CLICK BELOW TO READ THE NEWEST ISSUE OF TOGETHER ON LINE

January 2008

January 2008 Volume 21 Number 4

WHAT’S INSIDE

Survivor Advocacy Groups Split on Proposed Legislation
Of Memory and Remembrance by Sam E. Bloch
The New Museum at Bergen-Belsen by Menachem Rosensaft
Jewish Foundation for the Righteous by Roman Kent
I Came to Bergen-Belsen by Gloria Bloch Golan
Pakistan Attacks Survivors
Claims Conference News
Applying for New German Government Ghetto Labor Compensation Fund
It Happened in Prague
Monument Men Honored
Winds of Change in Holocaust Museum by Manar Fawakhry
Poland’s Hidden Jews by Vanessa Gera
Stella by Dr. Salomea Kape
In Memoriam
An Appreciation of David Kranzler by Jeanette Friedman
Tribute to E. Edward Herman by Helen Z. Schwimmer
Hafner’s Paradise
Announcements
Holocaust resisters weren’t only those who carried weapons by Jeanette Friedman
Kupferberg Holocaust Center
Remembering the Horror by Audrey-Marie Winn
Letters
Searches: contributing editor Serena Woolrich, Allgenerations@ aol.com

MTV videos take look at Holocaust
‘People like us’ themes from Arnold
By Christine McConville
Monday, January 28, 2008

click here for SUBWAY

click here for FAMILY ROOM

It’s a typical rush hour and commuters are crammed into a subway car, when the train slams to a halt.

Suddenly, soldiers with dogs and machine guns order everyone off the train and into two huge lines on the platform.

“That could be the Green Line, and those people could be us,” said Roger Baldacci, an executive vice president at the Boston advertising agency Arnold Worldwide, and one of the creative minds behind the two new jarring videos about the Holocaust.

The 30-second spots use contemporary images and scenes to teach young people about the Holocaust, the state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime.

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime killed nearly two out of every three European Jews. Many were rounded up on city streets, and then shipped to concentration camps via train.

Unfortunately, Baldacci said, many of today’s youth don’t know about the Holocaust. So Arnold used an in-your-face, educational approach to let kids know about it.

MORE.

Dr. Roman A. Ohrenstein, Auschwitz and Mauthausen survivor, has been honored as a Distiguished Professor and Author by
The American Journal of Economics and Sociology , Volume 66-4 , which dedicated its October 2007 issue to Roman A. Ohrenstein.
and expresses special appreciation for his original work in Talmudic economics.

“We honor him in this issue of the AJES by publishing his autobiographical sketch ” My Life, My Times and My Research ” as well as “The Talmudic Doctrine of ‘ The Benefit of a Pleasure ‘: Psychological Well-Being in Talmudic Literature ” with the Frontispiece of his portrait “

IN PICTURES

Holocaust Remembrance Day at the UN

Poland Marks 63rd Anniversary Of The Holocaust

Bush marks Holocaust remembrance

PM remembers Holocaust Memorial Day

LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND

Holocaust Memorial Day commemorated

Teenagers of all faiths remember Holocaust

SOMETHING JEWISH, UK

SWINDON, UK

WEST MIDLANDS, UK

Fun Munich carnival held on Holocaust remembrance day angers Jews

Germany commemorates victims of Nazi Holocaust

Auschwitz survivors mark liberation

AUSTRALIA-HERALD SUN

POLAND RADIO EXTERNAL SERVICE

German parliament commemorates victims of Holocaust

Holocaust Inversion
By MANFRED GERSTENFELD
January 28, 2008

Solemn ceremonies around Europe marked yesterday’s Holocaust Memorial Day. But 63 years after the liberation of Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945, one of the most perfidious forms of contemporary anti-Semitism is Holocaust inversion — the portrayal of Israelis and Jews as modern-day Nazis. The charge is that Israel supposedly behaves toward the Palestinians as Germany did to the Jews in World War II.

This distortion of history is particularly widespread in the Muslim world. But it is also gaining currency in the West, where it is no longer just the domain of the extreme Left. Last year, a German bishop visiting Israel compared Ramallah to the Warsaw Ghetto. Portuguese Nobel laureate for literature José Saramago in 2002 compared Ramallah even to Auschwitz.

Cartoons are a particularly popular medium to express such distortions. Portraying Jews as Nazis, Israeli prime ministers as Hitler and the Star of David as equal to the swastika is almost routine in the Arab world. This trend has also reached Europe, where during the anti-Iraq war protests, for instance, many demonstrators held placards depicting similar images. In the Netherlands you can now buy T-shirts and greeting cards showing Anne Frank wearing a kaffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headdress, wrapped around her neck like a scarf. In other words, the Palestinians are the new Jews, which makes the Israelis the new Nazis.

MORE.

IDEPENDENT.IE

Heaney leads Irish tribute to survivors of Holocaust

By Allison Bray
Monday January 28 2008

POET Seamus Heaney led a solemn tribute to the six million victims of the Holocaust and its survivors at a special memorial service last night marking Holocaust Memorial Day.
The Nobel laureate and guest of honour read an excerpt from his poem ‘A Sofa in the Forties’ decrying the vast ignorance that surrounded the annihilation of the Jews.

MORE.

——-

Survivors from past and present genocides join to remember and reflect

Updated: 27/Jan/2008 21:01

LONDON (EJP)—The Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) was joined by an Holocaust survivor and a refugee from Darfur, at a special event earlier this week to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day at the Houses of Parliament in London.

The event, hosted by MEP Louise Ellman, MP focused on the theme of Holocaust Memorial Day 2008, ‘Imagine…Remember, Reflect, React.’

Dr Henry Oster, the only remaining member of his family of nineteen after surviving both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, and Mohamed Ibrahim, joined a panel alongside Karen Pollock HET Chief Executive, shared their paralleling experiences of persecution, intolerance and racism in their individual and diverse home countries and periods of time.

MORE.

_________
BBC NEWS
City’s events mark Holocaust day

The trust wants to challenge people to imagine the unimaginable
Events to mark Holocaust Memorial Day are being held across London.
Multi-faith ceremonies, talks, dramatic performances, concerts, guided walks and film screenings are taking place in many of the capital’s boroughs.

Commemorative multi-faith services are to be held in Barnet, Haringey, Lewisham, Tower Hamlets and Romford.

Events in other areas will continue until Friday to remind people about the millions of victims of Nazi persecution and other genocides since then.

MORE.
———-

TREND NEWS

Victims of Holocaust Remembered Today
28.01.08 00:06

( BBC ) - More than 100 Holocaust survivors have gathered for a national service marking the 62nd anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

Survivors and their families joined a 1,200-strong audience at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day.

Victims of other atrocities, such as those in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, were also remembered.

Speakers included Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks and minister Ruth Kelly.

MORE.

———–

THE GAZETTE: CANADA

Holocaust survivor remembers
James Mennie, The Gazette
Published: Sunday, January 27
They came for him when he was 15.

Paul Herczeg was a fifth generation Hungarian, the youngest child of a family that lived in a Budapest suburb and wasn’t particularly religious.

“We were assimilated. I didn’t speak Yiddish, my parents didn’t speak Yiddish even my grandparents didn’t speak it,” he recalls.
But they were Jews, and for the Nazis that occupied Hungary in 1944, that was enough.

So now, 64 years later and on a day of international commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust, Herczeg can sit at a table at Montreal’s Holocaust Memorial Centre and describe himself to a room full of listeners as “a graduate of both Auschwitz and Dachau.”

MORE.
_______

Survivors have special role in museum opening
By Maribel Villalva / El Paso Times

El Pasoan Myer J. Lipson did not live through the Holocaust, but not a day goes by that he isn’t haunted by its horrors.

His family — parents, both sets of grandparents, a brother, sister, aunts, uncles and cousins — all experienced the atrocities. Some lived to tell about it.

His parents — Sundel and Rachel Lipson — were among the survivors, and they miraculously found each other after the war, though one had been imprisoned in south Germany and another in north Poland. But their struggle was so horrific that they rarely, if ever, spoke about the Holocaust. They came to El Paso in 1949 and lived a quiet life.

Lipson, a prominent attorney in El Paso, now tells their story.

MORE.

Holocaust survivors recall haunting past
By Stephanie Sanchez / El Paso Times
Article Launched: 01/27/2008 05:57:02 PM MST

At the opening of the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center, 90-year-old Sara Hauptman became teary-eyed as she recalled her painful experience during the Holocaust.
“I’m doing okay … I am alive,” said Hauptman, who was taken to several concentration camps and became a sterilization victim of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, also known as “Nazi’s Auschwitz Angel of Death.”

Hauptman, her husband, Nathan, and their son moved to El Paso in 1951. The couple were part of 75 survivors to relocate in El Paso after World War II — only 15 remain.

On Sunday, also International Holocaust Remembrance Day, most of the 15 survivors were at the opening of the museum at at 715 North Oregon. The museum was paid by $2 million worth of donations, said spokesperson Leslie Novick.

The museum was first founded by Henry Kellen, a local Holocaust survivor, in 1984. But in October 2001, an electrical malfunction caused a fire that destroyed artifacts, exhibits and glass displays.

MORE.

Holocaust Victims’ Lawyer Asks for Interest on His Fee
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
Staff Reporter of the Sun
January 28, 2008

The New York University law professor who was awarded $3.1 million by a federal judge for his work administering a settlement between Swiss banks and Holocaust survivors is back in court, asking for $299,419 in interest to cover the two years during which his fee was delayed by objections from the survivors.

MORE.

Volume 55, Number 2 · February 14, 2008
The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe
By Tony Judt
The first work by Hannah Arendt that I read, at the age of sixteen, was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[1] It remains, for me, the emblematic Arendt text. It is not her most philosophical book. It is not always right; and it is decidedly not her most popular piece of writing. I did not even like the book myself when I first read it—I was an ardent young Socialist-Zionist and Arendt’s conclusions profoundly disturbed me. But in the years since then I have come to understand that Eichmann in Jerusalem represents Hannah Arendt at her best: attacking head-on a painful topic; dissenting from official wisdom; provoking argument not just among her critics but also and especially among her friends; and above all, disturbing the easy peace of received opinion. It is in memory of Arendt the “disturber of the peace” that I want to offer a few thoughts on a subject which, more than any other, preoccupied her political writings.

In 1945, in one of her first essays following the end of the war in Europe, Hannah Arendt wrote that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe—as death became the fundamental problem after the last war.”[2] In one sense she was, of course, absolutely correct. After World War I Europeans were traumatized by the memory of death: above all, death on the battlefield, on a scale hitherto unimaginable. The poetry, fiction, cinema, and art of interwar Europe were suffused with images of violence and death, usually critical but sometimes nostalgic (as in the writings of Ernst Jünger or Pierre Drieu La Rochelle). And of course the armed violence of World War I leached into civilian life in interwar Europe in many forms: paramilitary squads, political murders, coups d’état, civil wars, and revolutions.

MORE.

Event marks 63rd anniversary of Auschwitz liberation
By Tony Castro, Staff Writer
Article Last Updated: 01/25/2008 09:34:15 PM PST

Los Angeles Holocaust survivors and their families, many with tears in their eyes, commemorated the 63rd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Friday with the symbolic groundbreaking for the permanent home of the city’s first museum dedicated exclusively to remembering the slaughter of 12 million in World War II death camps.
The new home of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust will be made possible through a landmark agreement with the city to build the state-of-the-art facility in Pan Pacific Park next to the Holocaust Memorial Monument in the Park La Brea area adjacent to The Grove.
MORE.