April 29, 2007

By Teri Greene
Montgomery Advertiser

Throughout his nearly eight decades, when asked about his early childhood memories, Henry Stern hasn’t known if those memories were really his or belonged to someone else.

Then, nearly a decade ago, he took his wife and kids to the place he called home in Westheim, Westfalen, Germany.

“And as I was going up the steps to go to the sitting room, I had a flashback,” he said. “And that again goes back to the question: Is this something you’ve heard all your life, or do you really remember it?”

He didn’t know the answer.

That sense of not knowing, of a past washed away, made him want to find those members of his family lost to the Holocaust.

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A comic novelist takes on the Holocaust
By Victoria A. Brownworth
Special to The Sun
Originally published April 29, 2007

Kalooki Nights By Howard Jacobson
Simon & Schuster / 464 pages / $26

The war in Iraq has made many of us painfully aware of the power religion has to wound as well as heal. The internecine religious civil war in Iraq exemplifies just how awry religion can go from its true purpose. The very beliefs that are meant to make us more humane can often have the opposite effect, spurring people to rage, violence, murder.

British writer Howard Jacobson journeys into this complex terrain of religious identity in his latest novel, Kalooki Nights. His protagonist, Max Glickman, is a secular Jew growing up in Manchester, England, in the 1950s when World War II and the Holocaust were fresh wounds in the Jewish community. Max’s best friends are Manny, an Orthodox Jew, and Errol, an adolescent hedonist right out of a Philip Roth novel.

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Sunday, April 29, 2007
BY DON BURKE
Star-Ledger Staff

WASHINGTON — It takes a lot to make an impression on most major league baseball players, wrapped as they are in their own me-first, where’s-my-room-service, February-through-October cocoons.

But visits this weekend to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and to Walter Reed Army Medical Center here by a handful of Mets players, executives, coaches and support personnel, stopped them in their tracks.

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ROCKBRIDGE WEEKLY

Washington and Lee University’s Hillel presents Holocaust Remembrance Activities from May 2 - May 4. The activities that have been planned range from films to a talk by a Holocaust survivor to a Jewish service.

The Holocaust Remembrance Week activities are open to the public without charge.

“The Last Days,” a film that won an Academy Award in 1999 for Best Documentary, will be shown on Thursday, May 3, at 9:30 p.m. in the Stackhouse Theater in the University Commons. “The Last Days” is the first feature documentary from Stephen Speilberg’s Shoah Foundation. It is a concise, devastating history of the Nazis’ decimation of Hungary’s Jewish population during the final days of World War II.

The film’s most searing images, shown sparingly near the end of the movie, include scenes of concentration camp inmates liberated from Auschwitz by Allied troops. These pictures are matched in impact by the interwoven testaments of five Holocaust survivors, one of whom, Irene Zisblatt, will speak at W&L on Thursday, May 3, at 5 p.m. in the Stackhouse Theater.

One of the most vivid and compelling stories is Zisblatt’s account of her deportation to Auschwitz. Before leaving, her mother had sewn a few diamonds into the hem of her dress. Arriving at Auschwitz she was strip-searched and hid the gems in her mouth and eventually had to swallow them. By swallowing them repeatedly and then retrieving them when she went to the bathroom, she was able to hold on to the diamonds for the duration of her stay. They have since been incorporated into a menorah that has become a family heirloom.

The activities at W&L during the final three days of the Holocaust Remembrance Week are:

• Wednesday, May 2, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the University Commons: Commons Atrium Scroll Signing: Sign a scroll for a victim of the Holocaust and receive a photo of the person and a remembrance paper clip. 7 p.m., film: “The Pianist” in Stackhouse Theater, Commons.

• Thursday, May 3, 5 p.m. in the Stackhouse Theater in the University Commons: Talk by Irene Zisblatt, Holocaust survivor. 9:30 p.m., film: “The Last Days” in the Stackhouse Theater, Commons.

• Friday, May 4, 5 p.m. in the University Commons, room 345: Yom Ha Shoah Service, led by Rabbi Treseder of Lynchburg. Dinner will follow in room 214 of the Commons. 10 p.m., film: “The Pianist” in the Stackhouse Theater, Commons.

By SAMANTHA GROSS (Associated Press Writer)
Associated Press
04/26/2007

NEW YORK - Khaled Abdul-Wahab was shy about his past, but the Tunisian would have been proud to be the first Arab nominated to receive an honor reserved for those who saved Jews during the Holocaust, his daughter said.

“He wouldn’t have looked for it,” Faiza Abdul-Wahab said of her father. But, she said, “he would have been very proud.”

Faiza Abdul-Wahab appeared Wednesday at Manhattan’s Yeshiva University with the grown daughter of one of the girls her father rescued in the early 1940s, when he hid more than 20 Jews during the Nazi occupation of Tunisia. The New York event followed her father’s posthumous nomination in January for recognition as “Righteous Among the Nations” in Israel.

Without Khaled Abdul-Wahab, Nadia Bijaoui said, her mother likely would not have survived World War II.

“That’s what your father did, Faiza,” Bijaoui said to her counterpart. “He loved his neighbor like he loved himself.”

The women met for the first time last week, united in part by the work of Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who researched the families’ stories and nominated Khaled Abdul-Wahab for the Israeli high honor.

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ROHNERT PARK: MEMORIAL AND EXHIBIT PLANNED FOR HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE COMMEMORATION
04/26/07 2:35 PDT
ROHNERT PARK (BCN)

Photographs of local Holocaust survivors will be displayed at Sonoma State University from May 1 to 28, and a memorial grove honoring survivors of genocide is expected to be dedicated in early 2008, the university reported.

Ilka Hartman’s photographs of survivors will be part of an exhibit called “A Second Gift of Life” and will be on display in the gallery of the Center for Culture, Gender and Sexuality on the first floor of the Sonoma State University student union.

The university reported that the concept of a memorial for Holocaust and genocide survivors was conceived of at a special event in September honoring more than 50 Holocaust survivors in Sonoma County. According to the university, Hartman’s photos of survivors were also displayed at this event.

The new memorial will feature an original symbolic sculpture and will be built on the east side of the campus adjacent to the alumni grove and near the lakes area. The memorial grove will be a collaboration between the community group “Alliance for the Study of the Holocaust,” the university’s Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide and the School of Social Sciences.

Anti-Semitics Deny Holocaust
By Tim Fasano
Apr 26 2007
According to Deborah Lipstadt, critical analysis of the facts is a Holocaust denier’s worst enemy.

The current professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University and former advisor to Secretary of State Madeline Albright on international religious persecution discussed the distressing variation on the classic themes of anti-Semitism in a lecture entitled “Holocaust Denial: The New Anti-Semitism” in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium in Goldwin Smith last night. Her appearance was sponsored by numerous organizations, including the Jewish Student Union and Students for Tolerance, Awareness and Remembering Survivors (STARS). Allison Arotsky ‘09, co-president of Geiborot, Cornell’s Jewish Women’s Forum, introduced the speaker. Arotsky stressed the importance of Lipstadt’s work, saying, “Holocaust and genocide awareness in general are still very important issues, especially considering what’s going on in Darfur today.”

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04/26/2007

April 16 this year was designated Holocaust Remembrance Day to remember the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust and to honor the survivors of the most shameful event in world history.

This year’s remembrance day commemorated 60 years since the Holocaust. While those who lived through it share a goal that the world will never forget, they also recognize the time to tell their stories is running out.

Marion Blumenthal Lazan is one of those survivors who want to tell the story firsthand to the last generation that will hear it. A Royersford church gave her that opportunity this week.

Sacred Heart Church in Royersford invited Lazan to share her story with youth, and the greater community, Tuesday night.

“I am always very grateful when I get to speak with a group of youngsters. It’s the lessons learned from that tragic period in our history (the Holocaust) that need to be taught to the children. They need to learn, not blindly follow the leader without checking their hearts and minds about what the consequences might be,” Lazan said.

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Holocaust role a spiritual journeyBy Stephen Applebaum
April 26, 2007 12:00am
news.com.au

JEFF Goldblum has had to dig deeply into his Jewish heritage for his latest film.

IN 1969, Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk wrote a novel, Adam Resurrected, whose protagonist was a German Jew and once Europe’s greatest clown. Having survived the Holocaust by entertaining victims on their way to the ovens, Adam Stein suffers a mental breakdown years later and enters rehabilitation in Israel’s Negev Desert, where he gradually finds his way back to sanity.

Now American director Paul Schrader is making the novel into a film, with Jewish-American actor Jeff Goldblum in the title role. Goldblum has been researching the role for several months when I meet him before he starts filming. The 54-year-old Pittsburgh native spent time in Berlin, talking to Holocaust survivors and studying the lives of Jews before and during the war.

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04/26/2007

Poignant memories drew survivors to a community-wide Holocaust memorial ceremony service at the Kings Bay Y.

The Yom Hashoah program – held at the community center, Nostrand Avenue and Avenue V – featured a candle lighting procession in memory of Jews killed during the Nazi horrors of World War II.

The annual commemoration – co-presented by the Jewish Community Council of Kings Bay – was part of national Holocaust prayer services.

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