52 together may 2014 yp press

May 2014

Volume 28, Number 1

Aviva Sufian Listens and Learns as White House’s First Holocaust Survivor Envoy Quarter of 120,000 American Survivors Live in Poverty

Letter from Special Envoy for US Holocaust Survivor Services T

By Nathan Guttman http://forward.com

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ashington — Aviva Sufian is in “listening mode.” Since being appointed to serve as the first ever special envoy for U.S. Holocaust survivor services, she is learning the outlines of her new position by speaking to survivors, service providers and notfor-profit organizations, many of them Jewish.

“This is the last generation of survivors and, as a survivor shared with me last week, if we don’t help now, we will never be able to,” Sufian told the Forward in an email exchange. “The needs are urgent, and our collective response must be as well.”

She noted that a key challenge is creating awareness to the fact that an estimated 120,000 elderly Americans are survivors and that it is believed a quarter of them live in poverty.

The Obama administration announced Sufian’s nomination on January 24, following a promise delivered a month

earlier by Vice President Joe Biden. “This will make the government more responsive to a Hungarian survivor in the Bronx who needs a wheelchair or the elderly woman with memories of the Warsaw Ghetto who needs a ride to the doctor,” Biden told a gathering marking the centennial anniversary of the Joint Distribution Committee.

Creation of the new position comes, at least for now, with very little resources and it is not clear if new federal funding will be given to program helping survivors. “The Special Envoy position will start with a focus on outreach and advocacy,” Sufian said. “The overall initiative, of which the Special Envoy is a part, will be exploring a range of options and programs, including new opportunities for public-private partnerships to generate additional support for this population.”

The federal government’s key partner in helping American Holocaust survivors are the Jewish Federations of North America, which are already operating

o the American Gathering Community: It is with great humility that I write to introduce myself to your community, and I am grateful to American Gathering’s leadership for the opportunity to do so.

In January, I was appointed to serve as the first Special Envoy for U.S. Holocaust Survivor Services.

The creation of this position is one part of the Obama Administration’s initiative—which the Vice President announced in December-- to focus on the needs of the approximately 130,000 victims of Nazi persecution living in the United States, particularly those living in poverty. The initiative also includes the establishment of an AmeriCorps VISTA program to build capacity in nonprofit organizations that serve this community, as well as the exploration of publicprivate partnership opportunities with foundations, nonprofits, and the private sector to increase resources.

I am also excited to share that, in March, President Obama released his proposed budget to Congress, which includes a Holocaust Survivor Assistance Fund for Fiscal Year 2015. If Congress funds this proposal, we aim for this proposed $5 million federal fund to be amplified by additional private dollars and help provide supportive services for survivors living in the United States, such as case management services and assistance with urgent health and social

service needs. Over the next months, I am conducting an extensive outreach and community engagement process so that I can best understand the unique issues that survivors and their families are facing in the United States. I will use what I learn to make recommendations for the Holocaust Survivor Assistance Fund’s implementation, as well as to inform the advocacy I am doing to raise the profile of these issues with my colleagues across government. I am looking forward to hearing from you so that I can get a better understanding of any specific regional or local issues that you or your families and communities face. I encourage you to contact me with your thoughts and concerns at specialenvoy@hhs.gov.

I have worked in the field of aging for over a decade, and serving in this capacity feels like the true culmination of my professional experiences in both the Jewish community and government.

It is an extraordinary privilege to focus on an issue that’s so important to the Administration and to me both personally and professionally. Thank you again for the opportunity to work with you and for everything you do in your families and communities.

Sincerely, Aviva Sufian Special Envoy for U.S. Holocaust Survivor Services

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American Gathering Plays Prominent Role at Yom HaShoah Commemoration Temple Emanu-El, New York City, April 27, 2014

May 2014

Volume 28, Number 1

c•o•n•t•e•n•t•s

Aviva Sufian Listens and Learns as White House’s First Holocaust Survivor Envoy...............................................................................................................1 Letter from Special Envoy for US Holocaust Survivor Services...................................1 Remarks by Roman Kent Yom Hashoah Commemoration............................................2 Berlin: World Jewish Congress head urges Germany to return Nazi-looted art........................3 Learning How My Father Escaped Execution At Auschwitz.........................................3 World Jewish Congress CEO addresses UN forum on Holocaust education.................4 Latvian minister fired after defying government ban to attend SS veterans’ march.......5 Ambassador Samantha Power Speaks at US Holocaust Memorial Museum Tribute Dinner; Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire Receives Museum’s Elie Wiesel Award........................ 5 Union ‘expels’ Palestinian professor who took students to Auschwitz......................................6 Vienna Orchestra To Return Looted Painting.................................................................6

Photo: Melanie Einzig

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he largest Yom HaShoah commemoration in the United States, attended by hundreds of survivors, accompanied by their children, grandchildren and even some new members of the fourth generation, was held in New York City at Temple Emanu El on Sunday, April 27.

The American Gathering, a co-sponsor of the annual event, was well represented, and the voice of the survivor was, as always, an important aspect of the program. This year the Gathering’s chairman, Roman Kent, delivered these poignant and powerful remarks: “Only a few weeks ago Jews throughout the world sat at their tables to remember and celebrate the Passover holiday. The teaching of our sages encourages us to remember that thousands of years ago we were slaves in the land of the Pharaohs in Egypt – “Avadim Hainu Lparoh Bmitzraim”. Thus, the Jewish people are bidden to remember and to understand our past. In a way, the mystery of Jewish history is memory, and the secret of our survival and of our humanity is remembrance.”

Today we are gathered to fulfill a “modern-day” commandment imposed upon the Jewish people by contemporary history... the fate of the six million martyrs who perished as slaves during the Holocaust. Passover and Yom HaShoah represent the two extremes of Jewish history: redemption and destruction, hope and despair.

Passover is celebrated privately and individually. Even though the redemption was public and the miracles beheld by all, the remembrance is private and intensely personal. By contrast, Yom HaShoah, which commemorates the private sufferings and personal losses of the Jewish people, is observed publicly. Yet there is a simple explanation to this paradox. Jews don’t want to be alone on Yom HaShoah.

We draw strength and encouragement from each other. The presence of community makes it possible for us to collectively confront the destruction that devastated the Jewish people.

By drawing together, the Jewish people testify to its survival, solidarity, and defiance. Despite despair, we are consoled when we realize that the enemy fell short of its goal – for the Jewish people live.

Zachor, Gedenk, Remember, Pamientaj …

This was a word frequently uttered to us by our fathers during the Holocaust.

Today, more than seventy years later, it appears that for survivors this word was indeed superfluous. For how could it be possible for me, a survivor of Auschwitz to forget even for one moment the horrific experiences endured in the concentration camps. Just witnessing the atrocities committed at the gate entering Auschwitz is more than enough to keep me awake at night until the end of time.

The brutality and bestiality that occurred daily in the camps is indelibly etched in my mind. The look of pleasure and laughter on the faces of the murderers as they tortured innocent men, women, and children is beyond description and will always linger in my consciousness.

How can I erase the sight of the living skeletons, still alive just skin and bones? How can I ever forget the smell of burning flesh that constantly filled the air? Auschwitz was a place where many of us came not knowing each other in life, but most of us left together in the form of whiteblue smoke emanating from the chimneys.

The heartbreaking sobbing of the children, as they were torn from their mother’s arms by the inhuman actions of their captors, will ring in my ears until I am laid to rest.

Since one and a half million children were murdered, the few of us who were fortunate enough to survive the horror of the Holocaust can neither forgive nor forget. Forgiveness can be granted only by the ones who were murdered, and they are dead and their voices can no longer be heard.

Although forgiveness is not ours to grant, anyone who advocates that we forget the traumatic experiences in the concentration camps is expecting us to be as barbaric as the murderers. There must be a limit to everything... even to forgiveness.

I have been asked many times how long I was in Auschwitz, and my answer is puzzling to some when I respond “I do not know”. What I do know is that one minute in Auschwitz was like an entire day, a day was a year, and a month, an eternity. How many eternities can one have in a single lifetime? I don’t know the answer to that either.

We survivors certainly don’t want our past to be our children’s future. Therefore, we dare not forget the millions who were tortured and killed. For if we were to forget, then the conscience of mankind would be buried alongside the victims. Thus, it is our obligation

continued on p. 4 visit our website at www.amgathering.org

Holocaust Historian Returns Hungarian Honor Over ‘Whitewashing’ of Shoah...........7 Knesset approves bill to increase aid to Holocaust survivors.........................................7 Jewish heirs won’t get back art treasure, German panel rules........................................7 The Jewish Woman Who Was the Liaison between the Nazis and Americans ..............8 A Glimpse of Jewish Warsaw.........................................................................................9 The story of theinverted “B”...........................................................................................10 First-ever excavation of Nazi death camp reveals horrors..............................................10 NY Legislators call on US to reject contracting with SNCF Railway............................11 Pope Francis: Breaking New Ground in Jewish-Catholic Relations..............................11 Former Auschwitz medic arrested in Germany..............................................................11 Auschwitz metal stamps used by Nazis for tattooing discovered in Poland...................13 Ravensbruck’s Famous Survivor....................................................................................13 Holocaust restitution body could close...........................................................................14 Holocaust survivor stepping down from role organizing Tulsa’s annual Yom Hashoah.................................................................................................................14 New find may bring Nazi-tainted art trove to $2b..........................................................15 Tens of thousands participate in Budapest Holocaust memorial march.........................16 Peres: Israel a living monument to the six million.........................................................16 Child Survivors Hold Conference in Berlin Summer 2014............................................16 Searches..........................................................................................................................17 In Memoriam..................................................................................................................18

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 William Lowenberg z”l Founding President Benjamin Meed z”l Honorary President Vladka Meed z”l Honorary Chairman Ernest Michel 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 Counsel: Abraham Krieger Publications Committee, Chair: Sam E. Bloch Executive Director: Elaine Culbertson Administrative Assistant: Luis Gonzalez Publisher: 3rd Rail Marketing Strategies, Inc. 917 776-3197

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Berlin: World Jewish Congress head urges Germany to return Nazi-looted art http://www.worldjewishcongress.org

Germany should introduce a law specifically aimed at facilitating the return of Nazi-looted art, World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder told a packed audience at the Documentation Center ‘Topographie des Terrors’ in Berlin, following his meetings with senior German government ministers.

Lauder was the keynote speaker at an event hosted by Andreas Nachama, the director of the Documentation Center, and Julius H. Schoeps, the head of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European and Jewish Studies at Potsdam University.

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auder said there were still thousands of artworks in the hands of individuals and museums that were stolen from Jews by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. He added that Germany was not legally equipped to handle such

cases. “One of the main reasons that these problems still exist is that there is no law in Germany that addresses the restitution of looted art,” Lauder to the audience, which included a number of experts in the field, among them Ingeborg

President Lauder and his wife Jo Carole with Ingeborg Berggreen-Merkel Berggreen-Merkel, the head of the Gurlitt Task Force, and Jutta Limbach, chair of the Limbach Commission which gives non-binding recommendations on the issue of looted art.

Lauder noted that Germany had already negotiated compensation on “the difficult issues of slave labor, stolen bank deposits and insurance policies”.

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Learning How My Father Escaped Execution At Auschwitz My father, Josef Rosensaft, decidedly did not want to be in Auschwitz. True, no one did, but my father was able to do something about it. Repeatedly.

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eported for the first time from the ghetto of his hometown of Bedzin in Southern Poland on June 22, 1943, he dove from the Auschwitz-bound train into the icy Vistula River. Hit by three German bullets, he managed to return to the Bedzin ghetto.

He subsequently discovered that virtually all the Jews on his train, including his wife and her daughter, were sent directly to the gas chambers upon their arrival at the AuschwitzBirkenau ramp.

Less than six weeks later, during the liquidation of the Bedzin Ghetto, my father avoided deportation to Auschwitz once more by escaping to the nearby town of Zawiercie. In late August 1943, however, he arrived at Birkenau as part of a transport from Zawiercie.

I knew that shortly thereafter, he spent five days, from September 30, 1943 until October 4, in the notorious Block 11, the so called Death Block, in the main camp of Auschwitz, but I never knew how and why he made it out alive.

Until now. I discovered the details of father’s improbable first survival at Block 11 (he would be imprisoned and tortured there again the following year for some six months) in a book that was recently published in Israel, From the Depths to the Skies (in Hebrew, Tehomot u-shehakim), by journalist Moshe Ronen (Reinish). It is a biography of Auschwitz survivor Zeev “Yumek” Londner who, after Hebraizing his name, rose to become Colonel (Aluf Mishne) Zeev Liron, one of the highest ranking officers in the Israel Air Force in its formative years.

In September 1943, my father, then 32 years old, 21-year-old Yumek Londner,

the son of a close friend of my father’s, and Yumek’s brother Moshe (Moniek) found themselves together in Birkenau. As Liron tells the story, “Rosensaft did not stop thinking about escaping.”

My father told the Londner brothers that he had developed a friendship with a German SS doctor stationed in the city of Katowice, some 10 kilometers (about 6.14 miles) from Bedzin, who had offered to hide my father and members of his family. Now my father plotted for the three of them to escape from their work detail, hide in a deserted tunnel until the Germans stopped looking for them, and then make their way to the SS doctor’s house in Katowice where they would be able to stay least for a while.

When their scheme was betrayed to the Germans by a German Unterkapo, the assistant to one of the inmates assigned by the camp’s administration to supervise his fellow prisoners, my father and the Londner brothers were taken from Birkenau to Auschwitz where a young German SS officer named Otto Klaus interrogated them.

The punishment for even plotting to escape, Klaus told the three Jews, is death.

We are now going to take you to Block 11 and decide whether you will be shot or hanged, he continued. But prisoners are only shot on Mondays, and as today is Thursday, you will spend the next several days in Block 11.

A page of the Block 11 registry reproduced in the book confirms that on September 30, 1943, my father, Josef Rosensaft, number 140594, and the two Londner brothers arrived at Block 11. There, the three were put into a small cell with two other prisoners. Liron recalls that my father quipped with “black

humor” that it was a shame they didn’t have a deck of cards to pass the time.

On Monday morning, they heard prisoners being taken from other cells, followed by gun shots. Liron remembers that “Yossele” - my father - bid his friends good bye, telling them that they might meet again in the next world. But no one came for them. After an hour, Jacob Kozelczyk, the Kapo in charge of Block 11, came to their cell and hugged them. “You’re heroes,” he told them. “Nothing will happen to you, not today.” Later the same day, they walked back to Birkenau along the same path now taken each year by the Jewish youngsters who come to Poland on March of the Living.

The registry confirms that they left Block 11 alive on October 4.

When Liron met my father again two years later in the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany, my father told him that following the liberation, he had looked for and found his SS doctor friend from Katowice who cleared up what had been the mystery of the three young Jews’ survival.

The Unterkapo who had betrayed my father and the Londner brothers did not know the name of the man who was going to hide them but he gave Otto Klaus, the young SS officer, an address in Katowice. Intent on exposing and arresting the still anonymous traitor, Klaus rode his motorcycle to the address in question and rang the house bell.

When the doctor opened the door, the two stared at one another in disbelief.

More than 25 years earlier, during World War I, the doctor had saved Otto Klaus’s father’s life. The two families had remained friends. Now Klaus had a decision to make,

by Menachem Z. Rosensaft

and he made it. Instead of taking the doctor into custody, Klaus returned to Auschwitz and reported that his investigation had not uncovered any scheme to escape, that the Unterkapo had lied, that my father and the Londner brothers were therefore innocent of any crime, and that there was no legal basis for executing them.

And so it is that I can now tell my grandchildren that their great-grandfather survived Block 11, which made it possible for their grandfather to be born, because a young German SS officer named Otto Klaus had at least one spark of decency, of humaneness, left within him at Auschwitz in the first days of October in 1943.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress and Senior Vice President of the American Gathering. He teaches about the law of genocide and war crimes trials at the law schools of Columbia and Cornell universities, and is the editor of the forthcoming book, God, Faith and Identity from the Ashes, Reflections by Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors (Jewish Lights Publishing).

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World Jewish Congress CEO addresses UN forum on Holocaust education ‘Making art kept countless Jews alive during the Holocaust,’ Robert Singer tells United Nations forum UNITED NATIONS - Speaking before a packed audience at the United Nations in New York, World Jewish Congress CEO Robert Singer noted the importance of the arts to the persecuted Jews in Nazi Europe. “The will to make art kept alive for a few more days countless Jews imprisoned in ghettos and camps,” Singer said. “The art that Jews made lifted the spirits of those who heard the music of ghetto orchestras or saw a drawing scratched out in charcoal on a barracks’ wall. It was the finest kind of spiritual resistance.”

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inger spoke at “Learning About the Holocaust Through the Arts,” a UN program to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 28, which featured presentations by accomplished artists in the fields of dance, literature, film, and music, including choreographer Steven Mills of Ballet Austin, author Nava Semel, actress Olympia Dukakis, Professor Olga Gershenson of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, philanthropist and arts patron Clive Marks, and Shirli Gilbert of World ORT. The event, co-sponsored by the UN Department of Public Information, the Permanent Mission of Israel to the United

Berlin: World Jewish Congress head urges Germany to return Nazi-looted art continued from p. 2 “I encourage Germany to deal with Nazi-looted art in the same comprehensive manner,” he said, calling the works “the last prisoners of World War II”.

Lauder said he pressed this point in talks with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Justice Minister Heiko Maas. The onus should be on museums, not the victims of Nazi plundering, to search their collections for stolen works and track down their rightful owners.

“Austria has done this. France and Holland have made steps in this direction and the UK has a commission that is available to examine claims and advise the government on restitution,” he said. “But this is Germany, where the crime began. More is required.”

The WJC president called on Germany to eliminate its 30-year statute of limitations on stolen property cases, a major stumbling block in many restitution cases since World War II ended almost 70 years ago. He also urged the establishment of an international commission that would research and help return the artworks to families of the original owners.

Nations, and World Jewish Congress, drew more than 500 attendees, a cross-section of the international community, including diplomats, dignitaries, and arts educators and students from 30 universities.

‘Today’s neo-Nazis use art to attract followers’ In his speech, Singer drew a line from the Nazi propaganda of the last century to similar efforts by today’s neo-Nazi movements. “Hitler’s heirs, the European neo-Nazis, still use art to attract followers,” Singer said. “Hungarian far rightists erect statues to honor the anti-Semitic politicians of World War II. Skinheads front all kinds of rock, rap and metal bands.”

Marks and Gilbert presented on the World ORT Music during the Holocaust Project, one of the premier web-based educational resources on the Holocaust era. Singer had overseen the project as head of World ORT, a WJC affiliate. The music project contains information about and recordings of songs and compositions composed in the ghettos and camps of Nazi-occupied Europe, and the recordings they played brought tears to the eyes of the audience.

Singer said that the arts could help human beings grasp the Holocaust’s crimes against humanity and the Jewish people and could enrich young people’s

American Gathering Plays Prominent Role at Yom HaShoah Commemoration continued from p. 2 to instill in our children, and in future generations, what happens when prejudice and hatred are allowed to flourish.

It is my conviction that only through education can a calamity such as the Holocaust be prevented from occurring again. We must teach our children tolerance and understanding both at home and in school. For tolerance cannot be assumed …. it has to be taught. We must emphasize to all that hate is never right, and love is never wrong.

On January 27th, the day of Liberation of Auschwitz, we observed an International Holocaust Commemoration, the significance of which was finally recognized by the United Nations. Consequently, this recognition of Yom HaShoah is a perfect opportunity to extend a meaningful, heartfelt message to all nations and the world at large.

We must all remember!

Unfortunately, nowadays there are too many people who say that it is necessary to forget the trauma of the Holocaust in order to go on living.

Some even go as far as to deny that the Holocaust existed at all. I for one believe it is imperative to recall the past so that our lives and those of generations to come will have more meaning. For me, the memory and lessons of the Holocaust are not negotiable, and not a subject to be forgotten.

At the same time, we must not forget the helping hands and the heroic deeds of the Righteous Gentiles represented in Yad Vashem by the Avenue of the Just.

In a way, the battle against Hitler was won by the allied military forces, but the war against Hitler’s evil was won by the daring deeds of

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the Righteous Gentiles. Their deeds proved to the world that the answer to oppression and indifference is involvement; they were a moral torch in a time of tyranny and darkness …. an example of what could have been done and an indictment of what was not done.

Thus, if the leaders of the world will remember and teach others to remember, then the Holocaust and the atrocities in Darfur, Biafra, Kosovo and many others will have no place on the face of the earth.

We survivors must always be unique leaders in the fight for a just and everlasting remembrance to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust.

But to remember is not enough ….

“Lo Haikar Hamachshavah Ela Hamaaseh” – It is the deed not just the thought that is critical.

Therefore, it is our mutual obligation, that of survivors and the leaders of the Jewish community, to instill in future generations the understanding of what happens when intolerance and bigotry are permitted to thrive.

Throughout these many years, we survivors did not sit idly by. We were constantly striving for the preservation of human rights and the dignity of mankind, while at the same time building a new life from the ashes of the one that had been destroyed. Despair was never an acceptable answer for us. Despite hopelessness, we created life in a world of darkness, and successfully wrestled with the dark shadows as we remembered an all-consuming evil.

In a simplistic way, I can say in one word why the tragedy of Auschwitz happened …. that word is “indifference”. Thus, educational centers must be the antidote to illiteracy and

understanding of the Holocaust, which for them happened in a distant past.

And he expressed the hope that the arts could educate the rising generation about the dangers of hatred and promote peaceful coexistence among peoples and nations.

Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal, the UN under-secretary-general for Communications and Public Information; Ambassador David Roet, Israel’s deputy permanent representative to UN, also gave remarks.

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. apathy. This is our security to perpetual and dignified remembrance. There the future scholars will be educated, and millions of students will be afforded the opportunity to study the past.

Together, they are our insurance for tomorrow that the Holocaust will not become a footnote in history and its memory will be a deterrent to prevent future atrocities.

I realize that nowadays the world appears to be “crumbling”, and there is increased hatred and prejudice against Israel and Jews throughout the world. Yet, being a survivor of Auschwitz, having survived against all odds, I continue to hope that a peaceful future for all people is in store for us.

I want to hope against hope that finally there will be a brighter future for mankind. Perhaps we are slowly realizing that we all live together on the same planet, and we are all one people.

Only then can we be sure that a tragedy such as the Holocaust will never happen again to us or any other people.

Maybe, just maybe, now we are experiencing an awakening, as slow as it is, and hopefully the world is finally changing for the better. In view of the current participation and awareness of so many young students, the future leaders of the world, there is presently visible proof of compassion and involvement instead of indifference. This is progress ... and it is up to the young leaders of tomorrow to make it a reality. They must be involved and stay involved... and never, never be bystanders!

Standing here today, in this magnificent sanctuary under the artistically engraved “The Ten Commandments” while observing the Yom HaShoah, I am bold enough to suggest one additional commandment; namely, in the face of injustice, “NEVER, NEVER BE A BYSTANDER.” Roman Kent is Chairman of Americna Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

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Latvian minister fired after defying government ban to attend SS veterans’ march Latvia’s Prime Minister Laimdota Straujuma sacked a member of her government after he defended his intention to attend a pro-Nazi rally in the capital Riga.

Einars Cilinkis (center) at the march http://www.worldjewishcongress.org

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nvironment Minister Einars Cilinskis of the rightist National Alliance participated in the annual march of WaffenSS veterans and their supporters. About

1,500 people attended the event, which has been held in the Latvian capital for nearly two decades.

Cilinskis ignored a government order that no minister should attend the march and declared that he would be attending the

rally. Straujuma’s spokesman, Andis Blinds, said that the PM had “no choice but to dismiss Cilinskis “in view of the “particularly sensitive” situation in Ukraine, according to a report by the ‘Associated Press’. Straujuma had given Cilinskis “time to reconsider his participation, but unfortunately he decided to participate,” Blinds said.

The annual parade commemorating Nazi collaborators during World War II has not been banned, however. The veterans, who fought alongside Nazi German troops during World War II, walked through the Latvian capital to lay flowers at the Freedom monument. The parade was protected by guards from a private security company. Cilinskis said a “nation that does not respect its heroes has no future.”

The gathering near the Freedom monument was opposed by several dozen activists chanting anti-fascist slogans. A sharp argument exchange took place between the two groups, but a heavy police presence prevented any kind of violent clashes.

The Latvian Waffen-SS legion was founded in 1943 and was actively used by Nazi Germany in reprisal raids against partisans and the civil population on the occupied territory of Russia, Belarus and Poland.

Ambassador Samantha Power Speaks at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Tribute Dinner; Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire Receives Museum’s Elie Wiesel Award WASHINGTON, DC –The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Elie Wiesel Award, the Museum’s highest honor, was conferred on Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda in 1993-94, at the Museum’s annual National Tribute Dinner on Wednesday, April 30. Dallaire was recognized for his valiant efforts to warn the world and prevent the Rwandan genocide and for his continued work as an outspoken advocate for genocide prevention.

United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power delivered keynote remarks. Also speaking was Strive Masiyiwa, a member of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, which oversees the Museum’s genocide prevention efforts.

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stablished in 2011, the award is named in honor of its inaugural recipient, Nobel Peace Laureate and Museum Founding Chairman Elie Wiesel.

It is given annually to an internationally prominent individual whose actions have advanced the Museum’s vision of a world where people confront hatred, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity.

Engraved on the award are words from Elie Wiesel’s Nobel speech, “One person of integrity can make a difference.”

Previous recipients are Aung San Suu Kyi (2012); Władysław Bartoszewski (2013), as a representative of all rescuers during the Holocaust; and the veterans of World War II (2013).

“Lieutenant-General Dallaire displayed singular insight at a pivotal moment and did not allow the apathy of the world to deter him. His extraordinary moral and physical courage should inspire and challenge all of us,” said Museum Director Sara J. Bloomfield.

The Museum’s National Tribute Dinner was held on Wednesday, April 30.

The Dinner Chairs are Shelley and Allan Holt. More than 850 people attended. The National Tribute Dinner will support the Museum’s campaign, “Never Again. What You Do Matters.” Led by honorary chair

Samantha Power, Ambassador Elie Wiesel, the campaign will ensure that the Museum can keep Holocaust memory alive as a force for change in today’s world.

The dinner is part of the Museum’s annual Congressionally mandated Days of Remembrance, during which it leads the nation in remembering the victims of the Holocaust. In addition to the Tribute Dinner, Days of Remembrance activities included a public names reading of Holocaust victims in the Museum’s Hall of Remembrance on April 30. Museum visitors and members of the community participated. Days of Remembrance observances also took place in state houses, city halls, churches, and synagogues throughout the United States, and at US military installations worldwide.

Aviva Sufian Listens and Learns as White House’s First Holocaust Survivor Envoy continued from p. 1 programs geared at assisting survivors.

Philanthropist Mark Wilf, who heads JFNA’s efforts to work with survivors, said federations are “exploring ways to raise funds to supplement the services many survivors already receive.”

According to Wilf, efforts are already underway to reach out to donors and foundations for extra funding.

“Federations have provided tens of millions of dollars over the years for Holocaust survivor services, but we know the need is great and we are working hard to do more,” he said.

As for the government, it is now focusing on building partnerships with groups like JFNA and on harnessing volunteers from AmeriCorps VISTA program to work with survivors, but there are no plans for providing new federal funds.

Sufian, a staffer at the department of Health and Human Services, specializes in treating the aging community. She had been involved in the field in previous positions as well, at the Social Security Administration and at the UJA-Federation of New York. Sufian, who described her work with aging as a “sacred responsibility that I take on with humility,” did not grow up in a family of Holocaust survivors. Her grandparents fled the pogroms in Eastern Europe and came to the United States after World War I. They are responsible, she said, to her commitment for hiddur p’nai zaken, the honoring and respecting of one’s elders.

Holocaust survivors make up a distinct constituency within elder Americans. Some are relatively new immigrant that came from the former Soviet Union while others emigrated from Europe shortly after the war. Poverty levels among survivors are higher than in the general aging population, and many survivors have special health and mental needs.

“Holocaust survivors are a special population who endured unspeakable horrors at the beginning of their lives. Because of these experiences, survivors are likely to have greater and more complex physical and mental health needs as they age,” Sufian said.

In addition, Holocaust survivors, in some cases, are averse to institutional care because of their traumatic experience. “We recognize that most Americans want to remain in their homes and communities as they age, and we support policies that promote self-determination and choice,” Sufian added.

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together May 2014

6

Union ‘expels’ Palestinian professor who took students to Auschwitz Supposed expulsion occurred after union sent students to Prof. Dajani’s office in Al-Quds University to protest the tri p. He says he was never a member, and that the expulsion is phony.

by Matthew Kalman http://www.haaretz.com

T

he Al-Quds University professor who led the first group of Palestinian students to visit Auschwitz has been expelled from the university’s workers union – even though he was never a member to begin with.

Professor Mohammed Dajani said he would take legal action against the union, accusing its leaders of “incitement” against him.

The latest assault on Dajani’s reputation occurred just three days after Palestinian President Mohammad Abbas described the Holocaust as “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era.”

Dajani’s supporters had hoped that the unprecedented comments by the Palestinian leader indicated a change in the traditional view of the Holocaust as either an element of Zionist propaganda or a reference point for Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

But on April 30, the professors and employees union at Al-Quds University announced in a letter that they had suspended Dajani’s membership due to “behavior that contravenes the policies and norms” of the union.

The supposed expulsion occurred after the union had sent students to Dajani’s office in the Al-Quds University Library, where he is director, to protest the Auschwitz trip.

Rima Najjar, assistant professor of English Literature at Al-Quds University, justified the union decision, saying the “norms” Dajani had violated were the academic and cultural boycott of Israeli universities supported by the union.

“The letter does not state this, but the discussion prior to the announcement refers to the trip he took with some students to visit Auschwitz,” she explained on her Facebook page.

But Dajani said he had never been a member of the union, so the “expulsion” was phony. He said he would make a legal challenge to the union announcement, which was an insult that had placed his personal safety and livelihood at risk.

“You know that I am not a member of your union and I did not register in it. I have nothing to do with your union and I have never participated in any of its activities or elections. Therefore, you are aware that the decision to dismiss me from a union I am not a member of is only aimed at slander, provocation, and personal and professional harm in an obvious violation of legal provisions,” Dajani told the union leadership.

“You know that the decision you made is a blatant interference in my work as a teacher, which aims to transfer learning and advance knowledge to students, and to reinforce both. You have no right to interfere in this work and force your opinions upon my teaching method,” he said.

Dajani revealed he had met with the union president, who had agreed to arrange a

meeting where the professor could discuss his views. Instead, the union expelled him, failing to follow its own proper procedures, Dajani charged.

The union decision appears to have widespread support at Al-Quds. Najjar denounced the Auschwitz visit as “a misguided stunt” and dismissed the parallel visit by Israeli students to a Palestinian refugee camp.

“What has a Palestinian refugee camp got to do with the death camp at Auschwitz except reinforce the false Zionist narrative that justifies the colonization of Palestine on account of Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis?

The whole affair is a misguided stunt,” she said. ”It could be argued that such an educational experience for Jewish Israeli students might contribute something to a just peace. But having Palestinian students visit Auschwitz can only appear to send them (and the world) the message that they have somehow to take on the responsibility for the evil they are witnessing and accept to give up their fundamental rights, because of such a horror,” she said.

But many of Dajani’s students support him, including those who were not on the controversial trip to Poland. Some declined to comment publicly, saying they were also under pressure from critics.

“I was not of the participants, but I am happy that I am one of his students,” said Mohanad Shakarne, a first-year student in

Media and American Studies from Bethlehem.

“The trip took place in the framework of research and scientific exploration to refute racist ideology.”

Prof Dajani told me he was determined not to remain silent, and that the backlash against his initiative had echoes of the pressure that had silenced critics of the Nazis.

“Hate, racism, and bigotry spread when a reign of terror rules and fear cripples the good people and they freeze as bystanders doing nothing to protest evil… making evil become more and more powerful,” Dajani said. “That is why I took it upon myself not to be a bystander.

In this struggle of corrupt politics, hijacked religion, and lost morality, I decided not to be a bystander.”

“An educational trip to honor the memory of the victims of the ugliest atrocities in history, becomes an inquisition trial tainted with twisted politics and we stand by and do nothing. Words of sympathy and compassion by a Palestinian leader expressed to show empathy and humanity to the suffering of a historic enemy are received with ridicule and cynicism. Jews struggling for justice, peace and reconciliation are being boycotted

by Palestinians calling for boycotts and antinormalization. In these clashes between moral values and narrow political interests, evil will continue to prevail if the good look on and do nothing,” he said.

Koch was a French resistance figure who founded the Documentation Francaise, a public publishing service.

The orchestra is known for its New Year’s Concert, an annual gala of Strauss waltzes broadcast to millions around the world.

It published details of its conduct during the Nazi era last year, calling it a “dark period” in its history, when the New Year’s Concert was invented as a Nazi propaganda instrument.

Austrian Greens party member of parliament Harald Walser, who has long campaigned for more openness by the orchestra, said the Philharmonic should allow an international panel of historians to look into its Nazi-era past.

“The deeper one digs into the Vienna Philharmonic’s past, the more ‘corpses’ emerge from the orchestra pit,” he said.

Vienna Orchestra To Return Looted Painting Philharmonic Gives Back Paul Signac Masterpiece

By Reuters

T

he Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra will return to a French family a valuable painting that was looted by the Nazis and given to the orchestra as a gift in 1940 by a Viennese secret police official.

The heirs of the painting’s late owner, Marcel Koch, will receive “Port-en-Bessin” by neo-Impressionist Paul Signac at a ceremony this year, the orchestra said on Saturday, announcing the latest step to address its past association with Nazism.

About half the Philharmonic’s musicians were Nazi party members by 1942, four years after Hitler’s annexation of Austria. Thirteen

musicians with Jewish origins or relations were driven out of the orchestra and five died in concentration camps.

“We have tried for many years to come to grips with the Vienna Philharmonic’s past and face up to our responsibility to make good historical injustices,” orchestra director Clemens Hellsberg said in a statement cited by the Austria Press Agency.

Last year the Philharmonic revoked awards it had made during Hitler’s rule to six leading Nazis.

“Restitution of this painting is a special concern of ours,” Hellsberg said. The orchestra said it was only now returning the painting as it only recently tracked down the rightful owner.

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together May 2014

7

Holocaust Historian Returns Hungarian Honor Over ‘Whitewashing’ of Shoah Hungary Plans Memorial to German Occupation in Budapest

By JTA

N

oted Holocaust historian Randoph L. Braham is returning a high honor granted him by the Hungarian state.

The action is a protest against what he called the government’s falsification of Holocaust history and attempts to whitewash Hungary’s role in the Holocaust.

The Hungarian state news agency MTI quoted a letter from Braham, 91, in which the Bucharest-born scholar, a Holocaust survivor and expert on the Holocaust in Hungary, said he was handing back the Cross of the Order of Merit “with a heavy heart” following recent developments in Hungary. He also said he would no longer permit the Budapest Holocaust Memorial Center to use his name for one its research departments.

Braham, an emeritus professor at the City University of New York, wrote in the letter that: “The campaign of history falsification which aims to whitewash the (Miklos) Horthy era, has shocked me.” Horthy led Hungary into World War II as a Nazi ally.

Braham said the “last straw” had been the decision by the government to erect a memorial in downtown Budapest to the 1944 German occupation of Hungary. This, he said, was a “cowardly attempt” to exonerate Hungarians from their own role in the Holocaust and confuse the issue by placing all blame on the Nazis.

Hungarian Jewish leaders, historians and others have sharply criticized plans for the memorial.

“The events of 1944 are, to say the least, more complicated than a story of ‘bad’ Germans fighting ‘good’ Hungarians,” the

Members of the Hungarian Jewish community march in commemoration of the Holocaust. The country, however, has recently moved away from honestly reporting its involvement in the Shoah. prominent historian Krisztian Ungvary wrote in the HVG.hu news magazine. “Eichmann himself was thrilled by his experiences here, observing that the Hungarians must surely be descended from the Huns since nowhere else had he seen so much brutality ‘in the course of solving the Jewish question.’”

Hungary’s conservative government, headed by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has designated 2014 as Holocaust Memorial

Year, with a series of events and initiatives planned.

In October, Hungarian Deputy Prime Minister Tibor Navracsics told an international conference that the country’s leaders recognized Hungarian involvement in the Holocaust and vowed that the state will combat anti-Semitism and racism. Hungary’s ambassador to the United Nations made a similar statement last week.

Knesset approves bill to increase aid to Holocaust survivors

By LIDAR GRAVÉ-LAZI Jerusalem Post

T A display showing tattoos at the Holocaust Museum in Wasington, DC Photo: reuters

Bill calls for an increase in aid from NIS 100 million to NIS 135 million annually, with further annual increases.

he Knesset approved the second and third (final) readings of a bill to amend the Restitution of Holocaust Victims’ Assets Law. The measure sets the end of the Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims’ Assets’ operations as December 31, 2017, as opposed to 2021, as previously stipulated in the law.

The new law also calls for an increase in aid to Holocaust survivors from NIS 100 million to NIS 135m. annually.

In 2015, the amount will rise to NIS 150m.

The justice minister with the consultation of the finance minister and the approval of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice committee can raise this sum further.

The company will transfer 75 percent of funds directly to the bank accounts of Holocaust survivors.

“Apart from increasing the amount of aid and improving the conditions of the survivors, we have increased the amount that will go directly into the accounts of survivors, who can use this money however they see fit, and allow them to live a much better life,” MK Merav Michaeli (Labor) said.

The legislation is also meant to facilitate the operations of the company to locate heirs and return their assets by allowing access to documents from the Population Registry.

Furthermore, any assets owned by the company that remain unclaimed at the end of 2017 will be used to aid Holocaust survivors and will be transferred to an executor.

The bill was proposed by Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and combined with two proposals by MK Eliezer Stern (Hatnua) and Michaeli. The Knesset plenum approved the bill with 24 votes and no opposition in the second reading, and 27 votes without opposition in the third reading.

“Despite the unquestionable importance of locating assets of Holocaust victims and transferring them to their heirs, there is also a clear obligation to assist survivors still living among us.

This is a solution formulated with the purpose of achieving these two goals, accomplished with the collaboration of all government ministries, and it constitutes a just and balanced layout,” said Livni.

Jewish heirs won’t get back art treasure, German panel rules (JTA) — A collection of medieval religious art worth an estimated $275 million will not be returned to the heirs of four German-Jewish art dealers.

T

he descendants of another heir said, however, that they will not give up the fight for the Guelph Collection now held by the Berlin-based Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.

In a ruling last week, the Limbach Commission — a German advisory board for Holocaust-related claims — said the collection sold in 1935 was not bought from the German-

Jewish art dealers under duress and thus did not have to be returned to the heirs.

The collectors — Zacharias Max Hackenbroch, Isaac Rosenbaum, Saemy Rosenberg and Julius Falk Goldschmidt — had purchased the treasures in the 1920s.

The claimants and their attorneys, as well as other advocates, have argued since 2008 that virtually all purchases of valuable property from Jews under the Nazis were made under duress.

They noted that the sale was orchestrated by Hitler’s chief deputy, Hermann Goering.

In its argument, the foundation, which oversees the museums of Berlin, pointed out

that the collection was not even in Germany at the time of its sale, the Times of Israel reported.

Meanwhile, an additional claimant — the heirs of the Jewish jeweler Hermann Netter, who reportedly owned 25 percent of the treasure at the time of its sale — said they would continue their fight for restitution of the treasure. Dresden-based attorney Sabine Rudolph told the German news agency that since the Netter heirs had been excluded from the previous deliberation, they would not recognize the commission’s decision.

A spokesperson for the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation told the

online Sudkurier newspaper that Netter’s descendants had declined to make a claim together with the other heirs, and noted that the Limbach Commission’s rejection of the claim expressly included the descendants of other previous owners. But Rudolph said her clients had only just learned about the case in December.

Speaking to the Times of Israel, Markus Stoetzel and Mel Urbach, attorneys for the original claimants, said they were analyzing the recommendations and would discuss them with their clients. They said they were shocked and disappointed by the findings.

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together May 2014

8

The Jewish Woman Who Was the Liaison Between the Nazis and American Rescue Groups

By Bernard Wasserstein http://www.tabletmag.com

O

ne morning in May 1941 Gertrude van Tijn—a middle-aged Jewish woman bearing a Dutch passport—arrived at Lisbon airport after an adventurous journey from Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.

The Portuguese capital at that time was a place of strange incongruities and topsy-turvy values: an island of peace in a continent at war, the seat of government of an authoritarian police state that boasted of being Britain’s “oldest ally,” and a magnet for international intrigue. The city was also the main embarkation point for refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe seeking desperately to secure passages to the Western Hemisphere.

Who was Gertrude van Tijn, and why had she come to Lisbon? Hers was a mission of mercy. Though she did not yet fully realize it herself, the trip was an 11thhour effort to avert mass murder. Her aim was to extricate thousands of Jews in the Netherlands from the clutches of the Nazis.

She undertook her journey with the approval of the Nazi authorities, who, at that stage, were still ready to countenance, indeed keen to encourage, Jewish emigration.

In Lisbon she was to meet representatives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a wealthy charitable organization concerned with the fate of the Jews of Europe. She was to inquire whether the Joint, as it was known, would finance the exodus of Jews from occupied Europe across the Atlantic.

That the Nazis would permit a woman, a Jew, and a person of no apparent standing to carry out such an assignment seemed improbable. Yet Gertrude’s flight to Lisbon was the stuff not of fantasy but of bizarre reality.

“Almost all the things I remember of my childhood are acts of rebellion,” Gertrude wrote in her unpublished memoirs.

She called herself an “exasperating child,” and the independent-minded outlook with which she approached everything throughout her life was deeply rooted in her character and in the circumstances of her upbringing.

Gertrud Franzisca Cohn, as her name was rendered on her birth certificate, entered the world “during the worst hailstorm in history” on July 4, 1891, in Braunschweig (Brunswick), the historic “Lion City” in Saxony. Her father, Werner Cohn, a merchant, had been born in 1854 in the small town of Seehausen and moved to Braunschweig in 1879. Her mother, Thekla, née Levisohn, ten years younger than her husband, married him five years before Gertrude’s birth. Gertrude had two brothers, the elder, Ernst, and the youngest of the family, Walter, to whom Gertrude was particularly devoted.

Gertrude van Tijn in her office at the Jewish Council, Amsterdam, 1942. (Courtesy of the Collection of the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam)

In 1941,Gertrude van Tijn traveled to Lisbon in a last-ditch effort to save Europe’s Jews from annihilation. She was already too late.

The Cohns belonged to the respectable middle class, and Gertrude was imbued from an early age with the social and moral attitudes of the German bourgeoisie: scrupulous manners; tidiness; order; cleanliness; discipline; and respect for authority, education, and conventional morality. But Gertrude, like many German Jews of her generation, was barely aware in her childhood that she was Jewish. Together with her nanny and her brother Walter, she attended church every Sunday and “firmly believed in God and in Jesus.” She may even have been baptized.

The outbreak of war in August of 1914 raised a potential conflict of loyalties for Gertrude, who was by then working in London, first as a secretary and then as a factotum for a lawyer-author. As an enemy alien, she was required to report regularly to the police. While continuing her work and political activity in the suffragist movement, she joined some of her English relations in a relief effort on behalf of the tens of thousands of Belgians who had flooded into England in the wake of the German invasion of their country. This was her first involvement with refugees, a concern that was to become the leitmotif of her life.

In 1915, she was given 10 days to leave the country. If she had remained, she would have been interned with other German civilians until the end of the war.

As she was “fiercely anti-German,” she decided to go to a neutral country rather than return to Germany. The choice was between Switzerland and Holland. The toss of a coin decided, fatefully, that for the next

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three decades the Netherlands would be her home base.

In Amsterdam, Gertrude discovered a new passion: Zionism. At a dinner party, she met “a very attractive young man” (Gertrude does not give his name) who, when she said she was Jewish, began to talk about Zionism. He persuaded her to read some Zionist literature, including Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State. “Suddenly my interest was aroused. I read and read.

The fact that Jews could be proud of their heritage and actually worked for a renaissance in a country of their own was like a revelation.” She felt she had to come to a decision: “Stop calling myself Jewish or go over to the Zionists with all my heart.”

Gertrude plunged headlong into the Jewish national cause. When her father heard that she had embraced Zionism, he disapproved. “He could not understand it,” she later wrote, “seeing how well I had been brought up.” This was the typical reaction of an assimilated, middle-class German Jew. But on this, as on so much else in her life, Gertrude, once she made up her mind, was not to be moved.

Why did she adopt this, at at the time, apparently quixotic, even eccentric creed? She certainly had no religious motive, since she had led a thoroughly secular life. She seems rather to have found in Zionism an ideal that she could embrace unconditionally, an outlet for her restless energy, and a circle of young fellow enthusiasts with whom she could engage.

Her earliest recorded formal contact with the Zionist Organization came in a letter in August 1916, addressed to the head office of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in The Hague. This was the movement’s financial arm, concerned with the purchase of land in Palestine for settlement by Jewish immigrant halutzim, or pioneers. Soon after the outbreak of war the fund’s headquarters had moved from Cologne to shelter under the umbrella of Dutch neutrality. In her letter Gertrude requested “one guilder worth of stamps of the JNF, preferably with the Herzl portrait.”

Gertrude’s knowledge of English, German, and Dutch led to her engagement as translator of correspondence and publications for the JNF. By February 1 9 1 7 , s h e w a s r u n n i n g t h e J N F ’s commissariat in Amsterdam. From her office in the elegant Diamond Exchange building on the Weesperplein, she was soon busy organizing propaganda and fundraising. Zionist activity in the city was at a low ebb, but Gertrude breathed renewed life into the movement in the Dutch capital. Her Zionist ardor even led her to consider moving to Palestine to work for the JNF bureau there. But the country was the theater of military operations between its Turkish rulers and an Allied invading army headed by Gen. Edmund Allenby. Settling there was thus impracticable for the time being.

Her work brought Gertrude into the heart of Zionist affairs. She met many Zionist leaders, among them Chaim Weizmann. He was at the peak of his prestige as the man who, in November 1917, persuaded the British government to issue the Balfour Declaration, favoring the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Like many who encountered him, Gertrude was captivated by the majesty of Weizmann’s personality, the pathos of his oratory, and the visionary realism of his politics. She cherished his acquaintance for the rest of her life.

During this period, Gertrude also came into contact for the first time with the the Joint. She probably owed this connection to Pieter Vuyk, who acted during the war as an intermediary for communications between the Hamburg-based bankerphilanthropist Max Warburg and the New York headquarters of the Joint, in which his brother Felix Warburg played a central role. With the support of the Joint, Gertrude organized the dispatch of kosher food parcels to Jewish prisoners of war in eastern Europe. Although the Joint offered her a full-time job at an increased salary, she preferred to remain in her position as private secretary to Carel Eliza Ter Meulen, one of the most senior and respected financiers in the Netherlands. The link she established with the Joint nevertheless later became central to her working life.

together May 2014

9

A Glimpse of Jewish Warsaw

By Jordan Kutzik blogs.forward.com

M

enachem Kipnis is known to Jewish history as a cultural figure who worked across several fields. Born in Uzhmir, Ukraine in 1878, Kipnis distinguished himself as a singer, ethnomusicologist and journalist. As a singer he was the first Jewish tenor in the Warsaw Opera (1902-1918) and along with his wife, Zimra Zeligfield, he was among the most important early singers of Yiddish folksongs.

As an ethnomusicologist Kipnis collected songs all over Europe and published them in two important pioneering anthologies of Yiddish folksongs. As a journalist he wrote articles about music in various Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers. He was also well-known for his reportages, which recounted the lives of ordinary Jews whom he encountered on the streets of Warsaw.

For these articles, which were published in the Warsaw-based newspaper Haynt as well as in the New York-based Tog, as well as occasionally in the Forverts, Kipnis took his own photos of his interview subjects.

Kipnis died in the Warsaw ghetto of a brain-aneurysm in 1942. After his death, his wife Zimra kept his massive archive of papers, diaries, music and photographic negatives with her in the ghetto. She refused to turn her husband’s archive over to Emanuel Ringelblum, who had asked her to let him preserve it as part of the secret archive he administered called “Oyneg Shabbos.” Kipnis’s archive disappeared without a trace after Zimra Zeligfield’s deportation to Treblinka.

Although the photographic negatives themselves were apparently destroyed along with the rest of Kipnis’s archive during the destruction of the Warsaw G h e t t o , m a n y o f K i p n i s ’s p h o t o s survived, as copies of them had been sent to America so that they could run in the Forward. Thanks to these surviving photographs, we are now able to learn about Kipnis’s less well-known role as a photographer.

To that end a new exhibition, “Miasto i oczy” (“The City and the Eyes”), dedicated to Kipnis’s photographic legacy, has opened at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. The exhibition is a collaboration between the institute and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York.

“I absolutely love Menachem Kipnis’s photos” Krysia Fisher, the photo archivist at YIVO and the curator of the exhibition said during an interview with the Forverts.

“His photos are totally different than Roman Vishniac’s or Alter Kacyzne’s. Although all three received the same instructions from Ab Cahan to send sentimental photographs of nostalgic Jewish landscapes — of the shtetl, of little streets, of Jews from the past,” Kipnis took pictures “that don’t feel stuck in the past. The Jews are traditional but they are doing things associated with modernity; they aren’t talking about Talmudic lessons, they’re talking about immigration, they’re sitting on benches in parks and talking about politics.”

Kipnis was not a professional photographer like Kacyzne or Vishniac.

Nevertheless Fisher believes that Kipnis’s photographs are more interesting than those of his better-known colleagues because “he wasn’t estranged from the people he was photographing. This is very different than Vishniac who photographed his subjects as an outsider and had contempt for them, or Kacyzne, who complained that it was a chore having to take such pictures. Kipnis spoke with his subjects and considered himself one of them.”

Fisher explained that she serves as a bit of an advocate for Kipnis’s photographs because she believes that there is “something interesting about them, something that is so real that anyone who looks at them can tell a story about the people in the picture.” One such photograph, which Fisher is especially fond of, was published in the Forward on August 22, 1926. Kipnis wrote the following about the picture, featuring a woman helping a friend apply lipstick: “the eyes black, lips

new exhibition “Miasto i oczy” red, and when they are bored they make them redder.” Fisher noted that it is very rare to find such a candid intimate shot of Jews in pre-World War II Eastern Europe because such photographs were almost always posed. Such photos of women are even rarer.

Fisher said that the exhibition has received positive reactions from visitors.

The Israeli ambassador to Poland attended the exhibition’s premiere along with other VIPs and a large crowd of visitors. “During the three days the exhibit was running when I was in Warsaw the visitors were

Amerian Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants

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very happy with it,” Fisher noted. “For those in Warsaw the pictures provide an intimacy and authenticity” that lacks on other occasions. “It’s not like just looking at a memorial.”

The exhibition will run until May 15. The Jewish Historical Institute will soon release a catalog of the photographs featured in the exhibition. Fisher hopes that the exhibition will travel to other cities but there are not yet any concrete plans to that end.

122 West 30th Street, Suite 205 New York, NY 10001 (212) 239-4230 Fax (212) 279-2926 e-mail orders: luis@americangathering.org

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NAME: _______________________________________________________________ ADDRESS: ____________________________________________________________ CITY, STATE & ZIP: ____________________________________________________ E-MAIL: _____________________________ PHONE: ___________________ CREDIT CARD #: _______________________________________________________ EXPIRATION DATE: __________ SECURITY # ___________ The application of a Commemoration Marker to a headstone is contingent on permission from the cemetery/memorial authorities.

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10

THE STORY OF THE INVERTED “B”

A

t the entry gate to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, a preposterous contemptible overhead sign was placed by the Germans reading “Arbeit Macht Frei” ...

“Work sets you free”. As we all know, the mere mention of the name Auschwitz symbolizes brutality, cruelty and cold-blooded murder because of the many despicable atrocities that occurred there on a daily basis during the Holocaust. The merciless slaughter of innocent Jewish people is indeed a prime example of man’s inhumanity to man at its highest level, and this infuriating overhead message only added insult to injury.

In an act of daring defiance, the enslaved workers decided to purposely invert the letter “B” in the word Arbeit when making the outrageous sign. In their subtle yet

clearly visible way, the inmates of the camp showed great courage in helping to sabotage the construction of the sign, and what they accomplished has become a permanent reminder of the unwavering resistance of those who were imprisoned in Auschwitz.

The International Auschwitz Committee, in remembrance, has designed and erected a statue shown in various cities throughout Europe to symbolize their daring deed and remarkably courageous act. It is a replica of the upside down “B”, and the meaningful dedication on the sculpture was chosen by the International Auschwitz Committee. The compelling message on the statue reads as follows, and is a lasting legacy for future generations to come….

“Remember: when injustices take place, when people are discriminated against

The Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial in Oswiecim, Poland. Photograph: Czarek Sokolowski/AP and persecuted – never remain indifferent.

Indifference kills...”

It is the hope of the International Auschwitz Committee to erect a similar monument in the United States as a permanent reminder of their

gallant fight against tyranny. Of course, the most fitting place would be in New York City at the United Nations.

ROMAN KENT, chair of the Presidium of the International Auschwitz Committee

First-ever excavation of Nazi death camp reveals horrors

Archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls excavates at Treblinka. A documentary about the work airs on Saturday (March 29) on the Smithsonian Channel.

By Zackary Sholem Berger http://www.sott.net

T

he first-ever archaeological excavations at the Nazi death camp Treblinka have revealed new mass graves, as well as the first physical evidence that this camp held gas chambers, where thousands of Jews died.

Presented in a new documentary, Treblinka: Hitler’s Killing Machine, which (March 29) on the Smithsonian Channel, the excavations reveal that the Nazis weren’t as adept at covering up their crimes as they believed when they razed the death camp in 1943. Brick walls and foundations from the gas chambers remain, as do massive amounts of human bone, including fragments now eroding out on the forested ground surface.

“For me, that was quite shocking,” said project leader Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist who normally works with police to find modern murder victims. “These artifacts are there, and these human remains are on the surface, and they’re not being recorded or recovered.”

Treblinka’s horror Of all the atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich, Treblinka is one of the most mind-boggling.

Historians estimate that about 900,000 Jews were murdered at this concentration camp in Nazioccupied Poland over a mere 16 months.

The Nazis began deporting Jews, mostly from the ghettos of Warsaw and Radom, to

Treblinka in July 1942. There were two camps.

Treblinka I was a forced-labor camp where prisoners were made to manufacture gravel for the Nazi war effort. A little more than a mile (2 kilometers) away was Treblinka II, a horrendously efficient death camp.

Jews were sent to Treblinka II on trains, told they were simply going to a transit camp before being sent on to a new life in eastern Europe. The deception was elaborate: Nazis erected a fake train station in the remote spot, complete with false ticket-counter and clock.

“There was an orchestra set up near the reception area of the camp to play,” Colls told Live Science. “It was run by a famous composer at the time, Artur Gold.”

Gold, a Jewish violinist from Warsaw, was kept alive at Treblinka both to entertain the Nazi guards and to run the orchestra. He died at the camp in 1943.

The Jewish deportees were split into two groups, one of men and the other of women and children, and ordered to undress for “delousing.”

After handing over their valuables and documents, the victims were sent to the gas chambers, which were pumped full of exhaust from tank engines.

Within about 20 minutes, some 5,000 people inside would be killed by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Corpses were initially buried in mass graves, but later in 1942 and 1943, Jewish slave laborers were

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forced to reopen the graves and cremate the bodies on enormous pyres.

Hidden atrocities But because the Nazis razed Treblinka’s death camp in 1943, little physical evidence of this genocide remained. What was known about Treblinka came from Nazi confessions and the eyewitness descriptions of very few survivors, most of whom were never allowed near the gas chambers.

But as an archaeologist, Colls knew that “the landscape could never be sanitized in that way,” she said. She began assessing Treblinka as an archaeological site in 2007. Her emphasis was on using “non-invasive” archaeological methods, including geophysical surveys of the site and visual inspection.

“What we wanted to do at that stage was to asses what, if anything, survived below ground,” Colls said.

Since that time, Colls has also led a lidar survey of the wooded site. Lidar is a method that uses lasers to measure the distance between the ground and the airplane-borne instrument. By scanning the ground with lidar, archaeologists can detect depressions and mounds that might indicate manmade structures. Lidar allows researchers to virtually strip away the vegetation that might obscure these features on the ground.

“What that revealed was the presence of previously unknown mass graves,” Colls said.

The suspected mass grave sites were in Treblinka I, the labor camp. The story of the labor camp is less well-known than the story of the death camp, which is now marked by a memorial.

But the labor camp was no less brutal, Colls said: Eyewitnesses report seeing men hacked to death alive, and beatings and murder were commonplace.

The largest of the mass graves as revealed on lidar was 63 feet by 58 feet in size (19.2 by 17.6 meters).

Indeed, when the archaeology team began digging to confirm the lidar results, they uncovered shoes, ammunition, and bones - including bones with cut marks indicating that the victims had been stabbed or otherwise assaulted.

After digging three small test trenches to confirm each mass grave, Colls and her team

reburied the remains. Jewish rabbinical law prohibits the disruption of a gravesite, so the aim was never to disinter the bodies. But placing the bones back in the grave was emotionally difficult, Colls said.

“I think it never actually crossed my mind that it would actually be me who would re-inter the remains,” she said. “I think sometimes the hardest thing to do was to actually re-inter the remains, and to backfill the trenches over the gas chamber, for example, because it felt like you were almost putting a lid on it.”

Finding the gas chamber The gas chamber was the subject of the teams’ second dig. There were two sets of gas chambers built at Treblinka, the first with a capacity of about 600 people, the second able to hold about 5,000.

Colls and her team conducted four excavations at Treblinka II. The first two revealed a strange find - a fossilized shark tooth, and sand. Evidently, the Nazis dumped sand from a nearby quarry over the remains of the death camp to disguise them.

The second two trenches, however, revealed a brick wall and foundation. The gas chambers were the only brick buildings in the camp, Colls said. The excavations also revealed orange tiles that matched eyewitness descriptions of the floor of the killing chambers. Chillingly, each tile was stamped with a Star of David, likely part of the Nazi subterfuge that the building was a Jewish-style bathhouse.

“Treblinka had never been looked at since the period after the war,” Colls said. “And everybody had assumed that because the history books said it was destroyed, it was.”

The excavations prove otherwise, she said.

Colls is now working on an exhibition of the findings to go on display at Treblinka, as well as a book about the work. There are plans to go back and dig at an execution site near the labor camp to confirm the presence of a mass grave, she said, and there may be more work near the gas chambers.

The hope, Colls said, is to bring the atrocities to light, understand them, and hopefully prevent future genocides. To that end, she says, she channels the emotion of uncovering victims’ remains to finding more answers.

“For me, it feels like the Holocaust happened yesterday,” she said..

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NY Legislators call on US to reject contracting with SNCF Railway “We say we will never forget,and we won’t forget by cutting off business for them,” says councillor.

By MAYA SHWAYDER http://www.jpost.com

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ew York Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney and City Councillors Mark Levine and Benjamin Kallos announced that they would introduce a resolution to the New York City Council that would call on the state legislature to pass legislation barring contracting with companies that profited from the Holocaust, but have never compensated victims.

Of particular concern is the Société Nationale des Chemin de fer Français (SNCF), the French national railroad company that was responsible for the deportation of 76,000 Jews during the Holocaust.

SNCF recently won contracts in Virginia and Massachusetts, and is currently thought to

be the leading bidder for a contract that would run a new purple line through Washington DC’s Metro System into suburban Maryland.

Levine and Kallos hope to prevent the same from happening in New York.

“We generally respond to the Holocaust by looking to the past,” Levine said, “but today we also want to think about the future. There are 50,000 New Yorkers [Holocaust survivors] for whom we need to provide resources to live out their lives with dignity. And we must do everything in our power to get reparations for them. We believe it is unconscionable that anyone would award them a contract.”

“Corporations must pay restitution, or they will not receive a contract” said Kallos.”We say we will never forget, and we will not forget by cutting off business for them.” SNCF has paid reparations to survivors living in Belgium, the

Czech Republic, Poland, and the UK, but not to those living in the US, said Congresswoman Maloney.

Maloney and Florida representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen introduced the Holocaust Rail Justice Act last year, a bill that would have given Holocuast survivors the right to sue the SNCF in the United States, but the bill is still in committee.

“SNCF has acknowledged its role in transporting victims, but has always refused to pay compensation for its actions,” Maloney said.

“The survivors deserve their day in court.

We believe that this will add to the pressure on France. After 69 years there’s no reason for France to drag its feet.”

The city resolution will be introduced and Kallos, who is vice chair of the Jewish

NEW YORK Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney, flanked by City Councillors Mark Levine (right) and Benjamin Kallos, announced their intention to pass a resolution to prohibit city enterprises from dealing with companies that profited from the Holocaust and have not paid reparations. Photo: MAYA SHWAYDER caucus of city council, said they expect to see it referred immediately to the Contracts committee, and also hope to see similar legislation pass in the state capital before the end of the session in June.

Kallos said they would be meeting with council speaker Melissa MarkViverito, and Levine said that all his meetings about the resolution had been “very positive.”

Pope Francis: Breaking New Ground in Jewish-Catholic Relations

The Holy Father’s friendshi ps and strong tradition of dialogue with St. John XXIII are already having an impact, building on the foundation provided by previous popes

by PETER JESSERER SMITH www.faithstreet.com

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EW YORK — The bonds between Jews and Catholics have never been stronger in the Church’s 2,000-year history, but some Jewish leaders say that, with Pope Francis, the best is about to get even better.

Blessed Pope John XXIII reset CatholicJewish relations in the 1960s, seeking to reconcile the grievances of the past, in which Catholics had treated Jews less like beloved brothers and more like strangers — or worse, as enemies. The Church approved that outreach in 1965 at the Second Vatican

Council with the document Nostra Aetate, and Popes Paul VI, Blessed John Paul II and Benedict XVI all continued efforts to deepen those relations.

But Pope Francis’ pontificate represents a new chapter of deeper understanding and friendship between Jews and Catholics.

“Pope Francis has very close personal friends from his days as cardinal who are rabbis, who are leaders in the Jewish community,” said Menachem Rosensaft, general counsel for the World Jewish Congress (WSJ). “The dialogue and the relationship have been unprecedented in terms of warmth and closeness.”

Rosensaft said the Pope’s relationship with Jews in Buenos Aires reveals “a totally new model that we’ve never seen before.”

“The relationship is not a formal or intellectual one. But in addition to being intellectual, or symbolic, it is also heartfelt and intuitive,” he said. “That makes a tremendous difference.”

Rabbi Skorka Few things highlight Pope Francis’ relationship with the Jews more than his deep, abiding friendship with Rabbi Abraham Skorka, rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary in Buenos Aires. The two men started a friendship in the late 1990s with a joke over

Former Auschwitz medic arrested in Germany http://www.theguardian.com

93-year-old held on charges of aiding and abetting mass murder of prisoners at Nazi death camp

G

erman police have arrested a former Nazi medic who served at the Auschwitz death camp on multiple charges of aiding and abetting murder.

The 93-year-old, who was arrested at his home near Neubrandenburg, north of Berlin, underwent a medical checkup before he faced a judge and was then taken into pre-trial detention.

The former SS member allegedly assisted in the mass murder of prisoners who arrived on eight transports from Germany, Austria, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovenia in September 1944.

Of the arrivals, 1,721 were killed in gas chambers after they were deemed unfit for forced labour at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Oswiecim, southern Poland, prosecutors said.

Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, praised German authorities for “not relenting in the pursuit of those who murdered, or aided in murdering, thousands of people” during the second world war.

“The prosecution of those who participated in terrible crimes sends a clear message that justice must be done, no matter how late the hour,” he said.

The arrest followed a recommendation from the German office investigating Nazi war crimes to bring charges. It was the latest in a series of arrests since Germany launched a renewed drive to bring to justice the last surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust.

For more than 60 years German courts prosecuted Nazi war criminals only if evidence showed they had personally committed atrocities. But in 2011 a Munich

President Shimon Peres of Israel meets with Pope Francis at the Vatican on April 30. their favorite soccer teams, and they published a book in 2010 called On Heaven and Earth, revealing their interreligious dialogue on 29 different topics.

continued on p. 12

court sentenced John Demjanjuk to five years in prison for complicity in the extermination of Jews at the Sobibor camp, establishing that all former camp guards could be tried.

“There cannot be a statute of limitation for crimes against humanity, and mass murderers must continue to live in fear of the long arm of the law,” Lauder said.

Auschwitz has become an enduring symbol of Nazi Germany’s genocide of European Jews, of whom one million were killed there from 1940 to 1945. More than 100,000 non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, gay people and anti-Nazi partisans also died at the camp in occupied Poland before it was liberated by Russian forces on 27 January 1945.

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12

Pope Francis: Breaking New Ground in Jewish-Catholic Relations continued from p. 11 “He does what he says, and he speaks what’s on his mind and what he feels in a very direct and clear way,” Rabbi Skorka told the Register in an exclusive interview. “He’s a respectful person who respects me, really, in everything he says. He’s a lovely person, very simple and highly spiritual.”

The Pope and Rabbi Skorka made history by sharing meals and praying together during Sukkot and Sabbath at the Vatican — making Pope Francis perhaps the first bishop of Rome to do so, since St. Peter himself.

Rabbi Skorka has been in the United States sharing his experiences with Pope Francis at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York on Oct. 29 and at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, where he received an honorary degree.

The book co-written by Pope Francis and Rabbi Skorka reveals how they feel dialogue should be conducted: by becoming acquainted with the person, viewing him as having something good to say, but not compromising one’s different identity while finding common ground together.

Rabbi Skorka said he and Pope Francis have discussed that the next step in their dialogue “will be a theological one”: what a Catholic means to a Jew and what a Jew means to a Catholic.

Francis’ Personal Touch Rosensaft said that Pope Francis’ personal touch leaves the deepest impression. The Pope had surprised Rosensaft with a personal email, later published in The Washington Post, thanking Rosensaft for mailing him a copy of a guest sermon he had written for his synagogue about where an all-knowing and all-powerful God was present in the Holocaust.

Rosensaft is the son of two Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, or Shoah.

The Nazis had killed his mother’s first husband and her young son, his brother.

Rosensaft’s sermon, which Pope Francis said contained “the only possible hermeneutic interpretation,” concluded that God’s presence was “alongside and within the victims, those who perished and those who survived.”

“The idea that Pope Francis reached out to me and validated my approach is a tremendous gift,” Rosensaft said. “It is very indicative of his sensitivity to be a spiritual leader and a role model for humanity as a whole.”

Father John Crossin, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, said Pope Francis’ attitude reveals his idea of a “culture of encounter,” where a person walks with others, respects them, while “sharing with others his faith and what he believes.”

“It’s how he relates to other people with respect, love and concern,” he said.

“The bigger picture is his whole thinking that we need a culture of encounter (which is more broad than just the Jewish community)

with everybody — no matter what they believe in,” Father Crossin added.

Actions Accompany Words Rosensaft said Pope Francis not only displayed this personal concern to the World Jewish Congress’ president, Ron Lauder, but has shown that actions follow his words.

He said Lauder had met with Pope Francis in September to share Jewish concerns that the Polish government was going to curtail their religious liberty by banning the kosher slaughter of animals. Rosensaft said Pope Francis thanked Lauder for bringing this to his attention and said he would see what he could do. Within a month, the Polish bishops were speaking out against the legislation, and Poland’s government has pledged to reverse the law.

“I’m quite convinced there is a direct link between the two,” Rosensaft said.

Pope Francis also proclaimed “a Christian cannot be anti-Semitic,” emphasizing how much Jews and Catholics have a “common root” and share much as a consequence.

Rosensaft saw Pope Francis’ commitment to these words also fulfilled in the Vatican’s refusal last month to give Nazi war criminal and Holocaust-denier Erich Priebke a public Church funeral.

Priebke — who spent nearly 50 years in the Holy Father’s native Argentina after escaping in 1946 from a British prison camp — had never publicly repented of his role in the murder of Jews and Italian civilians, following his extradition to Italy in 1996 and his subsequent conviction and sentence of life imprisonment for his war crimes. The breakaway Society of St. Pius X subsequently offered to give Priebke the requiem Mass his lawyer wanted — the day before the 70th anniversary of the Nazi roundup of 1,000 Roman Jews sent to die in Auschwitz — but an outraged mob blocked the casket from ever entering the SSPX chapel in the Albano Laziale suburb, and local authorities canceled the funeral.

Gary Krupp, a Jewish leader who runs the Pave the Way Foundation, said Pope Francis’ treatment of the unrepentant Priebke was consistent with the actions taken by Pius XII against unrepentant Nazis.

“No priest was allowed to officiate at their funerals,” he said.

Pius XII’s Legacy Krupp said he believed Pope Francis will also be the pope to draw Jews and Catholics even closer together by vindicating the legacy of Pope Pius XII. The subject of Pius XII is sensitive for many Jews. Rabbi Skorka told the Register that both his mother’s and father’s families lost many family members during the Holocaust, and he himself questions why Pius XII did not publically denounce Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. However, he said that revealing the Vatican Secret Archives will be key.

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“From my first perception — take into account that I lost the main part of my mother’s family and my father’s family during the Shoah — my first feeling is: How can it be that [Pius XII] did not shout out his criticisms of the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews?” Rabbi Skorka said.

“But let us have the documents do the talking.”

Krupp said he himself grew up hating Pius XII intensely, until his own research convinced him 180 degrees in the opposite direction. His own organization has documented more than 76,000 pages pointing to Pius XII as the man most responsible for “saving 80% of the Jews in Italy.”

Krupp said opening the Secret Archives will be decisive and that Pope Francis — whom he described as “very pro-Pius XII” — is eager to see them opened at last. Krupp said the cataloging of the Secret Archives is in the final stages.

“Pius XII is going to wind up being the greatest hero of World War II,” Krupp predicted. “We’re going to find that the Jewish world was very lucky to have this man as pope during World War II.” Embracing in Israel, Forging the Future Pope Francis intends to visit the Holy Land next spring, and with him will be his longtime

friend Rabbi Skorka. The two leaders plan to embrace each other in Jerusalem at the Wailing Wall and will go together to Bethlehem, in the Palestinian territories, to visit Jesus’ birthplace.

But the gesture could also send a very powerful message for dialogue and peace for not only Israel and Palestine, but for the whole Middle East, which has been the epicenter of so much violence and conflict.

“That will have a very positive effect on the region,” said Betty Ehrenberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, North America.

Ehrenberg said she is looking forward to the deepening of cooperation between Catholics and Jews that Pope Francis has been encouraging by word and example. She said the recent summit between Jewish and Catholic leaders in Madrid, and the joint declaration they signed, reflected that.

“We need to speak up together” in addressing common challenges, including religious freedom, she said. “Both of us are also seeing a falloff in the commitment of youth in religious traditions and religious observation.”

Ehrenberg said, “I think Pope Francis will provide leadership here and have a powerful influence, because of his openness and courageousness in addressing these realities.”

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Auschwitz metal stamps used by Nazis for tattooing discovered in Poland Auschwitz metal stamps with embedded needles, which were used by Nazis to tattoo inmates, have been discovered in Poland in ‘one of the most important finds in years’

Discovered metal stamps, with a-few-millimetre-long needles, used for tattooing KL Auschwitz prisoners Photo: EPA

By Matthew Day, Warsaw http://www.telegraph.co.uk

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etal stamps with embedded needles that the SS once used to tattoo inmates at the notorious Nazi death camp at Auschwitz have been discovered in Poland.

The find has been hailed by the Auschwitz museum, which now stands on the site of the camp, as one “of the most significant in years” as it was thought no original tattooing equipment survived the war.

SS soldiers used the small stamps, consisting of a two, two threes and a six or a nine, to tattoo inmates as they were processed

on their arrival at the camp in Germanoccupied Poland.

Some prisoners got the tattoo on the chest but most were tattooed on their arms, and the numbers became a hallmark of Auschwitz’s inhumanity.

“This is one of the most important finds in years,” said Piotr Cywinski,

director of the Auschwitz museum. “We never believed that we would get the original tools for tattooing prisoners after such a long time.

“The sight of a tattoo is getting rarer every day as former prisoners pass away, but these stamps still speak of the dramatic history that took place here even after all these decades,” he added.

“They will become a valuable exhibit in forthcoming exhibitions.”

The museum has declined to say who discovered the stamps and where they were found - other than to confirm they were unearthed in Poland and that their finder wishes to remain anonymous.

Auschwitz was the only Nazi camp that tattooed its prisoners. At first identification numbers were sewn onto inmates’ clothing but the practice was dropped because the clothes often disintegrated and camp guards found it difficult to identify the dead who had been stripped before death.

The metal stamps were slid into a wooden block to form a number, which was pushed into flesh of the prisoner. Ink was then rubbed into the wound to create a tattoo.

Ravensbruck’s Famous Survivor Memoir

By Jon Kalish http://forward.com

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ack in the 1980s, a number of Holocaust scholars and “people who should know better” told historian Rochelle Saidel that Ravensbrück, a women’s concentration camp located about 60 miles north of Berlin, was used for political prisoners and that “there wasn’t a Jewish story there.” Saidel proved them wrong by writing what many consider to be the definitive book on the estimated 20,000 Jewish prisoners that passed through the camp.

Among them was one prisoner, the camp’s most famous survivor, whose story struck a particular chord with Saidel: Gemma La Guardia Gluck, sister of legendary New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Now, with Saidel’s help, Gluck’s memoir — first published in 1961 — is being re-released by Syracuse University Press under the title “Fiorello’s Sister: Gemma La Guardia Gluck’s Story.”

Born in New York to an Italian Jewish mother and a “lapsed Catholic” father, Gluck and her famous brother

grew up in the United States. During their childhood, though, they joined their parents on trips back to Trieste, Italy, where their mother’s family had deep Jewish roots. In 1900, with the children grown into young adults, the family moved back to Italy. Fiorello returned to New York to attend law school, after which he ran for a number of elected offices. Gemma stayed in Europe with her mother and taught English in Trieste, where she ended up marrying one of her students and, eventually, getting caught in the maw of World War II. Gluck was 64 when she was released from Ravensbrück in the spring of 1945.

Saidel is 65.

“I think that is part of why I feel a great affinity for her now,” said Saidel in an interview with the Forward. “At my age, I can’t stand for a very long time in a museum and look at a painting without my leg hurting. And then you read that they’re standing there for five hours in an appel,” she said, referring to the concentration camp roll call.

During her eight months in Ravensbrück, Gluck endured a diet of turnips cooked in potato peelings. She

promised herself that if she survived, she would tell the world about the camp.

So Gluck resolved to observe life in Ravensbrück as best she could. She remembered the stench of the crematory, and prisoners who looked like “walking skeletons.” She remembered the babies who suffocated because they were crammed five or six to a crib, and she remembered the Polish woman housed on the “Rabbit Block” who had limbs amputated by Nazi doctors in “experiments.”

Although the Nazis considered Gluck to be Jewish, she did not think of herself as a Jew — despite the fact that her maternal grandmother was a member of the Luzzattos, a prominent Italian Jewish family active in the Italian unification effort and the rabbinical college in Padua.

In her memoir, Gluck mentions a woman in Ravensbrück who begged to take off the yellow patch labeling her as a Jew, arguing that she may have been married to a Jew but she herself was not Jewish. Gluck was angered by the inmate’s plea, declaring in her memoir, “I have been married for thirty-six years to such a good Jewish husband, I am proud to wear their sign.”

In April 1945, Gluck was reunited with her daughter and grandson, who were also imprisoned at Ravensbrück.

There, she had lost 44 pounds in less than a year. Her toddler grandson looked so weak, she thought, “Where am I going to bury this baby?”

The three were released in Berlin, just prior to its liberation by the Russians. Gluck writes in her memoir that the Soviets were “violating girls and women of all ages.” A year later, she read a newspaper article that revealed the fate of her husband, Herman, a Hungarian Jew who had perished in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Despite the fact that she was the sister of a powerful American politician, it would be another year before Gluck, her daughter and grandson made it to New York. They arrived in May 1947, four months before her beloved Fiorello died of cancer. She spent the rest of her life in a low-income public housing project in Queens, built by the LaGuardia Administration. Gluck died in 1962, about a year after her memoir was first published.

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14

Holocaust restitution body could close

Holocaust survivor stepping down from role organizing Tulsa’s annual Yom Hashoah

By SAM SOKOL Jerusalem Post

Senior Citizens Minister Orbach “failed to earmark further budget for Project HEART, which will therefore be forced to fold,” source says.

P

roject HEART, a government initiative cataloging Jewish assets stolen during the Holocaust, may have to shut down operations in May due to the failure to earmark funds for its continued operations, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

Senior Citizens Minister Uri Orbach “failed to earmark further budget for Project HEART, which will therefore be forced to fold in May,” a source familiar with the matter told the Post.

HEART, which stands for Holocaust Era Asset Restitution Taskforce, began operations following a government decision to involve itself in the issue of restitution.

HEART does not involve itself with restitution negotiations with Austria and Germany – the domain of the Conference of Material Claims Against Germany, a New York-based organization that has been providing restitution and support to Holocaust survivors and their heirs since the early 1950s. Rather, HEART compiles claims relating to assets stolen, confiscated or looted throughout the rest of Europe.

Last August, Project HEART executive director Bobby Brown told the Post that the body was facing a budget shortfall and would have to curtail some of its activities should it fail to receive further funds.

There was only a small amount of cash left from HEART’s original 2009 allocation and he had been forced to operate on what he calls a “shoestring budget” for a number of months, he said.

“We originally were given money by a decision of the [Israeli] government.

That money, a little of it, stills exists, and that is what we are living on right now,” he added.

The new budget, which according to Brown was supposed to have come from the Senior Citizens Ministry by way of the Jewish Agency, should have arrived “months ago,” he said at the time.

He adding that he believed that the government was “working on it.”

However, according to the Post’s source, the money has not been allocated and HEART faces closure as a result.

Asked in August about HEART’s budget woes, Ayal Eliezer, assistant to the directorgeneral of the Senior Citizens Ministry, told the Post that it could take up to two weeks to provide an answer. Eliezer failed to send the Post a reply after the time was up.

The Post has learned that the government is contemplating internalizing HEART’s activities within the Senior Citizens Ministry, but that no final decision has been made.

The ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Eva Unterman (left) stands with Suzie Bogle on Wednesday at the Holocaust exhibit at the Sherwin Miller Jewish Museum in Tulsa. Unterman, a Holocaust survivor, is stepping down as the head of the annual Yom Hashoah Holocaust commemoration, and Bogle is taking her place. MICHAEL WYKE/Tulsa World

By BILL SHERMAN Tulsa World

F

or many years, Eva Unterman was silent about the horrors she endured in Nazi concentration camps in World War II, where millions of her fellow Jews were exterminated.

Then, in 1978, a public school teacher asked if she would tell her story to his students.

By the 1990s, she was deeply involved in Holocaust education, and since 1998, she has directed Tulsa’s annual interfaith Yom Hashoah Holocaust commemoration, which last year drew more than 1,000 people to B’nai Emunah synagogue.

This year’s Yom Hashoah, at Temple Israel, will be her last as director.

Now in her 80s, Unterman is turning the project over to Suzie Bogle, the new director of Holocaust education for the Jewish Federation of Tulsa. Unterman will remain chairwoman of the Council for Holocaust Education but will not organize the annual event.

Unterman said her work with Yom Hashoah has been “most gratifying.”

She was a child during the Holocaust, and she said she has always felt it was her obligation to remember the children who died. The theme of Tulsa’s first Yom Hashoah was, in fact, “Children in Hiding,” and the speaker was Gerda Seifer, a woman who survived the war as a child by hiding with a farm family.

Unterman said she is excited that Bogle has stepped up.

“I feel like this was meant to be. We both feel that way,” she said.

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Over the years, the annual observance has covered a variety of themes.

This year’s theme will be the 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust: gays and lesbians, Gypsies, disabled children, “asocials” (alcoholics, the homeless, criminals), people of African or Asian descent, and ideologically dangerous people.

Bogle, who is not Jewish, developed a keen interest in World War II and the Holocaust while growing up in England, where they were regular topics of conversation around the dinner table.

She and her grandmother sometimes uncovered shrapnel from Nazi bombs while digging in the flower beds.

Bogle was born in Bartlesville and moved to England with her family when she was 3. Her father worked with the Phillips Petroleum London office.

When she was 21, she met her husband on a visit back to Oklahoma. They were married a year later and lived briefly in Norman while he finished his education.

They then lived in Houston before moving to Tulsa in 1997.

She was the education coordinator for Tulsa Ballet, finished her master’s degree on the English Reformation in 2011 at the University of Oklahoma, and then taught at Tulsa Community College and the Tulsa School for the Arts and Sciences before accepting the position with the Jewish Federation in December.

“I found that my students didn’t know about the Holocaust, and that was a little jarring to me,” said Bogle, who can switch

effortlessly between British and American accents.

“I decided to focus more time on the causes of the Holocaust and the events surrounding World War II,” she said.

She redesigned the curriculum and brought her students to the Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art to see the Holocaust exhibit and to meet with Unterman.

Last summer she visited concentration camps in Poland and Germany.

When she returned she spent days talking to Unterman about it.

She began to feel a need to “speak for the people who can’t tell anyone what happened, either because they are not here to do so or because it is too painful to talk about,” she said.

“I think it’s important for all students to understand what happened. It was unprecedented in the history of the world.

The circumstances could easily occur again – and have.

“If we are not aware of our past, we’re likely to repeat it. It’s important to know the consequences of how we treat others, and what we do and don’t do when we see injustice,” she said.

She said that though Holocaust education is not mandated in Oklahoma, and many students know little about it, she finds that young people are highly interested in it.

And she’s excited about her new job.

“It’s fascinating. And I really enjoy working so closely with Eva. She’s probably the most positive individual I’ve ever met.

She inspires me, and we’re good friends.

“I believe what I do every day is important.”

together May 2014

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New find may bring Nazi-tainted art trove to $2b Additional 180 paintings discovered in Salzburg and at house near Austrian salt mines of the ‘Monuments Men’

By Michael Leidig www.timesofisrael.com

SALZBURG, Austria — The saga of the trove of artworks hoarded away under the Nazis by the son of art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt was given a new twist with the discovery of a third house in a town in the Austrian state of Styria that may well contain further pieces of art.

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he location of the third house in Bad Aussee next to the salt mines where the vast majority of the art looted by the Nazis had been stored had been unknown until now, because it had been in the hands of Hildrebrand’s cousin Wolfgang, who had also gathered art for the Nazis. On the same day that its location was revealed, Austrian officials also admitted that they had apparently “missed” another 180 paintings from a previously discovered residence that had “suddenly” been discovered.

Austrian officials indicated these new works were found in the house in Salzburg of Hildebrand’s son Cornelius Gurlitt, who claimed he had inherited the collection from his father, who took orders from Hitler to buy and sell so-called “degenerate art” to fund Nazi activities during World War II. The Salzburg house had already been searched, but officials claimed that the new artworks were in a part of the house that was “previously not accessible” — despite the fact that the tiny two bedroom house barely covers 100 square meters of living space.

They have also hinted that there may be further artworks still to be revealed.

Cornelius Gurlitt aroused suspicion in 2010 when German customs officials stopped him on a train from Switzerland carrying 9,000 Euro in cash, which although it was below the 10,000 Euro limit which would need to be declared, it had still been high enough to have been reported to tax inspectors.

But they only acted on it after he sold Max Beckmann’s “The Lion Tamer,” which was known to have had a questionable provenance.

When authorities raided his Munich apartment in February 2012 on suspicion of tax evasion, they found the vast art collection valued by some at $1.4 billion, but chose to keep it secret while they investigated its origins, a fact that caused international outrage when it was leaked in a report in German magazine Focus.

As part of the investigation they discovered Gurlitt owned a second

property in Salzburg, western Austria, and Austrian authorities searched it and sixty art works were reclaimed. Yet they apparently missed another 180 works of art that have now been revealed.

So far the fact that Hildebrand had a cousin, Wolfgang, who was also active on behalf of Hitler in acquiring artworks, has attracted little attention. The question never arose why a man with Jewish ancestry (Hildebrand and Wolfgang had one Jewish grandparent) would have chosen to buy a property in Bad Aussee, the place that Hitler had chosen to stage his last stand, and which was filled with Nazi loyalists.

It is also unknown what access Wolfgang had to the nearby salt mines, huge tunnels that had been in place since Roman Times that featured so spectacularly in the George Clooney film “Monuments Men,” and where the Nazis had stored the largest part of their looted art collection because of the dry air and the fact it was safe from bombs under thousands of tons of solid rock.

The first time it was even raised was when a journalist from the Vienna-based TV station Puls 4 discovered there was a third house that had been used as a storage depot for the Gurlitt family art, although officially at least this property has still not been searched.

But the house, according to insiders in Bad Aussee spoken to for this report, was still stuffed with art as recently as 2012 when the last occupant, Wolfgang’s sister, had died.

The meeting coincided with the news that the further 180 works had been discovered on the same day as Babits was talking to Dr Harting. Reuters reported that the artwork found in Gurlitt’s second home in Salzburg had risen to 238, “many more than previously thought.” It included a Claude Monet oil painting from 1903 of London’s Tower Bridge, a bronze sculpture by Auguste Renoir and drawings

by Gauguin, Cezanne and Picasso.

The investigators have already indicated that the paintings may have been owned by Gurlitt’s grandfather Louis, and thus — unlike other works in Gurlitt’s collection — are not suspected of including art looted by the Nazis, or their “Jewish” agents Wolfgang and Hildebrand. If so it would mean the artworks could remain with the Gurlitt family.

According to paperwork which s u r v i v e d t h e w a r, Wo l f g a n g a n d Hildebrand had been actively working for the Nazis since the early 1930s, before claiming when the Allies arrived that their collections were destroyed and that they, too, were victims.

A reporter from Puls 4, Caroline Babits, outside the Styria, Austria house. (Europics/Puls 4) When the stations investigative reporter, Caroline Babits, went to interview Cornelius Gurlitt’s lawyer, Dr. Hannes Harting, on February 28, 2014, he appeared to know nothing about the third property. His only reaction was to ban her from using the interview, and to then demand that the show pixelate the images of the Bad Aussee house and banned them from revealing the address.

Allied investigators apparently did not ask too closely how the two with Jewish ancestry managed to survive the frequent denunciations from jealous rivals under the Nazis. They did not have information then that the cousins’ connection with the Nazis dated back to 1937, when the German Ministry for Education and Science sent out a pamphlet to coincide with the “Degenerate Art”

show, that declared, “Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, and the other isms are the poisonous flower of a Jewish parasitical plant, grown on German soil.”

Although he viewed the art as degenerate, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, also saw it as an opportunity “to make some money from this garbage” by selling modern art to overseas buyers.

And for that he needed agents.

A shuttered window in Wolfgang Gurlitt’s home. (Europics/Puls 4) So a year later when he formed the Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art, Hildebrand was appointed to the four-person commission because of his expertise, his connections to the Jewish community, and his art-world contacts outside Germany.

It was the commission’s job to sell the art abroad, and for that his art dealer cousin Wolfgang, owner of the Bad Aussee home, was the perfect partner.

The pair were permitted to acquire degenerate work themselves, as long as they paid for them in hard foreign currency, an opportunity they took full advantage of, acquiring forbidden art at bargain prices from Jews fleeing the country or needing money to pay the devastating capital-flight tax and, later, the Jewish wealth levy.

Hildebrand was later to tell the Monuments Men, who pronounced him and his family as victims of the Nazis, that they had fired him from two museums. They called him a “mongrel” because of his Jewish grandmother. He was doing what he could to save these wonderful and important maligned pictures, which would otherwise have been burned by the SS. He assured them he never bought a painting that was not offered voluntarily.

In fact he had lied about his collection being destroyed in Dresden, and in reality, much of it had actually been hidden elsewhere.

Hildebrand was reinvented as a victim of the Nazis and was elected the director of the Kunstverein, Dusseldorf’s venerable art institution, and in 1956, he died unexpectedly in a car crash.

Cornelius his son has meanwhile been declared unfit to manage his affairs because of his age and infirmity, and he is currently being cared for in a private clinic.

visit our website at www.amgathering.org

together May 2014

16

Tens of thousands participate in Budapest Holocaust memorial march

Peres: Israel a living monument to the six million

BUDAPEST, Hungary (JTA) — Tens of thousands of Jews and Jewish supporters participated in the 12th March of the Living Hungary in Budapest.

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unday’s event, considered the largest civil anti-fascist event in Hungary, was held on the 70th anniversary of the mass deportation of Jews from Hungary by the Nazis.

Holding posters saying “Never again” and “History cannot be re-written!,” the participants marched from the Danube River to the Eastern Railway Station in Budapest to commemorate the loss of Hungarian Jewry in 1944, when twothirds of Hungarian Jewry — nearly 600,000 people — were deported and killed.

Dozens of Hungarian Holocaust survivors were the guests of honor at the march.

“We go to Auschwitz, but this time we will return,” Ilan Mor, Israel’s ambassador to Hungary, said in an emotional speech.

Mor will be part of the Hungarian delegation in Monday’s Auschwitz commemoration, where Hungarian President Janos Ader will deliver a speech at the Auschwitz memorial site of Hungarian Holocaust victims.

The International March of the Living Conference was part of weekend memorial events in Budapest, including a panel discussion on the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe with the participation of members of parliaments from Poland, Greece, Spain and Canada.

Irwin Cotler, the former Canadian justice minister and lawmaker, as well as a human rights activist, chaired the panel.

“Jews died in Auschwitz, but anti-Semitism did not die, and we are experiencing anti-Semitism yet again,” he told JTA. “Now the time to mobilize all of humanity against this anti-Semitic phenomenon that again has come.”

Cotler visited the Budapest site of the daily protest against a monument being constructed to honor the country’s victims of World War II. Jewish and non-Jewish groups, mainly liberal intellectuals, have protested that it obfuscates Hungary’s Holocaust-era role.

“I hope that the Hungarian government will cease and desist from putting up this memorial as it now stands because in the end of the day, it will not serve neither the interest of remembrance nor the truth, or not even the interest of the Hungarian government, which I don’t believe want to be seen as mischaracterizing the Holocaust,” he said.

Israel’s President Shimon Peres and Austrian President Heinz Fischer (R) pay respect to victims of the Holocaust, Vienna, Austria on March 30, 2014. (photo credit: Mark Neyman/GPO/Flash90)

By Times of Israel staff

In Austria, president says Jewish state is a victory over the crimes committed

by Nazis during Holocaust

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he State of Israel is a living memorial to the lives of six million Jewish men, women and children who were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, President Shimon Peres said during a ceremony in the Austrian capital.

“The Judenplatz was at the heart of a vibrant, thriving Jewish community, [but] from the 176,000 Jews of Vienna, only 5000 remained after the dark chapter of the Holocaust,” Peres said.

“The State of Israel is our victory. A fortress of triumph against the dark hand of the Nazis. A home to the memory of our six million brothers and sisters. A promise

to the survivors of the horrors. A hope for the future of the Jewish People.”

The president recited Kaddish, the traditional Jewish memorial prayer, honoring the memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

Austrian President Heinz Fischer, who also attended the ceremony, said the residents of his country bore full responsibility for the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, adding that Austria’s mission today was to combat anti-Semitism in all of its forms.

“We have to acknowledge that the way this country dealt with the time of National Socialism even after the end of the war was over a long period largely dominated by an uneasy silence, a guilty conscience and attempted repression,” Fischer said.

“It is only in the last 25 years that Austria – as a result of a difficult process of awareness-raising – has eventually undergone a fundamental and important change in its historic awareness, from forgetting to

remembering… By laying wreaths here at this memorial today in a ceremony with the President of Israel, we jointly commemorate the men and women who were killed during the Holocaust and honor the survivors of this tragedy of mankind.”

Earlier Sunday Peres met with Lamerto Zanier, secretary-general of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, to discuss the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

“We are in the midst of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and the sides are working around the clock in an effort to reach a breakthrough in the talks, but the process is ongoing,” Peres said.

“It is difficult to overcome the difficulties and I hope that in the coming days there will be positive developments in the negotiations. Your organization has a central role in preserving stability in the Middle East and bringing economic prosperity to all the people of the region.”

Child Survivors Hold Conference in Berlin Summer 2014 The World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants will hold its 26th Annual Conference in Berlin, Germany, Aug 24th-Aug 27, 2014.

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he conference program includes: Workshops for survivors, Second Generation/Third Generation, non-survivor spouses/partners, as well as seminars, speakers, plenary sessions.

For all conference information, updates, registration forms and

visit our website at www.amgathering.org

hotel information please visit: WFJCSHD at www.holocaustchild. org or the conference website www. wfbc2014.com.

The conference registration fee is EU 275 per person if registered by July 15th, or EU 325 by August 1st.

The above websites feature a direct link to the Hilton hotel for hotel registration. The hotel is extending the special conference rate for 3 days prior to and three days after the conference.

We have had increasing numbers of Second and Third Generation attendees, and we hope to see many more at this conference.

Stefanie Seltzer President World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants

together May 2014

Searches FROM ALL GENERATIONS, Inc. SERENA WOOLRICH, PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER PLEASE SEND RELEVANT RESPONSES TO: allgenerations@aol.com

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rom Vera Hecht, a Survivor in Brooklyn, New York.

I am looking for the Radi(y) family; Jeno, Clara and the two girls, Susanna and Georginna (see photo below).

After the war they emigrated from Budapest to Sydney, Australia.

Susanna, who was born in 1937, married George Enyi in 1958; Georginna was born 1939.

I would appreciate any help.

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rom Stefanie Seltzer, a Survivor in Rancho Mirage, California: I am looking for my friend, Monica, from Hungary. We were together in a DP camp in Vienna together.

She was there with her mother, and I was also there with my mother.

It was a large DP camp that had a school and a park nearby, where Monica and I used to walk.

Monica and her mother eventually left for Australia.

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rom Michele Blaska, a 2g in Woodbury, New York: I was going through some old papers of my fathers.

I’m not sure if you ever received any inquiries about anyone living in the IRO Camp 231 in Steyr, Austria.

It turns out after the war ended, my father, Velvel Szymanowicz, lived there from 1946-47.

Thanks so much!

Again, Happy Birthday! Have a wonderful day! Hope to meet you one of these days!

Regards.

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rom Erwin Deutsch, a Survivor in Tel Aviv, Israel: I am looking, for Survivors from Neunkirchen Lager in Austria near Wiener Neustadt; there were 3 lagers for Hungarian Jews.

We were liberated by the Red Army in April 1944.

Thank you.

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rom Esia Friedman, a Survivor in West Hartford, Connecticut: Dear Serena, After liberation my family and I lived in Vienna in a DP camp called Bindermichl.

I lost contact with some very old friends from there. I believe their last name may have been Meisel. I tried to find them many years ago.

The father worked for the UNNRA. They had several children.

One of the daughters married a young man from Vilna, He was a policeman in Bindermichl.

In the 1950’s I visited the mother in Sheepshead Bay (Brooklyn), New York.

Perhaps you can find them?

Love, Esia

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rom Herbert Friedman, a Survivor in Baltimore, Maryland: Hi Serena, Would you please list this in your next SEARCH bulletin as follows: Does anyone remember the Friedman Family who lived in Vienna at 61 Klosterneuburger strasse Wien XX. They had three children; Bernhard, Herbert and Lilly. Herbert attended the Talmud Torah School at Malzgasse Wien II? And searching for relatives of Martin Loeble erstwhile from Burgenland, Austria.

He was in England via the Kindertransport and last lived in Glasgow, England. He may have been killed at age 16 or so in an auto accident in England.

I appreciate your service.

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rom Leah Hammer, in Port Townsend, Washington: Hi Serena, I just found another photo - I know that people are always looking for photos of people they knew or family.

This photo states on the back, “The Boys from Wien;” they are identified as the following: Ernst Appenzeller Martin Axelrad Fritz David (Tuff’l) Mundi Horowitz Heinzi Low Felix Scherzer(Flaxi) Otto Weiner Walter Weitzman Georgi Wotzozele Please let me know if these are wanted or not.

Thanks and regards.

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rom Ann Reisner Jacobson, a Survivor in Naples, Florida (and Kansas City, MO): I emigrated from Vienna, Austria in April 1939 to the United States with my parents.

I would like to find three friends with whom I went to a private gymnasium in the Novara Gasse from 1935 to 1938.

I would like to contact Marianne Rosenthal, Putti Popper and Erika Stoltz.

I know Marianne went to Israel to a foster family, and Erika went to England with her mother, but I do not know what happened to Putti.

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rom Barbara Kintaert, a documentarian, in Vienna, Austria: Oswald Adler (born May 27, 1920 in Vienna, Austria) was the cousin of my father-in-law.

He arrived in Flossenbuerg on February 25, 1945 after a Death March from another

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concentration camp. He was very ill and sick by then. He died on March 4th, just one week after his arrival and about 6 weeks before liberation.

Do you think that anyone who was in Flossenbuerg may remember Oswald Adler?

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rom Elias Kupfermann, a 2g in Slough Berkshire, UK: My grandparents were Elias and Menia Kupfermann, who lived in Vienna between 1926 and 1941.

I just wondered if anyone had known my family in Vienna?

A real shot in the dark but you never know!

Best wishes.

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rom Ellen Minkwitz, a 2g in Dover, Delaware: Would like to hear from anyone who remembers my mother and father, Ettel and Max Bomze. My father, either from Vienna, Dachau, Buchenwald, or Camp Kitchener (in Kent, England), and my mother, nee’ Ettel Wechsler, born in Poland, lived in Palestine in late 1920’s, early 1930’s and finally in London (Whitechapel) 1939, early 1940.

Searching for internees or, most likely at this time, children of Camp Kitchener internees who were there during 1939, early 1940, who might have known or have information on my father. Also, I can e-mail a photo of the inside of the barracks if anyone wants. Does anyone have data or references regarding my father’s incarceration in Dachau and Buchenwald 1938-1939. (All I have is documentation from the International Tracing Service with prisoner numbers.)

Also, would like to know what happened to my grandmother, Ettel Bomze, nee Vogelbaum, I believe, of Vienna, Austria. My family has no idea what happened to her, other then she did not survive WW II. And does anyone know of my uncle Moses (Moishe) Steinwolf, of Vienna; fled to Belgium alone around 1939. He most likely died after the Nazi invasion of Belgium,nothing in Yad Vashem’s database.

Thank you.

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rom Harry (Herschel) Schneider, a Survivor in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: The picture below was taken in Ebensberg, Austria DP Camp 1947-1949.

I would like to know if anyone can identify any of the school children in this picture.

I am the boy on the extreme left.

From Kurt Singer, a Survivor in Miami, Florida: I am searching for any Survivors of the Vienna Weisenhaus, Probusgasse 2 Vienna.

My mother, Melanie Singer, was housemother there, and I was an inmate til 1939 when I was shipped to England with the Kindertransport.

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rom Dana (Danusia) Szeflan-Bell, a Survivor in Montreal, Canada: I would like to do a search of children that were in our D.P. camp in Austria, near Vienna called Styer.

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rom Kurt Singer, a Survivor in Miami, Florida:

I am searching for any Survivors of the Vienna Weisenhaus, Probusgasse 2 Vienna.

My mother, Melanie Singer, was housemother there, and I was an inmate til 1939 when I was shipped to England with the Kindertransport.

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rom Judy Tayler, a 2g in Vancouver, Canada: I am trying to find information about a Hessner (Heffner) family; parents, Josef and Getl and children, Jakob, Daniel and Sarah. Josef Hessner may have been born July 13, 1930 in Vienna, Austria.

This family may have lived on Liebenstrasse, in Vienna. This family may have been sent to Dachau. I apologize as I am not totally sure of the correct spelling of the names.

I would appreciate receiving any information that you may have pertaining to this family or any living relatives.

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rom Rachel Bodner, a Survivor in Owings Mill, Maryland: Dear Serena, To all those whose mothers (or themselves) who wrote that they were in convents, perhaps some of them were in the convent In Belgium where I was hidden from 1942- 1944. The convent was, Soeurs de Charite in Louvain (Louvain is French for Lleuven (country is bi-lingua)). I remember only the 6 oldest in 1942;,Irene Russak, 15; Therese Granek 15; Rachel Rozenfeld 15(myself); Dora Russak, 14; Tony Granek, 14, and Helene ( last name unknown) 14, with her sister (name unknown).

Also, there was Olga Russak, 8 (sister of the other two Russaks); one girl whose first name I’ve forgotten but her last name was Atlas, about 11; Hilda Granek, 8; and my sister, Isabelle Rozenfeld, then 5.

There were more but I cannot remember them; we were 17 in all, and most survived except one. We had to leave the convent in May 1944 as we were bombed daily (it was before VE day). If anyone recognize any these names, please contact me - I hope I can help.

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rom Sylvain Brachfeld, a Survivor in Herzlia, Israel: I would like to ask if someone knows Irene Sarphati (maiden name), a former hidden child, who came from Antwerp, Belgium, to Canada (probably Montreal) around 1953.

We were living in the same house at the Plantin en Moretuslei 22. After so many years I would like to get in contact with her.

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rom Rose Anuszewicz Haneman, a Child Survivor, in Sydney, Australia: I was born in Belgium in 1933. During the war I was hidden in a convent called. “Les Seours de Saint Joseph,’ in a village called L’hermite’ with my little sister, Suzanne.

We were hidden for over 2 years (1942 till late 1944), given false names, baptized, etc.

Our names originally were Rose and Suzanne Anuszewicz. My cousin, Sabine Lewenkron, whom I am trying to find, was also in the convent with us. Our names had been changed and after the war we lost track of our cousin.

visit our website at www.amgathering.org

together May 2014

18

Saul Kagan, Claims Conference founder and chief, dies at 91

Saul Kagan, the founder and a longtime chief of the Claims Conference, died Nov. 9, 2013 at the age of 91. http://www.jta.org

NEW YORK (JTA) — Saul Kagan, the founder and a longtime chief of the Claims Conference, died at age 91.

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agan helped found the organization in 1951 to be the main vehicle for negotiating with Germany over restitution for Holocaust survivors.

In a statement announcing his death, the Claims Conference credited Kagan with securing tens of billions in restitution payments during his 47 years at the helm of the organization.

Saul Kagan was one of the unsung heroes of the struggle for reparations for restitution to the Jewish people after the Holocaust, “ said Sam E. Bloch, president of the American Gathering.

“He was one of the greatest friends and supporters the survivor community ever had.”

Kagan was himself a survivor of sorts. A native of Vilna, Lithuania, he fled the country in 1940 on a journey that took him to Vladivostok and Japan before reaching Hawaii. He eventually made his way to New York. His father survived the war in the Soviet Union, but his mother, brother and grandparents were killed by the Nazis.

Kagan found himself back in Europe before the war’s end as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force. After the war Kagan, who spoke six languages, coordinated property restitution in Germany for the U.S. Army.

According to the Claims Conference, he was involved in the creation of U.S. Government military order No. 59, which allowed Holocaust survivors and victims’ families to file claims for property confiscated by the Nazis.

In 1952, Kagan played a key role in the landmark Luxembourg Agreements, when representatives of Israel, Germany and the newly created Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany sat down to hammer out a reparations agreement for the crimes of Nazi Germany.

The mood at the negotiating table was solemn, recalled Kagan — by then the executive director of the Claims Conference — in a video shown at a July 2012 event in Washington marking the 60th anniversary of the Claims Conference.

“There were no handshakes, there was no banter or anything else,” Kagan said in halting tones.

“We somehow had the feeling that we were not alone in this room. Somehow we felt that the spirits of those who couldn’t be there were there with us.”

The document signed that year established payments from West Germany to the Claims Conference and Israel.

“For the first time in the history of the Jewish people, oppressed and plundered for hundreds of years … the oppressor and plunderer has had to hand back some of the spoil and pay collective compensation for part of the material losses,” Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion wrote in a 1952 letter to the Claims Conference’s first president, Nahum Goldmann.

The early years of restitution were quite contentious among survivors and the Jewish community. The Knesset saw violent confrontations over whether and how Israel should accept money from Germany, and Kagan was threatened by survivors and had to hire a bodyguard.

Kagan was instrumental in setting up some of the most significant compensation programs at the Claims Conference.

In 1980, Germany agreed to the establishment of the Hardship Fund, which has issued one-time payments of 2,556 euros (or their equivalent) to 390,000 victims of Nazism.

Following the reunification of Germany, Kagan helped negotiate the creation of the Article 2 pension program to pay Nazi victims who had not received compensation from the agreements

dating back to the 1950s. He also helped extend the Claims Conference’s purview to include restitution from Austria.

Through the Claims Conference, Kagan helped establish the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem and the program to honor righteous gentiles — non-Jews who helped save Jews during the Holocaust.

Kagan stepped down from the helm of the Claims Conference in 1999 and was succeeded

by Gideon Taylor.

Kagan’s name was back in the news this year when it emerged that he was among those CC’d on correspondence in 2001 about allegations of fraud at the Claims Conference.

Investigations that year by Claims Conference leaders failed to detect a massive fraud scheme was underway that would rack up more than $57 million in fraudulent payments by the time it was discovered and stopped in 2009. The fraud dated back to 1993.

Even after he handed over the reins of the Claims Conference to Taylor, Kagan still did work on behalf of the organization. He also was a board member of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland, the World Jewish Restitution Organization and Yeshiva University’s Wurzweiler School of Social Work.

Kagan is survived by his wife, Eleanor; a daughter, Julia; and stepchildren Jonathan and Emily Lobatto.

Remembering Through Poetry and Film

By Janet R. Kirchheimer

I

sraeli novelist and survivor Aharon Appelfeld stated, “After the death of the last witnesses, the remembrance of the Holocaust must not be entrusted to historians alone. Now comes the hour of artistic creation.” Taking this statement literally, I’m producing BE•HOLD, a cinematic film that showcases poetry written by survivors, their descendants, and modern poets, both Jews and non-Jews, encountering and struggling with the Shoah and its aftereffects.

My parents were born in Germany.

At sixteen, my father was arrested on Kristallnacht and sent to Dachau. My mother was six when she was backed up against a wall at school for refusing to say “Heil Hitler,” and kids threw rocks at her. Her parents were able to get her out to a Jewish orphanage in Amsterdam, the Israelitisch Meijes Weeshuis. There were one hundred and four girls. Four survived. My mother was able to come to America with her parents and an older sister. My father’s parents, an older sister and younger brother were murdered

in Auschwitz in 1942. My parents both lost over ninety-five percent of their extended families in various camps.

Each Sunday morning in the summer when I was a kid, we’d pack up the station wagon and drive to the beach just like other American families. We’d sit at the same table in the pavilion and eat our lunch– my parents, brother, and me. Next to us was a large Italian family– parents, kids, grandparents, relatives and other visitors.

I’d watch them from our table, that big family, mine so small. As the daughter of survivors and a poet, I’ve written about the Shoah and in 2007 my book, “How to Spot One of Us” was published. Poet Cornelius Eady says “poets write to figure out the world.” Poetry is my craft and the way I can try to come up against the Shoah and try to understand the world I was born into.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti said, “Poetry: the shortest distance between two humans.”

For all of the stories I heard from my parents, I always knew much could never be spoken. What better way to bridge that chasm between what can be spoken

visit our website at www.amgathering.org

and what cannot than through poetry? Its power lies in what is on the page, what is not, what it hinted at, or stated outright. It is why I am making BE•HOLD. I believe that the languages of poetry and cinema can be brought together for profound and powerful results, and am caught up with the possibilities of expanding the limits of what is purely literary and purely visual.

The team behind BE•HOLD is Richard Kroehling, a two-time Emmy award winning director, who directed “Einstein” for the PBS American Masters Series, and Sundance Independent Spirit Award winner Lisa Rinzler as cinematographer.

BE•HOLD grapples with some of the large questions of the Shoah, such as remembrance when the survivors are gone and the persistent presence of genocide. We feel a duty to present poems in a way that will spark conversation and urge viewers to learn more about the Shoah. The wide range of works in BE•HOLD conveys a profound literary response to the Holocaust, and the film also imparts the ongoing relevance of the Shoah: that the past is not simply in the

Aharon Appelfeld past, but rather the past is a vital part of the present and future.

For the next generations, we need inventive ways to ensure that the Holocaust will not be forgotten. It is my hope that BE•HOLD will be an important legacy to those lost, to the survivors and their descendants, and an innovative way to remember for coming generations and the future.

together May 2014

19

Leo Bretholz, Holocaust survivor and activist, dies at 93

(USHMM, courtesy of Leo Bretholz) Leo Bretholz as a young man in Vienna, Austria.

By Emily Langer http://www.washingtonpost.com

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eo Bretholz, who made a daring escape from the Nazis by jumping off a moving train en route to Auschwitz and decades later led a campaign for reparations from the French railway that carried thousands of others to their deaths during the Holocaust, died March 8 at his home in Pikesville, Md. He was 93.

Born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Mr. Bretholz became a leader among activists who have called for reparations from governments and companies in Europe that aided the Nazi regime during its execution of the Final Solution.

The often-controversial issue of reparations has figured prominently in recent considerations of the planned Purple Line light-rail system to link Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland.

The Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais (SNCF), the French railway system that historians say carried 76,000 people to Nazi camps, is the majority owner

of Keolis, one of the companies invited to bid on the multibillion-dollar Purple Line project. Mr. Bretholz was scheduled to testify March 10 before the Maryland General Assembly’s House Ways and Means Committee on a bill that would prevent Keolis from winning the contract if the SNCF does not pay reparations to victims.

A longtime resident of Baltimore County, Mr. Bretholz had frequently recounted in speeches before lawmakers, schoolchildren and others his story of persecution and survival.

Leo Bretholz was born March 6, 1921, to Polish immigrants in the Austrian capital.

His father, a tailor and amateur Yiddish actor, died when Mr. Bretholz was a boy. His mother supported their surviving children by doing embroidery.

At his mother’s insistence, Mr. Bretholz fled Austria after it was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938. He recounted traveling by rail to Trier, a city in western Germany, and then swimming across the Sauer River to Luxembourg. There, he said, he was met by refugee workers who smuggled him into Belgium.

After the German invasion of that country in 1940, Mr. Bretholz was deported to France. He entered Switzerland in 1942 but was returned to France and ultimately to the Drancy transit camp northeast of Paris. From there, he and thousands of others were sent east, bound for the death camp at Auschwitz, in what is now Poland.

Years later, in testimony before the U.S. House Foreign Relations Committee, he recalled the conditions on the train.

“For the entire journey, SNCF provided what was one piece of triangle cheese, one stale piece of bread and no water,” he said. “There was hardly room to stand or sit or squat in the cattle car.

There was one bucket for us to relieve ourselves. Within that cattle car, people were sitting and standing and praying and weeping, fighting.”

In a recorded interview preserved by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Mr. Bretholz recalled his escape through a cattle car window on Nov. 6, 1942. He and a friend removed articles of clothing, soaked the clothing in human waste from the bucket and repeatedly wrung out the moisture to increase the fabric’s strength.

The two men then used the clothes to force open the bars.

“We kept twisting the wet sweaters tighter and tighter, like a tourniquet,” he told the House committee. “The human waste dripped down our arms. We kept going for hours, until finally there was just enough room for us to squeeze through. It was night.

I went first, and Manfred helped me climb out the tiny window. . . . He followed me, and we held on tight so as not to slip and fall beneath the train, and waited for it to take a curve and slow down. Then we jumped to our freedom.”

Mr. Bretholz recalled that he lay in a ravine and then moved into a village, where he received aid from a priest.

H e s a i d t h a t t h e u n d e rg r o u n d resistance provided him with false identification documents. He worked with the resistance, falsifying documents

and scouting Germans, and later assisted refugees in France after the 1944 D-Day invasion.

Of 1,000 people on his train to Auschwitz, Mr. Bretholz said, only five survived the war. Many of his relatives also perished.

He came to the United States in 1947.

His wife of 57 years, the former Florine Cohen, died in 2009. Survivors include three children, Myron Bretholz of Phoenix, Md., Denise Harris of Ellicott City, Md., and Edie Norton of Herndon, Va.; a half-sister; and four grandchildren.

Mr. Bretholz was the author of a memoir, “Leap into Darkness: Seven Years on the Run in Wartime Europe,” written with journalist Michael Olesker.

“The train to Auschwitz was owned and operated by SNCF,” he said before the House committee. “They were paid by the Nazis per head and per kilometer to transport innocent victims across France and ultimately to the death camps.”

He handed committee members a copy of an invoice.

“SNCF pursued payment on this bill after the liberation of Paris,” he said, “after the Nazis were gone.”

Mr. Bretholz often said that there was one victim he could not forget. She was an elderly woman on his cattle car.

“If you get out,” she told him, shaking her crutch, as he made his escape, “maybe you can tell the story. Who else will tell the story?”

Gisela Kohn Dollinger, refugee who rescued husband from Gestapo, dies at 111

By Julie Wiener http://www.jta.org

N

EW YORK (JTA) — Gisela Kohn Dollinger tricked death twice.

Soon after Kristallnacht, when she was 36, Dollinger persuaded the Gestapo to release her husband, rather than send him to a concentration camp, and the two of them

fled Austria for Shanghai, where she almost died of typhus.

After that, death seemed to forget all about her — until Dollinger passed away peacefully at Manhattan’s Beth Israel Hospital. She was 111 years old.

Dollinger’s passing came just weeks after Alice Herz-Sommer, a pianist and the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary

continued on p. 20

Gisela Dollinger with her great-great-great-grandnieces. (Courtesy Carole Vogel)

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together May 2014

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continued from p. 19 who was believed to be the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor, died at the comparatively young age of 110.

Known by her friends and family as “Gisa,” Dollinger was the youngest of 15 children. She was born in Baden-beWien, a Vienna suburb, on Aug. 30, 1902, according to her relatives.

Widowed in 1993 after more than 60 years of marriage, Dollinger never had children but leaves behind scores of nieces, nephews and their offspring in numerous countries, including the United States, Israel and England.

“To everyone in the family she was always Aunt Gisa or Tante Gisa,” recalled Dr. Mark Horowitz, a grand-nephew who lives in Manhattan.

Horowitz described his great-aunt as “well educated and well cultured,” a frequent theater- and opera-goer who spoke several languages.

At the age of 103, Dollinger returned to Austria for the first time since she and her husband, Bernard, had fled in December 1938.

She had been invited to speak at the rededication of the synagogue her father had helped found in the 1880s and decided to use the trip as an excuse for a family reunion.

At least 22 family members came along.

“I don’t know how many 103-year-olds go on trans-Atlantic flights, but she did,” recalled Vogel, who attended the reunion.

During the trip, the centenarian guided family members around Badenbe-Wien, pointing out where family members and other Jews lived.

“She also pointed out the homes of the Nazis and their names,” Vogel said. “She’d say, ‘I went to school with her, and she married a Nazi.’ She had a phenomenal memory up until the end.”

Shortly after Kristallnacht, when her family-owned dry-goods store was destroyed and Bernard was arrested, Dollinger went to the Gestapo in Vienna — putting herself at risk — and asked

To submit an obituary please follow these guidelines:

1. All obituaries should be submitted 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

for her husband’s release. She argued successfully that since he was not an Austrian citizen (he was Polish), he should not have been included in the roundup of men scheduled to be sent to Dachau or Buchenwald.

Some family members have speculated that her persuasion included a bribe, but Dollinger never mentioned that when recounting the story, Vogel said.

“She credited the release of her husband to the fact that someone had advised her to speak to a certain Gestapo officer who was known to be more open to reason and that she showed him a valid Polish passport belonging to Bernard,” Vogel explained, adding that “open to reason” might have meant bribes, because “with Gisa everything could be in the nuance.”

Upon his release, Bernard was told that if he did not leave Austria within two weeks he would be sent to

a concentration camp. Thanks to a lastminute cancellation, the couple managed to obtain two first-class tickets on a boat to Japanese-occupied China, one of the few places where Jews could easily obtain visas at the time.

In Shanghai, the Dollingers lived in the crowded and impoverished ghetto to which stateless refugees were restricted, and Gisela worked for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was distributing clothing and other aid there.

In December 1948, exactly 10 years after leaving Austria, the Dollingers departed China for the nascent State of Israel.

After the hardships of the Shanghai ghetto and the typhus bout, Dollinger and her husband were leery of life in a new and embattled country, even though most of Dollinger’s relatives were there, Vogel said. Since Bernard had sisters in the United States who urged them to come, the couple moved to New York in 1950.

They soon settled in a rent-controlled onebedroom apartment i n t h e E a s t Vi l l a g e , where she would live more than 60 years.

He painted houses, she worked at an envelope f a c t o r y. T h e c o u p l e frequently hosted friends for bridge games.

When they received reparations money from Germany for a relative who had been killed in the Holocaust, they put the entire sum into a scholarship fund at an Israeli university. ( Vo g e l w a s n o t s u r e which one.)

Despite their Gisela Kohn Dollinger with family members during her r e l a t i v e l y m o d e s t 2003 trip to Austria. (Courtesy Carole Vogel) circumstances,

Dollinger, whose father had sold men’s and women’s clothing in Austria, was a sharp dresser, Vogel said.

What was the secret to her extremely long life?

Vogel said Dollinger participated in an academic study on longevity among Ashkenazi Jews, and that aside from being blessed with good genes, her great-great aunt thought “maybe her purpose was to bring together the farflung relatives.”

“She served as the uniter of the family — she had nieces and nephews in Argentina, Switzerland, England, Israel and Austria,” Vogel said. “She became the place where people connected and the purveyor of information. When she was too old to get out much, her currency became the stories people told her.”

Dollinger kept up not just with her family’s news but with current events, making a point of voting in every election, Vogel said.

In his 2008 victory speech, Presidentelect Obama referenced a 106-year-old voter who had been profiled on CNN. Upon reading about it in The New York Times, Dollinger, who was the same age, apparently said, “They should’ve written about me, but I’m not a publicity hound.”

Although she died at Beth Israel on March 10, having checked in a few days before her death, Dollinger managed to remain in her home, with the help of caregivers, until the end.

In her final 10 years, relatives suggested Dollinger consider moving to an assisted living facility. Vogel said “she was absolutely against it.”

“She didn’t want to be around old people,” she said.

Liesl Loeb, 85, Holocaust Survivor Aboard the ‘S.S. St. Louis’ MICHAEL ELKIN JE STAFF

L

IESL LOEB, a Holocaust survivor whose travails with other survivors aboard the ill-fated S.S. St Louis was truly a Voyage of the Damned - the title of a 1976 movie that charted the doomed ship on its aborted way to freedom - died Aug. 25.

Loeb, whose international sojourn began in sorrow and ended with a grant

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of asylum in England, died at age 85 in Warminster.

Loeb, along with her family, settled in Philadelphia in 1941. She made it a life’s mission to speak out about her infamous voyage, which left Germany for the port of Havana, Cuba, only to be denied entry there.

It was then rerouted to the United States, but was r ejected entry rights there, too.

Liesl Loeb The ship returned to Europe, with many of the passengers eventually taken

continued on p. 22

together May 2014 Alice HerzSommer, oldest Holocaust survivor and subject of celebrated documentary, dies at 110

http://www.jta.org

(JTA) — Alice Herz-Sommer, the 110-year-old Holocaust survivor and concert pianist whose life was the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary, has died.

H

erz-Sommer, who was believed to be the oldest Holocaust survivor and was still playing the piano, died in London.

“The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life,” the 38-minute film about her life, is up for best short documentary at the Academy Awards.

The film showed her indomitable optimism, cheerfulness and vitality despite all the upheavals and horrors she faced in life.

“I know there is bad in the world, but I look for the good,” she told JTA in a brief telephone interview recently, and “music is my life, music is God.” Trained as a pianist from childhood, Herz-Sommer made her concert debut as a teenager, then married and had a son.

In 1943, however, Herz-Sommer and her husband, Leopold, and their 6-year old son Raphael (Rafi), were transported to the Nazi model concentration camp Theresienstadt. Her husband died in the Nazi camp, but Herz-Sommer became a member of the camp orchestra and gave more than 100 recitals while protecting her son.

Liberated in 1945, Herz-Sommer and her son returned to Prague but four years later left for Israel. There she taught at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and performed in concerts frequently attended

by Golda Meir, while her son became a concert cellist.

After 37 years in Israel she followed her son to London in 1986. She remained in London even after her son died 15 years later at the age of 65.

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The Bard of Czernovitz and the Bronx Remembering Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman (1920-2013)

Ms. Schaechter-Gottesman

By Zackary Sholem Berger Tabletmag.com

B

e y l e S c h a e c h t e r- G o t t e s m a n , a Yiddish singer, songwriter, poet, artist, and educator, died on Thanksgiving in her Bronx home at the age of 93.

Schaechter-Gottesman’s songs about separation, homelessness, joy, and celebration are now part of the standard Yiddish song repertoire for performers internationally.

Beyltse, as she was known, was born in Vienna to Lifshe, an accomplished singer and songwriter, and Binyumen, who as a young man made a miles-long pilgrimage on foot to the famed Yiddish Language Conference of 1906. Later, the family moved to Czernovitz; she

Mordkhe Schaechter (1927 – 2007) was a well known Yiddish linguist and Beyle’s uncle

returned to Vienna at the age of 16 to study art.

The family moved to the United States in 1951 after its own variety of wartime hell: the Czernovitz ghetto, her father’s exile to Siberia and his death at the hands of the Soviets, and the death of her infant son Binyumele.

She portrayed her start as a writer in modest terms: “I needed something for the children to read.” But her work reached a far wider audience than her children Taube, Hyam, and Itzik (she is survived by Itzik, a folklorist and journalist, among a number of other relatives). She composed songs for children; wrote and produced plays; edited journals of children’s literature; and taught nursery school.

She performed her work for children and adults around the world.

The breadth of her contribution was recognized by the National Endowment of the Arts in 2005, with a commendation presented by then-Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. She is most known for her Yiddish art songs, many of them paeans to fleeting beauty and transient friendship. Perhaps her best known song, “Harbstlid” (Autumn Song), talks about the “falling leaves/flying days”—“where will I wander,” she asks, “when thick fog covers my way?” She also wrote songs in a satirical and celebratory vein.

As an anchor of the quixotic community known as Bainbridgifke (a name taken from Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx), she spoke Yiddish to her family, friends, and community.

Together with her neighbors, she and her husband, physician Jonas Gottesman, made speaking Yiddish as normal as the D train and trips to the park.

But at the same time as she infused the quotidian with mameloshn, she was

a steadfast maintainer of standards in high culture. Her home was hung with her sketches and watercolors, and stacked with literature in many languages.

Her eye was keen and her judgment discerning.

Her five volumes of poetry enable the reader to plumb the depths of a difficult life which might not always be evident in song. The suffering she underwent, coupled with an unsentimental intelligence, together with her role as the pre-eminent standard-bearer (with her brother, philologist Mordkhe Schaechter) of living Yiddish-language culture, gave her poetry a dark, world-wise, and sometimes weary cast.

She wrote about gunshots in the Bronx, saxophone players on the subway, forced exile in the Transdniester, and fellow Yiddish writers. One poem of hers is a shiv in the ribs of the great M.L. Halpern, who famously wrote a poem about meeting the Angel of Death—but who did not, she points out, manage to encounter his own wife and children too often. Her style was spare, relatively unencumbered by formal flourishes, but enlivened by the native vocabulary of Czernovitz.

Beyle, one of the greatest contemporary writers of Yiddish song and poetry was an inspiration to younger generations interested in Yiddish culture.

Her packed funeral on December 1 on the Upper West Side was as much a celebration of her unique talents as it was a sad farewell. Leading performers of Jewish music, including Theodore Bikel, rose to sing Beyle’s songs, which have become an important part of the repertoire of Yiddish music around the world.

Beyle Schaechter Gottesman 2005. Photo by Tom Pich

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together May 2014

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Eulogy for Herman Taube

By Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt March 27, 2014

T

“Often, when the house is asleep and visions Burn my mind I take the stone Into my hands; Like friends, we share Our secret memories.

The stone has a heart…

Sometimes past midnight I think I hear the stone cry: Why? Why? Why?...

I take the stone, Hold it to my face And wash it with my tears.”

he Book of Job, a book which challenges traditional notions about God is appropriate to quote when speaking about Herman Taube. It says, “Yesh lakesef motza, umakom lazahav yazoku: “There are mines for silver, and places where gold is refined.

Iron is taken from the earth, and copper is smelted from rock.

But where can wisdom be found, and where is the source of understanding?”

“Talmid chacham im met, mee yavee lanu temurato?

For when a person of wisdom dies, who can replace him?”

Herman Taube was such a man – a man of wisdom and of understanding; a man who is truly irreplaceable. There will not be another one like him. We have lost one of God’s precious treasures.

Herman was a witness to a vanished world; a window to a world that was vanquished and is no more. With anger, but not malice, his writings took us back and recreated and brought to life those whose lives were taken so cruelly, and the way of life that was destroyed.

His images of cobblestone streets and of open fields were so descriptive.

One poem is about a stone he picked up from the street where the Warsaw ghetto uprising took place and brought home with him. In one of his poems, he wrote:

When he saw the display of suitcases at Auschwitz, he wrote movingly about the suitcase of his beloved grandfather, who helped to raise him after his parents died at a young age. His grandfather kept a suitcase packed so they would be ready when the messiah arrived to be able to go to Eretz Yisrael. Looking at the pile of suitcases, he asked what happened to his grandfather’s dream and promise?

One of my favorite poems was one of his most powerful, “A Single Hair”.

It is the voice of a single hair in the display case of hair at Auschwitz, which beckons the tourists gazing at the glass case to realize that it once was on the head of an 18 year old girl who loved life. What a keen eye and mind he had to think in these terms. He wrote that if only the hair which once was caressed could break out of the glass case, to be blown into the eyes of the world’s

Liesl Loeb, 85, Holocaust Survivor Aboard the ‘S.S. St. Louis’ continued from p. 20 away by the Nazis to concentration camps and inevitable death.

In Philadelphia, Loeb attended Girls High and the Philadelphia College of Art. As she told the USC Shoah Foundation in its oral history project, “My American classmates didn’t have a clue” as to the suffering she had gone through.

And Loeb didn’t want to tell them.

“I wanted to fit in,” she recalled. But later she found the world her canvas, painting stories as a speaker, detailing her trying and troubled attempt to escape Germany on the heels of Kristallnacht, and the shattering experience aboard the S.S. St. Louis.

She became one of the most popular speakers r equested by groups from the Jewish Community Relations Council

of Greater Philadelphia Speakers Bureau.

Loeb t raveled the globe, describing her experience as one of 300 children aboard the S.S. St. Louis, cavorting and playing as their parents watched movies and were treated to the lifestyle accorded by a luxury cruise.

But as the ship roamed from port to port, seeking entry, Loeb’s father, Josef Joseph, a prominent lawyer in Dusseldorf, headed up a committee on board trying to negotiate a port of safety for the abandoned passengers.

In her oral history, Loeb r eferred to her father as her “buddy; my hero,” and to the existential status of follow passengers without a country as “a circus.” She also told the Shoah

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leaders “to irritate and disturb their vision enough to make them past.”

Herman was the moral conscience of the Washington Jewish community.

He was the thread that tied together Holocaust survivors in Washington, Baltimore, and around the world, having founded survivors and Yiddish groups in Washington and Baltimore. He was a volunteer at the Holocaust Museum, and involved in planning the World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors. He prodded us to do more to ensure that Holocaust survivors would live out their lives in dignity. He helped to guide a new generation of lay leaders to create Capitol Camps. He reminded us of the importance of observing Yom HaShoah, but also of remembering the anniversaries of Kristallnacht, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Night of the Murdered Poets and the Doctor’s Plot, so that the victims would not be forgotten.

Anyone who ever met Herman immediately sensed his decency and his kindness, and instantly knew they were in the presence of a very special person, a gutte neshama, someone who was precious, who epitomized the qualities our tradition says we should try to live by. He had a wonderful smile and sharp mind. Like Will Rogers, Herman never met a person he didn’t like, and no one who ever met Herman did not love him instantly and feel his love in return.

His other love was Yiddishkeit – which meant - Judaism, the Jewish people, Israel, Jewish values, Jews,

as well as all of humanity. His love for clal yisrael, of his fellow Jews and of Jewish traditions oozed from every ounce of Herman’s being and was the quintessence and source of his strength.

Writing, which he began doing at a young age, was the means whereby he could convey his innermost feelings, his theology, experiences, reflections and emotions.

I first met Herman when he was working for UJA Federation, over 30 years ago, and immediately fell in love with him. He was the hardest working employee there. I don’t think he ever missed a Super Sunday, and he worked longer and harder than people half his age.

One time a number of years ago, I saw him at the UJA office when it was on Wisconsin Avenue. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and before I left he wished me a gut yom tov.

“Gut yom tov?” I said to him, expressing surprise that he would call this secular holiday a yom tov, the Yiddish word for holiday. He said to me words I will never forget and that I recall every Thanksgiving since then.

“Yes. This is a yom tuv,” he said. “The fact that I can walk down a street and not have someone pull on mein beard, or knock off my yarmulke if I choose to wear one, that I can live here in this country as a proud Jew, that I do not have to live in fear – yes.”

Foundation how extraordinacy it was to be able to set sail from Germany at the time. Any ships departing had little room for Jews, she said, “and here was a ship entirely for Jewish refugees; quite something.”

Coming to America was no smooth sailing, however. When her family was finally granted permission to immigrate, the convoy making the trip ran into trouble; both the ship in front and ahead of Loeb’s vessel were sunk by German U-boats.

In Philadelphia, Loeb worked for a while as a graphic designer before taking the speaker ’s route.

Despite a busy schedule, she found time for activities at Congregation Adath Jeshurun in Elkins Park and she served as an officer and board member of the Philadelphia branch of the National Women’s League for Conservative Judaism. She also was president of Chevrath Tikvoh Chadoshoh - a Philadelphia synagogue

for German Jews founded in the ‘40s and volunteered at Gratz College in its Holocaust Archives Department.

If the world dealt her a bad deck as a child - she “celebrated” her 11th birthday docked in Antwerp after 40 days at sea searching for a country willing to accept the ship’s passengers - she took life into her own hands and years later became an ace at cards, playing with other Holocaust survivors who found roots in Philadelphia. They comprised the aptly named The Card Group.

The former Liesl Joseph, she was married to Hans Loeb, a German refugee and American veteran of World War II whom she had met at a German-Jewish club in Philly. They were married for 40 years until his death in 1987.

She is survived by a daughter, Joani; a son, Joel; and four grandchildren, who called her “Schatzi,” Hebrew for “Little Treasure,” a name accorded her by her late husband.

together May 2014 Alex Beck

U.S. in the field of Jewish education, he eventually changed careers and worked in sales in the garment business. As reflected by the pile of dictionaries located near his living room chair, Alex had a life-long love of language learning and languages - especially anything related to Hebrew. Alex also enjoyed world travel, accompanied by his wife, Ruth. He is survived by Ruth, his daughter Pearl Beck (and her husband David Fisher), and three grandchildren: Ariel Fisher (and his wife, Bina Brody), Jonah Fisher, and Gabriel Fisher.

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in every person. We will miss her dearly but she will never, ever be forgotten.

To honor her memory, Morris’ Son-in-Law, Brian Melamut designed a poster depicting Matilde’s (Nonna) tragedy and rebirth of her extended family. This poster shall always be exhibited in each grandchild’s home so we shall never forget.

Leon Samuel Idas

Herman Schwarz A lex B eck passed away on March 2, 2014, three weeks short of his 95th birthday. Alex was born in 1919 in Tisza Ujlak, Transcarpathia, which at the time was located in Czechoslovakia. The highlight and fundamental experience of his pre-War II life was attending the ‘Gymnasia Ha’Ivrit’ (Hebrew Gymnasium) in Munkacz, Hungary from middle school through high school graduation in 1939. There he became a fluent Hebrew speaker and Zionist and made life-long friends. After graduating, Alex attended University and also worked as a part-time Hebrew teacher. One of his Hebrew students was Hannah Sennesh who was preparing to make aliyah. In October, 1943, Alex was inducted into a Hungarian Nazirun ‘Arbeitslager’ (labor-camp). He remained there until October 28, 1944 - a day he referred to as his ‘birthday’.

On that day, Alex managed to escape from the labor-camp - one day before all the camp’s occupants were to be liquidated. After his escape, he met up with the approaching Russian army and offered them his services as a translator.

At the war’s end, Alex was re-united with his parents who miraculously survived the Nazi round-up of Budapest Jews. Although his father died shortly thereafter, Alex and his mother made their way (with the help of HaBricha/ JDC) to Italy, and from there, with forged papers, to Palestine. In Palestine, they were greeted by Alex’s brother and sister, who had made Aliyah in the 1930’s. Alex taught Hebrew and Hebrew literature at the Reali High School in Haifa (affiliated with the Technion) and served in the Palmach where he helped design the Ulpan Hebrew teaching system. During the summer of 1947, he met Ruth, a New York City public school teacher and avid world traveler, who was fortuitously staying at the Savoy Hotel which was partially owned and managed

by Alex’s sister. Ruth and Alex were married at the Savoy Hotel in March, 1948. Alex emigrated to the U.S. to join his wife in the early 1950’s. Although Alex originally found employment in the

H e r m a n S c h wa r z , 91, Paul and Cheryl Schwarz, their sons Andrew and Evan Schwarz; Malka Schwarz, Ghita Schwarz, Chuck Goldblum and Tirzah Schwarz and their children Navah, Mia and Malena Goldblum mourn the passing of Herman Schwarz. Beloved father, father-in-law, grandfather, brother-in-law, uncle, and great uncle. Holocaust survivor, fighter, mensch, the best of the best.

Funeral services were held on Thursday, February 20th, 2014.

Matilde Capelluto Behar DuBord M a t i l d e C a p e l l u t o B e ha r D u B ord , 87, of Oldsmar, passed away Feb. 20, 2014. She was born on the Island of Rhodes in 1926, to Daniel and Rosa Capelluto. She was a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau and was liberated in 1945, at Bergen Belsen weighing only 75 pounds. She lost her entire family including six brothers and sisters, her parents and over 60 aunts, uncles and cousins during the Holocaust in WWII. After the war she was sent to Sweden for recuperation.

Subsequently she went to Italy to restart her life. In 1947 she married Anrico Behar and lived in Milan Italy. In 1956 she moved to Chicago with her family . In 1959 her husband died and she relocated to Clearwater Florida. In 1961 she married Andre Dubord and became a fine arts dealer until her retirement in 1987.She was a member of Temple Ahavat Shalom and spoke about her Holocaust experience at local schools and news channels. Even as her days were numbered she made sure all her nurses,doctors, and care givers knew that she had been in concentration camps as designated by the number on her arm.

Although she experienced unimaginable horror during WWII she never gave up hope and faith.

Her son,Morris and daughter-in-law Deborah, three grandchildren and seven great grandchildren were her number one priority. She always saw the good

L eon S amuel I das passed away at his home on April 12, 2013. He was 87 years old. Leon was born July 11, 1925 in Athens, Greece to Samuel (born,Ioannina Greece, Romanoite Jew) and Miriam(born New Symrna, Asia) Ioudas, aka Gabrielides. Leon’s early life was interrupted by the invasion of his beloved homeland, by the Germans during World War 2. At the age of 16, Leon fled the Nazi fortified city of Athens and with forged documents and instructions from Underground Resistance Leaders, he and a friend joined the Partisans in the mountain regions of Greece to fight this occupation. Leon often told stories of firefights with the enemy and the difficulties to survive with very little food, being hungry, cold and the constant marching day and night to stay ahead of the enemy. Leon was a contributor to www.jewishpartisans.org and you can hear many of his stories in his own voice, by visiting their website. Upon the liberation of Greece by the Allied forces, Leon returned to his home in Athens, to discover that the German Nazis had deported and killed his parents and oldest brother, Gabriel, to the death camp Auschwitz.

Leon joined the Royal Greek Army and served during the brief civil war. In 1951, an opportunity arose for Leon to immigrate to the United States. “ God bless America, the greatest country on this earth”, Leon would often say.

Leon would spend the next 50 years making Baltimore, Maryland his home.

Upon his arrival to Baltimore, Leon joined the Maryland National Guard and served as a Sergeant in the 5th

Regiment for 5 years. In 1952, Leon married Ruth London and together they had three children, Samuel, David and Judy. Leon found his career work as a production supervisor for Shapiro & Whitehouse, Baltimore, who recycled used clothing and paper items.

When Shapiro & Whitehouse closed operations in the 1970’s, Leon started his own company called Royal Vintage Clothing. His company supplied valuable and rare antique clothing to stores throughout the world as well as to the filming stages of Hollywood and New York. Leon was well known throughout his industry as a specialist on Vintage Clothing and travelled extensively overseas. He appeared in articles titled, “ Leon, The King of Rags “ and in” His Kingdom” he was known as a “ Rag-oligist “ authority. He was comfortable anywhere and with anyone in any culture. He was always the center of attention in a crowd, party or event.

He maintained a huge list of friends reaching from his childhood in Greece to the present. He always had great stories to tell and friends and family loved to hear these stories of his life and travels.

In 1968, Leon married Elise Zalis, of Baltimore. In Leon’s later life he spent summers in Samos, Greece, a North Aegean island, where he reminisced the good times of his childhood, when he would visit his grandparents Leon & Rachael Goldstein, owners of the local wine factory. Leon loved to just run around this small town and play among the wine caskets and machinery of this awesome family business. Leon’s grandfather (Leon Goldstein) and great uncle (Albert Goldstein) are buried on this island in a private Israelite family cemetery, which Leon visited every year and solely took the unselfish responsibility of caring for.

Leon is survived by his wife Elise Idas, his three children; Samuel Idas, David Idas & Judy Novick; son in law Jerold Novick and daughter in law Carole Idas; his brother and sister in law Salvy & Esther Gabrieli of Tel Aviv, five grandchildren; Sophie Novick, Max ldas, Bianca Idas, Max Novick & Charlotte Idas and numerous cousins, nieces and nephews throughout the world. Leon was also a video contributor of his survivor story to the Steven Spielberg Foundation.

Leon Samuel Idas was laid to rest in the private Jewish Cemetery of Samos Island, Greece, alongside his grandfather Leon Goldstein and his uncle, Albert Goldstein.

visit our website at www.amgathering.org

together May 2014

24

Sam E. Bloch

An urgent appeal from the President and Chairman

Roman R. Kent

Dear Friends:

Who partners with the Museum of Jewish Heritage to present a meaningful annual Yom Hashoah commemoration in New York attended by thousands?

Who continues to play a vital role on behalf of all survivors in the United States? The American Gathering The American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants Who supports the Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers Program that has more than 1000 alumni teaching in every state in our great country who keep our Who is the voice of the survivors on political and economic matters in this history alive while helping students to make connection to present day events? country?

The American Gathering The American Gathering Who publishes TOGETHER, the paper that helps keep you abreast of vital Who do survivors turn to on a daily basis for information and assistance in all issues to the survivors, second generation and third generation community and matters? helps to keep us connected?

The American Gathering The American Gathering Who provides referrals to social agencies all over the US and intervenes on behalf of survivors when they are not being treated with the respect and concern they deserve?

The American Gathering

For more than 30 years, the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants has been there for you. We have never lost sight of our mission, which first and foremost has been the advocacy for the needs and rights of the survivors, as well as remembrance of our precious legacy.

Who has continued to fight the Holocaust deniers who want to erase our history We have always been there for you and we are now turning to you for your help and dishonor our martyred families? and support. All of our activities require significant funding at a time when we The American Gathering are experiencing severe financial strains. As our numbers grow smaller, so do our funds yet the work we do does not diminish!

Who continues to represent survivors and their interests at the Claims Conference and in matters of reparations and benefits both in the US and Help play a vital role in the important work that we continue to do by sending internationally? in a contribution at this time. You have a stake in our future - we implore you The American Gathering to respond to this appeal with whatever contribution you are comfortable with: $1,000, $500, $250, $180, even $50 or $18.

Who speaks out on behalf of those victims of Nazi persecution who need Let us continue to be your advocates and your voice! enhanced support as they age and become less able to care for themselves?

WE MUST CONTINUE THIS IMPORTANT WORK! IF NOT US, WHO WILL DO IT? The American Gathering Who maintains the Survivor Registry with its partner The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, serving as a database for our survivor families and a research base for scholars?

The American Gathering

Sam E. Bloch President

Roman R. Kent Chairman

Please make a meaningful tax deductible contribution

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