Feb. 20



USA/CANADA:

U.S. deports Holocaust denier; groups seek second deportation


More than two years after Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel left Canada
vowing never to return, he has once again landed on Canada's doorstep.
On Wednesday, the United States deported Zundel to Canada for missing an
immigration hearing.

Zundel previously lived in Toronto for more than 40 years. But he failed
repeatedly to gain Canadian citizenship, in part because Canadian
intelligence officials considered him a threat to national security.

Zundel had been living near Knoxville, Tenn., until he was arrested Feb. 5.

Because he has lived outside of Canada for more than two years, he has
now lost his permanent residency status.

The 63-year-old German citizen - who is now being held in an Ontario jail -
has applied for asylum as a refugee, claiming he will be persecuted if he
is sent back to his native Germany.

Jewish officials, who had lobbied the government not to allow him back
into Canada, are now pressing Canadian authorities to deport him to
Germany, where he faces a possible jail term of five years or more for
his Holocaust denial.

"He left Canada voluntarily and basically turned his back on the country,"
said Keith Landy, national president of the Canadian Jewish Congress.

"He is a hatemonger and Holocaust denier, and there is no obligation on
Canada's part to let him in."

"He's a citizen of Germany, and thats where he should be sent," Landy said.

Under Canadian refugee law, federal officials are not obliged to hear
every refugee claim.

Some observers have suggested that Zundel is ineligible for a refugee
hearing and could be deported to Germany within days.

But others, including Toronto immigration lawyer Sergio Karas, paint a
more negative scenario by suggesting that the case could drag on for
years at public expense.

Immigration Minister Denis Coderre would not comment on the case because
of privacy concerns, but he expressed disdain for people who attempt to
make a "mockery" of Canada's refugee system.

"I'm totally dedicated to make sure that the legitimate people who are
seeking our generosity will be facilitated," Coderre said. "But those who
are trying the system and who give a bad reputation to our system should
be careful."

In January 2001, a Canadian human rights tribunal ruled that Zundel broke
the law through his operation of a California-based Web site that
vilified and promoted hatred against Jews.

But Zundel, who had already left the country in anticipation of the
ruling, ignored the tribunal's order to remove all anti-Semitic material
from his site.

Within hours of his forced return to Canada, the Canadian Human Rights
Commission and the Canadian Jewish Congress served papers on him ordering
that he show cause as to why he shouldn't be held in contempt of court for
not complying with the tribunal's ruling.

Last year, after the tribunal reached its verdict, Zundel told a Canadian
reporter that he had no intention of complying with it.

"You're talking to the new Ernst Zundel," he said at the time.They used to
accuse me of Holocaust denial. "Well, now I'm in Canada denial. I have put
Canada behind me."

Zundel has been married for three years to an American citizen, Ingrid
Rimland Zundel, who operates his Web site and sends out daily e-mail
messages to his supporters.

In her Z-gram of Feb. 16, Ingrid Zundel speculated that his arrest was
prompted by old-fashioned talmudic revenge.

Zundel, who has penned numerous books and treatises applauding Hitler and
denying the Holocaust, was convicted in the 1980s of "knowingly publishing
false news," a charge that Canadas Supreme Court struck down in 1992
before he served any jail time.

He is also the subject of an outstanding arrest warrant in Germany, where
he has been convicted in absentia of Holocaust denial and other
hate-related crimes.

"To be a refugee, a person has to have a bona fide fear of persecution,"
said Bernie Farber, the executive director of the Congress Ontario
region. "The only fear Zundel has is of prosecution from a free and
democratic country like Germany."

"He is truly the man that nobody wants."

(source: JTA)






USA/PENNSYLVANIA:

The Holocaust's invisible evil
A director discussed her film about a boy in a Hungary Nazi camp.


It's hard to imagine that the Holocaust went largely unprotested by
scores of Hungarians, but this was exactly what acclaimed Hungarian
director and screenwriter Erika Szanto set out to prove yesterday to a
crowd of over 30 faculty and community members.

Sociology Professor Elijah Anderson was at the Annenberg School for
Communication to introduce Szanto, who was on her first visit to Penn to
hold a screening and discussion of her film Elysium -- a story about a
Hungarian boy who is placed in a Nazi labor camp in 1944.

"Erika Szanto has worked in Hungarian and American film, television and
theater for almost 30 years," Anderson said. "She has written and
directed over 50 television and feature film scripts."

She is also a novelist and short story writer.

But Elysium is one of her works which hits particularly close to home.
Szanto said her inspiration to write and direct the film came from a
real-life experience during the Holocaust when her father received an
invitation to come to the United States but refused the offer. He was
later killed in a Nazi labor camp.

Though alive during the Holocaust -- she was 2 years old at the time --
Szanto said she does not remember experiencing it.

Still, Elysium revolves around a child, with a 10-year-old Hungarian boy
who is taken away from his family by the Nazis while he is walking to a
neighbor's house. He arrives at a children's Nazi camp called Elysium --
another name for the Garden of Eden because it is for the good children
captured by the Nazis.

Ultimately, the Nazis kill the young boy while he is showering. Though
the end of the film does not show the actual death, it does hint at his
oncoming death.

"I didn't try to depict the physical horror of the concentration camps,"
Szanto said.

In fact, she deliberately stayed away from making a Holocaust story that
showed the actual deaths of Jews. Rather, she said she wanted her
audience to feel the emotional distress the Jewish people felt because of
the Holocaust.

"My main message was that the devil [does] not always show his face and
sometimes... it is not very easy to recognize the devil in our society,"
she said. "I wanted to show a metaphor of how people are trapped in a
situation and they believe that if they follow the rules, if they [are]
obedient, it will help them and everything will be OK, the government
will protect them."

For this reason, Szanto said the Hungarians did not establish much of a
resistance against the German oppression and left their lives in the
hands of the Nazis. She also said she wanted to show that many types of
people in Hungarian society were responsible for the extermination of
Hungarian Jews.

One of her overarching messages was that different Hungarians from
different socio-economic classes were all responsible in some way for the
Holocaust in Hungary. In the film, the parents of the Hungarian boy are
not able to receive help from their rich friends, the police or even
Jewish officials.

And students connected with Szanto's message.

"This was a different kind of film. You were able to receive it on more
of an emotional level," said Michelle Charles, a first-year professional
student with the Organizational Dynamics Program in the School of Arts
and Sciences. "It was impressive with the casts of the children to get
the message of the film across."

But despite the acclaim, Szanto is far from finished -- in April, she
plans to begin directing theatre in Hungary.

Her screening was sponsored by the Kelly Writers House, the center for
Africana Studies Center, and the Philadelphia Ethnography Project.

(source: The Daily Pennsylvanian)





VATICAN:

Pope was deaf to scholar's plea on Nazis


A letter by the scholar and philosopher Edith Stein to Pope Pius XII
imploring him to speak out against the Nazis has been published following
the opening of a new section of the Vatican archives.

The Milan daily Corriere Della Sera published the letter, which will feed
controversy over the Vatican's failure to oppose the Nazis.

The Vatican's decision to open its prewar archives to scholars years
ahead of schedule is a move to deflect critics of its silence over the
Holocaust.

The documents cover the Vatican's relations with Germany from 1922 to
1939. During those years Pope Pius XII was the Vatican nuncio in Germany
and later its secretary of state.

Ms Stein, a Jew who had converted to Catholicism, wrote to Pius XII on
April 12, 1933, shortly after the Nazis came to power.

"For years, Nazi leaders have preached hatred of Jews. Now they are
gathering the fruits of that hatred," she wrote. She added that the
anti-Semitism had induced some Jews to commit suicide, and those who
maintained silence were partly responsible. Jews and Catholics, she
wrote, were waiting to hear the Church condemn the Nazis.

"We faithful children of the Church fear the worst for its worldwide
image if the silence continues. And are convinced that it will not
eventually lead to a change of government policy. The war against
Catholics is less obvious and brutal than that against the Jews, but just
as systematic."

In response, Ms Stein received only a papal blessing. At the time she
wrote, she was teaching in Germany. She became a nun and died at
Auschwitz in 1942.

The present Pope, John Paul II, canonised her as a martyr of the faith,
which upset some Jews who said she had been killed because she was Jewish.

(source: Sydney Morning Herald)






GERMANY:

Nazis Attempted to Make Robots of Their Soldiers

The Nazi leadership had a lot of hopes about the use of D-IX wonder drug


New research shows that Nazis were going to turn their soldiers to robots
with the help of a special chemical. Until recently, the chemical has
been kept secret. So-called Experiment D-IX started in November of the
year 1944 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Eighteen prisoners were
marching on the semicircular square, which was used for daily call-overs.
The prisoners were carrying backpacks that weighed 20 kilos each. They
were circling the square non-stop, while Odd Nansen, Arctic explorers
son, was watching them from the window of his barracks. Years later,
after the war was over, he said that those marching people on the square
were called "pill patrol." They could march without a rest up to 90
kilometers a day. Everyone knew that they were like guinea-pigs that were
used for testing the new method for preserving the energy of a human
body.

Hitler's chemists wanted to find out, how long those people could last. At
first, those poor prisoners sang songs and whistled various melodies as
they marched. Twenty-four hours later, the majority of them fell down on
the ground dead. Nazi chemists tested their new wonder pills on those
people. The pills were called D-IX. This was also the work code of the
whole experiment. The pills contained cocaine together with other drugs.
As the Third Reich leaders believed, the new pills were supposed to turn
German soldiers into tireless and fearless warriors.

Hamburg-based criminologist Wolf Kemper believes that D-IX pills were
Hitlers last secret development. The pills should have helped him to win
the war, which was about to be lost for fascist Germany. Kemper deals
with the studies of little-known events of the latest months of World War
II. The description of those events will be included in his new book
about the use of drugs during the Third Reich era. It is an open secret
that the big-time Nazi propaganda held up any drug addiction to shame.
Such propaganda was launched back in 1993: Nazis basically lambasted the
"devilish" cocaine - the major drug of the demoralized European Bohemia of
the 1920s. However, the Nazi regime did not hesitate to let its soldiers
use those drugs, trying to turn them into thoughtless robots.

The use of an amphetamine called pervitine was a usual thing at the
Western front in the very beginning of the war. Nazi leaders believed
that the use of that stimulant would inspire their troops to noble and
heroic deeds for the sake of the victory. A factory of the Berlin company
Temmel, which manufactured pervitine, supplied the Nazi Army and the
Luftwaffe with 29 million of pervitine pills during the period of
April-December of 1939. The Ground troops high command ordered to keep
that a secret. Official documents mentioned the drug under the code name
obm. Yet, Nazis underestimated pervitines side effects. The "consumers"
could not do without the drug really soon. In 1939, German doctors
determined during their inspections at the Western front that the
soldiers used pervitine without any control at all. The period to recover
from the drug effect was getting longer and longer, while attention
concentration ability was getting weaker and weaker. This eventually
resulted in messages of lethal outcome in several Nazi divisions in
France and Poland. Doctors' warnings were left with no attention. All
orderly bags were filled with that dangerous drug during the last years
of the war. They prescribed pervitine pills to anyone, who had any ailing
complaints.

Nazis conducted more and more of their tests with the new wonder
chemical, although the war was coming to its end. It occurred to the
Third Reich leaders to launch the series production of the new D-IX
substance on March 16, 1944. Vice Admiral Helmut Heye stated at a session
with pharmacologists and small military units commanders that there
should be a new medicine invented to help German soldiers stand the tense
situation longer and to make them feel more uplifting than usual in any
situation. After the war, the admiral became a Bundestag deputy for
defense issues, by the way. Heyes suggestion was completely supported by
such an influential figure as Otto Skortseni (after the successful
operation to release Mussolini in September of 1943, the commander of the
Fridental special unit was awarded with the German National Hero title).
Skortseni was searching for a new drug for his division for long. After
he had a very detailed conversation with the leadership of Hitler's
headquarters in Berlin, there was a group of researchers set up in the
city of Kiel. The group was presided over by pharmacology professor
Gerhard Orchehovsky. The group was given a task to develop and launch the
production of the needed drug. Criminologist Kemper believes that the
plan was approved by Adolf Hitler himself: none of such projects could be
implemented without his approval.

Orchehovsky came to conclusion after several months of hard work at Kiel
University labs that he finally created the needed substance. One pill
contained five milligrams of cocaine, three milligrams of pervitine, five
milligrams of eucodal (morphine-based painkiller), as well as synthetic
cocaine that was produced by the company Merk. The latter drug was used
by German fighter pilots during World War I as a stimulant for their
large-distance sorties. The invented cocktail of drugs was supposed to be
tested by mini-submarine crewmen first. The results were supposed to be
checked during their navigation in the Kiel Bay. Skortseni ordered to
send him a thousand of those pills. He wanted to test their action on the
members of the Forelle diversionary unit of submariners, which was a part
of Danube destructive unit of the German death squad.

Researcher Kemper came to conclusion that the results of the tests were
very inspiring. That made Nazi leaders continue the experiments, testing
the new drug on the people, who walked in circles 24 hours a day,
carrying 20 kilos backpacks. Those people were Sachsenhausen
concentration camp prisoners. They became like laboratory guinea-pigs in
November of 1944. The goal of the experiment was to determine the new
stamina limit for D-IX exposed humans. Medical records of that time show
that several participants of the experiment felt fine with only two or
three short stops a day: "The considerable reduction of the need in sleep
is very impressive. This drug disables man's action ability and will." In
other words, D-IX made a human being a robot. The results of all those
tests inspired their initiators to supply D-IX drug to the entire Nazi
Army. However, they failed to launch the mass production of the
substance. Allies victories at both fronts in winter and spring in 1945
resulted in the collapse of the Nazi regime. The absurd dream of the
wonder drug was crushed.

(source: Pravda)






GLOBAL:

New Internet Archive On Nazi Victims


Esther Perlmutter never knew the wartime fate of her aunt.

But a few minutes on the Internet helped Perlmutter, who lives in
suburban Philadelphia, learn what befell Mindl Lederman, a resident of
Brest-Litovsk, a town on the Polish-Russian border.

Like many before her, Perlmutter used an archive of the nearly 20,000
Jews of Brest-Litovsk before they were annihilated by the Nazis in 1942.
The archive is now on the Web.

"I do not know of any similar archive for other ghettos," said
Christopher Browning, a professor of history at the University of North
Carolina.

The archive is available thanks to a man in Arizona who didn't give up
trying to find out what date to say Kaddish for his parents, a professor
who devoted himself to uncovering the truth about the "Final Solution" in
areas of the former USSR and the accidental discovery of an archive
forgotten for half a century in the basement of a provincial town in Belarus.

Shortly after they conquered Brest-Litovsk in 1941, the Nazis instituted
a registration system requiring all Jews older than 14 to present
themselves in the town hall, be photographed by Nazi photographers,
record their personal data and receive an identity card.

Out of the 26,000 Jews living in Brest in 1941 40 percent of the town's
inhabitants fewer than 15 remained alive upon liberation by the Soviets
in 1944.

As far as Holocaust researchers are aware, Brest-Litovsk was the only
place the Nazis conducted this type of comprehensive registration
program. And the 560-page ledger which bears 12,465 names, signatures,
fingerprints, addresses, professions and dependents survived intact in
the archives of the municipal town hall.

Soviet authorities concealed the existence of the archive for nearly 50
years, not wanting to spread evidence of massacres of Jews.

Scholars attribute this to two factors: First, Stalinist policy stressed
that victims were Soviet citizens, not Jews; second, the authorities were
anxious to hide the extent of local populations' collaboration in
exterminating Jews.

The archive was unearthed after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early
1990s, when the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem received
notice of its existence from Zakhar Zimak, a pioneering Brest researcher
in the USSR.

In July 1994, Yad Vashem researcher Masha Yonin was dispatched to Brest,
told only that "it is a place worth looking into." Sifting through
documents, she was stunned to find the archive.

Situated on the Bug River in what is today Belarus, Brest-Litovsk has a
long Jewish history.

The 1902 Jewish Encyclopedia cites it as "the largest and most important
of the first five Jewish settlements in Lithuania, dating from the second
half of the 14th century."

Subjected for the next 600 years to successive waves of protection,
subjugation, persecution and expulsion, the Jews of Brest maintained
their community.

After World War I, all strains of Jewish life synagogues, Zionist
organizations, Jewish schools, a hospital, newspaper, sports
organizations and professional societies were represented in Brest.

After the Nazi conquest of Poland in September 1939, the town was
transferred from Polish to Soviet jurisdiction.

Brest-Litovsk was the first target when Hitler launched his surprise
attack on Russia on June 21, 1941. The town fell to the Nazis a day later.

Nazi soldiers were accompanied by special SS killing commandos and German
police.

Less than three weeks later, Brest Jews suffered one of the first
anti-Jewish killing operations on Soviet territory.

On July 10, 1941, 6,000 Jews were rounded up in trucks, then shot or
bayoneted into open pits.

"On the first night of the mass killings the shooters were rewarded with
an unusual treat of strawberries and cream," Browning reports in his
book, "Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers."

From December 1941 the remaining Jews were enclosed in a ghetto. There
they worked under starvation conditions until the morning of Oct. 15,
1942, when the ghetto was emptied.

Hospital patients and small children were shot outright. The rest were
transported in cattle cars to a forest at Bronnaya Gora, some 50 miles
away. There they were shot into mass graves and their bodies were covered
with hot lime.

Only one person escaped alive.

On Oct. 15, the town's Accounting and Control Book of Population Movement
listed 16,934 Jews in Brest; on Oct. 16, the number was crossed out.

Yad Vashem made arrangements to have the voluminous material photocopied,
and it arrived in Jerusalem in 1995. Yad Vashem then shared an additional
copy with the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington.

In both institutions, the copies are open to any individual who comes in
person.

The archive's ledger of names is now accessible on the Internet as well.
That giant contribution came from the collaboration between Louis Pozez,
a Brest native who moved to the United States before the war, and John
Garrard, a professor at the University of Arizona.

The two first met while involved in Holocaust memorial projects in
Tucson, Ariz. Then, on a 1994 visit to Brest, where he hoped to learn his
family's fate, Pozez learned of the archive and arranged to have a copy made.

Together with institutional donors, Pozez financed the project, which
Garrard headed.

"I immediately recognized that the materials should be digitized so that
a searchable database could be put on the World Wide Web," Garrard said.
"I felt very strongly that relatives should be able to search the
database for free, from any country."

The next step in the chain was cooperation from JewishGen, a nonprofit
genealogical organization that agreed to post the archive on the Internet
in 1998.

Since then, the Brest Ghetto Passport Archive has been accessed more than
54,000 times.

The Brest Ghetto Passport Archive appears on a searchable database site
on the Internet: www.jewishgen.org/databases/brest.htm.

(source: Jewish Times)







USA----book review

BOOK REVIEW
By Robert J. Rosenberg


The Holocaust's Unsettled Accounts
In Imperfect Justice, author Stuart Eizenstat follows the Nazi money
trail into the abyss of World War II's financial crimes and a postwar
coverup
In January, 1995, on a typically dark and dismal winter day in Brussels,
Stuart Eizenstat received a call from U.S. Assistant Secretary of State
for European Affairs Richard Holbrooke that would change his life.
Holbrooke asked him to be a special State Dept envoy. His mission: to
assist in the return of property confiscated from religious communities
by the Nazis and later nationalized by East European Communist
governments.

Eizenstat, who was working at the U.S. Mission to the European Union,
hesitated, knowing the assignment would be difficult. He had tasted a
little of what was to come earlier in his career: During a stint in the
Carter Administration, he had recommended that the U.S. establish the
first Holocaust memorial outside of Israel, in Washington, D.C.

The bitter struggle that ensued between the Jewish community, which saw
the Holocaust as a distinctly Jewish event, and others such as the
Polish-American community, which pointed to their countrymen's own
suffering under the Nazis, taught him a lasting lesson: "Nothing about
the Holocaust is free of controversy," he writes. "It is politically
radioactive. Everyone who it has touched, directly or indirectly, holds
strong emotional opinions and seeks to claim it as theirs."

SURVIVOR PARADOX. Not even that lesson, though, could have adequately
prepared Eizenstat for the controversies that surfaced in his new
assignment. His work would lead to a reckoning of the economic and
financial crimes of World War II, expose the myth of Switzerland's
wartime neutrality, and foster an increase in anti-Semitism in Europe.

Eizenstat would also struggle with the paradox that I, along with others
whose parents are Holocaust survivors, have found: The greater our
distance from the Holocaust, the larger it looms. Imperfect Justice:
Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II
(Public Affairs, $30.00, 401 pages) is Eizenstat's account of his journey
to a strange corner of hell, one filled with dormant bank accounts,
unclaimed property, gold, insurance policies, looted artwork and
valuables -- and the restless ghosts of the dead.

The basic facts of the Holocaust are now horribly familiar: the 15
million civilians killed, including 6 million Jews. The world's silent
acquiescence to the Nazi program of extermination. The 10 million people
forced into labor by the Germans. The theft of some 600,000 works or art.
The homes, businesses, and money confiscated. The survivors, filled with
sorrow and anger, dread and guilt at being left among the undead.

"SEETHING BITTERNESS." Eizenstat's descent into the horror begins in
Eastern Europe -- Ground Zero of the Holocaust. In visits from 1995 to
2000 to a dozen East European countries, he encountered a host of
problems: competing wartime claims, the feeble rule of law and weak
judicial systems, the legacy of an age-old anti-Semitism, government
complicity, and officials' refusal to return such properties as schools
and community centers. He also finds "a seething bitterness that the
citizens of these countries, also Hitler's victims, had never received
compensation from Germans" comparable to what was paid to Jewish
survivors.

Had he kept to the original parameters of his mission, the modest results
Eizenstat achieved might have ended as a footnote to post-cold war U.S.
policy. But in the late '90s, news articles concerning "dormant" bank
accounts in Switzerland began to surface, raising questions about the
role of Swiss banks during and after World War II.

Eizenstat read of the roadblocks placed before one survivor, Greta Beer,
in her quest to recover a secret account set up in a Zurich bank on the
eve of the war by her father. Right away, he "saw the connection to the
property restitution work." Eizenstat asked that his responsibilities be
extended to exploring the issue of Holocaust-related bank accounts in
Switzerland and seeing that the sums reached their rightful heirs.

DECEPTIVE NEUTRALITY. In his telling, a simple inquiry into the facts of
the dormant bank accounts reveals an ugly story of deception and
complicity. Beneath the image of trustworthiness so carefully cultivated
by the Swiss banks Eizenstat finds evidence of lies told to victims'
heirs, of hidden accounts, and of balances being run down to zero through
the levying of excessive fees.

Switzerland initially admitted only to the existence of a few hundred
accounts worth a mere $15 million. But more than 20,000 worth hundreds of
millions turned up after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker
forced the banks to open their books.

The banking inquiry widened into an examination of Switzerland's role
during World War II -- and the country's "neutral" status took on a
different hue. It emerges as a nation whose central bank acted as the
chief lender to the Nazis, converting looted bullion into hard currency
needed to feed the war effort, buying gold that it knew had been
extracted from the teeth of the victims, and finally allowing German
companies to park wartime profits achieved through the exploitation of
slave laborers in Swiss banks. After Eizenstat presented a report on the
role of the Swiss in connection with Nazi gold, a tense situation span
out of control and into a diplomatic crisis between the U.S. and
Switzerland.

BEYOND COMPENSATION. Overriding every other issue: How to achieve a
final reckoning for the economic crimes of World War II? The only justice
possible, Eizenstat concludes, is an imperfect one, since the victims,
for the most part, are dead, as are those who inflicted the suffering
upon them.

While Imperfect Justice isn't the only work to deal with this side of the
Holocaust -- The Victim's Fortune, a more sensational account by John
Authers and Richard Wolffe, was published last year -- Eizenstat brings
an insider's view and grasp of the issues. More important, he possesses a
keen eye and a sharp pen. Whether writing about CS/First Boston Chairman
Rainer Gut, who grasps the potential damage to his bank's reputation, or
a class-action lawyer "shamelessly using elderly Holocaust survivors as
props" during press conferences, Eizenstat brings a deft touch to his
portrayal of character and motive.

The story that Imperfect Justice tells is far from uplifting. I found it
personally painful to read. My parents are survivors of the death camps,
both were slave laborers and receive compensation from Germany. As I
followed the wrangling between the banks' lawyers, class-action lawyers,
and the representatives of the Jewish organizations, with Eizenstat
shuttling back and forth between the sides trying to come up with a
figure to compensate more than 1 million survivors of the Nazis' horror,
I often stopped and thought: What compensation can there be for being
condemned to an unjust hell?

It's a question for which no adequate answer exists. Indeed, all that
anyone is left with is Eizenstat's imperfect justice.

(source: Business Week, Feb. 19)








USA:

Homosexuals Included in Holocaust Museum


A new exhibit at the Holocaust Museum in Washington features the plight
of homosexuals during World War II. Many Jews are not happy about the
inclusion.

The U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., has an exhibit that
examines the Nazi persecution of Homosexuals. Some Jewish groups aren't
happy about the addition.

The exhibit depicts homosexuals as victims of the Holocaust. But millions
of them didn't die like the Jews did.

Ted Phillips, who created the exhibit for the museum, said the display
makes clear that homosexuals were persecuted, not murdered.

"We are not attempting to equate the persecution of homosexuals with the
murder of the Jews," Phillips said. "It's a very carefully presented line
of distinction because the two tragedies while having some similarities
clearly are very different in scope as well."

But that's not good enough for Rabbi Yehuda Levin. As head of the Jewish
Union, Levin said including homosexuals in the museum gives the wrong
impression.

"Even the homosexual revisionists have been forced to indicate that most
of the homosexuals who were in the concentration camps it numbered only
several thousand. . . 5,000 according to some estimates were there
because of criminal misbehavior," Levin said.

That fact makes the exhibit even more troubling.

"To make them into heroes and to try to rewrite history and to try and
use this as a way of 'koshering' the homosexual lifestyle is an absolute
sacrilege," Levin said.

The exhibit took two years to create. It will be up for another month
here in Washington and then it takes its show on the road across America
to select cities.

The U.S. Holocaust Museum has had similar exhibits, and a group of
orthodox rabbis sued to remove them.

(source: Family News in Focus)








GERMANY:

Jewish group: Germany increases Holocaust survivor funds


Germany is to increase monthly payments to some 62,000 Holocaust
survivors around the world, a Jewish group that campaigns for
compensation said on Thursday.

In a statement, the Jewish Claims Conference said Germany had also agreed
to extend an offer of compensation to up to 4,000 former concentration
camp victims in Hungary and Romania.

Under the agreement, monthly payments to some 46,000 Holocaust survivors
in 40 countries will rise to 270 euros from 255 euros. Payments to
another 16,000 people in central and eastern Europe will increase to 135
euro from 128 euros.

A Finance Ministry spokesman confirmed talks took place with the Jewish
Claims Conference on Wednesday but could not provide any details.

(source: Reuters)