k


April 27




ITALY:

Mussolini's home to be Holocaust museum


In Rome, the former home of Italy's Benito Mussolini will be turned into
a memorial of the Holocaust endured by Rome's Jews, the Independent
reported Tuesday.

The Shoah Foundation, established 10 years ago by U.S. film director
Steven Spielberg, will contribute funds to the museum, to be built on the
Villa Torlonia, where the dictator lived.

Beneath the villa is an enormous network of Jewish catacombs. Some six
miles in length, it dates to the third and fourth centuries and contains
some of the best-preserved paintings and inscriptions of the Jewish
community.

After the start of the war, Mussolini used some of them to construct an
air-raid shelter for himself and his family.

It was Mussolini who, under Nazi pressure, enacted the race laws that
mandated discrimination against Jews in education, jobs and other areas,
but no Italian Jews were deported to concentration camps until the Nazi
takeover in 1943.

Of all countries touched by the Nazis' extermination program, Italy's
record is the least shameful. About 85 percent of the country's 45,000
Jews survived, many thousands protected by Catholics around the country.

(source: United Press International)




USA//NEW JERSEY:

Rutgers newspaper to apologize for Holocaust cartoon


The student editors of an alternative Rutgers campus newspaper plan to
apologize for publishing a cartoon last week that mocked the Holocaust.

The full-page drawing on the cover of Wednesday's issue of the Medium, a
student-funded weekly publication, drew sharp criticism from many students
and school officials, including university President Richard L. McCormick.
Several national Jewish organizations also expressed outrage, and many
people called on the school to shut down the publication.

The cartoon shows a man throwing a ball at another man sitting on an oven
at the campus' spring fair. The text reads, "Knock a Jew in the oven!
Three throws for one dollar! Really! No, REALLY!"

The paper's editors initially defended the cartoon, contending that it was
satire meant to lampoon the racist attitudes that fueled the Holocaust. On
Monday, they said its publication was "an unfortunate event" and that an
apology would be issued sometime this week while stressing that their
intentions for using the cartoon had been widely misunderstood.

"We wanted people to laugh at the absurdity of it," Ned Berke, the paper's
managing editor, told the Home News Tribune of East Brunswick. "In this
case, we failed. The meaning didn't get across."

Berke, 19, who is Jewish and had relatives die in the Holocaust, said he
made a last-minute decision to use the cartoon as a substitute for another
cover that was not working. And despite the uproar it caused, Berke said
the paper would not shy away from commenting on issues in ways that may
anger some people.

"College humor is like a training ground for future satirists. You learn
to walk the line between funny and offensive, and sometimes you stumble,"
he said. "We were trying to make a joke. When people don't get a joke,
it's usually because it's a joke not well told."

This is not the first time the Rutgers community has lashed out against
the Medium, which is published 13 times each semester and receives nearly
$10,000 through the Rutgers College and Livingston College student
governing associations. Campus rallies were staged last semester after it
published personal ads with slurs against blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Jews,
Christians, women and homosexuals.

(source: Associated Press)



HUNGARY:

In Hungary, a Belated Holocaust Memorial----A new commemorative museum in
Budapest is part of the country's attempt to confront its role in the
wartime mass killing of Jews.


For Hedwig Pataki, the opening of Central Europe's only Holocaust museum
offered a chance finally to commemorate the family she lost more than
half a century ago.

A wall in the courtyard of the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest is
inscribed with the names of 60,000 of Hungary's approximately 600,000
victims of the genocide.

Pataki, an 86-year-old Hungarian Jew who survived the Dachau concentration
camp in Germany, had provided the names of her father and an aunt, both of
whom died in Nazi camps. She clutched an application to add the name of
her uncle, slain in Budapest, his body thrown into the Danube.

"I learned that there is a wall and a place for names. That is why I am
here," she said. "It is my obligation."

The Holocaust Memorial Center, which opened April 15, is part of the
country's belated efforts to grapple with its role in the Holocaust.

"We show that people are missing, and we ask how did these things happen
and why haven't we talked about them?" said Andras Daranyi, the center's
executive director. "The Holocaust is part of Hungarian national history.
It is not just something that happened to the Jews."

The state-funded facility, the fifth national Holocaust museum in the
world, incorporates a 1923 synagogue on Pava Street. The second floor of
the synagogue holds an exhibit dedicated to the Romany, or Gypsy, victims
of the Holocaust. The first floor will house the museum's permanent
exhibition, a comprehensive history of the Hungarian Holocaust, scheduled
to open next year.

The complex also includes a research and documentation center and a public
database to aid people looking for the names of Holocaust victims
inscribed on the memorial wall. Daranyi said names would be added as
research continued.

Another hall houses the center's inaugural exhibition, "Auschwitz Album,"
which features photographs of a transport of Hungarian Jews taken to
Poland's Auschwitz concentration camp in May 1944. The pictures, found by
an Auschwitz survivor after liberation, document the arrival in the
morning and the wait outside the gas chambers later that day.

The exhibition brought back painful memories for Ica Lendvai, an
83-year-old Hungarian Jew who was held at Auschwitz for seven weeks.

"For whoever survived, whoever lived through those times, it was shocking
to see those pictures," she said. "It was a shock to be made to remember
again."

But there was also a sense of relief in being encouraged to speak about
what happened, she added. "For decades no one talked about this, not even
inside the family," Lendvai said.

During the war, Hungary was allied with Nazi Germany. About 825,000 people
legally classified as Jews lived in Hungarian territory in 1941. In August
of that year, about 17,000 "stateless" Jews most of whom came from
territory that had been recently annexed by Hungary were deported, and
11,000 were subsequently massacred by German forces.

But Hungarian authorities resisted Nazi pressure to carry out further
deportations, and in March 1944, Germany occupied Hungary. The Nazis, with
the assistance of Hungarian gendarmerie and army units, rounded up Jews
into ghettos, and the deportations began.

In just 56 days, 437,402 Jews were deported, all but 15,000 taken to
Auschwitz. The deportation was the largest and fastest of the Holocaust.
More than half a million Hungarian Jews died during the war.

After the war, Hungary showed little desire to ponder its role in the
Holocaust. The Communists came to power in 1948, and the new government,
aligned with the Soviets, who had liberated Hungary from Nazi occupation,
did not feel compelled to address the country's wartime role.

"No one in Hungary really faced their past," Lendvai said. "Hungary
basically put the responsibility on the Germans. But the Germans would
have been unable if the Hungarian police and army hadn't helped them."

Efforts to deal with the past have intensified since the end of Communist
rule in 1989. But a recent battle to erect a statue in honor of a former
prime minister underscores the continued lack of consensus.

Pal Teleki served as prime minister of Hungary from 1920 to 1921 and from
1939 to 1941. During his first tenure, laws restricting Jewish enrollment
at universities were passed; during his second term a law limiting Jewish
access to jobs and widening the definition of who would be considered
Jewish was put into effect.

Teleki committed suicide on April 3, 1941, rather than assist Germany in
invading Yugoslavia. He is viewed by some Hungarians as a patriot who
chose to die rather than collaborate with the Nazis.

"The debate over Teleki is the debate over Hungary's role in the
Holocaust: Is it the Germans forcing the Hungarians, or is it the
Hungarians actively collaborating?" said Michael Miller, a professor of
history at the Central European University in Budapest.

The Alliance of Jewish Communities in Hungary opposed honoring Teleki,
saying he symbolized "institutional, nationalistic anti-Semitism," and the
Jerusalem branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said it would be
"extremely incongruous" for Hungary to open a Holocaust museum and pay
tribute to Teleki at the same time.

After the protests, the Budapest city government revoked the Teleki
Memorial Committee's permit to put up the statue in Buda Castle. But in
early April the committee found a new home for the statue in the
courtyard of a Catholic church near Lake Balaton, southwest of Budapest.

The Hungarian Holocaust was "a heinous crime that was committed by
Hungarian people against Hungarian people," Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy
said at the memorial center opening.

Lendvai praised Medgyessy's directness. "No one acknowledged that before,"
she said. "I know how little of this history has been taught. This is a
time when people are being introduced to the past."

(source: Los Angeles Times)