I read a recent article about the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, being unhappy that Mormons had listed some names of Holocaust victims on their website. Please don’t be offended, it is actually the way we try and keep our Family units and history intact. I have done my family history back to the 16th Century. Many of my ancestors were from the Baden area, and most were Jews. I am a Mormon. Their family information is included in my family history, also included is the fact that they were Jews.

I am very proud of my Jewish ancestry. I have been to Dauchau, and experienced the Holocaust as much as someone can, after the fact.
We must ALWAYS remember. Jews and Mormons alike. It must never happen again…….

Sincerely,
Robert Schiller

bob {at} noahrobert(.)com

Serbian Property Registration Deadline June 30
The Claims Conference announced that the deadline set by the government of Serbia for the registration of confiscated property is June 30, 2006. Registration forms may be submitted for property taken through confiscation, nationalization, agrarian reform, sequestration, expropriation and other regulations effective after March 9, 1945.

Information in English, Serbian, and Hebrew is on the website of the Claims Conference, www.claimscon.org.

There is currently no legislation in Serbia governing restitution of private property. However, if such legislation is enacted in the future, only persons who register claims by June 30, 2006 will likely be covered. Although the law provides for the registration of private property confiscated beginning in March 1945, it is suggested that individuals who owned property in Serbia that was confiscated during the Holocaust also register.

A copy of the registration form is available through the following links: belgrade.usembassy.gov/consular/uscs/restitution.html

Or

www.mfin.sr.gov.yu

Registration forms must be sent to the following address:
Property Directorate of the Republic of Serbia
GraÄ?aniÄ?ka St. no. 8
11000 Belgrade, Serbia

If there is any doubt as to eligibility, it is recommended that individuals complete the registration form.

The material on the Claims Conference website is for information purposes only. This program is administered by and is the sole responsibility of the Serbian government.

Claimants must register their claim no later than June 30, 2006.

MORE.

Chino Hills resident’s poem embodies pain of Holocaust
By Joanna Parsons, Staff Writer

Chino Hills resident and holocaust survivor Peter Fischl has written a book titled “And The World Who Said Nothing” depicting his experiences during the WWII.

CHINO HILLS — On a warm Friday afternoon, Peter Fischl sat comfortably on the carpeted floor in his home, dressed in sneakers and gray sweat pants, recalling his memories as a Holocaust survivor.

Fischl speaks about the Holocaust and its lessons to anyone who listens — be it public schools all over California, or most notably, through a poem he wrote.

more.

Jewish group condemns Ahmadinejad’s statements on Holocaust

Washington: A prominent Jewish human rights organisation has condemned Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s questioning of the veracity of the Holocaust and asked Germany to bar him from attending the FIFA World Cup 2006 hosted by the country.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre said in a statement that while the Pope is in Auschwitz remembering the horrors of the Holocaust, the President of Iran had once again questioned it.

“I know this is difficult for the Germans, they have economic relations to think of, but it is unfair for the victims of the Holocaust and their families to pay the bill once again,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, the Founder and Dean of the organisation said.

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New Holocaust Memorial Inaugurated in Ukrainian City

Tuesday, May 30 2006

ALEXANDRIA, Ukraine – A monument to Jews murdered in the Holocaust in the Alexandria Region of Ukraine was inaugurated on May 28th. The event took place on the Day of the City, involving representatives of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine, government officials, the local Jewish community and hundreds of other local residents.

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Dissent Mounts Over Funds in Holocaust Settlement

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
May 30, 2006

The historic $1.25 billion settlement with Swiss banks is largely disbursed to Holocaust survivors. But as the settlement fund shrinks, dissent is mounting over how to allocate the remaining $350 million.

There are also indications the original formula used to calculate the value of individual bank accounts may have undervalued them. An economic historian involved in the claims process, Helen Junz, has suggested increasing the payout to account holders which now average $134,000, by more than 40%. That move would sap most of the fund’s remaining cash - which is already the subject of a bitter dispute between two lawyers in the case.

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Holocaust mystery is solved in Chicago
Haunting picture of boy who survived Nazis inspires researcher to piece together his fate

By Ron Grossman
Tribune staff reporter
Published May 30, 2006

For years, a professor at the University of Amsterdam was haunted by a photograph of a boy dating to the era of the Holocaust. He came across it while researching the fate of the Jewish community of a small Dutch town.

Erik Besseling knew that the child’s parents had perished. But the boy with the youthful mop of hair survived, older townspeople told Besseling.

He was given letters the parents had written from a Nazi concentration camp and a tablecloth that once covered the family’s table.

“I couldn’t stop wondering,” said Besseling, 58. “What happens after the story breaks off?”

Besseling recently discovered the unwritten chapter: The boy is now a 69-year-old Chicago businessman. Adopted by American relatives after the war, Michael Lowenthal had only vague recollections of dinners around the family table in Edam, a picture-book Dutch town where his parents had sought refuge from Hitler’s regime in 1937.

It is discouraging for those of us who recognize the significance of the covenants made between God and the descendats of Abraham to continue to hear how those who claim lineage through Judah constantly complain, mistreat their cousins who are descended from Ishmael, and generally choose to ignore the teachings of great prophets such as Moses and Isaiah. When are you going to stop griping and start appreciating what the Christian world does and clean up your act? Poor old Judah must roll over in his grave when he sees what his descendants are doing.

steve {at} aboutown(.)ca

Jewish leaders, survivors welcome pope’s visit to Nazi death camps

MORE.

By Jonathan Luxmoore
5/29/2006
Catholic News Service (www.catholicnews.com)

WARSAW, Poland – Jewish leaders and Holocaust survivors welcomed Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, although some said they thought his remarks were problematic.

The Jewish co-chairman of Poland’s Council for Christians and Jews, Stanislaw Krajewski, said Pope Benedict’s May 28 visit had provided an “exceptional occasion” to say “important things which would be heard not just in Poland, but throughout the world.” He praised the pope for his quotation from Psalm 44 that Jews were being killed and marked “as sheep to be slaughtered.”

“It’s very important he said the murder of Jews was intended to kill God himself,” Krajewski told Catholic News Service. “This is still true today, at a time when Jewish life is being devalued.”

Poland’s former foreign minister, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, said he believed Pope Benedict’s visit would confirm the church’s previous contributions to Polish-German reconciliation. Bartoszewski, who earlier welcomed the pope at the camp’s death block, said he recalled feeling “powerless and degraded” when, as a prisoner, he watched executions.

“It would have been beyond my imagination that two popes would come here — first a Pole, then a German,” Bartoszewski said, referring to Pope John Paul II’s 1979 visit to the camp. “It’s overwhelmingly symbolic that a German pope from Bavaria has now been here, and I think the whole world understands this.”

MORE.

POLAND-AUSCHWITZ May-29-2006 (930 words) With photos. xxxi

German-born pope visits Nazi death camps as ‘duty before God’

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

OSWIECIM, Poland (CNS) — German-born Pope Benedict XVI stood in silence on the site of the Nazi’s Auschwitz death camp.

He walked alone May 28 under the entrance gate sign, “Work will make you free,” and joined three dozen survivors before the wall where firing squads shot thousands.

Moving to the nearby Birkenau camp, he walked past the ruins of gas chambers where hundreds of thousands of people died from the fumes of Zyklon B gas and past the chimneys of the crematoriums where the bodies were reduced to ash.

“To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man is almost impossible — and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a pope from Germany,” he said, standing at the Holocaust memorial at the end of the railroad tracks inside Birkenau.