November 22, 2007
Holocaust Award
Hendrick and Kees Scheffer lived in Holland and kept a Jewish couple hidden from the Nazis for two years. The couple have passed away. Their daughter, Henny Scheffer of Nanton, will accept an award from The Calgary Jewish Community in their honour. Ruth Tennenholtz has come to Calgary from Israel to attend the ceremony. It was Ruth’s late parents who were saved by the Scheffers.
November 22, 2007
Holocaust Award
Hendrick and Kees Scheffer lived in Holland and kept a Jewish couple hidden from the Nazis for two years. The couple have passed away. Their daughter, Henny Scheffer of Nanton, will accept an award from The Calgary Jewish Community in their honour. Ruth Tennenholtz has come to Calgary from Israel to attend the ceremony. It was Ruth’s late parents who were saved by the Scheffers.
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Brought Together by the Holocaust and N.Y.
By TATYANA GERSHKOVICH
Special to the Sun
November 23, 2007
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
A Holocaust survivor on Friday is reuniting with the deaf-mute woman whose family saved her life during the Nazi occupation of Poland.
Golda Bushkanietz, 94, and Irena Walulewicz, 82, who hid Ms. Bushkanietz for six months during World War II, are traveling from Tel Aviv, Israel, and Olsztyn, Poland, respectively, to meet for the first time in 62 years at John F. Kennedy International Airport.
“I am thrilled to see Irena. Her family was part of the intelligentsia in my town. I was a good friend of her parents, and her mother, a very sweet woman, saved me,” Ms. Bushkanietz said in a phone interview. “I often think about Irena, and I have told all of my grandchildren about how I stayed with the family.”
Holocaust Survivors, Heirs Fight On for Compensation
Though Germany Long Ago Satisfied Most Claims, Many Remain
By Craig Whitlock and Shannon Smiley
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 25, 2007; Page A16
TELTOW, Germany — Six decades after the end of World War II, tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors and their heirs are still struggling to receive compensation or the return of looted property from Germany.
More than 76,000 claims filed by Jewish families and other Nazi-era victims who had owned property in the former East Germany remain unresolved. About 60,000 Jews who applied for special pensions payable to people the Nazis forced to work for subsistence wages in ghettos were turned down. And owners of stolen artwork complain that efforts to find their collections have been stonewalled by German museums, despite a 1999 pledge to clear up the issue.
(Media-Newswire.com) - WASHINGTON, D.C. — The world’s largest collection of visual Holocaust survivor and witness testimonies is now available to United States Holocaust Memorial Museum visitors. The University of Southern California ( USC ) Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive contains nearly 52,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses from 56 nations and in 32 languages. More than 90 percent of the collection is comprised of testimonies of Jewish survivors; however, other victims of Nazism—political prisoners, Sinti and Roma ( Gypsies ), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and survivors of eugenics policies—as well as liberators, liberation witnesses, and rescuers and aid providers are also represented in the collection.
“The power and authenticity of survivors’ testimony is our most effective tool in transmitting the history of the Holocaust to future generations,” says Museum Director Sara J. Bloomfield. “Making the Shoah Foundation collection, in addition to the Museum’s oral histories, available to visitors will greatly enhance our ability to educate millions of people worldwide about the lessons of the Holocaust.”
BLUFFTON NEWS
Holocaust survivor Nesse Godin returning to Bluffton
By Joe Smekens
Nesse Godin, a Holocaust survivor who made a tremendous impact during a visit here in 2002, is coming back to Bluffton.
The noted speaker, who has dedicated her adult life to teaching and sharing memories of the Holocaust will be in Bluffton for a community presentation on Tuesday, Dec. 4.
She will speak at Bluffton High School on that evening at 7 p.m. in a free event open to the public.
And on Wednesday, Dec. 5, she will address the BHS student body at 9 a.m.
“We are thrilled to have her coming back to Bluffton,” said BHS language arts teacher Deb Johnson, who played a pivotal role in bringing Nesse to Bluffton in November of 2002 and also has spearheaded arrangements for the return visit.
MORE.
LA JEWISH JOURNAL
Galina Isakovna’s life has never been easy.
She was 3 months old in 1922 when a pogrom broke out in her Belarusian village. As a band of anti-Semitic thugs stormed her family’s home, her mother quickly stashed her under a bed. When the intruders entered the room, cutting up the feather pillows with bayonets, her mother prayed that her baby wouldn’t cry. Miraculously, the entire family survived.
During World War II, Galina served as one of the Russian army’s first women aerial gunners and as a bombardier mechanic. She fought on the Second Ukrainian Front, and when her arm was mangled in an attack, part of a bone was replaced with a metal plate.
Today she’s confined to a wheelchair, disabled with multiple ailments, and she rarely leaves her apartment in Brest, Belarus, because she can’t navigate the staircase.
MORE.
C & G NEWS
WARREN, MI
Holocaust survivor speaks to local students
Seventh-graders at Algonquin relive Lowenberg’s experience
By Erin McClary
C & G Staff Writer
CLINTON TOWNSHIP— In 1936, Holocaust survivor Martin Lowenberg was sent off to a Jewish boarding school after Nazis took over his hometown of Hessen, Germany. After several unsuccessful attempts by his parents to escape Hitler’s reign, Lowenberg entered into an experience he says he’s lucky to live to tell about.
On Nov. 14, Lowenberg told his story to more than 200 students at Chippewa Valley’s Algonquin Middle School. Because part of the seventh-grade curriculum at Algonquin is studying Europe and the persecution of different groups of people throughout history, social studies teacher Sarah Wills thought Lowenberg’s experience might catch her students’ attention. MORE.
USA TODAY
Holocaust survivor celebrates Thanksgiving with family
Posted 3d 7h ago | Comments5 | Recommend3 E-mail | Save | Print |
By Bill Handleman, Asbury Park Press
LONG BRANCH, N.J. — Elizabeth Spitz came to the United States with her husband and their 4-month-old daughter in November 1946. It was Thanksgiving Day, she was told. “That’s nice,” she said. She had no idea what this meant.
She remembers eating a tuna fish sandwich, for which she was probably thankful, now that she thinks about it.
The following year, they had the more traditional turkey, with all the traditional trimmings. “We were Americanized pretty fast,” she says now.
SOUTH BEND TRIBUNE
Holocaust survivor and son reach out to new generation through talks
CLAUDIA BAYLISS
Tribune Staff Writer
SOUTH BEND — In the small chapel at Temple Beth-El on a recent Sunday morning, Joseph Bialowitz urges a group of middle school students to move closer to their heritage so they can better represent the Jewish people, their history and tradition in a world where “Jews are still misunderstood.”
The students, who attend religious classes at Beth-El, and about a dozen adults listen attentively to the 33-year-old son of a Holocaust survivor.
THE ECHO, UK
Liverpool’s lead on Holocaust day
Nov 22 2007 by Catherine Jones, Liverpool Echo
BRITAIN’S Chief Rabbi and the Archbishop of Canterbury will head commemorations at National Holocaust Memorial Day in Liverpool.
Sir Jonathan Sachs and the Rt Rev Rowan Williams will both take part in the January 27 memorial.
The event, at the Philharmonic Hall, will be the culmination of a month-long programme highlighting the Holocaust, genocide and repression.
JEWISH HERALD ONLINE
By MICHAEL C. DUKE 22.NOV.07
EWS seniors make innovative, multimedia Holocaust documentation project their own
“When we came to the gates [on] the outskirts of Ostrów Mazowiecki, there was a bunch of German soldiers. I visualize this to this day, a bunch of German soldiers standing there. And, when they saw my grandfather, who had a beard, they took a scissors and cut his beard – just as an insult. So, my grandfather, he was a quiet person, but he must have asked: ‘Why are you doing this? I’m a pious Jew, this is part of me. Why are you cutting my beard?’
Helen Ciesla Covensky, 82, abstract expressionist artist, died on Tuesday, November 20 of heart failure.
Born Hanka Ciesla in Kielce, Poland in 1925, as a young child the artist moved with her family to Sosnowiec. Known as the prettiest girl in town, she enjoyed an idyllic childhood until World War II broke out in Europe, putting her Polish Jewish family in peril. Realizing that her green eyes, blond hair, and fluency in Polish and German would allow her to pass as a Polish Catholic, her father obtained false papers for his daughter. She and two other Jewish girls, also with false papers, made their way to Germany. They worked in a labor camp near Stuttgart. Every morning Hanka lived the ruse by pretending to recite Catholic prayers. She also passed food clandestinely to inmates in a nearby Jewish concentration camp.
She was very proud to be liberated by the US Army and rode victoriously into Berlin on a tank. Good at languages, Hanka started working for the United Nations Relief Administration in Berlin. Her parents and sister died at Auschwitz, but she was reunited in Berlin with her brother David, who survived Auschwitz. At their tearful reunion a US Army soldier, Chaim Kempner, wrote their moving story for the Army newspaper. In 1946 she married the Lithuanian born soldier, in a wedding dress made from a parachute. Her daughter, filmmaker Aviva Kempner, was born in Berlin. In 1949 the family moved to Detroit. Their son Jonathan, now President and CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association, was born in 1951.
In Detroit, Helen Covensky received an art degree from Wayne State University.
Divorced in 1959, she married professor of history, Dr. Milton Covensky. Helen Covensky built an outstanding career as an artist in Michigan, culminating in a one-woman show at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1983. Her work was shown in art galleries in New York City, Michigan, and Tel Aviv, Israel. Inspired by European and American Abstract Expressionism, her “action” paintings were noted for their lush texture and strong, vibrant colors. The paintings can be seen both in collections around the world and locally, including at the Kreeger Museum in Washington DC. Helen claimed that her paintings were “an affirmation of life, as each stroke of my paintings is in honor of the six million.”
“My mother’s devotion to her painting for 40 years inspired my filmmaking and art collecting. Even with the great tragedy of her youth, she focused on teaching us lessons about creating beauty,” observed her daughter Aviva. Her son Jonathan added: “My Mother had the uncanny ability to make you feel good about yourself. All whose life she touched came away convinced they were the most intelligent, the most insightful, the most attractive person in the world. She told you so with such conviction that you really believed you could do anything.”
With her husband, Milton Covensky, Helen moved to Bethesda in 1983 to be close to her daughter and son. Helen is also survived by her daughter-in-law Dr. Lise Van Susteren, beloved granddaughters Aliza, Delaney, and Piera Kempner, and brother David Chase of Hartford, CT. She was a member of the Washington District of Columbia Jewish Community Center. The family asks that memorial contributions be made to the Helen and Milton Covensky Fund care of the WDCJCC, 1529-16th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036.
No More Holocaust Reparations, Says German Finance Minister
Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück said in Jerusalem Thursday that Germany had no plans to renegotiate a Holocaust reparations deal signed with Israel in 1952.
“The existing deal is signed and final and there is no need to change it,” said Steinbrück after meeting with the chairman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, Noah Flug.
Flug said that although the reparation agreement with Germany would not be amended, if there were “specific problems” Germany would try to solve them.
“We didn’t ask for money, we spoke of the responsibility of the German government,” added Flug.
Complaints that Germany’s reparations fail to compensate in any reasonable way for the trauma of the Holocaust are ongoing. But the Israeli Holocaust survivors who met with Steinbrück on Thursday, Nov. 23, to request improvements to the reparations arrangement specifically argued that the original agreement failed to take into account today’s longer life expectancy or the tens of thousands of survivors who immigrated to Israel after the fall of the Soviet Union.
more.
Taking On The UN
Conference lambastes the international body for its anti-Israel, anti-American bias.
The UN’s attitude toward Israel has improved over recent decades, says Daniel Carmon, Israel’s deputy permanent representative.
by Walter Ruby
Special To The Jewish Week
Is the United Nations an irredeemably anti-Israel and anti-American body?
For a vast majority of the speakers and attendees at a Nov. 18 conference entitled “Hijacking Human Rights: The Demonization of Israel at the United Nations,” the answer was an emphatic “Yes.”
“Today’s conference represents the first direct challenge to the UN’s annual ritualistic condemnation of Israel, and to the blatant hypocrisy and double standard involved in it. Enough is enough,” said Anne Bayefsky, senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and principal organizer of the event.
The conference, held at a hotel across the street from the UN, was co-sponsored by the Hudson Institute, Touro Law Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, and the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. About
250 people attended, including ambassadors, academics and members of Congress.
The General Assembly stands poised to introduce a raft of anti-Israel resolutions in the coming weeks, and will likely approve a committee report setting into motion planning for the 2009 Durban II conference, which many say promises to be a repeat of a UN conclave many criticized as overtly anti-Semitic.
“The UN is far from being a harmless talking shop as some believe, but rather is dedicated to undermining the self-determination of the State of Israel,” Bayefsky said. Asked if there is any point for Israel and the U.S. to remain engaged in the UN, Bayefsky said emphatically, “The UN is certainly not a forum to protect human rights or to foster peace and security.”
Bayefsky also termed the advent two years ago of an annual observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day at the UN on Jan. 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, as “an insidious effort to divide Jews from Israel,” remarking, “One day a year, the UN remember the Holocaust, and over the course of the rest of the year it holds dozens of meetings to condemn Israel.”
Stating that Holocaust remembrance “is being used to make the demonization of Israel OK,” Bayefsky said, “This is too high a price to pay for a history lesson.”
The only voice among the 23 speakers at the event to make the case that the UN is sometimes useful to Israel was Ambassador Daniel Carmon, Israel’s deputy permanent representative to the UN.
“When I check with my [Israeli] colleagues who were at the UN from 20 or 30 years ago, I see there has been a considerable [improvement],” he said, although he acknowledged that General Assembly members — including 56 Muslim countries and over 60 other so-called Third World ones — form an “automatic majority” ready to continue passing virulently one-sided anti-Israel resolutions.
Nonetheless, Carmon said, “there are three major clusters of activity for Israeli foreign policy that are going through the UN: the process with the Palestinians, activities related to Iran, and issues related to south Lebanon.”
Stating that the Israel Mission to the UN works effectively with the UN Secretariat, headed by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Middle East matters, Carmon added, “It is no secret that Israel doesn’t want the UN acting as a mediator between us and the Palestinians, yet we recognize the UN has a role in providing humanitarian help to the Palestinians. UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency) is doing a relatively valuable job in this regard.”
Carmon said that Israel “supports and values” recent Security Council resolutions demanding Iran end its pursuit of nuclear energy and added, “The last report of the secretary general [on the implementation of the cease fire between Israel and Hezbollah in south Lebanon] was a relatively good one.”
After his remarks, Carmon was taken to task by several in the audience, including Esther Kandel, a Los Angeles-based pro-Israel activist, who has lobbied on Capitol Hill to have the U.S. cut off funding for UNRWA, which she accused of massive corruption and publishing anti-Semitic textbooks. Kandel told The Jewish Week, “It doesn’t help when we are working on educating members of Congress about the fraud and evil-doing in UNRWA to have a representative of Israel say that UNRWA is a good thing. I feel undercut and undermined by the government of Israel on this issue.”
Another Israeli diplomat, Ambassador Itzhak Levanon, the permanent Israeli representative to the UN in Geneva, gave a presentation more to the liking of the audience. He traced the metamorphosis of the old UN Human Rights Commission —which included the participation of perpetual human rights abusers such as Libya, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Cuba — to the new, supposedly more moderate UN Human Rights Council. The new body has actually been passing anti-Israel resolutions at a faster clip than the old one.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, who has become increasingly outspoken in criticizing the Bush administration in recent weeks, said in a speech that he is unhappy the administration has maintained a tight-lipped response to the Sept. 6 Israeli air strike at a Syrian target rumored to have been a nuclear facility under construction.
“There is no reason for withholding from the U.S. public what the facility was about,” Bolton said. “North Korea, Syria and Iran really constitute an axis of evil, not in metaphorical terms, but in a very concrete way. If and when the U.S. or Israel use military force against Iranian reactors … we’ll be in a safer world.”
Sen. Norman Coleman (R-Minn.), who took the lead in demanding accountability from the UN during the oil-for-food scandal and is now pushing for a cutoff of U.S. funding for the UN Human Rights Council, remarked, “I didn’t want our money used to fund nations that engage in Israel-bashing. The combined annual contribution to the UN of the 132 nations [of the Islamic and Third World blocs] is less than the U.S. contribution. We have to play hardball with these countries.”
Some members of the audience said they hoped the conference would lead to the launching of a grass-roots American Jewish campaign to change the UN.
“This is a wonderful conference, but I hope it is only the first step,” said Carole Handwerker of Brooklyn, who identified herself as a pro-Israel activist unattached to any organization. “There are a lot of people like me out there waiting for someone to tell us what we can do to fight against the defamation of Israel at the UN. We want to be mobilized.”
Harris Schoenberg, the longtime director for United Nations Affairs for B’nai B’rith International and today president of UN Reform Advocates, was less rhapsodic. “Neither the United States nor Israel … are willing to give up on the UN,” he said. “Accordingly, we prefer to let it continue doing what it does best — creating international norms in such significant areas as climate change — while we continue major UN reform campaigns which, in the past, have succeeded in repealing the Zionism-is-racism libel and moving the UN in good measure from condoning to condemning and combating international terrorism.”
Rabbi Arthur Schneier, president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, who recited Kaddish at the UN’s observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day in January 2006, the first time in the history of the UN that a religious prayer was allowed there, took issue with Bayefsky’s assertion that the UN cynically adopted Holocaust remembrance to mute Jewish criticism of its anti-Israel position.
“One has nothing to do with the other,” Schneier said. “Let’s not forget that it took a tremendous amount of sustained effort by Israel and Jewish organizations to get the UN to adopt Holocaust Remembrance Day. While we must continue to work to get the UN to treat Israel with justice, we must not throw away such a hard-won achievement.”
Poland has announced that former Polish Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski will be a foreign policy advisor for Warsaw’s complex relations with Germany, Russia and Israel, which have all come under strain recently.
Bartoszewski’s official position will be secretary of state in the prime minister’s chancellery where he will advise Poland’s new Prime Minister Donald Tusk and new Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski.
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski’s nomination had a “symbolic character” and was meant to raise the country’s profile on the international stage, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said at a news conference in Warsaw on Wednesday, Nov. 21.
“He is a patron of a new chapter in Polish history,” said Tusk, whose government took office last week.
Tusk has pledged to mend fences damaged by his nationalist predecessor Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who had a turbulent relationship with Germany.
The ousted premier regularly raised the spectre of Polish suffering at the hands of the Nazis during World War Two as he accused Berlin of trying to dominate the Europe Union.