April 25



GREECE:

Greek Jews remember Holocaust victims

Members of Greece's small Jewish community laid wreaths Sunday at the
train station where tens of thousand of people were sent to Nazi
concentration camps.

The Jewish deportations from Greece have been an often overlooked part of
the Holocaust, but Greek officials and Jewish activists have staged
memorials and other events in recent years. Nearly 90 percent of Greece's
80,000 Jews perished in Nazi death camps, mostly in Poland, and less than
5,000 remain.

According to David Saltiel, head of Thessaloniki's Jewish community, more
than 55,000 of the city's Jews were shipped out from the train station
from March to August 1943.

The northern Greek port of Thessaloniki, whose Jewish community now
numbers about 1,100, was once a vibrant hub of Jewish culture and was
known as the "Pearl of Israel."

(source: Associated Press)



USA//NEW JERSEY:

Cartoon on Holocaust Draws Fire at Rutgers


The president of Rutgers University condemned a weekly campus publication
on Friday for printing a front-page cartoon that ridiculed victims of the
Holocaust. But, citing legal precedents protecting student publications,
he said he could not take away its university funds as some critics had
urged.

The publication, The Medium - a journal of news and opinion that features
humor, cultural items and sexual and scatological references - ran a
cartoon depicting a bearded man wearing a hat and sitting on the edge of
an open kitchen stove in a carnival setting. Under the heading "Holocaust
Remembrance Week," the cartoon's caption reads: "Knock a Jew in the oven!
Three throws for one dollar!"

In a statement, the Rutgers president, Richard L. McCormick, said that the
illustration was "outrageous in its cruelty" and called on the editors of
the publication to issue an apology. "The editors may think this is
satire, but I completely disagree," Dr. McCormick said. "While this
student-funded publication is protected by the First Amendment, the
vicious, provocative and hurtful material the editors have chosen to
publish is completely at odds with our values as a university."

The university's senate, a body made up of student and faculty
representatives, issued a statement on Friday noting that it "abhors" the
illustration. It was unclear whether the university would take any further
action. Officials said the publication received about $15,000 in school
funding.

While noting court precedents that protect student newspapers, three
Jewish groups on Friday nevertheless urged the university to re-examine
the possibility of a stronger action than the senate statement condemning
The Medium. "There's zero tolerance for making jokes, making fun or
belittling the Holocaust," said Kenneth Bandler, a spokesman for the
American Jewish Committee.

The editors of the newspaper did not return e-mail messages seeking
comment, and no one answered the telephone at their campus offices.
However, one editor, Ned Berke, defended the cartoon on Friday in The
Star-Ledger of Newark. He said that he is Jewish, and that he viewed the
illustration as a tribute to his own Jewish relatives who died in the
Holocaust.

"Humor is a way of honoring them and trying to get over it and to laugh,"
Mr. Berke said.

Mr. Bandler said that while his group was "strongly supportive of the
First Amendment," he did not feel that any explanation could justify the
contents of The Medium.

Andrew Getraer, executive director of the Rutgers University chapter of
Hillel, the Jewish student organization on campus, noted that the cartoon
in the most recent edition of The Medium was the latest example in a
long-running series of items that have offended various groups at the
school.

Last fall, for example, the publication was strongly criticized by Dr.
McCormick and others on campus for a number of items in one issue that
were considered racially offensive.

"But even this," said Mr. Getraer of the latest incident, "is a new low
for them."

The Anti-Defamation League also criticized the publication.

"The Medium has engaged in some of the most egregious and vile attacks on
Asian-Americans, African-Americans and gays," said Shai Goldstein, the New
Jersey regional director. "It lacks any qualification as satire. Its level
of sophistication is beneath junior high school." The controversial
edition of The Medium was not on the publication's Web site on Friday, but
an issue posted earlier featured the kind of fare that critics of the
organization said was common. Interspersed with photos of nude women,
close-ups of genitalia and explicit personals ads, were mock news stories
like one about the "death" of a campus computer server unit.

By late Friday, even that issue was inaccessible online. The newspaper's
site had been wiped off the Web, apparently by a computer hacker who left
a link to the Anti-Defamation League's Web site. Mr. Goldstein denied any
involvement by his organization.

"If that was done, that's not something that we do and we condemn," Mr.
Goldstein said.

The Web site's removal came a few hours after the statement by the
university senate, an action that Mr. Goldstein said had encouraged him
about the university's commitment to fostering amicable relations between
those of different faiths and ethnicities.

Noting that the senate's resolution called for the "expression of
responsible journalism," Mr. Goldstein said of The Medium: "That isn't
journalism. That isn't even bad journalism."

(source: New York Times)


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

USA//WASHINGTON, DC:

Holocaust Museum Shows 'Master Race' Effort


A first-of-its-kind U.S. exhibit documents how the Nazis
attempted to create a "master race," from murder and forced sterilizations
to the less violent urgings of "10 Commandments for Choosing a Mate."

By the time the Nazis arose last century in Germany, biologists had shown
that genes can determine a baby's hair and eye color. From that, the Nazis
argued that eliminating what they called the inferior genes of the "Jewish
race" or the "Gypsy race" would help develop Germans into a master race to
rule the world.

One of the exhibits at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shows a metal
case with 20 glass eyes and a skin color chart.

"Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race" opens on Thursday. The museum
says it's the first exhibit in the United States to deal with the subject.

The Nazi version of genetics was out of date long before they took power.
But they pressed ahead, blending political racism with science.

"Nazism is applied biology," said Rudolf Hess. Adolf Hitler's deputy.

The Nazis furthered the development of what they promoted as a blue-eyed,
golden-haired master race by issuing documents like "10 Commandments for
Choosing a Mate."

"Remember that you are a German," warned the first commandment.

Others note that genetic makeup spreads far beyond a parent and urge
Germans to choose mates only with "Nordic blood" and stay away from
non-Europeans.

The commandments, issued by the Reich Committee for Public Health, is
included in the exhibit in a book called "May I Marry My Cousin?"

There's also a sample of an official Nazi decoration: the "Honor Cross of
German Motherhood."

A simple version went to mothers of four or five properly Aryan children,
the silver version to mothers of six or seven. The gold cross was reserved
for women who had eight or more.

More ominously, Nazi authorities worked to rid themselves of the expense
of keeping alive the mentally defective, whom they called "life unworthy
of life."

That began soon after they took power with a "Law for the Prevention of
Genetically Diseased Offspring." Those affected included the feebleminded,
schizophrenics, manic-depressives, the deaf, blind and epileptic, the
severely deformed and chronic alcoholics.

Special hereditary health courts approved sterilization of an estimated
400,000 Germans.

A cartoon from a high school biology textbook shows a worker with
rolled-up sleeves, bowed under the weight of two degenerate-looking
figures on his back.

"You're helping carry these," says the caption.

During World War II, more than 5,000 children with birth defects were
killed in special German hospital wards and their parents received
falsified reports of the cause of death. the museum says.

Organizers of the exhibit estimate that 200,000 German patients considered
incurable were killed during the war. A photocopy of a letter on exhibit,
signed by Hitler, orders "euthanizing" one group.

As for the genetic experiments, "the Nazis had trouble with skin color,"
says Paul Lombardo, professor of law and bioethics at the University of
Virginia.

Adapting science to their own beliefs, they considered the people of the
Indian subcontinent to be Aryans, though many had darker skins than many
Africans.

Though the human genome has now been mapped, years of work remain to be
done to determine what combinations of genes are responsible for diseases
and human characteristics. The idea of race has changed greatly over the
years, and experts disagree on just how many races there are.

Before World War II several countries had programs for sterilizing people
considered likely to produce unfit children. At one time as many as 30
U.S. states had laws that made it possible, Lombardo said.

In 1927 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, known as a supporter of civil
liberties, wrote a unanimous Supreme Court decision upholding one such
law. He pointed out that it provided legal safeguards for the rights of
the woman concerned.

"Three generations of imbeciles are enough," he said.

But scientists' ideas of what can be inherited have changed.

"I looked up the school record of the daughter of the woman in that case,"
said Lombardo. "She was on the honor roll."

The state laws have been repealed or are no longer enforced, he said.

The exhibit will be open through Oct. 16, 2005. Admission is free.

On the Net: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: www.ushmm.org/deadlymedicine

(source: Washington Post)


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

The deadly medicine of the Holocaust


In the infancy of a wicked regime, the very first year of Adolf Hitler's
dictatorship, the new German chancellor signed a chilling mandate: the
law for the prevention of genetically diseased offspring.

Thousands of children would not survive the application of the law. Simon
Rozenkier did -- but only after Nazi doctors made sure he would never have
children of his own.

"I understand German and they said, 'We don't want to kill him, but lets
make him so he's not ... how do you say, that he not be productive,"
Rozenkier says.

Striving to create a pure, Nordic populace, Hitler and his cohorts seized
upon science, espousing "the idea that you could breed better human
beings," says Susan Bachrach, the curator of the new "Deadly Medicine:
Creating the Master Race" exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum.

Eugenics is the concept of changing the genetic makeup of a population,
mainly through controlling marriage and reproduction. It was attractive to
the Third Reich, which issued instructional films and encouraged Aryans to
couple-off and strengthen the bloodlines.

The Nazis wanted to rid their population of those they deemed inferior. In
the regime's early days, that meant not only Jews, but also anyone from
the depressed to the paranoid to the so-called "feeble-minded" to people
of mixed race.

"This provided a new opportunity to carry out policies in the name of the
fatherland and using the argument that certain groups were just an
enormous burden on German resources," Bachrach says.

The "Deadly Medicine" exhibit, which recently opened at the Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, takes you through this purposeful,
regimented slaughter.

The Nazis gathered the "undesirables," told their families they were being
taken away for special care and went to work.

Some 400,000 were forcibly sterilized and 200,000 were killed. The most
popular methods were lethal injection, heavy sedation and later, gassing.

As the Nazis rolled through Europe, the program extended to the
concentration camps -- and people like Simon Rozenkier, a Polish teenager
who'd survived the Jewish ghettos, was sent to Auschwitz in 1943.

"Being in Auschwitz, they gave me shots, you know, and sent me to Block
10. So they gave me ... They call it in German 'einish vuten', so I should
be stronger, able to work," Rozenkier says.

He didn't know it at the time, but the shots made him sterile.

Others at Auschwitz and elsewhere were murdered, their bodies dissected
for research.

The twisted, horrifying story the exhibit tells turns surreal with
portraits of the hands-on perpetrators.

The most notorious name attached to Nazi physical experimentation: Dr.
Josef Mengele. He was a significant part of the program to alter the
genetic makeup of Germany, but was really just one in a long line of
accomplished doctors who bought into the Nazi ideal of biological purity.

Geneticist Otmar von Verschuer was a mentor of Mengele's who shared his
fascination with twins -- a driving force behind the sterilization
program. Eugen Fischer, a prominent anthropologist, galvanized the program
to eliminate racial mixing. Dr. Ernst Wentzler, a respected pediatrician,
ordered the killing of several thousand children. Dr. Julius Hallervorden,
a well-known neuro-pathologist, once acknowledged receiving the brains of
nearly 700 executed children for research.

"It was an opportunity for their ideas and research to become public
policy," says Bachrach.

A doctor's opportunity, a child's demise -- perhaps the most disturbing
visual in this exhibit is its tribute to the youngest victims.

Simon Rozenkier remembers the children and remembers how close he came to
joining them.

Liberated from the camps, Rozenkier came to the United States, joined the
Army, served in the Korean War, got married and adopted a newborn girl.
He'd met Dr. Mengele and his colleagues at Auschwitz -- and suffered at
their hands.

"I want to know what happened to them. That bothers me. The war is over.
Where did they go?" Rozenkier asks.

Most of these torturers were never prosecuted. They faded into society and
some practiced traditional medicine again.

But their legacy did not escape.

(source: CNN)


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

USA//UTAH:

Jews urge halt to baptisms of dead


Researchers say that Mormons have continued to posthumously baptize
Jewish Holocaust victims into their faith despite a promise to
discontinue the practice.

"We are very hopeful that we will be able to convince the church to stop,"
Ernest Michel, chairman of the New York-based World Gathering of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors, has said. If not, Michel said, his group will
consider other options, "possibly legal steps."

In response, Mormon spokesman Dale Bills said church officials "do not
know what may come of these discussions, but we welcome the involvement of
any who seek to resolve amicably the concerns expressed by some of our
Jewish friends."

The denomination has released documents in which it said it couldn't
guarantee that no Jews would be posthumously baptized.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has long collected names
from government documents and other records worldwide for posthumous
baptisms.

Church members stand in to be baptized in the names of the deceased
non-Mormons, a ritual the church says is required for them to reach
heaven.

The practice is primarily intended to give salvation to the ancestors of
Mormons, but many others are included, since the church believes that
individuals' ability to choose a religion continues beyond the grave.

Non-Mormon faiths have objected to the baptisms.

"It's ridiculous for people to pretend they have the key to heaven," said
Rabbi Marvin-Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los
Angeles. "And even if they say they want to do somebody a favor ... it's
not a symbol of love. It's a symbol of arrogance."

In 1995, the Mormon church acceded to demands by Jewish leaders that the
denomination stop posthumously baptizing Jews. But Helen Radkey, a Salt
Lake City researcher, said earlier this month that the process hasn't
ended.

She said she has found posthumous baptism records for 268 Dutch Jews
killed in Polish concentration camps, which she described as a "small
sampling."

All the death camp victims, incorrectly listed in the Mormon database as
dying in "Auschwitz, Germany," were posthumously baptized well after the
1995 agreement.

Mormon leaders reaffirmed the 1995 pact in December 2002, after Radkey
found at least 20,000 Jews in the church's International Genealogical
Index. The church says proxy baptisms have been performed for nearly every
one of the 400 million names in the database.

"The Jews have to either accept what the Mormons are doing or take legal
action,"-Radkey said.

Michel's group asked Sen. Hillary Clinton to intervene in the matter, and
the New York Democrat met last month with Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah
Republican and Mormon, though neither would comment.

The church directed its members after the 1995 agreement to not include
names of unrelated persons, celebrities and non-approved groups, such as
Jewish Holocaust victims, for the baptisms, according to documentation
from the church.

The church also assumes that the closest living relative of the deceased
being offered for proxy baptism has consented.

The pact, however, "did not guarantee that no future vicarious baptisms
for deceased Jews would occur," according to church documents.

In a Nov. 14 letter, church elder D. Todd Christofferson wrote Michel that
the church did not agree to find and remove the names of all deceased Jews
in its database of 400 million names.

"That would be an impossible undertaking," Christofferson wrote.

(source: Associated Press)





GERMANY:

Dresden returns largest Holocaust art collection to owners


A city in Germany has officially handed over stolen Holocaust art to
rightful Jewish owners, marking the return of possibly the largest
private collection of art works that had been feared lost forever.

Berlin newspaper reports said the collection was worth millions and was
"the largest private Holocaust art collection ever discovered".

The collection reportedly was stolen from Max and Fanny Steinthal, a major
Berlin banking dynasty who were co-founders in 1873 of Deutsche Bank, the
largest commercial bank in Germany today.

The Dresden State Art Collection handed over 36 paintings along with 28
sketches, etchings, prints and other works, said collection spokesman
Tilmann von Stockhausen.

The works had been discovered during an inventory of the collection in the
wake of concentrated efforts to track down art illegally confiscated from
Jews by the Nazis.

Among the art works are paintings by Dutch Masters, sketches by Pablo
Picasso and works by French Impressionists.

They were returned to the heirs of a Berlin Jewish family, it was said.

The Nazis had taken them from the family and handed them over to an
"Aryan" son-in-law for what was called safe-keeping until such time as
their fate could be determined, von Stockhausen said.

When he fled Communist East Germany in the 1950s, the collection was
seized by the regime in East Berlin.

"The collection was shipped to our collection, but was never listed in the
official inventory," he added. "It was only when we actually scoured the
vaults for unlisted works that we found them and their documents of
origin."

(source: Expatica)