Send page to a Friend Current Holocaust News Boston Community sends a clear message to Iranian leader December 29, 2006 People speak out at downtown vigil that the 'truth will be shown" Near Faneuil Hall Marketplace last Thursday, Boston’s Jewish leaders raised their voices in protest of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s conference earlier this month, where he denied that the Holocaust happened.   Sponsored by organizations such as the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Synagogue Council of Massachusetts, GesherCity and the American Jewish Committee, a candlelight vigil was held at the New England Holocaust Memorial, and hundreds of individuals came to honor victims of Nazi persecution. To continue reading this article, click here. Boston Jewish Community Relations Council Condemns Iranian Government Sponsored Holocaust Denial December 6, 2006 The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston condemns the Iranian government’s international conference questioning the existence of the Holocaust that will take place Monday, December 11th and Tuesday, December 12. Scholars from over 30 countries will present topics such as whether gas chambers were ever used by the Nazis. It is consistent with the outrageous statements made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad who has claimed on several occasions that the Holocaust was either greatly exaggerated or a complete myth. Ahmedinejad and Foreign Ministry have also stated that the Jews have used the Holocaust as a propaganda tool to promote Israeli and Jewish interests. In response to these reckless statements, JCRC Executive Director Nancy K. Kaufman said, "It is unfathomable that a world leader can deny the incontrovertible truth of the Holocaust’s occurrence. The shocking claims by the Iranian President show callous disregard for the memory of eleven million innocents, Jews and Gentiles alike, who were murdered at the hands of the Nazis. The conference reiterates its lethal intentions towards Israel and the Jewish community throughout the world." To continue reading this article, click here. Boston Holocaust Restitution Fee Waiver Program Launched December 1, 2006 April Simpson Boston Globe State officials announced yesterday that more than 60 banks will waive the international wire transfer fee for Holocaust survivors receiving reparations or restitution payments. Holocaust victims, bankers, and state employees gathered in the Great Room of the State House to mark the Holocaust Restitution Payment Fee Waiver program. The fee, about $15 for every yearly or monthly payment, will benefit survivors statewide who receive compensation from Germany and other European countries for being victims of Nazi persecution. To Continue reading this article, click  here. To learn more about the Holocaust Restitution Fee Waiver Program, click  here. New York Benjamin Meed, 88, Who Was a Key Advocate for Holocaust Survivors, Dies October 26, 2006 Margalit Fox Jerusalem Post   Benjamin Meed, a leading advocate for Jewish Holocaust survivors who in the decades after the war gathered them together by the tens of thousands, reuniting people with friends, neighbors and family members presumed to have been lost forever, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88. The cause was pneumonia after a long illness, his son, Steven, said. A survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, Mr. Meed was at his death the president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, an organization he helped found in 1981. For decades, he was a driving force behind the large-scale reunions of survivors held every few years in Washington. To Continue Reading this Article, click here. United Kingdom Groundbreaking Holocaust Education Resource October 23, 2006 Jerusalem Post A revolutionary Holocaust education resource for UK high schools, the product of a partnership between the UK's Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) and the Shoah Foundation Institute at the University of Southern California (USC), was launched last week at Pimlico High School in London. HET, an organization set up in 1988 to educate young people from all ethnic backgrounds about the Holocaust and lessons to be learned for today, with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, whose mission statement is to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry - and the suffering they cause - through the educational use of the institute's visual history testimonies, launched an interactive DVD, Recollections: Eyewitnesses Remember the Holocaust.  The work integrates testimony from Holocaust survivors and witnesses from the Shoah Foundation's "Visual History Archive," which contains nearly 52,000 video testimonies and recorded interviews in 32 languages. It also contains 18 visual history testimonies and interviews from Jewish survivors. Roma, Sinti and Jehovah's Witness survivors and survivors of the Nazi eugenics program are also included. To Continue Reading this Article, click   here. Hungary Hungarian Nun Who Saved Jews in World War II Beatified September 17, 2006 Associated Press   Thousands of faithful on Sunday attended the beatification of a Hungarian nun who helped save the lives of dozens of Jews during World War II. The beatification proclamation for Sara Salkahazi, issued by Pope Benedict XVI, was read out by Cardinal Peter Erdo, Hungary's Primate and Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest, during a Mass held outside St. Stephen's Basilica. "She was willing to assume risks for the persecuted ... in days of great fear," Erdo said. "Her martyrdom is still topical ... and presents the foundations of our humanity." Salkahazi was killed by the Arrow Cross — the Hungarian allies of the Nazis — on Dec. 27, 1944, for hiding Jews in a Budapest building used by her religious order, the Sisters of Social Service. Salkahazi was taken along with several other occupants of the home and shot, their bodies falling into the Danube River and never recovered. Details of her death were revealed only in the 1967 trial of some Arrow Cross henchmen. To continue reading this article, click   here. Berlin  Guenther Grass Admits Serving in Hitler's SS August 14, 2006 Associated Press   German novelist Guenter Grass has admitted in an interview that he served in the Waffen SS, the combat arm of Adolf Hitler's dreaded paramilitary forces, during World War II, a German newspaper reported. In the interview, published yesterday by the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Nobel Prize winner discusses a memoir about his youth and the war years, slated for publication next month. Asked why he was making the disclosure now, Grass was quoted as saying, "It weighed on me. My silence over all these years is one of the reasons I wrote this book. It had to come out, finally." Grass said that after the war he was ashamed of having been in the Waffen SS. "At the time, no," he said. "Later this feeling of shame burdened me." Grass, 78, is regarded as the literary spokesman for the generation of Germans that grew up in the Nazi era and survived the war. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999 for works including his 1959 novel "The Tin Drum," made into a Oscar-winning film in 1979. To continue reading this article, click   here. Boston Committed to Memory: Holocaust Survivor Says Story Has to Be Told August 6, 2006 Ralph Ranalli, Boston Globe Staff SHERBORN -- The mere fact that Helen Stern Kuban is alive raises the kind of questions that could take up an entire term of divinity school. Questions like: If there is a God, how could he allow the astonishing amount of suffering she witnessed during the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia and the Holocaust? But if there isn't, how could she have cheated certain death so many times without divine intervention?   SHERBORN -- The mere fact that Helen Stern Kuban is alive raises the kind of questions that could take up an entire term of divinity school. Questions like: If there is a God, how could he allow the astonishing amount of suffering she witnessed during the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia and the Holocaust? But if there isn't, how could she have cheated certain death so many times without divine intervention? Kuban, 87, chooses to believe. She does so despite the fact that calculating the odds of her making it from the gates of Auschwitz death camp in 1942 to her son Karl's family room in Sherborn last week would have the average mathematician reaching for Extra Strength Tylenol. "I firmly believe in God," she said during an interview to discuss the new memoir, "Born Twice," that she and her son have self-published. "But when I came back, sometimes I did say to myself, "Where is justice?" Even by the standards of Holocaust survivors, the story of how Kuban and her late husband, Matyi -- who played a key role in a little-known act of Jewish resistance, made it out of Auschwitz-Berkenau -- is remarkable. To continue reading this article, click   here. To learn more about Helen Stern Kuban and her story, please visit her website at www.borntwice.net. To view older Holocaust news stories, click  here.