Special Exhibition Opens January 24, 2006 at the
Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust

This moving special exhibition tells the remarkable stories of the Nazis’ most vulnerable victims-Jewish children. By war’s end, as many as 1.5 million of those children were dead.

Thousands of Jewish children survived the Holocaust by living with false identities; by being physically concealed in attics, cellars, barns, or sewers; or by being protected by clergy in convents and monasteries. For these children, going into hiding often meant leaving their families and identities behind. Life in hiding was never safe and was always fraught with danger, where a careless remark, a denunciation, or the murmurings of inquisitive neighbors could lead to discovery and death.

After the war, a new saga in the story of hidden children began. Surviving parents, relatives, and family friends sought out children they had placed in convents, orphanages, or with foster families. Local Jewish committees in Europe tried to register the living and account for the dead. In many cases the quest for family or true identity involved traumatic soul-searching by children to rediscover who they really were. In many cases, they were now orphans.

This exhibition is organized and circulated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

A tour of the Life in Shadows exhibition will be offered as an option for school and youth groups visiting the Museum’s core exhibition. Tours designed to correspond to school curricula are adapted to meet the specific needs, interests, and backgrounds of groups; Museum staff or Gallery Educators lead them. In addition, a Teacher’s Guide will be available on the Museum’s website when the exhibition opens. The March 2, 2006 Fanya Gottesfeld Heller Conference for Educators will focus on the challenges confronting those who were hidden during the Holocaust.

On Sunday, January 29, at 2:30 p.m. the Museum will screen Europa Europa (1990, 112 MIN, 35MM) followed by a post-screening discussion with Professor Stuart Liebman of Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center. The screening is included with Museum admission ($10, $7, $5, free for members).

FOR MORE INFORMATION CLICK HERE.

DUBLIN, Ireland Newly released documents show Ireland’s president offered condolences to Nazi Germany over the 1945 death of Adolf Hitler during World War Two.

Historians had believed that Ireland’s prime minister at the time was the only government leader to convey official condolences to the German diplomatic corps in Ireland. His comments were criticized worldwide. MORE.

By Ari Kriegel, a 3G

Tikochin August 30, 2005

What am I supposed to say? How am I supposed to feel? I just came from the Beit Kvarot outside of a town I don’t know how to spell, but it sounds like Tikochin. We stood outside of a fenced in area, maybe 20 feet by 20 feet, one of three in this forest, one of many more in the rest of Poland. Among these three fenced-in areas, 2000 Jews lie somewhere. “2000,� like the “6 million� Jews killed during the holocaust. Life is not that precise, nor is the destruction of it. So what am I supposed to say? I know that a supposed 2000 people were killed in the exact place I stood, yet how can I feel anything more than the sorrow that comes at the thought of the loss of innocent lives? Don’t those people, who happened to be Jews, deserve more than to be a part of a general feeling of “badness�? To be more than a part of a general number of 2000… 6 million? What if there were really 2,001, 6,000,001; who is that person being left out of the number? If I can’t say enough, why say anything at all? If I can’t feel enough, why feel anything? I say and feel what I can, as much as I can, but does it make any difference to the 2000 people, the 2000 sets of bones over which I just stood? Do those bones care? Does the 2,001st corpse take offense to not being counted?
MORE.

Scrooging the Holocaust

ABC/Disney—Scrooging the Holocaust
By Jeanette Friedman

Reprinted from The Jewish State, Highland Park, NJ

‘Tis the season, and over at ABC/Disney, Scrooge is busy at work. It can make someone wish that Fairy Godmother would take out the bad guys. But the question here is, who’s the bad guy in this story? Is it Mel Gibson or Quinn Taylor, VP of ABC TV movies?

It took two days for people to react to the news that ABC/Disney agreed to make a Holocaust miniseries with Mel Gibson. Let there be spin, declared the pundits, and there they were: the usual people in the usual places, saying the usual things about Mel and his dad, Hudson the Holocaust denier. They missed the point. It’s not about Mel.

It’s about ABC/Disney, and corporate cynics like Quinn Taylor.
MORE.

FIRST UNITED NATIONS
HOLOCAUST COMMEMORATION

All Survivors, their Families and Friends should
be present at this Historic event. Make plans to come.

The United Nations General Assembly Hall
First Avenue and 46th Street in New York City
10:30 AM on Friday, January 27, 2006

Important: Security procedures at the UN are strict,

YOU MUST SUBMIT the names of people in your party as soon as possible to the American Gathering to pass on to the UN for easier processing. Bring ID.

The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants
122 West 30 Street, NY, NY 10001
Tel: (212) 239-4230
e-mail: mail {at} americangathering(.)org
Fax: (212) 279-2926

Company owner upset; police investigate
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 12/31/05
BY MARGARET F. BONAFIDE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU

JACKSON — Benjamin Kirsch, 50, the son of a Holocaust survivor, was outraged Friday to find an anti-Semitic slur written across the front fender of one of his company’s trucks.

“The only good that could ever come of this is to remind people that they should never forget that the war against racism and anti-Semitism is never over,” said Kirsch, who was most upset that this happened during Hanukkah. MORE.

Holocaust moved him
Retired U.S. brigadier general taught children about Jews in WWII

DIANNA SMITH
Cox Newspapers

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - There was something piercing about Sidney Gritz’s stare. His eyes were dark and brown and deep set. They had seen more than one man should in a lifetime. Gritz, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general, died Tuesday in Boca Raton, Fla., leaving behind a trail of staggering military accomplishments. He was 87.

Gritz served in the Korean and Vietnam wars. But one of his most life-changing moments came during World War II, when Gritz, a devout Jew, helped liberate Jews from Nazi concentration camps. MORE.

By The Associated Press

WARSAW - Polish lawmakers condemned Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday for recently dismissing the Holocaust as a myth, and said such statements were “absolutely unacceptable for Poland, on whose land Nazis set up death camps.”

“The memory of the Holocaust in Poland is vivid and painfully present,” the parliamentary commission on foreign relations said in a statement. “Millions of Polish citizens fell victim to the genocidal and anti-Semitic policies of the Third Reich.”
MORE.

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - Dr. Heinrich Gross, a psychiatrist who worked at a clinic where the Nazis killed and conducted cruel experiments on thousands of children, died Dec. 15, his family announced Thursday. He was 90.

Gross, who was implicated in nine deaths as part of a Nazi plot to eliminate “worthless lives,” had escaped trial in March after a court ruled he suffered from severe dementia. No cause of death was given in a brief statement issued by his family.

Gross was a leading doctor in Vienna’s infamous Am Spiegelgrund clinic. Historians and survivors of the clinic had accused him of killing or taking part in the clinic’s experiments on thousands of children deemed by the Nazis to be physically, mentally or otherwise unfit for Adolf Hitler’s vision of a perfect world.

Gross, who proclaimed his innocence for decades, had insisted he was not present at the hospital at the time in the 1940s when most of the children were killed.

“I was always against euthanasia,” he told the weekly magazine News in 2000. “I never sped up anyone’s death, nor did I assign anyone to do so.”

He became a prominent neurologist after the war and was awarded the prestigious Austrian Honorary Cross for Science and Art in 1975. He was stripped of the medal in 2003.

He was put on trial three times, but all the cases were dismissed. In a trial in the 1950s, the case was thrown out because of legal technicalities. A second case in the 1980s was dismissed because the 30-year statute of limitations on manslaughter had expired.

A third trial in 2000, in which Gross was accused of complicity in the murder of nine handicapped children who died as the result of abuse, was suspended after a psychiatrist testified he was unfit for trial because of advanced dementia.

Immediately after the suspension, Gross gave lively interviews in a local coffeehouse.

Across Europe, about 275,000 people, including 5,000 children, were killed by the Nazis for real or imagined mental, physical or social disabilities.

Hundreds of urns containing the remains of young Austrians were buried quietly in 2002 after having been used for medical research as recently as 1978.

In September, a new play about the Spiegelgrund clinic made its debut in Vienna, underscoring how far the country has come in confronting its World War II past.

It portrays Gross as an evil Nazi scientist who views his patients only as research objects. Bone-chilling laughter hangs omnipresent over the stage during the production, which shows children confined in straitjackets, held in tiny cage beds and force-fed medication through funnels.

During a trial in 1998, German historian Matthias Dahl said his research showed that Gross published five articles between 1955 and 1965 based on research using the preserved brains of children killed because they were deemed handicapped or anti-social.

Six other articles published by him also likely used the same specimens, Dahl said.

From Gunn’s Delicious Bakery in Canada, a multitude of Yiddish songs to choose from.

To choose and listen, click here.