Sept. 1





EASTERN EUROPE:

Project to properly bury Holocaust victims is planned


An international initiative to give Holocaust victims interred in mass
graves a proper Jewish burial will be launched in Eastern Europe.

The Dignity Return project is being organized by Yuri Kanner, president of
the Russian Jewish Congress, in cooperation with Rabbi Marc Schneier,
chairman of the World Jewish Congress American Section.

The project's mission is to bury the remains of victims of mass execution
from Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine and Estonia in
a manner acceptable under Jewish law.

Kanner and Schneier expect the initiative to inspire thousands of
volunteers from around the world, according to a joint news release.

As we move further away from the Shoah, the number of those who can share
a personal experience from this atrocity grows smaller," Schneier said in
the statement. "As a result, it is increasingly up to those who were born
after the Holocaust to preserve and protect their stories and these sites
so that Holocaust revisionists will be unable to change history, and our
call of Never again will continue to resonate from one generation to the
next.

The founders of the Dignity Return initiative will present details of the
project on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27.

(source: JTA)







GAZA:

Hamas Objects to Possible Lessons on Holocaust in U.N.-Run Schools in Gaza


The prospect of United Nations-run schools in the Gaza Strip teaching
children about the Holocaust has sparked fierce resistance this week from
leaders of the Palestinian Hamas movement and forced international
officials to confront a situation fraught with political risk.

U.N. officials, who say they are only discussing changes to a school
program on human rights, have not commented directly on whether any new
curriculum will reference the Holocaust. But Hamas leaders, saying any
such reference would "contradict" their culture, are moving quickly to
head off the possibility.

"Talk about the holocaust and the execution of the Jews contradicts and is
against our culture, our principles, our traditions, values, heritage and
religion," Jamila al-Shanti, a Hamas legislative official, said in a
statement distributed Tuesday after a meeting among elected leaders of the
radical Islamist group and the head of the Hamas-run Education Ministry in
Gaza.

Hamas Education Minister Muhammad Askol used similar language in
criticizing the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, saying it was not
respecting Hamas's "sovereignty" over Gaza. He said he planned to ask for
a meeting with agency officials to "assure the necessary coordination."

His remarks came a day after Hamas spiritual leader Yunis al-Astal said
teaching children about the murder of 6 million Jews during World War II
would be "marketing a lie." He characterized the possible introduction of
the subject into Gaza schools as a "war crime."

UNRWA provides food, education and other services for about half of Gaza's
population, including about 200,000 children. It has clashed previously
with Hamas on a variety of issues, including whether to support
mixed-gender summer camps.

In the latest dispute, the agency risks being caught between its usual
practice of deferring to local officials on school curriculums and
overlooking central facts about world history.

There is currently no mention of the Holocaust in schools run by UNRWA in
Gaza, according to Karen AbuZayd, the agency's commissioner general.

UNRWA follows the curriculum set by local officials but has been
supplementing it with lessons on human rights it developed on its own,
according to an agency official. AbuZayd said a program on the details of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is being developed for Gaza
middle schools. Though still in draft form, the lesson "will go into some
history," she said.

The Universal Declaration was issued by the United Nations in December
1948, in the aftermath of World War II and in recognition of Nazi
atrocities.

"It is very much a draft," AbuZayd said, adding that before its
introduction into classrooms, it would be circulated among community
groups for reaction.

The content of school curriculums is a volatile part of the Arab-Israeli
conflict and has taken on a heightened pitch in recent months. Israeli
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu considers Israel's historical claims
central to reaching a peace agreement and has said he would support
creation of a Palestinian state only if Palestinian leaders acknowledged
Israel as a legitimate Jewish homeland.

Israeli Arabs have complained about recent moves by the country's
Education Ministry to remove the word "naqba" -- or catastrophe -- from
lessons taught in Arab schools about the events surrounding Israel's
creation, while Jews feel that the texts prepared by the more moderate
Palestinian Authority still diminish the Jewish experience.

Palestinian Authority textbooks, used in the occupied West Bank, refer to
Nazi massacres and anti-Semitism as part of high school lessons about
World War II but do not go into detail about the scope of the genocide,
according to Israelis and Palestinians familiar with the texts.

On both sides, "there is really no mention of the other story -- of how
the other side sees it," said Gershon Baskin, co-chief executive of the
Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information, a think tank that
has examined textbooks. Baskin is on an advisory panel for a U.S.-funded
study, announced on Tuesday, in which Israelis and Palestinians will
review each other's textbooks, while U.S. experts perform a computer
analysis of the language used in them.

Although both Palestinian and Israeli schools could do a better job,
Baskin said, Hamas's outright denial of the Holocaust, as well as
opposition to its mention in Gaza schools, is "a step beyond."

(source: Washington Post)






USA:

Holocaust suspect could be deported


A retired Troy autoworker who authorities say persecuted Jews in wartime
Ukraine could end up in legal limbo because it's unclear to which country
he belongs, his attorney said Monday.

The U.S. Justice Department has begun deportation proceedings against Jon
Kalymon, 88, who was stripped of his citizenship by a federal judge in
Detroit in 2007. But the government has not said to which of three
possible countries -- Ukraine, Poland or Germany -- it wants to send
Kalymon.

William Kenety, a trial attorney with the Justice Department's Office of
Special Investigations in Washington, D.C., said in an e-mail Monday no
decision has been made.

A scheduling hearing on the deportation proceedings is set for Oct. 13.

"We might have a situation where Mr. Kalymon is ordered removed, yet he is
in legal limbo because no one has agreed to take him," said Kalymon's
attorney, Elias Xenos.

After a trial in federal court, U.S. District Judge Marianne O. Battani
determined that while Kalymon was a member of the Ukrainian Auxiliary
Police stationed in L'viv between 1942 and 1944, he fired shots during
operations to round up and remove Jews. He also misrepresented his wartime
activities when he entered the United States in 1949 and obtained U.S.
citizenship in 1955, Battani found.

Kalymon, who denies the wartime allegations, cried on his front porch
Monday after a reporter from the Associated Press knocked on his door.

"I love this country because it's my country. I'm going to die here," he
said.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an
international Jewish human rights organization based in Los Angeles, said
Kalymon's comments are typical "for someone whose cover is finally blown."

Thousands of Jews were killed amid unspeakable cruelty during the
operations in which Kalymon participated, Cooper said.

(source: The Detroit News)





POLAND:

Poland angry at Soviet war role



Polish President Lech Kaczynski has voiced his anger at the Soviet role in
World War II at commemorations marking the beginning of the global
conflict.

In front of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and other world leaders,
Mr Kaczynski said the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact had divided
Europe.

At an earlier event in the port city of Gdansk, he had described Russia's
actions as a "stab in the back".

Mr Putin said all pacts with the Nazis were "morally unacceptable".

The day of ceremonies began at the exact time and location where, on 1
September 1939, a German battleship fired at a Polish fort on Westerplatte
peninsula - the first shots of World War II.

Speaking at the dawn ceremony, Mr Kaczynski, referring to the occupation
of eastern Poland by Soviet forces a fortnight later, said: "On 17
September... Poland received a stab in the back... This blow came from
Bolshevik Russia."

Later, Mr Kaczynski used the occasion of the wreath-laying ceremony to
again criticise Moscow for its war, which focused on what he called the
tragic occupation Poland endured under the Nazis following its military
defeat.

Relations between Poland and Russia are currently thorny, partly because
of differing historical interpretations of events at the start of the war.

Mr Kaczynski said the Soviet-German pact, signed a week before the first
shots were fired, had divided Europe into areas of influence and had
preceded a conflict which caused the deaths of 50 million people.

He also recalled the Katyn massacre of 1940, in which 20,000 Polish
officers were killed by Soviet secret services, saying it was an act of
chauvinism and in revenge for Polish independence.

For 50 years Moscow blamed the Nazis and only admitted responsibility in
1990, but Russian courts have ruled it cannot be considered a war crime.

Improving relations?

Mr Putin, in his speech after Mr Kaczynski, said all pacts between
European states and Nazi Germany were "morally unacceptable," including
the 1939 Nazi-Soviet accord.

"All attempts to appease the Nazis between 1934 and 1939 through various
agreements and pacts were morally unacceptable and politically senseless,
harmful and dangerous," Mr Putin said.

"We must admit these mistakes. Our country has done this."

He also said that improved relations between Germany and Russia since the
war should be an example for improving Russian-Polish relations.

"We sincerely want Russian-Polish relations to get rid of the accumulated
legacy of the past... and to develop in the spirit of good-neighbourliness
and co-operation - that is to say, to be worthy of two great European
peoples," Mr Putin said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke of the "immeasurable suffering"
which began with Germany's invasion of Poland.

"No country suffered from German occupation as much as Poland.

"Here at the Westerplatte, as German chancellor, I commemorate all the
Poles who suffered unspeakably from the crimes of the German occupying
forces."



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


In quotes: Poland WWII anniversary


The leaders of European nations gathered in Poland to mark the 70th
anniversary of the outbreak of war


As Europe marks the outbreak of World War II, world leaders have spoken
about the events of the past and issues faced in the future. Below are
some of their comments.


GERMAN CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL
I remember the 6 million Jews and all others who suffered, who died a
terrible death in German concentration and extermination camps.

I remember the many millions of people who had to lose their lives in
their fight and in the resistance against Germany.

I remember all those, those innocents who suffered, who died from hunger,
cold and disease, from the violence of war and its consequences; I
remember the 60 million people who lost their lives through this war that
Germany started.

There are no words to adequately describe the suffering of this war and
the Holocaust.

I bow to the victims.


RUSSIAN PRIME MINISTER VLADIMIR PUTIN
The victory in the fight against Nazism was gained at an immense price,
with truly irretrievable losses.

For the liberation of Gdansk alone, more than 53,000 Red Army soldiers and
officers gave their lives.

There are 600,000 of my compatriots lying in the Polish soil, who brought
the victory over Nazism nearer. Six-hundred thousand!

Altogether, of [those] killed in World War II, more than half - more than
half - were citizens of the USSR.


POLISH PRIME MINISTER DONALD TUSK
We meet here to remember who started the war, who the culprit was, who the
executioner in the war was and who was the victim of this aggression.

We meet here to remember this, because we Poles know that without this
memory - honest memory about the truth - about the sources of World War
II, Poland, Europe and the world will not be safe.


US PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
The first day of September 1939 was a black day in history, and the events
it ignited brought years of tyranny and despair to Poland and other
European countries.

On behalf of the American people, I wish to join the voices commemorating
this anniversary today, and express admiration and gratitude to those who
stood on the side of freedom and hope, giving an example of spiritual
superiority over tyranny.

Today, we live in a different era in which the United States and Poland
are close allies, partners in meeting global challenges to our security
and prosperity, in supporting fundamental human rights around the world.


BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARY DAVID MILIBAND
We have a duty to remember the sacrifices, including of Poles fighting in
and alongside British forces, and to learn the right lessons - about
confronting racism and xenophobia, about standing up against tyranny, and
about building international co-operation.

In that context, Poland's entry into the EU in 2004, alongside other
countries from the former eastern bloc of Europe, represents a huge step
towards the final closing of of a terrible set of chapters of European
history.

(source: BBC)

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


Gergiev to Lead Krakow Concert in Remembrance of Nazi Attack



Adam Neuman-Nowicki was only 13 years old when Hitler's Nazis invaded
Poland 70 years ago and turned his life into a nightmare. Now he is
returning to his home country from the U.S. to hear his grandson play for
the first time in one of the world's most original orchestras.

The World Orchestra for Peace, established in 1995 by the Hungarian
conductor Georg Solti, assembles musicians from more than 70 orchestras
around the globe who waive their fees to play at events designed to bring
harmony to peoples traditionally hostile to each other. Famous musicians
must put questions of prestige aside, as roles are rotated and so the lead
flautist on one piece will be preceded by a colleague on another.

This evening's concert, on the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World
War II, will open with the world premiere of Prelude for Peace by
Krzysztof Penderecki, Polands best- known living composer, who composed
the piece specially for the event. The orchestra will go on to play
Mahler's fifth symphony.

The invitation-only performance, conducted by Valery Gergiev, is set to
begin at 7 p.m. local time at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in
Krakow. It will be broadcast to the public on a city square and on Polish
television. It also will be streamed live on CNNs Web site.

"This concerts special for me -- I feel like Im saying somehow you didnt
succeed in doing what you wanted to because my grandfather survived the
Holocaust, and I'm here to prove it," says Doron Alperin, a viola player
in the orchestra and Neuman-Nowickis grandson, addressing an imaginary
Nazi.

Global Ensemble

Alperin, 30, and the orchestras other 92 players are drawn from places as
disparate as Manchester in the U.K., Novosibirsk in Russia and Pittsburgh
in the U.S. Alperin himself plays each year with Daniel Barenboims
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which uniquely brings together Israeli and
Arab musicians and, according to Alperin, aims to perform in all the
countries from which the players are drawn.

"If the World Orchestra for Peace is really about promoting peace, it
would play in places where there is conflict now, like in North and South
Korea," he says.

Alperin echoes Charles Kaye, the orchestras director, who says the players
mixed background as well as the beauty of the music they perform should
serve as an example to the leaders of countries mired in conflict.

"We're making a powerful international statement," he says. "We think of
ourselves as ambassadors for peace: We talk to each other, listen to each
other, understand and feel for one another."

Conductors Pal

Gergiev, who has been the orchestras conductor since Soltis death in 1997,
is seen by some as an ambiguous peace representative. A close acquaintance
of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, he conducted a concert in South
Ossetia in August 2008 shortly after Russia and Georgia fought a five-day
war over the breakaway district. Gergiev is from Ossetia.

Putin is in the Polish city of Gdansk today to take part in the political
commemorations of the outbreak of war. Poland and other central European
countries view Russias intentions with distrust after spending more than
four decades under Soviet rule. Poland and its powerful eastern neighbor
have clashed in recent years over energy policy and potential NATO
membership for Ukraine and Georgia.

"I think if Mr. Putin didnt want to contribute to peace, he wouldn't have
come," Gergiev told reporters yesterday.

Orchestra Motto

The World Orchestra for Peace cites on its Web site the United Nations
Charter, which was written after World War II ended in 1945: Since wars
begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that defenses of
peace must be constructed.

Neuman-Nowicki, even after his experience at the hands of the Nazis and
also some of his compatriots, is certain of one means to avoid the events
he lived through being repeated.

Generalizations always lead to prejudice and hatred, he says. Ive always
been against radicalism -- and maybe thats a way in which music can help
to contribute to bringing peace.

(source: Bloomberg News)





GERMANY:

Film portrays athletics gender row in Nazi Germany


A new film soon to hit screens in Germany tells the true story of a
female Jewish high-jumper whom the Nazis excluded from the 1936 Berlin
Olympics, picking instead a man in drag -- who came fourth.

By a quirk of the calendar, the film -- "Berlin 36" -- premiered just days
after a row over the gender of Caster Semenya, a South African 800m
runner, marred the World Athletics Championships held in the very same
stadium.

"Berlin 36" tells the story of Gretel Bergmann, a record-breaking German
high-jumper who fled Nazi Germany but was forced to return to "prove"
Hitler was allowing Jewish athletes to compete in the 1936 Games.

Exiled in Britain, Bergmann became national high-jump champion there in
1934 but soon found herself a pawn in Hitler's bid for international
respectability.

Concerned the United States might boycott the Olympics, the Nazis
pressured Bergmann to compete, making it clear her family left behind in
Germany would suffer the consequences if she refused.

She returned from Britain and duly broke the German high-jump record in
the run-up to the 1936 Games.

But when the Nazis were sure the ship bearing the US athletes had already
left dock, Bergmann was spectacularly dropped from the team, with
so-called "Aryans" Elfriede Kaun and Dora Ratjen chosen instead.

Bergmann received a letter from Germany's Athletics Association saying:
"Based on your recent performances, you will yourself not have thought you
were going to be selected."

Ending the letter "Heil Hitler," the association offered her a place in
the stands at the Olympic Stadium -- scant reward for years of training.

Elfriede Kaun and Dora Ratjen came third and fourth respectively in the
high jump. Only one problem: "Dora" Ratjen later turned out to be
"Heinrich", who had grown his hair long and shaved his legs for the
occasion.

In 1938, his performances were expunged from the records and he was
eventually packed off to the front as a soldier.

It is not clear whether the Nazis knew Ratjen was in fact male. Bergmann,
now 95 and living in the United States, said she herself had had no idea.

"I never suspected anything," she told Der Spiegel news weekly.

"We all wondered why she never appeared naked in the shower. To be so shy
at the age of 17 seemed grotesque. But we just thought: well, she's weird,
she's strange."

"There was a door to a private bathroom but we were not allowed in there.
Only Dora could go in. But for years, I never had any suspicions," she
said.

But she is in no doubt that Hitler stole from her an Olympic gold medal.

"I would have won gold, nothing else," she said. "I wanted to show to the
Germans and to the world that Jews were not these terrible people, not
fat, ugly and disgusting as we were portrayed."

"I wanted to show that a Jewish girl could beat the Germans. In front of
100,000 people."

While she was livid at her exclusion, she was not surprised.

"I knew from the beginning, from 1934, that they would find a way to
exclude me, to shut me out and I was scared day and night," she told the
Tagesspiegel daily.

"Would they break my legs? Murder me?" she added.

The only consolation to her exclusion was that she was released from the
agony of deciding whether to perform the Nazi straight-arm salute on the
podium, she said.

Eventually, she emigrated to New York in 1937 with the equivalent of four
dollars in her pocket.

As poverty loomed, she postponed her athletics career and took a job doing
odd jobs. That year, she met and married Bruno Lambert and became Margaret
Bergmann-Lambert.

She was not long out of the athletics vest, though, and she scooped the
United States shot put and high-jump championships in 1937, winning the
latter event again the following year.

She swore never to return to Germany again, nor to speak the language.
Only more than 60 years later did she step on German soil, to attend the
inauguration of a stadium named after her in her southern hometown of
Laupheim.

She said she was a fan of the film, in which her story is played by German
actress Karoline Herfurth, praising both her acting and sporting skills.

"I enjoyed the film. I hope it shows that such a thing should never, ever
happen again."

And she is not slow to note the ultimate irony of the story. The gold was
eventually won by a Hungarian athlete, Ibolya Csak.

"A Jew," she pointed out.

(source: Agence France-Presse)





ENGLAND:

Children who escaped Nazis retrace 1939 journey to Britain



A steam train carrying 22 of the 669 Jewish children who escaped the
Holocaust thanks to a British man dubbed the "English Schindler" left
Prague on Tuesday on a four-day journey to mark the 70th anniversary of
the evacuations.

The train will trace its 1939 route via Germany and the Netherlands to
London where it will be met by Nicholas Winton, now aged 100, the man who
organised the children's safe passage out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

"I feel a little sentimental and a little sad, because that was the last
time I saw my mum," said Hana Franklova, one of the former evacuees who is
making the trip, as she set off.

Between March and September 1939, Winton saved the nearly 700 children
from almost certain death by arranging for them to be hosted by British
families, then negotiating their departure with the Nazis -- a mission
many had thought impossible.

Winton has been called the "English Schindler," in reference to Oskar
Schindler, who saved hundreds of Polish Jews and whose actions were
immortalised in Steven Spielberg's film "Schindler's List."

Winton's story only came to light by chance 50 years later when his wife
found papers relating to it in a battered briefcase in his attic.

"We had no idea (about Winton)," added Franklova, who was eight-years-old
when she left Prague. She spent the war in Stoke-on-Trent in central
England.

The commemorative train journey is one of a string of Czech tributes to
the modest Englishman including a statue, unveiled on Tuesday, at Prague's
main railway station from where the children set off.

The train is carrying 174 people including 22 survivors of the original
journeys and 64 family members. A further five so-called Winton children
will join the train at Harwich, a port town on England's east coast.

(source: Agence France-Presse)