studies, said he was “genuinely impressed” by Koch’s warmth and willingness to “listen and learn.”
“He seems like a very lovely man,” Visotzky said,
“and when dealing with people you can respect as a
lovely human being, it augurs well for a lovely relationship.”
Visotzky said Koch’s references to Rabbi Neusner
were fine. He said Neusner made a significant contribution to the study of Judaism and was a respected
figure.
Later the same day, Koch met with members of
the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious
cont’d on p. 18
TOGETHER 17
All Minds Blurred and Darkened’ Diaries 1939-1945
By Madeline Chambers
(Reuters) - The newly published diary of an indignant
small-town official in Nazi Germany has stirred the
sensitive debate over how much ordinary Germans
knew of atrocities committed under Hitler, creating a
wave of interest at home and abroad.
Friedrich Kellner
The diary of Friedrich Kellner, All Minds Blurred
and Darkened: Diaries 1939-1945, came to prominence thanks to the intervention of the elder former
U.S. President George Bush.
Filled with scathing commentaries on events,
newspaper clippings and records of private conversations, Kellner’s 940-page chronicle gives an insight
into what information was available to ordinary Germans.
Kellner, a mid-ranking court official who was in
his mid-50s when he started writing, vents his anger
at Hitler, hopes his country will be defeated in the
war and laments reports of mysterious deaths at mental homes and mass shootings of Jews.
“These diaries ... represent a towering refutation
of the well-worn refrain of so many Germans after
the war: ‘We knew nothing of the Nazi horrors,’”
Elan Steinberg of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants said.
Kellner was a Social Democrat who refused to
join the Nazi party and his perspective offers a unique
view, say historians.
Born in 1885, Kellner was the son of a baker. He
fought in World War One and became a government
employee in the district court at Laubach, a western
town largely sympathetic to Nazis.
“The decisive thing is that he is not an intellectual,
he is an ordinary employee sitting in the provinces
who reads the newspapers. He is full of anger about
what is happening,” said Sascha Feuchert, head of
the Research Unit for Holocaust Literature at Giessen University, and editor of the volumes.
“NAZI BEASTS”
One of the most chilling entries comes on October
Top Cardinal
cont’d from p. 17
Consultations, an umbrella group in charge of official
relations with the Vatican.
IJCIC chair Lawrence Schiffman, vice provost for
undergraduate education at Yeshiva University, said
the meeting was “excellent” despite disagreements
regarding the Vatican archives.
IJCIC has no official position on whether Pius XII
should be beatified, Schiffman said. But the group
TOGETHER 18
28, 1941:
“A soldier on vacation here said he witnessed a
terrible atrocity in the occupied parts of Poland.
He watched as naked Jewish men and women were
placed in front of a long deep ditch and upon the order of the SS were shot by Ukrainians in the back
of their heads and they fell into the ditch. Then the
ditch was filled with dirt even as he could still hear
screams coming from people still alive in the ditch.”
“...There is no punishment that would be hard
enough to be applied to these Nazi beasts.”
That an occurrence like this was the talk of the
town as early as October 1941 shows what information was available.
“Kellner realized there was more to be seen than
was being shown. That is some proof that it was not
impossible, maybe not even so difficult to see through
things,” said Feuchert.
Personal conversations, news reports and keen
observation convinced Kellner the Nazis were committing terrible crimes.
On September 16, 1942, he wrote: “In the last few
days Jews from our district have been removed. From
here it was the families Strauss and Heinemann. I
heard from a reliable source that all Jews were taken
to Poland and would be murdered by SS brigades.
“This cruelty is terrible. Such outrages will never
be wiped from the history of humanity. Our murderous government has besmirched the name ‘Germany’
for all time.”
Kellner also wrote a great deal about the crazed
ambition of Hitler that would lead to defeat. Noticing
a lack of reports about German losses, he made his
own calculations on the basis of death notices and
came up with a figure of 30,000 per month.
“That may not be the right figure, but the point is
he realizes the losses are extreme and he concludes
that the war cannot be won. This is very striking,”
said Feuchert.
DISGRACE
Kellner, realizing Germany was heading for turbulent times, set out to record them. He read newspapers from the Voelkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party
mouthpiece, and Das Schwarze Korps, the SS newspaper, to local papers from all over the country.
“The purpose of my record is to capture a picture
of the current mood in my surroundings so that a future generation is not tempted to construe a ‘great
event’ from it (a heroic time or something similar),”
he wrote on September 26, 1938.
“I fear very few decent people will remain after
events have taken their course and that the guilty will
have no interest in seeing their disgrace documented
in writing.”
Kellner, who never pretended to hold Nazi views,
was under surveillance and questioned by officials
several times.
“My grandfather was determined, at great risk to
his life, to provide future generations with a weapon
does demand that the archives be opened before a decision is made.
At the meeting, Schiffman said, Koch reiterated
his view that there is nothing in the archives that is
not already known. But the cardinal did say the archives would be opened in three or four years. The
Vatican initially promised to open its World War IIera archives 25 years ago, after a meeting between
IJCIC leaders and Pope John Paul II.
The cardinal also assured IJCIC that the Vatican
would never accept controversial Bishop Richard
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of truth against any resurgence of Nazism and totalitarian impulses,” Robert Martin Scott Kellner, Friedrich’s grandson and joint editor of the diary, told Reuters in an email exchange.
Documents show Kellner came close to being sent
to a concentration camp but was careful enough not
to let the Nazis get hold of proof against him. “If his
diaries had been found it would have been over,” said
Feuchert.
In 1940, one Nazi official wrote: “If we want to
apprehend people like Kellner we will have to lure
them out of their corners and let them incriminate
themselves. The time is not ripe for an approach like
the one used with the Jews. This can only take place
after the war.”
PUBLICATION BATTLE
After the war, Kellner helped decide which local
Nazi party members should be barred from professions and public office. In the late 1960s he gave the
diaries to his grandson in the United States who faced
an uphill battle to get them published.
“I had no idea it would take over four decades to
fulfill my promise. Publishers throughout the United
States and Germany did not want to take a gamble,”
said his grandson.
Eventually the chronicles caught the eye of Bush,
who put them on exhibition at his presidential library
in Texas in 2005.
That sparked interest in Germany and Feuchert
and a team of colleagues started five years of research, verifying Kellner’s sources and conversation
partners before publication.
The appearance of the diaries, 15 years after a major controversy over U.S. academic Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, has revived
a debate on how much Germans knew about the Holocaust. Goldhagen argued that many more Germans
were complicit in carrying out Hitler’s plan to exterminate Jews than had previously been acknowledged.
In the last few years, some focus has shifted to
Germans’ own suffering, with documentaries and
books on subjects from the Allies’ firebombing of
Dresden and the rape of German women by Soviet
troops to expulsions of Germans from central Europe.
Kellner’s diary features on Sueddeutsche Zeitung
newspaper’s “recommended reading” list. The publishers, Wallstein, are on the third print run, indicating unexpectedly strong demand with about 6,000
copies sold and an English translation planned.
Der Spiegel weekly compared the diaries to those
of Jewish academic Victor Klemperer, whose account of the climate of hostility and fear in the Nazi
years is widely used in Germany as a teaching text on
the Third Reich.
“These magnificently edited volumes ... belong
in every German library and if possible every book
shelf—next to the diaries of Klemperer,” wrote Der
Spiegel.
Williamson as long as his group, the Society of St.
Pius X, continues to deny the Holocaust, Schiffman
said.
Schiffman recalled that when Koch’s predecessor,
Cardinal Kasper, took up his post 10 years ago, he
too had a bumpy start. But the relationship became
a fruitful one.
“I am hopeful that as he gets increasingly educated what this is really all about, we will also have
accomplishments,” Schiffman said.
January 2012
Israeli, German researchers expose the Nazi past of a
prominent historian and ‘resistance hero’
By Nir Hasson, Haaretz
The night of April 17, 1945 was a dramatic one in the Bavarian town of Ansbach. The Third Reich was on
the verge of collapse and U.S. forces were besieging the city. They would take it in less than 24 hours. That
night a small, courageous group of young anti-Nazis tried to get the town to surrender without bloodshed or
destruction.
The tragic events of that night and the following morning would enable one of Germany’s most important
postwar historians to clear his name of accusations that he was pro-Nazi. Through a web of lies and halftruths, the historian, Karl Bosl, swept away his Nazi past and replaced it with the image of a brave opponent
of the Nazis.
Research by Prof. Benjamin Z. Kedar, the vice president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Peter
Herde of Wurzburg University in Germany, has exposed what really happened that night, as well as Bosl’s
true Nazi past. As a result, the government of the Bavarian city where Bosl was born, Cham, announced about
two weeks ago that it was changing the name of a square from Dr.-Karl-Bosl-Platz and removing a statue of
Bosl from town hall.
The two scholars discovered that Bosl had tried to gain anti-Nazi credentials through his previous contact with Ansbach’s true hero,
a young man named Robert Limpert, who had been Bosl’s student.
Limpert, born in 1925, had established an anti-Nazi underground cell
in Ansbach.
In the days before April 18, he and his comrades posted flyers on
city hall calling on residents to disrupt the defense of the town and get
it to surrender to Allied forces. Limpert even secured the deputy mayor’s consent to surrender, but he was overridden by Ansbach’s Nazi
military commander, Col. Ernst Meyer, who insisted that the town fight
to its last bullet.
Limpert then took the courageous, perhaps crazy, step of cutting
communications wires he thought linked Meyer’s headquarters with
Nazi forces in the town. But the lines were not connected. Limpert’s
act of sabotage was witnessed by two members of the Hitler Youth,
who turned him in to Meyer. Limpert was arrested at home, quickly
Karl Bosl
convicted and executed on a gallows set up outside city hall.
On April 18, Limpert actually escaped his captors but was recaptured. Meyer himself put the noose around the young man’s neck, but on the first attempt the rope broke. The
executioners were successful with their second try. Shortly after the execution, Meyer fled Ansbach and U.S.
forces captured the town.
Three days later, Limpert was buried in Ansbach in a ceremony in which he was eulogized by his former
teacher, Bosl. The eulogy was Bosl’s first attempt to rid himself of his Nazi past, say Kedar and Herde.
“He spoke about Limpert as if they had been on the same side,” Kedar said. An American officer, Frank
Horvay, who was in charge of Ansbach’s denazification, played a key role in further burnishing Bosl’s image.
The two men apparently became friends.
The researchers obtained a letter in which Horvay wrote about Bosl to his teacher in the United States.
Horvay recounted the cutting of the communications wires but said Bosl was the one who carried it out.
This account found its way into a number of other letters, and in January 1946, Bosl received a document
from the American forces stating that although he had nominally been a member of the Nazi Party, he had
also been a member of the anti-Nazi underground who had risked his life to post anti-Reich notices.
The document also noted Bosl’s purported act of bravery in cutting the wires. Horvay helped Bosl publish an
account on the “New Germany” in an American publication, and the way was paved toward clearing his name.
During his research, Kedar located Horvay’s daughter in Kentucky and was provided some of her father’s
personal papers. The truth came out after research into Bosl’s papers and interviews with two members of
Limpert’s underground group who survived. The researchers dispelled Bosl’s claim that he had only been a
member of the Nazi Party for a short time and had left for ideological reasons. After the war, Bosl became a
leading historian of the Middle Ages. Stories surfaced occasionally about his Nazi past, but they were countered by accounts of his alleged anti-Nazi activity.
“Bosl was cautious,” said Kedar, a Holocaust survivor and also a historian of the Middle Ages. “He never
said he had cut the cables himself, but he provided the letters in which others said so. When people interviewed him and asked him directly about the case, he said he didn’t want to talk about it.”
Kedar and Herde’s research was recently published in English by Hebrew University’s Magnes Press in a
book entitled Karl Bosl and the Third Reich. Bosl died in 1993.
German program uses Shoah funds to play down Holocaust
By Benjamin Weinthal, Jerusalem Post
The German Holocaust Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility, Future (EVZ)” has used public monies to finance a second anti-Israel high school program that includes elements of Holocaust denial, according
to a new report issued by the Jerusalem-based watchdog organization NGO Monitor.
The new revelations add to the bombshell disclosure in late September that EVZ provided 21,590 euros
to a dubious 2010-11 student exchange program between an east German high school (Gerhart Hauptmann)
and an Israeli- Arab school in Nazareth (Masar Institute for Education) to produce brochures delegitimizing
Israel’s existence. The brochure compared Israel to the former communist East German state and depicted
Jewish pupils in distorted and biased terms.
January 2012
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
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 reaffirm 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 $125. 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.
The cost of each marker is US $125
including shipping & handling.
Make checks payable to:
American Gathering
and mail to:
American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust
Survivors and Their Descendants
122 West 30th Street, Suite 205
New York, NY 10001
Please allow sixty (60) days for delivery.
Name ________________________________
Address_______________________________
City ___________________State __ Zip ____
Phone________________________________
E-mail ________________________________
Number of Markers ______________
Total Amount Enclosed $__________
NOTICE TO HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
NEEDING ASSISTANCE
Financial assistance is available for needy
Holocaust survivors. If you have an urgent
situation regarding housing, health care, food or
other emergency, you may be eligible for a one-time
grant funded by the Claims Conference.
If there is a Jewish Family Service agency in
your area, please discuss your situation with them.
If there is no such agency nearby, mail a written
inquiry describing your situation to:
Emergency Holocaust Survivor Assistance
P.O. Box 765
Murray Hill Station
New York, NY 10156
TOGETHER 19
an incremental part of all aspects in the area. One of
his anonymous community contributions is that he
collected discarded bicycles, restored them and gave
it to a child in need.
ERNEST W. ABEL
Ernest W. Abel passed away peacefully in San Francisco on January 12, 2011 at age 100. Ernest was a
Holocaust survivor who arrived in San Francisco in
1939 from Vienna where he had been a lawyer. In
San Francisco he accomplished many positions starting as a Fuller Brush Man. He graduated as a chemist from USF and he became a professor there. He
went to work for SAARCO. After his retirement he
became a volunteer for legal aid and went back to
study law. He was written up in Time magazine for a
case he won before the U.S. Supreme Court. Ernest
was a long time member of Hadassah, Hebrew Free
Loan Association and B’nai B’rith.
FRED ABELES
Fred Abeles, born in Austria on February 11, 1918,
endured one of the lesser-known holocaust experiences ofWWII. He passed away on June 11, 2011.
In March, 1938, Fred was arrested in his hometown,
Berndorf, a suburb ofVienna, and imprisoned for
three months. By June 1938, the Gestapo gave him
the choice to leave Austria or be deported to Dachau
concentration camp, just for being a Jew. Fred was
able to go to Zagreb, Croatia. By 1941 he was arrested by the Italians, who were then in control of
the region, and sent to a camp, Kraljevicha. By Sept.
1943 he was moved to an island off the coast of Dalmatia called Raab. Rumors were that Italy was leaving the war and the Germans would take over. He
and a few hundred other Jewish prisoners used whatever goods they had to rent boats and went back to
the mainland to escape and avoid being deported to
Auschwitz. When he arrived on The Croatian Coast,
Fred had to find the partisans in order to survive. He
miraculously survived pneumonia during 1944. He
then boarded a ship waiting in the Danube, trying to
get to Turkey and then Palestine, via Bulgaria and
Romania. Credible rumors again arose that the Germans knew about this. Fred lived in fear on this ship
for about a week, left it one morning and made his
way back to the partisans. Although life hiding in the
forests with the partisans was difficult and dangerous, this saved his life, and in March of 1945, at the
end of the war, Fred was 27, and went to Bari, Italy.
His cousin, Karl Abeles, a member of the American
Air force in Italy, found him and brought him to the
U.S. Fred was married to Charlotte in 1950 in NYC,
and worked as a designer and salesman for Fiberbilt,
Inc. until the age of 71. Connoisseurs of classical music, Fred, with his wife, frequented the Metropolitan
Opera, the New York Philharmonic and the Boston
Symphony Orchestra in Tanglewood. He lived in
Whitestone, Queens, and was a member of the Clearview Jewish Center and the Workmen’s Circle.
GIZELLA ABRAMSON
Gizella Abramson, 85, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who charged teachers and students across North
Carolina not to hate, passed away the Hospice House
of Wake County. She had suffered from ovarian cancer. The only member of her immediate family to survive the Nazis, Mrs. Abramson will be remembered
for her frequent appearances in the public schools.
She often said she survived the Holocaust in order to
share her experience with young people.
Since 1973, Mrs. Abramson became a highly
sought-after speaker who visited middle and high
schools, teacher workshops, military bases, college
campuses, churches, and police academies throughout the state.
Born in Tarnopol, Poland, she was 13 at the outbreak of World War II. Mrs. Abramson escaped the
TOGETHER 20
BENJAMIN BEDZOW
Luck ghetto posing as a Christian with false papers.
She joined the partisans until her capture and deportation to the Majdanek concentration camp where
she performed slave labor in a stone quarry and as
a translator. Forced into a death march in the final
months of the war, she was liberated in May 1945.
After surviving the Holocaust, Mrs. Abramson
joined her aunt in Brooklyn, NY, in 1946. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville,
NY, in 1951 with a B.A. in Education. On September
7, 1952, she married her beloved husband Paul.
After relocating to Raleigh in 1970, Mrs. Abramson
became an active member of Temple Beth Or, working as the Director of Education for 19 years. She
also served as a charter member of the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust from 1981 to 1996.
She was a devoted volunteer for Meals on Wheels of
Wake County for 25 years as well.
LILLIAN ALEXANDER
Lillian (Blumenthal) Alexander, 86, of Newington,
CT died November 25, 2011. She was born August
7, 1925 in Berlin, Germany. As a Holocaust survivor, Lillian stressed the importance of civil liberties,
that the right to vote should always be cherished. She
strongly believed in the significance of the arts and
education, instilling this passion in her children and
grandchildren. She came to New York with her family in January of 1941, where she studied art and design during high school. After marrying Saul, they
moved to Hartford, CT to raise their family, where
she took leadership roles in the PTA, girl scouts,
and cub scouts. Her artistic abilities were showcased
throughout her work with these organizations. It was
well known to all that Lillian was also an accomplished chef and seamstress. A highlight of her life
was the twenty years she spent as a History Professor
at Central Connecticut State University.
DR. NINO DAVID ASCOLI
On July 8, 2011, Nino David Ascoli, passed away.
Born in Rome, Italy in 1929, he was a Holocaust
survivor and moved to the United States in 1957 after serving as a Medical Officer in the Italian Army.
Nino was a respected General Surgeon who served
as the Chief of the Medical Staff at Good Samaritan
Hospital in the late ’70s and practiced in Baltimore
until the late ’80s. Nino also donated his time as a
volunteer doctor in Saint Lucia.
SAMUEL “CLAUDE” BECK
Samuel “Claude” Beck, age 76, of Chichester, owner
of Claude’s Bistro, passed away in Kingston, NY on
July 30, 2011 after a short illness. He was surrounded
by his loving family and friends. Sam was born in
Paris, France on Feb. 7, 1935, a Holocaust survivor.
He immigrated to the U.S.A. in 1955 to eventually
become a proud U.S. citizen; as a matter of fact, he
was the proudest grandfather when his first grandchild was born, calling him “a true Yankee.” Sam
was a Jack-of-all-trades: a tailor, diamond cutter,
cosmetician, barber, mechanic, broker, pilot small
planes, and, his many friends’ confidant. Claude was
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
Benjamin Bedzow, 78, passed away at home on December 12, 2011. He was born in Lida, Poland on
November 11, 1933 and survived the Holocaust in
the forests of Belorussia, one of the youngest members of the Bielski Partisan Resistance. Benjamin began his new life in Montreal, Canada in 1948 with
the determination and vision of a young maverick
launching a 50+ year career in real estate development that spanned North America in cities across
Canada and the United States, focusing in Miami
after moving there in 1978. He was most proud of
his role as Building Chairman of the Shul of Bal Harbour, a structure to replicate and resurrect three of the
many synagogues destroyed by the Nazis.
JACOB SOLOMON BELIAK
Jacob Solomon Beliak, 88, of Phoenix passed away
October 11, 2011. Jacob was born in Riga, Latvia and
was a Holocaust survivor. He was a member of several valley synagogues. He took pride in his work as
a cabinet maker and contractor.
IDA ZUGMAN BELIK
Ida Zugman Belik, age 81, of the Daughters of Sarah
Nursing Home in Albany, died on Saturday, October
22, 2011 at Hospice Inn at St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany. Born in Ukraine, Mrs. Belik came to this country in 1978, and had been residing in Schenectady.
She had been employed for 20 years for the payroll
department at OTB Headquarters in Schenectady and
was retired. She was a member of Congregation Agudat Achim in Schenectady. Ida was a holocaust survivor and will be remembered as a loving grandmother
and mother. She was married to Michael Belik until
his passing in 1996.
ABRHAM BIELL
Abraham Biell, 91 of Aventura, Florida passed away
on August 12, 2011. Born in Lida, Poland in 1920,
Abe was a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust and he
saved many Jewish lives. It was this fighting spirit
for life that enabled him to live years beyond his doctors' expectations. He was a dedicated, hard-working
and loving husband, father, grandfather and greatgrandfather.
PETER BORKOWSKI
Peter Borkowski, age 85 of Stratford, CT passed
away peacefully August 25, 2011, at the Jewish
Home of Fairfield. Born in Chelm, Poland on March
25, 1926, Peter was a Holocaust survivor, who as a
young man fought in the resistance. He left Poland
and went to live in the newly formed country of Israel before immigrating to the Untied States. With his
wife of 58 years, Halina, they were extraordinary role
models for their children and grandchildren.
JAY BROTTMAN
Jay Brottman, 79, of East Windsor, NJ, died Sept. 22,
2011 in The Gardens at Monroe Health and Rehab,
Monroe Townhip. Jay was born in Poland, and was a
Holocaust survivor. He had lived in New Jersey for
50 years, having come from Canada. He was selfemployed as a manufacturer for ladies apparel. Jay
was an active member of the community. He played
soccer for the Canadian National Team, was an avid
dancer, volunteered as a coach for the “Greek Stars”
January 2012
Soccer Team, and judged soccer competitions. He
was an avid and great dancer, and also enjoyed playing cards with his family, but above all, he cherished
his family.
SUSAN BUDLOVSKY
Susan Budlovsky passed peacefully after a brief illness in palliative care at St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto, on November 10, 2011. As a Holocaust survivor, she has been officially credited to saving the
lives of many women, who, just like her, lost their
youth to the concentration camps of Terezin and Auschwitz. The women whose lives she saved were too
ill to go on a death march, and were left to dig their
own graves on the 31 of January 1945. A fiercely private person, Susan was always there with encouragement and wisdom.
PAUL CSILLAG
Paul Csillag, 90, of Indianapolis passed away on December 5, 2011. Paul was born
on May 23, 1921 in Hungary.
He and his beloved wife, the
late Rose Csillag, both Holocaust survivors, came to Indianapolis with their children
in 1956. Paul was a long time
and dedicated member of
B’nai Torah. For many years,
Paul was known as the “challah man” in the community. Every week he would make 50 challot from
scratch and deliver them to friends and community
members.
MARIA DEVINKI
Maria Devinki, of Leawood,
passed away Dec. 12, 2011,
at Menorah Medical Center. Maria was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1920.
She grew up in Wodislaw,
Poland, where she studied
at the Bais Yaakov Hebrew
school. In 1942, three years after the onset of the
Holocaust, she married her beloved husband of 50
years, Fred Devinki. Maria lost her father, both of
her brothers and over 100 relatives in the Holocaust.
She survived with her husband and her mother for
27 months in a bunker under a barn. Immediately after the war, Maria and Fred started a grocery store
in Sosnowiec, Poland, before moving to Regensburg,
Germany, where they founded a textile business.
In 1950, the family immigrated to the United States.
In 1955 Maria and Fred founded Devinki Real Estate
in Kansas City. With the success of their business,
Maria was able to do what she loved most, helping
others.
She supported the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy
from its beginnings. One of Maria’s proudest moments came in 1992, when she and Fred dedicated
a Torah scroll to Kehilath Israel Synagogue in honor
of their 50th wedding anniversary. K.I. remained one
of the most important institutions for Maria’s family.
She served for many years on the synagogue’s board
and Sisterhood. Maria also helped found the Midwest
Center for Holocaust Education in 1993, and served
as a vice president and director emeritus there.
DORA DORENTER
Dora Dorenter, 88, of Fair Lawn, NJ, died on Nov.
26. Born in Belchatow, Poland, she came to America
January 2012
in 1946 settling in Paterson. A Holocaust survivor,
she was a member of the Eastside Social Center in
Fair Lawn.
EMIL ELLENBERG
Emil Ellenberg, 87 years of age, of Lyman Road, West
Hartford, husband of the late Irene (Saks) Ellenberg,
died August 29, 2011. Born in Poland, he was the
son of the late Zigmund and Ernestine (Kranthammer) Ellenberg. He was a Holocaust survivor. Emil
was the owner and co-founder of Esquire Cleaners
which was founded in 1956. He was a member of the
Emanuel Synagogue in West Hartford.
LORRAINE ERLANGER
Lorraine Erlanger, 82, of Tinton Falls, died Nov. 7,
2011. She was born to the late Benno and Lucy Stern,
May 7, 1929, in Obernkirchen, Germany. Lorraine
was a Holocaust survivor and came to the U.S. after the war in 1946. She married the late Sgt. Max
Erlanger in 1955, and lived together in New City,
NY for 32 years before his passing. In 2007, Lorraine relocated to Seabrook Village in Tinton Falls,
NJ. Lorraine was an administrative assistant for the
East Ramapo school district for over 20 years and
was an active member in the Jewish War Veterans
Ladies Auxiliary.
DANIEL FRIED
Daniel Fried was born on July 4th 1921 in Uzhhorod,
Czechoslovakia. As a 17-year-old, he experienced
the plight of World War II first handedly when he was
sent to a forced labor camp. After escaping from the
camp he came in contact with a group of Russian soldiers. Luckily, a soldier in the group was Jewish and
told him to keep going as fast as he could, and that he
did. He kept going until he made it to a ship that took
him to Ellis Island and his new life in America. After
arriving, he took up making jewelry with his Uncle
Ernest in New York City. In 1955, he moved to California and while on vacation one year later in Miami,
he met his wife of 56 years, Marlyn. She accompanied him back to California where he would occupy
many jobs such as working for Douglas Aircraft and
the city of Los Angeles. Dan retired in 1987. He died
of prostate cancer on September, 28, 2011 at the age
of 90.
MONIQUE RAYMONDE LUSTIG GINCIG
Monique Raymonde Lustig Gincig lost her battle
with mutiple myeloma August 16, 2011. Monique
was born in Pont-a-Mousson, France on July 7, 1939.
In July, 1942 her parents were deported to Auschwitz
and she and her three sisters were placed in hiding
in various households until the end of the war. After
the war, she was taken in by family friends. In April,
1961 Monique married her husband Bill Gincig an
American working on an Air Force Base in Nancy,
France. To them were born two children, Deborah
and Didier. 1966 saw the closures of the U.S. military
bases in France and Bill and Monique chose to move
with their children to Los Angeles to be near Bill’s
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family. 15 years ago, Bill and Monique moved to the
idyllic island of Orcas in the San Juans. She was very
active in her community, teaching French and quilting, planning community dinners, fund raisers, and
assisting in local plays and other activities up to the
day she died. On the island Monique finally found a
sense of peace and safety that she had searched for
her whole life, and she began to speak about her experiences and the pain she suffered because of the
war and the pain of never having known her parents
to students and groups on the island.
ESTHER LAMPERT
Esther Lampert, of Wayne, NJ, passed away at the
age of 84 on November 21, 2011. Esther was bom in
Berlin, Germany in 1927, the youngest of four children, to Jakob and Yentyl Kopelman. As the persecution of the Jews intensified in pre-war Germany, and
faced with increasing hardship and deprivation, Esther’s sisters Miriam and Hannah, and brother Manfred fled to London via Kindertransport to escape the
Nazis. Esther was too young to go and stayed behind
with her parents. It wasn’t long before her father was
arrested and all their goods confiscated, leaving her
and her mother homeless. When Esther was 12 years
old, HIAS found her and spirited her off to England.
Both her parents became victims of the Nazi conflagration.
In England, after much travail including a stay
with members of the Christadelphian sect, Esther
was reunited with her siblings. Her sister Miriam encouraged her to take nurse’s training, and she spent
the war helping wounded soldiers and enduring the
London Blitz. After the war, Esther immigrated to
the U.S., where she had relatives. She got work as
a nurse in Beth Israel Hospital in New York City,
which enabled her to send food packages to her sisters and brother, whom she had left back in England.
Esther and Sam were residents of Montclair, NJ
from 1976 to 1994.
MARTHA LEBER
Martha Leber passed away on Nov 11, 2011 at the
Rose Blumkin Jewish Home in Omaha, Nebraska.
The daughter of Esther and Abe Hyman, Martha was
born in Aleksandrov, Poland on Mar 26 1926. A Holocaust survivor, she escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and
spent years in a German labor camp before she was
liberated at the end of World War II. She emigrated
to the United States in 1949 and settled in Omaha
through a post-war sponsorship by the Omaha Jewish Community Center. She was predeceased by her
beloved husband of 64 years, Gerson Leber, who was
a survivor of both Auschwitz and Dachau.
CLARA LEVY
Clara Levy, 90, née Kupferstein, died on Aug. 14 at
the Daughters of Miriam Nursing Home in Clifton,
NJ. Born in Poland, she was a Holocaust survivor.
After World War II she lived in Italy where she met
her future husband, David, and came to the United
States settling in the Passaic/Clifton area 50 years
ago. She worked for her husband’s plumbing business, David Levy Plumbing & Heating, and was a
housewife. She was a member of Cong. Adas Israel
of Passaic and the Yugoslavia Jewish Association.
HELEN KOERNER
Helen Koerner of Rochester, NY, 97, formerly of Fair
Lawn, NJ, died on Nov. 29. She was a Holocaust survivor.
cont’d on p. 22
TOGETHER 21
Romania, the Sorbonne in Paris, and graduated from
the Philadelphia Textile Institute in 1952. In 1979 he
bought Custom Maid Brassieres and continued to
work full time until his death. He was an active member of Cong. B’nai Israel in Emerson for 25 years and
spoke nine languages.
BLUMA LUDZKI
Bluma Ludzki (nee Liebowicz), 90, died Oct. 8. Born
in Lodz, Poland, she came to America in 1951, settling in Bronx, N.Y., until moving to Fair Lawn in
1969. She and her late husband were the owners and
operators of a luncheonette in Bronx, NY, before
their retirement. They were both Holocaust Survivors and were liberated by the Russian Red Army
from the Lodz Ghetto on Jan. 19, 1945. They were
two out of 800 survivors of the Ghetto which originally had more than 350,000 Jewish prisoners. She
was a member of the Eastside Social Center in Fair
Lawn and was a longtime member of the Workman
Circle in New York City.
HANS MARSAIEK
VIENNA (AP) - The Mauthausen Memorial Committee says Hans Marsaiek, a Nazi resister who
helped document the history of the former Nazi concentration camp, has died. The committee says Marsaiek died recently at age 97. Marsaiek was arrested
and sent to Mauthausen, in upper Austria, in 1942
for his opposition to the Nazis and survived there
until the Allies liberated the camp in 1945. He was
a leading member of the committee, which turned
the camp into a memorial to the crimes committed
by the Hitler regime. The Nazis shot, gassed, beat or
worked to death about half the 200,000 inmates in
the main camp or its affiliates. About 200,000 people
visit Mauthausen each year.
HENRY DAVID
WEISSMANN
Rudi H. Nussbaum, 89, born
March 21, 1922 died on July
22, 2011. Born in Germany,
Rudi survived the Holocaust
in The Netherlands. After the
war, he married his sweetheart,
Hansje Klein and eventually
settled in Portland as a physics
professor at PSU. Rudi was
a passionate activist for peace, nuclear disarmament
and social justice. In addition, he was active in the
Holocaust Speakers Bureau.
Henry David Weissmann,
74, of Binghamton, NY,
died peacefully in his home
on December 16 after a
courageous 3 month battle
with melanoma.
Henry was born January
9, 1936, in Mannheim, Germany, son of Fred and Erna
Weissmann. A Holocaust survivor, he came to the
United States with his parents when he was four years
old where he grew up and built a thriving dairy farm
in Harpursville, NY. He was a graduate of Harpursville Central School, Perkiomen Preparatory School
and WV Wesleyan College. He served as a Broome
County Legislator from 9th District and after retiring
from farming he went to work for Broome County,
where he served as Manager of Risk and Insurance,
Deputy County Clerk, Manager of Department of
Motor Vehicles, and Director of Public Works. Following retirement from Broome County in December 2007, he worked for Nezuntoz Cafe, where son,
Scott, is an owner. Henry never expected to retire and
he worked up to two days before entering the hospital
for his last bout with cancer.
Always active in community affairs, he was
founding President of Colesville Rotary Club,
Past President and Treasurer of the Broome Tioga
Holstein Club, member of Farm Bureau, Member
of Afton Sertoma Club, Member and past Treasurer
of Hillcrest Rotary. He served for 20 years on the
Board of Education of Harpursville Central School.
He served on the Boards of Children’s Home of
Wyoming Conference and Metro Interfaith Housing.
ESTHER PAPERNIK
EDITH IRENE WINGENS
chwitz in December 1943. In early April 1945, he
escaped from an outcamp of Buchenwald by pushing
aside a guard and fleeing into the woods. He eventually made his way toward the direction of American
Liberation soldiers.
When the war was over, he was sent to Landsberg,
Germany to a Displaced Persons’ Camp. Here is
where he regained his weight and strength. He also
confirmed the reality that he was the only survivor
of his immediate family. He lost his mother and father and three sisters. David met his bride, Cela, who
also had survived the war, and they were married in
Landsberg. Just a few months after the wedding, they
received notice that they were being sponsored as
refugees by Beth Shalom Synagogue in Columbia.
They were the first of several Holocaust survivors
sponsored by Beth Shalom Synagogue to come to
the United States in 1949. A member of Beth Shalom
Synagogue, he was also a member of B’nai B’rith
Men and was a former Mason.
RUDI H. NUSSBAUM
IRMA MATHES
Irma (nee Groeschel)
Mathes, 86, passed away
on November 17, 2011.
She was born in Forcheim,
Germany, on March 24,
1925, and fled to Switzerland on a Kindertransport,
before arriving in New
York City, where she lived
until moving to Fort Lee, NJ 40 years ago.
She was an active member of the Hebrew Tabernacle of Washington Heights and was instrumental in
starting Jewish adult education classes. Irma studied
kabbalah for years and was a lifetime member of Hadassah. She was the fundraising chair for the Palisade
Chapter in Bergen County and was named “Woman
of the Year” in 1997.
She had an unbelievable commitment to the ideals
of Hadassah. She was also a member of the National
Council of Jewish Women.
Esther Papernik, née Fisherman, of Englewood
Cliffs, formerly of Teaneck and Paramus, died on
July 18. Born in Preshnitz, Poland, she was a housewife. She and her husband, Bernard, both Holocaust
survivors, were among the original founders of Cong.
Beth Aaron in Teaneck, NJ.
GEORGETTE GROSZ SPERTUS
DAVID MILLER
David Miller died on November 28, 2011. Born in
Warsaw, Poland in 1921,
he was a son of the late
Baerisch and Ruchla Miller. Mr. Miller was owner
of several package stores
in the downtown Columbia area prior to his retirement in 1984. Following a stroke, he was cared for
by his loving and devoted wife, Cela, until her passing in 2000.
Mr. Miller was among approximately 5,000 resistance fighters who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising which began on April 19, 1943. He escaped
and was among the last of the Jewish population to
leave Warsaw. His freedom was short-lived, however, as he was captured and eventually sent to Aus-
TOGETHER 22
Georgette Grosz Spertus passed away at the age
of 86 on Descember 12, 2011. Beloved wife of the
late Maurice Spertus and the late Alexander Grosz.
Georgette was born and raised in Hungary and survived the Holocaust there. She immigrated to the
United States in 1948. She was on the staff of The
Art Institute of Chicago for 22 years. She was a conservator of paintings for many small museums, a philanthropist, member of board directors of the International Museum of Surgical Science and a member of
the Board of Trustees of Spertus, A Center for Jewish
Learning & Culture.
HARRY L. WECHSLER
Harry L. Wechsler of Paramus, NJ. formerly of Canada and Israel, 84, died on Sept. 17 in Atlantis, Florida.
Born in Bucharest, Romania, he survived the child
labor camps and the Nazis during World War II. He
attended the University of Textile Engineering in
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Edith Irene Wingens, 86, of Cliffside Park, formerly
of Washington Heights and Hartford, Conn., died on
Dec. 8 in Englewood, NJ.
A Holocaust survivor, she was born and raised in
Loehnberg, Germany. When she was 14, she was interred to Camp Westerbork in Holland, a Nazi concentration camp, and was one of 876 liberated in
1945. She married Herman Wingens, whom she met
in Westerbork, and immigrated with him to the U.S.
shorly after their wedding in Amsterdam in 1946.
A homemaker, she was a member of Temple Israel
Community Center in Cliffside Park, Hadassah, National Council of Jewish Women, B’nai B’rith (Leo
Baeck Lodge), and Hebrew Tabernacle.
WERNER A. WYCK
Werner A. Wyck, 90, of North Bergen, NJ died on
Sept. 8. Born in Berlin, Germany, he was a Holocaust
survivor. Before retiring, he owned Wyck Jewelers
in Teaneck and was a member of Thomas Wildey
Lodge in New York City.
ERVIN ZILAHI
Ervin Zilahi died November 11th, 2011 in Ottawa.
Born January 17th, 1929 in Budapest, he was a Holocaust survivor, scientist, chemistry teacher and numismatist.
January 2012
FROM ALLGENERATIONS,
Inc.
SERENA WOOLRICH,
PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER
PLEASE SEND RELEVANT RESPONSES TO:
[email protected]
From Sylvain Brachfeld, a Survivor in Herzlia,
Israel:
Recently Yad Vashem has recognized Sister Superior
Marie Agnès Van den Peereboom of the convent “La
Providence” at Hodimont - Verviers, Belgium as
“Righteous Among the Nations.” I was hidden during the Second World War in the orphanage for boys
in that place, with a dozen Jewish boys, and probably, a same number of Jewish girls were hidden in
a place in the building for girls.There will be a special ceremony at the end of the year at the town hall
or the building of the convent, to present the medal
and the diploma of “Righteous,” in the presence of
the Israeli Ambassador and many Belgian personalities; the nuns of the Order of the Sisters of Charity of
Saint Vincent de Paul, as well as the close family of
the late Sister Superior. I am searching boys or girls
who were hidden in “La Providence.”
From Hannah Berliner Fischthal, a 2g in Jamaica,
New York:
My Mom, Lea Rubinstein Berliner, a Survivor born
in Antwerp, Belgium, is looking for possible friends
and acquaintances she may have known in Antwerp
up until 1942, when she fled to France.
Inquiry from Maxine Fisher, in New York:
On a weekend in September of 1945, my father, Sergeant Norman Fisher, then serving in the U.S. Army
in the 134th (mobile) AAA Gun Battalion in Kassel,
Germany, was given the task of delivering a 15-year
old Jewish Polish refugee boy by the name of Maurice to the boy’s uncle in a suburb of Paris. This boy
had been in 11 concentration camps in five years;
his parents had died in one of them. He turned up
without legal papers and became so beloved by the
American officers in my father’s outfit that they gave
him an army uniform to wear and unofficially “adopted” him. But by that date, the outfit would soon be
disbanded and the soldiers shipped back to the U.S.
My father found the boy’s uncle but was so horrified
by the circumstances in which he was living, that he
could not in all conscience leave Maurice there. So
he spent the weekend searching for an alternative. Finally, he found a chateau outside of Paris which took
care of Jewish refugee children and there he left him
on Sunday, September 16, 1945. I have just learned
all this by reading for the first time my father’s wartime letters to my mother. My father is gone now and
I have no way to find out Maurice’s last name, or the
name of the chateau that took care of Jewish refugee
children where my father left him. But I would like to
find Maurice if there is a chance in the world.
From Janka Metzger (Judith Chass), a Survivor
in Jamaica, New York:
I lived in Jaroslaw, Poland, Badeniego 5. Hersh Katz,
his wife, two sons and two daughters were my neighbors. They were suppliers of eggs for the whole city.
Shortly before the war they purchased an apartment
January 2012
house on May 3 Street and moved there. Hersh Katz
had a brother, with a wife, three sons and a daughter.
The sons were named Wilek, Lemek, and Moniek,
and the daughter was named Ruth.Toward the end of
September we were forced by the Germans to leave
the city. We reached Novosibirsk Oblast, but were
disembarked at different locations. The next thing
I heard about the family was in 1948, Wilek (Zev
Katz) was in Israel and was a member of the Israeli
parliament.
From Esther Gilbert, a 2g and historian, in London, UK:
Our family came from Czartorysk (also known
as Stary Czartorysk), and from Sarny. These are
the names associated with my family: Byk, Flejsz,
Fruchter, Goldberg, Goldschmidt, Manishen, Swarc,
Szapira. If anyone has any information about any of
these families from Czartorysk, I would be very glad
to hear from them.
From Haydee Fabian, a 3g in Buenos Aires, Argentina:
I am writing to you, hoping you can help me to find
the descendants of my great uncle,Max Meier, born in
Hamburg, Germany, on October 1, 1893. He passed
away in Quebec, Canada on April 4, 1954. I am the
granddaughter of Herrman, the elder brother of Max
Meier. Max Meier was married to Alice (née Porges),
born in Hamburg, Germany. They had two sons: 1).
The older son changed his name to Fred Richart Maitland (he was born in Hamburg, Germany, on March
19, 1923 and passed away on July 7, 1995). 2). The
younger son, Frank Meier, was born in Hamburg,
Germany, on December 30, 1928 (if he is still alive, it
is possible that he lives in Florida or North Carolina.
It would be wonderful if I could get in contact with
Frank and his family and the descendants of Fred.
From Gitta Rind (nee Thieberger), a Survivor, in
New South Wales, Australia:
I was born in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia and survived
the war in Siberia. I spent 2 years in DP camps in
Italy; Trani, Barletta, Bari, St. Antonio and Bagnoli.
I was in Italy between the age of 14 and 16, so the
people I knew should still be alive; I am now 77. My
mother’s name was Matylda Thieberger, known as
“Tylda;” she worked for IRO as a translator. I wonder
if anyone out there knows of Mirko Gluck and Sonia
Lewin? Mirko was in St. Antonio during 1950 - 1951.
He immigrated to the USA at the beginning of 1951
and lived in Los Angeles, California. Sonia studied
medicine while waiting to join relatives in the USA.
From Ruth Sprung Tarasantchi, a Survivor in Sao
Paulo, Brazil:
I’m an ex-Yugoslavian Survivor and would like
to make contact with Branko Hohbauer and Raul
Spitzer, my colleagues in Castelnuovo del Bosco.
They are also ex-Yugoslavian Survivors; they are
the same age that I am. I have some information that
Raul Spitzer had gone to the USA and Branco Hohbauer went to Canada.I would appreciate if you had
any information about them.
From Ruth, a Survivor in Westlake Village, CA:
I am a Holocaust Survivor and am looking for other ones in my neighborhood! I live in a small town
called, Westlake Village in California. The other day
your paper, Together, was mailed to me by accident;
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
it was addressed to someone else at my address. I
have been trying to find other Survivors in my area
for quite awhile.
I am 88 years old and do not own a computer. I would
appreciate it very much if you could find someone
living in the “Conjeo Valley” area that I could get in
touch with.
From Aneta Hoffmann, General Manager, The
Kresy-Siberia Foundation, Warsaw, Poland:
For a long time we have wished to start our PolishJewish project, “From Shtetl to Siberia.” We hope to
document the life of Jews who were deported and
imprisoned in 1940-56 to the Soviet Union (Siberia,
Kazakhstan) from Poland, and their fate. We are
looking for any archival materials in connection
with this subject; written testimonies, video or
audio testimonies (recorded or gathered by anyone
worldwide), photographs, etc. We would appreciate
it very much if you could help in spreading this
information. Our previous projects, “The KresySiberia Virtual Museum” (www.kresy-siberia.org)
and the “Survivor Testimony Project” have been
in operation for the past 2 years. Please send any
information you may have to directly to me at: aneta.
[email protected] or to: Aneta Hoffman,
General Manager. Kresy-Siberia Foundation,
Krakowskie Przedmiescie 64/3100-322 Warsaw.
From Rabbi Dr. Norbert Weinberg, a 2g in
Encino, CA:
My parents, Rabbi Dr. Wilhelm and Irene Weinberg,
were in a DP camp in Hallein, Austria (near Salzberg).
I would like to post a request for information from
anyone who was in that camp from 1946-1948 who
may have known my parents. My father at that time
was employed by the Joint Distribution Committee
in an adult education program which I believe was
run by ORT.
From Pessy Blum, a 2g in Brooklyn, NY:
I am helping my mother complete “ZRBG500EN” claim for widow’s/widower’s pension for Survivors
of former ghetto workers residing outside Germany,
but since my father never claimed reparations we have
no documentation. I managed to collect the following
from a cousin who was with my father during that
period as my mother knows almost nothing of his
experiences:
My father, Lajos Schimmel, was born in
Szombathely, Hungary in November 1925. He was
in the Szombathely Ghetto from April 1944 to July
13, 1944, where he worked at whatever odd jobs,
such as kitchen work, etc., were available.From
there my father, along with other young men, were
taken by the Hungarian Army (Munka Tabor/Labor
force) to Koszeg. From Koszeg they were taken to
Lesencetomaj and then to Pusztaszabolcs.In or near
Mosonmagyaróvár, Hungary (near the Austrian
border), Samuel Porgesz who was in an Iron Cross
(“Nyilas”) uniform, provided the young men with
Raoul Wallenberg’s Swedish “Schutzpassen.”
Porgesz also helped them travel to Budapest.
My father remained in the Budapest Ghetto until
Liberation. While in Budapest he worked for
a shoemaker. Any information, suggestions of
resources for documentation, etc. of the above, such
as his having lived in the Szombathely Ghetto and
the existence of the ghetto would be appreciated.
TOGETHER 23
An Urgent
Appeal
to Our
Readers
Dear Friends,
· Advocated our cause in newspapers and on television, with more than a
dozen columns and hundreds of articles since the beginning of 2011;
· Through direct intervention with state officials in Maryland, brought about
the legal end of the infamous and bogus sale of so-called “Holocaust Torahs”
that were fraudulently claimed to have been found and rescued from that period;
· Promoted Holocaust education, with the participation of Yad Vashem, the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the new museum at BergenBelsen, through our Summer Seminar Program on Holocaust and Jewish Resistance
that takes American teachers to Poland, Germany, Israel and Washington to give
them a personal appreciation of the Holocaust;
· Worked with the U.S. Justice Department in the search for and prosecution
of Nazi criminals, culminating in a special Justice Department Human Rights
Award recognizing our efforts;
· Brought members of the second and third generations together with survivors
to strengthen our legacy and the lessons of Holocaust remembrance;
· Promoted the search for “lost survivors” sought by relatives friends, in
cooperation with All-Generations, Inc., under the leadership of our regional vice
president, Serena Woolrich;
· Continued the solemn observance of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance
Day, with the largest annual commemoration in the United States, in association
with New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the
Holocaust;
· Maintained and updated the Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors which now includes the records of over 185,000 survivors
and their families who carne to North America after World War II;
· Disseminated Holocaust-related news and other items of interest to the
survivor community on our website, www.americangathering.org.
The American Gathering is your organization, and
your generous contributions help us to carry out our
unique mission.
As you know, for the past 27 years, the American
Gathering, the largest umbrella organization of
survivors, has been at the forefront of all issues
pertaining to survivors and their families. This past
year has been no exception despite the
challenges of extraordinary difficulties
and confrontations.
If you can, please consider
increasing your contribution to reflect
the increased needs of our community.
If you did not yet send in your annual
contribution, please consider doing so at
whatever amount you are comfortable
with. As described below, contributors
of $500 or more will be acknowledged
and listed in our newspaper, Together.
As survivors and their families,
we are painfully aware of the toll
that the bleak economy has taken on
our available resources. Nevertheless,
we are determined to continue our work. We
know that together, with thanks to your generous
contribution, we will be able to insure that our fight
In order to continue these important efforts, the American Gathering needs
for remembrance will live on. With your generous
your ongoing financial commitment and support, NOW more than ever. We, too,
support and that of the more than 80,000 survivor
are facing tremendous fundraising challenges but we are confident that we can
families who make up our organization, we will
count on you, our Survivor family, to help us continue to make the difference we do.
be able to continue our critical work in the coming
If you can increase your contribution please
year and build on our
consider
doing so. If you can’t, please know that any
past accomplishments.
The
amount
you
are able to contribute will be greatly
This past year alone,
American
appreciated.
we have:
Gathering
With your ongoing support comes a yearly
· Continued to represent
survivors’ interests at
now accepts subscription to Together, the largest publication
diplomatic conferences
Visa, in its field that reaches more than 80,000 survivor
families, and which features news, opinions, notices of
and negotiations in
Mastercard,
commemorations and other events, book reviews,
Europe and Washington
American searches, historical articles and personal reminiscences.
to secure and increase
In addition, those who are able to contribute $500
reparations and restitution
Express, and
for those victimized
Discover by phone and in person or more will be acknowledged and listed in Together as
Benefactors, Patrons or Guardians (see the enclosed card
by Nazi persecution
for
your
convenience.
for the levels for each of these categories).
and plunder. Of particular
As we continue to raise our voices to defend the
(212) 239-4230
note was our success in
dignity and address the needs of Holocaust survivors,
pressing Germany to obtain
we turn to you at this time of introspection and new
$150 million dollars for
beginnings to ask for your support for our ongoing efforts. Your generous, taxhomecare and social services in 2011;
exempt (U.S.) contribution to the American Gathering will help us greatly in our
· Fought those who would deny the evils of the
continued activities.
Holocaust, both here and abroad.
We thank you in advance for your generosity, and wish you and your families
· Ensured that survivors receive proper care and
a successful, peaceful, healthy and happy 2012.
assistance through our work with social agencies
like the Jewish Board of Family Services, Self-Help
and Blue Card;
American Gathering, 122 West 30th Street, Suite 205, New York, NY 10001
Please make a meaningful,
tax deductible
contribution payable to the
“American Gathering.”
Thank you.
TOGETHER 24
Name:
___________________________________________________________________________
Address:
___________________________________________________________________________
City:
State:
Zip:
Phone:
___________________________________________________________________________
qMastercard qVisa qAmerican Express qDiscover Amount:
____________________
visit our website at www.amgathering.org
January 2012