May 10



WASHINGTON, DC:

Concerts honor victims of Nazis
Kennedy Center will feature music of 4 men, 3 of whom died in
concentration camps.


In a dramatic example of the strength of the human spirit, some artists
found the capacity to create their art even while held in a Nazi
concentration camp.

Music by four composers who were victims of Nazi persecution will be
featured on two evenings next week at the John F. Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts.

On Tuesday, the Hawthorne String Quartet will perform Viktor Ullmann's
"String Quartet No. 3, Opus 43." He composed it at the Theresienstadt
camp, where the Nazis had put him in charge of organizing inmates'
"leisure" time.

Theresienstadt was a concentration camp where conditions were far less
harsh than most others, so Nazis could use it to show off to the Red Cross
and others. The Nazis allowed inmates at Theresienstadt to organize an
orchestra.

"In no way whatsoever did we sit down and weep on the banks of the waters
of Babylon," Ullmann wrote in a diary, left behind when he was transferred
to Auschwitz. "Our efforts to serve the arts respectfully was
proportionate to our will to live, in spite of everything."

Ullmann died in 1944 at Auschwitz, one of the most notorious Nazi death
camps.

The musical program at the Kennedy Center opens with a song for soprano by
Alexander Zemlinsky, with the ironic title "May Flowers Were Blooming
Everywhere."

Zemlinsky left his music incomplete, but the lyrics tell of two young
lovers: the man dies of summer heat and exhaustion; the girl, wandering
under the Christmas lights of inhospitable farms, kills her newborn child
and sinks into the snow.

Zemlinsky was a protg of Johannes Brahms and a brother-in-law of composer
Arnold Schoenberg. A conductor in Berlin who was partly Jewish, he fled
first to Austria when Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, then to
Czechoslovakia.

Ill and approaching 70, he made his way to the United States at the
outbreak of World War II. He died in Larchmont, N.Y., in 1942.

Erwin Schulhoff wrote his "Concerto for String Quartet and Wind
Instruments" before the Nazis sent him to a camp at Wuelzburg, Bavaria,
where he died of tuberculosis in 1942. It will be played as the finale.

On Thursday, the full National Symphony Orchestra will play Ullmann's
Symphony No. 2. It too was written in Theresienstadt, as a sonata for
piano. A German composer, Bernhard Wulff, turned it into a symphony 45
years later from notes Ullmann left on how it might be orchestrated.

Pavel Haas also composed his "Study for String Orchestra" at
Theresienstadt. Haas died in Auschwitz.

(source: Associated Press)



ILLINOIS:

LDS discontinues baptism for deceased Holocaust victims -- Nauvoo temple
was not involved in practice.


A 158-year-old Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints ordinance
pertaining to baptism for the dead is in the final stages of being
redefined with respect to inclusion of Jews who died during the
Holocaust.

Requests from family members of Jews executed during World War II that the
church not include those individuals began several years ago.

The result of that protest was an agreement between church officials and
the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in 1995 that the
deceased in question be removed from the church's database of individuals
eligible for baptism by proxy.

"I consider this an insult. I don't like them to impose their beliefs on
me," said Ernest Michel, chairman of the organization.

Elder Jack Renouf, director of public affairs in Nauvoo, said the temple
in Nauvoo was not involved in the practice, but added that not all Jews
are opposed to the idea.

"There probably are some names that inadvertently, or intentionally, have
been added to the list," he said. "At the same time, there are rabbi
associations who have said, 'Gee whiz! What's all the fuss about?' "

The church operates the program based on the assumption that the closest
living relative of the deceased has consented to be baptized in proxy.

Offering baptism for the dead originally was intended for the church's
membership, and was one of the first ordinances put in place by the church
when the first temple was located in Nauvoo in 1846.

Renouf clarified that the offer of baptism for the dead is not one of
absolution, but an offer of choice.

"It's an offer for the dead to be able to choose to be saved or not,"
Renouf said.

Some 400,000 names of Holcaust victims have been removed and the church
continues to delete names when asked.

But 20,000 Jews were discovered in the church's International Genealogical
Index, including Anne Frank, as recently as 2002.

Although church leaders have ordered the practice stopped, some members
have continued the practice of baptism for the dead by proxy including
Jews killed during the Holocaust.

Identifying those who are in defiance of the church order is often a
problem of its own, Renouf said.

And church officials have offered no guarantee of universal compliance.

"Obviously, some names leaked through," Renouf said.

"The church has 117 temples operating worldwide, so you can imagine how
difficult it is to track all the names and who is involved."

But Michel's organization wants to see the process pick up speed and has
requested the assistance of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, DN.Y., in
convincing the church to stop the practice altogether.

Should negotiating efforts prove ineffective, Michel has said his group
will consider other options in resolving the matter, including legal
action.

(source: The Hawk Eye)




NEW YORK:

Painting Seized By Nazis Found After 60 Years


A Jewish history center in New York has a new painting with a rich
background.

The artwork came from the home of a family that fled the Nazis. Claims
experts found it in a Berlin institution.

The English translation of the painting is "Head of a Girl" by German
artist Anselm Feuerbach.

The market value of the canvas, painted in 1853, is estimated to be close
to $20,000.

(source: Associated Press)




LITHUANIA:

The man who is rewriting history


Ten years ago, after 45 years of Soviet rule, the Holocaust came into the
curriculum in Lithuania for the first time. "All the books that were
published before then were very Soviet, and their aim was to strengthen
the regime of the Soviet Union and not the historical facts," explains
the head of the Foundation for Educational Change in Lithuania, Vytautas
Toleikis. "In the Soviet textbooks, there was no topic called the
Holocaust. They talked there about the slaughter of inhabitants of the
Soviet Union. I still remember from my childhood that in villages
and small towns in Lithuania where Jews were killed it says: `Here
inhabitants of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were killed by
Hitler's people and bourgeois nationalists who lived here.' Now these
signs have been changed, and here too the Holocaust is studied in the
fifth and sixth grades."

Toleikis, 44, began his career in the educational system as a teacher of
Lithuanian language and literature. In 1999, the Foundation for
Educational Change, whose main aim is to encourage independent school
initiatives and multicultural education, was established. The teaching of
the Holocaust plays a major role in the work of the foundation, partly due
to Toleikis' personal story. "I was born in small village to a pious
Christian family. When I was still a young boy, my mother told about a
neighbor of ours who had turned in the Jews of the village, who was later
murdered. He claimed that the Jews had brought about the arrest of his
brother, and therefore, he turned them all in to the Nazis. My mother
showed me the houses where the Jews had lived, and the whole village
regarded this man oddly. Because of this story, I began to take an
interest in the Holocaust and to research it."

The walls of Toleikis' office in downtown Vilnius are decorated with
pictures of three cities that are sacred to Christians - Jerusalem,
Bethlehem and Nazareth. On his desk are inscriptions in Hebrew and
photographs from Yad Vashem. Toleikis has visited Israel twice and is in
constant contact with Holocaust researchers in Israel. "Jewish culture had
a great influence on Lithuania, and I am very proud of this," he says.
"I'm very proud of our multiculturalism, of having been born in a part of
the world that is so interesting historically. I am proud that three Nobel
Prize winners came from Lithuania - one of them of Polish origin and the
other two Jews."

Toleikis believes that while most Lithuanians relate to the Soviet rule of
their country more severely than to the Nazi occupation, "it is necessary
to take into account that these people have a different perspective. For
the Jewish Lithuanians, the Nazi occupation was certain death; for the
Lithuanians, it was a regime that brought back private property. From the
historical perspective as well, the Lithuanians greeted the German
soldiers with flowers," he says.

Soviet army forgot to leave

"In the Baltic countries, we don't mark May 8, the date of the liberation
from the Nazi occupation. Anyway, the Soviet army stayed here for years -
they simply forgot to leave. I think that as the years go by, we will look
back at this period in a less hostile way. Then no one will regard with
hostility the Lithuanian Jews who fought beside the Soviets and the
Americans against the Nazis. Today, no one humiliates those fighters -
they meet and they write books, but everything is done pretty much
secretly," he continues.

"Another question is what is being done at the historical sites where the
Lithuanian partisans fought. These sites are crumbling and require
refurbishing, but in the meantime, the government is not approving such
renovation due to fears that it will look pro-Communist. Nevertheless, I
believe that in the future, the public will recognize these people's
historical role."

Toleikis believes that Lithuanians are starting to recognize their role in
the slaughter of Jews. "Our society has already begun to acknowledge that
this slaughter did indeed take place, and this is very important. Only a
decade or even five years ago, the situation was completely different. A
few months ago, we announced a competition on the topic of `Toward a Civil
Society.' The students could choose among many topics - they could write,
among other things, about the Soviet occupation or the Holocaust. We
received about 150 projects, and I was surprised and glad to see that the
largest number of essays were written about the Holocaust."

(source: Ha'aretz)




GERMANY:

Berlin Holocaust monument to open on 60th anniversary of V-E Day


Berlin's long-delayed Holocaust monument is now on schedule toward a
formal opening on the 60th anniversary of the surrender of Germany a year
from now, an official said Thursday.

Nearly half of the 2,751 stone blocks arrayed like dominoes around the
open-air site have been installed, said Hans-Erhard Haverkampf, head of
the memorial foundation.

"We are confident it will be finished in time for the 60th anniversary of
V-E Day next May 8," he said.

Costing about EUR 30 million, the Holocaust memorial will be the size of
two football fields and include a small underground history museum.

It is being built in downtown Berlin close to the 18th Century Brandenburg
Gate almost atop the bunker where Nazi leader Adolf Hitler committed
suicide in 1945 rather than face capture by the Red Army.

Construction of the memorial only began in April 2003 - several years
later than planned - because securing and checking the site for unexploded
munitions took longer than expected and there were last minute wrangles
over project costs.

(source: Expatica News)




MACEDONIA:

Holocaust Museum For Macedonia


After years of negotiations, work on the Balkans' first Holocaust Museum
could begin in as little as several weeks.

Macedonia's tiny Jewish community has been in discussions with the
government for several years about building a memorial center to the
Balkans' lost Jews, using Holocaust restitution funds.

After various bureaucratic hurdles, construction is finally close to
commencing in the former Jewish quarter in the capital city of Skopje.

The final document concerning the land is about to be handed over, and
then work can start," Samuel Sadikario, chairman of the Macedonian
Holocaust Fund, told JTA.

Macedonia lost 98 percent of its 7,300 Jews in the Holocaust. The
country's Jewish community today numbers just 200.

Its members are keen that the center, which would cost around $1 million,
would not just map out the country's painful Jewish history but should be
a memorial center for Jewish communities from the whole Balkans region.

The three-story white building is to be built in the shape of a Star of
David.

The ground floor would house a museum and permanent exhibits showing
Jewish life over the years, featuring photographs and documents. The
second floor would feature an education center and the third floor a
research center and library.

The community's vision would be realized thanks to money secured for the
Holocaust Fund, established after the Macedonian government introduced a
sweeping restitution law in August 2002. Unlike measures in other
countries, the Macedonian law introduced a provision for heirless property
seized from deported Jews -- or the equivalent value in government bonds
-- to be transferred to the fund.

Sadikario points out the poignance of such a center in the former
Yugoslavia, parts of which still are home to simmering ethnic conflicts.
The center would play an important role in helping to educate about
tolerance and preventing such ethnic tensions and conflicts in the future,
he says.

"This center will be very important for Macedonia and for the whole region.
We cannot bring back all the people who died -- and in some ways building
this will be causing more pain -- but we need a reminder of the crossroads
of culture," he said.

Yugoslavia is a very dangerous area for potential conflict based on
nationalism, and we have to get across the important message about
different cultures living together in one place," he added.

"But it has been a slow process," Sadikario said.

"We have agreed with the government on 7,000 commercial and residential
properties which are former Jewish properties, most of them heirless and
therefore earmarked to be transferred to the Jewish community. But of
those, just seven have been passed to us," he said.

The Macedonian government has shown an impressive commitment to
restituting properties that belonged to the country's Jews before the war,
particularly in the face of severe economic strains. The country has
suffered severely from the breakup of Yugoslavia, formerly Macedonia's
primary trading partner.

The Macedonian Jewish community has been collecting documents and
researching the lives of the 7,148 murdered Jews for the museum, to be
built on the site of a former synagogue in the old Jewish quarter. One key
aim is to match all victims' names with photographs.

Sadikario said the Jewish community had been deeply saddened by the recent
death of Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski in a plane cash in Bosnia.
Trajkovski, who was not Jewish, had close ties with the Jewish community,
he said.

"Trajkovski was a true friend to the Jewish community and used to attend
some of our holiday celebrations. It's a deep loss for us," he said.

(source: The Jewish Times)