Holocaust survivors desire justice, accountability
February 18, 2008
By Rosette Adler Goldstein

I am the child of the Holocaust, one of the extraordinarily few fortunate ones.

I was only 3 1/2 when my parents realized Paris was no longer safe for Jews. They managed to move me out of Paris and into hiding with a generous farmer and his family. To avoid internment, my father enlisted to work in a nearby labor camp. Every night he managed to sneak away and visit me at the farm.

Then, one night, he didn’t come. He had been taken away, transported by train to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, and finally to Langenstein-Zwieberge, where he was murdered by the Nazis just five days before the camp was liberated by the Americans. After liberation, my mother and I struggled for years in Paris and, eventually, at age 10, I immigrated to New York.

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Holocaust Educators Worldwide to Convene in Houston

HOUSTON, TX (Feb. 13, 2008) - Holocaust educators from across the globe will meet in Houston this March for a first-of-its-kind forum for discussing challenges and strategies related to teaching the Holocaust in modern times.

Holocaust Museum Houston will host the International Conference of Holocaust Museum Educators March 2-6, 2008, on behalf of the Association of Holocaust Organizations (AHO).

“Holocaust museums are a relatively new phenomenon,” said AHO President Dr. William Shulman. “Most have only been in existence for 10 or 15 years, and there is a need for experts in various areas to meet each other, share information and get new ideas.”

Shulman said the conference will give educators from around the world the opportunity to network and discuss problems they have in common. The conference also will feature programs and panels in which Holocaust educators will discuss challenges and strategies related to teaching about genocide and the Holocaust.

Speakers will include Dr. William Meinecke, historian for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, who will discuss challenges museum educators face; Karen Polak, international coordinator of the educational department for the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam; and Dr. Wolf Kaiser, deputy director and head of the educational department of the House of the Wannsee Conference, both of whom will speak about teaching the Holocaust in museums at original Holocaust sites.

While the conference is not open to the general public, Shulman said educators from Holocaust organizations around the world have been invited to participate. To date, educators from Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Canada are expected to participate.

Sessions will be held at Holocaust Museum Houston’s Morgan Family Center, 5401 Caroline St., in Houston’s Museum District.

“Houston is one of the premier Holocaust Museums in the world,” Shulman said. “Fortunately, the institution was gracious enough to be the host of this important event.”

Next year, the AHO plans to hold the first conference for Holocaust museum curators, and a forum for Holocaust librarians will be held the following year.

An Israeli lawyer got jail time for defrauding Holocaust survivors of $240 million.

Tel Aviv District Court sentenced Yisrael Perry on Tuesday to 12 years’ imprisonment and another five and a half years suspended sentence. He also was fined $6 million.

Perry was found guilty of defrauding dozens of Holocaust survivors he had represented in filing postwar government insurance claims in Germany. According to a group of survivors who had taken the lawyer to court, Perry siphoned away $240 million worth of benefits.

Perry has denied wrongdoing and plans to appeal his conviction and sentence with Israel’s Supreme Court.

How to Spot One of Us by Janet Kirchheimer

CLAL, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership
ISBN 13: 978-0-9633329-8-1
114 pages
$15

TO ORDER: www.clal.org

Review by: Sally Lipton Derringer

There is every reason to read How to Spot One of Us. There’s the pleasure of witnessing a poet unafraid to listen, so that she may truly hear. There’s the grace with which this poet takes what she hears and makes it speak. As we listen to this talented new voice that speaks so eloquently for those who lost their lives in the Holocaust, for those who have lived through it, and for their children, we cannot help but hear. It is not often that we get the opportunity to learn what we thought we already knew.
There are poems that speak about her family’s experiences and poems that speak about Ms. Kirchheimer’s personal experiences. In poems such as “Lunchtime,” “Grand Central Station,” “At the Butcher’s,” and “Jury Duty,” the objects and activities of the everyday world become chilling representations of the Holocaust. A pizza oven turns sinister; riding a crowded subway or taking a number at the butcher shop induces sudden panic; waiting to find out if one has been selected for jury duty hits a little too close to home — home being that place where the stories of the Shoah have been passed down from parent to child and survive. The poems are a kaddish for her family, as Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg states in his Introduction, and give “life to the dead and compassion to the living.”

In this expertly crafted, profoundly moving book of poems, surely destined to be one of the most important books of the year, Ms. Kirchheimer proves that the voices of the Holocaust can never be silenced.

Leon L. Wolfe (1916-2007)

Leon L. Wolfe, who survived the Płaszów, Gross-Rosen, and Langenbielau concentration camps and went on to play a prominent role in Jewish education and Shoah remembrance, died in Ann Arbor, Michigan on July 7, 2007. Born Löbel Wolf in Kraków, Poland in 1916, his law studies at the Jagiellonian University of Kraków were interrupted by the War. In 1941, Wolfe married Henia Karmel. Together they were interned in the Kraków Ghetto and the Płaszów concentration camp. After being separated to different camps in 1943, Wolfe was liberated by the Russian Army and returned to Kraków to search for his family. There he learned that his mother, along with the nine brothers and sisters who were still in Europe, had perished. As well, he was told that Henia, her sister Ilona, and their mother had been killed by they were run over by a German tank during the Buchenwald death march, but that a manuscript of the sisters’ poems had survived. Undeterred, Wolfe searched for Henia for six months, finally discovering that she and Ilona, while badly injured, were alive in a Leipzig hospital. Wolfe brought the sisters home and eventually gained entry to Sweden before immigrating to New York in 1948.
Wolfe was a teacher and principal in numerous New York City-area Hebrew schools before working as the director of the Department of Youth and Education at the Jewish National Fund. Following his retirement from JNF, he worked as curator at the Judaica Museum of the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale. He supported Henia in resuming her writing, and celebrated the publication of her short stories and novels. After Henia died, Wolfe married the artist and sculptor Rita Rapaport, z”l. Wolfe was a highly sought-after speaker in elementary and secondary schools, where he shared his experiences in a manner that engaged and deeply moved the students. He was a co-founder of the Westchester Holocaust Commission (now known as the Westchester Holocaust and Human Rights Education Commission) and was instrumental in the creation of the Garden of Remembrance in White Plains, New York, whose centerpiece is “The Gates of Remembrance,” sculpted by Rita.
Most recently, Wolfe saw a long-standing dream come true when Henia and Ilona’s wartime poems, translated into English by the American poet Fanny Howe, were published as “A Wall of Two: Poems of Resistance and Suffering from Kraków to Buchenwald and Beyond.” To the end of his 91 years, he was a source of boundless wisdom and love to his two children and his five grandchildren. May his memory be for a blessing.

Watch the Tom Lantos Memorial
HERE

Among the speakers were his wife Annette, his children and grandchildren, Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Joe Biden, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, Rock Star and political activist Bono and Rabbi Arthur Schneier.

By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: February 16, 2008

PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

President Nicolas Sarkozy with a schoolgirl who had just taken his photograph on Friday during his visit to Périgueux, France.

“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Mr. Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night. He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”

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Note:
To our regret, the first few minutes of Professor Bauer’s speech were not taped due to some equipment malfunction that had occurred at the time. Dr. Bauer began his presentation by emphasizing that there were a lot of Jewish rescuers whose heroism saved many Jewish lives. As his first example, Professor Bauer introduced the activities of OSE [Oeuvre de Secours Aux Enfants—Children's Aid Society] the organization that started in Russia for the health protection of Jews but later transferred its headquarters to Paris and devoted its efforts to the care and rescue of children.

**********
And now, to Professor Bauer’s recorded speech:

As World War II began and France was occupied by the Germans, they [OSE] concentrated on children—the rescue of children.

Now, there was a problem there: because Jews were known, marked. It was very difficult for Jews to be active. There was a very active branch of OSE in what was, at the beginning, non-occupied France—in other words, the southern part of France where the French collaborationist government under Marshal Petain resided in the resort of Vichy. And the OSE branch there was looking for somebody who would do the work, the practical work.

There was a Jewish electrician in one of the cities in the area, with a completely French name: Georges Garel. It is very likely that his grandfather was called Garelsky, or something like that. But he had a French name—nobody knew that he was Jewish. He was recruited in order to set up an organization to take Jewish children out into the countryside and hide them with French peasants. He established something, which was called “Circuit Garel (?)”—a network. He didn’t do it alone—and this was very typical. He did it with the help of a Jesuit priest, Pierre Chayet (?) in Lyon. And with a Jewish convert to Christianity, an abbot—the head of a monastery, with a typical French name: Avraham Glassberg. He never changed his name. He thought of himself as a Jewish Catholic, whatever that means. After the war he helped illegal immigration to Palestine, he organized weapons for the Haganah. But during the war he combined with Chayet and Garel and set up this network. Garel recruited some Jewish girls, but also quite a large number of non-Jewish girls, who scoured the countryside on their bicycles and found peasants who were willing to hide Jewish children. They hid thousands of Jewish children.

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BY Michael Berenbaum

Democratic congressman from California, the lone Holocaust survivor to serve in the US Congress, Tom Lantos was born in Budapest, Hungary.

“The bulk of the Jews of Budapest were utterly assimilated,” Lantos said. “Many of them like my family were deeply patriotic and included military officers, university professors, writers and they were enormously proud of their Hungarian heritage.”

He was 16 years old when Nazi Germany occupied his native country in March 1944. As a teenager, he was placed in a Hungarian fascist forced labor camp. Tall, blond-haired, and blue-eyed he looked like the model Aryan, so he could survive provided that he was not betrayed or forced to lower his trousers. He succeeded in escaping and was able to enter a safe house in Budapest set up by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.

His mother was not so fortunate. She was deported and never heard from again. He served as a messenger, passing between houses. His story is one of the five individual accounts which form the basis of James Moll’s Spielberg’s Academy Award winning documentary about the Holocaust in Hungary, The Last Days.

His gratitude toward his savior Raoul Wallenberg led him to propose as his first bill in Congress that Raoul Wallenberg be given honorary American citizenship; only Winston Churchill had been so honored. It took extraordinary persuasiveness and perseverance to elevate Wallenberg to such a level. He also had the street on which the US Holocaust Memorial Museum was build, 15th Street between Indepedence Avenue and the Washington Basin declared Raoul Wallenberg Place. Thus, anyone writing the Museum or contacting the Museum touches the memory of this very great diplomat. He also pressured the Swedish government to actively open up the Wallenberg case again. I worked with on this issue. While there was hope that Wallenberg was alive – the Swedish diplomat born in 1912 would now be 96, an unlikely age to survive 62 years of Gulag life — no lead of too remote, no meeting was too insignificant to warrant Tom and Annette’s time.

In 1947, Lantos was awarded an academic scholarship to study in the United States on the basis of an essay he wrote about U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In August of that year, he arrived in New York City after a week-long boat trip to America on a converted World War II troop ship. Onboard “there was a big basket of oranges and one of bananas,” Lantos recalled. “I wanted to do the right thing so I asked this sailor “should I take an orange or a banana? And he said: ‘Man, you eat all the goddamn oranges and all the goddamn bananas you want.’ Then I knew I was in paradise.”

His only possession was a precious Hungarian salami, which U.S. customs officials promptly confiscated when he arrived. Just a few weeks after he left Hungary, the Communist Party seized control of the country.

Lantos attended the University of Washington in Seattle, where he received a B.A. and M.A. in Economics. He moved to San Francisco in 1950 and began graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he later received his Ph.D. in economics. In the fall of 1950 he started teaching economics at San Francisco State University.

For three decades (1950–80) Lantos was a professor of economics, an international affairs analyst for public television, and an economic consultant to businesses. He also served in senior advisory roles to members of the United States Senate including Senator Frank Church of Iowa, Mike Gravel of Alaska, and Joseph Biden of Delaware.

He was first elected to Congress in November 1980 – the only Democrat to defeat an un-indicted incumbent Republican in the year of the Reagan landslide. He won his seat by the lowest plurality of any member of Congress elected that year – 46% to his opponent’s 43%. Through excellent constituent service, careful attention to his district’s needs and hard work in the Bay Area and in Washington, Lantos has been reelected repeatedly by large margins. He finally achieved his dream and became chairman of the House International Relations Committee. Having made human rights the center of his public service, he helped found the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and worked tirelessly on behalf of Soviet Jewry.

Lantos was a strong supporter of the Gulf War Resolution, a hawk on foreign policy, and a powerful voice for human rights. He was active in the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and served on its governing Council. He was proud of the role of its Committee on Conscience that brought remembrance of the past to bear on contemporary instances of genocide and mass murder.

He was married to his childhood sweetheart and fellow Holocaust survivor Annette Tillemann, who had been sheltered in the Portuguese embassy in Budapest. A Jew by birth, she is a Mormon by faith and raised her daughters that way. She was his full partner, working side by side with her husband on Human Rights causes and especially on Jewish causes. Oftentimes, the easiest way to get to him was to speak with her.

Lantos embraced his responsibilities as a Holocaust survivor supporting Jewish causes, Israel –- powerfully but not uncritically — and Soviet Jewry among them, and also supporting universal causes of combating genocide and mass murder, advocating tirelessly for human rights and human dignity. Charismatic, elegant and eloquent, he possessed a gravitas that is rare in the House of Representatives and conducted himself as a Senator and Statesman. He was a masterful speaker who could move audience with his rhetoric but elevated them to his level of serious discourse. He exemplified Jewish social values and Jewish political values. Unceasingly decent, he would act quietly on behalf of constituents, colleagues and friends. I have seen him mentor young staff and truly shape their lives.

Many Jews are going to be uncomfortable with the description of Tom Lantos in such laudatory terms as an exemplar of Jewish values. After all, his wife converted to Mormonism and his children were raised as Mormons. In his official biography Congressman Lantos listed his religion as Jewish and in his public life wore the mantel with pride and with great dignity. No matter what his personal observance, his was out front as a Jew and conducted himself impeccably as a Jewish American and as an American Congressman.

Sociologists of modernity have pointed at that boundary lines which were once rigid and difficult to cross are now porous and so very difficult to describe. Thus, in American political life there has been a debate over how “Black” Barack Omama is, while there could be no such debate over Jessie Jackson or Al Sharpton.

In his public life, there can be no debate over how “Jewish” Tom Lantos was. In France, Cardinal Lustiger, the Yiddish-speaking, Jewish-born Archbishop of Paris breached the boundary lines and spoke comfortably of himself as both Jewish and Catholic, much to the chagrin and almost as often to the confusion of French Jews and Roman Catholics alike.

Tom Lantos embraced his public role as a Jew and most especially as a Holocaust survivor. It brought added gravitas to a very serious man and added attention to his role as a champion of human rights, the founder of the Human Rights Caucus.
He had an immigrants’ love of America; those who have experienced tyranny cherish American freedom in ways that we who have been free from birth can seldom appreciate.

Reflecting on his journey, he said: “My life today is something I cannot believe possible. I think back sixty years ago when I was a hunted animal and now I am dealing with the issues of state of a country I love so deeply. It all seems like a dream and it all places an incredible sense of responsibility on me. I didn’t achieve this because of what I am, it happened because of what this country is.”

The Holocaust Documentation and Education Center, Inc. Announces the 2008 Annual Visual Arts and Writing Contest

(OPENPRESS) February 13, 2008 — The Holocaust Documentation and Education Center, located in Hollywood, Florida, announces the 2008 Annual Visual Arts and Writing Contest with the theme: The Holocaust: Remember the Children for the Sake of All Children

The contest began September 1, 2007 with submissions being accepted until April 1, 2008. Eligibility divisions are:

Elementary School – Grades 4-5
Middle School – Grades 6-8
High School – Grades 9-12
Colleges and Universities

Visual Arts Contest
Students can submit any media including sculpture, computer graphic design, collage, or painting.
Writing Contest
Students can submit poetry, an essay, or a story – avoid research papers. Written entries must be typed and double spaced on one side of the paper.

The Overall Winner will be sent to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and will attend the annual national commemoration of the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust. The ceremony will be held in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol Building in May 2008. Please note: The winning student must be accompanied by a chaperon who is willing to pay for his/her own expenses.

First Place Winner in each category will receive a $250 U.S. Savings Bond.

All entries will receive a Certificate of Merit if they include their home address.
Entries must have an index card indicating name, home address, home phone, grade, name of school, school address, and teacher. Each entry must represent the original effort of the writer and/or artist. Please have student print clearly. Winners will be announced April 2008.

To enter the competition and for more information, contact Merle R. Saferstein, Director of Educational Outreach, Holocaust Documentation and Education Center, Inc., 2031 Harrison Street, Hollywood, FL 33020, (954) 929-5690 x206 / (954) 929-5635 Fax.
Written entries can be e-mailed to merle {at} hdec(.)org.

The Center reserves the right to reproduce, publish, and exhibit all entries. The winning entries will become the exclusive property of the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center. Those entries which are not awarded prizes may be picked up by June 15, 2008 or they, too, become property of the Center.