By Judith Latham
Washington
24 August 2007

Confronting AntiSemitism
Last few years have witnessed a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the world
The Secretary of State’s “Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism” is a position that grew out of the 2004 Global Anti-Semitism Review Act passed by the U.S. Congress. The Congress had noted a rise in anti-Semitic incidents around the world. They include violence against Jews, desecration of Jewish property, publication of books by government-owned publishing houses that encourage “hatred toward Jews,” and conferences sponsoring denial of the Holocaust.

Last year Gregg Rickman was appointed to the position of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. A former director of congressional affairs at the Republican Jewish Coalition, Mr. Rickman is the author of two books – Swiss Banks and Jewish Souls and Conquest and Redemption: A History of Jewish Assets from the Holocaust. Speaking with host Carol Castiel of VOA News Now’s Press Conference USA, Gregg Rickman says that from 2002 to 2004 there were numerous attacks against Jews and attacks on synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Europe. The U.S. State Department, he says, has been working with foreign governments and with multilateral agencies to combat such incidents and to develop educational programs promoting tolerance. Mr. Rickman notes that, although previous conferences in Berlin and Cordoba have dealt solely with anti-Semitism, this June’s conference in Bucharest dealt with intolerance and discrimination against Christians and Muslims as well.

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New WJC Exec: Lauder To Head Restitution Effort
Embattled group’s new secretary general, in first interview, says ‘heavyweight’ WJC president to spearhead negotiations.
Steve Lipman - Staff Writer

The new top leadership team of the embattled World Jewish Congress will head to Eastern Europe soon to re-energize stalled negotiations over Holocaust-era restitution payments, Michael Schneider, the group’s next secretary general, said this week.

The political discussions will represent a return by the WJC, perceived as rudderless in recent years, to the activity that cemented its reputation as a representative of Jewish interests.

Schneider, whose appointment as the WJC’s top professional was approved last week by the organization’s steering committee, said he and President Ronald Lauder agree that the money owed by several Eastern European governments to the countries’ Jewish communities and to individual Holocaust survivors — compensation for funds and property taken out of Jewish hands during the time of Nazism and Communism — ranks as the first priority of the WJC.

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Israel’s ambassador will speak with a top Jewish Democrat after the congressman wrote to express his “disappointment” in Israel for turning away Sudanese refugees.

“The ambassador hopes to be speaking with Congressman Emanuel in the coming days,” an embassy spokesman said on Thursday, confirming that the embassy had received the letter from Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), the fourth ranked Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“I am writing today to express my disappointment that Israel would turn away any person fleeing from persecution,” Emanuel said in his letter sent Monday to Ambassador Sallai Meridor.

Emanuel referred to a report that Israel had turned away 48 Sudanese at the Egyptian border. Sudanese fleeing their war torn land have been beaten and in some cases killed by Egyptian authorities.

“I understand the concern the State of Israel has for maintaining the integrity of her borders, but if any country should understand the special needs of those affected by the genocide in Darfur, it should be Israel,” wrote Emanuel, whose father is Israeli.

Claims Conf. Revises Old Funding Formula
An added $100 million to go to survivors over four years, as controversial Holocaust education funding is frozen.
Stewart Ain - Staff Writer

With no fanfare and little debate, the Claims Conference has overturned its controversial 17-year policy of setting aside 20 percent of its allocations for Holocaust education.

As a result, the group has decided to pump another $112 million into social-service programs for survivors over the next four years while freezing funds for educational, documentation and research projects at $18 million annually.

The 80/20 formula — 80 percent for survivor benefits and 20 percent for education programs — will be applied only to $90 million of the conference’s yearly allocation, the amount it had been distributing since 2003.

Julius Berman, chairman of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, said the action was taken last month at the group’s annual meeting “because of the crying need for social welfare programs as survivors get older and sicker.”

But Roman Kent, a survivor and the group’s treasurer, said the move was in response to “pressure” from survivors. He said he spearheaded the effort to revise the allocation distribution.

“As long as survivors are in need, they come first,” Kent said he has argued. “Even the rabbis acknowledged that if you have a sick man, you could break the sanctity of the Shabbos to help the sick.”

Samuel Dubbin, a Miami lawyer who represents survivors, noted that the Claims Conference board met just a month after an Op-Ed article in The New York Times questioned the millions of dollars the group had spent for education, including “$700,000 to a ‘consultant’ — a friend of the organization’s president — who, in an interview with The Jewish Week, couldn’t recall what he had been asked to consult on.”

“While the conference supports many worthy projects, it is controlled not by survivors but by surrogates, and operates with limited oversight and financial accountability,” wrote Thane Rosenbaum, a professor of law at Fordham University.

“They obviously decided that when it hit The New York Times, it was time to act,” Dubbin said. “This decision just sharpens the focus on the continued expenditure for non-survivor needs and demands justification in light of the suffering those expenditures permit.”

The 80-20 split has been the subject of debate even outside of the Claims Conference. In 2002, Israel Singer, then president of the Claims Conference, defended the allocation, telling the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “The survivors are not the only heirs of Jewish property. They are the first beneficiaries, but not the only heirs. The Jewish way is to take care of those in need, but also to educate our children.”

But as medical costs of survivors have increased as they aged — most are now about 80 — more and more people questioned the split. Just last year, Wolf Factor, chairman of the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel, told JTA that Holocaust commemoration and youth trips to Poland are not as immediately relevant as help for survivors.

He said he hoped that the Claims Conference and the State of Israel would “come to their senses and understand that honoring the memory of the Holocaust is not only to remember the dead, but essentially to remember the living who still need us.”

The number of needy applicants approaching the foundation has increased by more than 60 percent since it was created in 1994. The foundation said that 40 percent of Israeli Holocaust survivors lived below or just barely above the poverty line. And it was reported that one-fourth of Israel’s 280,000 survivors could not afford medications or the cost of a home health aide.

Just this week, the State of Israel announced that some 100,000 survivors would receive a $285 increase in their monthly allowance. But no decision has yet been made about increased assistance for another 150,000 survivors in Israel who fled the Nazis by escaping to the Soviet Union.

Dubbin said that in 2004 there were a reported 175,000 survivors in the United States, at least 85,000 of whom were living at or below the poverty line or considered poor.

Berman, the Claims Conference board chairman, said $18 million annually for education “is a good hunk of money” that would be sufficient to meet the “competing needs and priorities.”

Since 2003, the Claims Conference’s annual allocation had been $90 million. It was increased this year to $100 million and will jump to $110 million next year, $122 million in 2009 and $135 million in 2010.

“The board usually makes its decisions year by year, but we decided that because of the [growing] needs we should tell social welfare agencies and the people that they will have more money,” Berman said.

“The cost of living of a sick person is becoming astronomical,” he added. “People are living longer and they are sicker and they need financial support in greater dimensions.”

Menachem Rosensaft, founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, called the Claims Conference’s decision a “welcome step in the right direction.

“I’ve been aware that discussions were going on for years,” he said. “The overriding mission of the Claims Conference is and must be to ensure that Holocaust survivors can live out their remaining years in dignity and with their basic needs met,” he said. “Once that is accomplished, one can have a discussion as to how to apply remaining funds.”

Asked if he supported allocations to educational projects, Rosensaft replied: “There are very legitimate Holocaust remembrance projects. Having said that, it is very clear that medical care and food for an elderly survivor trumps any cultural or educational project.”

There are so many other organizations that also fund Holocaust education programs that funding from the Claims Conference is not necessary, maintains Leo Rechter, president of NAHOS (National Association of Jewish Child Holocaust Society).

He said he had just received the magazine of a major organization that is spending more than the Claims Conference on Holocaust education.

“We are very much in favor of educational efforts and we survivors go to classes and speak to high school and junior high school students” about the Holocaust, he said.

But Rechter maintained that some of the educational projects funded by the Claims Conference are nothing more than “pet projects” of board members who get them funded “for their own glorification.”

He cited capital investments in St. Petersburg and Kishinev in Russia, cities in which “there were no survivors.”

“St. Petersburg was not occupied by the Germans,” Rechter said.

However, Eli Zborowski, another survivor and chairman of the American Society for Yad Vashem, said he supported the 80-20 mix because much of the money distributed by the Claims Conference comes from the sale of German Jewish property owned by Jews who had no heirs.

“Shouldn’t part of the money go to remembering them?” he asked.

But David Mermelstein, president of the Miami Holocaust Survivors, said he believes the $18 million annual education allocation should either be eliminated or cut in half to provide more money for needy survivors.

“The needs gets worse as we get older,” he said. “Until now we didn’t have to worry about wheelchairs. But today I helped a man get a wheelchair” who could not get to the synagogue without it.

“If they would only take a person who would go from state to state and visit some of the cities and see the need of the survivors, they would understand better,” he said. “We tell them, but it is not the same as being there.”

Asked what could be done if all $18 million were allocated for the care of survivors, Mermelstein replied: “Just give us $1 million and we could add to the hours of homecare” and other services.

The following commentary was given by Scott Simon in NPR radio, Saturday morning August 11, 2007:

“There used to be a joke in Paris, what is the difference between the chief rabbi in France and the Cardinal of Paris? The Cardinal speaks Yiddish! Jean Marie Cardinal Lustiger was buried yesterday; he died this week of cancer. He was born almost 81 years ago to Polish parents who ran a dress shop in Paris. When the German army marched in his parents sent him and his sister into hiding with a Catholic family in Orleans. Their mother was captured and sent to Auschwitz.

In 1999 as Cardinal of Paris, Jean Marie Lustiger took part in reading of the names of France’s day of remembrance of Jews who had been deported and murdered. He came to the name Gesele Lustiger, paused, teared and said, my mama. The effect in France during a time of revived anti-Semitism was electric. He was just 13 and in hiding when he converted to Catholicism, not to escape the Nazis he always said, because no Jew could escape by conversion, and not of trauma, he said. Among his most controversial observations, I was born Jewish and so I remain, even if that is unacceptable for many.

For me the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyem. That is my hope and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it. There were a great number of rabbi’s who consider his conversion a betrayal. Especially after so many European Jews had so narrowly escaped extinction. Cardinal Lustiger replied, to say that I am no longer a Jew is like denying my father and mother, my grandfathers and grandmothers. I am as Jewish as all other members of my family that were butchered in Auschwitz and other camps.
He confessed to a biographer that he had a spiritual crisis in the 1970’s provoked by persistent anti-Semitism in France.. He studied Hebrew, and considered emigrating. He said I thought that I had finished what I had to do here, he explained and I might find new meaning in Israel.. But just at that time the pope appointed him bishop of Orleans. He found purpose he said in the plight of immigrant workers. Then he was elevated to Cardinal. The Archbishop of Paris.

Jean Marie Lustiger was close to the Pope. They shared a doctrinal conservatism. He also battled bigotry and totalitarianism. For years Cardinal Lustiger’s name was among those who was considered to succeed John Paul. Without putting himself forth, the Cardinal joked that few things would bedevil bigots more than a Jewish Pope. They don’t like to admit it he said, but what Christians believe, they got – through Jews.
The funeral for Cardinal Lustiger began at Notre Dame Cathedral yesterday, with the chanting of Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.” Sometimes there are profound inconsistencies in our world

By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer August 23, 2007
For more than half a century, Rachel Kane kept the memories at bay.

There were her daughters to think of, twins born in a displaced persons camp in the aftermath of the second World War. Kane didn’t want to burden them with tales of the Holocaust, of a husband shot to death by the Nazis, a baby who starved to death in the forest, an extended family wiped out in a mass execution.

She didn’t explain the nightmares that woke her, screaming, in the long string of cramped apartments the family called home after resettling in Detroit and then Los Angeles.

Instead, the university-educated Hebrew teacher who spoke seven languages regaled her daughters with stories about her “beautiful life” before Hitler’s armies stormed Poland, successfully locking the war years away until 1998.

That was when her second husband died. When she began to lose her battle with dementia. When she became convinced that the soldiers were coming for her, as they’d done so many years before.

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Sunday, October 28, 1-5 P.M.
Jewish Resistance Reconsidered
With Yehuda Bauer, professor emeritus, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Judy Baumel-Schwartz, associate professor, Bar-Ilan University; David Engel, professor, New York University, Yitzchak Mais, exhibition curator; and Robert Shapiro, assistant professor, Brooklyn College, CUNY.

Our panel of leading Jewish scholars from Israel and North America will discuss the Museum’s groundbreaking new exhibit, which shatters the myth that Jews went passively to their deaths during the Holocaust. Speakers will consider the context in which Jews found themselves struggling against the overwhelming strength and ruthlessness of their enemy. The panel will expand the definition of defiance to include the range of activities that Jews engaged in, and will explore underlying aspects of Jewish identity that left Jews both prepared and unprepared to confront the atrocities that they faced.

Yehuda Bauer was born in Prague and emigrated to Palestine in 1939 with his family. He has taught at the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University, Brandeis University, Richard Stockton College, and Clark University. He was the founding editor of the Journal for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and served on the editorial board of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Currently, he serves as academic adviser to Yad Vashem, academic advisor to the International Task Force for Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research, and senior adviser to the Swedish government on the International Forum on Genocide Prevention.

Judith Baumel-Schwartz is the chair of the Graduate Program in Contemporary Jewry and Associate Professor of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. She is the author or numerous books and articles including the books Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust and Perfect Heroes: The World War II Parachutists and Collective Israeli Memory.

David Engel is professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies and professor of history in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University. He holds the Maurice R. and Corinne P. Greenberg Chair of Holocaust Studies at NYU, established in 1999 in cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Yitzchak Mais, curator of Daring To Resist and editor of the companion volume of the exhibition, was director of the Yad Vashem Historical Museum in Jerusalem and founding Curator of the Museum of Jewish Heritage- A Living Memorial to the Holocaust’s Core Exhibition. A distinguished public historian, he has written for various scholarly and educational publications, and developed museum projects on Jewish history and the Holocaust in Jerusalem, Kiev, Montreal, and Moscow. He is currently the co-curator of the planned Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie.

Robert Shapiro was born in Germany to Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors. He completed his doctorate in Jewish history at Columbia University while holding fellowships at the Max Weinreich Center of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has taught at Baltimore Hebrew University, Yeshiva University, the University of Maryland, the National Yiddish Book Center, the Ramaz School, and Brooklyn College. He is the author of Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust Through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts.

This symposium will honor the achievements of professor Yisrael Gutman, a resistance fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and leading Israeli Holocaust historian.

Additional support provided by the Conference for Material Claims Against Germany: Rabbi Israel Miller Fund for Shoah Research, Documentation and Education.

This program is in conjunction with the exhibition: Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust.

$12 adults, $10 students/seniors, free for members
Free admission to Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust with ticket purchase.

***

Wednesday, November 14, 7 P.M.
The Quarrel
A play by David Brandes and Joseph Telushkin
Featuring Reuven Russell and Sam Guncler; with Avi Billet
A discussion with playwright/screenwriter Rabbi Joseph Telushkin will follow the performance

Adapted from the Yiddish short story (1951) and the award-winning film (1991), this provocative play follows a chance encounter between two estranged friends, each believing that the other had perished in the concentration camps. One man an Orthodox rabbi, the other a secular writer, their experiences and losses during the Holocaust have reinforced the rabbi’s trust in God and the writer’s trust in himself. Capturing the bittersweet memories of two men revisiting their past, the play confronts the spiritual questions raised by these survivors’ opposing lifestyles.

David Brandes began his career as a television news reporter and documentary film maker at CBC TV in Ottawa, Canada. He produced and directed over thirty documentaries. Brandes moved to Los Angeles where he earned an MFA in Film Production from UCLA. He subsequently line produced and wrote many political TV campaigns in the Midwest. Brandes was a writer on the highly successful television series Fraggle Rock and has written and co-written many screenplays including The Dirt Bike Kid starring Peter Billingsley. Brandes is currently creator and executive producer of a TV series airing on Showtime, based on the acclaimed Swedish film, My Life as a Dog. He is also finishing up an action adventure film called American Hero which he wrote and produced. Mr. Brandes wrote and produced the film version of The Quarrel.

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, was named by Talk Magazine as one of the 50 best speakers in the U.S. He is the author of Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things to Know about the Jewish Religion, Its People and Its History, among other well received books including Why the Jews: The Reason for Antisemitism, which he co-authored with Dennis Prager. Rabbi Telushkin co-wrote the film version of The Quarrel as well as the play.

Avi Billet majored in Speech and Drama in Yeshiva University, where he was president of the Dramatics Society. He was a Spielberg Fellow for two of the four summers he served as director of the drama program in Camp Moshava. Last year he appeared in the Center for Jewish History’s reading of Salvaged Pages. Avi holds a MS and Rabbinic Ordination from Yeshiva University and is a writer, drama coach, and mohel. On stage, he has performed in Broadway Bound, The Quarrel, Mister Roberts, God’s Favorite, The Shawshank Redemption, Primal Fear, and Dead Poets Society.
Sam Guncler recently appeared in the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival’s Comedy of Errors, and led the cast of Winning at Theater Off Park in New York City. He has also appeared at Soho Rep, John Houseman Theatre, Theatre for the New City, Jewish Rep, and as a resident actor with the Phoenix Ensemble. His credits include Lenny, Sight Unseen, Prelude to a Kiss, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Normal Heart, I HATE HAMLET, and others.
Reuven Russell was trained at Carnegie Mellon and went on to receive his MFA at the prestigious Yale School of Drama. Highlights of his career include performances alongside Mickey Rooney and Donald O’Connor in Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys.

$20 adults, $15 students/seniors, $12 members

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Sunday, November 18, 2:30 P.M.
Ulica Granicza (Border Street)
(Poland, 1948, 122 minutes, Beta SP)
Introduction and post-screening discussion with Professor Stuart Liebman, CUNY Graduate Center

Recreating the final days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, director Aleksander Ford explores war and resistance from the perspective of children: young Jewish boys plotting for their own survival, and non-Jewish Poles rejecting the Nazi occupation as an insult to their Polish heritage. This film follows their fight against a common enemy, striving toward the same goal, with very different stakes at hand.

Stuart Liebman is a professor of the history of cinema at the CUNY Graduate Center and Media Studies at Queens College. His awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and the Association of American Publishers prize for the best single issue of a scholarly journal in 1995. He is a member of the advisory board for the critical journal October and a former member of the board of trustees of Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

Screened in conjunction with the exhibition: Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust.

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

***

Wednesday, November 28, 7 P.M.
Holocaust Odysseys: The Jews of Saint-Martin-Vésubie and Their Flight through France and Italy
(Yale University Press, 2007)
With author Susan Zuccotti

In her newest book, which Publishers Weekly says “helps turn painful memories into valuable history,” Susan Zuccotti uncovers the chilling stories of nine central and eastern European Jewish families displaced to France, and later to Italy, during the war. Faced with escalating danger, these Jewish refugees endured intense persecution, were deported to Auschwitz, or forced to disperse in flight. Zuccotti describes their agonizing struggles, and the evolution of France’s policies toward Jews.

Susan Zuccotti is an independent historian living in New York City and author of the award-winning Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy.

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.

$5 all tickets, free for members

The

Holocaust Council of MetroWest

Invites You

to

LUNCH AND LEARN

with a

SURVIVOR

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

12:00

Alex Aidekman Family

Jewish Community Campus

901 Route 10

Whippany, NJ

Ruth Messing will speak. Ruth was born in Austria

and survived in Belgium.

Please bring a dairy lunch.

Beverage and cookies will be provided.

Please note that Lunch and Learn for

September 25, 2007 has been cancelled.

CELEBRATE WITH US OUR 25TH ANNIVERSARY!

For additional information contact

The Holocaust Council

(973) 929-3067 or holocaustcouncil {at} ujcnj(.)org

Jerusalem Offers Aid After Holocaust Survivors March On Israel’s Streets
No Funds To Go to ‘Refugees’

Matthew Gutman | Wed. Aug 22, 2007

Jerusalem - After an acrimonious summer-long debate about Israel’s treatment of its Holocaust survivors, the Israeli government inked a controversial deal Sunday that will provide millions of dollars in financial aid to some survivors.

Other articles by Matthew Gutman

The plight of Israel’s Holocaust survivors, of whom there are estimated to be 260,000, has been on public display since the release of two reports earlier this year that pointed to high levels of poverty among their ranks. The government was slow to react, and a few weeks ago, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was confronted with a protest march in which survivors donned striped pajamas and yellow Stars of David.

The new package of benefits, agreed upon by Olmert’s Cabinet, will provide direct funds for people who lived through the death camps, labor camps and ghettos. But the legislation was criticized immediately by many survivor advocates, who said it leaves out tens of thousands of people who lived in Nazi-occupied countries but did not end up in the camps.

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Aug 22, 2007 9:51 | Updated Aug 22, 2007 9:51
Lessons from the past?
By TOBY AXELROD, JTA

The image of a horned Ariel Sharon with vampire-like teeth is one of several jarring displays that greet visitors these days to Germany’s Foreign Ministry building in Berlin.

ANTI-JEWISH sentiment is not merely a relic of the past in modern day Germany. Berlin’s Foreign Ministry exhibits modern examples of anti-Semitism.
Photo: JTA

Among others is a depiction of President George Bush surrounded by bearded rabbis as his gurus and a description of Israel as the “Fourth Reich.”

Unlike during the Third Reich, these images on public display are not official German propaganda but part of a German government exhibition on contemporary anti-Semitism that aims to show that anti-Jewish sentiment in the German Republic, and in Europe generally, is not just a relic of the past.

“Anti-Semitism? Anti-Zionism? Israeli Critique?” opened August 1 in the atrium of Germany’s Foreign Ministry. In September it will begin an extensive tour of German cities, starting at Berlin’s Technical University.

The exhibit, a collaborative effort between the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and the Berlin-based Center for Research on Anti-Semitism, takes on an issue of enduring controversy: Just when does criticism of Israel cross the border of legitimacy?

“There is a clear boundary in debates about solidarity with Israel,” Gernot Erler, minister of state at Germany’s Federal Foreign Office, said, introducing the exhibit to some 200 guests at the opening. “Israel’s right to exist within clear and recognizable borders is a non-negotiable point.”

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