April 2


USA//UTAH:

Museum returns painting looted by Nazis to heirs


More than a half century after a Paris art gallery was looted by Nazis,
one of the paintings that was taken has been returned to the owner's
daughter.

The small pastoral painting, "Les Jeunes Amoureux" by Francois Boucher,
was part of a collection of hundreds that disappeared after Jewish art
dealer Andre Jean Seligmann fled with his family to the United States.
The painting was donated to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts by a collector
in 1993.

David Dee, the museum's executive director, returned the painting to
Seligmann's daughter, Claude Delibes, and his daughter-in-law, Suzanne
Geiss Robbins, on Thursday.

"We are very excited to get this painting from the museum," said Delibes,
of New York City.

Robbins estimated that about 400 paintings were looted from Seligmann's
gallery, and only 25 percent have been returned. The Louvre recently
returned a painting of the Crucifixion to the family after discovering it
was owned by Seligmann, who died in 1945.

Delibes recounted how Hermann Goering, a top aide to Adolph Hitler, came
into her father's gallery in the late 1930s to admire the collection.

"Apparently Mr. Goering had visited the gallery and my father knew very
well who Mr. Goering was and he threw him out," she said.

After her father fled the country, Goering sent trucks to confiscate his
art, Delibes said.

Toward the end of the war, when it was evident the Nazis would lose World
War II, Goering sent a trainload of stolen art from his hunting lodge to
the relative safety of Bavaria, but the train was abandoned and the art
looted.

The Boucher painting remained missing until 1967, when it showed up in a
New York gallery. It was bought in 1972 by Val Browning, an heir of the
Ogden, Utah-based Browning Firearms Co. He donated it to the Salt Lake
City museum 21 years later.

Last year, a researcher at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
working on a book about Goering's art collection found the painting in
Utah through an Internet search. Nancy Yeide alerted the museum, which
launched its own investigation.

Robbins commended the museum for what she called their "honor" and
"integrity" in returning the painting.

"The actions you're taking today have been a wonderful message and a happy
ending to a distressing story," Robbins said.

David Carroll, director of collections, said the painting had not recently
been appraised, and declined to estimate its value.

The women will return the painting to New York, but haven't yet decided
whether to sell it.

(source: Associated Press)

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USA//TEXAS:

91 Texans to get Holocaust insurance payments


Ninety-one Texans are among 16,000 Holocaust survivors and heirs
worldwide who will receive $1,000 payments from an international
commission that investigated Holocaust-era insurance claims.

The payments, to be mailed out this week, are going to people who believe
they had an insurance policy in effect during the Holocaust but are unable
to identify the insurance company, the Texas Department of Insurance
announced Wednesday.

"This money does not come close to fully compensating survivors or their
families. But what we hope it does is offer some solace," Texas Insurance
Commissioner Jose Montemayor said.

The Insurance Department worked with the International Commission on
Holocaust Era Insurance Claims to identify Texas survivors and their
families. The state agency organized outreach events, placed information
on its Web site and helped Texas survivors send claim information to the
international commission.

The Texas Legislature enacted a law last year that also would have helped
Holocaust survivors collect on insurance policies, but it was declared
unconstitutional by Attorney General Greg Abbott.

The Texas law, which would have required the Insurance Department to set
up a Holocaust registry, was patterned after a California law, which was
struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court last June. Abbott cited the Supreme
Court ruling in his opinion.

Under the short-lived Texas law, insurance companies doing business in the
state would have had to provide information to the registry about European
policies written from 1920 to 1945. In overturning the similar California
law, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision sided with the Bush
administration and insurance companies and held that the statute amounted
to unconstitutional interference in foreign affairs by a state.

The high court said the executive branch of the federal government already
had established a mechanism -- the international commission -- for
handling Holocaust claims.

The commission was formed by insurers, the state of Israel, and Jewish and
Holocaust survivor organizations.

(source: Houston Chronicle)

********

Danish PM to receive award in Texas for rescue of WWII Jews


Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen will visit Houston later this
month to receive an award honoring the country's World War II rescue of
thousands of Jews from occupying Nazi forces.

Fogh Rasmussen, who will be in Houston April 20-22, will receive the
Lyndon B. Johnson Moral Courage Award during a ceremony at the Holocaust
Museum Houston on April 21, his office said Thursday.

The award was given to Denmark for "the miraculous action by people of all
levels to save the Jewish population during the Holocaust," the museum
said.

Previous recipients include U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and
filmmaker Steven Spielberg who directed the Oscar-winning "Schindler's
List."

German troops met no resistance when they invaded Denmark on April 9,
1940. The Danish government protested, but stayed in power and cooperated
with the Nazis.

By 1943, efforts by the Danish resistance against the occupation led to
martial law. In late September, some German officials tipped off Danish
politicians about Adolf Hitler's order to round up Jews and deport them to
concentration camps.

Danes spontaneously began smuggling several Danish Jews across the narrow
Oresund Strait to safety in neutral Sweden, dodging German patrol boats.

About 7,300 Jews escaped, while 481 others mainly elderly and sick people
who couldn't get out were arrested and deported to a concentration camp
in Theresienstadt, in what was then Czechoslovakia. Fifty-three died
there.

Fogh Rasmussen will also speak at the James baker Institute for Public
Policy at the Rice University about the situation in the Middle East and
the U.S.-Danish bilateral relations.

On the Net -- Holocaust Museum Houston: http://www.hmh.org/

(source: Associated Press)


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USA//MARYLAND:

Days of Remembrance: Holocaust
Survivor's Son Shares Story


April is designated as the Days of Remembrance Observance for the tragic
suffering and genocide of nearly 11 million people during the Holocaust.
The 61-year anniversary of one of mankind's darkest eras in history
continues to remind us all of what happens to civilized people when
bigotry, hatred and indifference reign.

In April 2003, the National Naval Medical Center hosted a Holocaust Days
of Remembrance Program, which featured Holocaust survivor Helen Lebowitz
Goldkind, who relived for the audience her youth in the Nazi era.

Said Goldkind, "The Nazis walked in the houses in the dark while we were
sleeping. They woke us up and told the people to walk on the left and
right sides. The people on the right side were marched to a shower; the
people on the left side marched to the gas chamber."

After English soldiers liberated Goldkind from a concentration camp, she
was nourished back to health in Sweden before emigrating to the United
States in 1946 and starting a family. Her son, Dr. Lawrence Goldkind, a
staff gastroenterologist at the National Naval Medical Center and
assistant professor at the Uniformed Services University of Health
Services, says he never fully understood his mother's 'silent' pain until
she became a speaker for the Holocaust Awareness Program.

In his own words, this is Dr. Goldkind's story:

When I was a kid, my mother never talked about the Holocaust; it was
almost like a secret. It was an internal sadness just knowing that
something horrible had happened to her, and we wouldn't talk about it.
Children didn't ask their parents why they were crying.

I remember I became aware of the Holocaust because my mother had books on
that topic during the 1950s and 1960s. One of the books, I believe, showed
a picture of Hitler on the front cover with his eyes cut out. I then
realized there must be something about this because my mother literally
tore off a piece of the paperback cover.

There were also several television shows about the Holocaust during the
1960s. I remember being less than 10 years old when I saw piles of dead
bodies and horrific things on those shows.

When I became a teenager, I found out more about my mother's experiences
from her sister.

As an adult, I sometimes feel a sense of guilt for having such a good
life, but, at the same time, there is also sadness. My experience with my
mother is almost identical to other people in my position. When you read
books written by Holocaust survivors, it was an extremely common
phenomenon that people would not talk about the genocide. They would spend
years rebuilding their lives and trying to have relationships.

For the most part, relationships between survivors and their children are
very complicated. Though it's loving and caring, there is a certain amount
of tension. You can't replace or erase the horrible things that happened.
There's a
Courtesy of USAMM photo archives
German civilians dig mass graves for dead prisoners from the Nordhausen
concentration camp.

responsibility from us to make whole the life of your parent whose life
has been shattered.

Not until 1975, almost 30 years after the end of World War II, did Israel
teach children about the Holocaust. Prior to that year, the subject of the
Holocaust was considered a taboo topic associated with shame.

After my mother and I saw the movie "Schindler's List," she told me it
didn't portray what the reality of the Holocaust was really like. Though
it was a powerful and excellent movie, it had its limits. The magnitude,
sites and smells can only be felt and seen in a real situation.

Unfortunately, open anti-Semitism still exists today. My son went to
Poland with a youth group during his final semester in high school. There,
people spit on him and taunted these Jewish high school students. Three
million Jews lived in Poland, which was 10 percent of the entire
population before the war. Now, hardly any Jews live in the country.

The biggest concern in my mother's generation is if the memory of the
Holocaust disappears from history, there would be no message from the
survivors, and the atrocities would never be told. To prevent something
like this from ever happening again is the only possible positive thing
that could come out of this horror. Now, people in their 70s and 80s are
more vocal about the Holocaust than they were 30 years ago.

Whenever anybody tries to come to terms with the Holocaust, it's really
impossible to understand how it can fit into a world that we would all
like to think of as an orderly place. You have to go through a process,
and some people lose faith or put it out-of-their mind because,
eventually, you hit a brick wall. Ultimately, we must remember that it's
within a person's power to basically be bad or good.

Author's note

Although his mother prided herself on not letting the Holocaust affect her
children, Goldkind adds that his cousins, who are also children of
Holocaust survivors, also share the responsibility of making life good for
their parents.

At the end of his mother's story to the audience, Goldkind said, "I was
very proud to go to last year's Holocaust Days of Remembrance Program at
Bethesda. It's becoming part of the American psyche to identify evil when
it exists and to take measures to fight it.

(source: Bethesda Journal)


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USA//NEW JERSEY:

Press Release Source: Congregation B'nai Israel of Greater Red Bank, NJ


'Righteous Gentile' Honored 49 Years After Holocaust Leader of Segregated
All-Black Army Unit Saved Lives of Jewish Teens

Forty-nine years after he saved the lives of two young Jewish teenagers
by hiding them within the ranks of his Army unit, former Lieutenant John
Withers is being honored by Congregation B'nai Israel. The ceremony will
take place on April 18, 2004, at 7:30 p.m. in conjunction with the
synagogue's Yom HaShoah Holocaust Remembrance service.

"John Withers represents the best of America and the best of humanity,"
said Rabbi Jack Rosoff. "He extended a helping hand at substantial
personal risk to save the lives of two teenage boys. It is important for
people to know that there are those in the world who will put themselves
at risk for people in need," he added.

ABOUT WITHERS:

Near the end of World War II, a time when the U.S. Army was segregated,
Withers lead an all-black supply convoy unit in Germany. In direct
violation of Army orders and at the risk of a dishonorable discharge,
Withers hid two Jewish teenagers within the ranks of his truck company for
over a year. The two, both survivors of Dachau concentration camp, were
literally sores, skin and bones when they came to the unit, and stayed for
more than a year becoming stronger, healthier and learning English from
Withers and his men.

At the time, Withers fought for freedoms that he, as a Black American,
could not enjoy; black soldiers rode separately from whites and were
expected to step aside when a white walked by. Yet, he understood the
difference between right and wrong, and knew that leaving these young men,
whose families were killed in the Holocaust, was wrong.

Because of his heroic humanitarian acts, Withers has earned the title
"Righteous Gentile," a named given by the Jewish community to those who
saved the lives of Jews before and during the Holocaust.

In a recent interview published in the Wall Street Journal, Withers said
of his decision to hide the boys, "I think I identified with them very
strongly and instantaneously."

Dr. John L. Withers, now 87 years old, is a retired Foreign Service
Officer, who served in Laos, Thailand, Burma, Korea, Ethiopia, Kenya and
India. He served in the U.S. Army from 1941 to 1947.

A presentation that crosses all religious and cultural lines, the event
will include music from the Congregation B'nai Israel choir, as well as
the 60-voice Emanuel Baptist Church choir from nearby Tinton Falls.

Founded in 1922, Congregation B'nai Israel, on the corners of Hance and
Ridge Roads, is one of the oldest conservative synagogues in Monmouth
County. For directions and more information, contact the B'nai Israel
office at 732- 842-1800.

This release was issued on behalf of the above organization by

(source: Congregation B'nai Israel of Greater Red Bank, NJ)






(in) AUSTRIA:
Billion-dollar Holocaust lawsuit


Using a musty Austrian bank vault as a backdrop, an American lawyer said
he plans to file a $1.3 billion lawsuit on behalf of Holocaust victims
whose artworks were stolen by the Nazis and sold off after World War II.

New York-based attorney Edward D. Fagan said a new group calling itself
the Association of Holocaust Victims for the Restitution of Artwork and
Masterpieces would call on Austrian banks, the Austrian government and
Sotheby's auction house to return paintings and other works allegedly sold
without the permission of their original Jewish owners.

A draft of the lawsuit handed out to reporters named Bank
Austria/Creditanstalt, Landerbank and Erste Bank, but did not name the
Austrian government or Sotheby's.

Fagan said he would file the lawsuit in a US District Court in New York,
but it was unclear whether the suit had been filed.

Fagan contended that the missing artworks include paintings by Monet,
Cezanne, Delacroix and other Impressionist masters.

The plaintiffs, who were not identified by name, were said to include
several dozen families, mostly Jews, from Austria, Belgium, France,
Hungary, Germany, Israel, Poland, Switzerland, the United States and other
countries.

Fagan said lawsuit would accuse the banks, government and auction houses
for "the systematic theft of great artwork, masterpieces and collections,"
and would seek between $130 million and $1.3 billion in damages if the
artworks - valued at between $2.6 million and $6.52 million apiece -
cannot be returned.

At a press conference in a Vienna cafe, Fagan showed reporters a sketch he
said was drawn by an unidentified former employee of Bank
Austria/Creditanstalt, purportedly showing the location of a secret vault
concealed beneath a trap door that once contained priceless paintings
unclaimed after the war.

He then led several dozen journalists on a walk to the bank's nearby
headquarters, where flustered officials agreed to unlock the cellar and
open several vaults. None contained anything more than old books and dusty
boxes of documents and files.

Nonplussed, Fagan said he never expected to see artworks, which he
contended were sold off by Sotheby's and other auction houses with the
complicity of Bank Austria/Creditanstalt, Erste Bank and the Austrian
government, which he said issued export licenses allowing the works to
leave the country.

The works' rightful owners, he said, were mostly Jews who perished in the
Holocaust - the Nazis' extermination of 6 million people.

Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, one year before the war began
in Europe.

"We are accusing the banks of engaging in the trafficking of stolen
Holocaust artwork," Fagan said. "It's not sufficient to say, 'We don't
have anything.' A New York court is going to say, 'Well, you've got
something - show me."'

A 16-page draft of the lawsuit alleges that the banks "developed systems
and schemes through which they collected, took title to and/or profited
from artwork ... which the defendant Austrian banks knew, had reason to
know and/or upon the exercise of reasonable diligence could have
discovered were stolen from Holocaust victims."

Bank Austria, which recently merged with Creditanstalt, paid $58.7 million
in 1999 to settle a lawsuit brought by Fagan on behalf of Jews whose gold
and other financial assets were stolen by the Nazis and allegedly fell
into the bank's hands after the war.

Spokesman Peter Thier said the bank was eager to cooperate in any way and
show it does not possess artworks or other valuables seized by the Nazis.
He said the bank was working closely with an independent historical
commission set up in the mid-1990s to handle claims by victims of Nazi
looting.

Oliver Rathkolb, a ranking member of the commission, told the Austria
Press Agency there was "no evidence of a connection between art theft" and
the bank.

"We have no problem with exposing the truth. We want to be as transparent
as possible," Thier said, conceding that if proof exists that the bank was
involved in illegal sales of artwork, "it would be a catastrophe."

A respected Austrian newspaper, Der Standard, reported that one of the
disputed masterpieces is Mount Sinai, an oil by El Greco that surfaced a
decade ago at an open market in Vienna, only to disappear until it was
auctioned by Sotheby's for $6.5 million five years ago.

(source: The Courier-Mail)