Mg together fall 2014 yp

FALL 2014

Volume 28, Number 2

From The Jerusalem Post

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ERLIN – The last day of the threeday Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany in Berlin featured a focused discussion and examination of the experiences of child survivors of the Stuart Eizenstat, Special Negotiator Holocaust, a category into which most of those that outlived the Shoah in the crowded conference room fell.

Conducted in English and in German, this last event of the week, held at the Centrum Judaicum museum near the center of the city, was meant to be a wake-up call to the ongoing needs of Holocaust victims, said Greg Schneider, the executive vice president of the conference.

“How do we honor child survivors?”

Schneider asked. “We need to ask what are the issues of child survivors today. When someone is subjected to trauma, what effect does that have over time? Problems come out even later in life.”

It quickly became clear that they are almost the only survivors left in the world, as Roman Kent, a Poland-born survivor of Auschwitz and the treasurer of the conference, spoke about how the trauma of surviving when your entire family perished extended to more than just loneliness after the war.

“Some things are intangible,” said Kent.

“On our wedding day we didn’t have the parents and the aunts and the brothers.... I never thought I would be asked by my daughter: ‘Where is my grandma?’ I had no answer.”

Colette Avital, the chairwoman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, said that today, Holocaust survivors

find themselves hiding from rockets and bombs in the same way they used to hide from the police looking for Jewish children.

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t e f a n i e

S e lt z e r , another survivor from Poland and the president of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants, spoke Stefanie Seltzer, about how years later, President of the despite being only a World Federation of Jewish Child child, the memories Survivors were vivid enough to bring her to tears, and to inspire her to start forming social groups of other child survivors.

“There’s no need for introductions or starting from square one,” Seltzer said. “We are each other’s family.”

The federation has conferences for survivors all over the world.

Despite being experienced 70 to 75 years ago, the trauma can be triggered at any time, almost regardless of how old the child was when they went through the Shoah, said Dr. Kurt Grünberg of the Sigmund Freud Institute in Berlin.

Every experience and trauma was different depending on age, whether they were hiding or in a camp, how they were separated from their families, what that moment of separation was like and a myriad of other factors, Grünberg said.

Examining four different case studies of survivors and how they live today – underlining the fact that 1.5 million children were murdered – guilt, anxiety, antisocial behavior and even physical illness were all common manifestations of the trauma, he said.

“The long-term effects highlight the acute need for action, especially for those who are still being neglected,” Grünberg said. “The 1,000-year Reich lasted only 12 years, but the psychological effects extend across generations.”

continued on p. 16

Steven Sotloff, Murdered Journalist, Grandson of Holocaust Survivors

Silence Surrounding Hostage’s Identity Can Now, Sadly, Be Broken http://forward.com

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e can now say that Steven Joel Sotloff was Jewish.

We can now say that he was the grandson of Holocaust survivors, that his mother was a preschool teacher at Temple Beth Am in Pinecrest, Florida, a Reform synagogue in South Miami where Sotloff attended day school.

We can now relay to you that “the family has been very much a part of the

Steven Sotloff

South Miami-Dade Jewish community,” as Jacob Solomon, president and CEO of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, told us for the record.

We can now say that Sotloff was also an Israeli citizen, studied government at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya and wrote for Israeli publications.

We can now say all this publicly because Sotloff is dead, the second American journalist beheaded by the barbaric Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

continued on p. 11

Moral Emptiness of Holocaust Survivors Who Took on Israel The True Face Behind a New York Times Ad

By Alvin H. Rosenfeld http://forward.com

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iven Hitler’s voluminous rants about Jews, it is not surprising that one aspect of his obsession is less known: the pleasure he took in the spectacle of Jews deriding and defaming other Jews. Hans Frank, one of Hitler’s top aides, quotes him as saying:

“I am an innocent lamb compared to revelations by Jews about Jews. But they are important, these disclosures of the Jew’s most secret, always totally hidden qualities, instincts, and character traits. It isn’t I who say this, it is the Jews themselves who say it about themselves, about their greed for money, their fraudulent ways, their immorality, and their sexual perversions.”

continued on p. 17

American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors 122 West 30th Street, Suite 304А New York, New York 10001

Child Survivors to Receive Payout

NON-PROFIT U.S. POSTAGE PAID NEW YORK, NY PERMIT NO. 4246

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Let It Go?

together Fall 2014

By Menachem Z. Rosensaft

Volume 28, Number 2

c•o•n•t•e•n•t•s

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am utterly appalled by smug and deliberately provocative Jewish intellectuals who promote “radical innovation” in Holocaust remembrance by casting aside the “anxiety” of having to deal with the full scope of the Shoah and contemplating non-traumatic, non-morbid ways of transmitting some type of Holocaust awareness forward once the survivors will no longer be around to inconveniently remind us of the suffering they endured.

A recent pre-Rosh Hashanah lecture at my synagogue by one such talking head from a self-styled Israeli “research and leadership center at the forefront of Jewish thought and education” made my skin crawl. No need to continue obsessing on the depressing tragedy or morbid facts of the Holocaust, he proclaimed. Instead, he advocated a sanitized user-friendly approach to Holocaust remembrance in which only those elements of Holocaust history and memory that might be appealing or sophistically useful would be retained, thereby casting the event as much as possible in a positive, non-oppressive light that will not offend the sensitivities of Jews who could be turned off by somber historical truths. “Let’s play with the meaning” of the Shoah, he said, in essence dismissing the importance of any need for historical integrity.

Don’t worry, be happy, as it were.

He also set up a specious analogy between the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the Shoah. The Temple, he contends, exists in a recreated, glorifying memory that has little to do with how it actually was. We don’t focus on the gruesome animal sacrifices performed by the High Priests.

Rather, the Rabbis of the Talmud retroactively created more convenient depictions that suited their needs. Had modern technology existed at the time, he went on, we would have had pointless museums exhibiting artifacts of the Temple, implying that institutions such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem do not serve a critical or even worthwhile purpose in preserving Holocaust memory as part of the forging of contemporary Jewish identity.

For starters, I would urge him to go to Jerusalem and visit the tunnels adjacent to the Western Wall. Why bother to undertake incredibly costly and politically provocative archaeological excavations if not to ensure a verifiable historical basis for the Jewish national claim to sovereignty? If our presentday conception of the Temple is nothing more than an anachronistic myth, why sacrifice the lives of Israeli soldiers in the defense of discardable relics?

I also wonder whether this particular lecturer, who wears a kippa, is as cavalierly dismissive of Jewish religious laws and

Fall 2014

Child Survivors to Receive Payout.................................................................................1 Steven Sotloff, Murdered Journalist, Grandson of Holocaust Survivors........................1 Moral Emptiness of Holocaust Survivors Who Took on Israel......................................1 Let It Go?........................................................................................................................2 Teachers learn to better teach.........................................................................................................3 Zara apologizes for ‘concentration camp’ tee-shirt.........................................................4 Amid neo-Nazi surge, Jewish groups applaud Greece’s Holocaust denial ban..............4 Alfred Hitchcock’s Nazi death camp film to finally be seen after 70 years............................. 5 Holograms Keep Holocaust History Alive...................................................................................6 Amulet Created By Son For His Mother in Lodz Ghetto Recovered.............................6 Photograph by Cardoni

Jewish community praises Greek mayor for yellow star protest....................................6

traditions generally, or is it just the difficulty of fitting the inexorable realities of the Shoah into facile theological or philosophical theorizing that bothers him? I wonder whether he would, for example, be as ready to discard what many consider to be the archaic ritual of circumcision. It’s certainly not a “fun” experience and it’s increasingly controversial in many parts of the world. So why bother?

The same goes for the laws of kashrut.

They do tend to complicate life so does he advocate to “let it go”? Or is his intellectual flexibility manifested solely in an utter disdain for Holocaust memory?

The basic problem with this type of approach to Holocaust remembrance and memory is that it is as pernicious as Holocaust denial and, in fact, plays directly into the hands of those who claim that the Shoah never happened, that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz or Treblinka, that six million Jews were not brutally and systematically murdered.

Of course the way we perceive, understand, interpret, and memorialize the Holocaust will inevitably change as the event recedes into history. Even today, other genocides that have been perpetrated since – Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur – place it in a different context than was the reality in 1945 when the Nazi death and concentration camps were liberated, or even in 1988 when the United States at long last ratified the Genocide Convention. But that should not ever mean that the historical facts of the Shoah – all the facts – are irrelevant to future generations and should be discarded or trivialized.

Over the course of the past year, I compiled and edited God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes, Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors, a book that will be published this December

by Jewish Lights Publishing. In this volume, 88 contributors from sixteen countries on six continents explore the significance of the legacy we have received from our parents and grandparents. Among them are Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist rabbis as well as professed atheists. They also include a US Senator, a former British Foreign

Travels in Poland and Israel, Between Old Wars and New ...........................................8

con’d on p. 9 visit our website at www.amgathering.org

Holocaust Questions and Answers ................................................................................9 USC Shoah Foundation and World Jewish Congress announce global program to support 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz............................................9 German neo-Nazi’s naming to EU committee rankles Jewish leaders...........................9 Warsaw to restore 1,000 Jewish tombstones used for construction................................10 Plans for Rome Holocaust Museum...............................................................................11 Teaching Kids About the Holocaust: How Young Is Too Young?..................................12 These Students Spend Summers Making Animated Movies About the Holocaust........13 Vienna Jewish Museum restitutes Nazi-looted painting.................................................13 Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers’ Program.....................................................14 Polish Jews split over plan to exhume massacre victims................................................18 Eulogy for my father, Yehuda Nir (1930-2014) — Holocaust survivor and beacon of hope..........................................................................19 In Memoriam..................................................................................................................19

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122 West 30th Street, Suite 304A, New York, NY 10001 Same building Just Up One Floor!

AMERICAN GATHERING OF JEWISH HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS AND THEIR DESCENDANTS President Sam E. Bloch Chairman Roman Kent Senior Vice President Menachem Z. Rosensaft Treasurer Jeffrey Wiesenfeld Secretary: Joyce Celnik Levine Honorary Senior Vice President Ernest Michel Founding President Benjamin Meed z”l Honorary President Vladka Meed z”l Honorary Chairman William Lowenberg z”l Vice Presidents Eva Fogelman Gloria Golan Rositta E. Kenigsberg Romana Strochlitz Primus

Jean Bloch Rosensaft Stefanie Seltzer Elan Steinberg z”l Regional Vice Presidents Vivian Bernstein Bernard Kent Michael Korenblit Mel Mermelstein Serena Woolrich Publications Committee, Chair: Sam E. Bloch Executive Director: Elaine Culbertson Administrative Assistant: Luis Gonzalez Publisher: 3rd Rail Marketing Strategies, Inc. 917 776-3197 For subscription information, call 212-239-4230

Happy New Year! Shana Tova

together Fall 2014

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Teachers learn to better teach Reggie Wynn looked at the tri p he took this summer as a journey. Paula Tate called it an experience. The two Guilford County teachers were among 31 teachers nationwide selected to partici pate in the 2014 Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teacher Program (HAJRTP).

Paula Tate

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riginated by Vladka Meed, a Holocaust survivor, in 1984, the summer seminar is designed for secondary school teachers who implement Holocaust studies in their classrooms. It allows them to visit historic sites and hear first hand accounts from survivors and scholars. As teachers gain a new understanding of the Holocaust and Jewish resistance, it prepares them to better teach so future generations will understand and never forget the lessons of the past as warnings for the present and the future.

“The program was not about what the perpetrators did,” Tate said. “It was all about the victims and survivors and how they persevered.”

Leading this year’s trip were Elaine Culbertson, whose parents survived the Holocaust, and Stephen Feinberg, a former employee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. “Elaine brought us to tears with her stories and Stephen was a fountain of knowledge,” Tate said. “During the entire trip, Elaine reminded us why we were there. It was a life-changing experience.”

Tate, a teacher at The Middle College at GTCC Greensboro, has always been interested in the Holocaust. The seminar gave her the opportunity to learn more about the places she had heard of since high school. She feels experiencing the Holocaust in such a personal way will add depth to her teaching.

“I want to help my students clarify what they believe in, what they will stand up for and what they will be willing to speak out against,” Tate said. “In 1930s Germany, generalizing, stereotyping and name calling ultimately led to what has since been defined as genocide. I want young people to be reminded that each of us makes decisions – the consequences of which ultimately may prove to be the measure of their humanity. I want my

students to find their own point of moral outrage – the line over which they simply will not go.”

Tate felt losing her mother to cancer made her value life more, but her summer experience puts a new value to it.

“It is not just that life is short and you need to live for the moment,” she said. “We need to value life by realizing our words and actions can have a detrimental and ripple effect that can hurt others. The trip has also helped me realize what is important in life and what is not. (Comparatively), every thing I go through is trivial.”

The three-week 2014 HAJRTP was both mentally and physically challenging for participants. It began with a tour of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The following day the group flew to Germany where they toured concentration camps, death camps, museums and memorials. They were reminded of the German’s efforts to dehumanize those they considered “inferior” to their race, and of the mental, spiritual and sometimes physical resistance that strengthened the victims.

Elaine Culbertson shared her parents’ story: When her father, uncle and their best friend were in a concentration camp they accidentally found diamonds hidden inside a harmonica. The three made a pact to only use the jewels to save a life. After learning his brother had been assigned to a death detail, Culbertson’s uncle used the diamonds to bribe a guard so her father would not have to go, literally saving his life by the action.

Culbertson’s mother had lost everyone in her family and was on the verge of giving up when a woman in her camp encouraged her to keeping trying to survive – which she did.

Tate had toured the U.S. Holocaust museum when she was single, but says looking at the entire trip through the eyes of a parent made it a totally different experience. Its seriousness is reflected in her pictures. She plans to make two photo books – one for her classroom and one for her family, which includes two young sons.

She will use comments from her blog to reflect what she was thinking throughout her travels.

“Those who participated in the program are haunted by it a bit,” Tate said.

“You could not go on this trip and not be.

But I don’t regret going. I am thankful for the opportunity.”

Wynn’s journey back in time was both academic and personal. Wynn teaches civics, sociology and economics at Ragsdale High School. His mother is also German.

“This is part of my history and I wanted to know more about it,” he said.

“My mother’s generation was one of the first to learn what had happened. One of her teachers took students on a tour of some of the camps. It was very controversial.

“When I was young and kids found out I was German, they called me Nazi, which hurt because, of course, I was not. As I got older, my mother was very open to tell me what she knew about the Holocaust. She is the one who encouraged me to participate in this program.”

Like Tate, Wynn had seen the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum before, but noted it has permanent exhibits and changing ones.

“It goes through not just what happened, but the background behind it, the beginning and the increase in antiSemitism,” he said. “The museum focuses on people themselves. It has pictures of families like you would see in anyone’s house. Near the end it has a display of shoes taken from people in the camps. Shoes are very personal. When you see them you cannot help but think about the people they belonged to.”

The camps in Germany also had artifacts taken from Holocaust victims.

Some included eyeglasses, pots, toothbrushes and dolls – the only things they had been able to take with them when they were forced to leave their homes.

“One of the most disturbing things I saw was a display at Auschwitz of human hair,” Wynn said. “Before or after they were killed, the people’s heads were shaved. The hair was collected in bags and sent to companies to make products, such as cloth with human hair fibers in it.”

In addition to concentration camps, there were three death camps designed specifically to kill people. The Germans sometimes referred to them as extermination camps, another way to dehumanize their victims.

Wynn’s journey impacted him in two major ways. First he saw those involved in the Holocaust, the ones killed and the survivors, as real people. He learned to appreciate their resilience that would not let anyone take away who they were.

“They had businesses and families,” Wynn recounted. “Getting that personal narrative is what meant the most to me. I

http://www.jamestownnews.com

Reggie Wynn could visualize a lot of what was going on from the stories one of our group leaders told about her parents.

“One survivor I talked to allowed his faith to get him through. Other had trouble understanding why. I’m not sure what I would believe after going through something like that. It made me put my trials in perspective.”

He also realized the power the word hate carries.

“The acronym for hate is ‘honoring all things evil.’ When you hate someone that is what you are doing. During those three weeks I saw how far some took hate.

I don’t hate anyone and I want to get that word out of my vocabulary and teach others not to use it. You can never heal unless you stop hating.”

While not everyone has the opportunity to experience Holocaust history so up close and personal, Wynn recommends reading Vladka Meed’s book On Both Sides of the Wall. All of Meed’s family died, but because she did not look Jewish and could speak Polish she was able to smuggle in guns, explosives, chemicals and other items used in the Warsaw Resistance, and to help some of the children get out of the ghetto to safety.

Meed later married and moved to America, but she wanted people to remember the Holocaust and pass on its stories. With that in mind, she started HAJRTP. Meed understood that the personal experience of seeing what the Holocaust was really like would make an impression.

“When I came back home, I had such a motivation to tell others about the experience,” Wynn said. “I am not normally a person who shares his emotions, but I think people have been able to feel my emotion on the inside.”

Three weeks away from family and friends, three weeks of intense feelings as they looked at horrific events of the past, but for Tate and Wynn it was three weeks that has molded them for a lifetime.

visit our website at www.amgathering.org

together Fall 2014

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Zara apologizes for ‘concentration camp’ tee-shirt Spanish retailer discontinues sale of stri ped shirt with yellow star after it causes social media uproar.

From The Jerusalem Post

Zara’s controversial T-shirt design. (photo credit:WWW.ZARA.COM)

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etail clothing chain Zara issued a public apology following an outcry over one of its T-shirts that some claim bears a resemblance to a concentration camp uniform.

The blue and white striped boy’s shirt with a yellow six-pointed star was intended to convey a wild west aesthetic, according to parent corporation Inditex, and will no longer be sold.

“The T-shirt has already been withdrawn,” a spokeswoman told The Jerusalem Post, adding that “you can find sheriff written on the star. It has nothing to do with the Second World War or whatever. The inspiration had to do with the old classic western movies. Obviously we are very attentive to the sensitivity of our customers. We made a mistake in this case.”

Angry consumers took to Twitter to question Zara’s decision to sell it, with one user joking that “this shirt from #Zara won’t sell too well in Germany.”

“How did this get through to production in the first place,” another asked.

Responding to Zara’s apology, Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’

Remembrance Authority said that the shirt “was insensitive and we’re glad they took action.”

“This is not the first time that Zara has shown its lack of sensitivity on Holocaust issues and it shows that the company has an unfortunate tendency to misuse symbols that are a source of pain and suffering with any knowledge of the history of World War II,” said Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

In 2007 the chain, which maintains a significant retail presence in Israel, removed a handbag decorated with swastikas from store shelves following a public outcry and negative media coverage around the world.

Speaking with the Daily Mail at the time, a spokesman for Zara explained that the company “did not realize swastikas appeared on some of these bags, the swastika was not on the bag which was sourced by us after being supplied by an external producer.”

“An occasional mistake can occur, but these strike me as being at best efforts at subversive artistic creativity that badly misfired, that are in horrendous bad taste,” said Menachem Rosensaft, senior vice president of the American Gathering and General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress. He teaches about the law of genocide at the law schools of Columbia and Cornell Universities.

Stating that he hoped that whoever approved the outfit “will be looking for new employment,” Rosensaft asserted that “putting a yellow star on what looked like a concentration camp uniform is not under any possible configuration a coincidence. There has to be somebody making an artistic choice and Zara is correct in pulling it.”

Auschwitz prisoner garb. (photo credit:TAKKK/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)

Amid neo-Nazi surge, Jewish groups applaud Greece’s Holocaust denial ban

Anti-fascist protesters holding banners in front of the Athens municipal amphitheater during a swearing-in ceremony for Golden Dawn party member Ilias Kasidiaris, Aug. 29, 2014. (Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)

By Gavin Rabinowitz http://www.jta.org

ATHENS, Greece (JTA) — Jewish groups say the passage of a bill banning Holocaust denial and imposing harsher penalties for hate speech is an important milestone in the fight against Greece’s rising neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party.

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his comes very late, but not too late,” World Jewish Congress CEO Robert Singer told JTA. Greece’s parliament passed the bill Tuesday following more than a year of political wrangling.

Riding a wave of fear and despair brought on by Greece’s devastating economic crisis — coupled with a large influx of illegal immigrants from Africa and Asia — Golden Dawn emerged from obscurity in 2012 to become the country’s third largest political party, with 18 members of parliament.

Golden Dawn, which uses Nazi imagery, has been blamed by the government, prosecutors and law enforcements for hundreds of xenophobic attacks. The incidents include the killings of at least four Pakistani immigrants and the murder of Pavlos Fyssas, a noted anti-fascist Greek rapper known as Killah P.

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The new law increases jail time to three years for instigating racist violence and imposes fines of up to 26,000 euros (about $34,000) for individuals and up to 100,000 euros (about $130,000) for groups convicted of “inciting acts of discrimination, hatred or violence.” It also criminalizes denial of the Holocaust and other recognized genocides, with the same penalties.

In a move that will allow the government to target political groups like Golden Dawn, organizations found to incite racism can be barred from receiving state funds. However, the law cannot be applied retroactively.

Anti-racism laws dating back to 1979 did not provide for prosecuting groups or parties that incited bias crimes. They also barred police from investigating suspected hate crimes if the victim chose not to press charges.

“We have anti-racism laws already, but the reason they were not applied was that immigrants, for example, were afraid to report the crimes because they did not hold proper travel documents, lived here illegally and feared deportation,” Justice Minister Haralambos Athanasiou told parliament ahead of the debate on the legislation.

There were also no prior provisions against Holocaust denial. So there was little the authorities could do when a Golden Dawn lawmaker proudly declared himself a Holocaust denier or when party leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos, in a television interview, denied the existence of gas chambers at Nazi death camps.

Following the 2013 murder of Fyssas, which Greek prosecutors blamed on Golden Dawn activists, many Golden Dawn leaders and lawmakers were arrested and accused of running a criminal organization. Their trials are scheduled for December.

Even with top party leaders jailed, including Michaloliakos, Golden Dawn maintained its popular support in recent municipal elections.

“We really hope the law will limit racist and anti-Semitic statements and will deter Holocaust deniers, who have multiplied in the last two years, including inside parliament,” said Victor Eliezer, the secretary general of the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece.

continued on p. 16

together Fall 2014

Alfred Hitchcock’s Nazi death camp film to finally be seen after 70 years Buried for generations, the Nazi death film that Alfred Hitchcock helped make will finally have it premiere

British Army Film and Photographic Unit cameraman and photographer, Sgt Mike Lewi

by Paul Routledge http://www.mirror.co.uk

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ombat cameramen serving with the Allied forces fought their way across occupied Europe in the Second World War, filming liberation from the Nazis. They captured the joy of freed people welcoming British Tommies, but also the wanton death and destruction of total warfare.

Often at risk from enemy fire and armed with nothing more lethal than a cine camera, they sent the reality of war back home on film.

But nothing on the battlefield could prepare them for the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. Combat-seasoned sergeants gazed in mute disbelief at scenes of mass murder, torture and depravity.

Still, they kept the cameras rolling, to record the greatest act of man’s inhumanity to man (and woman, and child), for a documentary that would warn future generations what happens when a nation abandons belief in the sanctity of life.

Directed by the future Granada TV chief Sidney Bernstein, with Alfred Hitchcock on board as an adviser and Labour politician – and psychological warfare expert – Richard Crossman writing the script, it was to be entitled German Concentration Camps Factual Survey.

It closes with these words. “Unless the world learns the lessons these picture teach, night will fall, and by the grace of God we who live will learn.”

But night did fall, on the film itself.

Amid post-war political intrigue, the project was shelved. The harrowing

images of SS guards dragging emaciated corpses to mass graves, of a weeping woman kneeling and kissing the hand of her British liberator, of German civilians confronted with the vile acts of inhumanity carried out in their midst, were put into storage in 1945.

Almost 70 years later, the British Film Institute, working with the Imperial War Museum and top flight director Andre Singer, has brought them back to life in a 75-minute documentary about the filming, inevitably titled Night Will Fall.

This powerful film is now in cinemas around the country. I watched a preview DVD with alternating horror and distress, the tears never far away.

If that is what it is like on film, what must it have been like for the combat cameramen?

Too painful to contemplate, but they were just ordinary soldiers doing their duty – Sergeant Mike Lewis, and Sergeant William Lawrie, both army cameramen.

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Sergeant Lewis remembers driving into Belsen: “We saw a sight that shook us as nothing even in the sights of war had ever, ever, ever shown us before. It was painful to look at, pain that this could happen to people.

“There were hundreds of bodies piled up. There was a stench of death everywhere.

There were pits containing bodies of people as big as lawn tennis courts – babies, youths, girls, men, women, old and young, how deep we didn’t know.”

Sergeant Lawrie recalls haltingly: “There were half-dead people walking about, glazed eyes and absolutely dead.

There was the appalling smell, the whole atmosphere of depression, like the end had come.

“You lost contact with reality... they were dummies, they were dolls. I don’t know whether we ourselves withdrew into another space time existence but you could never associate what you were seeing with your own life. This was something completely separate. It’s another world. If you had become too involved I think you would probably have gone mad.”

Night Will Fall also brings us the testimony of Captain Alexander Vorontsov, a cameraman with the Red Army sweeping into Poland when Maidanek camp was discovered. “We shot the guards dead on the spot,” he reports tersely.

Here too, are the extraordinary survivors of the Nazi killing industry, including Branko Lustig who made it out of BergenBelsen and went on to become a producer of Schindler’s List. And there’s Menachem Rosensaft, born in Belsen in 1948 when it became a displaced persons camp. He’s younger than me. All this happened in my lifetime.

And with the horrors of present-day Syria, Iraq, Libya and Central Africa there has never been a more appropriate time to be reminded of what happens when night falls on humanity.

Legend: Alfrd Hitchcock

Army Film and Photographic Unit

This unique film, narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, opens with British troops moving into northern Germany in April 1945. When they get to Bergen-Belsen the SS are still there. The barbaric commandant Joseph Kramer is still in his office.

They become prisoners of war, while inmate Mania Salinger runs screaming to

the barbed wire: “The Germans are going!

The British are here!” She recalls: “I will never forget it. They said, ‘help is on the way, we are British soldiers.’ We were just crazy.” And that’s where the unknown weeping woman kisses the hand of the unknown soldier who has given her life back to her.

A fleeting, poignant, unforgettable moment, but it’s the curtain-raiser to mindblowing scenes of corpses piled high on the ground, thrown into bulldozed mass graves, of gaunt, terminally-starved faces.

Of human hair “harvested” for the Nazi war effort. Of piles of spectacles, shoes, clothes, suitcases, teeth stored in warehouses, gruesome paraphernalia of an extermination industry.

Hitchcock called for long sweeping shots, so there could be no accusations of fabrication.

He dreamed up a way of confronting the Germans with their collective guilt and the wider world with the criminal proximity of civilians who turn a blind eye to what is going on in their midst. He used large-scale maps to show audiences how close ordinary Germans had lived to the camps. One mile, five miles, 20 miles.

And you knew nothing?

It isn’t all death and destruction. There is footage of women camp survivors, rummaging through clothes liberated from German stores and trying them on amid gossip with fellow ex-inmates. With food and medical care, they often got better within weeks. Women recovered their sense of humanity faster. A hairdo and new clothes were part of the therapy.

But the Bernstein-Hitchcock film was not allowed to see the light of day. A secret official Whitehall minute from the time makes Britain’s position clear: “Policy at the moment is entirely in the direction of encouraging, stimulating and interesting the Germans out of their apathy, and there are people around the C-in-C [Commander in Chief] who will say ‘no atrocity film’.”

The Americans produced a shorter, more overtly propagandist film, Death Mills, to show in their Zone of Occupation.

It had its “premiere” in Wurzburg to an audience of 500 Germans, all but 75 of whom left before the end, sickened and ashamed of what had been done in their name. But though the 100 feet of British film never made it to the screen, some was used as evidence in the Nuremberg war crimes trials. The Butcher of Belsen, Joseph Kramer, was sentenced to death.

General Dwight Eisenhower, overall Allied commander, put it succinctly after visiting Belsen. American soldiers sometimes asked what they were fighting for, so, he said “at least they now know what we are fighting against”.

And that’s what Night Will Fall does also. It fights against forgetting this Holocaust happened in our lifetime, and if we fail to heed the message behind those haunting pictures, it will fall again, and again, and again.

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together Fall 2014

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Holograms Keep Holocaust History Alive There are thought to be over 500,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide. The average age of a survivor is 79 and nearly a quarter of them are 85 or older.

Amulet Created By Son For His Mother in Lodz Ghetto Recovered ‘With Love to Mom, From Avram. Lodz Ghetto. March, 1943’

Shem Olam Institute

By JTA http://forward.com

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by Nic Halverson http://news.discovery.com

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hile many elderly Holocaust survivors leave behind rich narratives of their lives through manuscripts, oral histories or art work, many do not. Some fear that as this aging generation fades away, so too will the personal accounts of the horrors they experienced. In an age of Holocaust deniers like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the preservation of survivors’ oral histories is even more critical.

Taking this preservation into the 21st Century is a group led by the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation who, for the last 18 months, have been creating three-dimensional holograms of nearly a dozen Holocaust survivors. The project is called New Dimensions in Testimony.

John Roger’s recent article in the Associated Press told the story of 80-yearold Pinchus Gutter and how he was filmed for hours in 3-D, in front of a green screen, over the course of five days as he answered some 500 questions about his life and experiences. USC researchers are still editing the footage and working with voice recognition software so that Gutter’s hologram will not only tell his story, it

will be able to recognize and respond to questions.

O n c e G u t t e r ’s h o l o g r a p h i c doppelgänger is finished, visitors to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. could find themselves talking face-to-face with him and the holograms of other Holocaust survivors.

According the AP article, this could happen within the next one to five years.

“Having actually put it together, it’s clear this will happen,” Paul Debevec told the AP. Debevec is associate director of the university’s Institute for Creative Technologies, which is creating the hologram project’s infrastructure. The institute has also worked on Hollywood films such as “Avatar” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”

Ever since deceased rapper Tupac Shakur made a beyond-the-grave, 3-D hologram-like appearance at last year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, hologram tech has gained footing in popular consciousness. However, technically, Tupac’s image wasn’t a hologram because it was projected onto a thin sheet invisible to the audience.

“This takes it one step further as far as you won’t be projecting onto a screen, you’ll be projecting into space,” Stephen Smith, the Shoah Foundation’s executive director said of the project.

visit our website at www.amgathering.org

he existence of an amulet created in the Lodz Ghetto by a son for his mother was recently discovered.

“With love to Mom, from Avram. Lodz Ghetto. March, 1943,” reads the inscription on the amulet, made from two old coins.

The son apparently created the amulet for his mother so she would not forget him if he was sent to the gas chambers.

The amulet, which also includes a drawing of the ghetto and the mother’s initials, was given this week to the Shem Olam Institute for Education, Documentation and Research on Faith and the Holocaust located in Kfar Haroeh in Israel, Ynet reported.

The amulet reportedly was found in the ruins of the ghetto by a Polish man.

His heirs turned it over to the institute.

The institute told Ynet that the son and his mother were sent to a death camp the year after the amulet was created, and that other family members including a husband and father, and older brothers and sons were sent to a labor camp and then died in a death camp the year before the amulet was created.

“The exciting discovery tells of a love story between a son and his mother,” Rabbi Dr. Avraham Krieger, director of the Shem Olam Institute of Holocaust Studies, told Ynet. “More than anything, in the face of oppression and extermination, they wanted to remember each other from inside one of the most crowded and cruel ghettos in Poland.”

Jewish community praises Greek mayor for yellow star protest http://www.jta.org

ATHENS, Greece (JTA) – The mayor of the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki wore a yellow Star of David at his inauguration to protest a newly elected city councilman from the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party.

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ayor Yiannis Boutaris wore the symbol pinned to his jacket last week while being sworn in for his second term.

Greece’s small Jewish community hailed the move in a letter to Boutaris on Monday.

“Your gesture sends a strong and clear message to those nostalgic for Nazism and fascism that under your leadership your city will continue to fight against any phenomena

of racism, intolerance and anti-Semitism,” the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece wrote.

Boutaris was protesting the presence of Golden Dawn lawmaker Artemis Matthaiopoulos on the municipal council.

Matthaiopoulos gained 7.7 percent of the vote in May’s local elections, garnering Golden Dawn two councilmen.

It was part of a strong showing by the party across Greece despite an ongoing government crackdown on the xenophobic party, which has been accused of dozens of attacks on immigrants.

Boutaris’ move also was seen as a gesture of solidarity with Thessaloniki’s Jewish community, which was devastated in the Holocaust and now numbers about 1,000 members.

2014 nationaL GRanDPaRentS tRiP November 15, 2014 9 a.m.–5:15 p.m.

The Krouses visit the Donors Lounge during the 2009 Grandparents Trip. US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Join uS foR the 2014 nationaL GRanDPaRentS tRiP to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC for a day of educational programs for grandparents and their grandchildren, featuring:

ChaiRS

ann Wolk Krouse and Paul C. Krouse Chicago Co-ChaiRS

• Visits to the new special exhibition Some Were Neighbors: Collaboration & Complicity in the Holocaust and Remember the Children: Daniel’s Story; guided tours of the Permanent Exhibition • Behind-the-scenes activities and discussion sessions with Museum educators • Overview of the Museum’s latest initiatives

Sharyn and Walter Gertz Los Angeles Margaret Singerman and Dr. Lawrence Singerman Cleveland Diane and howard Wohl New York

• Presentation by a Holocaust survivor • Candlelighting ceremony Lunch will be provided with a kosher option available.

Register: ushmm.org/events/grandparents For additional information, contact Elana Stern at 847.433.8099 or midwest@ushmm.org.

an optional DC landmarks tour will be offered on friday, november 14, 7–9:30 p.m., at an additional cost of $30 per person.

Programming is designed for ages 11 and older. Program fee is $110 per person (including round-trip bus transfers between the Mandarin Oriental hotel and the Museum). A block of rooms, under the name united States holocaust Memorial Museum, has been reserved at the Mandarin Oriental Washington DC (1330 Maryland Avenue, SW). Space is limited. Please make your hotel reservations as soon as possible by calling 888.888.1778, but no later than October 24.

100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW Washington, DC 20024-2126 ushmm.org/campaign

uShMM 11 x 12 aD

together Fall 2014

8

Travels in Poland and Israel, Between Old Wars and New

By Annette Insdorf http://forward.com

A

s I travel through Poland and Israel, watching, discussing and writing about films, I find myself tracing the continuities, as well as the tensions, of Jewish identity. The only child of Polish Holocaust survivors, I am returning to Poland for the first time in 25 years, exploring what Judaism means there now.

My mother, who accompanied me the last time, is no longer alive, but I feel her presence especially in Krakow, her beloved native city. Unlike 1989, when the first free elections were ending decades of Communist rule, I sense a growing philoSemitism: Younger Poles are expressing awareness of all that their country has lost — not only during the Holocaust, but also in the 1968 expulsion of Jews.

The most striking official expression of this is in Warsaw, at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Although its official opening will be in October, the museum’s director, Dariusz Stola, offered me an early guided tour. The museum is an extraordinary testament to the vitality of Jewish life in Poland, especially before World War II. The site is across from the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, created in 1948 by Nathan Rapoport, an American sculptor of PolishJewish origin who appropriated the black granite that had been ordered during World War II for a Berlin monument to celebrate Hitler’s victory.

Warsaw was not simply occupied by the Nazis from the first days of World War II, but systematically destroyed on Hitler’s orders, even as the end of the Third Reich was imminent. Stola reminds me that the Nazis began the process of torching one house after another in the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943 — targeting Jews first and foremost — and then repeated the same strategy for the Polish population during the Warsaw Rising in 1944.

Despite omnipresent modernization, Poland seems permeated by a sense of loss. When my husband, Mark (an actor and teacher whose parents were also Polish Holocaust survivors), arrives in Warsaw a week after I do, I take him to the Plac Grzybowski to see the restored Nozyk synagogue (where I attended Sabbath services a few nights ago), as well as a ruined building I previously noticed nearby: Riddled with bullet holes, it had large aged photos of Jewish-looking individuals next to the upper windows, as if commemorating them. But when we arrive there, no photos are visible. A construction company has already erected a huge drop cloth on the upper floors.

We are on the Ulica Próżna, a name that seems all too apt: It means “empty street.” Unsure if this is the same building, I find a worker who confirms that they are renovating and have covered the photos.

Festivals Unveil Continuities of Jewish Identity

Hard Choices: Michael Verhoeven’s recent film ‘Let’s Go’ is about Holocaust survivors raising their daughter in Germany in the late 1940s.

I have no idea where we are, but I keep feeling that this must be a remnant of the Warsaw Ghetto, even though the Ghetto area is supposed to be farther away. I am struck by words that were stenciled near the bottom: “żyjesz?” (Are you alive?), and “pamiętasz?” (Do you remember?). I later research “Ulica Próżna” and learn that it’s the only former Warsaw Ghetto street that retained tenement houses. We must have seen the very last one, literally on the brink of modernization.

At the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival, I develop a deeper appreciation of the city where my mother had a happy childhood until she was deported to concentration camps. Her family was assimilated: Because her father had been a captain in the Polish Army, she was one of only two Jewish girls in her secular school. She told me she went to the synagogue on only the High Holy Days.

There were no open synagogues when we visited Krakow 25 years ago, but now I sit in the restored synagogue, listening to klezmer music one evening and to exhilarating Middle Eastern rhythms another. Leaning my head against the wall, I wonder if my mother prayed within this space 80 years before.

During the festival, I hear about the growing number of Christian Poles who learn of their own Jewish ancestry when a parent or grandparent is on her deathbed.

As in the great Polish film “Ida” — the fictional tale of a young nun who discovers she is the daughter of Jews murdered during the war — there seems to be a growing personal stake in exploring one’s origins and assuming a legacy. This has become the subject of new documentary films such as Adam Zucker’s “The Return” and Francine Zuckerman’s “We Were There,” as well as Katka Reszke’s 2013 book, “Return of the Jew: Identity Narratives of the Third Post-

visit our website at www.amgathering.org

Holocaust Generation of Jews in Poland.”’

At Krakow’s museum, I visit the Stanley Kubrick exhibit, which contains its own Jewish dimension. In addition to the copious material from his completed classics — notably “Paths of Glory,” “Dr. Strangelove” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” — I view the director’s plans and correspondence for a movie he never made: “Aryan Papers” would have been his only Holocaust film, which he planned just before Steven Spielberg made “Schindler’s List” in Krakow. Based on Louis Begley’s book “Wartime Lies,” it might have been shot in the very same areas.

Spielberg’s choice to film in Kazimierz — the Jewish quarter that became a slum after the war — is now credited with transforming the area. I learn that the Krakow-based musician Zbigniew Preisner (one of the greatest film composers in the world, based on his scores for Kieslowski’s “Three Colors”) is in town, and I contact him for a rendezvous. He tells me that he and Kieslowski met with Spielberg in Paris when he was still thinking of shooting “Schindler’s List” in Prague, and convinced him to go to Kazimierz. The result? Over the past 20 years, this neighborhood has grown into a vibrant community, and the main location of the Jewish Culture Festival.

From Krakow I travel to Jerusalem to speak at Yad Vashem’s ninth International Conference on Holocaust Education. The opening ceremony of “Through Our Own Lens: Reflecting on the Holocaust from Generation to Generation” is in the Valley of the Communities, surrounded by names — inscribed in stone — of 5,000 places where Jewish life was lost. Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, now chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, eloquently (with no notes) addresses the hundreds of participants.

The youngest survivor of Buchenwald (at the age of 8), he begins by remarking that

one of the gifts the Lord gave us is the ability to forget; otherwise, how could we go on?

But he cautions that this gift does not work with the Holocaust. After acknowledging the 24,000 “Righteous … holy people” as well as the general indifference of the majority, he concludes with the hardearned lesson to “Never lose hope.”

On the night before my panel — part of the session titled “Documentation and Representations of the Holocaust” — the first siren is heard, alerting Jerusalem to missiles being fired from Gaza. I am more surprised than frightened. Only when I read emails from concerned friends in New York do I realize I’m in a potential war zone.

The next morning, conference head Ephraim Kaye announces that, of the 450 participants from 50 countries, not a single person has left. After hearing security instructions (which I will experience at almost every public event over the next few days), I participate in a fascinating discussion — devoted to using Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” as an educational tool — while hoping there won’t be more sirens.

The conclusion of the Yad Vashem conference coincides with the opening of the 31st Jerusalem Film Festival. For the next 10 days, I see provocative movies that often echo themes from this conference. The legacy of the Holocaust is one of them, as in the latest film from master German director Michael Verhoeven, “Let’s Go.” Adapted from the autobiographical novel by Laura Waco, it is a beautifully made drama about a survivor couple who choose to raise their daughters in Germany in the late 1940s.

Another recurring theme is the prevalence of genocide. Daniel Goldhagen’s Yad Vashem lecture — based on his book, “Worse Than War” — includes a horrifying statistic: In our time, across the globe, there have been 100 million innocent victims of genocide. In Stefan Ruzowitzky’s documentary “Radical Evil” — about the Einsatzgruppen death squads that shot to death some 2 million Jews in Eastern Europe during World War II — Benjamin Ferencz says, “Mass murderers are ordinary people like you and me.”

One of them is the riveting “Night Will Fall,” directed by Andre Singer: The archival material contained in this documentary constitutes essential evidence about the Holocaust. When Allied troops liberated the German concentration camps, they systematically recorded evidence of torture and murder. In 1945 England, Sidney Bernstein, chief of the Psychological Warfare Film Section, commissioned a documentary to show Nazi atrocities to the German population. Titled “German Concentration Camps: A Factual Survey,” it was never shown.

Twelve minutes of “Night Will Fall” are from the original documentary. Some

continued on p. 10

Holocaust Questions and Answers

by Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg

O

ne wonders why there was not a mass exodus from Europe when they knew that Nazi occupation meant death.

Many Holocaust survivors have told me that the invasion of the Nazis and the annihilation of the Jewish population was like a tsunami. It happened so fast that there was no time to think, to flee, or to leave. Even if one wanted to leave, where would they go? Most countries did not allow Jews to enter, including the United States of America. There were quotas and anti-Semitism throughout the world. They thought it would all pass, just like other instances of anti-Semitism that had occurred in the past. They believed Hitler would never have enough power or support to annihilate German Jewry. They were wrong and it cost them their lives. In addition how does one leave behind family members while escaping to freedom, even if they could?

Following the death of my parents, after I married and started a family, I began searching for the history of those in my family who perished in the Holocaust and for a trace of anyone who survived. The only family I knew to survive were one cousin and aunt on my father’s side. As of today I have not found anyone who survived the Holocaust. My parents of blessed memory

continued on p. 21

Let It Go? continued from p. 2 Secretary, a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, a former director of the Israeli Security Agency, the Shin Bet, two members of Knesset, and the editor-publisher or the most influential German news weekly.

While the essays in this book cover a broad spectrum of religious beliefs and political views, their authors agree on the critical importance of both preserving the authentic memory of the Shoah and passing it on to future generations as a way of strengthening Jewish identity as well as fighting all forms of bigotry and intolerance.

As God, Faith & Identity demonstrates conclusively, the survivors can be reassured that their legacy will be fiercely safeguarded by their children and grandchildren. And those who would “let it go” should bear this in mind as well before they speak.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is Senior Vice President of the American Gathering and General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress.

He teaches about the law of genocide at the law schools of Columbia and Cornell Universities.

9 together Fall 2014 USC Shoah Foundation and World Jewish Congress announce global program to support 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

One hundred survivors from nations around the world to partici pate in official observance on January 27, 2015 NEW YORK - USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education and the World Jewish Congress will be supporting the official observance of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz with Auschwitz: The Past is Present, a global communication and education program. As part of the program, 100 survivors of Auschwitz, the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp, will travel to Poland to attend and participate in the official observance of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 2015.

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he Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the International Auschwitz Council are the organizers of the official commemoration event.

“January 27, 2015, will be a truly exceptional day,” said Dr. Piotr M.A. Cywiński, director of the AuschwitzBirkenau State Museum. “On this day of remembrance, the whole world will focus on the tragedy of the Shoah and the entire cruel system of ghettos and concentration camps. The survivors will be our most important guests.”

“When we gather at the site of unspeakable terror, we will do so to show not only survivors, but the entire world, that the suffering of so many will never be forgotten,” said USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen D. Smith. “Those who lived through the Holocaust have carried the burden of remembering long enough. It’s up to us now, their children and grandchildren, to lift its heavy weight off their shoulders.

We are ready to take on the responsibility of ensuring that this tragic chapter of human history is never repeated.”

“Auschwitz is not only the world’s biggest Jewish graveyard, it is also the primary symbol of the Holocaust, the biggest organized mass murder in human history. This will probably mark the last time that so many survivors will be able to join us there, and we must ensure that the unspeakable suffering they and many others had to endure at Auschwitz will not be forgotten once they are no longer among us,” said WJC CEO Robert Singer.

He went on to say: “The World Jewish Congress, and our President Ronald S. Lauder, are honored that such renowned partners have agreed to jointly prepare this important anniversary, to ensure that this anniversary will get the world’s attention.”

German neo-Nazi’s naming to EU committee rankles Jewish leaders Udo Voigt, the former head of the far-right National Democratic Party, was named this week to the parliamentary committee for Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. Voigt, 62, has lauded Adolf Hitler and is notorious for his relativization of the Holocaust. http://www.jta.org

BERLIN (JTA) — European Jewish leaders slammed the appointment of a German neo-Nazi lawmaker to the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee.

“I

t is surreal and the ultimate insult to the Jews of Europe and to the European Union itself,” Moshe Kantor, head of the Brussels-based European Jewish Congress, said in a statement Tuesday. He urged all lawmakers “to refuse to allow this man to participate in the workings of the committee.”

Kantor added that none of this would have happened if Germany had banned the NPD, which has some 7,000 members nationwide.

Voigt gained his seat in the European Parliament in May when the NDP won about 1 percent of the German popular vote — the new threshold for admission to the body.

World Jewish Congress CEO Robert Singer said “it was already bad enough that Voigt was able to get elected” after Germany removed the 5 percent vote threshold for international elections this year. His appointment to the committee is “disgraceful and unacceptable,” Singer

An estimated 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, but also Poles, Sinti and Roma, and Soviet POWs, were murdered in Auschwitz, in Germanoccupied Poland, between 1940 and 1945.

About the USC Shoah Foundation USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education is dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides, a compelling voice for education and action. The Institute’s current collection of over 53,000 eyewitness testimonies preserves history as told by the people who lived it, and lived through it. Housed at the University of Southern California, within the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the Institute works with partners around the world to advance scholarship and research, to provide resources and online tools for educators, and to disseminate the testimonies for educational purposes.

About the World Jewish Congress T h e Wo r l d J e w i s h C o n g r e s s (WJC) is the international organization representing Jewish communities in 100 countries to governments, parliaments and international organizations.

said, joining calls for the EU to establish a higher threshold to prevent extremist fringe groups from gaining a foothold. The next such election is scheduled for 2019.

“The idea of a neo-Nazi as a guardian of European human rights is sickening,” said Stephan Kramer, newly appointed director of the American Jewish Committee’s European Office on Anti-Semitism, based in Brussels and Berlin.

Germany’s last official attempt to ban the NPD failed in 2003, after it turned out that government informants had incited some of the illegal actions for which the party was being investigated.

After the NPD reached the threshold in May, Dieter Graumann, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said he felt justified in pushing for a new attempt to ban the party. Skeptics have warned that a second failure would only benefit the extremists and hurt all future attempts.

Just prior to his election, Voigt received a one-year suspended sentence in Germany for incitement to hate.

visit our website at www.amgathering.org

together Fall 2014

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Travels in Poland and Israel, Between Old Wars and New continued from p. 8 sections are exceedingly difficult to watch: The archival footage of the liberation of the concentration camps challenges our capacity to apprehend and comprehend the emaciated, tortured corpses found in Bergen-Belsen as well as in other death camps. (It is hard for me personally, as I fear recognizing an image of my mother among the survivors: She was sick with typhus when this camp was liberated.)

One of the most intriguing aspects of “Night Will Fall” is the role taken by Alfred Hitchcock. Bernstein asked his friend and colleague to serve as supervising editor.

Hitchcock began work in late June 1945, insisting on panning shots to keep the reality of the space and relationships — so no viewer would think images could have been faked — and he added maps. Hitchcock wanted the Belsen “dot” to be surrounded by dozens of other dots representing nearby towns and cities, demonstrating that people could not have been unaware of the death camp’s existence.

But “German Concentration Camps” was not released. As Menachem Rosensaft, who was born in Bergen-Belsen, says on camera, the film became a political inconvenience. Britain neither wanted to take in the refugees, nor to let them into Palestine. The Cold War was starting, and Germany would be playing a role against Russia.

The documentary’s footage was used as evidence in trials, however, including Nuremberg. “German Concentration Camps” was completed 70 years later by

Imperial War Museums, and the Jerusalem International Film Festival presented the remastered original in addition to “Night Will Fall.”

Ferencz also plays an integral role in “Watchers of the Sky,” the most powerful film I see at the festival. Directed by Edet Belzberg, this galvanizing documentary highlights a few heroes who struggle to do their part in repairing the world. While Raphael Lemkin — who coined the term “genocide” — is the focus, he clearly inspired such contemporary heroes as peace advocate Ferencz, Samantha Power (American ambassador to the United Nations) and Juan Moreno Ocampo (head of the International Criminal Court).

The heart of the film can be found in one of the lines from Lemkin’s notebooks: “Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of one person?”

While his own formative experience was the Holocaust (which claimed his Polish Jewish parents), the atrocities of Armenia, Kosovo, Rwanda and Sudan are discussed in the film as well.

At the age of 21, Lemkin decided to formulate international law against genocide — to make barbarity identifiable, punishable and preventable. He was first appointed to serve as deputy public prosecutor of Warsaw. In 1939 he hid in the forest and made his way back to his parents’ small farm. Unable to convince them to go with him to America, “I tried to live a year in this one day, to borrow time from the future,” he wrote about his last moments with them.

He arrived in the United States in 1941 and became a “one-man lobbyist” at the newly formed United Nations: In 1948 he succeeded in getting the votes of small nations to establish punishment for genocide in times of peace. But it took 50 years to implement this. Only in 2002 was Ocampo able to build a case against Sudan’s president, Omar Al-Bashir.

Ocampo is a fascinating hero, an Argentine who was a prosecutor of the military junta in 1985. We see him speaking at the United Nations to protect Darfuris by chronicling the rape of young girls and the bombing of schools. “Silence only helps the criminals,” he concludes. We later realize that there is no enforcement mechanism for the ICC’s evidence and conclusions.

From Rwanda, Emmanuel Uwurukundo, field director of the UN Refugee Agency in Chad’s refugee camps next to Darfur, is another inspirational figure, especially when recounting — ever so quietly — how intolerable the murders of his entire family remain for him. Through this survivor, we learn that it was (tragically and ironically) during the slaughter that troops were pulled out rather than added. The language we hear from the Hutu is identical to Nazi terminology — “Exterminate the cockroaches” — as well as from Sudan’s president, who demands the “ridding of vermin… insects.”

Uwurukundo’s assessment seems eerily applicable to the current situation in Israel: “No solution has ever been found by retaliation.” He laments “spiral killings” that lead to the children’s doom. But the film ends on an upbeat note, with Power expressing gratitude for “the privilege of getting to try,” and

Ferencz’s story of Tycho Brahe. This Danish astronomer and alchemist of the late 1500s minutely chronicled the skies, providing manuscripts that served even the American astronauts who landed on the moon. “I’m watching the sky,” Ferencz concludes.

It seems more than coincidental that this is the last film I see at the JIFF. I have been looking upward a great deal — at movie screens, or for possible missiles, or in prayer. Maybe this gaze of ascent is also one of assent, accepting that I was meant to be in Warsaw, Krakow and Jerusalem at these particular moments, tracing lines from a haunting past to a volatile present and a more hopeful future.

Yes, hopeful, as I refuse to believe that violent retaliation is the only path. Indeed, many of the movies shown at the JIFF serve as a reminder of one of Lemkin’s lines from “Watchers of the Sky”: “Love despite difference, and rather because of difference.”

While it is of course easy to feel frightened or vulnerable in Israel, a particular moment feels symbolic. One afternoon, I hear what seem to be gunshots and ask a local what is happening. It turns out to be the sound of fireworks for Arab students who are celebrating their graduation from nearby schools. A few hours later, as night falls, I hear the sounds again; this time, I look up to appreciate the fireworks.

Annette Insdorf is director of undergraduate film studies at Columbia University. Her books include “Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust” and “Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski.” She is currently writing a book about the films of Wojciech Has.

Warsaw to restore 1,000 Jewish tombstones used for construction The headstones, which are currently part of a pergola and stairs at a park in Warsaw’s Praga district, will be returned in the coming months to the Brodno Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw, according to a statement Friday by From the Depths, the international commemoration nonprofit that led talks on the subject with city officials

T A structure made out of Jewish headstones at a park in Warsaw earlier this year. (Courtesy of From the Depths) http://www.jta.org

(JTA) — The City of Warsaw has agreed to return and preserve 1,000 Jewish headstones that were used to construct a recreational facility inside one of the city’s parks.

visit our website at www.amgathering.org

he city allocated a budget of $180,000 for the project, according to Jonny Daniels, From the Depths’ U.K.born, Israel-based founder.

The pergola at Praga district is one of countless sites scattered across Poland in which Jewish tombstones were used as construction material, according to Daniels, whose group earlier this year brought dozens of Israeli lawmakers to a meeting with counterparts from Poland and other countries, and a visit to the Auschwitz death camp on the 69th anniversary of its liberation.

“In the 1950s, the communists were in full swing of building structures and monuments out of matzevas, which they often broke into pieces,” Daniels said, using the Hebrew word for a Jewish tombstone.

From the Depths’ involvement in the subject is part of the organization’s Matzeva Project, which aims to restore an estimated one million gravestones hidden in buildings and urban spaces. The Jewish Historical Institute and the chief rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, are official partners of the project.

An effort to locate headstones will begin this month with help from volunteers from the University of Warsaw.

“Since we’ve started being interested in the question of matzevas used as a building material, there was a noticeable influx of information,” Daniels said, adding that his group is receiving calls and emails on a daily basis with information about tombstone and fragments that were used to make roads, walls, knife sharpeners and even toilets.

together Fall 2014 Steven Sotloff, Murdered Journalist, Grandson of Holocaust Survivors continued from p. 1 An impermeable cone of silence surrounded news of Sotloff’s disappearance last year and, more recently, the fact of his Jewish background and connections. That silence was requested by his family and maintained by media and Jewish organizations, including the Forward, in the hope that it would protect him from the worst.

Remarkably, in this age of unfettered social media, where boundaries between public and private are fading more quickly than old newsprint, the family’s request was respected.

Now it is appropriate to break that silence and humanize the innocent victim of an outrageous, unacceptable murder.

Sadly, what ISIS did to Sotloff and James Foley before him is no worse than what this rampaging group has done to thousands of others, Muslims and nonbelievers alike. But we are human. We intuitively relate to our own. And Sotloff was one of us.

Danielle Berrin, a reporter for the Jewish Journal in Los Angeles, posted a photo from her first-grade class at Beth Am, where she was seated in the first row and Sotloff was standing in the row behind.

The “goofy, smiley, playfully mischievous kid from Miami” was a childhood friend and, later, a Facebook acquaintance as he freelanced stories from the Middle East. She remembered that, “rather than cower from danger, he flew right into it, intent on telling the stories he believed would shape history.”

Sotloff spoke Arabic, studied Islam and evidently cared about the people he covered in Yemen, Libya and Egypt, writing for American and Israeli publications. And then, fatefully, he went to Syria.

Shortly after Sotloff’s kidnapping in August 2013, his parents, Arthur and Shirley, set up an emergency headquarters at their home, and began to assemble a team that would handle the crisis thrust upon them.

They turned to Jewish communal leaders and then to several kidnap and ransom experts, and to public relations specialists working pro bono to bring about Sotloff’s release.

The key strategy was secrecy. Secrecy because the United States government, as a matter of policy, does not publish the names of its citizens held by ISIS. And secrecy because there was a genuine fear that Sotloff’s Jewish identity and Israeli passport could put him at greater risk of torture and death.

A quiet effort led by the Miami federation raised $15,000 to fund the family’s work as it tried to find out as much information as possible about Sotloff’s well-being. Others helped with airfare and travel costs.

News of Foley’s murder on August 19 upended the strategy. Sotloff was thrust into the spotlight by ISIS’s chilling warning that he would be its next victim. Friends and acquaintances recognized him in the video distributed by ISIS. The veil had lifted.

The Sotloffs and their support team travelled to Washington to make an urgent appeal for their son’s life. They did not succeed in meeting with President Obama or Vice President Joe Biden, but they did talk with senior officials at the White House and State Department.

Through Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Sotloffs also reached out to Jewish groups, updating them on their efforts and asking for continued silence.

The request for a news blackout did not reach all publications simultaneously.

The Orlando Sentinel initially included information about Sotloff’s Jewish roots, as did The New York Times, but those references were quickly scrubbed from the Internet.

The same pattern emerged in the past few days, as word of Sotloff’s Israeli citizenship and connections began to seep out, only to then be removed at the request of the family’s representatives.

Only when the Israeli foreign ministry in Jerusalem confirmed his citizenship did the Forward and other publications acknowledge the truth.

As Sotloff’s mother Shirley said in a carefully-worded, heartbreaking video pleading for his release, “Steven is a loyal and generous son, brother and grandson.

He’s an honorable man and has always tried to help the weak.”

But virtuous qualities make no difference to the likes of ISIS, who torture and behead with impunity. Sotloff, only 31, was doing important work as a freelance journalist — extraordinarily dangerous work. Syria has, in fact, been the most dangerous country on the planet for journalists for two years now. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that at least 70 other journalists have been killed covering the brutal conflict; more than 80 have been kidnapped.

Most of them were Syrian. We mourn them, too. But forgive us if we experience a special kind of grief for the Jewish kid from Miami, who played rugby and video games and tweeted about American basketball and risked his life to tell a critical story.

Let his death serve as an urgent reminder to our government and the leaders of other nations — especially those who have shamefully paid ransom to release other hostages, only to further enrich these awful captors and encourage more kidnappings and murders. It’s past time to have a plan to deal with ISIS. It won’t help Steven Sotloff, but perhaps it will save and protect others.

“Our hearts and prayers are with the Sotloff family,” said the condolence note on the Miami federation’s website.

Ours, too.

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Plans for Rome Holocaust museum in jeopardy http://www.jta.org

ROME (JTA) – City authorities in Rome may drop the idea of building a $30 million Holocaust museum in the city — with the apparent backing of the Rome Jewish community.

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fter years of delays on the project, the community’s board issued a statement last week that seems to back plans for a smaller exhibit in a former shopping center in a Rome suburb.

Plans were announced a decade ago to build a state-of-the-art Shoah museum on the grounds of Villa Torlonia, wartime dictator Benito Mussolini’s residence, where ancient Jewish catacombs also are located. Financial and bureaucratic problems have stalled the project in the central part of Rome for years.

Funds were finally freed up and architectural plans approved in 2012, but since then there has been no movement.

As a result, Holocaust survivors and their families this summer launched appeals and petitioned the Rome Jewish community and City Hall to speed up plans in order to Amerian Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants

From Holocaust to New Life!

inaugurate a Shoah museum before they passed away.

Proposals were floated to drop the Villa Torlonia plan and install a permanent Holocaust exhibit in a building already standing – a former shopping center in EUR, a southern suburb of the city. The exhibit would be inaugurated on next year’s International Holocaust Memorial Day, Jan. 27 — the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Responding to the petition, the board of the Rome Jewish community issued its statement that appeared to support the idea.

The board said that a Holocaust museum should be completed within a rapid time frame, take into consideration the “economic difficulties” of the country, and have a “decorous and dignified” structure. It urged the museum founders to “consider any concrete and immediate proposal” that respects those “mandatory requirements.”

A mayoral spokesman offered no explanation for the delays in building the museum, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported, and added that it was understandable the Jewish community would be leery of whether it would be built anytime soon.

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Teaching Kids About the Holocaust: How Young Is Too Young?

An acclaimed and controversial Australian children’s book, raises questions about Holocaust education

By Elissa Goldstein http://www.tabletmag.com

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et the Celebrations Begin has all the hallmarks of a successful children’s picture book: simple language with just the right amount of repetitive phrasing, watercolor illustrations, grumpy-yetcharming elders, and wide-eyed children who must learn to accept the difficult realities of their small universe. But— to paraphrase that very Jewish question— there’s one thing that makes this picture book different from all other picture books: The story takes place in a concentration camp on the eve of liberation, and all the characters are starving.

The book was originally published to great acclaim, and some controversy, in Australia in 1991, when I was growing up in Melbourne. Author Margaret Wild and illustrator Julie Vivas are both beloved and prolific contributors to the corpus of Australian kid-lit. There’s not a bookseller Down Under who doesn’t recommend Wild’s Harry & Hopper; and Possum Magic, illustrated by Vivas, is the country’s unofficial national picture book.

There was a copy in my school library, which I read many times; I must have been around 9 when I first read it, and I returned to it often as a teenager. Let the Celebrations Begin has been out of print in the United States for over a decade, but this September it will be republished. (Which is great, because it means I can finally stop scouring secondhand bookstores for battered, decommissioned library copies.)

But even after more than 20 years, the book still raises the same questions it did when it first came out: How young is too young to learn about the Holocaust? And how frank and explicit can a book about the Holocaust be while still being appropriate for children? ***

For a story set in a concentration camp, the opening sentence is incongruous: “We are planning a party, a very special party, the women and I.” The narrator is a girl of about 10, Miriam, who lives in hut 18 with a group of older women, a younger girl named Sarah, and a 4-year-old named David. Unlike Sarah and David, Miriam is old enough to remember a time before the war, when she had a mother and a father and her “very own bedroom” with her “very own toys.” Here, in this unnamed place of horror, there are none of those things, only a longing for what once was. But the people in Miriam’s hut are resourceful

of the soldiers represents the restoration of order and justice, chicken soup is abundant, the children receive their toys, the human spirit reigns triumphant. This is entirely appropriate for young children—why should a 9-year-old expect anything else from the world? And yet, Let the Celebrations Begin is a fantasy of survival, one which elides the truth of Holocaust, in which 1.5 million children died, and very few as young as Miriam and David survived the camps.

Should Wild or the publishers have included more historical facts within the text of the story? Or does that responsibility fall to us, the adults who will read and teach this book to children?

Though the critic in me is cognizant (LET THE CELEBRATIONS BEGIN!. Text copyright © 1991, 2013 by Margaret Wild.

Illustrations copyright © 1991, 2013 by Julie Vivas. Reproduced by permission of the of the book’s limitations, the reader in publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA on behalf of Walker Books, Australia.) me loves it and finds solace in it. I cannot read Let the Celebrations Begin without and hopeful; emboldened by rumors of expressive, alternately fearful and mirthful; tearing up, especially when we are told impending liberation, they are making toys their meager figures fill the large pages. that the liberators stare at the inmates for the children with whatever scraps of Their proportions, and the fact that we do “oh, so strangely, making soft noises in fabric and thread they can find. The story is not actually see the liberators, reinforce the their throats.” Their horror is inarticulate. fictional but inspired by true events: Wild message that the prisoners are the heroes of In that moment, multiple perspectives are masterfully layered: We are close to includes two quotations as a foreword and the story, not its victims.

These narrative and illustrative choices Miriam’s point-of-view and her jubilation, afterword, one describing the stuffed toys made by women in Belsen for the first are incredibly moving, but not without but we also gaze upon the characters as the children’s party after the liberation, the other their weaknesses. When the book was liberators would have, their cachectic faces from a first-hand account of the liberation of first published, some reviewers expressed peering out from the page. This poignancy Bergen-Belsen by Dr. Hadassah Rosensaft. disappointment at how the topic was is heightened by our own knowledge of the Miriam narrates the story in simple, handled, concerned that the themes and incomprehensible scale of the Holocaust, of u n s e n t i m e n t a l l a n g u a g e , a t t i m e s imagery were inappropriate for young which neither Miriam nor her liberators are reminiscent of a 1950s primer. Describing readers. The Publishers Weekly review yet aware. The effect is haunting.

For me and I think other Australian David, she says: “See him there in the took umbrage at its “improbable plot” and corner with his mama’s old black shawl. “grotesque figures,” concluding that there Jews of my generation, Let the Celebrations See his hungry eyes and legs.” Later, when was “something monstrous about forcing Begin is more than just a book about the the camp is finally liberated: “Everyone, the moribund into cheerful attitudes.” Most Holocaust. It’s a portal into a dark, mostly everyone, the soldiers are here! See their reviews were positive, however, and the inaccessible world that once contained guns and their tanks and the big gates book was short-listed by the Children’s our grandparents, and many more family swinging open!” For adult readers, this Book Council of Australia for Picture Book members who did not survive. This perhaps speaks more to the bubble of my phrasing is incongruous. Instead of Dick of the Year in 1992.

Michelle Prawer, who taught English community and the myopia of childhood, and Jane, we see the mechanisms of oppression and war from a child’s point at Jewish schools in Melbourne (including but I remember being truly shocked to of view, told in a child’s voice. If we’re the one I attended) for many years, and is learn that there was a country with millions disturbed by the simplicity and naivety of now a Ph.D. student in literary studies, of Jews—America!—and most of them the language, it’s because we’re supposed recently wrote to me in an email that she had no direct connection to the camps. to be. For younger readers, especially found the illustrations alarming when she Almost all of my peers in Melbourne had those unfamiliar with the Holocaust, the first read the book: “They are stylized grandparents who were survivors, and text reads differently: Miriam is simply depictions of survivors, distorted for effect, this simple fact explained the quirks, or a peer describing her experiences in but they are quite haunting.” At the time neuroses, of our loving but overprotective a straightforward way with minimal of publication, she explained, there would families. (One of my friends once wryly not have been “many attempts to depict the commented that some sort of collective historical context, as any child would.

Like the text, Vivas’ illustrations— Holocaust in a picture book for such young Holocaust memory dust must have been rendered in a muted, pastel palette— readers, and this in itself would have been added to our milk in preschool, like a supplement.) I have no memory of learning juxtapose the horrors of the camps with a confronting.”

The promise of “celebration” is about the Holocaust for the first time—I more naive, childlike, storybook world. The women and children have skinny legs and certainly an unorthodox entry point to simply always knew that millions had shaved, almost bulbous, heads. Their clothes a story about the Holocaust. Miriam’s died in horrific circumstances, that my (not uniforms) are threadbare and torn. But focus (and thus, the reader’s) is on life and grandparents were lucky to have survived, Vivas draws them in a way that restores their imagination and the comfort of memory. The and that my existence, therefore, was a dignity: Their watercolor eyes are wide and final message is a hopeful one. The arrival small but miraculous accident of history.

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These Students Spend Summers Making Animated Movies About the Holocaust

Photo courtesy of Ilana Ross, Righteous Conversations Project

An animated still from an upcoming film.

By John Mroch http://www.laweekly.com

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ucked into a makeshift studio at HarvardWestlake High School on a Monday afternoon last month, a group of teenagers fiddled with cameras, adjusted key and filler lights and balanced out boom microphones.

They were preparing to interview 88-yearold Holocaust survivor Curt Lowens for an animated short film.

Lowens, who has been an actor since 1951, both in Off-Broadway theater, TV and movies – he had a role in General Hospital in 1963 and also had parts in movies including A Midnight Clear and Angels and Demons (starring Tom Hanks) — waited patiently for the students to set up. He sat comfortably, humming to himself. It was apparent that he’s used to being on a set.

Brought together by the Righteous Conversations Project — a program launched in 2011 by the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust — these kids devote a few weeks out of their summer break working to re-tell the life experiences of Holocaust survivors through short film and animation.

The animation, based on the art of the time period, consists of dramatizing the Holocaust survivors’ stories through drawings and cardboard set designs, as seen in Curt Lowens: A Life of Changes.

Much like a documentary, the film switches between an interview with Lowens’ recollecting his experience as a Jew living in and escaping Nazi Germany and the kids’ animation of his story.

Not only do the programs’ movies focus on re-telling Holocaust survivor accounts, they also sometimes include contemporary social issues, like anti-genocide in Darfur, and the effects of censorship in the media.

According to Samara Hutman, who’s co-founder of the Righteous Conversations Project and director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, these animation

Curt Lowens. Photo courtesy of Ilana Ross, Righteous Conversations Project workshops allow kids to collaborate with these “elders who are an incredible source of human history” and give kids the opportunity to be “makers of media that’s shared across multiple platforms.”

Each film made over the summer is screened at the Museum of the Holocaust during the fall months following its creation, and they are also entered into film festivals.

In past years, these short films have circulated through the Los Angeles Film Festival and the International Youth Film Festival (among many others). Their 2013 film What Saves Us claimed first place in the Student/Mentor PSA

Memory After Belsen

category at the International My Hero Film Festival, based in L.A. For most of these kids, the chance to hear these moving stories hits home, as many have had family ties to the Holocaust. At the workshop, as the kids were finishing up their preparations to interview Lowens, a few of them gave accounts about how one way or another, they had been affected by the Holocaust.

“I had a relative in Poland who was beaten by [German] troopers,” explained one.

“My grandfather was in the U.S. Army,” chimed another. “He was assigned to watch imprisoned Nazi soldiers.”

It’s heavy material to be processing at such a young age, but they’re up for the challenge. And when Lowens was their age, he was dealing with a lot more.

With all lights, cameras and eyes on Lowens, the interview commenced. A student picked up the conversation where it left off the session before. She asked Lowens — a Jew born in East Prussia, which is now an area of Western Russia boarding the Baltic Sea — about what it was like undergoing “Kristallnacht,” the Night of Broken Glass, when Jewish businesses throughout Germany were demolished by Nazi paramilitary forces, and thousands of Jewish citizens were beaten, captured and incarcerated into concentration camps.

He traveled back in his mind and pulled the memory out – clear as day. At the time, Lowens was living in Berlin, and only twelve years old. Speaking slowly in a deep, lyrical tenor, he recalled the event: “The teacher closed the school and sent us home. The main street of many wonderful luxury stores [were] smashed up, vandalized.

“It was not a cheerful experience,” he added.

The room was quiet. For the teenagers, powerful stories like these are what make spending summer indoors worthwhile.

As World War II was winding down, Lowens worked as a translator for England, interrogating Germans in POW prisons. “I was wearing the British uniform, and I stuck to my job,” said Lowens. “Incredible scene if you consider the irony.”

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new documentary feature film, Memory After Belsen, that follows a granddaughter of a survivor as she traces her grandmother’s experience, will have its New York premiere on Thursday, November 20, 2014 at 6:30 p.m. at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (36 Battery Place, New York).

The young woman’s journey to Bergen Belsen serves as a springboard for exploring issues of memory. Voices of leading scholars and educators contribute to this unique program on the future of Holocaust memory and how it is portrayed in contemporary culture through film, the arts, human rights initiatives and education.

Interested in attending? You must RSVP to joshua@strmedia.com. The film is being shown by invitation only. For more information on the film, check out the website www.memoryafterbelsen.com.

Vienna Jewish Museum restitutes Nazilooted painting http://www.jta.org

(JTA) — The Vienna Jewish Museum restituted a Nazi-looted painting to the artist’s grandnieces.

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An animated still from an upcoming film.

Photo courtesy of Ilana Ross, Righteous Conversations Project

he 1922 painting “The coffee hour. Fanny, the sister of the artist” by Jewish artist Jehudo Epstein, was handed over Friday to Anne Starkey, one of Epstein’s grandnieces and the granddaughter of the woman in the painting.

Starkey traveled from Britain to the museum to recover the painting, according to reports.

The museum, which obtained the artwork in 2010, discovered that the heirs were seeking to recover the painting.

Epstein left Austria for South Africa in 1934. The painting later was confiscated by the Nazis after they annexed Austria. Epstein died in South Africa in 1945.

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together Fall 2014

Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers’ Program I would most definitely recommend this program to my colleagues as it changes one’s entire teaching. The Holocaust is complex, and this historic multiplicity cannot be fully understood, just by reading about it. To experience it, to stand in the place of history (e.g. actual sites), and to see it (e.g. remnants of the ghettos, the proximity of it, or the Jewish life before 1933) will greatly enhance that understanding… In my case, the Schindler Museum, which was phenomenal, gave me new and valuable insights.

Christiane Schmidt, Tennessee As an individual, the high points were the overwhelming vastness of the Holocaust and deliberate intent of the perpetrators. I didn’t realize to what extent the atrocities were planned. I was moved by the impact of the personal stories and experiences suffered by individuals, families, and other groups. The underground museum at Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe had the greatest effect on me, by focusing on individual victims of the Holocaust. There was a picture of a little boy with his teddy bear that broke my heart and will stay with me always. I valued the camaraderie experienced within the group through the sharing of personal stories related to the Holocaust and the ability to work out the emotional experience together. Through the group meetings, I learned how the Holocaust continues to affect people today.

Carol Manley, Houston Teachers’ Trip

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his year, 31 teachers from 19 different states journeyed with me and Stephen Feinberg on the Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers’ Program. We started our trip in Washington, D.C. with a day at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum studying artifacts.

We then flew to Germany where we visited Bergen Belsen, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, the Wannsee Villa, the Olympic Stadium, Track 17, the Topography of Terror, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

From Berlin we drove to Prague. We spent a day at Theresienstadt and another day touring Jewish Prague. We went on to Krakow where we visited the ghetto, the Schindler Museum (the Museum of Wartime Krakow), the Galicia Museum, and Plaszow. We spent a day at Auschwitz-Birkenau. From Krakow we journeyed to Belzec, to Lublin, to Majdanek and to Lodz where we walked the Jewish cemetery and saw the Radegast memorial.

We left for Warsaw and toured the remains of the ghetto walls, the Jewish Historical Institute, the Umschlagplatz, the Jewish cemetery, the Nozick synagogue, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and finally Treblinka.

If it sounds like a jam-packed itinerary, then you are beginning to understand just how rigorous and emotionally stressful this trip is. But, as always, it is the impact of both knowledge and enotion that is the result of all of our travels. Let us hear it from the teachers themselves: First and foremost, the program provided me with an incredible wealth of content knowledge that I did not possess before. Looking back, it is remarkable how much I did not know. This knowledge will allow me to significantly expand the amount of time that I spend on the Holocaust … the program fostered a greater understanding of designing and implementing strong and realistic educational objectives. I plan to focus my attention on understanding totalitarianism and genocide.

Michael Lemon, New Orleans, LA Meeting the survivors, like Eva Macourkova and Yehuda Blum, and the children of survivors like Robert Bielski and Elaine Culbertson, was a highpoint because their testimony and their presence not only bore witness, but also brought home the fact of Jewish resistance and heroism. I learned that resistance could take more forms than mere physical actions, such as spiritual, artistic, and humanitarian. Hearing how these survivors suffered and persevered opened the way to my understanding that Jews were “targets” and not victims; and that there is a meaning to the Shoah beyond the senseless killing, one that reconfirms the human spirit.

Eugene Davis, Florida As an individual my high point was the hands on learning experience at the various locations. Auschwitz was a true eye opener. Having learned about the camp since the 7th grade it was life changing to see what the books talk about. The vastness of the systematic plan is still overwhelming and has truly changed my own faith. As a curriculum coordinator for social studies my high point was the networking with other educators. We all shared so many ideas that I cannot wait to develop and train CCSD teachers in.

Emily Rodriquez, Las Vegas, NV

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First, this experience will provide credibility for my lectures and activities. I learned early in my teaching that when I can say, “I was there and this is what I saw/heard/smelled/ felt...,” then the students take more notice and ask more questions… I have more tools to share with my students in teaching about culture (Jewish life), democratic principles, human rights, resistance to tyranny and persecution, and the horrors of the Holocaust in a historical context with modern day application. My emphasis will be on human rights, moral responsibility, and tolerance (acceptance of the right to choose even if it is not my choice) of other cultures, ethnic groups, religions, etc. I plan to use more primary documents (photos, eyewitness accounts, testimonies) in my lessons. The true story is most always more interesting to my students than a fictional account.

Susan Locklear, Texas I think that my lessons will be more centered around the life and humanity of the victims rather than the perpetrators. I will be able to share my personal experiences and reactions to the camps as well as sharing the differences in each of these camps. I will also focus on examples of resistance, from small – the carving of a dreidle, the music and art that was created, the journals written to preserve the story and make sure that the Nazis could not get away with this to large – Warsaw Uprising, bombing of crematorium and also just the individuals sheer will to live to tell their story and make sure it was known and that the perpetrators were held responsible.

Rachel Westgate, Texas There were two places that I believe told the most powerful narratives. The first was the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. …if you just took the time to listen to each of the individual testimonies told by the murdered victims themselves. .. The story that moved me to tears was the 13 year old Hungarian girl sealed in a cattle car with 88 other souls frightened and alone yet she somehow managed to write a post card to her mother and father to tell them how much she loved them and would miss them. The post card was found and displayed at the museum. The second museum we saw contained tapestries depicting the first person account of a young Polish girl whose life is fine until the Germans show up in her village and her whole world is turned upside down. She uses the tapestry to tell her family’s story of struggle and resistance and survival. Both of these young women’s accounts can be taught using cross-curricular lesson plans in art, English and social studies. Their story is one of courage and any student would be privileged to know and understand how they kept their dignity and were able to tell their story.

Michael Ellis, Missouri I was honored and privileged to participate in the program as it will forever alter my teaching of all things “Holocaust.” My knowledge of the camps was significantly expanded as a result of this program. I now feel comfortable talking about other camps rather than leaving the significant focus on Auschwitz-Birkenau. The extraordinary effort to create an exceptional program for educators was evident.

Karen Sparkowski, Illinois The camps made the strongest impact, each in their own way. Each place was strikingly different and heartbreaking. Being witness to the atrocity of the Shoah via the camps made an impact that will stay with me for the rest of my life. Seeing the artifacts left behind by human hands, the fragments of people’s lives is haunting. In Bergen-Belsen, there were five coral

together Fall 2014 buttons, submerged in glass that I cannot shake from my mind’s eye, because I keep lingering on whose little dress those buttons belonged. The humanity and the individuality gleaned from each artifact at each camp impacted me, haunts me. It is the individuality in those artifacts that make such a much stronger effect than the numbers and statistics of how many people were murdered.

Lacy Watson, Montana The most impacting were the photos and personal experiences that I saw or read about at many of the sites. It allowed me to see the human side of the Holocaust. In conjunction with that the many memorials we saw touched me in a number of ways as each was designed to evoke some kind of personal reaction. The people are ones that we must not forget and the various sites we visited gave many opportunities to provide that information to my classes. Each site that I visited gave me a feeling of entering into a world that I could only imagine. The people talked about at these places makes me realize even more now the humanity that suffered during this horrific part of history. I felt an emotional pull when I was at a place where people were taken and their lives ended. I think it makes me more determined to let my students know what happened and make them realize we must not forget.

Robert Biehle, Missouri As Elaine stressed through the program, I will bring in more personal stories and make the teaching of the Holocaust less generalized and more personal. One of the major things that stuck out to me as we visited sites, read accounts and heard various survivor stories, is how different people’s experiences were, even within the same camp. This is something that I want to highlight in my teaching. I want to make the Holocaust less about statistics and more about people; less about misery and death and more about survival and hope. I plan on utilizing some of the readings supplied to us as well as reading Salvaged Pages to get more sources. Also, I will spend more time finding survivor stories from Echoes and Reflections and well as the Shoah Project. Lastly, I wrote in my application essays how I stress in my classes that we as a society need to learn from our past and not allow more genocides to continue. I feel I can do a better job of this with the personal perspectives rather than the statistically, historic perspective.

Amy Allaire, Massachusetts I am extremely appreciative to Elaine and Stephen for their unwavering willingness in going the extra mile to make sure everyone benefited as much as possible. Steve has a wealth of information and was always eager to share and engage in meaningful discussions. Elaine was a nurturing leader, always concerned about our welfare. Their dedication and sincerity was felt by all and they both were an essential part of the success of the trip. I hope you continue to organize this trip in the future, as it is critical that teachers are given the best tools to accurately engage their students in accurate and precise learning of the holocaust. This trip afforded all the teachers this opportunity. It was an honor to be part of your program.

Marilyn Shimon, New York Auschwitz most definitely made the strongest impact. This day affected me in a way that I never thought it would. I was so emotionally distraught by the time we reached the crematoriums in Birkenau that I wasn’t sure how much farther I could walk. For someone who runs and walks on a daily basis, I was amazed at how my emotions could interfere with my ability to trudge on.

I still remember Steve stopping to wait for me as we walked the long road to the exit. He said, “No one should walk out of Auschwitz alone.” I’ll never forget that moment for as long as I live.

Taylor Culjan, Savannah, GA I will make greater use of visuals for writing prompts. To that end, I purchased the photo sets at Auschwitz and the artwork at Terezin to use. I will also be expanding my lessons on individual responsibility and the role of bystanders.

Bob McCormac, Oklahoma The actual sites are highly relevant because no picture can convey what it’s like to be there.

You need to see how far from a town, how big the operation, how grim the surroundings to be able to convey that context to your students.

Stacy Savin, Connecticut I appreciated the opportunity to learn about the different sites and topics from ‘resident experts.’ I also thought it was important to have immediate feedback from someone who was well versed in the area, as it helped improve my knowledge base. I was also able to explore deeper some questions I had in response to information I was given.

Ellen Curran, Massachusetts In the past I had taught the Holocaust through the lens of US history during WWII. Granted the limited time frame to focus on the Holocaust, I admit that I had taught the topic through time lines, and through the perspective of the perpetrator (Nazi Germany). I had always prided myself on having survivors come in and speak to my students and also sharing personal narratives with them, but I admit that I generalized many aspects of the Holocaust in my instruction in terms of camps, ghettos, Nazis, etc. I think I did this, not only because of the limited time available, but also because I myself did not know the severity of the specifics.

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This program has given me a wealth of knowledge and information which I am still trying to organize and grapple with. But what I do know is that when I have survivors come in and speak, or when I give readings, I need to get the background information and provide my students with adequate background and detail to emphasize the importance of the individual experience and story. Only by doing this, are my students learning the through the lens of humanity and the human element of the Holocaust. … I plan on spending more time on the variety of and individual acts of resistance. I want my students to feel inspired and encouraged. I want them to know that resistance doesn’t need to come in some grand physical action, and want them to appreciate and understand the humanity of the Holocaust.

Rebecca Novalis, New Jersey To be sure, this program has wholly changed my life and perspective on the Holocaust and especially resistance. I did not share this with the group because I wasn’t sure of its relevance; my mother’s parents emigrated from Greece in the late nineteenth century, leaving the rest of their family in Greece. My great-grandmother, Eleni Markou was a member of the resistance in Athens during WWII; she was arrested, tortured and shot by the Nazis, presumably the Gestapo. Her two older boys had been in the Greek army; with the defeat of the Greek army by the Wehrmacht, they fled into the hills and became partisans. They didn’t live to tell their story but I have the artifacts and evidence, stipulating their activities. When Elaine spoke about her parents, I thought of my great-grandmother. For me, all are heroes to be admired and respected for their courage and determination to live and to, in their own ways, resist the evil of the Nazis and their collaborators.

Michael Park, California One of the high points of this program for me as an individual was gaining a comprehensive understanding of the Holocaust. Looking back to the beginning of this program, I had the individual goals of gaining knowledge about the Holocaust. From this program, I got so much more than just valuable information. This was a life-changing experience. I will spend the next weeks and months digesting my experiences and what they mean to me as an individual. What I can say for certain about this program is that it has fundamentally changed the way I see and think about the Holocaust. It is easy to get lost in the large numbers and statistics of the death toll especially when teaching the Holocaust. This program started with a shoe at the USHMM. I have taken that theme of an individual and used it as a framework for my understanding of the Holocaust.

Each person who suffered during the Holocaust is a human being. Each has a personal story through which I believe I can structure my teaching of the Holocaust. Teaching individual stories as opposed to generalizations was one of the main things I take away from this program.

Jennifer Mastrangelo, Pennsylvania I plan to take this experience back to my students by showing a new vigor toward awareness of discrimination and their power to make positive changes. Although the Holocaust is now an event of the past, the ideas, thoughts and actions that made it possible are still alive and well.

Even now I hear comments by all types of people who think that discriminating against certain types of people would best serve our country. Whether its racial minorities, immigrants, gay people, or atheists, there are a significant number of people who would actively participate in their removal from American society. Even more troubling is the fact that so many more people would passively allow this to happen. My renewed mission in life as a teacher is to call out these people and make my students aware of the tenuous steps they are taking toward evil deeds when they participate or stand idly by while evil thoughts are allowed to fester.

Gary Taft, Tennessee It is not possible to separate the role of individual and teacher. This is who I am and the impact was definitely each of the camps. To be able to touch the wall(s), the metal, the bricks or stones and to ‘hear’ the voices of the souls that pass through these places, will change my life as well as what and how I teach forever. I knew that all of these events occurred and that these places were there but now these facts have become part of who I am. How I am going to use this experience is still in my thought process.

Lainie Lapis, California While I initially felt a moral obligation to accept the responsibility of teaching this course, I now feel that I have evolved from this first-hand experience and I can now act as a moral authority. This will be conveyed through the expanding map of the Reich, maps and charts from the camps and ghettos, first-hand testimonies from our summer reading, and research from the USHMM, the Museum of the History of polish Jews, and extensive notes taken from the excellent guides we had in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Schindler Museum and Jewish Warsaw, and the recommended excerpts from autobiographies and texts.

Bettina Hoffman, Florida No other program can complete this much and do as much in three weeks as this one!

You learn a lot!

Kathryn Smith, North Carolina

continued on p. 16 visit our website at www.amgathering.org

together Fall 2014

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Child Survivors to Receive Payout continued from p. 1 The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany announced recently that it had secured approximately $250 million from the German government Roman Kent, to be paid to Chairman of the American Gather- Holocaust survivors ing of Jewish Howho were children locaust Survivors at the time of the war.

Beginning on January 1, 2015, onetime lump-sum payments of €2,500, or about $3,280, will be paid to the approximately 75,000 remaining Holocaust survivors all over the world in reparations for the psychological pain and suffering that they suffered as children as victims of the Holocaust.

The amount is set to be paid to anyone who was born between January 1, 1928, and the end of the war in August 1945, and who was put into a camp or ghetto, went into hiding, or had to live under a false identity for at least six months.

The agreement was announced just days after the conclusion of the Claims Conference’s first-ever symposium of Jewish child survivors.

Hailing it as a “landmark agreement” that took a year of negotiation with the German Finance Ministry, the executive vice president of the Claims Conference, Greg Schneider, told The Jerusalem Post that these were some of the most difficult negotiations that the conference has ever held.

“Many of the people who we’re speaking about were already receiving payments or pensions,” Schneider said. “So the German government was wary about double payments and giving additional payments to the same people.”

Almost all of these child survivors received a onetime hardship payment or had been receiving pensions, said Stuart Eizenstat, the conference’s special negotiator for these sessions and the former US ambassador to the EU. Despite the government’s wariness, both Schneider and Eizenstat said that one of the key negotiating points was the fact that much of the trauma experienced as child can have a very late onset.

“The suffering endured by these young Nazi victims, including devastating separation from parents at a critical time in a child’s development, as well as witnessing unimaginable atrocities, deprivation from proper nutrition, and a range of injurious experiences, has had a cumulative effect and are resulting in lateonset problems that only now are manifesting as physical and psychological symptoms in the survivor’s advanced age,” Schneider said in the Claims Conference statement.

“This was a remarkable breakthrough in several respects,” Eizenstat said.

“It’s the first time the Germans have ever paid people who have been paid by other funds. The Germans had a bright line not to pay people twice. We were able to convince

them that there was a unique deprivation so that they could make an exception.”

This was the first time that child survivors have been recognized as a special category of survivors, after “decades of trying,” he added.

The agreement is still subject to approval by the Bundestag, which is set to either vote on it or put it to a committee in the next few weeks, Eizenstat said.

Eizenstat and the other negotiators had been in discussions with German government “on and off” for more than a year.

On Wednesday, August 27, Eizenstat sat down for a two-hour one-on-one session with German representatives, and then for another sixhour session the next day to hammer out details.

“Given the advanced age of survivors, if we were going to do it, it had to be done now,” he said. “We’re losing them at a rate of eight per year.”

Schneider, another one of the negotiators, said the whole process was imbued with a sense of finality, particularly as the number of people who were in what’s known as the “first circle” – those who were rounded up and put in ghettos – dwindles.

“Everyone around the table, on both sides, knew that these years are the final opportunity for Germany to make a gesture,” he said.

“No one is saying Germany hasn’t paid very large sums of money, they have.

No amount of money can make up for the suffering, but these are the final years.

Any acknowledgment has to be done soon, and the conversations were infused with that knowledge.”

“And honestly, it was palpable.

You felt it [during the talks],” he continued.

“It is a mixture of business and financial and moral and it’s all there. Sometimes it’s friendly, sometimes tense, always professional.

Sometimes people shared personal stories, sometimes it was about big budget issues; it was a complicated combination of issues.”

“I’m continually inspired by this, the second and third generation of the Germans, who step up and meet their obligations to the survivors,” said Eizenstat, who has been on negotiating teams for billions of dollars of claims against the German government in the past. “It’s a great testament to the German people.”

In a report on the negotiations, Claims Conference chairman Julius Berman wrote, “We are all deeply grateful to Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, our Special Negotiator, who traveled to Berlin specifically for Thursday’s four-hour meeting, and returned to the U.S. that very afternoon. His dedication to helping Holocaust victims runs extraordinarily deep.

Our thanks also goes to Roman Kent, who has been a driving force in negotiations with the German government, particularly regarding the homecare program, over the years. Ambassador Colette Avital also deserves special acknowledgment for her active involvement in the child survivor fund negotiations.”

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Survivors who need help may contact: American Society for Yad Vashem 500 Fifth Avenue, 42nd Floor New York, NY 10110 - 4299 Phone: 212-220-4304 Fax: 212-220-4308

http://www.yadvashemusa.org/

The Blue Card, Inc. 171 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 Phone: 212-239-2251 Fax: 212-594-6881

blue.card@verizon.net

Claims Conference 1359 Broadway, Room 2000 New York, NY 10018 646-536-9100 Fax: 212-679-2126

info@claimscon.org

Jewish Board of Family and Children=s Services 135 West 50th St New York, NY 10020 888-523-2769

admin@jbfcs.org

New York Legal Assistance Group 7 Hanover Square, 18th Floor New York, NY 10004 212-688-0710 Laura Davis (212) 613-5040

ldavis@nylag.org

New York City Selfhelp Community Services, Inc. 520 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 866-735-1234 Beth Zeidel (212) 787-8106 bzeidel@selfhelp.net http://www.selfhelp.net/

Brooklyn 1512 Avenue Z, Brooklyn, NY 11235 (718) 646-7500

http://www.bluecardfund.org/

Selfhelp Washington Heights Nazi Victim Program 620 Ft. Washington Ave. New York, NY 10040 (212) 781-7200

http://www.claimscon.org/

http://www.jbfcs.org/

http://nylag.org/

419 Church Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11218 (718) 633-1300 Queens 70-20 Austin St., Forest Hills, NY 11375 (718) 268-1252

Bronx 990 Pelham Pkwy S., Bronx, NY 10461 (718) 239-3229

Long Island 50 Clinton Street, Hempstead, NY 11550 (516) 481-1865

Westchester County (914) 761-0600

Levittown Selfhelp-Nassau County 3601 Hempstead Turnpike, Levittown, NY (516) 520-9192

Amid neo-Nazi surge, Jewish groups applaud Greece’s Holocaust denial ban continued from p. 4 Some 5,000 Jews live in Greece today.

The prewar community of some 78,000, most of whom lived in the northern port city of Thessaloniki, was almost entirely wiped out in the Holocaust.

It is also hoped that the law will curb expressions of anti-Semitism. A recent AntiDefamation League survey found Greece to be the most anti-Semitic country in Europe, with 69 percent of the population holding anti-Jewish views.

The new law brings Greece in line with most of the other European Union countries, which have barred Holocaust denial and impose similar jail sentences for inciting racial or ethnic violence.

An initial draft of the measure failed to garner enough support after right-wing elements in Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ New Democracy party proposed excluding the Orthodox Church and the military or police from prosecution under the law.

Other holdups were over which genocides to recognize, whether or not to include provisions for homophobic violence and a petition by 139 academics against the Holocaust denial clause in the name of free speech.

In addition to the Holocaust, the new

law includes the mass killings of Armenians, Black Sea Greeks or other Christians in Asia Minor during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. Under the law, inciting violence or discrimination for homophobic reasons is illegal, but provisions allowing for civil unions of gay couples were removed.

In a measure of how problematic the law is, only 99 of the 300 members of parliament turned up for the final vote, with 55 voting in favor.

“What is xenophobia? The railings at my home stopping a Pakistani, or any foreigner, from raping my wife or killing me?” Golden Dawn lawmaker Michail Arvanitis told parliament, according to Reuters.

“Discrimination is a fact of life.”

But the nation’s Jews, its Jewish leaders and others who support the new legislation see things much differently.

“We hope [the law] will be applied rigorously by the courts,” the WJC’s Singer said.

“However, more efforts will need to be undertaken if the fight against extremist forces such as Golden Dawn is to be successful,” he said, but did not mention specifics.

together Fall 2014 Moral Emptiness of Holocaust Survivors Who Took on Israel continued from p. 1 H i t l e r ’s w o r d s a b o u t t h e denigrating things Jews say about themselves came to mind as I perused an ad published in the New York Times on August 23 by IJSN or International Jewish Solidarity Network. Tellingly, the very same ad appeared in the British Guardian on August 15, under the imprint of IJAN, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. For an American, and especially the New York readership, the crafters of this hostile statement must have figured it best not to make explicit their true credentials as anti-Zionists. Its signers display no interest in the misdeeds that Hitler ascribes to the Jews but focus their anger on today’s target-of-choice for Jew-haters everywhere: Israel.

Most Holocaust survivors, like most Jews, are Zionists and are strongly devoted to the welfare of the State of Israel. The IJSN/IJAN group is exceptional in its fierce opposition to Israel and is hardly representative.

That fact, however, did not keep the BBC from quickly publishing a story with the title “Holocaust survivors condemn Israel.” The impression conveyed is seriously misleading.

Headlined “Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of Nazi genocide unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza,” the Times ad lashes out at Israel from the first sentence to the last, repeatedly condemning the country for acts of colonialism, racism, and genocide; it associates unnamed “right-wing Israelis” with Nazis; and, in a fullthroated voice of protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza, it angrily calls for a “full economic, cultural, and academic boycott of Israel.”

It aims, therefore, not just to censure but to punish. And as a special touch, it attacks a fellow survivor, the most famous one of all: Elie Wiesel. Why? Because Wiesel recently published an ad of his own in American newspapers, including the New York Times, criticizing Hamas for some of its brutal ways.

IJSN pulled out all the stops in going after Wiesel, expressing “disgust” and “outrage” over Wiesel’s “abuse of our history” and “manipulation [of] the legacy of the Nazi genocide” to justify the unjustifiable: “the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people.”

I s r a e l ’s w a r w i t h H a m a s h a s exacted many casualties, but nothing remotely like “genocide” is taking place in Gaza. Why, then, charge Israel with a crime of this kind and magnitude? Those who are on to the rhetoric of “anti-Zionism” will

instantly recognize this language for what it is: a collection of familiar political clichés employed time and again by the purveyors of anti-Israel vilification.

What makes the IJSN statement noteworthy, therefore, is not the litany of emotionally-charged accusations against Israel but the identities of those making these accusations. They present themselves as “Survivors,” “Children of survivors,” “Grandchildren of survivors,” “Great-grandchildren of survivors,” and “Other relatives of survivors.”

They total 327 people. Who are they, and what importance, if any, should attach to their proudly proclaimed pedigrees?

If we take their self-descriptions at face value, some (a small number) had been in the Nazi ghettos and camps or claim to have been resistance fighters.

Others had been children spirited out of Europe on the Kindertransports or were hidden by Christians during the war. Some say they are “cousins of survivors,” or “friends of survivors,” or “relatives of victims,” or “relatives of many victims,” or the “spouse of a hidden child,” or grandchildren and great-grandchildren of “refugees.”

One identifies herself as “the great niece of an uncle who shot himself”; another as a “3rd cousin of Ann [sic] Frank and grand-daughter of NONsurvivors.”

The distance from Auschwitz and Treblinka grows as the list grows and, with it, the credibility of those on the list plunges. Nevertheless, all claim some special connection, however remote, to Jewish suffering during the Hitler era, and they expect others to recognize their anti-Israel diatribe as the product of unique insights they now possess by right of such suffering. Invoking the historical and moral weight of the Holocaust by speaking “as Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors,” they apply their presumed authority to the present war between Israel and Hamas and “unequivocally condemn” Israel.

Two thoughts come immediately to mind: Whenever someone begins a sentence with the words “as a Jew…,” what follows is likely to be full of political posturing and should be met with skepticism. The same often holds true when someone opens a sentence with the kindred formula, “as a Holocaust survivor...” On hearing those words, one no doubt is inclined to pay attention to what follows; but as IJSN’s ad demonstrates, the status of Holocaust survivor, let alone the status

17

of the children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren, and other assorted relatives and friends of survivors, carries no special entitlement to superior ethical insight or elevated political awareness.

T h e s i g n a t o r i e s t o I J S N ’s ad, however, invoke just such an entitlement as they ostentatiously pull rank as Holocaust survivors in condemning Israel. In inflating and exploiting a status they regard as privileged, they are guilty of doing precisely what they falsely accuse Elie Wiesel of doing: “manipulating the legacy of the Nazi genocide to justify the unjustifiable.” Their abuse of Jewish suffering for contemporary political ends comes especially to the fore whenever they proudly parade forth their pedigrees as survivors to defame Israel. Some have been doing so for years — way before Gaza. To reflect briefly on just two of them: Hajo Meyer, whose signature is the very first on the list, is the author of a book entitled “The End of Judaism: An Ethical Tradition Betrayed,” which argues that Zionism and Judaism are radical opposites and incompatible with one another.

Meyer equates Zionism with “fascism” and “criminality” and believes that Zionists “have given up everything that has to do with humanity.” “As a confirmed atheist,” he boasts that he “has never been a Zionist.” And as a Holocaust survivor — he was in Auschwitz for 10 months as a young teenager — he is certain that Israelis “have no idea about the Holocaust.

They use the Holocaust to implant paranoia in their children.”

In innumerable speeches and interviews (the words quoted here are from interviews on the websites “Intifada: The Voice of Palestine” and the “Electronic Intifada”), he charges Israel with all of the sins that are now part of the standard package of antiZionist accusations: the carrying out of willful massacres, ethnic cleansing, racist and apartheid policies, and other “blood and soil” nationalistic actions (“just like the Nazis”). He is so convinced of Israeli wickedness that he can “write up an endless list of similarities between Nazi Germany and Israel.” And what if other Jews object to his smearing the Jewish state with the Nazi brush? Meyer considers it a “high honor” to be put in the company of Jimmy Carter, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and other prominent opponents of Israel and even jokingly says that he is “very proud” to be called an anti-Semite.

Hedy Epstein, who has also signed on to the Guardian statement, likes garnering public attention as a “survivor,” although whether she is one is debatable. Like Meyer, she

was born in Germany in 1924, but she left the country in 1939 on a Kindertransport and spent the war years in Great Britain. Since coming to America in 1948, she has thrown herself into political activism, often on behalf of such celebrated Palestinian causes as the 2008 “freedom flotillas” that were meant to challenge the Israeli blockade of Gaza, the “Gaza Freedom March” in Cairo in 2009, and various antiIsrael activities on the West Bank and elsewhere sponsored by the radical International Solidarity Movement.

Like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who inevitably show up at high-profile rallies organized by others, Hedy Epstein “marched” in St. Louis in mid-August, 2014 to demonstrate her solidarity with protesters in Ferguson, Missouri. When stories broke headlining “Holocaust Survivor Arrested in Ferguson Protests,” it was a foregone conclusion that it was Hedy Epstein. She seems to thrive on flashing her dubious credentials as a “survivor” and, even at age 90, will step forward to join protests, especially if they are against Israel.

It’s hardly new that there are Jews who lend their endorsement to causes that prove harmful for most other Jews. There is a long history of such betrayal and the damage it has caused within Jewish communities, so what we are seeing today has an unhappy lineage that dates back over many centuries. One thing, however, is new: The endorsement of the most reckless charges against Israel — e.g., Israelis are like Nazis and are carrying out a genocide against Palestinians — by members of a people who themselves were victims of the twentieth century’s most determined attempt at genocide is unprecedented and can be hugely harmful unless it is seen for what it is: an unseemly exercise in the spread of propagandistic lies.

Sanctioning such propaganda by stamping it with the moral authority that supposedly belongs to Holocaust survivors does not turn these lies into truth. What it does instead is expose as fraudulent the claims of certain Holocaust survivors and their kin to possessing an enlarged moral and political consciousness. In fact, it is unlikely that many people emerged from Hitler ’s camps ennobled or enlightened. To believe otherwise and to arrogate to oneself as a “survivor” or a relative of a “survivor” some special access to wisdom and virtue is, as IJSN’s ad shows, little more than moral pretense.

Alvin H. Rosenfeld is a professor of English and Jewish Studies and director of Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University.

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Polish Jews split over plan to exhume massacre victims

continued from p. 14 One person from each school needs to attend this trip. Students trust teachers much more than the internet. They will believe and learn from trusted teachers who have experienced first-hand the personal accounts.

Sivonne Stone, North Carolina

By Cnaan Liphshiz http://www.jta.org

(JTA) — In September 1941, a group of villagers wielding axes and other tools descended upon the homes of their Jewish neighbors and murdered every last one, according to testimonies gathered by Holocaust scholars.

Elaine, you are a gem, the program is sacred work and it is absolutely vital to continue Vladka and Ben’s legacy.

Jeff Jarkow, Los Angeles

N

ot much else is known about the massacre in Wasosz, a village 100 miles east of Warsaw, including basics like the number of victims.

Current estimates range widely, from 180 to 1,200.

In an effort to provide conclusive forensic evidence about the massacre, in July a Polish prosecutor asked Jewish community leaders for permission to exhume the bodies. The plan has split the community, with some passionately supporting what they see as a last chance for justice and others claiming it would violate the dignity of the dead and Jewish religious law, or halachah.

“Once the bodies are in the ground, halachah teaches us they are not to be disturbed except when it is done to protect the dignity of the dead or to save lives,” Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich told JTA. “I and other rabbis and the leadership of the Jewish community in Warsaw, among others, feel neither stipulation applies to Wasosz. A desire to clarify history is not enough.”

Piotr Kadlcik, president of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, the country’s main Jewish umbrella group, called Schudrich’s position “a serious mistake, with detrimental implications.”

“We have tools to determine details about both victims and perpetrators in a matter which is still a criminal matter,” said Kadlcik, who is seeking an exhumation followed by Jewish burial of the human remains. “If we let this chance go, the case of Wasosz will become history — an unclear one and subject to falsification.”

In a move to undermine opponents to exhumation, Kadlcik has requested an opinion from Rabbi Yakov Ruza, a prominent authority in Israel on forensic medicine. Polish prosecutors have also reviewed the Israeli law that permits exhumation in cases involving a murder investigation, Kadlcik said.

Meanwhile, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance — the government body whose prosecutor,

Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers’ Program

Researchers searching for human remains in Wasosz, the site of a massacre of Jewish villagers in 1941. (Podlaska Archaeological Laboratory) Radoslaw Ignatiew, initiated the investigation of Wasosz — is holding off on any exhumation until at least 2015 while the issue is discussed within the Jewish community.

The debate has ramifications well beyond an internal Jewish dispute over halachah and forensics. In the background are echoes of Jedwabne, an earlier investigation of another wartime mass murder of Jews by Poles.

The opening of that probe in 2001 was a watershed moment for Poland, according to Joanna Michlic, a historian at Bristol University, who wrote a 43-page paper chronicling how the debate split the Catholic Church, generated ultranationalist protests featuring anti-Semitic hate speech, led to the replacement of a memorial plaque that blamed the Germans for the murders and, finally, yielded the first admission by a Polish president of Polish guilt.

Before Jedwabne, Holocaust-era crimes by Poles were taboo because they undermined the communist narrative that all Poles were equal victims of Nazism. The subject remains divisive today because it undermines the current government’s focus on Polish wartime heroism and resistance to totalitarianism.

From a forensic perspective, the dig in Jedwabne was inconclusive.

Though an excavation of the site revealed some human remains, it never progressed to include exhumation — as per understandings reached between Polish authorities and rabbis, including Schudrich.

Without exhumation, it was impossible to answer such basic

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questions as how many people died, which in turn left the door open to revisionism in far-right circles. Several nationalist lawmakers, clergymen and journalists continue to dispute Polish complicity.

“Jedwabne was ultimately a missed opportunity,” Jan Gross, the Princeton historian whose research triggered the 2001 debate, told JTA. “Some important findings were recovered, but questions persisted because the probe was interrupted before basic facts could be recovered.”

For Kadlcik, Wasosz is a chance to correct the opportunity missed at Jedwabne.

“For the ultranationalists, the bottom line from Jedwabne is as follows: The Jews made accusations but hid behind their religious laws at the first attempt to corroborate,” Kadlcik said. “Well, this time we need to settle this and serve justice.”

But Schudrich also drew painful lessons from the Jedwabne probe.

“The entire place was littered with human remains — not just the area where we thought the bodies lay,” he said. “So as soon as the digging began, we saw bones fused together in fire, earrings of little girls. We found children’s bones. To any reasonable person, that settled any doubts there may have been about a massacre.

There is no justification to violate the dignity of the dead.”

As for serving justice, Schudrich said, “The perpetrators will get justice from God. The small minority that refuses to face reality and historical evidence, no exhumation is going to change their minds.”

This is an experience I would never have been able to accomplish on my own.

To surround myself with other educators and the best guides for this emotional learning process was necessary. As a teacher, I have more knowledge and emotion to share with my students than ever before.

Paula Tate, North Carolina My teaching will now be more specific and not so general, not just in the Holocaust, but in all subjects. I will make a more conscious effort to ensure that generalizations are eliminated and that facts are presented fairly and accurately. I will also emphasize more primary source documents and personal narratives in describing the Holocaust.

Kyle Wylie, California I want to thank the American Gathering for the opportunity of this experience. …I truly hope this program is able to continue to provide this opportunity for others so they can feel the same impact that I felt …Before I went to Washington to start this experience I was asked why would I want to go on a trip like this. I thought for a second and responded that this was important. Not only for me, but for people to have their lives and history told so that we not only learn from our past mistakes but begin treating people like people …

Reggie Wynn, North Carolina The information I learned and all the wonderful source materials I collected over the past few weeks will be invaluable to my students. I can only hope that I can try to live up to the expectations of the Gathering in continuing to remind people that these terrible events cannot be forgotten in the hopes that they will never be repeated.

Thank you again for the opportunity of a lifetime. I will never forget this journey into the past.

Alice Carolus, Mississippi

together Fall 2014

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Eulogy for my father, Yehuda Nir (1930-2014)—Holocaust survivor and beacon of hope

by David Nir

Y

ehuda Nir died at the age of 84, peacefully and at home. He lived a remarkable life, which you can read about in his New York Times obituary. He was a Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to healing the hearts of others as a psychiatrist, and he was forever on a mission to educate the world about the evil he witnessed and lived through first-hand. His main vehicle for doing so was his memoir, The Lost Childhood, a book invariably described by its readers as gripping and vital.

He was also my father, and it was not always easy to grow up the son of a survivor, forever haunted by the shadow of the Shoah. But in spite of everything, my father still had much to offer the world. Below is the remembrance of him I delivered at his funeral on Monday.

*** I would like to talk with you about hope.

I always used to joke about myself that I had to be the ultimate pessimist: I’m a Jew, I’m a Democrat, and I’m a Mets fan.

But some years back, someone pointed out to me that I had it exactly backwards. If I thought good things might happen for the Jews ... if I believed Democrats might actually win some elections now and again ... and if I was capable—of all things—of rooting for the Mets to return to the World Series, then I had to be one of the most starry-eyed optimists in the world.

I think that’s exactly right. I am a relentless believer in hope.

But for my father, hope was something much harder to come by.

How could it not have been? We comfort mourners with the eternal words of Psalm 23: “Gam ki elech b’gei tzalmavet”—”As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” its most famous verse begins.

But my father did not merely walk through that valley. He dwelled in its darkest glen for four years. He was a victim of a humanity that had sunk to its lowest, most evil depths. Human prey, he called himself.

It would be impossible not to be profoundly altered by such an

unimaginable experience. Everyone in this room who knew my father knew that indeed he had been. The Holocaust left inerasable scars on his soul, and it robbed him of so many things.

One of those was the capacity for forgiveness, the left hand of hope.

My father began his memoir with an unforgettable quotation from Samuel Becket’s novel Malone Dies—the story of a man trapped in an asylum. “Let me say before I go any further,” thunders Malone at the outset, “that I forgive nobody.” It was a statement my father repeated countless times throughout his whole life.

Yehuda would glance at the front page of the newspaper and summarize the contents each day by saying “There’s nothing new under the sun.” He would summarize his own political philosophy with just one word, always uttered in rat-a-tat fashion: “Ven-det-ta,” he’d say, just like that, with his wry smile.

Many years ago, my father and I went to a screening of “The Trial,” Orson Welles’ 1962 rendition of Franz Kafka’s immortal work. The film’s protagonist, Josef K., is hounded by the authorities and pursued for an unknown crime that he didn’t even commit—just like my father had once been. I was in awe of Welles’ artistry, and I’m still haunted by Kafka’s disturbing message, but I could recognize nothing in Josef K.’s experience that was anything like my own.

In a sign of the gulf between our lives, though, my father told me he identified deeply with Josef K. and his harrowing tale.

These were not the sentiments of a man brimming with hope—not that anyone could ever blame him.

But. But. Unlike Josef K., who meets his death at the hands of his tormenters at the end of the story, my father lived.

He did not merely live—he chose life, affirmatively and decisively. And that decision allowed hope to flower in others.

Just about everyone here has heard my father recite that quote from Malone Dies. What fewer people know about is a line my father later included in an epilogue. He was once asked what kind of message young people, whom he fervently wanted to read his book, should take from such an otherwise stark and unforgiving man. Wrote my father: The intention of this book is to

convey to young people that if you take charge of your life rather than passively observe it like a couch potato, you might help to create a world where forgiveness is possible.

Think about that, if you would: a world where forgiveness is possible. My father wasn’t saying he could create that world, but in spite of everything he had faced, all the wounds he had suffered, he wanted to inspire those who could create such a world.

I am one of those people he inspired.

So is my mother. So is my sister Sarah.

So is my brother Aaron. So is my brother Dan. While my father could not embrace hope, he embraced his triumph over impossible odds, and he brought his children into a better world where they in turn could build on the love, hope, and forgiveness that he had never enjoyed.

But those ideals were there for us to embrace, and deep inside himself, I think he knew it. That’s why he always wanted us to take charge—to “unleash yourself,” as he would say. We could have the lives he was denied, and we have done exactly that.

In his later years, it felt to me like my father groused about the news less often. I’d like to think it’s a little harder to complain about the headlines when two of your kids are making the news, and the other two are writing it.

But my most indelible memory of my father comes from my earliest years.

My dad could do many things most of us cannot: He practiced medicine, he spoke six languages, he could eat absolutely horrifying leftovers that had sat in the freezer unwrapped for two weeks and still declare them “edible.”

Yet there was one simple task he could not perform: My father did not know how to ride a bike. It’s the easiest of things, something almost every child learns—but of course, my father’s childhood was lost, or to be faithful to his vernacular, it was stolen.

That did not stop him, though, from teaching me how to ride a big boy bike.

With the training wheels off for the first time, my father placed one hand on the handlebars and the other behind the seat. As I pedaled, he jogged alongside me, keeping me steady. A scary moment became a joyous one... and then I realized I was on my own.

My father had let go, and stood there watching me ride down the street all by

continued on p. 21

Eva Bluestein, Holocaust survivor, teacher, social activist Berkeleyside News.

E va B luestein , 90, Holocaust survivor, teacher, social activist, loving mother and grandmother, died peacefully in her home on June 12, 2014.

Born on April 21, 1924, in Berlin, Germany, Eva relocated to France shortly after the Nazis gained power in 1933 and lived in Paris until the Germans conquered the north of France. The family obtained false identification papers and fled south to Lyon in Vichy France where they lived as fugitives until the end of the war.

Eva immigrated to the United States in 1946 and earned a degree in sociology from UCLA. She married Charles Bluestein in 1950 and raised her family in Beverly Hills, California, where she was a French teacher.

The war left Eva with a strong sense of responsibility to help society, which she did through her involvement in numerous social, cultural, and civil causes. Eva was dedicated to ORT, a Jewish non-profit that provides vocational training to students all over the world, serving in many leadership roles including president of the Western Region. As a senior, she was an active member of the Gray Panthers and key leader of their Peace and Justice Commission, sat on the board of Café Europa (a Holocaust survivors’ group), volunteered at Jewish Family Services, and served as health chair for El Cerrito’s Committee on Aging.

Eva participated regularly in the Berkeley Elders Guild, classes at the Berkeley JCC, and the Raging Grannies.

In 2007 she received a Senior Leaders Award from UC Berkeley.

Eva is survived by her children, Mark Bluestein and Claudia Cohan, and her two grandchildren.

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together Fall 2014

20 Helen Rae Bamber OBE, née Helen Balmuth (1 May 1925 – 21 August 2014), was a British psychotherapist and human rights activist. She worked with Holocaust survivors in Germany after the concentration camps were liberated in 1945. In 1947, she returned to Britain and continued her work, helping to establish Amnesty International and later cofounding the Medical Foundation for Care of Victims of Torture. In 2005, she created the Helen Bamber Foundation to help survivors of human rights violations.

Throughout her life, Bamber worked with those who were the most marginalized: Holocaust survivors, asylum-seekers, refugees, victims of the conflict in Northern Ireland, trafficked men, women and children, survivors of genocide, torture, rape, female genital mutilation, British former Far East Prisoners of War, former hostages and other people who suffered torture abroad.

She worked in many countries including Gaza, Kosovo, Uganda, Turkey and Northern Ireland.

Towards the end of World War II, Bamber took a job responding to an ad calling for volunteers to help Jewish survivors of the Nazi concentration camps.

At the age of 20, she was appointed to one of the first rehabilitation teams to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with the Jewish Relief Unit to help with the physical and psychological recovery of many of that camp’s 20,000 Holocaust survivors. She says: “My father accepted it, almost with a shrug of resignation. I

think it was something about repaying a debt. I was aware that if the Nazis had succeeded in invading England, we would have been the victims.”

She related her experience at Belsen to the BBC in 2001: “I didn’t go at the very beginning - I wasn’t there at its liberation which was quite horrific and which we know well from our screens and from testimonies… By the time I got there, there were mounds - people had been buried in great numbers in ditches.

But the survivors, the displaced persons, as they then became called, were herded into what had been the German Panzer Division’s barracks. These were stone, very dour, very dark and cold buildings in which people lived many to a room without any facilities. She recounts, “I saw awful sights, amputees, gangrene, festering sores. People still looked terribly emaciated […] sometimes when you were searching through things you were reminded of the enormity of it: once we came across a vast pile of shoes, sorted according to sizes, including children’s, all neatly lined up; you were never safe from that kind of confrontation. She said that survivors “would dig their fingers into your arms and hold on to you to get to you the horror of what had happened.

Above all else, there was a need to tell you everything, over and over and over again. And this was the most significant thing for me, realizing that you had to take it all.” She spoke of what she thought of as her essential role: “After a while I began to realize the most important role for me there was to bear witness. Bearing witness to the vulnerability of humanity.”

She described her work by saying, “Sometimes I found it necessary to say to people who I knew were not going to

live: ‘You are giving me your testimony and I will hold it for you and I will honor it and I will bear witness to what has happened to you.” She remained in Germany for two and a half years, negotiating the evacuation to Switzerland of a group of young survivors suffering from tuberculosis.

In 1947, Bamber returned to England. She worked with the Jewish Refugee Committee and was appointed to the Committee for the Care of Young Children from Concentration Camps.

During the next eight years she trained to work with disturbed young adults and children while in close liaison with the Anna Freud Clinic.

Following her campaigning for children, Bamber became one of the founding members of the influential National Association for the Welfare of Children in Hospital. The organization established in Britain the practice of allowing a mother to remain with her young child. In 1961, Bamber joined the new Amnesty International (founded in May) and became chairman of the first British group. In 1974, she helped establish the Medical Group within the organization and was appointed secretary.

In recognition of the Medical Group’s work within Amnesty International, the British Medical Association established a Working Party on Torture. She led groundbreaking research into government torture in Chile, the Soviet Union, South Africa and Northern Ireland.

In 1985 she left Amnesty and set up Medical Foundation for Care of Victims of Torture. As the Medical Group had dealt often with people whose injuries needed specialist physical and psychological help, they set out to provide long-term

care to patients. They treated up to 3000 patients a year from over 90 countries, the role of therapist as one of witness - “to receive, not to recoil” and often “simply sit rocking somebody while they tell their story”. In 2001, comparing her early work with Holocaust survivors in Belsen, she said “I think perhaps then and now because I am now concerned with present day survivors from over 91 different countries - one is still bearing witness in the same way and that is the first gift you can give somebody who is a survivor”.

She continued as director until 2002.

In 2005, at age 80, in response to changing patterns of global violence and an increasingly hostile political landscape, she set up the Helen Bamber Foundation to expand her already established rehabilitative work with torture survivors to include those who had suffered other forms of human rights violations, such as human trafficking and gender-based violence.

Her Foundation continues to receive almost 1000 referrals every year from men, women and families. Its specialist team of therapists, doctors and legal experts hold an international reputation for providing therapeutic care, medical consultation, legal protection and practical support to survivors of human rights violations.

She died in August 2014 in London at the age of 89

A remarkable life: Henry Kellen, museum founder

Photo by Melody Parra

H

enry Kellen, the founder of the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center and a Holocaust survivor, died Thursday, July 3, two days before his 99th birthday. Services were held at Congregation B’nai Zion and the museum held a memorial and tribute on Saturday.

Kellen, whose original surname was Kacenelenbogen, was born July 5,

1915, in Lodz, Poland. After studying textile and mechanical engineering in France, Kellen returned to his family’s home in Lithuania in 1937. By 1941, the Germans had invaded Lithuania, and Kellen’s family, along with 30,000 other Jews, were forced into the Kovno Ghetto.

After witnessing a “Kinder-Action” in the ghetto, where Nazi and Ukrainian soldiers took Jewish children from their families, presumably to be murdered, Kellen and his family decided to flee the ghetto and go into hiding. Thanks to the kindness of a Lithuanian farmer. Andrius Urbonas, who hid them for the remainder of the war, Kellen survived the Holocaust with his wife Julia and their 8-year-old

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nephew Jerry. The rest of Kellen’s family was not so lucky. He lost his parents, brother and sister, Jerry’s mother, in the Holocaust.

In 1946, Kellen, with his wife and nephew, immigrated to the United States and settled in El Paso. He quickly learned English and Spanish and became a leading salesman for Rio Grande Sales Company. Later, he operated his own business ventures including Henry’s Men’s Store and Hollywood Store for Men. Like many survivors, Kellen rarely spoke of his Holocaust experiences. That changed in the 1980s when he learned of the existence of Holocaust deniers.

Angry that anyone would deny his

family’s fate, Kellen began collecting Holocaust memorabilia, artifacts and education materials, which he housed in a conference room at the El Paso Jewish Federation.

Eventually, the sheer number of artifacts and the growing number of visitors would lead to the formation and eventual construction of the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center.

The city of El Paso presented Kellen with a Conquistador Award for his contributions to the community.

Now, more than 30 years after Kellen began educating the public about the Nazi Holocaust as a way of ensuring that similar acts will not be repeated, the museum continues his mission.

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Holocaust survivor Ruth “Margot” DeWilde taught strength and forgiveness

By MARY LYNN SMITH , Star Tribune

H

itler wanted to reduce Ruth “Margot” DeWilde to a number: 47574.

She resisted.

With the freshly tattooed identification inked into her left forearm, DeWilde grabbed a handful of gravel to scour it away, said Anneke Branderhorst, who teaches Holocaust literature and art.

“She wasn’t willing to let them label her, control her,” Branderhorst said. “I just cringe at the pain that must have caused. But it was her making a statement. She just had a lot of spunk.”

Her Nazi captors again tattooed the number into her arm, and DeWilde later showed it off as a stark reminder of Nazi atrocities.

“In the ’90s, Margot was concerned with people who were denying the Holocaust,” said Clare Kelly, DeWilde’s grandniece.

So DeWilde went to schools, churches and community groups to talk about the cruelties

of the concentration camps and the lessons she learned — tolerance, strength and forgiveness.

“She wanted it not to be forgotten. She wanted it to be real. She wanted to let them know that these people [who lived and died in the Holocaust] were real,” Kelly said.

DeWilde, of Plymouth, formerly of Richfield, died on May 1. She was 92.

Born in Berlin, she moved with her family to Amsterdam in 1932. After the Germans invaded the Netherlands, DeWilde worked in the Underground, producing forged identification papers to help Jews escape. When she and her husband, Ludwig Meyer, tried to flee to Switzerland, they were captured and sent to the Ausch¬witz concentration camp. Meyer died there; 22-year-old DeWilde became part of Dr. Josef Mengele’s experiments for mass sterilization. She never had children.

After the war, DeWilde reunited with her family, who had survived the war in hiding. In the 1960s, she joined her brother and came to the United States, where she married Rudolph

Holocaust Questions and Answers

by Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg continued from p. 9 spoke about the Holocaust, but basically what they shared with me was the same information over and over again. Feeling I might hurt them emotionally, I never pressed for more information. I never had grandparents, and most of my family was annihilated by Hitler.

I run my life with the motto “never again,” and that is why I became a rabbi. Growing up I constantly looked at the numbers on my father’s left arm, which he received in Auschwitz. Those numbers… those numbers instilled in me the urge to fight for the state of Israel and against anti-Semitism, wherever it may occur.

When I recall the image of my mother, I cannot remember any time that she did not look older than her age. She worked in an ammunition plant, making bombs for the Nazis. My parents obviously did not wish to share things about the Holocaust which might hurt me emotionally, such as that my father was married before the war. I learned this by overhearing a conversation when I was nine years old. His first wife and two children were murdered by the Nazis. Recently, I have been able to obtain names of some family members who were murdered.

The questions I asked my parents were “Why did God allow this to happen?” and “Why did you allow me as an only child to leave home, move across the country and become a rabbi?” Now as a parent, I finally understand the loneliness they must have felt, having no other children. I always said to them “My heart tells me I should remain with you, but my brain tells me I must become ordained to make a difference in the Jewish world.” My father answered

that the night before he was liberated from the concentration camp, he had a dream in which his father came to him and said, “My son, today you will be liberated.”

I have taught Holocaust studies for most of my life on the high school and college level.

When I discuss the Holocaust and God, I share many possible views. In truth, after having written numerous books on the subject I don’t have an answer. I cannot in good conscience believe that the Jewish people were punished, because if I believe that, then I would not be a Rabbi, and would probably be an atheist.

One and a half million priceless Jewish children were murdered. What was their sin? The answer I give myself and others is that mankind caused the Holocaust, not God. . It is the only answer I can live with. Yet I just read Rabbi Avigdor Miller’s “Divine Defense of Hashem: Madness In The Matter of the Holocaust“ and I remembered my father telling me the Shoah is predicted in the Chumash, the tochahah.

My students ask me “Can the Holocaust happen again?” My answer is a definite yes.

A number of atomic bombs thrown at Israel by its enemies would annihilate the Israeli population. One is naïve to believe that antiSemitism does not exist throughout the world.

If we have learned anything from the Shoah, it is that it is possible for a madman to arise who wants to annihilate the Jewish people. Never fool yourself into believing that you are safe anywhere. We must always be alert and fight against prejudice wherever it may exist.

Finally, how do we keep Holocaust memory alive and what is our message

DeWilde, who preceded her in death.

And every year she held one day sacred — May 5, the day she was liberated from the Nazis.

DeWilde’s didn’t “sugarcoat” the horrors and cruel¬ties of the concentration camps, Branderhorst said. But she didn’t speak with hatred.

“Hatred is not the way,” DeWilde said in a 2007 Star Tribune interview. “Hatred only falls back on the person who feels it. We all have to live together in this world, to try, person by person, to bring a little peace to it.”

DeWilde paid severely for trying to help Jews escape and yet she never regretted it, Branderhorst said. “There’s something really powerful about that,” she said. “She challenged students not to be just bystanders to something going on in their school, neighborhood or the greater issues of the world. They should make a difference. …

They should stand up for what’s good and just.”

to our children, grandchildren and future generations? In my opinion, all the museums in the world and all the books that are written will not preserve the memory of the Holocaust. In time, the Holocaust may become nothing more than a date in history.

If we teach Holocaust and genocide together as one subject, we guarantee that the impact of the Holocaust will merely blend into other genocides. What is the solution? We must incorporate in our religious services and religious traditions, memoirs, readings, and liturgy, specific readings concerning the Holocaust. I have, therefore, already written a Holocaust Passover Haggadah and a Holocaust Siddur (see on the internet: RosenbergHolocaustHaggadah.com).

Reading about the Holocaust must become part of every Jewish holiday, particularly the High Holidays. I want to emphasize to those children and grandchildren who still have living survivors of the Holocaust in their families, ask questions now, do not be afraid.

Sometimes, a Holocaust survivor will not feel comfortable speaking to his children, but will be able to communicate his thoughts with grandchildren. I ask that you do so before all the Holocaust survivors are gone.

Remember the lives, the culture, the achievements, of those who perished in the Holocaust.

I made one promise to my parents of blessed memory, and that is that one day, I would fill up a station wagon with my children.

Thank God, I have a lovely wife, Charlene, four children, and so far, seven grandchildren.

If you wish to remember the Shoah and the beauty of Judaism which existed before that horrible period in our history, I say to you, have children, name them after Holocaust survivors as I have done, and never forget who we are as a people.

Eulogy for my father, Yehuda Nir (1930-2014) — Holocaust survivor and beacon of hope continued from p. 19 myself. I had done something he could not—but I had done it with his help. All my life I have felt this was the perfect metaphor for my dad. There were things he could not achieve, but he wanted others to achieve them, and he could inspire them to get there. That’s exactly what he did that day, and I’ll always remember it.

The melancholy Kafka once said there is hope, but not for us. If I could apply that saying to my father, I’d say that while hope may have been rendered a stranger to him, he knew it did not have to be that way for the rest of us. My father liked to quote the equally melancholy Samuel Beckett, but he made it possible for me instead to want to quote legendary New York Mets relief pitcher Tug McGraw, who once famously declared of his own team, “Ya gotta believe!”

You gotta believe—in love, in forgiveness, in tikkun olam, making the world a better place. In peace, in freedom, in safety, in happiness. Above all, you’ve got to believe in hope. My father wouldn’t want it any other way.

To submit an obituary please follow these guidelines: 1. All obituaries should be sub mitted electronically to

luis@americangathering.org

2. Obituaries should not exceed 300 words 3. A photo may be included but is not necessary 4. Obituaries may be edited to accommodate available space 5. Obituaries received after printing deadline will be printed in the next issue

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together Fall 2014

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Holocaust survivor, business leader Gabriela Landau dies at 86

By Howard Cohen hcohen@MiamiHerald.com

G

abriela Landau’s eye for fine art — in particular, religious menorahs and dreidels — was so finely tuned, some of her collection was featured in an exhibit, Treasures of Florida Jews, at the Jewish Museum of Florida in Miami Beach a decade ago. A sterling silver menorah she had inherited from her parents, Holocaust survivors, dated to 1906. That piece had served as the centerpiece of the Coral Gables home she shared with her husband, the late Rabbi Sol Landau, who had led Beth David Congregation in Miami.

Perhaps more notable, Landau’s own work, a series of photographs she took in the 1950s and ’60s that depicted Jewish life and culture in New York City’s Lower East Side, is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the University of Lyons in France.

But the piece that mattered the most to her was a simple menorah made by her daughter Tamara in a ceramics class. “I truly cherish this one. At least one night of Hanukkah I use it,” she told the Miami Herald in a 2005 feature on Judaica art.

Landau died at 86 on May 7 in Asheville, NC where she moved after

retiring from a series of positions that had made her a business leader in MiamiDade, including first vice president of investments at Prudential Securities’ Coral Gables office and senior partner of the Landau Group she headed for 28 years. At one point, she managed $165 million in assets. “I like a good style of living,” she told the Herald in 1998 about her midlife career switch from rabbi’s wife and mother to business executive.

Landau had also won the Breaking the Glass Ceiling award given by the Jewish Museum of Florida to women who excel in traditional male professions. “I never really felt handicapped by being a woman,” she said. Landau served as vice president of the Women’s Division of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, founded Beth David’s Fine Arts School and Jewish Museum, and she was a Jewish activist and Zionist.

Tamara wouldn’t be surprised that her mother cherished the menorah she had made above the historical pieces. After all, Landau became a Girls Scouts leader when her daughter expressed an interest in joining. And, years before that, when the youngster suffered “separation anxiety”

upon entering the Rabbi Alexander S. Gross Hebrew Academy in Miami Beach, her mother took a job in the school cafeteria just so she could see her.

“She was my mentor. I worked with her. We had a mother-daughter relationship and then a girlfriend relationship. It was very special,” Tamara Landau said.

At her mother’s service, Tamara read a letter she had directed at her mother.

“You taught me all the important things about the world and my place in it. I learned about the things that mattered from watching you, the shared values that made you so special. Kindness. Forgiveness.

Honesty. Thoughtfulness. And, especially, patience.”

Born Gabriela Mayer in northern Poland, Landau fled to Panama with her parents and sister in 1939 after her father was forced to sign over the family’s prosperous furniture factory to the Nazis.

Eventually, the trio made their way to Jacksonville where Landau sold clothes at Lerner’s for $3 a day on a 12-hour shift.

Unable to afford college, she moved to New York where she became a documentary photographer and snapped the shots that

would land in the museums’ collections.

She married Sol Landau in 1951 and, in 1965, the couple and their two children moved to Miami. Finally, with kids Tamara and son Ezra in school, Landau was able to get college degrees in anthropology and sociology at Florida International University. She landed her first career job at Merrill Lynch in 1977. Landau was later named one of 10 Outstanding Brokers of the Year by national trade magazine, Registered Representative. The couple was married until Rabbi Landau’s death in 2004 at 83.

“She was a tough cookie on the outside but she had a real heart of gold underneath. As the rebbetzin (the rabbi’s wife) of the oldest Jewish congregation in Miami she, alongside her husband, was a leader in the community. When the kids were old enough and she stepped out on her own, becoming a stockbroker, she became an even more dominant force in the community,” said family friend Mitch Weissner.

“There’s the [Jewish] term, Woman of Valor. She was,” Ezra Landau said.

Mike Jacobs, Holocaust survivor and founder of Dallas museum, dies at 89

By JOE SIMNACHER Staff Writer, Dallas News

M

Jacobs couldn’t forget the horrors of the Holocaust he endured, so he worked diligently to ensure the atrocities would never be forgotten.

His mother, father, two sisters and two brothers died in gas chambers at Treblinka. A brother died fighting the Nazis. Another 60 to 70 relatives also died in camps.

Jacobs survived five years before he was liberated. He immigrated to Dallas, where he built a successful metal recycling business.

His work to protect Holocaust history included organizing Dallas survivors, telling anyone who would listen and founding what is now the Dallas Holocaust Museum/Center for Education and Tolerance.

Jacobs, 89, died of complications from prostate cancer while in hospice at The Legacy at Preston Hollow. ike

Jacobs lectured to thousands of people about the Holocaust over the decades, but he was also a living example of survival, said his son Mark E. Jacobs of Dallas.

“He wanted people to know that no matter what, you can overcome anything,” his son said. “He showed that through the example of his life.”

Jacobs was born Mendel Jakubowicz in Konin, Poland. He was 14 in November 1939, when his family was taken in a boxcar to a ghetto in Ostrowiec, Poland.

Three years later, six members of his family were sent to Treblinka — and the gas chamber.

Jacobs was ordered to clean out the vacated ghetto apartments, where he found a baby.

“I remember it like today,” he said in 1982. “They told me to pick up the child and carry it to the tallest building. I thought maybe they were taking care of the children there.

“I can still feel the warmth of the child as I carried him in my arms. As I was walking upstairs I saw something fly

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by. I thought they were dolls they were throwing out.”

They weren’t dolls, but children the Nazis were using for target practice.

Jacobs weighed 70 pounds when Americans liberated him from MauthausenGusen II labor camp in Austria on May 5, 1945.

“I walked out of that place and vowed never to stop talking,” he said in 1982.

After the war, Jacobs studied physical education in Mittenwald, Germany, where he organized Jewish sports leagues.

He came to Dallas in 1951, under sponsorship of the Jewish Welfare Federation. He worked for a scrap-iron company. He also had handled scrap in Auschwitz.

In 1953, he married Ginger Chesnick, a Pleasant Grove teacher. In 1954, he started Jacobs Iron & Metal Co., with one truck he’d bought with $600 in savings and a $1,500 teacher’s credit union loan.

He organized and was president of the Holocaust Survivors in Dallas and founded Dallas’ Holocaust museum, which turned 30 in April.

Despite his early harsh physical treatment, Jacobs was active and athletic.

“He played racquetball well into his 70s, beating people in their 20s,” his son said.

Jacobs was instrumental in the growth of soccer in North Texas for 30 years, beginning in the ’60s.

“He was a referee for the North American Soccer League during its full existence,” Mark Jacobs said. “Some people come up to me who say, ‘I remember when your dad refereed our high school soccer games.’”

Jacobs retired in the 1990s and sold his business in 2001.

In recent years, Jacobs spoke at the museum and was often present to greet visitors.

In addition to his wife and son, Jacobs is survived by a daughter, Deborah Jacobs Linksman of Dallas; two other sons, Andy Jacobs and Reuben Jacobs, both of Dallas; four grandchildren and one great-grandson.

Memorials may be made to the Mike Jacobs Holocaust Educational Foundation Inc., care of Mark E. Jacobs, 5050 Quorum Drive, Suite 140, Dallas, Texas 75254.

together Fall 2014 BETTY (Potash) GOLD from

Cleveland Plain Dealer

GOLD BETTY GOLD (nee Potash), age 83, passed away peacefully on July 23, 2014.

A Holocaust survivor from Trochenbrod, Poland (now Ukraine), Betty was known throughout northeast Ohio for telling her story from a happy childhood to utter despair to salvation in the new world of Cleveland, Ohio. In 1942 the Nazis invaded the town and Betty and her family escaped into the forest. Betty was the last survivor of Trochenbrod living in the United States. Betty immigrated to Cleveland in 1946. She graduated from Cleveland Heights High School and married and became a mother. She was a docent at the Maltz Museum of Jewish, Heritage and the Museum of Contemporary Art. She spoke extensively to high school and college students about her Holocaust experience. She is featured in the 2013 Cleveland Film Festival documentary, “Lost Town” and authored a book, “Beyond Trochenbrod: The Betty Gold Story” which was published and is currently distributed throughout the world. Her story has also been briefly told in the 2011 publication, “The Heavens are Empty.” Up until her recent illness, Betty spoke for Maltz Museum to school and adult groups and frequently traveled to speak to groups of all ages from New York to Seattle. She was also a frequent guest speaker for Face-toFace, the Holocaust education program at Congregation Shaarey Tikvah. Betty would start all her talks with, “I am not a speaker. I talk. Betty Gold talk.” Had anyone been the least bit reticent about hearing a Holocaust story, she immediately put them at ease. She had a way of making every re-telling of her story seem like the first time and her audience invariably responded with applause, hugs, chocolate bars and invitations to return. Betty will be sorely missed by her family, friends, and the thousands of acquaint-ances she made along the way.

Fanny Rubinstein, Holocaust survivor,

mother Article by: JENNA ROSS, Minneapolis STAR TRIBUNE

Each day, Fanny Rubinstein thanked God for her long life, believing she had been given the years that were taken from her father, who was killed during the Holocaust.

Despite that dark time, Fanny and her husband, Roman Rubinstein — whom she met in a displaced persons camp — raised a family in Minneapolis and St. Louis Park with grace and gratitude, family members said.

“What t hey w ent t hroug h w as unimaginable,” said Rabbi Avraham Ettedgui, of Sharei Chesed Congregation in Minnetonka. “I always was awed by their achievement — not only being able to start a new life, but being such kind people, such generous people.”

Almost a year after being diagnosed with leukemia, Rubinstein died June 5 in her St. Louis Park home . She was 89.

Born in 1925 in Warsaw, Poland, Rubinstein was 17 years old when the Nazis invaded. Her father, Jacob Greenburg, a master plumber, saw what was coming and brought his wife, Toba, and their family across the border to Russia. In 1942, when the Nazis came to that small town, the family hid in an abandoned farmhouse, said Edward Rubinstein, Fanny Rubinstein’s son. Jacob returned to the town to deflect any suspicion.

“When he was arrested, he insisted he had no other family,” Edward Rubinstein said. “He sacrificed his own life to save the life of his ¬family.”

In the years following her father’s death, Fanny Rubinstein blended in, thanks to her ear for languages — she spoke Polish, Russian, German, Yiddish and English fluently, Edward said — and her blonde, blue-eyed looks.

Living in a displaced persons camp in Germany after the war, Fanny met Roman Rubinstein, the sole survivor of a family that had once numbered nearly 200.

“He was a strong individual, alone in the world,” said daughter Esther Rubinstein.

“She had lost her father, who was her world.

He needed love, and she needed ¬security, so it worked out.”

They married in 1949 and lived in Germany for three years before moving to north Minneapolis in 1952. They raised two children in the St. Louis Park splitlevel they owned for 40 years. In earrings that always matched her necklaces, Fanny Rubinstein cooked three meals a day, kept an immaculate, strictly kosher home and dedicated herself to Roman.

Fanny persuaded Roman, a real estate investor, to enjoy Florida. For more than two months a year, they’d stay in a North Miami Beach hotel with friends, many of whom were fellow Holocaust survivors. She also signed the couple up for dance lessons.

“She was the one who taught him how to live,” said Rabbi Ettedgui, who knew the -couple for decades.

They celebrated the birth of their grandson, David, in 1983. “He was the living testimony that life will continue, that Hitler failed,” Ettedgui said in his eulogy. “Fanny qvelled [Yiddish] at every occasion, and justifiably so, for her handsome, kind and successful grandson.”

Roman died in 2008, just a month before the couple’s 60th anniversary.

“She used to say to me, ‘I don’t remember when I wasn’t married to your dad,’ ” Esther Rubinstein said. “In a way, that was when she was born.”

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SCHER, Nathan (Nat) Beloved husband of Malya for 55 years, passed away on March 19, 2014 at the age of 88. Nat was born on September 15, 1925 in Hrubisow, Poland. At the age of 13 World War II broke out, and he was forced to work for the Germans in the ghetto, after which he was sent to seven different concentration camps. He was liberated by the American army on April 25, 1945. At the age of 20 Nat came to America, and he always said how much he loved this country. He owned two men’s clothing stores, Natsin’s in Bridgeport, CT and The Brass Rooster at Paradise Green in Stratford, CT. He also owned a seasonal leather store called New York Leather in the Trumbull Shopping Mall. Nat lived in Bridgeport and Trumbull for over 50 years before moving to Sharon, MA in 2007. During the winters, Nat lived in Boynton Beach, FL. He loved to travel and play golf, but mostly he loved his family and friends. Nat was very sociable, soft-spoken, and generous.

In addition to his wife, he leaves behind in Needham, MA the dearest to his heart, devoted daughter Cynie Scher Simon, son-in-law Paul, and grandchildren Jonah and Tori, who were his breath of fresh air, his life. He also leaves behind in Brookline, MA his son Steven Scher and three sweet and wonderful grandchildren, Natalie, Sam, and Isaac, in Pompano Beach, FL his brother Joe, and two nephews. We will miss his gentleness, humility, and beautiful smile. Nat’s family is his legacy. We will love you forever, Natsky. Expressions of sympathy may be made in Nat’s memory to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW, Washington, DC 20024 or at http://donate.ushmm.org.

Pola ARBISER ARBISER, Pola Pola Arbiser, 85, of Decatur, died peacefully in her home on Sunday, July 20, 2014. Born on September 23, 1928 in Drohobycz, Poland (now Ukraine), daughter of Sara and Israel Bienstock, of blessed memory. She was a Holocaust survivor and a hidden child. Along with her sister and her mother, Pola was hidden for three years

by Francesca (Frania) Sobkowa, a courageous Polish Catholic woman, who has since been recognized as a Righteous Gentile by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Institute for risking her life to save Pola’s family. In 1950, two years after the formation of the State of Israel, Pola, like many Holocaust survivors moved there to continue building the country.

In Israel she trained in medical microbiology and obtained a degree from Hebrew University.

In 1960, she and her husband Samuel Arbiser (of blessed memory) moved to Atlanta where she obtained a Master’s degree in microbiology from Emory University. After starting a family, Pola became an integral part of the company Sam had just started. The Arbiser Machine Building Company became renowned for innovative design of custom machinery.

Notably, Pola worked alongside Sam at Arbiser Machine Building Company for forty years.

Their marriage was a happy and productive

love affair which lasted for over sixty years.

Among the accomplishments she was most proud of was finding jobs for newly arrived Russian immigrants in the Atlanta area. Pola wrote Give Me the Children, a memoir of her experiences during the Holocaust as a tribute to Frania and to remind people of the lasting effect a single individual can have when they stand up to fight evil and injustice. She was passionate about Holocaust education and was active at the Breman Jewish Museum, where she was a frequent popular speaker and where she and Sam dedicated the Arbiser Family Theater.

Eva Salier E va S a l i e r , formerly of Vineland, N.J., died at age 91 on August 12, 2014 in Fountain Valley, CA, after a short illness.

She was born in 1923 in Koblenz, Germany.

Eva was a Holocaust survivor who wrote a memoir of her experiences in the concentration camps entitled, “Survival of A Spirit.”

As a resident in Vineland, she was best known for her art work. She created commercial art for numerous local clients and became the Art Director for the Vineland Times Journal where she drew political cartoons, as well as doing layout and design. She also designed sets and costumes for the Vineland Little Theater and drew illustrations for the Hebrew Women’s Benevolent Society Kosher recipes cookbook, “Let My People Eat!.”

Eva also taught art for many years, and touched many lives with her paintings and portraits. She participated in numerous art shows both regionally and in Philadelphia, PA. Her painting “Wiesje’s Children” is on view at the Goodwin Holocaust Museum, Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Another of her paintings is at the Koblenz Mittelrhein Museum, Germany.

Eva was noted for her positive attitude towards life, her warmth and great sense of humor.

Eva is survived by her two sons, Edward Salier and wife Patricia of Los Angeles, CA and Ralph Thomas Salier-Hellendag and wife Jane of Chicago, Il, plus five grandchildren. She was predeceased by her loving husband, Max Salier.

Donations in Eva’s memory can be made to: Hebrew Women’s Benevolent Society Attn: Doris Hecht 835 Queens Rd. Vineland, N.J. 08361 Goodwin Holocaust Museum 1301 Springdale Rd. Cherry Hill, N.J. 08003

visit our website at www.amgathering.org

together Fall 2014

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Sam E. Bloch

An urgent appeal from the President and Chairman

Dear Friends, The vitriolic winds of anti-Semitism are once again blowing across the continents. We, who have survived one of the greatest tragedies of Jewish history, are once again witnesses to the evils of intolerance and hatred. We raise our voices in the hope that the world will listen and learn from it’s past mistakes for the sake of all mankind.

The American Gathering, through its manifold programs, continues to be the voice of over 75,000 survivors in this glorious country. Many, who are ailing and aging turn to us for help, for news and simply for information as to developments on restitution, world events, commemorations and the hope of yet connecting with loved ones. Our newspaper, Together, is a source of information, unparalleled in this country and bridges the gap between the generations of survivors, their children and even grandchildren. Our Teacher’s Program, has been heralded by schools across the nation and continues to provide the next generations of Holocaust educators.

As the High Holidays approach we reflect on the past year. We cast off our transgressions and pray that we may all be inscribed in the Book of Life for health,

Roman R. Kent

prosperity, peace and joy. It is truly a time for evaluation and rededication.

We are turning to you, at this time of year, to help the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants fulfill its mission committed to remembrance, education and commemoration. Our work and the needs of the survivor community are greater than ever.

Your tax deductible contribution will help us to continue the manifold programs that are facing severe cuts due to financial constraints. We are counting on our friends and the community and thank you in advance for your generosity. It is up to all of us to ensure that the legacy of our martyrs lives on forever.

Let it be a sweet year, with good health, prosperity, and above all peace!

Sam E. Bloch President

Roman R. Kent Chairman

Please make a meaningful tax deductible contribution

American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants 122 West 30th Street, Suite 304A, New York, NY 10001

The American Gathering now accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover by phone. (212) 239-4230 “If you prefer to contribute by mail, please send your check and form to us.”

Name: ___________________________________________________________________________________ Address: ___________________________________________________________________________________ City: State: Zip: Phone: ___________________________________________________________________________________ Mastercard Visa American Express Discover Amount:____________________________________ __________________________ _____________/_______ _________________________________ Credit Card Number Expiration Date Security Code

visit our website at www.amgathering.org