March - April Public Programming Announced
for Edmond J. Safra Hall
at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust

New York, NY – The March and April public programming schedule at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust will focus on remembrance and resistance. In conjunction with the opening of the Museum’s new exhibition Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust, this year’s Annual Gathering of Remembrance on April 15 pays special tribute to the bravery of those that fought the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This annual event will bring together nearly 2,000 Holocaust survivors and their families, as well as New York’s political and community leaders for a candle-lighting service at the Museum that fulfills the sacred Jewish obligation to remember. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger will be the keynote speaker. Also on April 15, in honor of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Museum will offer free admission to the galleries where Holocaust survivors will be on hand to share their stories with Museum visitors and members of the press.

Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust will be the first large-scale exhibition at the Museum since the award-winning Ours to Fight For: American Jews in World War II. The groundbreaking exhibition, opening on April 16, will utilize first-person testimony, rare documents, and authentic artifacts to tell the little known stories of courageous men and women who risked their lives to protect their communities and their humanity.

Programs coming up in March and April at the Museum include:

• March Follies: A Preposterous Pre-Purim Pageant – Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross will host an evening of comedy, costume, and pageantry. (March 1)
• Be Fruitful and Multiply – Probing film looks at the roles of Orthodox women (March 7)
• Why Israel Matters Today – A panel of experts on the Middle East will discuss their points of view about Israel (March 11)
• My Father’s Secret War: A Memoir – Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lucinda Franks will discuss her father’s career as a spy with veteran news anchor Dan Rather (March 14)
• Passover Family Program – Spirited singer Shira Kline returns for storytelling and arts and crafts (March 18)
• The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World – Former US ambassador to the United Nations Richard C. Holbrooke interviews his wife, author Kati Marton about important Hungarian Jews (March 21)
• Regina Resnik Presents Crossing All Boundaries – Opera legend Regina Resnik hosts an afternoon of classical music with Jewish themes (March 25)
• Confronting the Perpetrators: A History of the Claims Conference – Author Marilyn Henry will discuss the negotiations that won compensation for hundreds of thousands of Nazi victims (March 28)
• Partisans of Vilna – Writer/director/producer Aviva Kempner will screen and discuss her award-winning film about the underground resistance (April 18)
• Witness – Humanitarian, journalist, and activist Ruth Gruber will discuss her remarkable life and career (April 25)

Detailed descriptions of all the programs listed above are included with this release.

The Museum’s three-floor Core Exhibition educates people of all ages and backgrounds about the rich tapestry of Jewish life over the past century–before, during, and after the Holocaust. Current special exhibitions include: A Blessing to One Another: Pope John Paul II and the Jewish People and From the Heart: The Photojournalism of Ruth Gruber. The Museum offers visitors a vibrant public program schedule in its Edmond J. Safra Hall. It is also home to Andy Goldsworthy’s memorial Garden of Stones, as well as James Carpenter’s Reflection Passage, Gift of The Gruss Lipper Foundation. The Museum receives general operating support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and is a founding member of the Museums of Lower Manhattan.

Public Programs

Thursday, March 1, 7 P.M.
March Follies: A Preposterous Pre-Purim Pageant

7-8 P.M. Pre-show festivities
8 P.M. Show begins
Hosted by Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross with comedians Julie Goldman, Seth Herzog, and Lenny Marcus

Join the “Queen of Judeo Kitsch” and her fabulous friends for a cabaret show with live music, stand up comedy, masks, and drinks. Costumes are optional — graggers and masks will be provided.

Open bar and snacks included with admission.

Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross has appeared before thousands worldwide in venues such as BAMcafé, The Ashkenaz Festival for New Yiddish Culture (Toronto), JCC Manhattan, JCC San Francisco, Burning Man Festival 2003, Lansky Lounge (NYC), the Belt Theater (NYC), Echo Club (LA) and the Limmud NY Conference. Hadassah was featured in the Channel 10 Israeli TV series “The Search for the 10 Commandments” (March 2005), and in a feature cover article for Ha’Aretz Magazine (October 2004).

Julie Goldman is an ensemble member of The New LOGO channel’s “The Big Gay Sketch Show” which is produced by Rosie O’Donnell and will air this coming spring. She has been in such independent films as Mom and Lee Friedlander’s Out at the Wedding. She is on the writing staff of “The Murray Hill Show.”

Seth Herzog performs in shows almost every night. He produces and hosts the very popular weekly show “Sweet” at the Slipper Room. He is often seen on VH-1, picking apart pop culture, and has appeared in the movies Prime, The Baxter, Safe Men, In the Weeds, and The Hottest State. On the small screen, he recently had turns on CBS’ “Love Monkey,” E!’s “#1 Single,” and Comedy Central’s “The Chappelle Show.”

Lenny Marcus has been a stand-up comedian in NYC for eleven years. He has performed at HBO’s US Comedy Arts Festival in Colorado. He has also appeared three times in the prestigious Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal. He has performed on NBC’s “Friday Nite,” NBC’s “Comedy Showcase with Louie Anderson,” and MTV’s “The Jim Brewer Show.”

$36 members, $40 non-members

Co-sponsored by the Young Friends of the Museum

The Young Friends of the Museum is made up of young professionals (21-40) dedicated to raising funds and awareness on behalf of the Museum through social, educational, and philanthropic programming. Young Friends members enjoy benefits including special events, discounts, and free Museum admission.

In cooperation with Jewcy, Storahtelling, and Zyr Russian Vodka

Wednesday, March 7, 7 P.M.
Be Fruitful and Multiply (2005-USA/Israel, 50 minutes, BETA SP)

Moderated by Shoshana Bulow, LCSW, psychotherapist; with Viva Hammer, attorney and fertility researcher; Shosh Shlam, director; and Pearl Stroh, featured in film

For many Jewish women there is no higher commandment than to “be fruitful and multiply.” In some cases this results in families with 10, 12, or even 16 children. In this even-handed documentary, director Shosh Shlam examines the roles of ultra-Orthodox women. Some of the women in the film revel in their roles as head of their large families and others decide to limit their family’s size.
Shoshana Bulow is a psychotherapist in New York City and Riverdale, NY. She is a faculty member of the Ackerman Institute for the Family and is currently a PhD candidate at the NYU School of Social Work. She is a teaching assistant at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine where she is a supervisor in family therapy. Ms. Bulow is also a trained sex therapist.
Viva Hammer is a research associate at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and partner in the DC law firm of Crowell & Moring. She has appeared in such publications as The Washingtonian, the Forward, Jewish Action, and Los Angeles Jewish Journal.

Shosh Shlam is the director of Be Fruitful and Multiply as well as the director of Last Journey Into Silence, an award-winning film about elderly Holocaust survivors in the Shaar Menashe Hospital.
Pearl Stroh is featured in Be Fruitful and Multiply and is the director of Chabad of the West Side Early Learning Center. She has a B.A. and M.A. in Early Childhood, Elementary, and Special Education and has ten children of her own.
$10 adults, $7 students/seniors, $5 members

Co-sponsored by Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance

Sunday, March 11, 1-4 P.M.
Why Israel Matters Today
Moderated by Jeffrey Goldberg, the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker and author of Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide; with professor Naomi Chazan, Hebrew University and Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo; David Makovsky, Director, Project on the Middle East Process, The Washington Institute; and Ruth R. Wisse, professor, Harvard College

Nearly sixty years ago when the United Nations approved the partition plan leading to the creation of the State of Israel, the horrors of the Holocaust were still fresh in people’s minds. Now, in 2007, as Israel copes with the aftermath of the latest in an ongoing series of wars with its Arab neighbors, and its very existence is threatened, our group of diverse speakers discusses Israel’s relevance today.

Jeffrey Goldberg is the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker. For ten years he was a Middle East correspondent for The New Yorker and for The New York Times Magazine. A winner of the National Magazine Award for Reporting, he is also a former columnist for The Jerusalem Post and the Forward.
Naomi Chazan, a professor of political science at Hebrew University, was formerly the deputy speaker of the Knesset. She has been involved for many years in the Israeli–Palestinian peace initiatives.
David Makovsky is a senior fellow and director of The Washington Institute’s Project on the Middle East Peace Process. He is also an adjunct lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
Ruth R. Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (Free Press, 2001).

$15 adults, $12 students/seniors, $10 members

The Rosenblatt Forum is made possible through a generous gift by Lief Rosenblatt, and endows a wide range of public programs.

Wednesday, March 14, 7 P.M.
My Father’s Secret War: A Memoir (Miramax Books, 2007)
Dan Rather in discussion with author Lucinda Franks

“A moving suspense story, brilliantly written and suffused with sensitivity and yearning.”
Elie Wiesel

“One of the most original memoirs of our time —an unsparing double portrait of an elusive and mysterious man and the daughter determined to learn the fullest truth about his life…moves with the dramatic and moral urgency of a Graham Greene novel.”
Joyce Carol Oates

In this riveting memoir, journalist Lucinda Franks discovers that the remote, troubled man she grew up with had in fact been a daring spy in World War II. Sworn to secrecy, he begins revealing details of his wartime activities only in the last years of his life — posing as a Nazi SS officer, slipping behind enemy lines to blow up ammunition dumps, and reporting on the atrocities found at one of the first concentration camps liberated by the Allies. A video presentation will accompany the discussion.

Lucinda Franks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who writes for The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Dan Rather was anchor and managing editor for the CBS Evening News for 24 years, and is currently global correspondent for Dan Rather Reports on HDNet.

Reception to follow program.

$5 all tickets, free for members

Sunday, March 18, 11:30 A.M.-1:30 P.M.
Passover Family Program
Presented with The Jewish Community Project Downtown (JCP)

Take a Passover journey with Shira Kline and enjoy a fun-filled afternoon of storytelling, singing, and craft activities. Children will create hand puppets to perform alongside Shira, and will make their own haggadot and chocolate matzo. Light lunch will be served. For more information please call 646-437-4300.

Shira Kline is a Jewish musician, educator, and performer living in New York City. For the past 15 years, she has worked with a diverse array of Jewish communities in New York and throughout the country. Starting at age 14, Kline began teaching Jewish music in Monroe, Louisiana. She continued her teaching while attending Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Over the years, Kline has developed an approach to Jewish learning that uses music, dance, prayer, tradition, and Torah.

Advance ticket prices: $40 per family of 4, $15 per adult, $10 per child
Door price: $45 per family of 4, $20 per adult, $10 per child
Museum Family-Level Members: $35 per family of 4, $10 per adult, $5 per child

The Museum’s family programs are made possible, in part, by the generous support of the Margaret Neubart Foundation Trust.

Wednesday, March 21, 7 P.M.
The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World (Simon and Schuster, 2006)
Richard C. Holbrooke, former US ambassador to the United Nations, interviews his wife, author Kati Marton

Kati Marton tells the story of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants and their astonishing success and influence in the West, especially in the United States. Among the men she follows are: Robert Capa, the first photographer to go ashore on D-Day; Arthur Koestler, author of the anti-Communist novel Darkness at Noon; and Michael Curtiz, the director of Casablanca.

Kati Marton, an award-winning former NPR and ABC News correspondent, is the author of Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History, a New York Times bestseller.

Richard Holbrooke was nominated by President Clinton to be Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs. Prior to becoming Assistant Secretary of State he was as U.S. Ambassador to Germany. Holbrooke has had a varied career as a professional diplomat, a magazine editor, an author, a Peace Corps director, and an investment banker.

$10 adults, $5 students/seniors, free for members

Sunday, March 25, 2:30 P.M.
Regina Resnik Presents Crossing All Boundaries
Regina Resnik, narrator; Katherine Whyte, soprano; Audrey Babcock, mezzo-soprano; Michael Philip Davis, tenor; Milos Repicky, piano

Crossing All Boundaries is the final concert in a three-year-long retrospective on Jewish classical song. Presented and narrated by opera legend Regina Resnik, the program features songs and operas on Jewish themes by famous composers, such as Kaddish by Ravel, the rarely heard Hebrew songs of Glinka, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, the brilliant and evocative Song Cycle on Jewish Folk Poetry by Shostakovich, and the New York premiere of Letter to Warsaw by Thomas Pasatieri. Classics by Tchaikovsky, Massenet, and Schubert, sung in Yiddish, and originally made popular by the great Jewish singers of the past, round out this unique concert.

Regina Resnik has had an opera career spanning more than 60 years and more than 80 roles in the great international opera houses. She became famous for roles such as Carmen and Mistress Quickly. In 1987, Regina Resnik made her musical theater debut as Fraülein Schneider in Cabaret with Joel Grey, for which she received a Tony Award nomination. Since 1997, she has been the host and narrator of the concert series “Regina Resnik Presents” — which she co-founded and co-produces with her son, tenor and stage director, Michael Philip Davis. The series has become an important presence in New York musical life, having offered such diverse programs as “Beethoven in Song,” “The Gypsy in Classical Song,” and “The Classic Kurt Weill.”

$25 adults, $20 students/seniors, $15 members

Wednesday, March 28, 7 P.M.
Confronting the Perpetrators: A History of the Claims Conference (Vallentine Mitchell , 2007)
With author Marilyn Henry

In 1951, Israel and an ad hoc consortium of Jewish organizations, known as the Claims Conference, negotiated with West Germany for “moral and material amends” for Nazi-era damages. Nearly 60 years later the Claims Conference has won compensation for hundreds of thousands of Nazi victims and established enduring legal and moral principles for redress for victims of human rights abuses.

Marilyn Henry is a contributing editor at ARTnews Magazine, prior to that she reported for the Jerusalem Post from Israel, New York, and Europe. She is a recognized authority on the recovery of properties confiscated in Europe during the Nazi and Communist eras. Her work also has appeared in the Washington Post, Die Welt and other media outlets.

$5 all tickets, free for members

This program is part of the Museum’s book club, Looking Back, Facing Forward, co-sponsored by the Forward and moderated by its associate editor, Gabriel Sanders.

Sunday, April 15
DAY-LONG OBSERVANCE

Yom HaShoah
Holocaust Remembrance Day

Come to the Museum to remember those who were lost, and learn from those who survived. Hear personal stories from artifact donors, Holocaust survivors, and their families.

Museum admission is free for everyone

Annual Gathering of Remembrance 2 P.M.

Join community leaders for New York City’s oldest and largest commemoration to honor the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. This year’s Annual Gathering of Remembrance will be held at the Museum. The keynote speaker will be Henry Kissinger.
Henry Kissinger was the 56th Secretary of State of the United States from 1973 to 1977, continuing to hold the position of Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs which he first assumed in 1969 until 1975. Kissinger has written many books and articles on United States foreign policy, international affairs, and diplomatic history. Among the awards he has received are the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Nobel Peace Prize.
Tickets are required for this event. Please call 646-437-4200 ext. 4490 for more information.

Co-sponsored by the Museum, the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization, and the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, in association with the Anti-Defamation League, Consulate General of Israel, Jewish Community Relations Council of New York Inc., New York Board of Rabbis, and UJA-Federation of New York.

Wednesday, April 18, 7 P.M.
Partisans of Vilna (1986, 130 minutes, 35 mm)
Post-screening discussion with producer Aviva Kempner and survivors featured in film

Interviews with survivors of the Jewish resistance movement tell the largely unknown story of young Jews and others who organized an underground resistance in the Vilna Ghetto and fought as partisans in the woods. Among those featured are Israeli poet Abba Kovner, a resistance leader, and Chaika Grossman, former Israeli Knesset member.

Screened in conjunction with the Museum’s new exhibition opening April 16th: Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust.

Aviva Kempner is also the writer, director and producer of “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg” (2000). The film was awarded top honors by the National Society of Film Critics, the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Circle, and the Broadcast Film Critics Association. The film also received a George Peabody Award and was nominated for an Emmy. She also wrote the narration for “Promises to Keep”, an Academy Award®-nominated documentary on the homeless. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, DC Mayor’s Art Award, Women of Vision award and Media Arts Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, Kempner is also the founder of the Washington Jewish Film Festival.

$10 adults, $7 students/seniors, $5 members

Wednesday, April 25, 7 P.M.
Witness (Schocken Books, 2007)
Author Dava Sobel in discussion with Ruth Gruber

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from modern day hero Ruth Gruber, and to celebrate the publication of Witness, her new book. Gruber, now 95, will share her incredible stories about life as an adventurer, international correspondent, photographer, and witness to—and maker of — history.

Humanitarian, journalist, and activist Ruth Gruber is also the author of several books including Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America, Exodus 1947, and Raquela, which won the National Jewish Book Award. Haven was made into a miniseries in 2001 starring Natasha Richardson as Ruth.

Dava Sobel, a former New York Times science reporter and Ruth Gruber’s niece, is the author of Longitude (Walker 1995 and 2005, Penguin 1996), Galileo’s Daughter (Walker 1999, Penguin 2000) and The Planets (Viking 2005). In her thirty years as a science journalist she has written for many magazines, including Audubon, Discover, Life and The New Yorker, served as a contributing editor to Harvard Magazine and Omni, and co-authored five books, including Is Anyone Out There? with astronomer Frank Drake.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition: From the Heart: The Photojournalism of Ruth Gruber.

$5 all tickets, free for members

Exhibitions

Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust
Opens April 16, 2007

During the Holocaust, Jews throughout Europe, through individual and collective acts of resistance, sought to undermine the Nazi goal of the annihilation of the Jewish people. Jews engaged in a range of resistance activities with the aim of preserving Jewish life and dignity despite unimaginable difficulties. Their efforts powerfully refute the popular perception that Jews were passive victims. Through testimony, archival footage, and authentic artifacts, the exhibition will help visitors to understand the dilemmas that Jews faced under impossible circumstances. Whether praying clandestinely, documenting the experiences of Jews in the ghettos, or taking up arms to fight, these responses took many forms, but each and every one was a courageous act of resistance.

This exhibition was made possible through major funding from: Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Elizabeth Meyer Lorentz Fund of The New York Community Trust, the Edmond J. Safra Philanthropic Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.*

Generous leadership gifts were made by: Frank and Cesia Blaichman, Patti Askwith Kenner and Family, George and Adele Klein, Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert, and Shalom and Varda Yoran.

Additional support was provided by: The David Berg Foundation, Nancy Fisher, Robert I. Goldman Foundation, The Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation, L’Oréal USA, Nash Family Foundation, Righteous Persons Foundation, and Gil and Claire (Israelit) Zweig.

*Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

From The Heart: The Photojournalism of Ruth Gruber
Through October 7, 2007

A world-renowned journalist now 95 years old, Ruth Gruber had backstage access to the history of the Jewish people: she escorted war refugees from Europe to America, visited Displaced Persons camps, detailed the plight of the Exodus 1947, described the establishment of the State of Israel, and documented the State’s ingathering of refugees—from Europe, Iraq, Yemen, and Ethiopia. Emissary for Harold Ickes and FDR, friend to Eleanor and Golda, Ruth’s life and work are inextricably bound with the rescue and survival of the Jewish people.

From the Heart is made possible through the generosity and admiration of Friends of Ruth Gruber. Many of the photographs is the exhibition appear in Ruth Gruber’s forthcoming book, Witness, to be published in April 2007 by Schocken Books.

A Blessing to One Another: Pope John Paul II and the Jewish People
Extended through March 16, 2007

This exhibition traces the life of Karol Wojtyla from his childhood in Poland through World War II and beyond. The exhibition examines Pope John Paul II’s enduring friendship with Jews, and how these relationships informed his ministry and papacy, shaping significantly the relationship between the Church and the Jewish people.

A Blessing to One Another: Pope John Paul II and the Jewish People was created and produced by Xavier University (Cincinnati), Hillel Jewish Student Center (Cincinnati), and The Shtetl Foundation. The New York exhibition is presented by the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust thanks to the generosity of Peter S. Kalikow, The Russell Berrie Foundation, The Fritz and Adelaide Kauffmann Foundation; the Ollendorff Center for Religious and Human Understanding, the Oster Family Foundation, and the Theodore and Renee Weiler Foundation. The Museum also thanks the Pave the Way Foundation and the Center for Interreligious Understanding. The lead financial sponsors of A Blessing To One Another are the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati and Xavier University. Media sponsorship provided by the New York Post.

Reflection Passage
On permanent display

MacArthur Fellow and architectural artist James Carpenter’s site-specific installation captures New York Harbor’s ephemeral qualities of light and water and re-presents them inside a main passageway of the waterfront Museum, creating a shimmering and ever-changing reflection.

The external events of the harbor displayed within the Museum environment are seen as a “mirroring of reality,” capturing the daily seasonal light and weather cycles. Andy Goldsworthy’s Garden of Stones sits one level below the Carpenter installation, and like the garden, Reflection Passage relies upon changes in the natural world to complete the artistic process.

Reflection Passage is the Gift of The Gruss Lipper Foundation.

Garden of Stones
On permanent display

Andy Goldsworthy’s only permanent commission in New York City, Garden of Stones is a contemplative space dedicated to the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust and honoring those who survived. There is no charge to visit the garden, which is open during regular Museum hours.

Each of the 18 boulders in the Garden of Stones holds a tiny sapling evoking not only the adversity and struggle endured by those who experienced the Holocaust, but also the tenacity and fragility of life. Survivors and their families helped the artist plant the garden in September 2003.

General Information

TICKETS
To purchase tickets to public programs call (646) 437-4202, or visit our website at www.mjhnyc.org, or visit the Museum in Lower Manhattan.

MUSEUM HOURS
Sunday through Tuesday, Thursday 10 a.m. to 5:45 p.m.
Wednesday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Friday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through October 29.
Friday 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. October 30-March 11.
The Museum is closed on Saturday and major Jewish holidays
The Museum will close at 3 p.m. on April 2 and 8. The Museum will be closed on April 3, 4, 9, and 10 for Pesach.

MUSEUM ADMISSION
General Museum admission is $10 for adults, $7 for seniors, and $5 for students. Members and children 12 and younger are admitted free.

Museum admission is free on Wednesday evenings between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Note: Tickets to public programs do not include Museum admission. Public programs may require a separate fee.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft

OP-ED

U.N. is fighting Holocaust denial,
but victims’ kin must do the most

By Menachem Z. Rosensaft
January 29, 2007

NEW YORK, Jan. 29 (JTA) — On Monday, my wife Jeanie and I were in the United Nations General Assembly Hall together with Rabbi Kenneth Stern and Vivian Bernstein to take part in the second Universal Commemoration in Memory of Holocaust Victims.

Vivian is co-chief of the Group Programmes Unit of the U.N.’s Department of Public Information. Ken is our rabbi at Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan.

The four of us are also children of Holocaust survivors. My parents, Vivian’s mother and Ken’s mother all were inmates of the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Jeanie’s father was a partisan in the forests of Belarus, and her mother was a hidden child.

As we stood there, the four of us were fully aware of our somber responsibility. My parents and Vivian’s and Ken’s mothers are no longer alive. We were there because of them and for them.

We were there to ensure that their horrendous experiences, the brutal mass murder of their families, our families and the attempted annihilation of European Jewry as a whole would become permanently engraved in the annals of humankind. We were there to represent them in the preservation and protection of memory. We were there because the ranks of the survivors are steadily dwindling, and because soon their voices will no longer be heard.

Anti-Semites of all types are becoming increasingly emboldened in their ongoing desecration of the memory of the Holocaust. Less than two months ago, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and other Holocaust deniers got together in Tehran for an international conference on what was disingenuously called “Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision.”

Last week, the U.N. General Assembly deemed it necessary to adopt a resolution urging “all member states unreservedly to reject any denial of the Holocaust as a historical event, either in full or in part, or any activities to this end.”

The threat posed by Holocaust deniers has frequently been underestimated. As recently as 2001, the conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg, while acknowledging Holocaust deniers to be “ignorant and evil,” called them “irrelevant and, therefore, relatively harmless.”

It took Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to awaken the international community. When the head of a country with nuclear ambitions combined his repeated calls for the destruction of Israel with public references to the Holocaust as a “myth,” people began to pay attention. When he convened Holocaust deniers from across the globe to a government-sponsored pseudo-academic conference, the danger represented by this assemblage of sociopaths became self-evident.

Holocaust denial is anti-Semitism in one of its most virulent forms. It seeks to deprive our murdered family members of their very existence as a means to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel.

In his historic address to the U.N. General Assembly on Jan. 27, 2005, my teacher and mentor Elie Wiesel declared that what the enemy of the Jewish people sought to accomplish in the Shoah “was to put an end to Jewish history. What he wanted was a new world implacably, irrevocably devoid of Jews.”

It’s true that even though the State of Israel was created by the United Nations in large part as a consequence of and in response to the Holocaust, the Jewish people and the Jewish state have had an often rocky, sometimes deeply troubling relationship with the world body. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the 1975 General Assembly Resolution that denigrated Zionism as a form of racism was adopted while the organization’s secretary-general was Kurt Waldheim, who subsequently was exposed as a Nazi and a liar.

Beginning in 1991, the United Nations gradually has reclaimed its role as a legitimate bastion against genocide. That year, the noxious “Zionism is racism” resolution was rescinded by an overwhelming majority.

In 2004, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan acknowledged that “our organization came into being when the world had just learned the full horror of the concentration and extermination camps. It is therefore rightly said that the United Nations emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust. And a human-rights agenda that fails to address anti-Semitism denies its own history.”

In 2005, the General Assembly proclaimed Jan. 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, as an annual International Day of Commemoration to honor the victims of the Holocaust. Thus there is every reason to believe that the General Assembly’s condemnation of Holocaust denial was sincere, and that the United Nations may be an important ally in our ongoing war against the mortal enemies of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

We may not, however, allow ourselves to become complacent. We cannot rely on others to preserve and protect the remembrance of our murdered families. After all, it took many years for even the Jewish community to begin to appreciate the significance of the Holocaust in Jewish history. And we hear too many disturbing murmurs from certain rabbis and academicians that the Holocaust is being overemphasized in Jewish education.

My father, the fiery leader of the survivors of Bergen-Belsen, was once described by historian Lucy Dawidowicz as “our Ancient Mariner, who passes, ‘like night, from land to land,’ with ‘strange powers of speech’ to tell his tale to whomsoever will listen.” Because the survivors’ memories are their legacy not only to us but to the world, we, their children and grandchildren, must and will assume our parents’ and grandparents’ role as the principal guardians of Holocaust remembrance.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a lawyer, is founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.

All Things Considered: January 27, 2007
JACKI LYDEN, host:

On this day, 62 years ago, the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated. About 250,000 survivors of the Holocaust live in Israel today. And, as NPR’s Linda Gradstein reports, up to one-third of them live below the poverty line.

LINDA GRADSTEIN: Seventy-three-year-old Rosa Zusman(ph) was eight years old when the German army approached her native Ukraine. She and her family fled ahead of the army and ended up in Uzbekistan. But many members of her family who stayed behind were killed in the Holocaust. After the war, Rosa returned to Ukraine and married.

MORE.

It’s time to bring this matter to an end

By Amiram Barkat

The battle waged by Holocaust survivors against Swiss banks was a resounding achievement that set a precedent for minority groups seeking reparations for historic injustices, according to Professor Michael Bazyler, an international expert in the field of Holocaust restitution. In his opinion, rising anti-Semitism, inflated legal fees, and infighting among Jewish groups with regard to the distribution of funds among Jewish organizations, did not manage to damage this battle’s overwhelming success. However, he criticizes the foot-dragging adopted by Israeli banks and the state in returning the assets of deceased Holocaust victims.

On October 3, 1996, Jewish-American attorney Edward Fagan filed a suit against the Swiss bank UBS in a New York federal district court. The appellant was Gizella Weisshaus, an elderly Holocaust survivor from Romania, who attempted, for half a century, to obtain the funds her father deposited in the Swiss bank. Weisshaus initially paid her legal fees to Fagan in the form of cakes and kugel. Her lawsuit represented the beginning of a fascinating historical, legal and political process.

MORE.

Sign of Haredi society coming to grips with the Holocaust
By Tamar Rotem

The conference on rabbinical writing in the Holocaust, held at Jerusalem’s Binyanei Hauma Convention Center Sunday evening, may mark a step forward in the ultra-Orthodox community coming to grips with the Shoah.

The conference was organized by its sponsors, the Jerusalem Municipality’s Torah Culture Department, as an evening for women. Indeed, Holocaust education and documentation has become predominantly a women’s occupation in ultra-Orthodox society, as women are the ones who advance it in the educational seminars and colleges.

The conference hosts presented a CD-ROM containing a database of prefaces to religious texts - Torah interpretations and meditative literature - written from 1945 onward by rabbis who survived the Holocaust. Only one of the prefaces was written before the end of World War II. MORE.

Greek Jewish leaders noted the country’s lack of Holocaust memorials.

“It is really perplexing that Athens is the only European capital that does not have a monument of Jewish martyrs,” Moses Kostantinis, president of the Central Jewish Board in Greece, said Monday in Athens at a service marking the U.N.-designated Holocaust memorial day.

Athens Mayor Nikos Kaklamanis promised that a monument would be erected soon.

The commemoration started in the Athens synagogue, and participants then laid a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier outside Parliament and went to the Greek Orthodox Metropolis, where Kostantinis and the archbishop of Greece unveiled a plaque at the feet of the statue of Damaskinos, the country’s archbishop during World War II.

Damaskinos sent a letter to the wartime Greek prime minister, saying that he would be held accountable if any harm befell the country’s Jews.

When the German commandant of Greece told Damaskinos that he would shoot him if he did not rescind the letter, Damaskinos reportedly answered: “Greek clerics are never shot. They are hanged. Please respect the tradition.”

Damaskinos helped save hundreds of Jews by giving them false identity cards.

UN Holds Holocaust Memorial Service
By Peter Heinlein
United Nations
29 January 2007

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The United Nations has held observances to mark the International Day of Commemoration of Victims of the Holocaust. VOA’s correspondent at the U.N. Peter Heinlein reports.

The U.N. General Assembly Hall was filled Monday with Holocaust survivors, along with relatives and friends of victims. They were there to observe the second annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, dedicated to teaching young people about the dangers of hatred, bigotry and racism.

Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Dan Gillerman, reminded the visitors that they were sitting in the same seats where, in 1975, General Assembly delegates adopted a resolution equating Zionism and racism.

He said, “Your presence here today, filling this very hall, where only 30 years ago, Zionism was equated with racism, is the ultimate answer to all the evil rhetoric, and the ultimate victory of good over evil.”

The Zionism-equals-racism resolution was eventually revoked in 1991 by an overwhelming majority of the Assembly.

The current Assembly President, Sheikha Haya Rashed al-Khalifa, called the Holocaust a “unique evil,” with consequences that reverberate in the present.

MORE.

Holocaust memorial starts Farsi site
By Aron Heller, The Associated Press
JERUSALEM — Israel’s Holocaust memorial has launched a version of its website in Farsi to educate the country’s most bitter enemy — Iran — about the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews.

Iran has faced widespread condemnation for hosting a conference last month that questioned whether the Holocaust took place. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust a “myth” and said Israel should be “wiped off the map.”

The website was unveiled this week to coincide with Saturday’s U.N. annual Holocaust remembrance day, officials said. Saturday marked the 62nd anniversary of the Auschwitz death camp’s liberation by the advancing Soviet army.

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“Every year, nearly 20,000 people from Muslim countries, including Iran, visit the Yad Vashem website,” said Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem memorial. “We believe that making credible, comprehensive information about the Holocaust available to Persian speakers can contribute to the fight against Holocaust denial.”

Geneva, Jan. 29, 2007 — Following is the Keynote Address by Professor Irwin Cotler, a longtime board member of UN Watch, delivered at today’s Holocaust commemoration ceremony at the European Headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva.

Professor Cotler is a member of Canada’s parliament and its former Minister of Justice. A board member of the Geneva-based UN Watch, Cotler is a distinguished academic and a prominent human rights lawyer, whose dedication to humanitarian causes has earned him the Order of Canada and many other awards. Professor Cotler has represented Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly Sharansky in the Soviet Union, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Nigerian playwright and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, and most recently Saad Edin Ibrahim, an Egyptian sociologist and democracy advocate whose criticism of Egypt’s Mubarak government resulted in his incarceration. Maclean’s magazine has referred to Cotler as “Counsel for the Oppressed.” He has been a leader in the development of international humanitarian law and has to his credit landmark cases in free speech, freedom of religion, women’s rights, minority rights and peace law.

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Please Check Against Delivery

Mr. Director-General, Ambassadors, Excellencies, Survivors, and Friends:

May I preface my remarks with a personal statement. Whenever I speak on the Holocaust (the Shoah) I do so with a certain degree of humility, and not without a deep sense of pain.

For I am reminded of what my parents taught me while still a young boy — the profundity and pain of which I realized only years later — that there are things in Jewish history that are too terrible to be believed, but not too terrible to have happened; that Oswiencim, Majdanek, Dachau, Treblinka — these are beyond vocabulary. Words may ease the pain, but they may also dwarf the tragedy. For the Holocaust was uniquely evil in its genocidal singularity, where biology was inescapably destiny, a war against the Jews in which, as Nobel Peace Laureate Professor Elie Wiesel put it, “not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims”.

We meet at an important moment of remembrance and reminder, of witness and warning:

• on the 62nd anniversary of the liberation of the death camps — of the liberation of the surviving remnants of “Planet Auschwitz” — the most horrific laboratory of mass murder in history;

• on the 62nd anniversary of the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg in January 1945 into the Soviet Gulag — this Hero of Humanity, this Saint Just of the Nations, whom the United Nations called the greatest humanitarian of the 20th Century, who showed that one person could confront evil, resist and prevail, and thereby transform history;

• on the eve of the 62nd anniversary of the United Nations, which as former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, “emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust”, and intended “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”; and where, as he reminded us, “a UN that fails to be at the forefront of the fight against anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, denies its history and undermines its future”;

• in the aftermath of the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg Principles, which became the forerunner of what has come to be known as international humanitarian and criminal law, but reminding us also of the double entendre of Nuremberg — the Nuremberg of jackboots as well as the Nuremberg of judgments, the Nuremberg of racism as well as the Nuremberg principles;

• on the first anniversary of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust — which is being commemorated for the first time in the Salle des Assemblées — the venue of the “gathering storm” of the Thirties that was not averted — so that we may remember and be reminded, bear witness and heed the warning — never again — not now, not ever.

And so, on this Anniversary of Anniversaries, on this day of days, some 60 years after the Holocaust, the birth of the U.N. — the double entendre of Nuremberg — on the eve of the 60th anniversary in 2008 of the Genocide Convention — the “never again” convention — and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — we have to ask ourselves, what have we learned and what must we do?

May I now summarize the universal lessons of the Holocaust — the lessons to be learned and the action to be taken. For as Kierkegaard put it, “life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards”.

Lesson 1 — The Importance of Holocaust Remembrance

The first lesson is the importance of Zachor, of remembrance itself. For as we remember the six million Jewish victims of the Shoah — defamed, demonized and dehumanized, as prologue or justification for genocide — we have to understand that the mass murder of six million Jews and millions of non-Jews is not a matter of abstract statistics.

For unto each person there is a name — unto each person, there is an identity. Each person is a universe. As our sages tell us: “whoever saves a single life, it is as if he or she has saved an entire universe.” Just as whoever has killed a single person, it is as if they have killed an entire universe. And so the abiding imperative — that we are each, wherever we are, the guarantors of each other’s destiny.

Lesson 2 — The Danger of State-Sanctioned Incitement to Hatred and Genocide — The Responsibility to Prevent

The enduring lesson of the Holocaust is that the genocide of European Jewry succeeded not only because of the industry of death and the technology of terror, but because of the state-sanctioned ideology of hate. This teaching of contempt, this demonizing of the other, this is where it all began. As the Canadian courts affirmed in upholding the constitutionality of anti-hate legislation, “the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers — it began with words”. These, as the Courts put it, are the chilling facts of history. These are the catastrophic effects of racism.

Forty years later, in the Nineties, these lessons not only remained unlearned, but the tragedy was repeated. For we witnessed, yet again, a growing trafficking in state-sanctioned hate and incitement, which in the Balkans and in Rwanda took us down the road to genocide.

And as we meet, we are witnessing yet again, a state-sanctioned incitement to hate and genocide, whose epicentre is Ahmadinejad’s Iran — and I distinguish President Ahmadinejad from the people of Iran, many of whom have themselves repudiated his remarks. For President Ahmadinejad denies the Nazi Holocaust as he incites to a Middle Eastern one — an assault on Jewish memory and truth in its denial of the Holocaust, which the U.N. General Assembly rebuked several days ago; and a violation of the prohibition against the “direct and public incitement to genocide” in the Genocide Convention, which U.N. Secretaries-General Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-Moon respectively called “shocking” and “unacceptable”, indeed, an assault on the very U.N. charter, which prohibits such incitement and threat.

Lesson 3 — The Danger of Silence, The Consequences of Indifference — The Duty to Protect

The genocide of European Jewry succeeded not only because of the state-sanctioned culture of hate and industry of death, but because of crimes of indifference, because of conspiracies of silence.

We meet today in the majestic Salle des Assemblées of the former League of Nations. It was here that Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie pleaded in vain for protection from Mussolini’s 1935 aggression. Fascism marched ahead, winning one victory after another. It was here that while the gathering storm of war advanced, with Czechoslovakia surrendering to Hitler in 1938, further appeals for protection went unheeded. The response was international indifference, a failure of moral resolve, and the result was world war and genocide.

We are assembled here on the banks of Lake Geneva, on the other side of which lies Evian-des-Bains. It was here in 1938 that the international community considered the plight of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees desperate to flee worsening persecutions in Nazi Germany and Austria. But the nations looked away. As it was said at the time, the world was divided into those places where the Jews could not live, and those places where they could not enter. Hitler drew his lessons.

As we gather here today to commemorate the Holocaust in this historic Assembly Hall, with the representatives of the international community and civil society, let us pledge that never again will we be indifferent to aggression, hatred and incitement.

And indeed we have witnessed an appalling indifference and inaction in our own day which took us down the road to the unthinkable — ethnic cleansing in the Balkans — and down the road to the unspeakable — the genocide in Rwanda — unspeakable because this genocide was preventable. No one can say that we did not know. We knew, but we did not act, just as we know and have yet to act to stop the genocide by attrition in Darfur, ignoring the lessons of history, betraying the people of Darfur, and mocking the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

And so, it is our responsibility to break down these walls of indifference, to shatter these conspiracies of silence and inaction — to stand up and be counted and not look around to see whoever else is standing before we make a judgement to do so; because in the world in which we live, there are few enough people prepared to stand, let alone be counted, reminding us of the words of Edmund Burke, “the surest way to ensure that evil will triumph in the world is for enough good people to do nothing”.

Indifference and inaction always mean coming down on the side of the victimizer, never on the side of the victim. Let there be no mistake about it — indifference in the face of evil is acquiescence with evil itself — it is complicity with evil.

Lesson 4 — Combating Mass Atrocity and the Culture of Impunity — The Responsibility to Bring War Criminals to Justice

If the 20th Century — symbolized by the Holocaust — was the age of atrocity, it was also the age of impunity. Few of the perpetrators were brought to justice; and so, just as there must be no sanctuary for hate, no refuge for bigotry, there must there be no base or sanctuary for these enemies of humankind. In this context, the establishment of the International Criminal Court must be seen as the most dramatic development in international criminal law since Nuremberg — to deter mass atrocity, to protect the victims, and to prosecute the perpetrators.

Lesson 5 — The Trahison des Clercs — The Responsibility to Talk Truth to Power

The Holocaust was made possible, not only because of the “bureaucratization of genocide”, as Robert Lifton put it, but because of the trahison des clercs — the complicity of the elites — physicians, church leaders, judges, lawyers, engineers, architects, educators, and the like. Indeed, one only has to read Gerhard Muller’s book on “Hitler’s Justice” to appreciate the complicity and criminality of judges and lawyers; or to read Robert-Jan van Pelt’s book on the architecture of Auschwitz, to be appalled by the minute involvement of engineers and architects in the design of death camps, and so on. Holocaust crimes, then, were also the crimes of the Nuremberg elites. As Elie Wiesel put it, “Cold-blooded murder and culture did not exclude each other. If the Holocaust proved anything, it is that a person can both love poems and kill children”.

And so it is our responsibility to speak truth to power, and to hold power accountable to truth. And those entrusted with the education and training of the elites should ensure that Elie Wiesel is studied in schools of law and not just in classes of literature; that the double entendre of Nuremberg — of Nuremberg racism as well as the Nuremberg Principles — is part of our learning as it is part of our legacy; that Holocaust education underpin our perspective as it informs our principles — on justice and injustice.

Lesson 6 — Holocaust Remembrance — The Responsibility to Educate

Sweden is a case-study of how Holocaust education, can not only teach an entire society of the importance of Holocaust remembrance and reminder — of witness and warning — but how it can engage that whole society in “living history” — in the teaching, learning, and internalization of Holocaust sensibility — where the particularity of the Holocaust has universal resonance.

In particular, in the spirit of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, states should commit themselves to the constituent elements of the Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, which included, inter alia, the understanding that:

“the Holocaust fundamentally challenged the foundations of civilization…[its] unprecedented character will always hold universal meaning…[its] magnitude…must be forever seared in our collective memory…together we must uphold the terrible truths of the Holocaust against those who deny it.

We must strengthen the moral commitment of our people and the political commitment of our governments, to ensure that future generations can understand the causes of the Holocaust and reflect upon its consequences.

We pledge to strengthen efforts to promote education, remembrance and research about the Holocaust…

We share a commitment to encourage the study of the Holocaust in all its dimensions…a commitment to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and to honour those who stood against it…a commitment to throw light on the still obscured shadows of the Holocaust…a commitment to plant the seeds of a better future amidst the soil of a bitter past…a commitment…to remember the victims who perished, respect the survivors still with us, and reaffirm humanity’s common aspiration for mutual understanding and justice.”

Lesson 7 — The Vulnerability of the Powerless — The Protection of the Vulnerable as the Test of a Just Society

The genocide of European Jewry occurred not only because of the vulnerability of the powerless, but also because of the powerlessness of the vulnerable. It is not surprising that the triage of Nazi racial hygiene — the Sterilization Laws, the Nuremberg Race Laws, the Euthanasia Program — targeted those “whose lives were not worth living”; and it is not unrevealing, as Professor Henry Friedlander points out in his work on “The Origins of Genocide”, that the first group targeted for killing were the Jewish disabled — the whole anchored in the science of death, the medicalization of ethnic cleansing, the sanitizing even of the vocabulary of destruction.

And so it is our responsibility as government representatives — and, morally, as citoyens du monde — to give voice to the voiceless, as we seek to empower the powerless — be they the disabled, the poor, the refugee, the elderly, the women victims of violence, the vulnerable child — the most vulnerable of the vulnerable.

Indeed, perhaps the most important human rights lesson I learned was taught to me by my daughter, now 27, when she was 15 years of age, when she said: “Daddy, if you want to know the real test of human rights, always ask yourself, at any time, in any situation, in any part of the world, ‘is it good for children? Is what is happening good for children?’ That’s the real test of human rights, Daddy.”

Conclusion

May I close with a word to the survivors of the Holocaust — for you are the true heroes of humanity. You witnessed and endured the worst of inhumanity, but somehow you found in the depths of your own humanity the courage to go on, to rebuild your lives as you have built your communities. And so it is with you, and because of you, and because of the righteous among the nations — like Raoul Wallenberg — that we remember that each person has a name and an identity — that each person is a universe — that in saving one life we save an entire universe.

We remember — and we pledge — and this must not be a matter of rhetoric but must be a commitment to action — that never again will we be indifferent to incitement and hate; that never again will we be silent in the face of evil; that never again will we indulge racism and anti-semitism; that never again will we ignore the plight of the vulnerable; that never again will we be indifferent in the face of mass atrocity and impunity.

We will speak and we will act against racism, against hate, against anti-semitism, against mass atrocity, against injustice — and against the crime of crimes whose name we should even shudder to mention — genocide.

And yes, always, against indifference, against being bystanders to injustice. For in what we say, or more importantly in what we do, we will be making a statement about ourselves as a people, we will be making a statement about ourselves as people. For in our day, more than ever, qui s’excuse s’accuse, whoever remains indifferent indicts themselves.

May this day be not only an act of remembrance, which it is, but let it be a remembrance to act, which it must be.

Germans recall Holocaust victims

29 January 2007

Berlin (dpa) - Germans held services around the country on Saturday to mark the annual Holocaust Memorial Day, while the country’s Jewish community issued a stern warning about the danger of denying the crime in which some six million Jews were murdered.

Politicians led the way in the ceremonies at various Holocaust sites in marking the day set up to coincide with the January 27, 1945 liberation of the infamous Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz.

In Berlin, the Greens party laid a wreath at the Pulitzbruecke memorial, with party leader Claudia Roth saying, “we are responsible for battling right-wing extremism, anti-Semitic and anti-foreigner attitudes.”

Pulitzbruecke was the former railway station used during World War II for the deportation of Berlin’s Jews to concentration camps.

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