elie wiesel tells hungary to ban holocaust denial

TOGETHER 1visit our website at www.americangathering.comJanuary 2010

JANUARY 2010 VOLUME 24 NUMBER 1

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BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungary should considerbanning Holocaust denial to improve its image abroadand contain lurking hostility towards its minorities,Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winnerElie Wiesel said recently.

Hungary is grappling with its worst economicdownturn in almost two decades and rising aversiontowards ethnic groups, mainly the country’s largeRoma population, lifted the far-right Jobbik party intothe European Parliament earlier this year.

Based on poll readings Jobbik is also likely towin enough votes in next year’s elections to get intoparliament.

“Wherever in the world I come and the wordHungary is mentioned, the next word is antisemitism,” said Wiesel, 81, who wasdeported along with hundreds of thousands of other Jews to Nazi death campsduring World War Two.“I urge you to do even more to denounce antisemiticelements and racist expressions in your political environment and in certainpublications,” Wiesel said.

“I believe that they bring shame to your nation and they bring fear to its Jewishcommunity and other minorities, such as the Roma,” Wiesel, who won the Nobel

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Elie Wiesel tells Hungary to ban Holocaust denialPeace Prize in 1986 told a meeting of Jewish and Hungarian leaders in parliament.

In July a court ruling dissolved the far-right Hungarian Guard, a radicalnationalist organization, which staged intimidating marches against Romanationwide, in black uniforms and insignia, which critics say are reminiscent ofthe Nazi era.

“I ask you, why don’t you follow the example of France and Germany anddeclare Holocaust denial not only indecent, but illegal? In those countries Holocaustdeniers go to jail,” Wiesel said.

Wiesel warned against what he called the perils of indifference and saidHungarians were responsible for how they handle memories of the past.

Hungary at present has no law protecting communities against imflammatoryremarks. Attempts to outlaw such language have failed to pass in parliament orwin the approval of President Laszlo Solyom.

Anti-Roma tensions have heightened in the country where 6-7 percent of the10 million population are Gypsies.

“Hungary does not meet European Union standards in this respect as there isno efficient protection for communities against hate speech,” Gyorgy Kollath,constitutional law expert told Reuters.

After Hungary’s occupation by Nazi Germany in 1944 the Hungariangovernment actively collaborated in the deportation of hundreds of thousands ofJews to death camps. (Reporting by Gergely Szakacs; editing by Ralph Boulton)

In a move that surprised Vatican watchers and Jewish and Israeli leaders,Pope Benedict XVI signed a decree on December 19, 2009 recognizing the “heroicvirtues” of Pope John Paul II and Pope Pius XII, a move that moves them bothon a faster track to sainthood. Benedict waived the customary five-year waitingperiod and allowed the investigation into John Paul’s life and virtues to beginimmediately. But it was venerating Pius XII that has infuriated Holocaust survivors,who were already angered by the disappearance, just a day earlier of the iconic“Work Makes Free” sign above the gates to Auschwitz.

In response, the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and theirDescendants issued the following statement: “One day after the Nazi death campAuschwitz is desecrated, Holocaust survivors are shaken by the profoundlyinsensitive and thoughtless Vatican announcement advancing the wartime PopePius XII on the path to sainthood.”

Elan Steinberg, vice president of the organization said that pairing theannouncement on Pius—who remained publicly silent during the Holocaust—with that of John Paul II, himself a victim of the Nazis, is a particularly disturbingand callous act. Steinberg added that it went against private assurances the Vaticanhad given the Jewish community. “No documents have been released altering theview of Pius as ‘the silent pope.’”

Steinberg noted that less than a year after Richard Williamson, a bishop fromthe Society of Pius X, publicly denied the Holocaust, “we are left bereft in ourfeelings and appeal to the Vatican to prevent the inevitable blow to interfaithrelations which will follow from this.”

The World Jewish Congress (WJC) also criticized the decision by PopeBenedict XVI to pave the way for the beatification of his controversial war-timepredecessor Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), who was pontiff of the Catholic Churchfrom 1939 to 1958. WJC President Ronald S. Lauder declared: “As long as thearchives of Pope Pius about the crucial period 1939 to 1945 remain closed, and

PIUS XII FASTRACKED TO SAINTHOOD until a consensus on his actions—orinaction—concerning the persecution ofmillions of Jews in the Holocaust isestablished, a beatification is inopportuneand premature. While it is entirely a matterfor the Catholic Church to decide on whomreligious honors are bestowed, there arestrong concerns about Pope Pius XII’spolitical role during World War II whichshould not be ignored.”

Most Jewish leaders, including YadVashem’s Avner Shalev, have repeatedlyasked for the beatification process to bestopped until the Vatican’s secret archives, containing thousands of documents,is opened for review. But the Vatican says the 16 million files relating to PiusXII’s 19-year reign will not be ready for public viewing until 2014 at the earliest.

The issue has been a thorn in the side of relations between Israel and theVatican for years. Israeli Social Affairs Minister Isaac Herzog once called sainthoodfor Pius XII unacceptable, and President Shimon Peres believes that Pius XII didnot try hard enough to save Jews.

When Benedict XVI signed the papers, he placed Pius XII just two stepsaway from full canonization. In 2007, Benedict asked for time for reflection inorder calm down interfaith tensions. That’s why his latest move is a surprise.Once a member of the Hitler Youth, the current pope maintains that Pius XIIsaved many Jews by hiding them in religious institutions, and that he kept silent toavoid aggravating their situation.

Abraham Foxman, a Holocaust survivor and the director of the US-basedAnti-Defamation League, said “We are saddened and disappointed that the pontiffwould feel compelled to fast-track Pope Pius at a point where the issue of the

TOGETHER 2 visit our website at www.americangathering.com January 2010

Pope Pius XII Fastracked to Sainthood...........................................................1Elie Wiesel Tells Hungary to Ban Holocaust Denial........................................1“Don’t Let the Light Go Out” by Menachem Rosensaft..................................2Remembering the Past..................................................................................3Peres Honors Survivors on Chanukah............................................................3Ghetto Pension Payments Reviewed.................................... .........................4Arbeit Macht Frei Sign Recovered.................................................................4The Financial Sustainability of Holocaust Museums by Gail Beckerman.........5Never Forget: Holding Collaborators Accountable..........................................6Holocaust Denier Fined by German Court by Jamie Romm............................6Gretel Bergmann: A Leap into History...........................................................730 years later, Holocaust Center Rededicated at Teaneck High.......................7Chanukah Miracles All Around by Yuval Azoulay..........................................8New View of the State Department’s Shameful Past by Gregory J. Wallance.....8Kristallnacht Commemorated at UN..............................................................9Holocaust Survivor Heirs Sue for Van Gogh Drawing by Dan McCue............9By Working Together We Can Accomplish Miracles by Gloria Jacaruso.....10Judges slam survivor benefit law as unclear by Ofra Edelman......................1090-Year-Old Charged in Nazi Massacre by David Rising .............................11Krakow Ghetto by Rita B.Ross...................................................................11Singer Exhibit Honors Artists.......................................................................12Killing Kasztner: A Posthumous Thank You................................................12Through the Generations by Joyce Ann.......................................................13They Didn’t Know What Hit Them by Gerhson Ron..................................14Bergen-Belsen survivors reunited after 64 years by David A. Schwartz........14US Appeals Court Nixes Vatican Bank Holocaust Suit by Nicole Winfield....15Announcements..........................................................................................16In Memoriam...................................................................... ........................17A Soup Surprise by Rose Dorfman............................................................20It’s a Shoo-id by Sheldon P. Hersh............................................................22Searches (contributing editor Serena Woolrich).............................................23

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NOTICE TO HOLOCAUST SURVIVORSNEEDING ASSISTANCE

Financial assistance is available for needy Holocaust survivors. Ifyou have an urgent situation regarding housing, health care, food or otheremergency, you may be eligible for a one-time grant. These grants arefunded 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 AssistanceP.O. Box 765Murray Hill StationNew York, NY 10156

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Vice Presidents

EVA FOGELMANROSITTA E. KENIGSBERGROMANA STROCHLITZ PRIMUSMENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFTSTEFANIE SELTZERELAN STEINBERGJEFFREY WIESENFELDSecretary

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MEL MERMELSTEINJEAN BLOCH ROSENSAFTMARK SARNA

by MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT

“Don’t let the light go out, it’s lasted for so manyyears” sang Peter, Paul and Mary in “Light OneCandle,” my favorite Chanukah song.

In late December 1948, my parents said a veryspecial shehecheyanu prayer as they lit the Chanukahcandles in the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany.

Barely five years after their entire families had beenmurdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, they could

not truly thank God for granting them life or for sustaining them as part of thesmall surviving remnant of European Jewry that had emerged from the Holocaust. Too many faces were missing—their parents, their siblings, my mother’s firsthusband and her five-and-a-half year old son, my father¹s first wife and herdaughter.

But for the first time, they were celebrating the festival of lights with theirson—I was then almost eight months old—and their focus must have been on thismoment of rebirth, of renewal. Their shehecheyanu, I suspect, was in large partfor me seeing the burning Chanukah candles for the first time, with no memoriesof the past, of death and destruction, of other flames.

Fast forward 61 years. On the first night of Chanukah, 2009, a display for a fragile Torah scroll

which was brought from Hamburg, Germany, to the United States in 1939 byRabbi Alfred Veis is dedicated at Congregation Ohabai Sholom in Nashville,Tennessee.

Two days later, my wife Jeanie and I attend a memorial service for RabbiAlfred Gottschalk, the long-time President and Chancellor of the ReformMovement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion who fled NaziGermany as a nine-year-old boy and who died three months ago. On the sixthnight of Chanukah, I am in the Grand Foyer of the White House together withseveral hundred other American Jews as the children of Commander Scott Moran,a U.S. Navy officer presently deployed in Iraq, light the candles on a 19th-centurysilver Chanukah menorah on loan from the Jewish Museum in Prague.

Standing beside them are President Barack Obama, First Lady MichelleObama, and Vice President Joe Biden. Chanukah, President Obama tells us, “wasa triumph of the few over the many; of right over might; of the light of freedomover the darkness of despair.”

He recalls how over the centuries “Jews have lit the Chanukah candles assymbols of resilience in times of peace, and in times of persecution—inconcentration camps and ghettos; war zones and unfamiliar lands. Their lightinspires us to hope beyond hope; to believe that miracles are possible even in thedarkest of hours.”

During the few moments I am able to speak with President Obama afterwards,he tells me of his deep admiration and affection for Nobel Peace Prize laureateElie Wiesel who had accompanied him to Buchenwald in June 2009.

“Light one candle for the strength that we need to never become our ownfoe,” goes another verse from “Light One Candle.” Following the ceremony, agroup of us gather in one of the adjoining rooms, surrounded by Christmas wreaths,for the evening Ma’ariv service.

Rabbi Avraham Shemtov, the head of the international umbrella organizationof the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim, prays alongside Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the Presidentof the Union for Reform Judaism. Elsewhere, members of the liberal, peace-oriented J Street advocacy group are engaged in intense conversations with leadersof AIPAC, the more conservative pro-Israel lobby.

In the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons camp, the Jewish survivors of theHolocaust, religious and secular, Yiddishists and Hebraists, lived and struggledtogether, as did Zionists covering the broad political spectrum from left to rightwho coexisted easily with non-Zionists.

They understood that they had suffered a shared fate and faced a commonfuture. In the White House during the Chanukah celebration, Jewish leaders ofall stripes and denominations seemed to let go of their differences, if only for afew hours, and revel in the freedom and dignity of America.

“Light one candle to find us together with peace as the song in our hearts.”On the flight back to New York, I sit beside a stranger and we begin talking.

He is David Vise, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Washington Post reporter. His grandfather was Rabbi Alfred Veis of Nashville, Tennessee. In 1939, David’sfather came to the United States from Germany on the same boat as AlfredGottschalk, and the two became good friends.

“Don’t let the light go out; let it shine through our love and our tears.”

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and vice president of the

American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.

“Don’t let the light go out”TOGETHER

January 2010 Volume 24 Number 1

c•o•n•t•e•n•t•s

Publication Committee

SAM E. BLOCH, ChairmanHirsh Altusky, l“z

Roman KentMax K. LiebmannVladka MeedDr. Romana Strochlitz PrimusMenachem Z. Rosensaft

Editor

JEANETTE FRIEDMANEditor Emeritus

ALFRED LIPSON, l“z

Counsel

ABRAHAM KRIEGER


James B. & Esthy AdlerDr. Nathan & Janet Appel

Atran FoundationLola Blady

Sam & Lilly BlochSimon and Josephine Braitman Foundation

Joel Geiderman, M.D.Marion Gendell

William P. Goldman and Brothers FoundationGruss Foundation

Paula & Alain J. HanoverCharles Hesdorffer

Hitter Family FoundationFrancis Irwin

Eric & Ruth KahnSima Katz

Miriam & Marvin KatzRoman Kent Philanthropic Fund

Jakob KryszekMax K. Liebmann

Lucius N. Littauer FoundationWilliam J. Lowenberg

Dewilde MargotJoan & Martin Messinger

Jack and Goldie Wolfe Miller FundAdam Novak

Oster Family FoundationDagmar Phillips

Mr. & Mrs. Jonathan Polonsky in honor ofLeo & Lola Wolsky

Robert & Michelle ReinerMenachem & Jean Rosensaft

Sheerit Hapletah of Metropolitan ChicagoJerald WankCary Weiss

Eli Zborowski

Child Survivors Meet:Remembering the Past

More than 400 survivors and their descendantscame to Newton, Massachusetts in October for the2009 World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors ofthe Holocaust, 21st Annual International Conference.Organized by the Greater Boston Child SurvivorGroup and the Boston Generations After, a localSecond Generation organization, its participantsincluded two members of the American GatheringCouncil, Isaac Kot and Lillian Fox, who also servedon the 24-member team led by Marianne Kronenbergand Eva Paddok, leaders of the organization.

As Kronenberg said, “We gathered to celebratethe life of our survivor community and honor the livesof loved ones whom we so tragically lost. We alsocelebrated the next generations of Jewish womenand men, girls and boys, who will carry the memoryof the Holocaust into the future.”

The main focus of Kronenberg’s remarks wasHolocaust denial, a subject that was addressed bykeynote speaker Prof. Deborah Lipstadt (DorotAssociate Professor of Modern Jewish and HolocaustStudies at Emory University) and by MenachemRosensaft, Vice President of the American Gathering.

American Gathering officers, including ChairmanRoman R. Kent, Vice President Stephanie Seltzer(president of the World Federation of Jewish ChildSurvivors of the Holocaust), Vice President Dr. EvaFogelman (author of Conscience and Courage:

Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust), andcouncil members Isaac Kot (treasurer of theconference and of Generations After in Boston) andLillian Fox (LICSW, founder of Second GenerationConnections and Resources, board memberand events chair of Generations After in Boston) ledworkshops that addressed the issues of the day—from how to live with joy in the shadow of the past,to restitution issues and the Conference on JewishMaterial Claims against Germany.

Fogelman presented her pioneering film, Breakingthe Silence, as well as a Second Generationworkshop with Rosensaft on “What is the Meaningof Our Voices.” Jeanette Friedman, founder ofSecond Generation North Jersey (1979), and authorwith David Gold of Why Should I Care? Lessonsfrom the Holocaust, presented a workshop onpublishing one’s memoirs. Stephanie Seltzer discussedwriting ethical wills, and Kot presented “Telling ourParents’ and Grandparents’ History.”

As Kronenberg noted, “It is up to the nextgenerations to confront the lies about the Holocaust.They are the ones that will have to remember the storiesof their parents and grandparents, the stories ofinhumanity and hate...As the generations change, weplace our legacy into their hands. It is their heritage, andI am convinced they will give their all to protect it.”

Peres honors survivors onChanukahBy GREER FAY CASHMAN

President Shimon Peres acknowledged thecontribution made by Holocaust survivors to theestablishment, security and continued existence ofthe state at a Chanukah candle-lighting ceremony at

Beit Hanassi.Speaking to

some 250 survivors,most of them intheir 80s, Peres toldthem that he stoodbefore them with agreat deal of humilityand respect. Hewas aware thateach of themcarried a heavyburden of traumaand loss of family,that each of themwas haunted atnight by theshadows of the

past, and yet each morning they swept away thenightmares, and with hope and courage faced a newday.

Whoever emerged from the horrors of theatrocities of the Holocaust, who experienced thatSatanic evil and did not abandon his trust in humanity,symbolizes the purity of spirit and the miracle wroughtby hope, said Peres.

“As far as I’m concerned, you’re nothing lessthan heroes. Holocaust survivors made a verysignificant contribution to the victories of the Stateof Israel against her enemies. In the War ofIndependence, only three years after the Holocaust,the yishuv stood with its back to the wall, and thefate of the Jewish state hung in the balance.” Thesurvivors made the difference, he emphasized.

During the years of World War II andimmediately afterward, 70,000 European Jews, mostof them young, served as soldiers in the War ofIndependence, said Peres.

In the midst of the War of Independence, morethan 25,000 volunteers came from the refugee campsof Europe and together with the recruits fromoverseas went straight from the boats to the frontlinesof the battlefield. This reinforcement enabled the IDFto triumph in such a fateful conflict.

Among those who came to fight, recalled Peres,were soldiers who were the sole survivors of theirfamilies. Some fell in battle, anonymous heroes, withno one left to mourn them.

“Our history is full of sadness,” said Peres, “butthe festival of Chanukah is a festival of heroism andlight. Just as Chanukah also symbolizes the victoryof the few against the many, so Israel’s independenceis both a victory and a miracle. Here too, it was thefew against the many—and the few did great things.”

“The light of the candles that we lit here tonight isthe light of life and hope, of prayer and triumph in whichlight conquered the darkness of evil.”

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cont’d from p. 1

Pius XII Fastracked

record, the history and the coming to a judgment, isstill wide open.”

“We do not forget the deportations of Jews fromItaly and in particular the train that deported 1021people on October 16, 1943, which left Rome’sTiburtina station for Auschwitz to the silence of PiusXII,’’ said one statement.

“While it is obviously up to the Vatican todetermine who its saints are, the church’s repeatedinsistence that it seeks mutually respectful ties withthe Jewish community ought to mean taking oursensitivities into account on this most crucial historicalera,” said David Harris, executive director of theAmerican Jewish Committee.

“I can’t understand the rush, especially whilethere are still survivors who are alive who feel theissue very, very deeply and are being told the filesneed time to be processed. What’s the imperative?”Mr Foxman said.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry concurred, sayingPius’ actions are worthy of a “thorough historicalexamination. History will be the judge of thismatter.”

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Previously rejected applications from Holocaustsurvivors for German “Ghetto Pension” payments are

automatically being re-evaluated,following three court decisions thissummer that greatly liberalized the criteriafor these German Social SecurityPayments.

The Claims Conference initiated aMonitoring Group together with theGerman Ministry of Labor and Social

Affairs. The Monitoring Group is ensuring thesuccessful reopening, under liberalized guidelines, ofnearly 70,000 social security pension claims rejectedsince 2002. The Monitoring Group examined keypoints of processing, criteria and administration. Thereare major open issues such as the date of backpayment of newly approved cases and the speed ofprocessing.

The Claims Conference is not involved in anyway in the processing or administration of theseclaims. Information about previously submittedapplications is available from German RegionalPension Institutions, which are organized based onthe current country of residence of the applicant.

Germany’s social insurance legislation of 2002(ZRBG, or “Ghetto Pension”) admits payments ofold age pensions under certain conditions to survivorsof Nazi occupied or incorporated ghettos (includingTransnistria) who performed “voluntary andremunerated work.” However, inconsistent and overlystrict interpretation of eligibility criteria by localGerman authorities resulted in widespread denial ofclaims. The Claims Conference has been pressingfor changes in the law’s implementation and eventuallyspearheaded an international campaign for theliberalization of the ZRBG conducted by governments,grassroots organizations of survivors and communityadvocacy groups.

Through the Monitoring Group, the ClaimsConference has insisted on the following conditionsthat the Federal Social Court and the National PensionBoard are using to reexamine denied claims:

All rejected claims are being reopenedautomatically, and denied claimants do not need todo anything to initiate the review of their claim. SocialSecurity offices are examining claims in order ofdate of birth, with the oldest claimants beingprocessed first.

Guidelines related to remuneration and “voluntarywork” are to be considered in the broadest possibleterms. The kind of remuneration received for thework performed (money, food, clothes, etc.) is nolonger a decisive factor, and remuneration need nothave been provided directly to the claimant. The courtdecisions in June also stated that ghettos inTransnistria should be covered under the GhettoPension law.

Additionally, individuals who are already receivinga Ghetto Pension may, under certain circumstances,be eligible for a re-assessment based on their ageand circumstances during the years 1945-1949.These re-assessments must be requested by thepensioner (applied for) in writing.

It should be noted that the ZRBG/Ghetto Pensionand the one-time “Ghetto Fund” payment of Euro2000 (established in 2007 to recognize workperformed in a ghetto) are separate programs. Theone-time payment does not preclude filing for, andaward of, a ZRBG pension. However, receipt of aZRBG pension precludes payment of the Euro 2000compensation.

More information on the criteria for GhettoPension and several current changes is availableon the Claims Conference website atwww.claimscon.org/ghettopension.

Ghetto Pension Payments Reviewed American Gathering laudsCzech action againstHolocaust memorialvandalsBy JPOST.COM STAFFThe American Gathering of Jewish HolocaustSurvivors and Their Descendants commended theCzech government recently for the stiff penaltieshanded out for vandalizing the Holocaust Memorialat Terezin.

Miroslave Dano, Libor Mirga and Petr Hricko wereconvicted for causing more than $100,000 worth ofdamage when they stole 824 bronze plaques from thesite in 2008 and sold them to a scrap dealer. Mirga andHricko, who fled to London, were sentenced in absentiato 4 1/2 and 3 1/2 years in jail respectively, while Dano,who was in police custody, was sentenced to four years.

“Vandalism against places of Holocaustmartyrdom have become all-too-frequent in Europeand are especially painful to those who sufferedthrough the horrors of that time,” said AmericanGathering President Sam E. Bloch. “It is reassuringthat authorities in Eastern and Central Europerecognize the critical importance of punishing thosewho would vandalize the sites where thousands uponthousands were murdered, and desecrate the memoryof the victims of the Holocaust. We are gratified thatneo-Nazis, skinheads and other thugs now know thattheir despicable actions have consequences.”

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Arbeit Macht Frei signrecovered

After a $40,000 reward was posted and 100 tipsreceived, Polish police arrested five men ranging inage from 20 to 39 for stealing the 16 foot-long ArbeitMacht Frei sign that hung over the gates ofAuschwitz. The sign, an icon of the Holocaust, readsin German, “Work Will Make You Free.”

When the theft was originally reported, Israeliand Jewish groups feared that the act was politicallymotivated. “The theft of thesymbol of Auschwitz was notmerely an act of vandalism, itwas a crime against mankind andmemory,” the American Gathering of HolocaustSurvivors and their Descendantssaid in a statement.

“The theft of such a symbolicobject is an attack on thememory of the Holocaust, andan escalation from those elements that would like toreturn us to darker days,” said Yad Vashem ChairmanAvner Shalev. “I call on all enlightened forces in theworld who fight against antisemitism, racism,xenophobia and the hatred of the other, to join togetherto combat these trends.”

In Jerusalem, the International AuschwitzCommittee said the theft “deeply unsettles thesurvivors. The sign has to be found,” said Noach Flug,an Auschwitz survivor and president of the committee.“The slogan and the camp itself will tell what happenedeven when we won’t be able to tell anymore.”

Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said he

had trouble imagining who would steal the sign.“If they are pranksters, they’d have to be sick

pranksters, or someone with a political agenda. Butwhoever has done it has desecrated world memory,”Schudrich said.

The sign, unscrewed from one side of its supports,broken off the other and then cut into three pieces,was stolen in the hours after midnight a week beforeChristmas. It was then carried out through a hole in aconcrete wall surrounding the camp. The gap wasleft to preserve a poplar tree that dates back to the

time of the war. Tracks in the snowshowed that the sign had beendragged to a waiting vehicle. Anexact replica of the sign, producedwhen the original receivedrestoration work years ago, wasquickly hung in its place.

Polish police indicated the menarrested for the crime were notneo-Nazis but common thieveswith previous police records.

Andrzej Rokita, district police chief in Krakow, theclosest city to Auschwitz said, “We’ll be able to saylater whether the crime was ordered or they actedon their own initiative.”

Polish inmates made the original sign in thecamp’s iron workshop after the camp wasopened. This was the first major act of vandalism atthe site, which has suffered graffiti including spray-painted swastikas. Other Holocaust sites inEurope have also suffered neo-Nazi vandalism,including memorials in Germany, Ukraine, Hungary,Romania and France.


by Gal Beckerman

The numbers speak for themselves: There arenow 16 Holocaust museums in the United States, fromAlbuquerque, N.M., to Houston, to Richmond, Va.And these are just the biggest of nearly 150 Holocaustcenters all over the country.

The proliferation of museums detailing the storyof what happened to European Jewry during WorldWar II has been largely a phenomenon of the 1990s,part of the general increase in Holocaust awarenessin the culture at large. But it has by no means slowed:The most recent museum, in Skokie, Ill., opened lastspring, while construction continues on a second LosAngeles museum, to open in the summer of 2010.

With a substantial, federally-backed nationalmuseum in Washington, critics are increasinglywondering about the need for so many local museums.Even more important, the question of whether theseinstitutions will be able to financially sustainthemselves into the future – given the heavy costs ofmaintaining collections, and the dying off of theHolocaust survivors who founded them – is of greatconcern to museum directors.

“We just had a board meeting in December inNew York City, and weall talked about thedwindling of funds,”said Susan Myers,executive director ofthe Holocaust MuseumHouston and vicepresident of theAssociation ofH o l o c a u s tO r g a n i z a t i o n s ,referring to her fellowmuseum directors.“We’re all competing for the same money. It’s aneveryday conversation we’re having.”

Those who defend the existence of the regionalmuseums do so on the grounds that they servepopulations that cannot visit the nation’s capital.

William Shulman is president of the association,which was founded in 1985 with 25 members andnow has 282 affiliated Holocaust centers worldwide,the majority of which are in the United States. Hedenied that there are any serious, long-term financialconcerns for these institutions, and emphasizedinstead that the museums are playing a critical role inHolocaust and genocide education.

“The rationale for having them is because mostpeople don’t get to Washington,” Shulman said.

Even Sara Bloomfield, director of the UnitedStates Holocaust Memorial Museum – the institutionthat, by most accounts, would have to bear the burdenin the future of caring for the collections of anymuseums that can no longer support themselves –agrees that these local museums are important.

“The national museum is becoming so nationaland global in our work that we now are depending onthese smaller, local organizations to be on the groundeveryday in their communities,” Bloomfield said,“because we can’t be in all 50 states at once.”

The concerns about these institutions fall into twobroad categories. First is the worry that heavyinvestment in Holocaust museums and monuments istaking away funds from other more critical needs inthe community.

“There is a very profound question of how muchof our limited resources we are going to put into thatas opposed to other things,” said Jonathan Tobin,

The Financial Sustainability of Holocaust Museumsexecutive editor of Commentary magazine. “This isa time when Jewish education is going begging, whenJewish schools are under siege financially, as wellas having the need to maintain basic social servicesfor the elderly and the poor. These things have tobe taken into consideration. It begs the question ofhow many of these institutions do we need in thiscountry.”

But the even greater worry about these localinstitutions – shared by those who run them – ishow to keep them financially viable.

Unlike the national museum in Washington,which, according to Bloomfield, is almost halfwaytoward its goal of raising a$400 million endowment, themajority of the regionalmuseums were started bysurvivors, with the goal ofkeeping alive the memory ofthe Holocaust in theircommunities. The generationthat strongly supported themis beginning to die out. Onlythe larger of these museums

have endowments at all, andthen relatively small ones.

In Richmond, theVirginia Holocaust Museumwas started in 1997 by JayIpson, who was born inLithuania and was still ayoung boy when he arrivedin the United States as asurvivor. The museum washoused first in five smallrooms at a local synagogue,

and mostly told the storyof Ipson’s family. In2000, the State ofVirginia donated adilapidated 120,000square-foot tobaccowarehouse as a newsite. Ipson also managedto get the backing ofMarcus Weinstein, a realestate mogul and localJewish philanthropist.

According to Ipson, who calls Weinstein his“angel,” the philanthropist has underwritten thetransformation of the massive warehouse into asprawling museum that opened in 2003. It has noendowment, and Ipson’s hope is that Weinstein’spromise of supporting the museum in perpetuityholds true.

“I’ve been told – I haven’t seen the paperwork– that he left in his will that we should continue toget those funds at a minimum,” Ipson said.

Weinstein said he would support the museumas long as there’s funding. “I can’t say what willhappen in a hundred years,” he said. As for his will,he declined to comment.

Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar whois the director of the Sigi Ziering Institute atAmerican Jewish University, is not opposed to theproliferation of these local Holocaust initiatives andhas even acted as a consultant for many of them.

But he, too, has concerns about the future. “Thegeneration that would give huge money to createthat is moving on,” Berenbaum said. “The survivor

who was 18 when he survived is now 82. Thesurvivor who was 30 is now 94. That generation isunfortunately going the way of all flesh, andtherefore the question for every institution is, howdo you create for the future. Endowments inparticular used to look like the safest bet, but thesepast years have shown us that they are not such asecure choice anymore, which is why the presidentsof museum boards are pulling their hair out of theirheads.”

For many Holocaust museum directors acrossthe country, the solution has been to look outsidethe Jewish community for support.

Myers said that 50% of her donors in Houstonare non-Jews. She has alsoreached out to such corporatesponsors as AT&T andContinental Airlines. The shiftin focus away from a Jewishaudience and donor base hasalso affected the content of themuseum, which is evidenced,Myers pointed out, in its twocurrent exhibits: one about JohnPaul II’s role in Catholic-Jewishreconciliation, and the other

about Muslims who saved Jews during theHolocaust.

And still, the building of new museums continues.The latest is in Los Angeles. In a city that alreadyhas a Holocaust institution in the Museum ofTolerance, a new 30,000 square-foot building is beingconstructed for an older institution, the Los AngelesMuseum of the Holocaust, now housed on the groundfloor of the ORT building, on Wilshire Boulevard.

Mark Rothman, executive director, wasunapologetic about the addition of yet anothermuseum to the Holocaust landscape. The Museum

of Tolerance, he said,was more generallyfocused on human rights– “It’s in the name,” hesaid – while his museummore narrowly tells thestory of the Jewishexperience of World WarII.

Rothman seeshypocrisy in those who

criticize the building of Holocaust museums whileusing the Holocaust to raise funds for othercommunity needs, including for the local federation.“As soon as they can stop using the Holocaust insome way to raise money, I think that at that pointit’s valid to say maybe it’s not reasonable to spendcommunity resources on museums,” he said.

With a projected endowment of $2 million to $3million – not yet raised – he, too, sees problems thathis institution might face in the future. But, he added,they are no different from the challenges that willconfront all institutions of Jewish life.

“In 15 years, I think the questions being raisedabout Holocaust institutions are also going to needto be answered by every Jewish federation in thecountry,” Rothman said. “In general, your profileremains older people who are not going to be withus at some very near point in the future. That’s theprofile of our donors, and that’s the profile of thedonors for every Jewish organization in LosAngeles.”

This article originally appeared in The Jewish Daily

Forward; reprinted with permission.


WASHINGTON, D.C. – Bipartisan legislation re-introduced in the House by Reps. Carolyn Maloney(D-NY), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) would hold accountable those railroadcompanies who worked with the Nazis during WorldWar II by making them subject to legal action in U.S.courts. More than 75,000 Jews were transportedfrom France to concentration camps by Frenchrailroad companies.

“Almost 70 years after enabling the largest massmurder of the 20th Century, railroads that transportedtens of thousands to their deaths should finally beheld accountable,” Maloney said. “Nothing will evermake up for the unthinkable atrocities undertaken byNazi Germany and its sympathizers during World WarII, but every bit of justice is important. This bill allowssome measure of closure for those who have sufferedfor far too long.”

“Companies that benefited from the deportationof persons to concentration camps during theHolocaust must be held accountable for theirdespicable actions. This bill will help ensure thatHolocaust survivors and heirs of victims are able toseek legal redress against those who sought to gainfrom the blood of innocent people,” said Ros-Lehtinen.

“The atrocities of the Holocaust would have been

impossible if not for the Nazis’ many willingaccomplices,” said Nadler. “Among those manyaccomplices, the French national railway knowinglytransported tens of thousands of Jews and others toconcentration camps during World War II, and, forthis, it has yet to be held accountable. This legislationwould ensure that survivors of the Holocaust canconfront the railway and hold it accountable for itsterrible history.”

The bill provides plaintiffs the right to seekdamages against the French National Railway(Société Nationale Des Chemins De Fer Francais -SNCF) in Federal Court for its transportation ofFrench and other Jews to Auschwitz as well as itssupply of personnel to facilitate the transportation andthe assessed charges per person. The FrenchGovernment claims immunity from legal action dueto the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, yet the FSIAwas passed 30 years after the action causing thedamages for which the plaintiffs seek. The bill allowsthe plaintiffs to sue regardless of the strictures of theFSIA.

For complete bill text, visit http://maloney.house.gov/documents/foreign/israel/100709SNCF 111th Congress.pdf

Never Forget: Holding Collaborators Accountable

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The Survivors Registry maintains the single most comprehensive listingof Holocaust survivors in the world. The Registry has existed for over twodecades and currently contains over 195,000 names of survivors and theirspouses and descendants (including children, their spouses, andgrandchildren).

Visitors to the Registry’s public area at the Holocaust Museum inWashington, D.C. can access basic information about survivors and theirfamily members via touch-screen computers. This information is based onregistration forms submitted by survivors and their relatives. The Registryis an invaluable resource for survivors still searching for family and friends,as well as for historians and genealogists.

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Survivors RegistryUNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

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HOLOCAUST DENIER FINED BY

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By JAMIE ROMM, JPOST.COM

While Jewish groups are upset over Pope BenedictXVI’s efforts to reach out to a breakaway Catholicgroup that includes a Holocaust-denier, Rabbi DavidRosen of the American Jewish Committee recentlyannounced he would be “very surprised” if the groupwere readmitted to the Catholic Church.

The Vatican held talks recently with a delegationfrom the Society of St. Pius X, that it said were heldin a “cordial, respectful and constructive climate” andwould continue frequently over the coming months.

One of the main sticking points to allowing thesociety back in to the church stems from formerexcommunicated British Bishop Richard Williamson’scomments regarding the Holocaust.

Williamson was shown on Swedish state televisionin January saying historical evidence “is hugely againstsix million Jews having been deliberately gassed”during World War II. Williamson was recently fined•120,000 by a German court for the remarks. Hereceived a penal order to pay the fine for incitingracial hatred.

Rosen, director of the AJC’s Department forInterreligious Affairs, said that Williamson’sstatements on the Holocaust lead him to believe thatthe society will not be let back into thechurch.

“Now they are truly under the magnifying glass,”Rosen said. “In the past they may have been able toslip under the ‘door,’ but after his [Williamson’s]comments, it won’t be so easy to slip in.”

The society, founded in 1969 by the lateultraconservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, splitfrom Rome over the modernizing reforms of theSecond Vatican Council, particularly its outreach toJews and to non-Catholic Christians. Vatican II alsoallowed for the celebration of mass in the vernacular,rather than in Latin.

In 1988, the Vatican excommunicated Lefebvreand four of his bishops, including Williamson, afterLefebvre consecrated them without papal consent.

In 2007, Benedict relaxed restrictions oncelebrating the old Latin Mass, which thetraditionalists had demanded. In January, he acceptedanother one of their demands by approving a decreelifting the bishops’ excommunication.

The American Gathering of Jewish HolocaustSurvivors and Their Descendants issued a statementcalling on Benedict to “exhibit great caution in theVatican discussions with Society of Saint Pius X—soas not to touch on the dignity of the Jewish people orto trivialize the memory of the victims of the Shoah.

“The crisis in Jewish-Catholic relations sparkedby the Vatican’s earlier overtures to the Holocaustdenier Richard Williamson must not be repeated,”the statement said. “But the problematic nature ofSociety of Saint Pius X goes beyond BishopWilliamson and centers on the tenuous state ofCatholic-Jewish relations before Vatican II.”

For Jews and the vast majority of Catholics, therecan be no compromise on the society’s acceptance,the group concluded.

The Vatican has set out conditions for Williamsonto be fully brought back in, saying he must “absolutelyand unequivocally” distance himself from hisHolocaust remarks if he ever wants to again be aprelate in the church.

Williamson has apologized for embarrassing thepope, but hasn’t publicly repudiated his views.

Demjanjuk goes on trial in GermanyJohn Demjanjuk, 88, who worked and lived in Cleveland, Ohio for 50 years, and who was tried in Israel as

a Nazi war criminal, is now on trial in Munich for the murder of 27,900 Jews. He will probably be the last Naziwar criminal, and the lowest ranking, brought to trial. Claiming to be a Red Army soldier captured by the Nazisand turned, he became a volunteer in the SS, and is accused of shepherding the Jews into the gas chambersof Sobibor. He denies the charges, and is facing a sentence of 15 years in prison.

In 1986, the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, headed by a son of survivors, EliRosenbaum, deported Demjanjuk to Israel. He was accused of being a notorious guard known as Ivan theTerrible at the Treblinka death camp. Sentenced to death 1988 and after several years in prison the IsraeliSupreme Court overturned Demjanjuk’s convictionafter a judge decided that there was reasonable doubt.Demjanjuk returned to the US, and then, in 2001, was accused the murders in Sobibor. Germany agreed to puthim on trial in April 2009.

His lawyer claims that since Demjanjuk is a Ukrainian, he is receiving harsher treatment than a German-born Nazi would have gotten. “How can you say that those who gave the orders were innocent ...and the onewho received the orders is guilty?” Mr. Busch asked the court. “There is a moral and legal double standardbeing applied today.”

He also put the defendant “on the same level” as Holocaust victims, because his client was a “forcedlaborer.” This assertion was greeted with anger by Holocaust survivors.

On November 30, Demjanjuk was brought into court on a stretcher, and is said to be terminally ill. Doctorshave limited the trial to two 90-minute sessions a day.

Demjanjuk claims he is a victim of mistaken identity. He said that after his capture he was forced to fightagainst the Soviets as they approached Berlin in World War II’s final months, but one eyewitness, AlexNagorny, who himself may be guilty of war crimes in Treblinka, will testify on behalf of the state.


Gretel Bergmann, also known as MargaretBergmann-Lambert (born 12 April 1914) is a GermanJewish athlete who competed as a high jumper duringthe 1930s.

Born in Laupheim, Germany, to Jewish parents,she began her career in athletics in Laupheim. In1930 she joined Ulmer FV1894, achieving a Germanrecord in high jumping in1931 when, during the SouthGerman Championships, shecrossed 1.51 metres.

After the Nazis’accession to power on 30January 1933, she wasexpelled from the club forbeing Jewish. That April, herparents sent her to theUnited Kingdom, where in 1934 she took part in theBritish Championships and won the high jump bycrossing 1.55 metres.

The German government wanted her to returnto Germany in order to help portray the nation as aliberal-minded, tolerant country. Members of herfamily, who had stayed behind, were threatened withreprisals if she did not return. She complied andreturned to Germany, where she was allowed toprepare for the 1936 Olympic Games. She won theWürttembergian Championships in the high jumpin 1935. On 30 June, 1936, one month prior to theopening of the Olympic Games, she tied the

German record by crossing 1.60 metres. However,two weeks before the opening of the Olympics,she received a letter from the German sportauthorities that she would be withdrawn from thenational team because her performance was notsufficient to compete on an international level.

Instead, she wasreplaced by highjumper (androommate) DoraRatjen, who waslater revealed tobe a man.

In 1937, Berg-mann emigrated tothe U.S., eventuallysettling in New York, where shemade a living doing casual work.

That year, she married Bruno Lambert, a doctor,whom she aided in his leaving of Germany throughfinancial support, calling herself from then onMargaret Bergmann-Lambert.

Also that year, she managed to win the U.S.women’s high jump and shotput championships, andin 1938 she repeated the feat by again winning thehigh jump.

With the beginning of World War II inSeptember 1939, her career in sports ended.

She received United States citizenship in 1942.In August 1995, a sport complex in Berlin-

Wilmersdorf was named after her on the instigation

Gretel Bergmann: A Leap into History

Reprinted from Wikipedia

30 years later, Holocaust Center rededicated at Teaneck High by JEANETTE FRIEDMAN, Jewish Standard

The 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht was a “back toschool” night of sorts. Teaneck, NJ residents, highschool faculty members, students, and alumni gatheredat Teaneck High School for the rededication of NewJersey’s first Holocaust Center, established in 1975by history teacher and Holocaust education pioneerEd Reynolds. Reynolds, who marveled at the factthat he hadn’t walked “these halls” for 17 years, wasthe keynote speaker. Addressing some 60 people, hedescribed the long educational journey that began witha telephone call, in 1975, from the Anti-DefamationLeague in New York. Reynolds was asked if he andteachers Richard Flaim, Ken Turburtini, and HarryFurman in Vineland would be interested in designinga curriculum for a course or unit to teach theHolocaust in New Jersey public schools.

At that time, history textbooks, if they coveredthe Holocaust at all (and most did not), limitedcoverage to approximately one paragraph. But therewas a need to address the subject in the classroom,at a time when antisemitism and Holocaust denialwere beginning to seep through the cracks ofAmerica’s civilized veneer.

Some parts of the journey weren’t pretty. Whenthey trained other teachers, Reynolds said, theeducators were accused by many of their colleaguesof bringing a Jewish subject, written by Jews for Jews,into the public schools. At one National EducationAssociation meeting, hearing this accusation for theumpteenth time, Reynolds told the teachers that aCatholic, a Mormon, a Presbyterian deacon, and aJewish son of Holocaust survivors were writing andimplementing this innovative program. Parts of thecurriculum were also challenged by Holocaustsurvivors and their descendants as being inappropriate.It was definitely an uphill battle, but the hearts andminds at Teaneck High had been won from the outset.

As part of that project, Reynolds created a

Holocaust Center on the third floor of the school as aresource for students and faculty and brought inHolocaust survivors to tell their stories. As the firstof its kind in New Jersey, it predated the creation ofthe three major Holocaust museums in the UnitedStates. Today, there are approximately 400 suchcenters in New Jersey schools.

Now, 34 years after it all began, the TeaneckHigh Holocaust Center has come back to life. A smallneglected room off to the side of the Student Centerhas been refurbished and restocked with resource

materials, including copies of the original Teaneck-Vineland curriculum and many posters. It is decoratedwith a mural by student Michal Krauthamer. PrincipalAngela Davis, faculty members Goldie Minkowitz —who emceed the program — and Al Kirschman, aswell as a long list of others on staff, encouragedstudents Sharon Leonor, Samara Rosner, and YaelOsman and others who one year ago decided toclean up the room and make the center viable oncemore. David Bicofsky, spokesman for the schooldistrict, summed it up this way: “Our HolocaustCenter is much more than a classroom for all ourstudents. It is a living memorial and testament tothe triumph of the human condition; of light overdarkness; of knowledge over ignorance and of lifeover death.” The students behind the project, headded, were to be highly commended for their

efforts.Alumnus Carol Faber, a daughter of survivors

whose father died recently, was there. She no longerlives in Teaneck, but said, “I always come toKristallnacht commemorations here when they havethem.” She found the rededication particularlypoignant.

Alumnus Hank London was also there. He hadbeen a student determined to create a Jewish Studiescourse way back, when Reynolds was chairman ofthe history department. He had butted heads withthe board of education and Reynolds, who wasoriginally against the idea, for two years before thecourse became a reality. Now he was happy to seethe school hadn’t forgotten its pioneers.

Teaneck resident Linda Kraar read from Albumof My Life, the posthumously published memoir ofher mother, Ann Szedlecki, a survivor ofconcentration camps and Siberia. Kraar’s daughter,Yona McGraw, sang an original composition aboutthe importance of remembering the past for the sakeof the future.

Al Kirschman, a Teaneck H.S. faculty memberfor more than 35 years whose father served inPatton’s Third Army, liberating Buchenwald, recalledthat his father taught him to remember thephotographs he had taken in the camps. Kirschmansaid his parents, safe in America, lost all theirrelatives in Europe, except for one survivor on eachside.

The Teaneck-Vineland curriculum project ledto the creation of Gov. Thomas Kean’s HolocaustEducation Council, which evolved into today’sHolocaust Commission. The thin book has turnedinto a massive two-volume resource and curriculumguide for teachers around the state. Working withMatthew Feldman, a Teaneck resident who had beenpresident of the state Senate, the teachers and theirsupporters saw to it that Holocaust educationbecame mandatory in New Jersey, setting anexample for the rest of the United States.

of the German National Sports Federation.Bergmann, who had vowed never to set foot onGerman soil again, did not attend the festivities.

In 1996, she was admitted to the NationalJewish Sports Hall of Fame in the United States.In 1999, she received the Georg von Opel-Preisfor achievements in the sphere of sports and society

without the prospect ofmaterial gains.

In Laupheim, herbirthplace, a stadiumwas named after her in1999. Bergmann atten-ded the dedicationceremony in personeven though, initially,she did not want to

participate “but when I was told that they werenaming the facilities for me so that when youngpeople ask, ‘Who was Gretel Bergmann?’ they willbe told my story, and the story of those times. Ifelt it was important to remember, and so I agreedto return to the place I swore I’d never go again.But I had stopped speaking German and didn’t eventry when I was there. They provided a translator.”[1]

On November 23, 2009 her German nationalrecord (1.60m) from 1936 was finally acknowledged.

Margaret Bergmann Lambert’s memoirs, By Leapsand Bounds, was published in 2005 by the

Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project and the

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

At the rededication

of the Holocaust

Center at Teaneck

High School are (l-

r) Ed Reynolds,

Yona McGraw,

Linda Kraar, and

Michal Krauthamer.


New View of the StateDepartment’s Shameful Pastby GREGORY J. WALLANCE, The Jewish Press

Recently, the Romanian government unveiled a longoverdue memorial to the 300,000 Romanian Jews andRoma who perished in World War II at the hands oftheir own government and the Nazis. Unfortunately,the U.S. State Department, whose wartime diplomatsdoomed tens of thousands of the Romanian Jewscommemorated by the memorial, has yet toacknowledge its own role in the Romanian Holocaust.

During the war, the Romanian governmentforced hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jewishmen, women and children out of their homes andmade them march hundreds of miles to the killingfields of Transnistria, where the survivors wereexpected to die from cold, disease or starvation. Agift from Hitler to his Romanian ally, Transnistria wasa grotesque chunk of land carved out of the Nazi-occupied Ukraine.

Romania turned it into the world’s largestconcentration camp. In one Transnistrian town, tensof thousands of the deported Jews had to live in justa few hundred small houses made of clay, many inruins from bombing and shelling.

“As to the Jews,” the Romanian leader, MarshalIon Antonescu, told officials of his government, “I havetaken measures to remove them entirely once and forall from these regions [of Romania]. If I do not purifythe Romanian nation, then I have achieved nothing.”

In early 1943, the German army and its alliessuffered a devastating defeat at the battle ofStalingrad. The Romanian army alone had 160,000casualties. Antonescu, no longer confident about theoutcome of the war and seeking to ease harsh peaceterms, offered to allow the surviving TransnistrianJews to emigrate to Palestine (after the war theRussians executed him anyway). The Romaniangovernment requested $50 per Jew as a bribe.

By mid-1943, Jewish groups in the UnitedStates and Switzerland had put together anelaborate rescue plan, including escrowing thebribe monies in blocked Swiss bank accounts, andmanaged to get it before FDR.

”This is a very fair proposal,” FDR told hissecretary of the treasury, who then issued thenecessary license for the Jewish groups to transferprivate funds for the rescue. Roosevelt assured themthat “the matter is now awaiting a further exchangeof cables between the State Department and ourmission in Bern regarding some of the details.”

But very few Jews, blacks or women served inthe wartime State Department and the few who didwere largely relegated to backwater posts. The StateDepartment bureaucracy was run by a cadre ofdiplomats who werecallous toward Jewishsuffering far beyond eventhe antisemitic norms ofthe era. Their elite,cloistered upbringingshad cut them off from theethnically divergentAmerican mainstreamand imbued them with adeep-rooted sense ofAnglo-Saxon superiority,a “don’t rock the boat”mentality, and disdainfor Jews and otherminorities.

Whatever nerves

transmit normal human empathy had simply atrophiedin these officials. And, like all good bureaucrats, asone Washington journalist observed, these diplomatswere “masters of the negative, the gentle objection,the postponement, the misplaced paper, the needfor further consideration.”

The diplomats argued that the British would neverpermit the Transnistrian Jews, whom they termed“enemy aliens,” to emigrate to Palestine and thereforethere was no place to put the dying Jews. After theAmerican mission in Switzerland reported to the StateDepartment on the Jewish massacres in Europe andon the plight of the Transnistrian Jews—“60,000 hadalready died and 70,000 were starving...living conditionsindescribable”—the State Department dispatched acable directing the mission to stop sending any reportsabout the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews, told inquiringU.S. senators that there was no foundation to theRomanian offer, and refused even to forward theTreasury Department license to the Jewish groups.

In late 1943, young, middle-class Christianlawyers at the Treasury Department, tough-mindedbureaucratic infighters dedicated to the defeat ofNazi Germany, discovered the State Department’ssabotage of the Transnistrian rescue and cover-upof the Nazi extermination plan. They described theState Department officials as “an undergroundmovement to let the Jews be killed,” “vicious men”who were “accomplices of Hitler,” and “warcriminals in every sense of the term.”

In memoranda, the young lawyers explicitlyaccused the State Department of “willful attemptsto prevent action from being taken to rescue Jewsfrom Hitler,” effectively charging their owngovernment with complicity in genocide.

Their morally redeeming outrage (and their directthreat to go public) eventually forced FDR to takerefugee and rescue affairs away from the StateDepartment. The new rescue agency, the WarRefugee Board, which is generally credited withsaving 200,000 Jewish lives in occupied Europe, didhelp to get thousands of Jews out of Transnistria.Had the U.S. acted earlier, tens of thousands moreRomanian Jews would have survived.

Short of defeating Nazi Germany, the U.S. hadno means to rescue most of the Jews who ultimatelyperished in concentration camps such asAuschwitz. But that was not true of theTransnistrian Jews and therefore their plightbecame a morally defining moment. The StateDepartment should acknowledge its shameful pastby creating its own memorial to the RomanianHolocaust victims. The memorial would not simplybe an act of expiation, but rather a permanentreminder that, as the Talmudic saying goes, “Tosave one life is as if you have saved the world.”

Breckinridge Long,

Assistant Secretary of

State with jurisdiction

over immigration and

refugee issues during

World War II.

Chanukah miracles allaroundBy YUVAL AZOULAY, HaaretzMore than 55million colorfulChanukah candleswere made by theMenorah CandleCompany factory inSderot in the pasttwo months. Mostare sold in Israel, butmany are shipped abroad, to Europe, Australia and theUnited States. The owner of the company, 82-year-old Holocaust survivor Yisrael Sheiner, says he “can’tcomplain.” Not about the distance between Sderot andTel Aviv, about the Qassam rockets, or about the globaleconomic crisis.

He seems to take it all this with a good measureof resignation—what’s a Qassam to someone whospent most of World War Two II the Polish woods,hiding with his family from Nazi soldiers? Sheinersees it as symbolic that the most-bombarded city inIsrael is producing millions of candles that stand forJewish heroism and resilience. Sheiner’s own storyand that of his factory and its workers both havetheir share of determination, faith and miracles.

Evidence of one such miracle can be found inthe scarred asphalt of the factory’s loading yard.Two years ago, when “cast lead” referred only toa Chanukah dreidel, or spinning top, a Qassamrocket hit the plant. It missed the thin aluminumroof of the factory and landed in the yard. Theblast sent doors flying off their hinges and blewout the factory windows. The workers, who wereinside packing the candle cartons, were sure it wasthe end. “The explosion was very powerful, andwe all ran breathless for the bomb shelter,” relatesNatasha Kosichevsky, 58, who has worked in theplant for 14 of the 15 years she has lived in Israel.“We didn’t go on working that day, we all went toget medical checkups. All the workers who usedto ignore the alarms and stay out of the shelterrealized we were all a target too, and that our verysurvival was a miracle,” Kosichevsky said.

“But I’d rather be here with my friends evenduring the worst of it,” she adds. “We had work todo and orders to ship, and besides, there’s nothingworse than sitting at home on your own in timeslike these.”

Sheiner runs the factory from his office in southTel Aviv, but there’s hardly a candle that leavesMenora without Seiner making sure it will last andkeep burning. “He’s a world expert on candle-making,” factory manager Nir Ziv says. “He cantake one look at a candle and tell you how long itwill last and the quality of the flame.”

“It was the first thing I did when I came toIsrael—buy a candle factory,” Sheiner says. “It’san act of closure for me. All I wanted was a candlefactory in Israel. I wanted to give people workmore than I wanted to make money.”

The closure Sheiner speaks of refers to his ownmiraculous story. When he was 11 he, his parentsand his three siblings escaped from the Polish townof Pinczow into the woods, fleeing the Nazioccupiers. Hanukkah came as they were on therun. Seiner wanted to light the traditional hanukkiah.“I drew the chanukiah I remembered from home,took a piece of wood and carved it out,” he says.“We celebrated Chanukah in some bunker in themiddle of the woods, but the important thing is thatwe all survived.”

Sheerit Hapletah of Metropolitan Chicago, theumbrella organization for Chicago-area Holo-caust survivor groups, announces its 64th An-nual Collective Memorial Service to be heldSunday, April 11, 2010 at 1:30 p.m. at theSkokie Valley Agudath Jacob Synagogue,8825 East Prairie Road, Skokie, IL.

Sheerit Hapletah ofMetropolitan Chicago

64th Annual Memorial Service

Gregory J. Wallance, a lawyer and the author of Two MenBefore the Storm, about the Dred Scott case, is the author of the

forthcoming America’s Soul in the Balance, about the State

Department’s response to the Holocaust.(Reprinted with

permission.)


KRISTALLNACHT COMMEMORATED AT UNUNITED NATIONS, NY—In observance of theanniversary of the Kristallnacht Pogrom of 9November 1938, in Germany and Austria, the UnitedNations Outreach Programme organized thescreening of the documentary film, As Seen through

These Eyes by Los Angeles 2G Hilary Helstein, atUnited Nations headquarters in New York City. Aconversation with Helstein, the film’s director,producer, and writer, followed the screening, andfocused on learning about the Holocaust through art.More than 200 people, including Holocaust survivorsand their descendants, as well as diplomats and othersattended the event.

On that same night, the UN Department of PublicInformation launched The Holocaust and the United

Nations Discussion Papers Journal, a publicationfilled with articles by nine scholars of Holocaust andGenocide Studies from around the world. The eventwas opened with remarks from Under-Secretary-General Kiyo Akasaka and was organized byKimberly Mann.

Filmmaker Helstein travelled the world for morethan 12 years, looking for artists who survived theHolocaust to speak to, including Nazi-hunter SimonWiesenthal. The film uses their art work and music inan attempt to combat prejudice, bigotry and intolerance.

Each conversation she had with the artistsbrought with it the realization that every painting orsketch on a torn scrap of paper is a Holocaust diary.As shown in the movie, their artistic words and imagesare profoundly moving, and communicate the horror,while also expressing hope.

The film is narrated by Maya Angelou andproduced in association with Sundance Channel. It ishoped that the film will become required viewing inprimary art survey courses at universities around theworld.

Helstein began her career atSteven Spielberg’s Survivors of theShoah Visual History Foundation,where she directed and produced over200 segments and interviewed manyprominent Holocaust survivors, militaryliberators and rescuers. She alsotraveled to remote areas to interviewsurvivors with unique experiences,including several members of theVarian Fry rescue mission, Chief ofStaff of the US Army, and a “Mengeletwin.”

As Executive Director of theLos Angeles Film Festi-val, for fouryears, Hilary has been single-handedly producinga week-long event featuring the newest Americanand international films that celebrate the diversityof the Jewish culture. Her role includes: fundraisingand sponsorship, programming, developingpartnerships with organizations (i.e., the ADL,Jewish World Watch and JDate), consulates andsynagogues throughout the city, organizing eventsand venues, creating the festival brochure andprogram guide, marketing and advertising; andtalent coordination.

In 2005, Hilary she directed a film about Rabbi

Harold M. Schulweis, the co-founder of The JewishFoundation of the Righteous. It premiered at a specialevent for an audience of over 1200 people includingMayor Antonio Villaraigosa and important membersof the clergy, including Rabbi Harold Kushner andCardinal Mahoney.

In 2004, she curated an exhibition of paintings,Samuel Bak: Between Worlds onthe surrealist for the Finegood ArtGallery and before that co-curatedthe exhibit, Memory and Meaning:the Holocaust Through the Eyes ofthe Artist , for the JewishFederation’s Los Angeles Museumof the Holocaust.

As Helstein herself notes, theseartists, some of whom passed onbefore the film was completed, havegiven us something that historycouldn’t—a journal of the Holocaustas seen through their eyes, the eyesof people who by the very act of

creating, rebelled and risked their lives by doing whatthey were forbidden to do.

The film will be screened in Miami at the CosfordCinema beginning December 18 and will also beshown in an exclusive event at the United Nations inVienna, Austria on January 27 as part of theinternational Holocaust Remembrance Program. Itwill also show at the Port Washington (NY) Libraryin conjunction with Community Synagogue onJanuary 31 for Holocaust Remembrance.

Holocaust Survivor HeirsSue for Van Gogh DrawingBy DAN MCCUE, Courthouse News MANHATTAN (CN) - A Canadian attorney and hisfamily sued the Swiss government and a prominentSwiss museum for a Vincent Van Gogh pen-and-inkdrawing they say their great-grandmother sold underduress as her family tried to flee the Nazis in theirnative Germany.

Andrew Orkin, of Ontario, claims Oskar Reinhart,the Swiss art collector who bought the drawing andbequeathed it to the Museum Oskar Reinhart amStadtgarten, took advantage of MargaretheMauthner’s dire circumstances and bought thedrawing for considerably less than its market value.

To bolster his complaint in Manhattan FederalCourt, Orkin cited precedents set by other museums,and the findings of the Swiss Federal Council on Nazi-era Activities and Dealings, a government commissionwhich concluded that the circumstances surroundingReinhart’s purchase of the drawing were “morallyquestionable.”

Orkin, who unsuccessfully sued the actressElizabeth Taylor in 2005 for return of a Van Gogh oilpainting believed to have been plundered by the Nazisduring World War II, wants the drawing declared a“flight asset,” which never legitimately passed fromMauthner to Reinhart. Therefore, Orkin says,Mauthner’s heirs should get it back or be compensatedat its current $5 million market value.

The survivors include Orkin, his two siblings andtwo maternal cousins.

The complaint describes Mauthner, a Jew, as apioneer collector of avant-garde art in the late 19thand early 20th centuries. She acquired numerous worksby Van Gogh after his death in 1890, including the 1888drawing that is the focus of this action, “Les Saintes-

Maries de laMer,” and ano-ther, “Garden ofFlowers.”

Eventually,she showed abouta half dozen ofVan Gogh’sworks in heradopted home

city of Berlin. In 1906, she undertook the firsttranslation of his letters into German, and publishedarticles on his work in Kunst & Kunstler, a Germanart journal.

But that came when the Nazis enacted lawsbarring “non-Aryans” from employment. Mauthnerand her family were dispossessed of almost all theirproperty, and their livelihoods.

To survive and finance the flight from Germany,Orkin said Mauthner sold her home, its furnishingsand important artworks in her collection at bargainbasement prices. Orkin says Mauthner asked for12,500 Swiss francs for the drawing, but accepted acounteroffer of 10,000 Swiss francs.

Reinhart donated his collection of 18th to 20thcentury European art to the city of Winterthur,Switzerland, in 1940. Most of his collection has beendisplayed at the defendant Museum Oskar Reinhartam Stadtgarten since 1951. He bequeathed the restof his collection to the Switzerland in 1958. Thatcollection was opened to the public in 1970.

In May 2007, a U.S. Appeals Court upheld aruling that the statute of limitations had expired forOrkin in his claim against Elizabeth Taylor, seekingthe return Van Gogh’s “Vue de l’Asile et de laChapelle de Saint-Remy,” then valued at more than$10 million.

In that case, filed in 2005, Orkin claimed that the

actress, who bought the painting in 1963 at a Sotheby’sauction, failed to examine papers that detailed thepainting’s provenance.

But the appeals court ruled in 2007 that Orkinand his family did not have the right to sue for thereturn of confiscated property. The U.S. SupremeCourt declined to hear the case.

Afterward, Orkin said his family was proud tohave brought the Holocaust-related art claim. “Weanticipated from the outset it would be a long andtough case, and were not mistaken,” Orkin wrote.“Our claim, like thousands of others in recent years,was prompted by the US 1998 Holocaust VictimsRedress Act and related U.S. laws, which werepremised on the necessary setting-aside of common-garden statutes of limitations.”

Orkin claimed that the “knee-jerk application ...of the statute of limitations does not disprove thefundamental legitimacy of our claim against Ms. Taylor.We have now established — at least in California andwith respect to Ms. Taylor — that these Holocaust‘redress’ laws were an empty promise.

“We look forward to a day when the fruits ofgenocide-related ‘thefticide’ are restored to theirrightful owners without the unjust application oftechnical defenses,” he wrote.

Orkin’ s attorney, Richard Altman said the factsof the case and the fact standards in applied in caseagainst a private person are different that those againsta foreign government, markedly distinguish the currentcase against the Liz Taylor action. Moreover, NewYork law is much more favorable to the recovery ofstolen property such as Nazi-era artworks thatCalifornia, which is as it should be, Altman said.

In the new case, Orkin asserts claims forrecovery of chattel, rescission and conversion, andseeks damages for unjust enrichment and violationof international law.

“Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer”


By GLORIA JACARUSO

Among the most popular features of Together areAllgenerations’ SEARCHES which are published inevery issue and on the American Gathering’s website. These SEARCHES seek to find informationand locate family members and friends ofHolocaust survivors whose fate has not beendetermined since the horrendous years of WorldWar II. Some were last seen in a ghetto or camp,others at the moment of liberation. Often, they arevague memories from childhood days, a name orpart of a name, mostly with only sketchy additionalinformation, if that.

These often moving and always fascinatingsearches are the product of Washington, D.C. basedSerena Woolrich, née Wolvovits, the daughter of aHungarian Holocaust survivor.Serena is the founder andpresident of Allgenerations, Inc.,a 501(c) (3) not-for-profitcorporation.

Allgenerations, a unique e-mail Network composed primarilyof Holocaust Survivors, theirchildren (2g’s) and grandchildren(3g’s)—in Serena’s words, itembraces “all the generations”—is an educational andinformational resource whosepurpose is to disseminate andshare information about theHolocaust and Israel, relatedissues and events, and to keep theunique community of survivorsand their descendants informedand connected. Beside Serena,its three-member Board ofDirectors, includes Audrey Kirzner Syatt, Vice-President, a 2g and attorney, in Boston,Massachusetts; and Ashley Taubman, Secretary, a3g and graduate student at Columbia, in New York,New York.

Allgenerations’ membership also includeseducators, historians, Holocaust centers, museumsand related organizations, social serviceagencies, colleges and universities, studentsfrom elementary school to graduate school, along withauthors, filmmakers, genealogists, and other individualsand institutions interested in the Holocaust and itsaftermath.

Serena is Allgenerations’ hub, receiving a steadystream of inquiries on a wide range of Holocaust-

By Working Together We Can Accomplish Miracles

related issues which she then disseminates to thegroup’s membership via e-mails and e-letters.

According to Serena among the most importantand rewarding services that Allgenerations providesare the SEARCHES, a compilation ofinquiries received from members about missingrelatives and friends., sent out in e-Letters toAllgenerations’ international membership. “Byworking with the American Gathering, whichpublishes the SEARCHES in Together and on itswebsite,” she explains, “we have been able toincrease the dissemination of the SEARCHES toTogether’s readership, thereby greatly increasing thenumber of possible responses.”

Serena told me of one ”SEARCH” she receivedwhere a 2g in Michigan, waslooking for anyone who mighthave remembered her fatherfrom the concentration campsor a post-war Displaced Personscamp. A survivor in Melbourne,Australia responded that he hadknown her father in the Radomghetto and in Dachau and senther a photograph of her fatherand his brother, in theirconcentration camp uniforms.

Another successful SEARCHwas when a survivor in WestHartford, Connecticut sent aninquiry to Allgenerations seekingher elementary school classmatefrom Vilna, Lithuania. ThisSEARCH was published inTogether, and a survivor livingin Florida read the SEARCH,

and saw that the person sought was his brother.He called his brother in Israel and told him thatsomeone in the United States was looking for him. After several e-mails and phone calls a connectionwas made after 50 years!

Serena is retired from the FDIC and lives inWashington, D.C. Born in 1947 in Brooklyn, NewYork and raised in West Hempstead, New York, overthe last 30 or so years Serena has participated inSecond Generation groups in both Israel (Beer Shevaand Netanya) and in the U.S. (Fort Lauderdale,Atlanta, Hartford, Connecticut, and Boston). She hasbeen the president and board member of several ofthese 2g groups, and has served on local and statecommittees for Yom HaShoah commemorations.

cont’d on p. 11

By OFRA EDELMAN, Haaretz

The 2007 Holocaust survivor benefit law isunclear, making it difficult for survivors to knowwhether they are entitled to state support, the Tel AvivMagistrate’s court stated recently, in its role as theappeals panel under the Disabled Victims of NaziPersecution Law. This was the first decision regardingthe law and the rights it grants survivors.

“The vision of those who drafted the benefits lawwas that eligibility would be determined by a simple,easy, short and fast process...without the need forcomplicated, drawn-out bureaucracy and lawyers,”the judges wrote.

Israeli Judges slamsurvivor benefit law asunclear

Serena was an interviewer for Steven Spielberg’sShoah Foun-dation.

The membership of Allgenerations has growntremendously, from the original 30 members toalmost 1,700, and mainly accomplished by “word-of-mouth,” members’ recommendations, professionalreferrals and referrals from Holocaust relatedmuseums and organizations, and direct requests frompeople who have heard of them and what they do.

Allgenerations provides educational toolsand research resources which are utilized byeducators, historians, students at all grade levels,authors, and others. Allgenerations also assists withschool projects, facilitates contacting of Survivors ortheir descendants for interviews, and obtainingspeakers. It also keeps its members updated aboutHolocaust related events, seminars, educational trips,books and documentaries.

Allgenerations’ members are deeply appreciativeof Serena’s efforts. According to one 2g fromSacramento, California, “Almost as soon as I gotonline, Serena connected me with a dear man acrossthe country who was one of the few survivors frommy mother’s shtetl in Poland. He wrote me and sentme pictures. It was the first time in 65 years we foundout what had happened to everyone my mother grewup with.”

And according to another 2G from Brisbane,Australia, “Apart from being an amazing resource –[Allgenerations] is also a surrogate extended familyand makes those of us so geographically far apartfeel connected to this global community of thoseaffected by the Holocaust.”

Serena said that by working together,Allgenerations and Together have been remarkablyeffective in finding information and locating friendsand relatives of Survivors who have been sought. Andwith a rapidly growing membership, and exponentiallya growing number of SEARCHES, Allgenerations ispleased to be expanding its outreach throughTogether.

Allgenerations has become a global resource forinformation about the Holocaust. Serena said that asthe organization continues to grow, it is constantlydeveloping new projects and initiatives. Serena hopesto seek new avenues of funding to continue with itsefforts and plans for future endeavors, and seeks newforums to display Allgenerations’ SEARCHES. “Myreason for founding Allgenerations was to provide aclearinghouse for Holocaust information for ourmembers, and to educate and promote tolerance andunderstanding, through awareness and knowledge. Iam convinced that by working together, we canaccomplish miracles.”

Serena can be reached: [email protected]

“We must admit: The law does not create a

practical way for Holocaust survivors, theirrepresentatives or judicial panels to determineeligibility in a simple, easy, short and fast process.”

The law was intended to provide a monthly stipendand other benefits to former concentration camp, workcamp and ghetto survivors who do not receive anysuch support from Israel, Germany or any othercountry.

The law says that the people eligible for benefitsare those who received a one-time payment fromGermany under the agreement with the Conferenceon Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, orreceived compensation from certain other Germanand Austrian funds.

The court criticized the Knesset’s decision to referto criteria set by foreign organizations.

“It is not even a reference to a foreign law. It is

even worse, it is a reference to an administrativedecision by foreign statutory bodies and foreigngovernments, which were not published openly andofficially,” said the judges.

The court quoted a meeting of the KnessetCommittee for Immigration, Absorption and DiasporaAffairs, where representatives of the Justice andFinance ministries said the process was intended tomake it easier for survivors. But despite the goodintentions, in practice there is no way to appeal toany body or receive information on whether a specificcamp or ghetto is recognized, said the judges.

The court also attempted to receive suchinformation itself, as a note to the law says theagreements involved have been deposited with theFinance Ministry, but it turned out not to be so simple.

“The German reparations law is a thick book


KRAKOW GHETTOby RITA B.ROSS, author of Running from Home

(This episode is dedicated to my

beautiful, brave mother, Freda

Schmelkes, vwwg, who single-

handedly saved my brother and

me from the jaws of Auschwitz.)

By the time we arrived at theKrakow Ghetto we had beenevading the Nazis and the zealousPolish antisemites by assuming aCatholic identity. We had hidden in

churches, a furniture factory and the homes of Polishpeople, who turned a blind eye to our identities andfor the payment of a few zlotys rented rooms for usto hide in for short periods of time. The ghetto is ourlast refuge. We are hungry, freezing, and tired ofhiding, as well as desperate for a roof over our headsto shield us from the brutal winter. We are runningout of hiding places and have to get off the icy streetsand howling wind. I am six years old and my brother,Bubbi (his nickname) is four.

...My mother, because of her Aryan looks, perfectcommand of German and Polish is pressed intoservice. She is handed a black woolen coat. “Don’task where it comes from,” she is told by the rabbi’swife. “Just take it and wear it. The owner will neveruse it again.”

She removes the yellow armband from the coatand trudges through the streets of Poland, bargainingwith shopkeepers for potatoes, half rotten carrots,anything she can get to keep us and the occupants ofthe room we share from starving, thereby stayingalive for one more day.

While she is away, Bubbi and I stay in the room,playing under the table with the other children. Inthat small space I feel protected and safe until duskcreeps into the little room. It is dark and she has notreturned. Panic stabs my heart sending out currentsof terror that radiate through my chest. I take herphotograph and hold it against the window pane,willing her to come back. In my mind, she has beencaught, tortured, mutilated. I see her beaten andbloodied. Even though I am just six, I have beenlistening to many adult conversations and know alltoo well about the terrible things that happen to Jewswho are found outside the ghetto It doesn’t take longfor my imagination to transport me to the forest ofthe orphan: abandoned, alone and frightened. No onehas time to comfort two small children. Everyone inthe little room is preoccupied with his own hunger,pain and loss.

I am ignored and left to my coping skill. I comfortBubbi, who is crying loudly.

“Shhh.” I whisper to him. “Mutti will be backsoon,” I say, even though I am already making plansfor our abandonment. I put my arms around him androck him back and forth. “Bubbi, Bubbi,” I croon, “Iwill never leave you.”

Suddenly she’s back. She’s safe and beautifuland smelling of snow. She has had an exceptionalday outside the ghetto. She comes in with a loaf ofbread, three tiny potatoes, a jar of yogurt and a maggotinfested slab of meat. The kosher people won’t eatthe meat, but we do. “This is war,” she says. “Youeat what you can.”

Rita B. Ross was born in Vienna, two years before the

annexation of Austria, just before Hitler’s troops stormed

the country. She came to America in 1945 to begin a new

life.Running from Home, Hamilton Books, gives an

eyewitness account of her family’s survival.

90-Year-Old Charged in NaziMassacreBy DAVID RISING, AP

BERLIN — A former SS sergeant who worked un-noticed for decades as a train-station manager wascharged with 58 counts of murder recently after astudent doing undergraduate research uncovered hisalleged involvement in a massacre of Jewish forcedlaborers.

University of Vienna student Andreas Forsterwas working on a project about the slaying in a forestnear the Austrian village of Deutsch Schuetzen whenhe stumbled across Adolf Storms’ name in witnesstestimony. Forster then obtained files from federalarchives in Berlin that enabled him to link the formersergeant to the massacre, his professor WalterManoschek told The Associated Press.

Manoschek visited Storms, 90, at his home in thecity of Duisburg several times last year after findinghim in the phone book. The professor conductedabout 12 hours of interviews in which Storms re-peatedly said that he does not remember the killings.

Forster and Manoschek notified authorities andstate prosecutors near Storms' hometown in the in-dustrial Ruhrgebiet region of western Germany filedthe charges against him.

Storms and unidentified accomplices are ac-cused of forcing at least 57 of the Jewish laborersto hand over their valuables and kneel by a gravebefore fatally shooting them from behind. A dayafter the March 29, 1945, massacre, Storms is alsoaccused of shooting another Jew who could nolonger walk during a forced march in Austria fromDeutsch Schuetzen to the village of Hartberg.

The court described the suspect simply as a “re-tiree from Duisburg,” but German authorities havepreviously identified him as Adolf S. His full namewas given in previous trials in Austria related to othersuspects in the massacre. He also been identified asa former member of the 5th SS Panzer Division"Wiking."

The Duisburg court still must decide whether

there is enough evidence to bring the case to trial.Authorities did not disclose his attorney's name andthe phone at his home in Duisburg went unanswered.

Storms does not appear on the SimonWiesenthalCenter's list of most-wanted Nazi warcriminals, but the organization's top Nazi-hunter,Efraim Zuroff, said he was “very encouraged by theindictment.”

"He wasn't on our radar — he wasn't on anyone'sradar — and this is a case that clearly shows it ispossible, even at this point, to identify perpetratorswho bear responsibility for serious crimes commit-ted during World War II and bring them to justice,"Zuroff said.

The remains of the victims of the DeutschSchuetzen massacre were found in 1995 in a massgrave by the Austrian Jewish association. A plaquenow marks the site.

Storms was interned in an American prisoner ofwar camp following the war, but was released in 1946.It was not uncommon for possible war criminals togo undetected in the chaotic aftermath of the war.

Storms worked as a train-station manager afterthe war until his retirement. The Austrian press hasreported he changed the spelling of his name.

Manoschek described Storms as “fully there”mentally but in poor physical health.

Prosecutor Andreas Brendel said there no livingwitnesses to the forest massacre but statements madeduring an Austrian trial of others involved can beused as evidence against the suspect. Brendel saidthree former members of the Hitler Youth who werehelping the SS guard the prisoners on the march haveprovided witness statements in Austria. A fourthformer Hitler Youth member, now living in Canada,is being interviewed this week, he told the AP.

According to Manoschek, several of the formerHitler Youth were tried in 1946 and convicted andsentenced to two years in prison for their involve-ment.

Associated Press Writer Veronika Oleksyn contrib-

uted to this report from Vienna.

cont’d from p. 10

Israeli judges slam survivorbenefit law

written in German, with the law and its explanationscombined in a Continental fashion,” wrote judge ShlomoFriedlander.

The judges got an English version of the lawestablishing the German fund, but it referred to theGerman reparations law for the list of camps whosesurvivors are eligible for benefits.

“The German language is not an official languagein Israel, and most citizens don’t speak it,” admonishedFriedlander. He also said the long lists of names weredifferent in different languages.

The Austrian law lacked a list of relevant camps,and cited no source for such information, while theagreement with the Claims Conference had no officialtext in either Hebrew or English.

Friedlander said the German government laterpublished a list of camps included in the agreement,but it was not complete.

He recommended the Israeli law be changed tostate that entitlement should be set by Israel, “as afterall, Israeli money is being granted here to Holocaustsurvivors, and not German or Austrian money.”

Friedlander also wrote that it would be proper ifan appropriate Israeli authority would set the criteriaand publish them in Hebrew, and expand the list toinclude other places where Jews suffered from Nazipersecution.

Kindertransport survivor isknighted (JTA) — A Jewish refugee from the Nazis whoarrived in England on the Kindertransport wasrecently knighted.

Erich Reich, 74, has raised millions of dollars forlocal charities through his company, Classic Tours,which organizes overseas fundraising challenges.

Reich, chairmanof the Kinder-transport Group ofthe Association ofJewish Refugees,organized thecelebration last yearof the 70th anni-versary of thedecision by Britain’sparliament to acceptthe children escapingN a z i - o c c u p i e dEurope on the eve ofWorld War II.

“I want to thank the people of Britain for allowingthe Kinder to come to the UK and for this amazinghonor,” he said.

Reich arrived in Britain at the age of 4 and neversaw his parents again.


Members of the AmericanGathering of Jewish HolocaustSurvivors and Their Descendantswere in attendance at the October15 opening reception for the specialexhibition, “Isaac Bashevis Singerand His Artists,” at the galleries ofthe Hebrew Union College Instituteof Jewish Religion in New York, incooperation with the newspaper, The

Forward.The exhibition, which runs until late June 2010,

presents the work of 17 artists who illustrated 25 ofSinger’s novels and short stories, including LarryRiver, Maurice Sendak, Raphael Soyer, RomanVishniac, William Pene Du Bois and Holocaustsurvivor Irene Lieblich.

Zalmen Mlotek, a 2G himself, the ArtisticDirector, National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene directedand accompanied members of the cast as theyperformed from the score of Singer’s story Gimpl

SINGER EXHIBIT HONORS ARTISTS

Tam, which was thecritically acclaimedmainstage productionfor the theatre in thefall of 2008.

The program wasorganized and curatedby Jean Bloch Rosen-saft, Senior NationalDirector for Public

Affairs and Institutional Planning for the university,who is a vice president of the American Gatheringand Laura Kruger, curator of the HUC museum.Among the guests were American Gathering VicePresident, Dr. Eva Fogelman, and her husband, Dr.Jerome Chanes.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 NobelPrize for Literature, created a legacy of 86 booksand numerous stories that continue to delight peopleof every age, circumstance, and nationality. Hedepicted with a sense of humanity, humor, and clarity

Holocaust survivors wholeft Budapest on June 30,1944 on a train organized byRezso Kasztner and othersgathered in New York Cityat the YIVO Institute forJewish Research onOctober 20 to pay tribute toKilling Kasztner, EmmyAward-winning filmmakerGaylen Ross, and Kaszt-ner family members. Ross’

film describes, how, after the war, Kasztner, aspokesman for the Israel government working onrecovering looted Jewish assets in Hungary for theBen-Gurion government, was reviled by some whowere not able to board the train. They accused himof being a Nazi collaborator and a thief, discountingthe fact that he was able to save approximately 20,000Jewish lives.

The elderly survivors came to YIVO to pay theirrespects to the man who saved their lives and to meethis daughter Zsuzsi, and his granddaughters Michal,Keren and Merav, so that they could personally saythank you.

Kasztner, the Hungarian Zionist leader and liaisonto the Jewish Agency (the Sachnut), managed toransom 1,684 Jews who departed Nazi-occupiedBudapest in June 1944 for freedom in Palestine viaSwitzerland. Because so few Hungarian Jewsactually managed to survive, there was a backlash ofrage and resentment toward Kasztner.

The film reveals that the arrangement, part ofmuch broader Nazi negotiations that began in Slovakiawith Rabbi Michoel Ber Weissmandl and his cousin,Slovakian Zionist leader Gisi Fleischmann, was abackdoor attempt to save as many Jews as possibledespite worldwide antipathy and condemnation.Working together in Nazi-occupied territory and inSwitzerland with Zionists and the Vaad Hatzolah, anassociation of Orthodox Jews in New York seekingto rescue members of the yeshiva world, millions hadto be raised for ransom from individuals and Jewishorganizations. History proves how unreceptive Jewishorganizations were and how they sought to condemnthose efforts.

For those who managed toboard the train, it was hardly anuneventful trip. Most of them wereheld hostage in Bergen-Belsen forsix months before they werereleased near St. Gallen, Switzer-land. But in the end they weresaved, and most historians agreethat the negotiations landedapproximately 18,000 others inlabor camps in Austria, where theywere held as potential bargainingchips with the Allies instead of beingdeported to Auschwitz.

In 1953, Kasztner, then living inIsrael, was publicly accused byMalchiel Gruenwald, a Holocaustsurvivor, of a host of charges:collaborating with the Nazis, stealingransom money, and essentiallycausing the destruction ofHungarian Jewry. The Israeligovernment, on behalf of Kasztner,a spokesman for the ministry oftrade and industry, suedGruenwald for libel. During a trialreplete with political overtones,the judge, Benjamin Halevi,accused Kasztner of having soldhis soul to the devil for making a deal with the Nazis.Gruenwald was acquitted of libel on several countsand fined a mere $1. After Kasztner was assassinatedin front of his Tel Aviv house on the night of March3-4, 1957, the High Court overturned the Gruenwalddecision. But it was too late. Kasztner’s name wasbesmirched. People even spat on his young daughterand threw rocks at her.

With the U.S. opening of the new documentaryKilling Kasztner, the controversy surrounding thenegotiations for Jewish lives with Hitler’s deputies(Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, Dieter Wisliceny,and Kurt Becher) is back on the front burner. Forsome, this is a very personal story involving Kasztner’sfamily and the families of the Kasztner survivors.For others, it is the story of political terrorism,described in full in the film by Kasztner’s murderer

himself, Ze’ev Eckstein, who wasrecruited by Shin Bet to spy on asmall right-wing radical group andthen join them. He became part ofa cabal to destroy Kasztner andperhaps, as a result, bring down theIsraeli government. Eckstein, thefilm’s major focus, was sentencedto life and served approximatelyseven years. His accomplices,

Joseph Menkes and Dan Shemer,received the same sentence and alsoserved just seven years. Israeli PrimeMinister Ben-Gurion even asked theKasztner family to give their approvalto the release. His wife, Bogyo, saidno. His daughter, ZsuZsi, said yes, inorder to spare the families of allinvolved more pain and anguish—she

sensed Ben-Gurion was going to letthem go anyway.

According to the film, ShmuelTamir, the defense attorney forGruenwald, had been a member ofthe Irgun, while Kasztner, coveringfor the Sachnut, did not want toadmit that he wrote affidavits on itsbehalf for Kurt Becher and hiscronies—the Nazi officials who

looted Hungarian Jewry. The Sachnut and later theIsraeli government under Ben-Gurion sought torecover Jewish goods and funds looted by the Nazisand didn’t want people to know that they were indirect negotiations with war criminals. When askedabout the affidavit he gave to the Allies on behalf ofBecher, Kasztner lied on the stand to protect theSachnut. The Zionists didn’t want anyone to knowthat everything Kasztner did was done at their behest,and Ross shows documents in the film, discoveredsince the assassination, that bear this out. They hadnot been released during his trial.

The film received rave reviews during its limitedNew York run, and the survivors at YIVO were gladthat the controversial Kasztner was finally receivingrecognition as the hero who saved their lives.

KILLING KASZTNER: A POSTHUMOUS THANK YOU

the vanished world of Polish Jews prior to and duringthe First World War, and in hiscollection of eleven short storiesconstituting The Spinoza of Market

Street, published in 1961, and laternovels he depicted a post-Holocaustworld, no longer provincial but rife withcontemporary chaos and paranoia.Based on his observations and genuinelove of pious, superstitious, earthy,heroic, resourceful, and tragic figures,

his works continue to live in our collective memories.Artist Irene Lieblich, a Holocaust survivor from

Poland, shared a mutually life-enhancing friendshipwith Singer. Her memories of village life capturedwith joyous naivete the evocative landscape that wasfaithful to Singer’s recollections of the shtetl. Singerwrote that “Her works are rooted in Jewish folkloreand faithful to Jewish life and spirit.”

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustratedcatalogue. For group tours or other informationinformation, call Katie Moscowitz, 212-824-2293.

Jean Bloch Rosensaft

addresses attendees.

Dr. Jerome Chanes and

Mahli Lieblich.

Gaylen Ross and YIVO Exec Dir.Jonathan Brent.

Zsuzsi Kastner and her

daughter Merav.

Photos by Eric Weiss.

Kasztner survivors Friedman, Spiraand Mayer.


Through the Generationsby JOYCE ANN (ABRDIGED)In 1922, Israel Wygodny, at the age of 3, walked homefrom his neighbor’s house chewing a big piece ofkielbasa, wonderfully flavored Polish pork sausage.He didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to eat the non-kosher meat and his mother told him it was forbiddenand took it away from him. That’s how my father,Israel, began learning about the differences betweenhimself and his Catholic neighbors. Growing up Jewishin Sladkow Maly, Poland, a small farmingvillage, where only five of the 50 families were Jewish,my father’s neighbors were his friends. Theyremained his friends throughout WWII when Jewsall over Europe were being slaughtered.

After experiencing the horror of the Holocaust,my grandfather, Itzchak Wygodny, told his son, “Ifyou survive the war, don’t remain Jewish. You cannotbuild a five-story building on a one-story foundation.”

But even after being put through various workand concentration camps during the war, my father,now Irwin Wygodny, married a Chicago girl. Togetherthey raised four children. His three sisters, Helen,Esther, and Linda also survived, but lost their mother,father and brother, Elchanan, who was only 17 yearsold to the Nazis and their collaborators.

“I would never have believed I would have 10Jewish grandchildren,” Irwin often said proudly. Yet,in raising us Jewish, through the pride, a sadness loomsbecause his parents never knew this joy. My fatheralso expressed guilt for not following his father’s lastwords of advice.

One day in 1986, my father told me he was goingto Poland. “Well, then I’m going too,” was myresponse. I knew that this would be a chance of alifetime. Two weeks later my parents, siblings and Iwere in Poland and we just did what my father wantedto do, saw what he wanted to see and visited placeshe had learned about as a child in school and nevergot a chance to visit.

Several times as we walked down the Polishstreets, we saw men asking for money. More thanonce my dad said to us, “That man’s a Jew.” Thenhe would ask the man if he was Jewish, and he alwaysreceived an affirmative answer. I was perplexed. Iasked my dad how he knew, and he responded,“because he speaks Polish with a Yiddish accent.”How could that be? I grew up in suburban America.Jews were not beggars! But they were in Poland in1986.

Our visit to Chmielnik, where my father went toschool, was the start of a journey into my father’schildhood. It was a once thriving town of 12,000people, 75% Jewish. He showed us where his schoolhad been, as well as the bombed out bakery wherehe hid for two weeks during the war. We met manypeople who remembered him or his sisters andhad conversations with familiar people, and as wewalked around he relayed his memories to us

We visited the synagogue but we were unable toenter it. We found the old cemetery next door, butneeded to find the new one where my great-grandfather and uncle were buried. We found it in

a large field with a single tombstone. We walkedthrough tall grass and weeds, but couldn’t read thestone because it was worn down. I looked at myfather’s face and will never forget the profoundsadness in it. The rest of the stones had been placedin an old building or were used to pave roads.

Leaving Chmielnik, we walked four kilometersto Dad’s hometown, Sladkow Maly. Alongside uswere horse-driven carriages and men riding bicyclesreturning from church in Chmielnik. Dad began torecognize and greet more people. We saw chickensrunning free, and fly infested thatched roofed homesand barns. My father became tearful when he saw aman with whom he used to play. Dad said, “He wasa nice guy as a kid.”

Kids were beginning to hang around and stare atus. Word was out that Israel Wygodny was back in

town after 41 years. We met Stanislaw (Stach)Pietzcyk, a strong looking, weather beaten 65-year-old , who purchased the land from my father afterthe war. Stach told my father that he dreamed abouthim two weeks earlier. In his dream my fatherreturned to Poland to see him. We were the onlyJewish family to return to Sladkow Maly and,according to my father, that was because our familywas the only one of the five who survived.

Stach invited us to his home, which sat in thesame spot where my fathers’ two-roomed, dirt-flooredhouse used to be. There were fresh tomatoes,cucumbers, pickles, tea, open-faced corned beef andschmaltz sandwiches, hot compote, homemadesausage, and vodka. “Eat, eat” they said, but theythemselves did not all eat.

Stach’s children and grand-children joined us. Inno time, we bonded and were racing after them,running up the heather covered hill behind my father’shouse, playing tag, and laughing with them, exploringlands and streams that were formerly my great-grandfather ’s property. We saw my great-grandfather’s farmhouse and stable, where dailyprayer services had taken place and the village Torahhad been stored.

Twenty-two years later, in 2008, we returned toPoland for the rededication ceremony of the Jewishcemetery and the sixth annual Jewish Festival inChmielnik. This time my father, 88, was not afraid.

Chmielnik was now a town of 4,200 people—none Jewish—but we were we were warmly andeagerly welcomed as friends, hugging, laughing. In themorning, I looked out the window and saw what myfather had seen as a child. The children we played

with 22 years ago were now parents, and my sonsplayed with their children as we had with them.

During our first visit to Poland in 1986, Isaw women pulling their cows on leashes and wholefamilies riding in horse-driven carts. Now the townsquare—a cobblestoned center with outside tablesand umbrellas—was thriving, with small food stands,a statue and a fountain. People dressed in modernclothing, jeans or skirts and high heels. There wereno carts and horses, only cars.

Yet, underneath, I wasn’t sure if much hadchanged at all. During the Jewish Festival, greatefforts were made to welcome and honor the foursurvivors and their families who came to visit fromIsrael and the United States. We were greeted bythe mayor and we were honored during Sundaymorning mass and given a written English translationof the priest’s sermon. We visited Auschwitz withPolish teenagers interested in meeting Jewishteenagers.

I chatted with a Polish man whose grandfatherwas being honored for hiding five Jews for severalyears. It was heart-warming when a group of Polishkids came to say goodbye to them the day we left forhome, watching them exchange e-mail addresses.

At the rededication of the cemetery, hundredsof townspeople gathered to hear the mayor,government officials, and survivors speak. Polishchildren stood at attention and sang Hebrew songs.When my mother saw the sparsely placed namelessstones in the Jewish cemeterythis, she said, “I realizenow that there is no life in Poland for Jews anymore.”

My strong reaction took place when I visited theremains of the Chmielnik synagogue built in the1600s. Standing in the balcony area of the almostempty synagogue I could see some remnants ofdecoration on the walls. I looked at the original windowframes leaning against the wall. There was no glassor windows, just the raw frame where the windowshad been. A spiral staircase led into further darkness.I saw children running around and laughing, exploringthe nooks and crannies of the ruined synagogue, notrealizing the building was once the center ofvital Jewish life.

Bittersweet is the only way I can describePoland.Some Jews question Polish motives increating Jewish festivals. My father never questionedtheir intentions. In June of 2009, at 89, my father tookhis last trip to Poland and returned to the United States,feeling contented. On July 11, 2009, my father passedaway.

Though Irwin Wygodny was one of only a fewsurvivors who bore witness to the darkest, most evilside of mankind, the Holocaust did not define myfather. His willingness to build a new life in a newcountry and raise four children with my mother, is atribute to his strength and character. And though hiscontentment from his visits to Poland later in his lifeattest to his memories. He is remembered as a friendto all—a gentle man, a man who adored his family,built his own business and had a special way withanimals. As a Holocaust survivor, he rememberedwhat he experienced and managed to survive andmove forward.

Sladkow Maly

From Ayelet Rubinstein, a 3g in Modi’in, Israel:I am looking for my grandfather’s niece, Nina Bella Goltz (maiden name), born 5-4-1942 and her mother, Lea Goltz from the town of Kaunas,Lithuania. My grandfather, Chaim Tzemach (Cemac/Semah/Zemach), now living in Israel, was born in Skidel, which is a town in Belarus todayand was in Poland before World War II. Lea Goltz also had a relative named Moshe Selz who lived in Skidel. Lea Goltz lost her first husband,

Yitzak Tzemach, in 1941 when he was killed in front of her in the Vilnius ghetto. She was pregnant at the time. After the war in Germany she married Mr. Goltz whoadopted Nina-Bella. They emigrated from Germany to New York in 1949. They initially resided in Manhattan and then in Brooklyn (1949). My grandfather receiveda few letters from them from New York City in the early 1950s but then the connection “disconnected.” I would be thankful if you can help me.








Teenagers Rosalyn Gross and Lucy Gliuck,imprisoned at Bergen-Belsen, met in April, 1945when British soldiers liberated the death camp.Recently, the two women, now Rosalyn Haber andLucy Jacobs, met again—64 years later at a CaféEuropa luncheon to reunite Holocaust survivors.

“I just had a feeling to come today,” Haber, 78.of Boca Raton said.

“God sent you,” said Jacobs, 80, who lives atCentury Village in Boca Raton.

Almost 70 years ago it may have been Jacobswho God sent to Haber during their last days at theconcentration camp in Germany. In the saysimmediately after liberation, 14-year-old- RosalynGross was sick with typhus and Jacobs cared forher, hiding the young girl in the barracks of Germansoldiers and nursing her back to health. “I saved herlife,” Jacobs said, explaining that she was afraid thegirl only two years younger than herself would die ina hospital. That was the fate of many at Bergen-

Bergen-Belsen survivors reunited after 64 yearsBy DAVID A. SCHWARTZ, Palm Beach Jewish Journal

After a few days of lingering around the tentcamp and getting bored, the gates opened. Men inHungarian military uniforms marched in. Thosewere the Jews who served with the Hungarian armyas slave laborers. To fit with the behavior ofHungarian gentlemen, they marched like soldiers,like the English in the movie The Bridge over the

River Kwai. But they didn’t whistle!We old timers, the striped ones (they called us

that because of our uniforms), lined up at theentrance road to the camp, cheering the Hungarianson. The poor bastards; they didn’t know what hitthem. They had no inkling about what hell theywere marching into.

Zoli, my childhood friend, and I, stood next toeach other and joined in taunting the newcomers.We stopped abruptly. We recognized two familiarfigures. They were Zoli’s father and his uncle. Theyalso recognized us. They broke ranks and startedto hug Zoli, each other, and cry. I stood there andhoped that my father would also be marching in.

He did not!The four tents filled up in no time. The rest of

the newcomers were camping out under the stars.The slave laborers had marched from Hungary andhad a little food in their backpacks. They tried toprotect what little food they had, but were no matchfor us 2,000 hungry wolves. Their food disappearedin the most mysterious ways. The Hungarians werecursing and chasing us but didn’t dare touch us.

One night a plane flew by and dropped a bomb.Unfortunately the pilot missed its target and thebomb fell in the camp. Some 40 people were killed,and who knows how many were injured? I sleptthrough the whole incident.

It was less than a month before liberation!A week or two before liberation, we were

ordered to pack. To pack what? As I mentionedbefore, we always traveled light.

We were moving again. The Hungarian slavelaborers lined up again as soldiers do. We, thestriped ones, marched at the end of the column,clowning around, trying to imitate the Hungarians.And a bunch of clowns we were!

On the road, women prisoners joined the

THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT HIT THEMBY GERSHON RON (FROM MY LITTLE BLUE TATOO) exodus. They looked terrible, maybe worse than

we did.At the villages that we passed, people watched

with amazement, but not one dared to approachus, or god forbid, give us a piece of bread. Wepassed a potato field. The prisoners, like crazies,ran from the formation and dug for potatoes. Theyate the potatoes raw. The guards had a hard timerestoring order. There was no shooting and nobeating. Most of the prisoners who dared to stepout from the formation were women.

I salute them!As darkness fell, we stopped at a meadow

close to a forest. I looked for Zoli but to no avail.He was marching with his father and uncle. Tolook for him was like looking for a needle in ahaystack. On the road, two Slovak kids stuck withme. One was 14, and the other 12 years old.

The idea of getting food from the kitchen didn’tlook very promising. Roaming on the edge of theforest, I found snails crawling all over. I decidedto cook a gourmet dinner. I sent the two kids tofind as many snails as possible.

When it came to food, my imagination ran wild.I had never cooked in my life, not even a hardboiledegg. When the kids came back with the snails, Ihad water boiling in a pot. I dumped the snails intothe boiling water. The smell was overwhelming.

We didn’t see the German guard approaching.It was too late to grab the pot. The guard kickedthe pot. The snail soup spilled, together with thehalf-cooked snails. Then he made us put out thefire. To make a fire next to the trees wasn’t thesmartest thing to do.

When the guard left, we picked up the half-cooked snails. Instead of a well made gourmetmeal, which we would have preferred, with a littlesnail soup to wash it down, we had to be satisfiedwith a medium rare dish. Nobody complained.

Nobody asked for seconds, either. As we weremunching on the snails, a young Polish kidapproached us. He finished the leftovers and joinedour small group.

The next morning we arrived at our destination;another camp. The gate had no welcome sign andthe orchestra was absent. The only similarity was

the barbed wire fence. I don’t think it waselectrified.

It seemed to me that the camp had just beenerected. We, the striped ones, got the barracks.Most of the Hungarians camped out under thetrees. As soon as we arrived, it started to rain.The ground turned into mud. It was hard to walk.The lice were eating us alive. There was hardlyany food. People got sick. An epidemic of typhoidbroke out. Dead bodies were lying everywhere.

It was the end of April 1945!The Red Cross delivered a truckload of food.

Everybody who could manage to stand on two feet,lined up in front of a building next to the barracks.Standing in the line, I met a schoolmate of mine;Finias. He was originally from Hust inKarpatorussia. We decided to support each other,because everybody was pushing to get to the front.To fall into the mud was as good, as saying goodbye to this wonderful world!

The distribution started in an orderly fashion,then, like on a command, the throng started to push.Everybody grabbed whatever their hands reached.The German guards tried to keep the prisoners backwith their rifle butts, when this failed, they openedfire. A lot of people were killed. My schoolmate,Finias, was one of them. I came back with emptyhands. My two Slovak friends and the Polish kidwere also disappointed.

We slept next to each other; actually, more ontop of each other. I woke up in the morning, openedmy eyes and saw a strange look in my Polishfriend’s eyes. He was dead!

We heard explosions all day. The day ofliberation seemed to be close. We didn’t knowwhich army was closing in; Americans, English, orRussians. To us, it made no difference.

I told my two little friends that I am going toescape. Their eyes lit up.

Late the same evening, we saw a commotion.The Hungarians told us that the gate wasn’tguarded. We went to investigate. They were right.The guards were gone. We didn’t go back to thebarracks. The three of us took off in the directionof the explosions.

We were on our way to freedom!Mazal Tov!

Belsen in the weeks following liberation.Finding Jacobs at the luncheon was a “miracle,”

said Haber, who has been searching for Holocaustsurvivors from her home town of Muncach,Czechoslovakia since the end of the war. “All theseyears I‘ve been searching for one of them,” saidHaber. “I said,” ‘This is a familiar face.’ I asked herfrom where are you and did you know Grosses?”

Jacobs replied that she had dated a young mannamed Gross, said Haber, realizing that Jacobs knewone of her six brothers, all of whom survived theHolocaust. And then the woman learned that theywere together again after so many years.

Almost 450 Holocaust survivors attended theCafé Europa luncheon at B’nai Torah Congregationin Boca Raton.

It was the ninth Café Europa luncheon in SouthPalm Beach since 2005. The luncheon, put on by theRuth Rales Jewish Family Service, are sponsored inJune by the Conference on Jewish Material ClaimsAgainst Germany and the Humanitarian Aid

Foundation and in December by Jill and Cliff Vinerof Boca Raton.

Larry Blair, chairman of the Ruth Rales board ofdirectors, said the luncheons are an opportunity tobring people together to reunite with friends andfamily from the past. “It’s an opportunity for twoindividuals that hadn’t seen each other in 60 years toreconnect,” he added.

“One success story like this is worth whatever ittakes,” said Stanley Gilbert, Holocaust Survivors Clubof Boca Raton president, who brought people in twobusses to the luncheon form Century Village west ofBoca Raton.

“It’s just the happiest day of our life,” Jacobssaid. “From now on we’ll be together.”


US APPEALS COURT NIXES

VATICAN BANK HOLOCAUST SUIT

By NICOLE WINFIELD

VATICAN CITY (AP) - An American appeals courtrecently dismissed a lawsuit by Holocaust survivorswho alleged the Vatican bank accepted millions ofdollars of their valuables stolen by Nazi sympathizers.The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Franciscoupheld a lower court ruling that said the Vatican bankwas immune from such a lawsuit under the 1976Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which generallyprotects foreign countries from being sued in U.S.courts.

Holocaust survivors from Croatia, Ukraine andYugoslavia had filed suit against the Vatican bank in1999, alleging that it stored and laundered the lootedassets of thousands of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies whowere killed or captured by the Nazi-backed Ustasharegime that controlled Croatia.

They sought an accounting from the Vatican, aswell as restitution and damages.

The court didn’t rule on the allegations. In itsdecision, the court said the Vatican bank, formallyknown as the Institute for the Works of Religion, orIOR, was a sovereign entity entitled to the protectionsof the foreign sovereign immunities act, and thattherefore U.S. courts had no jurisdiction.

The pope himself has been granted suchprotections in U.S. courts hearing clerical sex abusecases.

Jeffrey Lena, who represented the Vatican Bankin the case, said he was gratified with the ruling sincethe court decided not only that the IOR was asovereign entity but that as such it was immune fromU.S. jurisdiction.

“In defending the lawsuit, the IOR did notchallenge the allegations of the plaintiffs that theyhad suffered terrible losses at the hands of theUstasha,” he told The Associated Press. “Rather thechallenge was simply to the jurisdiction of U.S. courtsover the IOR.”

Jonathan Levy, who represents the survivors, saidhe thought he had sufficiently shown that the Vaticanbank engaged in commercial activities in the UnitedStates, which can serve as an exemption to theprotections granted by the immunities act.

“The reason we’re disappointed is the court foundthat dealing in gold teeth from concentration campswas not a commercial act,” he said.

In its ruling, the court said that the Vatican banks’U.S. commercial activities were “too tangentiallyrelated to their legal claims to be considered the basisfor the suit.”

Levy said he didn’t plan to appeal the judgment.The victims are also suing the Franciscans, the RomanCatholic order, on identical charges, and that portionof the lawsuit is going ahead, he said.

The survivors filed suit against the Vatican Banka year after Swiss Banks agreed to pay some $1.25billion to Nazi victims and their families who accusedthe banks of stealing, concealing or sending to theNazis hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Jewishholdings.

The Vatican bank was famously implicated in ascandal over the collapse of Italy’s BancoAmbrosiano in the 1980s. Roberto Calvi, the head ofthe Banco Ambrosiano, was found hanging fromBlackfriars Bridge in London in 1982. Thecircumstances remain mysterious.

More recently, Italian news reports said lastmonth that Italian financial police were scrutinizingtens of millions of euros worth of Vatican banktransactions to see if they violated money launderingregulations.

Exactly ten years ago, on a cold winter morningin New York City, the Catholic-Jewish HistoricalCommission, established to investigate Pope Pius XII’sresponse to the Holocaust, met for the first time todiscuss its future work. I was the only Israeli historianamong the six scholars (three Catholics and threeJews) designated by the Vatican and leading Jewishorganizations to study this hotly contested issue.

A little under two years later, the project wasabandoned as a result of the Holy See’s unwillingnessto release materials from its own archives that couldhelp clarify issues that our team of scholars raised inour provisional report.

Already at that time, in the last years of PopeJohn Paul’s pontificate, there were moves afoot toplace Pius XII on the fast track to sainthood, but theywere probably slowed down by Israeli and Jewishprotests and a desire by Church authorities to preventa serious rupture in Catholic-Jewish relations.

At issue was the silence of Pius XII during theHolocaust and his indirect complicity in the Nazi massmurder of Jews. These allegations, which firstemerged around 1964, had prompted the Vatican topublish eleven volumes of its own documents (editedby four trusted Jesuit scholars), most of themappearing in the 1970s. It was these documents inItalian, German, French, Latin, and English that wewere originally asked to review. The million or sounpublished documents from the pontificate of PiusXII (1939?1958) according to the Vatican’s mostrecent estimate, will only be available in about fouryear’s time. It is in this context that we need to seethe recent decree onthe “heroic virtues” of Pius XII,just signed by Pope Benedict XVI. Most Jews haveinterpreted this act as yet another signal that theVatican is determined to beatify the controversialwartime pope—whom some even consider to havebeen antisemitic—regardless of what the historicalevidence may indicate. The sharp response of Jewishleaders to Benedict’s decree prompted the Vatican’sPress Office Director, Father Federico Lombardi, S.J.,to release a conciliatory note distinguishing betweenthe historical judgment of Pius XII’s actions (still anopen question) and the saintly Christian life heapparently led. In particular, Father Lombardi wasconcerned to disclaim any notion that this decree was“a hostile act towards the Jewish people” or an obstacleto Catholic-Jewish dialogue. In the light of the pope’sforthcoming visit to the Synagogue of Rome, this wasa politically astute and welcome reassurance.

Nevertheless, the decree on Pius XII still raisesconcern not only about the continuing drive to beatifythe wartime pontiff but also about the present popeand the state of relations between the Catholic Churchand the Jewish people. Regarding Pius XII, Ipersonally have never seen him either as “Hitler’sPope” (the theory of British historian John Cornwell—a “lapsed” Catholic), or as the “Righteous Gentile”evoked by Rabbi David Dallin. My own provisionalconclusion drawn from the study of thousands ofdocuments is that the mass murder of Jews was fairlylow on his list of priorities. Of course, much the samecould be said of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, butthey did not claim to be the “Vicar of Christ” or torepresent the Christian conscience. Pius XII strikesme as a polished diplomat far more worried aboutthe Allied bombing of Rome than about the thousandRoman Jews who were being deported by theGermans to their deaths in Auschwitz, virtually under

the windows of the Holy See. True, other RomanJews were discreetly given sanctuary in ecclesiasticalestablishments in and around Rome after October1943, but it remains unclear if this was the result of adirect papal instruction. In some instances we knowthat Pius XII did try to intervene against Nazi or racistantisemitic legislation, but in general this was almostalways on behalf of baptized Jews since they wereprotected by the Church as Catholics. Pius’ rarereferences to the mass murder of the Jews wereinvariably veiled and very abstract, as if he found itdifficult to utter the word itself. Was it fear of furtherGerman reprisals? A latent antisemitism? Was it hisvisceral anti-Communism which also led him to hopefor a Nazi victory in the East? Or perhaps the desireto spare German Catholics a conflict of consciencebetween their loyalty to Hitler, the fatherland, or theirChurch? Whatever the reasons, this was hardly heroicconduct. So why has Benedict XVI chosen to takethis step now? Why risk unnecessary damage toCatholic-Jewish relations?

My own inclination is to think that the presentpope regards Pius XII as a soulmate—boththeologically and politically. He shares with thewartime pontiff an authoritarian centralist world-viewand a deep distrust of liberalism, modernity, and theravages of moral relativism. He was 31 years oldwhen Pius XII died in 1958, and already then regardedhim as a venerated role model. Moreover, the German-born Joseph Ratzinger (today Benedict XVI) certainlyknew that Pius XII (an artistocratic Roman) was alsoa passionate Germanophile, surrounded by Germanaides during and after the war, fluent in the Germanlanguage, and a great admirer of the German CatholicChurch. Not only that, but Ratzinger probably knowsthat Pius XII personally intervened after 1945 tocommute the sentences of convicted German warcriminals. This solicitude for Nazi criminals contrastssharply with Pius XII ignoring all entreaties to makea public statement against antisemitism even afterthe full horrors of the death camps had been revealedin 1945. In this context it is profoundly unsettling tothink that the ultraconservative Benedict XVI andhis entourage can identify so completely with PiusXII as a man of “heroic virtue.”

The present pope, no doubt, deplores anti-semitism, though his statements on the subject havebeen noticeably less robust than those of hispredecessor, John Paul II. At Yad Vashem lastsummer he expressed no personal regret as a Germanfor the unspeakable horrors of the Shoah, even thoughhe had once been a member of the Hitler Youth. True,he had little choice in the matter. However, he wasdisturbingly vague about the truly monstrous Germanrole in the Holocaust. Earlier this year Benedict alsoshowed remarkably poor judgment (to put itcharitably) in reinstating an unrepentant Holocaust-denying British bishop into the mainstream CatholicChurch, an action he only retracted after worldwideJewish and Catholic protests. These serious mistakesappear to follow a pattern and may even indicate aregression from the real progress in Catholic-Jewishrelations under Benedict’s predecessor. One can onlyhope they are not irreversible since the stakes arehigh and no sane person can be interested inundermining the bridges across the abyss that havebeen so painstakingly constructed.

By ROBERT WISTRICH

Why has Pope Benedict chosen now to beatify Nazi-erapontiff?

Prof. Robert S. Wistrich is the director of The Vidal Sassoon

International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew

University of Jerusalem (http://sicsa.huji.ac.il/).


Att: Dr. Liliane Kshensky Baxterplease contact Tosia Schneider at:[email protected]

Worse Than War, an epic new documentary setfor release on PBS in 2010, takes viewers on anextraordinary journey with noted Holocaust scholarDaniel Goldhagen as he travels to the sites in overeight countries of the worst mass slaughters in thepast century. Together we encounter killers, survivors,witnesses, journalists and political leaders whosestories provide powerful insights into why genocidescontinue to plague our planet. More than 60 yearsafter the Holocaust inspired cries of “Never Again,”is it possible for us to prevent genocide and savemillions of lives? The film shows us how.

“The real challenge in recalling any trauma is nothow many facts are preserved, but how our memoryof the past prevents a recurrence of its horrors forany potential victim,” according to Brad Hirschfield,President of CLAL-The National Jewish Center forLearning and Leadership. “We need to learn how toremember forward, and this film helps us do just that.”Rabbi Hirschfield’s most recent book, You Don’t

Have to Be Wrong For Me to Be Right: Finding

Faith Without Fanaticism, addresses the need tocombat extremism, be it religious, political or personal,by nurturing commitment and opennesssimultaneously.

My colleagues and I are college professors and filmmakers currently working on a documentary film aboutCzech prodigy, Petr Ginz. Petr, who was murdered at Auschwitz when he was 16, wrote five novels andproduced 200 drawings and paintings by the time of his death. Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon took one of Petr’sdrawings, Moon Landscape, into space with him aboard the Columbia space shuttle. My colleagues and I areworking with Yad Vashem and with Petr’s sole surviving family member, Chava Pressburger, on the project.The film is being supported by the Yavitz Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. (For moreabout our work and our graduate program, see www.jou.ufl.edu/documentary)

I was hoping your organization might be able to help us in our search to find individuals who may haveknown Petr Ginz. We are looking only for people who knew Petr personally and had interactions with him inPrague and/or Terezin. We have individuals who describe Terezin in general, the terrible conditions andheartbreak, but we need individuals who had specific encounters with Petr Ginz.Cara Pilson, The Documentary Institute, University of Florida, PO Box 118400, Gainesville, FL 32611

From Merle Funkenberg

The survivors of concentration camps, who decided to appear as witnesses before a German court in the1960 and the 1970, made an important contribution to the prosecution of the crime of the Nazis. The victimshad to report on their experience in the Concentration camps. They suffered mentally: Talking about torture,mindless violence and captivity was a daunting task for the survivors and the public seemed to be more on theside of the accused.

These witnesses were supported by German volunteers. The contact between the survivors and thegerman volunteers were the first peaceful meetings characterized by trust, understanding and sensivity. Despitethat, the support of the witnesses had been overlooked by the scientific research.

The aim of my dissertation is, to analyze the meaning of the volunteer work for the witnesses and itsparticular importance for the international understanding and the controversy about the Nazi dictatorship inthe 1960 and 1970. To realize this project, I am looking for survivors who testified at German courts.Lichtenbergstr. 1 • 37075 Göttingen • GermanyTelefon +49 (0)179 9056470 • e-mail [email protected]

I am undertaking a new project that involves Holocaust survivors. Theidea for this project arose when I was volunteering with the Red Cross,assisting with the missing persons register. Part of what I did was enterinformation from letters sent in searching for family members missingafter World War II. These letters often contained copies of the lastcorrespondence received from the missing family member. I found theseletters incredibly touching. They made history come alive in a way nothing

I had ever read before had. These letters were rendered all the more touching by the knowledge that for thesepeople, it did, indeed, become too late. I found myself crying as I entered the information, but also getting asense of what it meant to face the prospect of having to flee one’s home in a way I never had before.

I would very much like to collect as many of these last letters as possible and publish them as a book. I donot plan to add much to the text of the letters themselves, as there is very little one could add. Each letter willbe photographed and the photograph will be shown on one page. The text will be translated, if necessary, andtyped out on another page. If there is a photograph available of the person, I would like to show that, as wellas any commentary the family would like to include.

My first hurdle, obviously, is finding these families and the letters, especially after so many years. I amhoping that you could help, by passing along my request in Together. I realize that this is a delicate, and sad,request, but I hope that the value of the letters in educating people, of both current and future generations, andgiving them insight into the day-to-day concerns and considerations of people who were realizing that therewas a time limit on how long they could safely remain in their home country, will outweigh the sadness.

Elisabeth Pollaert Smith

If anyone has facility in any of the following languages(Albanian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish,Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Galician, Greek, Hungarian,Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian,Romani, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Sloven,Ukrainian) and is willing to assist the United StatesHolocaust Memorial Museum in translatingdocuments, please contact: Larry Garfinkel, ProjectCoordinator, Registry of Holocaust Survivors, 202-488-6145, [email protected].

From Bernd Horstmann, Custodian for the

Registry of Names, Department of Research

and Documentation at the Bergen-Belsen

Memorial:

I am the Custodian for the Registry of Nameshere in the Department of Research andDocumentation at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial,Anne-Frank-Platz, 29303 Lohheide, Germany.

I am working on compiling and registering thenames and data of the former prisoners of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Since 1990 contact has been made with about3,000 former prisoners of the Bergen-Belsenconcentration camp. There are also many familymembers who are asking for information about theirsisters and brothers, parents, grandparents and otherrelatives.

Contact with the Holocaust Survivors and withthe members of the next generations—all thegenerations—is very important for us. Our permanentexhibition which opened in 2007 would not have beenpossible without their enormous support.

About myself: I was born 20 years after WW II.I am not Jewish and my parents and grandparentswere not persecuted by Nazi Germany, so I am not amember of the 2nd or 3rd generation. I studied politicsand literature at Hannover University (my title is MA)and I live in Hannover. I have been doing this workfor about 10 years, getting in contact with manySurvivors of Bergen-Belsen and also members of thesecond generation.

I would appreciate any assistance in contactingSurvivors of Bergen-Belsen and their descendants. Ican be reached directly at: bernd.horstmann

@stiftung-ng.de

From Rainier Voss, Head of County Archives, Celle,Germany:

I live in Celle, where I am the head of the countyarchives. Celle is about 20 miles south of Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany. As the Bergen-Belsenarea became part of our county after World War IIthere are quite a few files about Bergen-Belsenconcentration camp, DP camp and the Memorial inmy archives. Moreover parts of the V-2rocket thatwas assembled in Mittelbau-Dora were produced inour county and the death marches and transports fromMittelbau-Dora and its subcamps to Bergen-Belsenalso came through our county.

I am looking urgently for information on a deathmarch that passed through Celle on April 10, 1945 onits way to Bergen-Belsen. This march was part ofthe evacuation of Klein Bodungen, a subcamp ofMittelbau-Dora. This death march of about 500prisoners left Klein Bodungen at the beginning of Apriland passed through Celle in the early afternoon ofApril 10th. Just northwest of Celle, in Gross Hehlen,the prisoners wanted to rest for the night, but theywere driven further on by the SS. Just outside GrossHehlen, the group ran into fire by the GermanWehrmacht who had dug themselves in the woods.Several people were killed. The survivors went on

towards Bergen-Belsen and spent the night inWittbeck, about half way between Celle and Bergen-Belsen.

I am looking for any information on this march,especially on what happened in the Celle area, names,details, etc. This death march had always been mixedup with the march that took place after the bombingof the Celle train station on April 8, 1945, when twotransports with concentration camp inmates were hit.

After the bombing, the survivors were chasedby German police, soldiers, and even inhabitants ofCelle, and many were killed after they had survivedthe bombing. This became infamous as the “CelleHasenjagd” (“rabbit hunt” or “hare chase” ofCelle). These survivors were then put on a death marchto Bergen-Belsen on the morning of April 10th. Thedifference between these two marches is just a fewhours. That may be the reason, why so far, everyonehas thought that there had only been one march.

Information on the death march after the Cellebombing would also be much appreciated. Manydetails about that march are still unknown as well.

If anyone has any information about either oftheese two death marches, please contact me directlyat: [email protected].


Yitzhak “Ike” AharonovitchBy Eli Ashkenazi, Haaretz

The captain of the legendary pre-state Jewishimmigrant ship Exodus, Yitzhak “Ike” Aharonovitch,died recently in Hadera at the age of 86.

Aharonovitch was born in Germany and came toPalestine as a child in 1932 with his family. At theage of 17, he stole away on a ship and sought to jointhe Soviet army to fight the Germans, but he wascaught and returned to Palestine.

He later joined the Palyam, the naval unit of thepre-state Palmach Jewish military force. He went toLondon to study seamanship, but returned to Palestinewithout completing his studies to get involved inbringing in illegal Jewish immigrants.

In 1946, he boarded the Exodus in Baltimore andworked on the ship’s renovation. When the ship’scaptain resigned, Aharonovitch, then 23, assumed thepost. The ship left France in July of that year with4,515 Holocaust survivors on board. After two monthsof run-ins with the British, its passengers werereturned to France; when they refused to disembarkthere, they were deported to Hamburg, Germany.

Aharonovitch was shown to be a fascinatingfigure. He charmed those around him, with his calm,his determination and his devotion.

Israel BerkenwaldIsrael Berkenwald, 86, of West Palm Beach, FL, diedOct. 18, 2009. Born in Lodz, Poland, he formerly livedin Bloomfield, New Jersey and New York City.

Berkenwald arrived in New York City in May1946 on the Marine Flasher, the first ship of Holocaust survivors to enter the United States. Hewas the sole survivor of his large family. After a fewyears as an operator in the garment trade, he becamean executive in the ILGWU, becoming the northernregion’s Administrative Supervisor until hisretirement.

He was active in the Workmen’s Circle, theLiberal Party of New York City, taught at the FashionInstitute of Technology, and in retirement, was activein Holocaust Survivor organizations.

William H. DonatWilliam Donat was born inPoland in 1937. AfterGermany invaded Poland,he and his parents wereconfined to the WarsawGhetto. He is one of ahandful of young childrenfrom the Warsaw Ghetto to

have survived.When he was 5, he was smuggled out of the

ghetto and given to Christian friends of his parents.Shortly thereafter, he was betrayed and had to spendthe remainder of the war in a Catholic orphanage.Meanwhile, his parents were sent to variousconcentration camps where they spent the remainingyears of the war. Fortunately, both survived and thefamily was reunited after the war.

Immediately after World War II, he was broughtto the United States where he grew up in New YorkCity. He attended public schools and graduated fromthe Bronx High School of Science in 1956. He

received a B.A.from Colgate University in 1960. Aftergraduation he was married, and then went on activeduty with the U.S. Army.

His professional career was spent in bookpublishing and in graphic arts. He simultaneouslydevoted much of his time working pro bono as aneditor, and then as the chairman of the non-profitHolocaust Library, which published 56 books aboutNazi persecution of Jews in Europe. He was amember of the Editorial Committee of the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and anactive speaker for the Museum of Jewish Heritagein New York.

He participated in the editing of the republishedversion of Alexander Donat’s The Holocaust

Kingdom, which is his father’s classic wartimememoir of their family. He subsequently participatedin a series of fundraising events where he was thekeynote speaker for the publisher, the U.S. Holocaust

Memorial Museum.

Jake HeifetzBy Samara Kalk DerbyJake Heifetz, who survived the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland after three years in the woodsfighting with the resistance, has died of cancer. Hewas 92.

Heifetz grew up in a family of seven children inLachwa, Poland. In September 1942, Heifetz andanother brother fled into the forest to escape thedestruction of their town by the Nazis. The rest ofhis family perished.

Her father was a freedom fighter, Pauline Heifetzsaid. Young guys such as her father were in chargeof going into the villages at night and getting food,drink and clothing, she said. A lot of the women wouldstay back and make the meals and take care of thechildren, she added. It was in the underground campswhere her father met her mother, Fania.

“She never learned English. Her experience wasworse than Dad’s as far as not having anyone left.They burned her village,” Pauline Heifetz said. “Shewas just happy to have anything. Her wedding ringwas a wedding, a new life, a new start. They werevery happy just to be alive.”

The couple decided to come to Madison whereHeifetz’ older brother settled.

Heifetz worked as a carpenter in Madison, andafter his retirement in 1974, he and Fania becamethe caretakers for their synagogue. Even five weeksago he was mowing the temple’s lawn, said RabbiJoshua Ben Gideon. “Jake was the heart and soul ofthe congregation in a lot of ways,” Gideon said.

Given his life story, many people would be bitterand nasty, but not her father, Pauline Heifetz said.He told everyone, ‘Life is short, live it.’”

Victor LewisVictor Lewis (WiktorLezerkiewicz), a Holo-caustsurvivor from Krakow,Poland, who escaped a traintransport from the KrakowGhetto to the Belzec deathcamp and became a Plaszow

camp prisoner and Schindler’s List survivor, died onOctober 5th in Queens, NYC, at the age of 90.

Lewis’ Holocaust experiences and transportescape were documented in testimonies to the ShoahFoundation Institute (1994), in a chapter on his life inthe book, Schindler’s Legacy (1994), in his autobio-graphical memoir Hardships and Near-Death

Experiences at the Hands of the Nazi SS and

Gestapo (1942-1945)(2000), in various interviews,speeches, and published articles, and in Churban, adocumentary film currently being produced about thelives of several Holocaust survivors.

As the only Jewish worker in the Krakow Ghettoauto repair shop, Lewis stole a hacksaw blade fromthe shop after witnessing the first bloody liquidationof the ghetto in June 1942. “I kept the blade in myboot in case I would need it someday,” Lewis oftensaid. That day would come four months later, onOctober 28, 1942, when Lewis was rounded up inthe ghetto for transport and extermination to theBelzec death camp along with his parents, sister,brother, his future wife’s mother and two sisters, and4,500 other Jews in the Krakow Ghetto.

After being forced into cattle cars, Lewisinformed his family of his plan to use his hacksaw tosaw the bars of the cattle car and escape from thetransport. Victor and his brother, Leon, both jumpedoff of the train to save their lives. Their parents,Abraham and Bertha, and sister, Greta, decided notto jump. The Lewis brothers never saw their parentsor sister again, and never again saw anyone else theyknew on the transport.

Both brothers survived the Holocaust, immigratedto the U.S., and raised families in the New Yorkmetropolitan area.

At the October 1965 Nazi War Crimes testimonyin Kiel, Germany, against SS-HauptsturmfuhrerMartin Fellenz, the Nazi commander of the Krakowghetto deportations, Lewis testified against the allegedsuspect, recounting the roundup, Fellenz’ role, andLewis’ escape from the train. Fellenz was convictedthe following year of war crimes and sentenced toprison.

In the United States, Lewis became a founder ofthe New Cracow Friendship Society in 1965 andserved continuously on its Board of Directors. Heserved on the Board of Directors of Beit Halochem(Friends of Israel Disabled Veterans) and washonored to represent Krakow in candle lightingceremonies at the American Gathering of JewishHolocaust Survivors’ commemoration ceremonies atTemple Emanu-El and at Madison Square Garden inManhattan.

Naava PiatkaMultitalented nternationallyknown artist/actress/play-wright/author, Naava Piatka,died peacefully at age 57 onSeptember 17, 2009 after abrave struggle with cancer.

Born in Cape Town,South Africa to Holocaust

survivor parents, Naava began her performing careeras a child, singing on stage with her cabaret starmother, Chayela Rosenthal. She taught at theGertrude Haas Entertainment Educational Center, didradio work and held her sold-out first art exhibition ofpaintings of Jerusalem at the age of 22.

After moving to Johannesburg, she worked as afreelance journalist, started the art department at alocal private school, exhibited her artwork in localgalleries and co-founded Stages, a children’s theatercompany. After marrying and immigrating to the USA,Naava continued exhibiting and selling her fine art,working as an actress in regional theater, writing anddirecting original musicals for Showstoppers, thetheater troupe for children she began at the NewtonJCC.

cont’d on p. 18


As a writer,Naava receiveda MassachusettsCultural CouncilGrant to stage herf u l l - l e n g t h

musical, won several Boston Playwrights’ New Playscompetitions and received commissions for her musicalplays. Naava’s debut book No Goodbyes, a father-daughter memoir about love, war and resurrection, thatshe finished while battling her cancer and otherhealth complications, was just published.

As an actress, Naava was best known for herinternationally acclaimed solo musical performancepiece, Better Don’t Talk (aka Finding My Mother’s

Voice) about the remarkable life and times of herHolocaust survivor actress mother, star of the VilnaGhetto.

Alice Pfefferby Deanna Pfeffer BlairAlice Pfeffer nee Lilienfeld passed away at the ageof 94½. She came to this country in 1938, escapingthe horrors of the Nazis. My Aunt Blanche (Lilienfeld)Israel (1909 – 2001), her sister, followed her in 1939.

She was a victim of Nazi abuse on Kristallnachtwhose parents were killed in Auschwitz. My father,Isaac Pfeffer (1909 – 1981), also lost his parents andsister in the Holocaust. My Mother never forgot theirloss. She always said that she had “Survivor’s Guilt.”

When she came to this country she settled in NewYork City. She worked as a milliner, designing hats forJohn Fredricks, Mr. John, Halston and BergdorfGoodman. She made hats for the movie Gone with

the Wind, and well-known individuals like Jackie O.My mother was an intelligent woman. She was

an active member of the Rego Park Jewish Center,where the Sisterhood depended on her creativity forall their functions.

Once the Anchorage Times came from Alaskato interview her about the emigration of GermanJews during the Holocaust. During the war, hercousins tried to flee Nazi German by requestingasylum in Alaska, but theywere denied access. Theyremained in Germany, were placed in concentrationcamps and executed.

We all miss her very much, but take solace inknowing she is with my Dad and her parents again.

Abe PollinThe American Gathering

offers condolences to

the Pollin family on

their loss. The Gather-

ing was founded at a

conference for Holo-

caust Survivors and

their descendants in

Washington, D.C. in

1983. Ben Meed, our

president, was able to rent Mr. Pollin’s Capital

Centre for the opening ceremony on very short

notice.American Gathering Chairman Roman R.

Kent describes what happened next: “When the

opening ceremonies were over, we wanted to pay

our bill, about $150,000, so Ben Meed and I made

an appointment to see Mr. Pollin, and we took

our wives along. We wanted to thank him for

making the site available to us at such short notice,

and to express our appreciation for the

professionalism and thoughtfulness of his staff.

“We were impressed when Mr. Pollin greeted

us not as the owner of the Capital Centre, but as

a gracious host. He invited us into his office and

offered us refreshments. When we started to write

the check, I will never forget how he took the

invoice and tore it up in front of us. His words

still ring in my ears: ‘You don’t owe me any-

thing...It is I who am indebted to you for bringing

under my roof 20,000 survivors who endured the

horrors of the Holocaust, the President of the

United States, and a considerable number of

renowned dignitaries.’ He said it was an

experience he would remember for the rest of his

life.”

Abe Pollin and the example of heartfelt

generosity he set for the Jewish people will always

be remembered with deep respect and fondness

by Holocaust survivors and their descendants.

May his memory be a blessing.

Abe Pollin, a longtime supporter of Israel andJewish causes, has died at the age of 85. Best knownas the owner of the Washington Wizards basketballteam and the Verizon Center the team played in, Pollinserved on the boards of AIPAC, Hillel, and The IsraelProject, and was involved in numerous philanthropicactivities in and outside the Jewish community. Morerecently, Pollin was one of three Washington real-estate developers who in 2004 bought and restoredthe Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, the former homeof the Adas Israel synagogue before it could be turnedinto a nightclub. The facility is now a magnet for thecity’s younger Jews, sponsoring a variety of Jewishand cultural programming, and is in the sameneighborhood Pollin revitalized when he built theVerizon Center.

Pollin was born on 3 December 1923 to Mr. andMrs. Morris Pollin. When he was 8, Pollin’s familymoved to the Washington area from Philadelphia.Pollin graduated from George Washington Universityin 1945 and took a job with his family’s constructioncompany that lasted for 12 years. Pollin launched hisown construction company in 1957.

A successful contractor in the Washington area,he headed an investment group that bought the thenBaltimore Bullets in 1964. He moved the team to theWashington area in 1973 after building the CapitalCentre and renamed it the Washington Wizards in1996. (Abridged from story by Eric Fingerhut, JTA.)

Martin MarcelPreislerMartin Marcel Preisler, 86, ofElkhart recently passed awayin South Bend, IN.

Born November 5th 1922,in Cluj/Transylvania, Romaniato Adalbert and Hermina

(Lowinger) Preisler, he also had a sister Judith. Hisparents and sister died in the Holocaust. However,born of tragedy would be a man of heroic action theworld should know and never forget.

His career was in the hospitality industry workingin many five-star facilities in Europe and owning theTea Break in Paris. He married Dr. Sylvia Yvette(March) Preisler in Miami, FL on July 2, 1979.

Fred SilbersteinFred Silberstein, 80, a survivor of Auschwitz who gaveevidence at the Nuremberg Trials has died in NewZealand. Silberstein, who was 14 when he was takento Auschwitz in 1943, spent much of his life educatingpeople in New Zealand about the horrors of theHolocaust and the subsequent dangers of racism. Thepresident of the New Zealand Jewish Council,

Stephen Goodman, described him as a righteousperson. “For 60 years he worked tirelessly bearingwitness to the horrors of the Holocaust,” Goodmansaid. “He was a modest and humble man.”

Silberstein survived operations by Nazi “doctor”Josef Mengele and avoided near-certain death bytelling camp guards he was 15 and able to do manuallabor. His evidence at the Nuremburg trials in 1946helped to convict Nazi leaders Hermann Göring andRudolf Heß. He moved to New Zealand in 1948.

Sali SzlamBy Rick Badie, The Atlanta

Journal-Constitution

In 1942, a young Sali Szlamwas herded from her homealong with thousands of otherRomanian Jews. Germansoldiers marched themthrough the woods forseveral weeks. Eventually,they were packed on a train

like sardines, then shipped to a ghetto in Transnistria,near the Ukraine border. There, her father died.Miraculously, she, her mother and her sister survived.

In 1968, due to rising antisemitism in Poland, Mrs.Szlam and her family migrated elsewhere. By then,she was married with two children. Her daughter,Melita, moved to Israel. The rest of the family settledin Rome, Italy, but had their eyes set on America.

In 1970, with the aid of the Jewish Federation ofGreater Atlanta, they relocated to Atlanta.

Through the years, Mrs. Szlam expressedgratitude for the Jewish organizations that helped thefamily settle in America. She also was grateful forsurviving the Holocaust. She showed it through action,not words.

“The empathy, caring for others, being involvedin the community—it came from her heart,” said ason, Aleksander Szlam of Alpharetta. “Nothingelse. She was always doing things for other people. Igrew up with this and understood the calling.”

Leopold and Sali Szlam were honored asHolocaust Survivors by the Jewish NationalFund. The couple met in Poland after the war. Hewas 99 when he died.

In June, Mrs. Szlam was diagnosed with ovariancancer. It spread quickly. She died at her home fromcomplications of the disease. She was 84.

RichardWeilheimerAt the age of 7 RichardWeilheimer witnessed thearrest of his father, thedestruction of his home, andthe burning of his synagogueon Kristallnacht. In October1940 his entire family wasdeported to Camp de Gurs in

Vichy-controlled France. Several months later theQuakers arranged for Richard and his youngerbrother to be placed in an orphanage in Aspet, southernFrance. His mother died in 1941 and two years laterhis father was gassed in Sobibor. Subsequently, theQuakers arranged for Richard and his brother to beon the last ship out of Europe just five days beforeAdolf Eichmann came to Paris to demand the “FinalSolution of the Jewish Question.”

Richard arrived in the United States at the ageof 10. He integrated into American society, fought inIn addition to writing three books about his

cont’d on p. 19


the Korean conflict, and had a successful career in the fashion accessoryindustry. He wrote a book for his wife and children, Be Happy, Be Free,

Dance! A Holocaust Survivor’s Message to His Grandchilden andwas involved with The Child Survivors/Hidden Children group of Florida.He passed away on November 27, 2009.

Leon Weliczker WellsLeon Weliczker Wells was born in Stojanow near Lvov, Poland in March 1925. He livedthrough the Russian and German occupations, and was arrested with his father and onebrother. Released three days later, he was rearrested and incarcerated in the JanowskaCamp in 1942. He worked as a glazier, and after recovering from typhus managed toescape during a mass shooting. He returned to his shtetl to discover his sisters had beenmurdered and his parents deported when the town was liquidated. He lived with his tworemaining brothers in Lvov until June 1943, when he was rearrested and taken to JanowskaCamp, where he was put into a sonderkommando that destroyed the bodies (evidence)of the people murdered there. He escaped again, was hidden by a Catholic family who

saved 22 Jews and was liberated by Soviet troops.Wells came to the U.S., and earned a doctorate in engineering and did post-graduate work in physics.

From 1950 to 1953, he was an associate researcher at New York University and graduated from the Schoolof Mathematics and Mechanics. He served as research director at Commerce International and was a projectengineer at Curtis-Wright Aeronautics.

Wells was a primary witness at the Nuremburg war crimes trials and at the Eichmann trial in Tel Aviv.In addition to writing three books about his experiences during the Holocaust—Death Brigade (1978)

repinted as The Janowska Road (1999), Who Speaks for the Vanquished (1988) and Shattered Faith

(1995)—he published many papers on engineering and held several patents. He was one of the early pioneersof VHS technology.

A member of the National Council of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and TheirDescendants, Leon Wells passed away on December 19, 2009.

cont’d from p. 18

MAREK EDELMAN (1919—2009): A REMINISCENCEby JERZY B. WARMAN

Marek Edelman, the last commander of theWarsaw Ghetto Uprising, died in Warsaw on October2, 2009. He was fated to become a hero at the age of24 and, after the war, a complex symbol of Jewishresistance to the Nazis. He was the best known figureamong the surviving remnant of Jews in Poland, thepersonification of courage and a chafing embodimentof moral authority. Since the burning days of April1943 he stood wholeheartedly in opposition to tyrannyand evil, always on the side of the weak, the powerless,and the suffering. Before the memory of the maninevitably becomes a monument carved in the whitemarble of piety, I want to remember Marek as a manwho was—for a son of his comrades—a childhoodidol, a stern and sometimes sarcasticcritic, a constant point of referenceand an unwitting mentor.

Marek was born in Homel,White Russia, and was orphaned asa child. He was raised by friends ofhis parents, members of the Bund,the General Jewish Workers Partyof Poland and Lithuania, at the timethe largest Jewish politicalorganization in Poland. The Bundwas his cradle, his home and school,and the most significant formativeinfluence in life. It was through hisspiritual grandfathers in the Bund,Henryk Erlich and Wiktor Alter, thathe became a Yiddish socialist, andthrough Abrasha Blum, BernardGoldstein and Maurycy Orzech, hispolitical fathers in the WarsawGhetto, that he joined the resistance.

As a representative of the Bund,Marek was a deputy commander of the JewishFighting Organization (¯OB), which began

preparations for an armed revolt against the Nazis inthe horrifying summer of 1942. During the GhettoUprising he commanded the Brushmakers’ factoryarea. After Mordechai Anielewicz’s death he becamethe last commander of the dwindling resistance forces.He and Ziviah Lubetkin led a handful of the survivingfighters out of the ghetto flames to the “Aryan Side”and into hiding.

With the ghetto gone, with Itzhak “Antek”Zuckerman he organized and managed anunderground network to aid Jews in hiding. Marekfought the German army in the Warsaw Uprising inAugust-September 1944, in the Jewish unit acceptedby the communist-led People’s Army during the

battle’s first days.When Warsaw

surrendered, a group of about15 Jewish fighters, includingMarek, Ziviah, Antek, and myparents, Marysia Feinmesserand Zygmunt Warman, hid forsix weeks in a cellar until theywere miraculously smuggledout of Warsaw by rescuers ledby Alina Margolis, Marek’s wifeafter the war.

Soon after the liberationmost of the Jewish survivors leftPoland. Marek stayed. Thisdecision made him acontroversial, if not a whollysuspect figure, in Israel and withNorth American Jewry. Yet itwas not in the least a betrayalor evidence of politicalopportunism. To the contrary—

always faithful to the ideals of his youth, Marek wasinstrumental in the Bund decision, made in 1948, to

dissolve instead of yielding to communist pressure tomerge with the Polish Workers’ Party. But he couldnot abandon the place that defined him for the rest ofhis life.

In 1945 Marek and Ala settled in £ódŸ, in thevilla of Dr. Anna Margolis, his mother-in-law, andstudied medicine. The couple became renownedphysicians—Ala as a pediatrician and a respectedauthority on childhood diabetes, and Marek as acardiologist. In the 1970s Marek conceived of and,together with Professor Jan Moll, designed aninnovative surgical procedure for heart attack patientswho suffered usually fatal, extensive heart-muscledamage.

Even during the vicious antisemitic purges,launched by the government in 1968, Marek refusedto budge. His wife and children immigrated to Francebut he would not let others define him or tell himwhere he could live. He felt it was his duty to standguard over the ashes of Poland’s Jews, to keep thememory of his fallen comrades alive, and to serve asan eyewitness for young generations of Poles.

He signed public protests against communistattempts to sovietize Poland. In 1976 he joined theCommittee for the Defense of Workers (“KOR”)which became the intellectual godparent of Solidarity.After the fall of communism in 1989, he was amongthe most important public figures in democratic Poland.He condemned contemporary assaults on humandignity, advocated various humanitarian causes, andopposed nationalism, antisemitism, the semi-fascistfringe, and the right-wingers in Polish politics. Polandhonored him with its highest distinction, the Order ofthe White Eagle; France made him a Chevalier deLegion d’Honneur; and he received honorarydoctorates from Yale and Jagiellonian Universities.

These bare facts of Marek’s official biographycannot capture the essence of the man. What was itlike to be a walking history and still be human—facingeach day with a sense of ethical duty, love for hischildren, devotion to friends, anger at much that washappening in the world, sadness of immeasurablelosses, and an extraordinary sense of professionalresponsibility to his patients? What does it mean toexist as a living memory?

At every opportunity Marek retold hisunvarnished memories of the Warsaw Ghetto. Heinsisted that what he and other young boys and girlsdid in April 1943 was not heroism. They fought withouthope, their only goal to die the way they chose forthemselves and to take a few Germans along withthem. Not to “die with dignity”—the phrase madehim livid—because he saw both dignity and evengreater courage in the mass of humanity he watchedevery day on the Umschlagplatz as inhabitants ofthe ghetto were pushed into the cattle cars waiting totransport them to Treblinka.

It is not for me to write about Marek’sexperiences in the ghetto. He spoke about these thingshimself, as the author of The Ghetto Fights, abrochure written in 1945, and later in several book-length interviews. No one has captured Marek’s voicebetter than Hanna Krall, a prominent journalist andchild survivor, in her Zd¹¿yæ Przed Panem Bogiem,a life story told in the mid-1970s, published in Englishin 1986 as Shielding the Flame. In that book hespeaks with such intensity that he sounds as if hewere sitting across the table from the reader.

Even among his friends Marek was special. Hecould be gruff, even rude, but it was impossible toignore him or dismiss what he said. His wisdom didnot originate from scholarly books or training withgreat masters. It sprang from being forced to confronthimself in the most extreme circumstances, from

cont’d on p. 21


“VOS IS GEVEYN IS GEVEYNIS MEHR NISHT DU”In Memoriam: Leon Wells, 1925-2009Leon Wells was a gentle, quiet man who vented hisrage at injustice by bearing witness to the past.He testified at the Nuremburg war crimes trials andat the Eichmann trial. His books, The Death Brigade

(reprinted by the USHMM as Janowska Road), Who

Speaks for the Vanquished? and Shattered

Faith told the stories of those he left behind and neverforgot.

Though raised in a home and shtetl that couldcome straight from a Sholom Aleichem story, Leon’slife was radically changed with the outbreak of WorldWar II. His story echoes the stories of thousands ofother survivor stories, each unique, each containingits own horror, as the Jewish people slowly fell intothe abyss. As a sonderkommando in Janowska campin Lvov, his experiences were particularly bitter.

Despite the agony, Leon’s eloquence anddetermination to be completely honest never waned.He thought before he spoke, weighing each wordcarefully, so that the brutality he had to describe mightbe less painful to the listener—and yet not a detailwas dismissed and the obligation to remember wasfirst and foremost in his heart.

When reminiscing about his childhood, his faithin Judaism and God, he would say, “Vos iz geveyn is

geveyn iz mehr nisht du.” What was, was and is nomore.

These words echoed in Leon’s mind every Yom

Kippur. He tried to conform to normative Jewishobservance, but really could not. He came toChavurah Beth Shalom on Shabbat mornings to listento and debate with his rabbi, Jack Bemporad, becausehe said, “A rabbi who talks about Plato is worthlearning from.”

Leon loved Plato, and knew very well that the“cave-dwellers” would prefer to keep him quiet. Yetalmost to the end, he refused to be silenced. He toldthe story of our legacy the way it needed to be told,and called Jewish leaders and world leaders toaccount. Near the end, he was still writing lettersand articles about Jewish and political injustice to localnewspapers and Together. In his gentlemanly manner,Leon never let leadership, Jewish or non-Jewish, everintimidate him.

Leon summed up his philosophy of lifein Shattered Faith, where he described visiting thesynagogue in Warsaw in 1994. He concluded hismemoirs with these thoughts:

“The synagogue was small, over 100 seatsdownstairs and about the same number in the balconyfor the women. It looked freshly painted, all white,restored and quite beautiful in its stark simplicity. Itwas Orthodox, like most synagogues prior to the war,But when my wife and I arrived for Kol Nidre, itbore no resemblance to the Kol Nidre from beforethe war. There were no lighted candles, there wasno sense of awe, no one without shoes or in slippers,no aura of fear for the Day of Judgment. The prayerswere mumbled routinely, quickly and without anyspecial melody or sense of urgency....

“This synagogue for me was proof that whatwas, was, and is no more. That sentence keepsrepeating in my mind again and again. As in the prayerof Hallel, it is not the dead who praise the Lord, it isnot those who go down in silence. Dead is dead. It isall gone, completely eradicated, as it was on that firstYom Kippur after my liberation...

“The love song of Kol Nidre that was once sungby the angels still echoes in my inner ear as a distantremembrance. It may have ended only for those whosuffered, were tortured and burned. For the living itgoes on and on, year after year. Yom Kippur is forthe living, and they will praise you God. The oneslowered into the dark depths, the charred and themaimed will be muted forever, and their pain will notbe felt by the living.

“He feedeth on ashes.”(Isaiah, 44:20) ...and sothe cycle goes on and on...And I, too, with the loveof my family, in spite of knowing the pains and truths,will continue in the same way. Therefore let everyman remember all that happened from the day ofAbraham, beginning of time until this hour. As it issaid, ‘Remember these oh Jacob and Israel (Isaiah44:21).’

“Oh that my words were now written! Oh thatthey were printed in a book! (Job 19:23).”

As Leon always said, “Vos iz geveyn is geveyn

iz mehr nisht du. What was, was, and is no more!”And yet he never stopped caring and placed his faithin young people, hoping that they would break thecycle of misery and violence to help repair the world.

—Jeanette Friedman

Now that the Holocaust is an “in” subject, peoplewho have experienced it first hand are talking withothers even if it is painful; some in turn listen withsympathy and understanding. I would like to tell youof an amusing incident that happened to me an thetwo sisters who befriended me when I was left atone.

It happened in the concentration camp inSkarzysko (Poland) on a blistering coldSunday morning during the winter of 1943.The exact month I do not remember but Icannot forget the cold, the wind, the finepowdery snow blowing in the sunshine, thegrowing pain of hunger and the hopelessnessof abandonment,

Sunday was our day off from work inthe munitions factory. We could sleep longerand didn’t have to be in line early in themorning to be looked over and countedrepeatedly before being taken to work. Wecould sleep and stay in bed which wassomething called pryeze. It was rough hewnwood made four levels high by four or sixlow narrow compartments wide, with somestraw onto it. We three happened to have thecorner pryeze on the second level into whichyou could slide from two sides.

As a young teenager I was’ prone tosleeping as !ate as possible. Many times Leahwould threaten me that she would not keepon waking me up every few minutes to get readyfor the lineup. She said she would let me sleep andthat “they will come and just take you away.” Anyway,it was cold and getting late and time to get in line forthe daily soup ration which always smelled like burntlentil beans. It wasn’t a smell that was in any wayappealing, but rather the thought of a warm liquid

A Soup SurpriseBy ROSE DORFMAN (MALCMAN)

flowing into the throat that got one moving.The soup used to come to camp in large kettles

and was dished out with long-handled measuring cups.The distributing was done by the kapos who werecareful not to mix the soup and disturb the solids thatsettled to the bottom. That they kept for themselvesand their girlfriends. Sometimes those who were firstin line were better off because when the .lids of thekettles were removed the kapo made mixing gestures,of which they were experts, lowered the handle to

almost the middle, never the bottom, and pretendedto vigorously mix. Some, of the soup actually did getmixed and those few lucky ones who happened to bein line at that moment of mixing were rewarded witha piece of potato or a morsel of horse meat. Whensuch s solid substance hit the tin cup it was a soundof joy to behold.

People used to try to figure out where to stand inline for the best chance of mixing time. However, ifone got out of. line in order to go to the end, thebeating and abuse was not worth the pain andhumiliation. So, you just stood in line hoping that hisarm would be making circle motions in the kettle.

Getting back to the amusing side of this story, itwas cold and blustery and as always it fell on Leahto go out and get the soup. She dressed in all the ragswe had, put my coat which supposedly was the

warmest, took the one pot we had and wentout. After she left we didn’t sleep. We justlistened to the sounds around us, the coughingand grunting and also the lack of sounds fromthose who no longer were making any, thosewho would be taken out later. One by oneother people kept coming in and the smell ofthe soup penetrated the air. Suddenly therewas Leah, the clean cold smell of the outdoorswas all around her, the snow flakes stillclinging to her eyelashes, and the soup potin her hands.

In an excited but hushed voice she kepton saying, “Get up, get up! Something fell intothe soup.” We didn’t need to hear any more.Swiftly we slid to the edge of the bed whereLeah had put the pot. We reached under thestraw at the head of the bed for our spoons.We plunged into the pot like true huntersseeking the prize that was to be ours.

The humor of the situation didn’t strikeus then, but now when we meet yearly in

Miami, we do talk about those sad times and laughabout our big prize in the soup. It isn’t a belly laughthat comes out, it’s more of a hollow sound, but I stillremember well the sickening feeling of disappointmentwhen we had pulled out our prize and found it to be apiece of dish cloth. We wrung it out as best we couldand finished the soup to the last drop.


having to face his own weaknesses, perhaps even along-remembered failure to do what may have beenbeyond possible. And it was informed by the ever-present memory of the fallen, those he deemed betterthan he and more deserving to survive.

Marek rescued many, and he was himself rescuedby others. He owed his life to Dr. Anna Braude-Heller,the director of the Bersons and Baumans ChildrenHospital in the ghetto, where he was a messengerand took his first steps into armed conspiracy.

During the Great Deportation in the summer of1942 only those with official work permits could avoiddeportation to Treblinka. The Germans gave themout sparingly—they issued so few for the Children’sHospital that only a fraction of the staff could bespared. Dr. Braude-Heller had to decide who wouldget one and who would not. She did not keep one forherself. Instead, she bet on youth. She believed thatyoung people had a better chance of survival and agreater claim to life. Marek and several others, mymother among them, received these “numbers forlife.” What a bet Dr. Braude-Heller made! And howmuch had she won in return…

Marek was later saved by Simha “Kazik”Ratajzer, who coerced two water workers in Warsawto lead him through the sewers into the dying ghetto,where he found the remaining fighters and broughtthem to the “Aryan Side.” He was hidden in a secretapartment in Warsaw by Marysia Sawicka, VladkaMeed and other girls who were indispensable ¯OBmessengers and caretakers of its hiding places. Hewas rescued again by Anna and Ala Margolis fromthe deserted ruins of Warsaw in November 1944.

Marek knew he had a debt to the dead and to theliving. And he repaid it throughout the rest of his life,

Name ________________________________________________Address_______________________________________________City ________________________________State __ Zip ________Phone_________________________________________________Number of Markers _____________Total Amount Enclosed $__________

Special “Matzevah Marker”Available for Survivors’ Graves

Survival has placed upon us theresponsibility of making sure that theHolocaust is remembered forever. Each ofus has the sacred obligation to share thistask while we still can. However, with thepassage of each year, we realize that time isagainst us, and we must make sure to utilizeall means for future remembrance.

A permanent step toward achieving thisimportant goal can be realized by placing aunique and visible maker on the gravestoneof every survivor. The most meaningfulsymbol for this purpose is our Survivorlogo, inscribed with the wordsHOLOCAUST SURVIVOR. This simple, yet

dramatic, maker will re-affirm ouruniqueness and our place in history forfuture generations.

Our impressive MATZEVAH marker isnow available for purchase. It is cast in solidbronze, measuring 5x7 inches, and can beattached to new or existing tombstones.The cost of each marker is $125.

Additional donations are gratefullyappreciated.

Let us buy the marker now and leavestructions in our wills for its use. This willenable every one of us to leave on this earthvisible proof of our miraculous survival and

The cost of each marker is US $125 including shipping & handling.Make checks payable to: American Gatheringand mail to:

American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants122 West 30th Street, Suite 205New York, NY 10001Please allow sixty (60) days for delivery.

MAREK EDELMAN (1919—2009):

A REMINISCENCE

cont’d from p. 19

splendidly. He did it by teaching younger generationsand serving as their role model. He repaid it by beingthe closest friend to his surviving comrades-in-armsand their children, and through his political andhumanitarian actions.

But he repaid it most of all to the ill and infirmfrom all walks of life. For Marek was an incredibledoctor. He had an unbelievable diagnostic intuition, asixth sense almost. I am told that this is a gift,something that cannot be learned from textbooks orin medical school. But I wonder. A few times, Iwatched him examine my parents’ friends. If theirproblem was beyond medicine’s power he woulddismiss their complaints, almost derisively saying therewas nothing seriously wrong with them. But if heknew that something could be done to cure or help,he would devote hours talking to the patient andconducting the most thorough examination. I amconvinced that his experiences in the ghetto—wherehe had only seconds to decide who could be helpedand who had to be let go; in the ¯OB, where he hadto judge in a blink of an eye the essence of a fellowfighter’s character; or in hiding where only instinctcould tell him whom to trust—were what honed hisunerring perceptiveness as a doctor.

All of us who knew him, children and friends,sensed this. He was someone who knew. Marekappeared to be a skeptic, even a cynic—more oftenthan not, a pessimist. He used to say that man wasby nature a wild beast, an evil creature. He learnedtruths of which others had only a vague inkling. Andhe told these truths in startling and confounding ways.In the preface to the reissue of The Ghetto Fightshe wrote: “In principle, the most important thing islife. And when there is life, freedom becomes themost important. Then you give your life for freedom.So, in the end, it’s impossible to know what is mostimportant…”

He made you feel as if he knew you better than

you knew yourself. Even if you sensed that you werenot quite up to his expectations, you also felt that hestill had faith in you. This was the essence of hisauthority: his very presence challenged you for thebetter. He provoked awe that, in turn, inspired hopeand the desire to join his side in the eternal battle onbehalf of ideals.

American Gathering

compliments Polish judgeThe American Gathering of Jewish HolocaustSurvivors and Their Descendants commends andapplauds a Polish judge who has fined the Catholicmagazine Gosc Niedzielny •7,400 for comparing awoman’s desire to have an abortion to medicalexperiments perpetrated by Nazi war criminals atAuschwitz.

Judge Ewa Nowicky also ordered the magazineto issue a formal apology to the woman, AlicjaTysiac, who had unsuccessfully sought an abortionand whom the magazine had accused of wanting,but “not being able to kill her child.”

“Comparing a mother’s always painful decisionto terminate a pregnancy for health reasons to thereprehensible crimes committed by the notorious Dr.Joseph Mengele and other SS doctors at Auschwitztrivializes the memory of the Holocaust and makesoffensive analogies that border on the obscene,” saidMenachem Rosensaft, Vice President of theAmerican Gathering. “It is gratifying that JudgeNowicky had the moral courage to declare suchunseemly exploitation of Holocaust imagery offlimits.”

The article followed a ruling by the EuropeanCourt of Justice which had ordered the Polishgovernment to pay Ms. Tysiac • 25,000 incompensation for denying her an abortion.

Sao Paulo sets ShoahRemembrance DayRIO DE JANEIRO (JTA) — Sao Paulo MayorGilberto Kassab recently signed a measure that setsJan. 27 as a municipal day to honor Shoah victims.Sao Paulo Municipal Holocaust Remembrance Day

will be held for the first time in 2010.“The Holocaust was a terrible period

in the history of humanity,” Kassab toldBrazilian media. “This date is ouropportunity for the city of Sao Paulo tohave a special day of reflection.”

Jewish council member FlorianoPesaro had proposed the bill.

Several Jewish officials attended theannouncement, including the presidentsof the Holocaust Survivors BrazilianAssociation, the Latin American JewishCongress, the Brazilian IsraeliteConfederation and Sao Paulo StateJewish Federation. At the end of theceremony, the fourth Chanukah candlewas lit.

Sao Paulo is the capital city of SaoPaulo state, which has a 60,000-memberJewish community, or half of Brazil’sJews.








IT’S A SHOO-IDby SHELDON P. HERSH

As the number of Yiddish speaking individualscontinues to decline, some pivotal Yiddish expressionshave fallen by the wayside, unfortunate victims ofneglect and non-use. For those of us who sprinkleour daily conversation with the confection that isYiddish, this unfortunate turn of events has started towhittle away at our appreciation and command ofthis most expressive of languages—leaving usdeprived of the schmaltz that makes idiomatic Yiddishso engaging.

Shoo-Id or Shawd (the proper pronunciationdepends upon where in Europe one’s forbearers calledhome) is one such word that Yiddish dabblers fail touse with any regularity—a shoo-id and a bit of ashande to boot. As simple translation of “it’s a shoo-

id” would be inadequate and does little justice towords or phrases that are endowed withoverflowing content. Word for word translationcertainly offers convenience but the subtlenuances that make up “it’s a shoo-id” wouldinevitably be lost—a clear disadvantage forthose seeking to become more acquainted withthe ins and outs of the Yiddish language. (Alas,another shoo-id.)

Simply put, a shoo-id is translated as apity or a waste. For example, when served apastrami sandwich without a pickle, one wouldsay it is a shoo-id (pity) that I didn’t get apickle for it would have made the sandwich somuch better. But in the event that part of thesandwich is left over, it would be a shoo-id

(waste) to leave behind perfectly good foodthat will end up in the trash. Many readers mayremember 24- hour-yahrtzeit candles in smalljuice-sized glasses. Subscribing to the wiseadage, waste not; want not, my parents, alongwith many other obsessive savers, wererecycling candle holders into juice glasses as itwas both a pity and waste to throw out these perfectly-sized glass chalices. Once they had amassed enoughglasses to supply a small catering establishment, myparents finally murmured it’s a shoo-id as theybegrudgingly tossed out any new arrivals.

So to appreciate “it’s a shoo-id,” requiresclarifying examples—without them, Yiddishterminology, like our fragile greenery, will likely bedevoid of color and vibrancy and with time, will witheraway.

“It’s a shoo-id” predates the Holocaust years,but became all the more poignant and exceptionalduring that tragic time. Starvation and deprivationwere rampant and the bare essentials of daily living—food, adequate clothing, protection from the elementsand minimal health care—were nowhere to be found.Nothing went to waste as one never knew when anyobject might mean the difference between life anddeath. Waste was unimaginable and patentlyunforgivable. Shoo-id was no longer simply aperfunctory remark but was infused with palpablerelevance as the barbarity of the Holocaustunfolded.

A broken stick or pieces of discarded wood couldprovide a bit of warmth during brutal, frigid EasternEuropean winters. Worn clothing or rags werecommonly wrapped around feet and hands as manyhad no shoes or gloves. Crumbs, peels and scrapsthat would have been discarded during better times,now attracted skeletal figures rummaging aboutlooking for anything that would help stave off

starvation for just a little while longer. Words, like“it’s a shoo-id,” took on new meaning and conveyedan added sense of importance to so many of the littlethings in life that we so often take for granted.

So who but a Holocaust survivor is betterprepared to provide a true understanding andappreciation of “It’s a shoo-id.” The time spent inghettos and slave labor camps left survivors with acompulsion to save and conserve and an impulse tohold on to items that may one day prove instrumentalin assuring one’s survival. For those who struggled tostay alive wasteful behavior was an unforgivable sin.

My parents, typical survivors, had the phrasepermanently embedded in their vocabulary. Caged inthe hermetically sealed Lodz Ghetto, they never letanything go to waste and started a collection of oddsand ends once they took up residence in America. Witha conviction that many religious zealots would envy,they stockpiled orphaned objects in case they shouldeventually be needed. Our basement was a storeroom

for random articles, carefully boxed and cataloguedas though by a staff of devoted museum curators.Here one could find an eclectic potpourri of doodadsand knick-knacks or spur of the moment purchasesothers had tired of or no longer needed. Whenever Ilooked askance and questioned the need for objectsthat appeared outdated or superfluous, I wasimmediately put in my place by a timely parentalrejoinder. “Who is so smart to know what tomorrowwill bring? Perhaps one day you will finallyunderstand.”

My father was attracted to the voluminous trashour neighbors so casually discarded. Lumber, clothing,tools and the like adorning the sidewalk promptedhim to observe with a note of dismay that many, ifnot all, of the things waiting to be picked up by thesanitation department would have been fiercelyfought over and picked clean in the Ghetto. “It’s ashoo-id,” (pity), he would sadly whisper, “It’s a shoo-

id” (waste). “People’s lives could have been savedjust with the things that lay here for the taking.”

“It’s a shoo-id” was never part of my vocabularyand was as foreign to me as baseball was to my father.I was often at odds with my parents about a conceptthat had such little relevance in a country awash infood and consumer goods and services. The notionof “it’s a shoo-id” was of little concern to manyAmericans as the blessings of abundance blinded anaive public to the realities beyond America’sborders. Many Holocaust survivors were now citizensin a land of plenty but found it difficult to let go of a

philosophy that had proven so critical to their survival.When it came to food, “It’s a shoo-id” took on

the status of a biblical injunction. Wasting food wassacrilegious and intolerable. Hunger and the miseryand disease it brought were everywhere…in theghettos, in the camps, in the forests. Food was life.

Given their experiences, there is little wonder thatmy parents were incapable of wasting food. Theywere clever improvisers who would immediately jumpinto action at the first indication that food was aboutto turn. The food was carefully examined and ifdeemed salvageable, was immediately incorporatedinto an innovative dish such as compote, kugel orcholent. All were tried and true recipes and nearlyalways guaranteed satisfaction to its consumers. Mymother would place heaping portions onto our plates—a reaction to a time when parents had so little to offertheir starving children. This led to occasions whenfood remained on our plates; an act that would causevisible concern and more often than not, gave rise to

a spontaneous chorus of “It’s a shoo-id!”accompanied by an assortment of sorrowfultales of hunger in the ghetto that wereintended to instruct and inspire naive childrento eat.

Dieting left my parents perplexed andwithout words. It was viewed as the heightof folly for normal, healthy individuals to placelimits on the types or amounts of food theyconsumed to lose weight. More than once,when I discussed the possibility of dieting,my mother would look at me in disbelief andexclaim “For five years, your father and Iwere on enough of a diet in the ghettos andcamps—no one else here should have to diet.It’s a shoo-id (pity and waste) to even thinkabout it.”

They were of the opinion that anyoneappearing too thin was likely ill, while thoseamply filled out in all directions were clearlysymbols of good health.

Rebelling against “it’s a shoo-id” in myyouth, I had imagined that one of the benefits ofadulthood would be the freedom to waste things andoverwhelmed with guilt. I tried and failed abysmallyas a result of a defining moment.

While in a bagel store a number of years ago, Istood behind a customer who asked for a scoopedout bagel, something heretofore unfamiliar to me. Thecounter person grabbed the innocent bagel, gougedout its’ soft innards and nonchalantly discarded theheart of the bagel into a trash can filled with otherbagel remains. “It’s a shoo-id,” I heard myselfwhisper, “It’s a pity and a monumental waste of aperfectly good bagel.”

I was overcome with a sense of purpose, andneglected teachings took on new-found relevance asimages of starving ghetto dwellers grabbing wildly atdiscarded bagel innards began dancing in my head.At that moment, I decided to practice a modifiedversion of “it’s a shoo-id,” one that would fit mysuburban lifestyle. With my priorities and perspectivessomewhat altered, visitors who happen to passthrough my overcrowded basement, are quickly takenaback by my expansive collection of oddities andunexpected artifacts. My response to their wide-eyedbewilderment is usually along the lines of “Hey, younever know when some of this stuff will come inhandy.” I never ask for a scooped out bagel and Ihave become quite adept at making great compoteand an above-average kugel. And why not? It wouldbe a shoo-id not to.


FROM ALLGENERATIONS, Inc.SERENA WOOLRICH,PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER

PLEASE SEND RELEVANT RESPONSESTO: [email protected]

From Steve Moss:I’m looking for Jewish immigrants who returned to Europe to fight the Nazis withthe Allied forces. I’m particularly interested in finding Jews from New England.Contact SteveM@thejewish advocate.com.

From Clara Spektor Grossman, a survivor in Florida:I’m looking for my brother, David Spektor, who lived with his family before WWIIuntil he went into hiding with our father. Since that time I have not heard from himand wonder if he is still alive.

From Peter Wittman in Deland, FL:Does anyone know any member of the Wittman family from Budapest, Hungary?I would like to find some members or friends of my family.

From Joseph Wolfowicz, a survivor in Brookline, MA:I am desperately trying to find the whereabouts of Mr. & Mrs. David Linder.

From Vera Hecht, a Survivor in Brooklyn, New York:I am looking for Survivors who were in the same block in Auschwitz with meand Elly Berkovits Gross: Auschwitz-2 / Birkenau - Lager C. Block18, June, July and August 1944. The Block Elteste was Miri Leichnerfrom Bratislava; her assistants were Ibi from Valea Lui Mihaly(Mihályfalva) and Brochy from Marghita. In this block there wereover 1,000 female deportees from Northern Transylvania mostly fromthe Bihor Region. There was a young girl there who carried water ina large pot for everyone; we called her “Elly kis kalyhas hozzal vizet”(Elly little kind bring water). She carried the water to the beds everyday. Elly [Berkovits Gross] was deported from Simleu-Silvaniei,Romania. Maybe one of you were there and remembers me and/or Elly. I survived with my mother.

From Oleg Ignatyev (Aleh Ihnatsyeu), a 3g in Minsk, Belarus:I am searching for any information about my grandfather who disappeared duringthe Second World War. His name was Ivan Antonovich Brengosh (Ivan AntonavichBrengosh in Belarusian). My family has been doing research for several de-cades. From local official bodies I have received negative answers to my ques-tions about information on my grandfather. By September, 1941 Minsk had beenoccupied for three months by the Fascists. One day there was an Aktion, tosearch and catch Jews. Armed soldiers of the Vermacht entered the courtyardand silently took away my grandfather. During this period the Germans still keptdetailed accounts of those who had been killed, or sent to Germany. Mygrandfather’s name does not appear on any list I have found. Please help me tolearn about the fate of my grandfather. My mother is still alive and all her life hasalso searched for him. His wife, my grandmother, died 40 years ago in ignoranceof his fate.Do you know of any organizations for me to contact where it is pos-sible to learn about the fate of people who were lost during the war; with data oncommunities of people originally from the Soviet Union that may be helpful withthis search?

From Gunther Katz, a Survivor in Encino, CA:On February 22, 1943, I crossed from France to Switzerland at Annemasse as partof a rescue of OSE children. There were 18 or 19 of us. I have always wonderedhow all these people fared after the war. After crossing we all wound up at avacant school, Les Charmilles, in Geneva until we were moved to various “children’shomes.” Some of us wound up at Lilly Volkert in Askona. One girl in particular thatI wonder about was a dark-haired 14-year-old from Belgium who had been hiddenin a convent in France. Another was Ernst Kirschheimer (now Hirsch), with whomI am in contact. Anyone out there have any information for me?

I am a 2g; my mother is a Holocaust survivor who left Berlin, Germany via theKindertransport. I am interested in writing a book about Nazi survivors and theirpets; specifically what actions they observed or were forced to take with regardto their pets (i.e., abandonment, death of, attempts to save them) and the ensuingimpact on their lives of these circumstances. Any narratives can be forwarded [email protected]

I am a Holocaust survivor that was in several concentration camps. In thewinter of 1945, I was in the city of Bendorf, Germany. During our time there, wemarched at night to some sort of elevator that went below ground. After twomore elevator rides, we entered a tunnel that looked like salt mines. We walkedfor a while and then climbed a flight of stairs. The stairs led to a munitions factorywhere we were told to work silently. We sorted different metal parts. We workedthere for about three weeks. I am trying to find anyone that also worked in thismunitions factory in Bendorf or knows any information about this place. Contact:[email protected]

From Rose Berl, a 2g in Amsterdam, the Netherlands:My aunt, Hilda Berl (maiden name) and her husband, Kurt Hirsh, were fromthe Czech Republic. She lived in Krnov in Silesia and later in Prague. I believethat my Uncle Kurt through marriage) also lived in Prague before being transported. They married inTerezin. My aunt was murdered in Auschwitz and my UncleKurt died or was murdered in Dachau on January 24, 1945, I believe. I have notbeen able to find out if any of my uncle‘s family survived. Further, I am lookingfor any relatives who were on the Kindertransport of Mr. Nicholas Winton.

From Evelyne Haendel, a Survivor in Belgium, and Director of Family TracingServices, Hidden Child Foundation in New York, New York:Perhaps someone knows something about Perl Farkasova (Freymowitz). Shewas approximately 10 years old at the onset of WWII. She lived with her parents,Abraham and Kreindla, in Belovarec (near Khust), Czechoslovakia. Shehad five older sisters and two brothers. It is believed that she may have survived,perhaps having been taken out of the Khust ghetto and possibly adopted. She

may still be living today under another identity.

From Kathi Keys (Fenyves), a 2g in Auckland, New Zealand:My father was Fenyves Gyula; he was born (July 1915) andraised in Budapest.He attended Piarista. He was a munkaszolgalatos and wasalso sent on the road to Russia.My mother was Antal Jutka(Csuti) before she married my father. She was also born inBudapest (September 1925). She had a sister, Antal Lili (b.1923 approximately), who emigrated to Israel around1948.Does anyone know my family, or by some miracleis related to us?

From Betty Weiss, nee Fleischman, a 2g in Skokie, Illinois:My mother, Sara Fleichmanova, z”l, nee Schulcz, survived both Auschwitz andAllendorf (she had been in a Hungarian transport). She had a brother, JozsiSchulz, who lived in Budapest on Mazsa utca 10, Budapest X kerulet. He wasmarried to Magda Fogel and they had a son named Laci Schulz, born April 1943in Budapest. Before they were transported to Auschwitz, a nurse named HildaSchulz (a cousin) made arrangements in Budapest with an opera singer for Laci’ssafety. We know Laci was saved by an unknown woman, and possiblely wastaken to Israel or the US under false papers, a different name, etc. - we do notknow. The nurse passed away just last year and told the story to my brother inGalanta (Slovakia). (My mother, z”l was from Galanta and I was born there in1957). My husband is from Bratislava, but lived in Galanta). Since we escapedthe Communists and immigrated to the US in 1981, I have been searching, but noluck - only dead ends. There are no records of a “Laci Schulcz.” but he might bealso under the name, “Laci Fogel.”

From Roxanne Dennis:

Surname: Dudinskas or DudinskaiteGiven Name: ReizaNationality: LithuanianDate of Birth: 18 September 1918I am trying to find information about my great grandmother. My family does nothave much information about her, and what we do have leaves a lot of our pastshrouded in mystery. I would love to be able to get into contact with any of ourfamily members or their surviving relatives.

From Deborah Ross, a 2g in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada:If anyone knows the fate of my grandmother, Devora Baltupski Ramm, or myuncle, Israel Ramm (her son) or my grandfather, Chaim Ramm from Vilna,Lithuania, I would LOVE to know. My mother’s name was Nechama BaltupskiRamm and she was married (before she married my father) to Yonia Fain, alsofrom Vilna. Would love to be connected with others from Vilna or anyone witheither of those last names.


An Urgent

Appeal

to Our

Readers

For 26 years the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, the largestumbrella organization of survivors, has been at the forefront of all issues pertaining to survivors and theirfamilies. Despite extraordinary economic challenges and confrontations with Holocaust deniers, this pastyear has been no exception. We are determined to continue our work and know that together, with yourgenerous contributions, we will be able to insure that our fight for remembrance will live on.

With your support and that of the more than 80,000 survivor families who make up our organization, wewill be able to continue our critical work in the coming year and build on our past accomplishments.Please send what you can. Contributors of $180 or more will receive a special gift, and contributors of$500 or more will be acknowledged and listed in forthcoming editions of our newspaper, Together.

In 2009 alone we have:

· Represented survivors’ interests at diplomatic conferences and negotiations in Berlin, Washington andPrague to secure and increase reparations and restitution for those victimized by Nazi persecution andplunder;

· Fought those who would deny or trivialize the evils of the Holocaust, both here and abroad;

· Ensured that survivors receive proper care and assistance through our work with social agencies likethe Jewish Board of Family Services, Self-Help and The Blue Card;

· Advocated our cause in newspapers and on television, with more than a dozen columns since thebeginning of 2009;

· Promoted Holocaust education, with the participation of the United States Holocaust MemorialMuseum, Yad Vashem, and the Study Center ofKibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot, by sponsoring the non-sectarian Summer Seminar Program on Holocaust

and Jewish Resistance that takes American teachersto Poland, Israel and Washington to give them apersonal appreciation of the Holocaust;

· Worked with the U.S. Justice Department in thesearch for and prosecution of Nazi war criminals,including the recent successful deportation to Germanyof the notorious John Demjanjuk;

· Promoted the search for “lost survivors” sought byrelatives and friends, in cooperationwith AllGenerations, Inc., headed by Serena Woolrich;

· Continued the solemn observance of Yom Hashoah,Holocaust Remembrance Day, with the largest annual commemoration in the United States, in associationwith 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 came to North Americaafter World War II;

· Disseminated Holocaust-related news and other items of interest to the survivor community on ourwebsite, www.americangathering.com.

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elie wiesel tells hungary to ban holocaust denial

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