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Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellows to Speak at KU’s Hall Center
EducationTwo senior Israeli scholars will help the University of Kansas kick off its 2006 Jewish Lecture Series when they speak on the topic of “Conflicting Memories of the Holocaust”

Lawrence, Kan. - infoZine - Daniel Blatman and Renée Poznanski, visiting fellows at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., will address continuing debates over the extent to which the local populations of Poland and France actively participated with the Nazis.

“Drs. Blatman and Poznanski are among the leading scholars in the world in their fields,” said John Sweets, KU professor of history. “We are fortunate to have access to their cutting edge research on this controversial topic.”

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Holocaust victims’ kin urge railroad to pay

PARIS: More than 200 families plan to press the French state rail network for compensation for its role in helping transport their relatives to Nazi death camps during World War II, a lawyer said Monday.

The families - French, Israeli, American, Belgian and Canadian - plan to send a letter this week to the SNCF rail network urging compensation of several million euros, the lawyer, Avi Bitton, said. If that fails, they plan to sue, he said.

The families were encouraged by a ruling in June by a court in Toulouse, in southern France, that ordered the state and the rail authority to pay damages of €62,000, or $79,500, to family members of deportees. The SNCF has appealed that decision. (AP)

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Dominican Republic ambassador to open Holocaust exhibit in New York

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

NEW YORK, USA: Commemorating 1,000 Jews rescued from Nazi Germany by the Dominican Republic, the Dominican Republic Ambassador will open an exhibit in New York on Sunday, September 10, 2006, to honour the Dominican Republic community for its heroic role during the Holocaust.

The Harriet & Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center & Archives in New York, in conjunction with Rabbi Isidoro Aizenberg, a noted scholar of Jewish communities in the Caribbean, has produced an historical exhibit, Sosua, Haven from the Holocaust in the Tropics.

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Germany | 30.08.2006
German Officials Under Fire Over Holocaust Gaffs
Culture Minister Bernd Neumann made two consecutive apologies
Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Culture Minister Bernd Neumann made two consecutive apologies

A speech on postwar German expellees and a misdirected fax have caused embarrassment for the ministry of culture and roused accusations that Germany doesn’t take the Holocaust legacy seriously.

Red-faced officials at the German culture ministry scrambled to apologize Tuesday after two gaffes at former Nazi concentration camps.

The first occurred when Hermann Schäfer, the deputy minister for culture and media, gave a speech at a memorial concert for victims of the Buchenwald camp near Weimar in central Germany.

He spoke at length about the ordeal faced by Germans expelled from their homes by Red Army forces in the final days of World War II but failed to mention Nazi crimes or Holocaust victims at any point during the speech.

Some 250,000 people from 36 countries were imprisoned at Buchenwald between 1937 and 1945, 56,000 of whom were killed or died as a result of the camp’s grueling conditions.

In case you haven’t noticed, the season for global Holocaust contests is drawing to an end. In January, Oprah Winfrey sponsored a national high school contest that attracted 50,000 student essays on the contemporary relevance of Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night. I was a judge. In late May, the 50 winners appeared on Oprah to receive a $10,000 college scholarship.

Around the same time, the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri announced its own Holocaust contest — one of pictures, the kind that are worth 1,000 unprintable words.

The contest solicited cartoons from around the world that either mocked the Holocaust or portrayed it as a myth. The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has repeatedly said the Holocaust is a myth, and the contest was, presumably, in retaliation for cartoons, appearing nearly a year ago in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, that mocked the Prophet Muhammad. The Iranian cartoon competition drew more than 1,200 submissions from 61 countries. Six came from the United States. The 204 finalists are on display in Tehran, where the winning cartoon will receive $12,000. I was not asked to judge this competition.

A strange parallel universe these two Holocaust contests occupy. After all, the contests are based on the same historical event. Submissions flowed in simultaneously, albeit in different parts of the world. Even a cash prize for first place is comparable. And Oprah and Ahmadinejad are prominent international newsmakers who became titular figureheads for each competition.

Yet the two contests reveal vast differences in the intentions of their organizers and the expectations of the contestants. They also say much about the nature of free speech, religious tolerance and artistic freedom.

The Oprah essays were written by American teenagers, the vast majority of whom are not Jews and have no personal connection to extreme prejudice of any kind. They were reflective, mature writings — humbly written, achingly observed — seeking to comprehend the darkest hours of inhumanity and reminding the world of the consequences of indifference and moral failure.

An entirely different agenda and set of ambitions energized the artists in the Iranian competition. One cartoon depicts Jews going into a gas pipeline. Another portrays the Statute of Liberty holding a book on the Holocaust in one hand and performing a Nazi salute with the other. Many of the cartoons simply and crudely communicate the message that the Holocaust is a lie — a fictitious Big Bang that preceded the creation of Israel.

The Oprah contest sought to educate high school students about history and what happens when history is forgotten.

The Iranian cartoon contest seeks to deny and erase history, all in a misguided and feeble attempt to express a cultural and religious grievance.

Yet, in the end, aren’t both contests valid? Does art have to be literally or historically true to be deemed art? Or can the art be judged on its own merit, regardless of its point of view?

Because the winners of the Iranian cartoon contest have yet to be announced, we don’t know whether the judges will be persuaded by esthetics or politics. Yet the contest, which amounted to an all-points bulletin for Holocaust deniers, suggests that the competition is more about venality than artistry. After all, the Muhammad drawings that sparked this wave of cartoon contretemps were no great works of graphic art.

Whatever grievance existed against the Danish newspaper that published the Muhammad cartoon, it isn’t clear how denying the Holocaust punishes Danes for their blasphemy of Islam. Aside from this misdirected ricochet of revenge, the contestants in the Iranian competition have much to learn about the relationship between caricature and truth, which often supplies the wit and wisdom of graphical art. Caricature is defined as a ludicrous exaggeration of a subject. It takes the subject as a given, then distorts its characteristic features to offer another truth — sometimes deeper, sometimes debased. But caricature never obliterates the larger truth of its subject. Indeed, the very existence of the subject offers the best reason for mockery, adding dimension, colour and nuance to its underlying truth.

What the cartoonists in the Iranian competition either failed to comprehend — or understood and gleefully exploited — is that there is a world of difference between mockery and denial, between caricature and falsehood, between expressing an idea through a graphical design and altering a picture to promote a grotesque lie. Derision is one thing; denial is something else altogether.

Hamshahri originally said its contest was intended to examine whether the Western world could tolerate the mockery of its own religions. But the Holocaust is not a religion, it is a historical fact. For the Nazis, the Final Solution had nothing to do with Judaism and everything to do with Jews. A Jewless world could have practised Judaism without any objection from the Third Reich.

But here again is the crux of this clash of civilizations. The cartoons in Iran could have mocked Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — the patriarchs of Judaism — and Jews would not have hurled stones or threatened to blow up the Iranian Embassy or burned all their Persian rugs in protest. Moreover, most devout Christians, although they may not like it, realize that Jesus Christ does, occasionally, end up on a billboard, in a music video or a cartoon.

Respecting someone’s religious beliefs and allowing them to have those beliefs, and even to share them with others, are the hallmarks of a secular society, one founded on pluralism and liberal values. That’s what religious tolerance means. It doesn’t mean that religion is both freely practiced and free from criticism or caricature.

Although the Iranians have now conveniently availed themselves of free speech and artistic freedom for the one limited purpose of denying the Holocaust, all those cartoons still don’t make them enlightened citizens of the modern world. The Oprah contestants would have a lot to say about that.

Thane Rosenbaum, a novelist, essayist and law professor, is the author of The Myth of Moral Justice. This column appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

New project uses genetic testing to identify the remains of Holocaust victims

More than six decades after the victims of the Holocaust met their fateful end, a new genetically based initiative could give some of the departed the last respects they never received.

The initiative, called the DNA Shoah Project, has as its goal the identification of human remains being unearthed in European towns and cities in recent years. The hope is to match these remains with DNA samples gathered from Holocaust survivors and from descendants of the departed. The project’s ultimate aim is the creation of a DNA database that can serve as both a genetic family tree and a memorial to those who perished.

The project is the brainchild of philanthropist Syd Mandelbaum and University of Arizona geneticist Michael Hammer.

“For the next thousand years, remains will be turning up in Europe,� Mandelbaum told the Forward. “But without a DNA database there is nothing to be done with them. With a database we may be able to offer closure [to a family] and a Jewish burial.�

Mandelbaum, himself the son of survivors, got the idea for his project last fall after reading a news report about human remains unearthed at a U.S. Army base outside Stuttgart, Germany. Construction workers digging a drainage ditch unearthed a shallow grave. Since the base was near the site of a former labor camp, and medical tests determined the remains to be about 60 years old, German authorities concluded the remains were likely those of Holocaust victims, and so they contacted Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum.

But when Mandelbaum, who has a background in genetics, phoned the museum to find out whether it had a genetic database, he discovered it had none. “I decided at that moment that I could do this,� he said.

Mandelbaum’s connections in the scientific world quickly led him to Hammer, a leading human genomics researcher and a co-author of the first study that located the genetic marker for Jewish priests, or kohanim.

The project’s top priority, Hammer told the Forward, is the creation of a database of genetic profiles from individuals still alive who lost close relatives during the Holocaust. This is particularly urgent, he said, given that in 20 years’ time the survivor generation will be virtually gone.

In most forensic work, a DNA match is made between a victim and traces of the victim’s DNA, left behind in things like hair- and toothbrushes. Sometimes, however, there are no such articles available — as is the case here — and a victim is identified through DNA matches with immediate relatives.

Those who choose to participate in the project would send a cheek swab to Hammer’s lab. The lab would then extract DNA from the cells in the swab and analyze them. The resulting information would be sent to a computer database that can scan for matches.

This database will be amassed by the Gene Codes Corporation, an Ann Arbor, Mich., software company that helped identify the remains of September 11 attack victims. Howard Cash, the president of Gene Codes, became a third partner in the project.

“One of my big motivations is to assist those who made it out alive and don’t know that there is another family member out there who also made it out,� Cash said, pointing to the project’s second aim: to unite those orphaned by the Holocaust with a close relative who survived. With a large database of living survivors, internal matches among them could also turn up. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful after all these decades to find out a brother or sister had also survived?� Cash said.

On August 13, the project conducted its first collection at a meeting of San Francisco Bay Area survivors. The first few hundred tests will be done free of charge, Mandelbaum said. After that the fee will likely be between $30 and $40. Mandelbaum is hoping to raise money from private sources to cover other costs of the project.

One survivor who has expressed an interest in participating is Charles Srebnik, an investment banker who, in 1981, was a co-founder of the biotech company Genetic Engineering. “I’m very bullish on this project,� said Srebnik, who survived the war hiding out in Belgium. “My mother and I were the only survivors [from my family], and I am always looking for relatives. I’m hoping maybe I’ll find someone.�

Louis Maier, a psychoanalyst in Washington, D.C., who was orphaned during the Holocaust, also expressed interest, saying he would be glad to participate and give a sample of his DNA, despite the fact that he doesn’t expect to find any relatives. “I’m afraid I know what happened to my immediate family,� he said.

Jeannette Friedman, editor of the newsletter Together, which is aimed at Holocaust survivors and their descendants, said that some survivors might be unsettled by the connotations of genetic testing in the context of the Holocaust. The project, she said, “is really addressing the second generation more than the survivors. The second generation would ask the parents for cheek swabs, and second-generation swabs are also good.�

David Szonyi, a co-editor of “Living After the Holocaust: Reflections by Children of Survivors in America,� expressed his own doubts about the project. “What percentage of people would really benefit from this?� he asked. “Will survivors want to go through the emotional turmoil again?�

A longtime advocate for Holocaust remembrance who wished to remain anonymous also voiced concerns over the project’s impact. “There is a certain somber dignity in allowing the victims of the Holocaust to be part of this nameless, spaceless graveyard,� he said, adding that he was not questioning the project directors’ motives but wondered how many positive identifications would result. “Mostly,� he continued, “what bothers me is that this will evoke false hopes in survivors� more than 60 years after the fact.

The directors of the project recognize some of these concerns themselves. “I don’t want people to have unrealistic expectations,� Cash said. “If 20 bodies are found, that doesn’t mean we will be able to make 20 positive identifications.�

“There is no guarantee it will return anything,� Hammer said, “But even if we get nothing out of it, documenting the Holocaust genetically has value.� The DNA Shoah Project, he said, will allow the memory of the Holocaust to be extended over many generations. A match not made in the survivor’s lifetime or in the lifetime of his children or grandchildren, he concluded, may be made in a later generation, allowing the memory of the victim to live on.

Wallenberg Musical to be Performed in New York
by Karina Grudnikov

The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation is proud to announce that
“Wallenberg, a new musical, will be presented in a staged reading in New
York City on Sunday, September 17th at 7:00 p.m. and Wednesday, September
20th at 8:00 p.m. at New World Stages, located at 340 West 50th Street (bet.
8th & 9th Avenues). The production is being presented as part of the 2006
New York Musical Theatre Festival. Admission is free, but reservations are
strongly recommended.

Based on the true story of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved
100,000 people from deportation to the Nazi concentration camps, the musical
has a book and lyrics  by Laurence Holzman and Felicia Needleman, the 2006
winners of the prestigious Kleban Award, and a musical score by Benjamin
Rosenbluth.  The production is directed by and Emmy Award winner, Annette
Jolles.

The title role is played by Thom Christopher Warren, who has appeared on
Broadway in The Lion King and Once Upon a Mattress. Also in the cast of 35
are Andrea Burns, seen in Beauty and the Beast and The Full Monty, and
George Dvorsky, seen in the Broadway casts of The Scarlet Pimpernel,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Broadway veteran Alice Evans

“Wallenberg” was performed in 2005 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of
Raoul Wallenberg’s disappearance in front of a full house, with over 200
guests who gathered at the JCC Manhattan to pay tribute to the missing hero.
Ambassador Kjell Anneling, Consul General of Sweden in New York at that
time, addressed the audience and holocaust survivors Judith Saly and Vera
Goodkind, both saved through Wallenberg’s actions, narrated their personal
stories and remembered their encounters with the Swedish diplomat.

The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, with branches in New York,
Buenos Aires and Jerusalem, is a public non-profit non-governmental
organization. Its mission is to develop educational programs and public
awareness campaigns based on the values of solidarity and civic courage,
ethical cornerstones of the Saviors of the Holocaust.

To make a reservation for the staged readings, visit www.nymf.org
  or call (212) 769-1227.
For more information about the show, please visit
www.wallenbergthemusical.com.
For more information about the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation,
please visit www.raoulwallenberg.net

23 August 2006 – Secretary-General Kofi Annan considers anyone who would try to deny the truth of the Holocaust or make false claims about it to be a bigot, his spokesman told reporters at United Nations Headquarters in New York today. Responding to a question at the regular press briefing about whether Mr. Annan would raise the subject of Iran’s cartoon contest on the Holocaust during his expected upcoming visit to the country, Stephane Dujarric reiterated that Mr. Annan condemns all forms of anti-Semitism. Mr. Dujarric said that while he would not pre-judge any of the issues to be discussed, Mr. Annan has already made his views clear and has brought up the matter during previous discussions with Iranian officials. He also said that the Secretary-General, as he did during the row earlier this year over the Danish cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad, affirms the universal right to free expression while insisting it must be used responsibly, and not as an incitement to hatred against anyone or any group. Mr. Annan is likely to visit Iran as part of his trip to the Middle East and Europe, starting later this week, in which he aims to strengthen the situation in Lebanon and Israel following the formal cessation of hostilities there in the wake of the recent Security Council resolution. Asked about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reported threats against Israel, Mr. Dujarric also noted that Mr. Annan has spoken out against them before and his position has not changed. Last December Mr. Annan issued a statement expressing shock following media reports that Mr. Ahmadinejad had cast doubt on the truth of the Holocaust, in which the Nazi regime in Germany murdered one third of the world’s Jewish people during World War II, along with countless members of other minorities. He also called on UN Member States to combat Holocaust denial and to educate their populations about the well-established facts of the subject. A month earlier the General Assembly passed a resolution which rejects “any denial of the Holocaust as an historical event, either in full or in part.�

Unique Holocaust center

Norway’s new center for Holocaust Studies is opening now, housed in Villa Grande, the former home of Vidkun Quisling in Bygdøy, Oslo.

(Aftenposten English Web Desk/NTB)

Odd-Bjørn Fure in front of part of the Holocaust exhibition at the new HL-center in Oslo. PHOTO: Aas, Erlend

The HL-Center (The Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious and Life Stance Minorities) believes it has a unique ambition, trying to embrace the examination of all types of prejudiced persecution.

“We have tried not to forget any of the minorities that have been exposed to racial persecution,” said HL-Center director Odd-Bjørn Fure.

The focus point of the center is the exhibition on the genocide of Jews, particularly Norwegian Jews, and other ethnic groups during the Second World War, and presenting this to younger generations.

“We will try to focus a spotlight on racist policies towards different groups. There is a great amount of work behind this center, and I venture to say that there is no exhibition like it in the world,” Fure said.

Fure emphasizes that the center is not just a museum, but also a research center.

“Our primary concern is the future. We are not just absorbed with the past in itself, but want to follow the threads that run through history and which unfortunately also lead to genocide in our time. I am thinking, for example, of what is happening in Darfur,” Fure said.

Fure also believes that the center’s work casts a stark new light on Norway’s history during the last world war. One case in point is the Norwegian National Socialist (Nazi) regime’s eagerness in deporting Jews to Germany.

“Norwegian Jews were sent to Germany regardless of whether they had Norwegian citizenship, were stateless, or refugees. In many other countries one differentiated between Jews with citizenship who were well integrated into society, and stateless Jews,” Fure told news agency NTB, pointing out that even Hitler had initial qualms with sending integrated German Jews to the gas chambers for fear of a reaction from the German population.

Fure mentions Vichy France, Bulgaria and fascist Italy as countries that did not go as far in deportation as Nazi Norway. Fure also believes the center’s revelation that it was exclusively Norwegian Nazis that rounded up Jews, while the German SS went after Norwegian students, police and military officers, has not been published before.

Fure also claims that the Norwegian NS regime had begun planning “a Jewish solution to the Norwegian gypsy question”, and that NS plans to deport Norway’s Romany people is another research area that has not been discussed in national history before. Revelations concerning the planning of a war of extermination on the Eastern Front is another developing historical area.

“These have been sins of omission by Norwegian historians, but the past six to seven years have seen a dramatic change of attitude, and a large research project about Norway’s contribution to Nazi Germany’s war on the Eastern Front is now underway,” Fure said.

HL-Center chairman Knut Aukrust says that their goal is that every schoolchild in Norway should have paid a visit to the museum in the course of their education. Schools are already making enquiries and the center offers free services for all school classes.

The creation of the center has taken a long time, and in 1999 the project seemed doomed after the government considered it too costly. But in 2000 Norway’s parliament, the Storting, approved the property’s conversion to a Holocaust Center. Villa Grande was transferred to the center in 2005. About 50 experts have taken part in the planning of the exhibition.

Romania plans Holocaust memorial in Bucharest

Deutsche Presse Agentur
Published: Wednesday August 23, 2006

Bucharest- A model by Romanian-born artist Peter Jacobi was declared the winner of a competition by the Romanian Ministry of Culture to find a suitable memorial to over 400,000 Holocaust victims to be erected in Bucharest, Mediafax news agency reported Wednesday. Jacobi now lives in Pforzheim, south-west Germany. A deadline for completion as well as an outline of the costs were not yet available. However, the foundation stone is set to be laid on Holocaust Memorial Day, October 9.

Jacob’s model envisions a sculpture in the shape of a seven-metre high building, which can be entered, and whose central element is a glass roof with metal beams. Light and shadows are reflected on the floor of black, polished granite.

This would “illustrate the passing of a lifetime,” Jacobi said.

A Star of David sculpture is to be erected beside the building in addition to a wheel, which has symbolic value for the Roma minority persecuted by the Nazis.

Texts and the names of Romanian Holocaust locations would be engraved on a glass fibre wall.

Jacobi was born in Ploiesti, Romania, in 1935. In 1971, he became a professor for design in Pforzheim. His work includes abstract sculptures, tapestries and photographs which have been exhibited in many international shows.

In 1974, Jacobi received the Lewis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in New York, in 1976 the Baden-Wuerttemberg State Prize and in 1981 the prize from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

From 1940 to 1944, Romania was an ally of Nazi Germany. In 1941, a pogrom was conducted against Jews in the north-eastern Romanian city of Iasi. Romania was also involved in building and operating concentration camps together with the Wehrmacht in seized Soviet areas.

© 2006 DPA - Deutsche Presse-Agenteur