the bergen record

Friday, September 28, 2007

By ALFRED P. DOBLIN
RECORD COLUMNIST

TWO YEARS AGO, some idiot or idiots carved a 15-foot swastika in the snow in a Clifton park. The people I talked with at the time, while concerned, viewed it as nothing more than a prank.

This month, anti-Semitic signs and fliers were posted in Passaic. Three men have been arrested. Two are from Clifton, one from Lincoln Park.

Further south in Mercer County, a football-field-sized swastika was cut into a cornfield. The timing around the Jewish Holy Days seems more than coincidental. more.

The Center for Holocaust Studies
at Brookdale Community College
and The Monmouth County Library
Present
Dr. Ann Kirschner
Sala’s Gift: My Mother’s Holocaust Story

“…[The letters] that Kirschner draws on to tell her mother’s story stand as evidence of humanity in the face of terrible conditions and of the religious faith and ritual that persisted despite the Nazi campaign to eliminate the Jews.”
– New York Times

September 30, 2007
at 2 PM
Monmouth County Library Headquarters, Manalapan

Few family secrets have the power both to transform lives and to fill in crucial gaps in world history. For nearly fifty years, Sala kept a secret: She had survived five years as a slave in seven different Nazi work camps. She held on to more than 350 letters, photographs, and a diary, without even mentioning them to her children. Only on the eve of heart surgery, did Sala present them to her daughter, Ann Kirschner, who has woven them into a moving account of her mother’s Holocaust experience.

Following the discussion, the author will be available to sign copies of Sala’s Gift: My Mother’s Holocaust Story.

For more information and reservations, please call the Center at (732) 224-2769
The Center for Holocaust Studies at Brookdale Community college is a
Registered Professional Development Provider with the NJ State Department of Education
Thanks to the Jewish Federation of Greater Monmouth County,
The Zobel Foundation and the members of the Center for Holocaust Studies
This program is presented free of charge

September 26, 2007

John K. Roth, the Robert and Carolyn Frederick Distinguished Visiting Professor of Ethics at DePauw University will lecture on the Holocaust at 8:00 p.m. tonight in Hays Hall, Room 104. The title of his lecture is “Forgiveness? Reflections on Ethics after the Holocaust.” His lecture is free and open to the public.

Aside from his one year visiting professorship at DePauw, Roth is the Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, where he is the founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights. He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than forty books, and the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees.

MORE.

Legacy of the Holocaust
Ben Barkow, the director of the Wiener Library, and his personal assistant, Margaret Daly
Rosalind Renshaw

It was not, said the cabbie as we drove towards the building that houses the world’s largest collection of Holocaust material, an address he knew. “Not part of The Knowledge,” was the explanation he offered.

Yet the Wiener Library, in Devonshire Street, Central London, should surely be on our radar. “It was started by Alfred Wiener, a German Jew, who as early as 1919 wrote a pamphlet warning of the dangers posed by the Nazis,” says the library’s director, Ben Barkow. “He began collecting everything he could. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Wiener fled to Amsterdam, where he set up the Jewish Cultural Information Office.”

The earlier collection was abandoned in Germany, but Wiener renewed his efforts in the Dutch city. In 1939 the archives were transferred to London and renamed. Today the library is bursting with oppressive and disturbing evidence of man’s inhumanity to man.
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By NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: September 19, 2007

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 — Last December, Rebecca Erbelding, a young archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, opened a letter from a former United States Army intelligence officer who said he wanted to donate photographs of Auschwitz he had found more than 60 years ago in Germany.

Ms. Erbelding was intrigued: Although Auschwitz may be the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, there are only a small number of known photos of the place before its liberation in 1945. Some time the next month, the museum received a package containing 16 cardboard pages, with photos pasted on both sides, and their significance quickly became apparent.

MORE:

Down Time From Murder

By ROGER COHEN
Published: September 24, 2007

So now we know where Eva from Mannheim and Angela from Dortmund and Irmgard from Dresden ended up during the war years — jiving in pleated skirts to the strains of an accordion, or gorging themselves on blueberries, or lounging on deck chairs in the shadow of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoriums.

MORE.

By Dave Graham

BERLIN (Reuters) - The Nazis had killed nearly 20 of Inge Deutschkron’s relatives when she first turned her back on Germany in 1946. Today, the Berlin resident is dedicated to championing Germans who defied Hitler and saved Jews like her.

The 85-year-old writer and journalist believes Germany has come a long way since the Holocaust, showing an openness about its troubled past it lacked in the years after World War Two.

No longer divided, or haunted by ex-Nazis who swapped top jobs under Hitler for high office in the postwar democracy, Germans are keener than ever to learn from history, she says.

“I can’t imagine it happening again in Germany,” she told Reuters at her home in western Berlin. “Today’s young generation is eager to discover what went on back then and they’re really appalled by it. It gives me a lot of hope.”

MORE

http://www.abcnews.go.com/International/popup?id=3625017

By TARA ROSS - The Press | Monday, 24 September 2007

New Zealand universities stand accused of chronic, endemic anti-Semitism in a new book by a South African-Australian academic.

Professor Colin Tatz, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, has highlighted the controversial cases of Joel Hayward at the University of Canterbury and Hans Kupka at Waikato University as evidence of wider anti-Semitism within New Zealand academia.

“Two postgraduate disparagers of Jews and their history do not make a whole society anti-Semitic,” he writes.

“But it is the wide supporting cast that leads to a reasonable conclusion that there is a chronic, endemic anti-Semitism in academe and in the intellectual world of New Zealand.”

MORE.

Written by Westchester.com
Sunday, 23 September 2007
Westchester Community NewsWhite Plains, NY - With funding from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc., Westchester Jewish Community Services is offering Holocaust survivors a subsidy for home health care. Services can include personal care, light housekeeping, shopping and cooking.

In order to qualify, an individual must meet all of the following criteria:

- Be a Holocaust survivor living in Westchester County.
- Have an income that does not exceed 200% of the 2007 Federal Poverty Income guidelines.
- Obtain a recommendation from a doctor or nurse for home health services.

For more information, contact Valerie Rissman, LMSW, Holocaust Claims Outreach Coordinator, at 761-0600 ext. 344.

Founded in 1943, Westchester Jewish Community Services provides comprehensive mental health, developmental disabilities, social services, home health care and community- and school-based programs on a non-sectarian basis to people across the life span, and cultural and economic boundaries. A state-licensed, non-profit WJCS serves 16,000 yearly with programs funded through government grants, UJA-Federation, United Way, foundations, corporations and individuals. For more information, go to www.wjcs.com.