July 26


LATIN AMERICA:

Latin American Jews contend with spike in anti-Semitism----Derogatory
political statements and attacks on synagogues have increased since
Israel's January war in Gaza.


A Sunday afternoon, the perfect family day.

Hordes of Jewish families in Buenos Aires headed downtown to celebrate the
61st anniversary of the state of Israel, an event sponsored by the city.

But the afternoon, in May, was interrupted when about 30 young men and
women began wielding sticks amid the dancing and singing, leaving 10
wounded and the Jewish community shocked.

"If it happened once, it can happen again," says Jorge Elbaum, the
executive director of the Delegation of Argentine Jewish Associations,
which includes schools, synagogues, and social clubs. He has called off
all public events until further notice.

Across Latin America, Jewish leaders say they are contending with a new
level of anti-Semitism that heated up after Israel's military operation in
Gaza in December.

From La Paz, Bolivia, to Panama City, political expressions have turned
increasingly derogatory, with graffiti and banners equating the Israel
conflict with Nazism. There have been bomb threats in synagogues
throughout the region.

Venezuela saw the worst attack: A synagogue was desecrated Jan. 31 and
Jewish leaders there have even condemned President Hugo Chvez of
tolerating, and even fomenting, anti-Semitic sentiment.

"There is a new current of anti-Semitism in Latin America, connected to a
discourse of anti-Zionism," says Sergio Widder, the director of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center for Latin America in Buenos Aires.

Onslaught in Venezuela

Nowhere does the Jewish community in Latin America feel more under attack
than in Venezuela, as the country's leader, his cabinet, and
pro-government media have launched a steady barrage of condemnation toward
Israel. That rhetoric sometimes seeps over into anti-Semitic behavior, say
Jewish leaders.

An article on the pro-government media site Aporrea in January, for
example, wrote that society should publicly demand "that any Jew on any
street, commercial center, or public square take a position shouting
slogans in support of Palestine and against the abortion-like state of
Israel." It was later taken off the site.

In late January, the Mariperez synagogue in Caracas was broken into an
act seen by many in the Jewish community as the greatest anti-Semitic
attack in Venezuelan history.

Fifteen people, including several policemen, were arrested after they
broke into the synagogue, taking off with money and scrawling anti-Jewish
graffiti such as "Damn the Jews," "Jews out of here," and "Israel
assassins" on the walls.

They also took out the Torah from its storage place and threw sacred cups
on the floor. The government claims the incident was a robbery
masquerading as an anti-Semitic attack.

Levi Benshimol, a communications consultant and former president of the
National College of Journalism in Caracas, says Mr. Chvez has encouraged
fundamentalist factions within his movement for "21st-century socialism"
by failing to distinguish sufficiently between Israel's policies and the
practice of the Jewish faith, despite several statements issued by Chvez's
government condemning the desecration.

"I have the impression that the president hasn't been able to
differentiate between the Israeli state and the Jewish religion, and in
that lack of semantic differentiation of not making it clear what is a
state and what is a religion, he creates confusion in the people as well
as confrontation in fundamentalists," says Mr. Benshimol.

Chvez has been a fierce critic of Israeli foreign policy. In January, he
expelled Israel's ambassador and called Israel's 22-day offensive in Gaza
a "holocaust." And Chvez's friendship with Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, a professed Holocaust-denier who famously said Israel would
collapse, has also made Venezuela's Jewish community uncomfortable.

The rhetoric reverberates as far as Argentina, says Mr. Widder, turning on
a video documenting Chavez's most recent statements condemning Israeli
action in the Middle East.

Argentina has Latin America's biggest Jewish population with 230,000
residents, and even though a 1994 bomb attack at the Israelite Mutual
Association that killed 85 is etched in the public memory, many say it is
a tolerant society much more than in decades past.

Venezuela, too, which has had less influence than its neighbors from the
Roman Catholic Church, has historically been tolerant of religious groups.
Julio Schlosser, secretary-general of the Argentine Israelite Mutual
Association, says that most of the recent attacks here are coming from
fringe radical groups, mostly on the left.

Anti-Zionism turns to anti-Semitism

Yet anti-Zionism has given anti-Semitism a new voice in Latin America. "It
is politically incorrect to be anti-Semitic," says Mr. Elbaum, "but it is
politically correct to be anti-Zionist."

Jewish leaders agree that the right to express views on the Israeli
conflict is guaranteed, but say that political expressions have turned
more personal. In January, protesters congregated outside a hotel owned by
Eduardo Elsztain, a prominent Jewish businessman, claiming he is financing
movements in the Middle East.

"We have always had protests against the Israeli Embassy but this was
against an Argentinian citizen," Widder says. "What we do not know is if
this was an isolated case or a precedent."

It was followed by the attacks at the anniversary celebration in May. At
least five people, from a group identified as the Front for Revolutionary
Action, a leftist radical group, were arrested on charges including
violation of antidiscrimination laws. Their supporters, who have protested
their arrest, say that the case criminalizes criticism of Israel.

Marches throughout the region have used incendiary rhetoric and symbolism,
in some cases superimposing the Star of David with a swastika.

"It is not criticism of Israel," says Michael Salberg, director of
international affairs for the Anti-Defamation League in New York. "It is
pure and simple anti-Semitism."

(source: Christian Science Monitor)


********************************

August 1


CALIFORNIA----obituary

Dina Gottliebova Babbitt dies at 86; Auschwitz survivor fought to regain
portraits she painted there

Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, an artist who had been forced to paint portraits
of fellow prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp and later sought
to recover the artworks from a museum there, died Wednesday in Northern
California.

Babbitt, 86, died of cancer at her home in Felton, near Santa Cruz, her
daughter Michele Kane said.

Babbitt's long and unsuccessful campaign to retrieve the seven paintings
of doomed Gypsy prisoners from a Polish state museum at Auschwitz became a
rallying point for many other artists and Holocaust survivors. Although
the museum recently sent Babbitt reproductions in what Kane acknowledged
as "a kind gesture," that was not enough, Kane said.

Babbitt "was terribly sad and upset and so despondent that she never got
her pictures back. 'Heartbroken' is the right word," Kane said.

The family pledged to continue fighting for the paintings, which Babbitt
said helped save her life.

From her childhood in a Czech-Jewish family to her later success as a
Hollywood animator, Babbitt was a witty, upbeat woman whose personality
belied some of the tragedies she endured, said U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley,
the Nevada Democrat and Babbitt family friend who worked on her cause.

"For her to continue this quest took not only a certain strength of
character, but a very optimistic view of life, rather than a pessimistic
view," Berkley said Friday.

Babbitt's wry humor was evident during a 2006 interview, when she showed
the forearm scar where her concentration camp number had been tattooed.
(She had it removed during an unrelated surgery.) The number, 61016, had a
symmetry that she sometimes used to play the California Lottery. "It
doesn't work," she quipped.

A young art student when she was deported to Auschwitz, Babbitt drew a
"Snow White" scene on a wall of a children's barracks to help soothe the
youngsters. Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor who performed hideous
experiments on prisoners, heard of her talents and ordered her to paint
portraits as mementos for his racist theories.

Babbitt said she told Mengele she would rather die if her mother was not
also let out of a group of Jews scheduled to be gassed. Her mother was
allowed to live. Her father and her fiance died elsewhere in the
Holocaust.

Babbitt said she wanted to briefly hold the paintings, which bear her
signature, and then lend them to a museum of her choice. "I wouldn't be
alive if it hadn't been for those paintings, and my kids wouldn't be
here," said Babbitt, who is also survived by another daughter, Karin
Babbitt, and three grandchildren.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum insists it is the rightful home
of the paintings, which it says it bought from camp survivors in the 1960s
and '70s. Artifacts proving Holocaust history should be in their original
setting, museum officials say.

Babbitt and her mother managed to survive Auschwitz and evacuation
marches. After liberation, Babbitt went to Paris and became an assistant
to American cartoonist Art Babbitt, one of Disney's "Snow White"
animators. They married and moved to Hollywood and later divorced. Dina
Babbitt worked in animation at various Hollywood studios.

Then, out of the blue in 1973, the Auschwitz museum notified her that it
had the paintings. An official had noticed that the signatures matched
those on Babbitt illustrations in an unrelated book. Stunned, she began
her campaign, traveling to Poland and winning a supportive U.S.
congressional resolution.

Babbitt's efforts represented "an important aspect" of Holocaust
survivors' struggles for restitution and to regain property stolen from
them, said Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for
Holocaust Studies, a Washington-based organization active in her cause.

Medoff and celebrated comic book artist Neal Adams helped produce a
six-page cartoon version of Babbitt's life that was published this year.
Adams said Babbitt symbolized the struggle of an individual against an
immoral state. "Now the woman has died and she doesn't have her paintings.
That's the very worst part," Adams said.

After cremation, private services for Babbitt were held Friday and plans
are pending for a public memorial.

(source: Los Angeles Times)



************************


August 3

USA--NEW YORK:


A Bronx woman has been charged with murder and robbery in the death of an
89-year-old Nazi concentration camp survivor, and police said a man is
still being sought in connection with the death.

Felix Brinkmann dances at a 2008 birthday party. "He was not the kind of
guy who had enemies," his son says.

Angela Murray, 30, was arrested Saturday, according to the Manhattan
district attorney's office, and is accused of strangling Guido
Felix Brinkmann on Thursday in his Upper East Side apartment.

Murray was arraigned Sunday and charged with one count of murder in the
second degree and three counts of robbery.

Brinkmann, a native of Latvia, was a Holocaust survivor who escaped death
for a year while he was in the Mauthausen, Ebensee and Auschwitz camps. He
had been slated for the gas chambers five times, but each time, he used
his fluency in German to talk his way out, said his son, Rick Brinkman,
who spells his last name differently.

After the war, he was stunned to discover his wife, who had also been
shipped to Auschwitz, alive and well in Poland.

The Brinkmanns immigrated to America, where Brinkmann spent years in the
bar and nightclub business, co-founding the Adam's Apple disco in
Manhattan in 1971.

In recent years, he had been the real estate manager of a mixed-use
building in the Bronx, working "seven days a week, without fail," Rick
Brinkman said.

On Thursday, the building's superintendent grew concerned when Brinkmann
did not show up for work. He notified Brinkmann's son and received
permission to enter the father's apartment, where he had lived alone since
his wife died last year.

Brinkmann was found face-down in his bedroom, his hands bound behind his
back and his body showing blunt-force trauma wounds, police said.
Brinkmann's blue 2009 Honda Civic had been stolen, along with one of two
safes in his apartment, police said. The vehicle was later recovered in
the Bronx.

Rick Brinkman speculated that the killing was random. "Anybody who knew
him really liked him," the son said. "He was not the kind of guy who had
enemies."

(source: CNN)



**********************************


August 10

USA:

Ex-homeless woman leaves $150,000 to Hebrew University


A Jewish Holocaust survivor who later lived on the streets of New
York City has left half of her $300,000 estate to Hebrew University, the
school said Monday.

"It moved us very much," university spokesman Yefet Ozery said in a
telephone interview from Jerusalem, where the school is based.

"Hebrew University has many, many donors and benefactors and supporters
and many people remember us in their will, but I haven't come across such
a person that lived actually as a poor woman who would give half of her
bequest to Hebrew University," Ozery said.

The woman, who died two years ago in her 90s, has not been identified
publicly at the request of her estate's executor, he said.

"He didn't want her name to be remembered as a homeless" person, Ozery
said.

The woman, who had no known relatives, survived a concentration
camp and was living on the streets of New York's Upper West Side several
years ago when a Jewish accountant befriended her, Ozery said.

"He and his wife adopted her pretty much to their home and supplied her
with basic needs," which included finding her public housing, he said.

In return, the woman moved the couple's car from one side of the street to
the other so that it would not be ticketed, he said.

At the time, they had no clue to her net worth, Ozery said.

"When the woman told him and his wife that she would be leaving a will,
they thought to themselves that there would be nothing there because they
knew her as owning nothing," he said.

It was only when the woman died that the couple learned of her wealth,
which she had kept in a bank.

"They were very surprised to find out that she left this amount and that
half of it went to Hebrew University, Ozery said.

How she accumulated the money, the balance of which went to other causes
and to her friends, is not known, he said.

Her executor -- the accountant who befriended her -- told school officials
of the gift three months ago, but they did not learn the circumstances
behind it until last week, Ozery said. There was no obvious connection
between her and the school.

A friend of the accountant took the first check to the school last week
and told administrators the story behind it.

"Everybody was moved and excited," Ozery said. "This was a special story
and a special gift."

In keeping with the woman's wishes, the money is to be spent on medical
research and scholarships for researchers, he said.

(source: CNN)


******************************



August 11



GERMANY:

PUNISHMENT FOR 1944 MASSACRE----German Court Sentences 90-Year-Old War
Criminal to Life



In one of the last Nazi war crimes trials, a court in Munich has sentenced
former Wehrmacht lieutenant Josef S., 90, to life imprisonment for
ordering the execution of 10 Italian civilians in June 1944.

A 90-year-old German man who served as an officer of the Nazi- era German
armed forces, the Wehrmacht, during World War II has been sentenced to
life imprisonment for ordering the execution of 10 Italian civilians in
1944.

In one of the last Nazi war crimes trials, a Munich court on Tuesday found
Josef S. guilty of murder for ordering the killings in the Tuscan village
of Falzano di Cortona, located between Arezzo and Perugia, in revenge for
an attack by partisans on German troops in which two German soldiers were
killed.

The former company commander had denied the charges throughout the
11-month trial and had made a statement denying all knowledge of the
events. But a former employee who worked in a carpentry business run by
Josef S. testified that his boss had bragged about being present during
the killings.

Josef S., a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht's Mountain Pioneer Batallion 818,
was found guilty of having ordered two punitive operations at the end of
June 1944. He told his men "to systematically search the area and arrest
several persons, primarily males," said state prosecutor Hans-Joachim
Lutz. Anyone resisting arrest was to be shot dead on the spot, and the
arrested people were to be brought to a central location and killed. Josef
S. was 25 at the time.

An Italian court had already sentenced Josef S. to life in absentia in
2006. He had lived in the town of Ottobrunn near Munich for decades.

Germany will hold another Nazi war crimes trial in October when
Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk will face charges of being an accessory to
27,900 counts of murder at Nazi death camps.

(source: Der Spiegel)





***************************************


August 13



GERMANY:

After latest sentence, Germans eager for Nazi trials' end----Former
officer Josef Scheungraber will face life in prison, a court ruled
Tuesday. The next trial, of John Demjanjuk, may be the last for Nazi
crimes in Germany.



When Germany hosted and placed third in the World Cup three years ago,
fans draped themselves in the German flag, waved the flag from cars, and
unfurled it from living room windows. Sixty-four years after the end of
World War II, it finally felt acceptable to be German again.

Well, almost.

In one of the last Nazi trials to take place, a German court Tuesday
sentenced Josef Scheungraber to life in prison. He was convicted of
ordering the murder of 10 Italian civilians while serving as a Nazi
officer in Tuscany, a revenge crime for the murder of two German troops in
June 1944. Gino Massetti, who survived the massacre as a boy, testified at
the trial.

Now, the final chapter of living Nazi history is being written. The last
trial in Germany for alleged Nazi crimes is expected to begin in October
for John Demjanjuk, who was deported from the United States in May to face
charges he was a guard at the notorious Treblinka concentration camp. He
is alleged to have helped operate its gas chamber.

For many Germans, the trials can't be finished soon enough.

"We hear about the trial every day on TV, we read about it every day in
the newspaper, politicians make sure it is as the top of the agenda," says
Ursula Weber-Kelke, a retired schoolteacher from Darmstadt. "We are
fatigued from the constant attention to it. It never stops.

"We are not saying justice shouldn't be carried out. These men committed
crimes and need to be punished. Only that this horrible era continues to
chase us. And it's time to move on."

A recent poll suggests that is exactly what's happening. The Identity
Foundation in Dusseldorf reports that 73 percent of Germans classify
themselves as "proud to be German" today, more than twice as many who felt
that way less than 10 years ago.

"I think we are ready to say the past is the past," says Heiko Topp, a
German graphic designer now living in Northern Ireland. "When I was
traveling in Israel, I often had the question about how I feel about what
happened. I can only say that I cannot undo the past. If I could, I would.
But it is also not healthy to constantly be wrapped up in it. We need to
evaluate what happened, but we also need to live in the world today."

More and more Germans are feeling less personal shame about the Nazi era,
and are viewing it as a historical event. The number of visitors to
Hitler's Munich apartment and his bunker is on the rise.

"I talk to my daughter about the war. Whatever questions she has, I answer
openly. She needs to be educated about it," says Mr. Topp.

Topp grew up in East Germany, and says he can see how far the country has
come.

"I don't say we are patriotic like Americans are patriotic, but this
generation is not ashamed to be German. The Nazi era was a very, very long
time ago. Most of us were not even born then."

(source: Christian Science Monitor)