Heirless Jewish assets to be used for aid to survivors

By Cnaan Liphshiz

East European nations yesterday stated for the first time that heirless Jewish property should be used to aid needy Holocaust survivors. The statement was the final and joint resolution of the Holocaust Era Assets Conference, which ended yesterday in Prague.

“In some states heirless property could serve as a basis for addressing the material necessities of needy Holocaust survivors,” said the 10-page declaration, signed by 46 countries including Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania.

Retired diplomat Reuven Merhav, who put together Israel’s delegation, told Haaretz the declaration was “a historic and great achievement for Israel,” which secured all of Israel’s goals for the conference. Though the document is not legally binding, he said, “it sets a norm.”

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Today’s idea: The Holocaust needs a major reassessment, a historian argues, because the symbolic power of Auschwitz obscures the Nazis’ mass shootings and other atrocities in the East early in the war.
book review staff

Associated Press

Much more to it than Auschwitz. History | Auschwitz and its gas chambers distort our vision of the Holocaust, Timothy Snyder of Yale says in a lecture adapted for the New York Review of Books. His reasoning: Since it was a “labor camp as well as a death factory” largely for West European Jews later in the war, Auschwitz’s liberation at war’s end yielded numerous survivors free to recount their experiences. Not so Holocaust victims caught behind the Iron Curtain.

Most of the killing of Jews had been carried out much earlier, Snyder says. “An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history,” he says, including the horrors of the death camps Treblinka, Sobibor and Be zec — the latter of which, “though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known.”

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by EPHRAIM ZUROFF

This week’s visit by Hungarian Prime Minister Gordon Banjai is an excellent opportunity to focus on one of the most important and interesting cases of a Nazi war criminal who can still be brought to justice. I am referring to Dr. Sandor Kepiro, who served as a gendarmerie officer during World War II and was among the key organizers of the mass murder of at least 1,250, but probably as many as 3,000 men, women and children (mostly Jews, but also Serbs and Gypsies) in the Serbian city of Novi Sad on January 23, 1942.

Until now, Israel has done relatively little to press Hungary to prosecute Kepiro, so Banjai’s visit might well be the last opportunity of its kind for the government to send a clear-cut message to the Hungarians that their failure to bring Kepiro to justice is incomprehensible and unacceptable.

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by Etgar LEFKOWITZ

The Baltic nations have embarked on a state-financed international initiative which seeks to cover up their role in the Holocaust by falsely equating Nazism with Communism, the founder of the Yiddish program at Vilnius University said this week.

“There is a state-sponsored genocide industry at work which seeks to mitigate the Holocaust and replace it with a model of two equal genocides,” said Professor Dovid Katz in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.

The remarks came amid a recent strain in relations between Israel and Lithuania over the latter’s investigations of Jewish Holocaust survivors, including a former Yad Vashem chairman, over their wartime activities as partisans.

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BOCA RATON – A charity that teaches children about racial and religious tolerance needs $60,000 by Aug. 15 or it likely will close, its executive director said Wednesday.

The moribund economy has pushed LEAH, the League for Educational Awareness of the Holocaust, into the worst crisis in its 13-year history, director Stephen Spiegel said. The Boca Raton-based organization’s $300,000 budget is $150,000 short because many of the donors on whom it depends no longer have money to offer.

That means that the grants and activities for schools in Broward and Palm Beach counties will be severely curtailed or eliminated.

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July 1, 2009

BUDAPEST (JTA) — Hungary’s lawmakers rejected constitutional amendments to make Holocaust denial a punishable offense.

Some local Jewish community leaders believe that Monday’s vote secured the first parliamentary victory for Jobbik, a rapidly rising local neo-Nazi movement widely predicted to win several seats in the national elections due within a year.

The proposals, put forth by the ruling Socialist caretaker government, attracted fewer than half the votes needed to adopt a constitutional amendment.

The frequently populist, ultra-Conservative Fidesz opposition party rejected the proposals along with the neo-Liberal Free Democrats, the erstwhile coalition partners of the Socialists.

The Association of Hungarian Jewish Religious Communities, or Mazsihisz — the country’s largest Jewish organization — has not issued an official comment. However, a commentary published on the Mazsihisz Web site by Tamas Palmai, an intellectual writing in his personal capacity, says many believe that Fidesz turned down the reforms for fear of provoking the wrath of Jobbik.

Holocaust denial is outlawed in many countries which, like Hungary, were occupied by the Nazis during World War II. The Hungarian government’s attempt at introducing the legislation that failed was made in response to provocations by neo-Nazis at Buda Castle that marred the last Holocaust Remembrance Day.

By Mary Sibierski – 5 hours ago

WARSAW (AFP) — The cornerstone of the long-awaited Museum of the History of Polish Jews, a major step towards reviving Poland’s Jewish heritage after the Holocaust, was laid in Warsaw on Tuesday, organisers said.

In the works for a decade, the long-awaited multi-million dollar, multi-media facility is expected to open its door in 2011.

“Prior to the Holocaust, the Shoah, Warsaw was one of the world’s main centres of Jewish life where politics, culture, publishing and Jewish theatre thrived — in fact it was the leading centre, surpassing other cities in the US and Europe,” project director Jerzy Halbersztadt told guests at the site.

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By Stefan Bos
Budapest
30 June 2009

The European Union and dozens of countries have pledged to speed up social support for Holocaust survivors and the search for art and other items that were stolen during World War II by the Nazis. At the meeting in Prague, they agreed to establish a special European institute to deal with these issues and education.

Czech Foreign Minister Jan Kohout delivers speech during Holocaust Era Assets Conference in Prague, 29 Jun 2009

As the number of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust rapidly declines, there was a sense of urgency among delegates that the world must provide them with adequate social assistance and compensation for stolen goods.

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Q&A with Eizenstat on Holocaust-era restitution

By Dinah Spritzer · June 29, 2009

PRAGUE (JTA) — Stuart Eizenstat, who led the U.S. government delegation to the June 26-29 Holocaust Era Assets Conference in Prague, sat down with JTA for an interview on the eve of the conference.

The conference, organized by the Czech government, which held the six-month rotating European Union presidency for the first half of 2009, brought together representatives of 49 countries for what participants said was likely to be the last major attempt to compensate Holocaust victims and their heirs for art and property confiscated or sold under duress during the Nazi era.

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By KAREL JANICEK – 2 hours ago

PRAGUE (AP) — Holocaust survivors, Jewish groups and experts gathered in Prague Friday to assess efforts to return property and possessions stolen by the Nazis to their rightful owners or heirs.

The five-day conference, which brings together delegates from 49 countries, is the first follow-up to a 1998 meeting in Washington that led to agreements on recovering art looted by the Nazis.

During the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler and his followers killed 6 million Jews and seized billions of dollars of gold, art and private and communal property across Europe.

But while countries such as Austria have stepped up restitution in recent years, critics claim some Central and Eastern European states still have a long way to go.

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