An Ode to the Last Survivor

By Deborah Rotenstein

When the last survivor dies,

there will be no one to say Kaddish

for those the living have forgotten

or never knew.

For some,

a book chapter closed

an era over

a generation lost to those who remain.

When the last survivor dies,

who will speak for the children,

the fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers-

all dead and denied by those who seek to rewrite history…

When the last survivor dies,
museums and memorials will remain

as physical testament to the past,

But it is in living that we defy death.

The generations that might not have been

must return to their roots to survive and grow,

to heal, to watch and protect,

to learn, to teach, to understand.

So that when the last survivor dies

to join the countless souls in return to the Eternal,

their rest will not be marked by a deafening silence-

rather a cacophony of creation.

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Thursday, October 9, 2008 AT 10:00 PM

Conductor James Conlon, vocal advocate for the study and performance of the repertoire of composers whose lives were affected by the rise of Nazism and the events of WWII, hosts Shadows in Paradise – Hitler’s Exiles in Hollywood, a one-hour television program documenting the lives of German and Austrian composers and writers who fled the Nazi regime to Hollywood in search of new opportunities in music, art, theater and film. The program will air on New York’s PBS station, Thirteen/WNET, on Thursday, October 9, 2008 at 10:00 p.m.

Combining interviews with rare archival footage, Shadows in Paradise portrays the vibrant atmosphere of the Los Angeles German-speaking exile community during the 1930s and 1940s, revealing their struggles, frustrations and accomplishments. By 1939, 30,000 intellectuals and radicals were exiled from Europe; eighty percent of which were Jewish. The events of WWII forced many of the greatest minds of the 20th century into exile in the United States. The scores of émigrés who settled in Southern California, such as composers Arnold Schoenberg, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Ernst Krenek, Erich Zeisl, and Walter Arlen, writers Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, and director Fritz Lang, briefly transformed the area into one of the capitals of world culture, and profoundly altered the horizons of American music, literature, and the arts.

James Conlon, Music Director of LA Opera, the Ravinia Festival and the Cincinnati May Festival, is a leading advocate in the ongoing effort to raise public consciousness to the significance of neglected works of composers whose lives were impacted and whose compositions were banned by the Nazi regime. Mr. Conlon programs this music and lectures on the subject throughout the U.S. and Europe, and features the composers’ works in his Recovered Voices series at LA Opera, Breaking the Silence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia, as well as on many of his symphonic concert programs in Europe and the U.S. In addition to the works of the composers mentioned above, Mr. Conlon programs those by Alexander Zemlinsky, Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Kurt Weill, and Karl-Amadeus Hartmann among others. In 1999 Mr. Conlon received the Zemlinsky Prize, awarded only once before, for his efforts in bringing the composer’s music to international attention, and in 2007, for his efforts in championing the works of these composers, he received the Crystal Globe Award from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Shadows in Paradise is a Peter Rosen Production, Inc. and WDR – Westdeutscher Rundfunk Koln production presented in association with KCET/Los Angeles and Arte. The documentary is co-produced by Peter Rosen and Sara Lukinson, directed by Peter Rosen, edited by Peter Rosen and Hilan Warshaw and sponsored by The Lloyd E. Rigler – Lawrence E. Deutsch Foundation.

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ALSO IN JERUSALEM POST

Organization working to assist Holocaust survivors counters blow received from controversial documentary by suing directors for ‘promoting their own personal interests through an unprecedented smear campaign’

Meirav Crystal
Published: 09.04.08, 22:01 / Israel Culture

The Claims Conference, a US-based organization responsible for recovering and distributing Jewish assets plundered by the Nazis during World War II, filed a libel suit on Thursday against creators of the documentary “Musar Shilumin (The Morals of Restitution) - the fight goes on”, Orly Vilnai Federbush and Guy Meroz.

In the suit, filed with the Jerusalem District Court, the Claims Conference demands a public act of
contrition from the filmmakers, as well as just under $1.5 million in compensation, which the organization says will be transferred to Holocaust survivors.

“‘Musar Shilumim’ is a false and manipulative movie,” the conference’s representatives claim in the suit. “Federbush and Meroz have desecrated their journalistic obligation to the truth from beginning to end.

“The defendants’ film is a libel, an evil, twisted, contemptible libel contrived to promote their own personal interests through an unprecedented smear campaign… The potential damage caused to Holocaust survivors as a result of this charlatanism is hefty.”

MORE.

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ajn staff

EXECUTIVE Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) president Robert Goot has been appointed to a special committee by Julius Berman, chairman of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany -– or Claims Conference.

The move comes after reports of infighting between Israeli and Diaspora delegates at a meeting of the organisation in New York in July.

The 14-person committee will analyse and assess the viability of the Claims Conference’s current structure and make recommendations on changes to its representation.

It will also look into the health of the organisation’s public image, after a documentary released earlier this year accused it of withholding up to $1 billion in funds -– a claim the board has vehemently refuted.

Goot said the appointment was a vindication of the ECAJ’s contribution to the worldwide effort to claim compensation and restitution for Holocaust survivors.

“The inclusion on the special committee of the president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry is significant recognition by a major international Jewish organisation of the importance and standing of the ECAJ and Australian Jewry’s continuing substantial contributions in the councils of world Jewry,” said Goot, the only Australian on the committee.

“I look forward to participating in this important project at a critical time in the affairs of the Claims Conference.”

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By Gareth Jones and Gabriela Baczynska

WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland, site of Nazi death camps in World War Two, needs to do more to celebrate the positive side of its rich Jewish heritage, former president Aleksander Kwasniewski said on Thursday.

Poland was home to one of the world’s largest Jewish communities before the Nazis slaughtered most of them at concentration camps such as Auschwitz.

“We need to show much more about our common history, 1,000 years of common history,” said Kwasniewski, who heads the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation, a new body formed to fight anti-Semitism.

“The problem is that for many Jewish communities around the world, Poland is associated with the Nazi Holocaust. That is a dramatic part, but only a part, of this whole history,” he told Reuters in an interview on Thursday.

For centuries Poland was one of the most tolerant countries in Europe, providing shelter to many Jews escaping persecution elsewhere on the continent.

After the partition of Poland by its powerful neighbors Russia, Prussia and Austro-Hungary in the late 18th century, anti-Semitism began to grow, culminating in the murder of over 90 percent of Poland’s three million Jews in 1939-45.

Many of Poland’s surviving Jews chose after the war to emigrate to the newly formed State of Israel.

Since the fall of communism in 1989, Poland has seen a resurgence of interest in its Jewish heritage. Recently, the first rabbis were ordained in Poland since World War Two.

NEW MUSEUM

Kwasniewski, who served two terms as post-communist Poland’s second president from 1995 to 2005, hailed plans to open a new museum of Jewish history in Warsaw next year.

“We need to show that the common life of Poles and Jews here was very rich, very intensive and very interesting,” he said.

Famous Polish Jews of the last century include Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose novels, written in Yiddish, won him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Many Israeli politicians, from its first prime minister David Ben-Gurion to its current president Shimon Peres, were born in Poland. Others such as Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir were educated at Warsaw University, said Kwasniewski, who is not Jewish himself.

Asked about anti-Semitism in modern, democratic Poland, Kwasniewski said: “Anti-Semitism exists everywhere, unfortunately, even in countries where the Jewish community is small or non-existent.”

“Poland is not more anti-Semitic than many other European countries. But Poland has a much longer, richer, more difficult history of the life of these two communities than others.”

(Writing by Gareth Jones; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

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Yael Branovsky
Published: 09.01.08, 23:50

Holocaust survivors remain worried that the receipt of critical benefits, promised to them by the government, will be delayed or shelved. Monday evening, the Knesset finance committee postponed a vote on a budget cut across the board for all ministries, which was designed to generate increased funds for Holocaust survivors.

This reallocation of funds was intended to bolster the pensions of survivors living in Israel and was based on a recommendation
Government’s promise
Survivors to receive larger pensions / Yael Branovski
PM, finance minister agree to adopt Dorner report suggestions calling for an immediate increase of Holocaust survivors’ pensions. Judge Dorner: ‘With this decision we have managed to amend injustice done to survivors just in time’
Full Story
of the Dorner Commission on Holocaust Survivors, appointed several months ago by the current administration.

more.

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By TOM MEADE
journal Sports Writer

She has traveled to some of the world’s most magnificent places: Mount Everest, the Arctic, Easter Island among them. She has pedaled 12,000 miles on a bicycle since 1986, across the United States and Canada. She set the women’s world spearfishing record three times. And she is among the internationally elite members of The Explorers Club.

Stewart, a 46-year-old resident of Charlestown, is a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. She returned on Aug. 22 from Israel, where she and a fellow adventurer went to raise money for another expedition. They plan to accompany four Holocaust survivors when they return to a 77-mile-long system of caves that hid them during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine.
MORE.

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By Eli Ashkenazi, Haaretz Correspondent

Clari Karni, 80, of Kibbutz Hama’apil, put a down payment on an expensive new pair of glasses a few days ago. She decided on the hefty purchase - some NIS 2,000 - as well as other medical expenditures, only because she knew she would receive a refund from the Hungarian Holocaust survivors’ fund. The fund transfers $1.75 million annually to Hungarian survivors with a maximum monthly before-tax income of NIS 6,650.

But Karni and other survivors like her will not be getting any more help this year, because the fund’s budget for 2008 has been used up. The fund has informed organizations that deal with survivors’ rights that it will not process applications filed after this coming Monday.

more.

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Music by Jonathan Portera
Book and lyrics by Daniel F. Levin

When:

Monday, Sep 22nd at 8:00 pm
Wednesday, Sep 24th at 5:00 pm
Saturday, Sep 27th at 5:00 pm
Saturday, Sep 27th at 9:00 pm
Sunday, Sep 28th at 1:00 pm
Wednesday, Oct 1st at 9:00 pm

Inspired by first-hand accounts of the Jewish Underground in the Warsaw Ghetto, To Paint the Earth tells a fictional account of the resisters and their families, exploring how a broken community was brought to one of history’s most stunning and inexplicable decisions–to fight a last battle they had no chance of winning.

Michael Bush directs a cast that features Jane Pfitsch (Company, Les Liaisons Dangereuses), Scott Richard Foster (Brooklyn), Robin Skye (Parade, Cyrano-The Musical) and Darin de Paul (Grinch). Also featured are Holly Ann Butler, Fred Berman, Jessica Carter, Daniel Katz, Maxine Linehan, Lauren Lebowitz, David Nathan Perlow, A.J. Shively, Steve Strafford and Lee Zarrett.

The musical won the prestigious 2004 Richard Rodgers Development Award, chosen by a committee chaired by Stephen Sondheim.

Where:

37 Arts, Theatre C
450 West 37th Street, between 9th and 10th Avenues
New York, New York

To buy tickets go to….
nymf.org/Show-927.html

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The president of Lithuania has promised that his country’s investigation
into the wartime activities of three elderly Jewish World War II partisans
will be dropped, according to an official of the Simon Wiesenthal Center —
but can he keep the promise?

The president of Lithuania has promised that his country’s
investigation into the wartime activities of several elderly Jewish World
War II partisans will be dropped, according to an official of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center — but can he keep the promise?

The promise by Valdas Adamkus is the latest twist in an oddly inverted
war crimes inquiry of the chairman emeritus of Yad Vashem and two other
former partisans who are being forced to testify about their partisan
activities with an eye toward possible indictment.

It comes after several Jewish organizations and members of the U.S.
Congress demanded that the Lithuanian government stop the judicial action
against the Holocaust-era partisans and be more proactive in the fight
against anti-Semitism, which has become a growing concern in recent months.

The 2-year-old inquiry stems from the publication of memoirs recalling
partisan activities in wartime Lithuania.

Adamkus reportedly has spoken to the prosecutor in the inquiry of
Yitzhak Arad, Yad Vashem’s chairman emeritus, and the two other partisans.
Partisan allies, however, are not convinced that the entire inquiry will be
dropped. They point to a pattern of moral equivalency between Jewish
partisan operations and Nazi war crimes, both of which, according to some
interpretations of Lithuanian law, amount to genocide.

Partisans’ advocates are unsure about the status of the case.

According to the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, where one of the former
partisans works, Adamkus said he was asking the prosecutor to shift from
requiring the three partisans to bear witness against each other in court
testimony and instead ask them to volunteer their memory as experts in an
inquiry into a massacre by Soviet partisans in the village of Kaniukai.

Thirty-eight villagers were killed, including children and a pregnant
woman.

Senior Prosecutor Rimvydas Valentukevicius found excerpts of Arad’s
1979 memoir that place him in Kaniukai when the villagers were massacred.
Though he has not been formally charged, Arad is considered a suspect in a
war crimes inquiry.

Advocates of the partisans remain dubious as to how Adamkus can uphold
such a promise in that his office does not have the authority to override
the prosecutor.

Lithuania’s consul general in New York, Jonas Paslauskas, acknowledged
that no decision has been made and that Adamkus had taken up the case
because of the negative publicity it has generated.

Paslauskas said there “may be no need for such big noise,” but added
that the level of emotion in Lithuania over the deaths of the 38 villagers
was difficult for his government to overlook. He promised that his
government would do whatever it could to resolve the case, but could not
promise the inquiry would be dropped because no one could overstep the
authority of the prosecutor.

The prosecutor’s office could not be reached for comment.

The investigation of Rachel Margolis, a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto,
was initiated after she published a memoir in 2006 that included an account
of World War II partisan activities by herself and others.

Prompted by the memoir, Professor Irena Tumaviciute, a retired
lecturer of German at Vilnius University, published a newspaper article that
equated violent partisan resistance to Nazism and demanded that the
Lithuanian government investigate the Kaniukai ambush.

In the memoir Margolis wrote that a friend, Fania Brantsovsky,
participated in the shooting. A historian at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute,
where the 86-year-old Brantsovsky works as a librarian, said that
Brantsovsky was in a makeshift hospital on the nearby partisan base during
the shooting and did not participate.

Shimon Samuels, the director for international relations at the Simon
Wiesenthal Center who recently met with Adamkus, said the Lithuanian leader
assured him that the survivors would not be forced to testify. Samuels had
expressed concern that the high-profile investigation of the partisans and
Holocaust survivors was placing the general Jewish population at risk of
hate crimes.

His words seemed prescient, as two Jewish community centers were
vandalized with swastikas and other anti-Semitic epitaphs in an attack
earlier this month. The attacks occurred in the capital, Vilnius, and in the
nearby town of Panevezys.

The incidents come against the backdrop of increasing concern about
anti-Semitism in Lithuania. Months before this month’s incidents, a neo-Nazi
rally with about 200 demonstrators, mostly youths, was held in Vilnius in
March. Lithuanian police at the rally were caught on tape appearing to be
enjoying themselves.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, also of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, believes
that the Lithuanian police have the ability and the resources to quell
anti-Semitic crime. He faults the political establishment.

“Their words are important,” Cooper said, but “the proof is in the
pudding.”

Cooper said political leaders must tell law enforcement to “go and do
your job.”

The case of the partisans has drawn the attention of U.S. lawmakers.

Reps. Paul Hodes (D-N.H.), Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) and Howard Berman
(D-Calif) wrote to Prime Minister Gediminas Kirkilas questioning the
Lithuanian government’s disproportionate attention to Jewish partisans.

The congressmen wrote that they were vexed by the “sudden energetic
pursuit” of the partisans in question, while no Nazi collaborators have
served a sentence in prison since the country became an independent state in
1991.

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