Send page to a Friend Archived Holocaust News Stories Israel German soldier pointing his weapon at Jewish soldier? Multinational force in southern Lebanon is still theoretical, but in Germany questions rise about appropriateness of sending in German forces July 27, 2006 YNet News The possibility that German soldiers will be stationed on Israel's northern border as part of a multinational force creates a complicated dilemma for Germany, well covered by the media and discussed among the public. The BBC reported that, in recent days, German newspapers were busy reporting the as of yet theoretical issue, with many arguments for and against. "History is part of the past, but the history of the Holocaust is part of the German present," read German newspaper 'Frankfurter Rundschau'. We cannot allow a German soldier, even in theory, "to be put in a situation where he may point his weapon at an Israeli," the article continued.  A survey from last weekend's edition of Der Speigel weekly magazine revealed that 53 percent of those surveyed opposed German participation in such a force. "In that area, Germans should be diplomats and mediators, but not soldiers," Green Party member Jerzy Montag told the newspaper. The Sueddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany's largest newspapers, wrote that the fact politicians have the audacity even to debate such a topic is "amazing". Austrian paper Der Standard wrote that it was "impossible that grandchildren of Holocaust perpetrators potentially find themselves in a situation where they shoot at grandchildren of Holocaust survivors." To continue reading this article, click here.  Israel Amid barrage, a Holocaust heroine shakes off fear July 19, 2006 Matthew Kalman, Globe Correspondent Orna Shorani, 76, was named a "Righteous Among the Nations" for her bravery in rescuing Jews from the Nazi Holocaust. This week her character was on display once again when she brushed off a direct hit by a Hezbollah rocket on her house in this town in northern Israel. Orna was fast asleep last Thursday morning when a Katyusha rocket fired by militants from Lebanon struck her home, crashing through the roof of her grandson's apartment upstairs and sending her bedroom door flying across the room, where it hit her on the head. But she refused to go to the hospital, and yesterday she was back at home while workers patched up the damage. All the windows in the front of her house were smashed, the doors were blown off their hinges, and the roof had a gaping hole. "There was a huge boom, and I got a crack on the head," said Orna, who sees and hears with difficulty and walks with a cane. 'My grandson came running down to see I was OK, but I told him to go away and let me go back to sleep," she said.   Orna lives in Nahariya, a few miles from the border with Lebanon, and the target of attacks by Hezbollah in the past few days. Half the town's residents have left, but Orna said she had no intention of leaving. "I lived through the Second World War and all of Israel's wars," she said. "I think I'll survive this one, too." To continue reading this article, click here. World Annan underlines Holocaust remembrance as crucial to preventing future genocides July 18, 2006 RSS Feed The United Nations will expand its partnerships with civil society to commemorate the uniqueness of the Holocaust in human history and to draw from the Nazi German murder of millions of Jews and other minorities lessons to help to prevent future acts of genocide, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has told the General Assembly.    “Through the recollection of the journeys of those who perished and by sharing the experiences of the survivors at commemorative events, in exhibits and on web pages, the programme will show that the failure of mankind to prevent the Holocaust has direct relevance to the dangers of genocide that persist today,” Mr. Annan says in his report on the Assembly’s 2005 resolution instituting official remembrance of the tragedy. He gives a breakdown of activities undertaken so far by the UN Department of Public Information (DPI), entrusted with carrying out an outreach programme in accordance with the resolution which established 27 January as Holocaust Remembrance Day. To continue reading this article, click   here. U.S. Learning How to Teach the Holocaust July 11, 2006 Brooke Bates EDWARDS — Jennifer Stiebel, a history teacher at St. Clare of Assisi Catholic School in Edwards, will head to Israel with 30 other Catholic educators to learn firsthand about Judaism. The teachers were selected to participate in the Anti-Defamation League’s “Bearing Witness Advanced: Anti-Semitism, The Holocaust and Contemporary Issues” program.  The advanced abroad program began last year, modeled after the regional Bearing Witness program, which Stiebel attended in July 2003.   “I’m interested in teaching the Holocaust in a way that’s not overwhelming to eighth graders,” Stiebel said. “This will show me how to use all the resources in the right way to get the horrible reality across to them.” To continue reading this article, click  here. Poland Polish Coalition Jeopardizes Cooperation on Holocaust Education July 7, 2006 Associated Press Israeli officials have decided to refuse all contact with Poland's new education minister because he leads a right-wing party they consider anti-Semitic, a policy that could hinder cooperation in the area of Holocaust education, officials said Sunday. Jerusalem is stopping short of a formal boycott of relations with Roman Giertych, but has decided instead to shun any dealings with him, said Tali Samesh, a senior official in the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. "The Polish education minister is the president of a Polish party... that is an anti-Semitic party by definition, therefore we are not interested in having contacts with him," Samesh said. "We are not initiating anything with that minister." Poland plays a pivotal role in Holocaust remembrance, because Nazi Germany's death camps such as Auschwitz, Chelmno, Majdanek and Treblinka, were set up on occupied Polish territory. To continue reading this article, click here. Berlin German Government Finally Approves Agreement to Open Vast Nazi Archive June 30, 2006 The Associated Press Germany's cabinet formally approved a deal yesterday to open to researchers an archive of millions of Nazi files that describe the mechanics of the Holocaust, and officials said the accord is likely to be signed in late July.   The agreement was reached last month by the 11-nation governing body of the International Tracing Service, the arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross that oversees the archive in the German town of Bad Arolsen. The protocol will probably be signed July 26 in Berlin, Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger said. The move to unlock the archive, controlled by 1955 agreements, has come amid pressure from the dying generation of Holocaust survivors and victims' families who feared the histories of their loved ones would be lost forever unless the rules were changed. The breakthrough came earlier this year when Germany, which had said that access to the files by Holocaust researchers would violate the country's privacy laws, agreed to soften its secrecy rules. Under current rules, information is given out only to former victims. A third party can access the archives only with the express, written consent of a former victim. It remains unclear when exactly researchers will be able to access the archives. To continue reading this article, click here. Israel Holocaust conference opens at Yad Vashem June 26, 2006 Etgar Lefkovits     More than 300 educators from 21 countries around the world will take part in a Holocaust education conference that begins Monday at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority announced Sunday. The three-day conference, entitled "Teaching the Holocaust to Future Generations," includes lectures, discussion groups and workshops that will explore and reflect on varied approaches to Holocaust education, with participants coming from China, Greece, Venezuela, Belgium, Australia, Romania, Hungary, South Africa, Poland, Germany and the United States, among other countries. Guest speakers at the fifth biannual event are set to include prominent Holocaust expert Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt from Emory University, Canadian parliamentarian Prof. Irwin Cotler, and Prof. Rita Suessmuth, the former president of the German Parliament who serves as Chairperson of The Friends of Yad Vashem in Germany. "The conference will provide a forum for educators around the world to participate in a wide-ranging and enriching dialogue on Holocaust education," said Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev, stressing the forward-looking focus of the conference. To continue reading this article, click here. Iran Tehranto hold Holocaust Conference in October Jun 25, 2006 June 25, 2006 Associated Press Tehran - Iran is to hold its controversial proposed conference on the Holocaust in October of this year, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Assefi said Sunday. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad provoked international outrage last year by calling for the eradication of Israel, branding the Holocaust a 'fairy tale' and demanding a relocation of Israel to Europe or the United States. Following international protests, Tehran decided to hold a conference discussing what it termed 'clarification of the real dimensions of the Holocaust.' The conference was supposed to be held in spring this year but observers say that it was delayed in order to avoid possible problems for the Iranian national football team before and during the World Cup in Germany. Several Muslim as well as Western scholars, reportedly also German neo-Nazis, are among those to attend the conference. The Holocaust is the term generally applied to the mass extermination of six million Jews in Europe by Nazi Germany during World War Two (1939-1945). Israel Battleagainst time to publish Holocaust memoirs June 16, 2006 Haggai Hitron   Like the brief resurgence of a campfire before it dies into embers, the past few years have seen a rise in the number of Holocaust memoirs being published. Time rushes on, and the desire to recreate, to witness, to struggle against one's failing memory becomes an urgent command. Most of these testimonies are amazing, even when the authors are not professional writers. It is difficult to remain indifferent in the face of "Yeled, Hetzel et Atzmakha" ["Child, Save Yourself"] by Yisrael Brestitzky ?(Ministry of Defense Publication, 2004?). Like many of these memoirs, it does not dwell on the horrors of the death camps. In Brestitzky's book, for example, the climax of the plot occurs after the Holocaust has ended, in 1945. The plot then takes a terrible twist: The exemplary officer in the victorious Red Army goes over from the light side of liberation and freedom to the dark side of Soviet despotism after a Jewish colleague turns him in. Dr. Bella Gutterman, Director of Publications for Yad Vashem, has been contacted by about 100 Holocaust survivors wanting to publish a book in each of the last few years. In 1998, by way of comparison, she received only four such requests. Gutterman accepts about 20 requests each year. The rest are offered a grant of at least NIS 5,000, through the generosity of the Azrieli family, to help them self-publish their manuscript or publish it with another publisher. To continue reading this article, click here. Boston MassachusettsCouple Honored for Saving Jews During the Holocuast June 13, 2006 The Associated Press JERUSALEM --An American couple was posthumously honored Tuesday at Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial for saving almost 2,000 Jews from the Nazis during World War II. In a ceremony at the memorial, Martha and Waitstill Sharp became only the second and third Americans to be inducted into the memorial's "Righteous Among the Nations" group for non-Jews who saved Jews.   Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, part of the Nazi "final solution" aimed at wiping out the Jews of Europe. The Sharps left their home in Wellesley, Mass. -- and their two small children -- to travel to Prague in 1939, where they helped hundreds of refugees escape the Nazi occupiers of Czechoslovakia. There they had to burn evidence of their work when they fled the country six months later as the Nazis marched into Prague. Later, they traveled to Lisbon, where they helped refugees flee Nazi-occupied France into Spain, then Portugal and then to the United States. A grandson of the Sharps, Artemis Joukowsky III, said it was their ability to work well with little funds and their social skills that made them good at sneaking people out of Europe to the United States. Joukowsky accepted the honor for his grandparents at the Yad Vashem ceremony. To continue reading this article, click  here. Berlin Jewish leader: Iran president a ‘second Hitler’ June 8, 2006 The Associated Press     The newly elected leader of Germany’s main Jewish organization called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a “second Hitler” who should be barred from attending the World Cup in Germany, according to comments published Thursday. "Ahmadinejad should not be allowed to set foot on German soil," Charlotte Knobloch said in remarks published in Bild newspaper. The Holocaust survivor was elected the first woman president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews on Wednesday. “For me, this man is a second Hitler,” Knobloch said. “He denies the Holocaust — that is illegal in Germany. The German government should therefore not protect him with diplomatic immunity. The authorities should rather investigate him and charge him.” Ahmadinejad has indicated more than once that he might visit the Iranian national team during the World Cup soccer tournament, though no specific plans have been announced. The Iranian president has sparked outrage for repeatedly questioning Israel’s right to exist, saying the country should be wiped off the map and dismissing the Holocaust as a myth. Wiesel weighs in In Israel, meanwhile, Nobel peace laureate Eli Wiesel suggested in an interview published Thursday that military action might be necessary to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb. “I am against war, I cannot bear to hear myself say that I am in favor of war. I am not a general, but maybe it is necessary to send in a commando team to destroy the (Iranian nuclear) facilities,” Wiesel told Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who speaks out frequently on human rights, said Iran’s nuclear program must be stopped “at any price.” He also said Ahmadinejad has become “the world’s number one Holocaust denier.” To continue reading this article, click here. Boston The Roots of the Holocaust June 5, 2006 The Boston Globe "The place where we are standing," Pope Benedict XVI said last week,"is a place of memory." He was standing at Auschwitz, but what he said and did there raised questions less about remembering than forgetting. Is the new pope prepared to carry forward his predecessors' revolutionary moral reckoning with Christianity's co-responsibility for the Holocaust, or does he intend to initiate a new era of denial? Similarly, does he intend to roll back the doctrinal revolution that has taken place in the church's view of the Jewish religion, reasserting the "replacement theology" that was the ground of the religious anti-Judaism that morphed into racial anti-Semitism?   The question about the Holocaust has a special edge because Benedict is German, and it first surfaced during his visit to Cologne last August. In addressing an audience of Jews in that city's synagogue, the pope roundly condemned the Nazi genocide campaign. But then he defined the lethal Nazi anti-Semitism that spawned the genocide as having been "born of neo-paganism." He made no mention of anti-Semitism's other parent, the long tradition of Christian contempt for Jews and the Jewish religion, which both fed the hatred of the perpetrators and justified the inaction of the bystanders. Little was made of the pope's omission of reference to such Christian responsibility, as if to give him time to make his position clearer. To continue reading this article, click  here. Poland Pope in Former Warsaw Ghetto without Mentioning Holocaust May 25, 2006 Israel International News Pope Benedict XVI passed though the former Jewish Ghetto Thursday, but as it passed by the monument to victims of the Holocaust, his motorcade did not slow down nor did he pay tribute to them. The French news agency AFP reported that that the crowd was disappointed at his silence.   The German-born Pope, as a youth, enrolled into the Hitler Youth movement although he did not take part in fighting. In his speech at the airport where he arrived, the Pope said he hopes to meet "survivors, the victims of Nazi terror, from the many nations which suffered this tragic oppression," when he visits the site of the Auschwitz death camp on Sunday. To continue reading this article, click here.  USA New Stamp to Honor WWII Envoy May 25, 2006 Washington Post Sixty-six years ago, Hiram Bingham IV, a blue-blood American diplomat in France, defied U.S. policy by helping Jews escape the Nazis in the early years of World War II. Bingham's actions cost him his Foreign Service career but won him the undying gratitude of the more than 2,000 refugees he helped save by issuing them travel visas and false passports, and even at times sheltering them in his home. Only in recent years has his heroism been officially recognized by his own country. Bingham's actions cost him his Foreign Service career but won him the undying gratitude of the more than 2,000 refugees he helped save by issuing them travel visas and false passports, and even at times sheltering them in his home. Only in recent years has his heroism been officially recognized by his own country.   Bingham, the Yale-educated son of a former U.S. senator, died in 1988 at age 84. His own children did not learn the extent of his wartime deeds until 1996, when a son found a cache of old journals and correspondence stashed in a hidden closet in the family's Connecticut home. Soon Bingham's face and, supporters hope, his story -- will be well known across the United States, as the U.S. Postal Service issues a stamp next Wednesday in his honor.he Yale-educated son of a former U.S. senator, died in 1988 at age 84. His own children did not learn the extent of his wartime deeds until 1996, when a son found a cache of old journals and correspondence stashed in a hidden closet in the family's Connecticut home. Soon Bingham's face and, supporters hope, his story -- will be well known across the United States, as the U.S. Postal Service issues a stamp next Wednesday in his honor. To continue reading this article, click  here. Russia Grodno Jews Celebrate First Torah Scroll Since Holocaust May 23, 2006 Federation of Jewish Communities GRODNO, Belarus – A vast and impressive ceremony took place yesterday in Grodno to celebrate the new Torah scroll completed and brought into the Synagogue for the first time since the Holocaust. The city of Grodno boasts centuries of Jewish history and famous Jews, most of whom perished in the Holocaust. With a shower of blessings and cheerful music, the colorful procession strode with the scroll towards the Synagogue along the city’s central street cleared by the local police. The parade reached its culmination when the participants entered the gates of the former ghetto, where hundreds of local Jews met their fate. A former ghetto prisoner Grigory Chasid was given the honor of carrying the scroll through the gate and bringing it inside the synagogue. “Bringing the Torah scroll through the ghetto gate is a symbol of our returning to Gordno and the sign of the rebirth of Jewish life in the city”, said Rabbi Yitzchak Kofman, chief rabbi of Grodno and Chabad Lubavich representative in the city. The Synagogue is one of the oldest one that survived the WWII in Europe. It was founded more than 400 years ago by Rabbi Mordechai Yaffe - "Baal Halevushim", who served as the city’s rabbi then. To Continue Reading this article, click here.