Sept. 27



SCOTLAND:

Scottish Jewish groups in bitter dispute over Holocaust slur'

A BITTER row has broken out in Scotland's Jewish community after a
pro-Israel group was accused of suggesting its opponents would not have
been worthy of surviving the Holocaust.

The Scottish Friends of Israel has clashed with an organisation called
Peace Now, which was established in 1982 to promote dialogue and
understanding between Israelis and Palestinians.

Tony Tankel, a prominent member of Peace Now in Scotland, claimed: "They
(The Scottish Friends of Israel) put a page on their website saying those
people who supported the Peace Now movement had cut themselves off from
the Jewish people and would not have been worthy 'to have been redeemed in
the Holocaust'.

"For one Jewish organisation to suggest that other Jewish people would not
have been worthy of surviving the Holocaust is as low as you can get."
He has called on the Jewish Representative Council, an umbrella
organisation representing Scotland's 7000 Jews, to dissociate itself from
the Scottish Friends of Israel.

Mr Tankel, 42, said the suggestion followed his criticism of a letter
written last month to the Jewish Chronicle by the Scottish Friends of
Israel in which they claimed they had been commended for their work by
various Jewish communal organisations in the UK.

He said: "I wrote a letter to the paper saying that not all of the
Scottish Jewry were supportive . . . and pointed out that a lot of
material on their website was offensive."

He said it was after the letter that a page appeared on the website which
featured an image of the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem Yad Vashem
alongside text which appeared to imply Peace Now members would not have
been worth saving during the Holocaust. Mr Tankel said "some of the
material on the website of the Scottish Friends of Israel is fundamentally
racist. Potentially the activities of this organisation are harmful to the
best interests of the Jewish community in Glasgow and further afield.

"We have now asked the Jewish Representative Council to formally
dissociate itself from the actions and words of the Scottish Friends of
Israel."

Last Monday the council, which initially encouraged the formation of the
media response group and was happy to have it affiliated, effectively gave
it a week to remove any offensive material from its website and apologise.
Dr Ken Collins, the council's president, has gone on record in the Jewish
Chronicle, saying he was unhappy with the material, and asked for it to be
withdrawn. He said last night the council is to meet the group to discuss
its concerns. "We trust this meeting will settle all the issues."

Micky Green, a spokesman for Scottish Friends of Israel, which set up its
website last month to counter what it saw as anti-Semitism in the media,
said: "The image of the Holocaust was not placed on our website with the
intention of suggesting that members of Peace Now would not have merited
saving in the Holocaust. It was to underline the necessity of an
independent state for the Jews.

"Peace Now's move to have us removed from the Jewish Representative
Council is based on their continuing misunderstanding of what we stand
for."

(source: The Herald)






UKRAINE:

Babi Yar: Jews Remember Greatest Holocaust Tragedy in Ukraine


In Kiev, the Jewish community of Ukraine held an emotional ceremony
at Babi Yar, the site of a mass murder conducted by Nazi forces during
World War Two. 63 years later, this Ukrainian site hosts a memorial to the
victims - a testament to the injustice of the Holocaust.

On Yom Kippur in 1941, the Nazis murdered 33,771 Jews. And the tragedy was
not yet finished, with more than 100,000 Jewish and non-Jewish people
killed over the following months.

Jewish men, women and children were ordered to stand, in small groups of
ten, at the edge of a deep ravine. There, they were machine-gunned down,
falling in tens directly into the pit. Two years later, the Nazis
restrained from immediately killing other prisoners, instead putting them
to work - forcing them to eliminate evidence of the mass murder by burning
the bodies.

With no gravestones to mark the tens of thousands massacred here, a
memorial service is held every year at the site known as Babi Yar. Earlier
today, representatives of the Federation of Jewish Communities paid their
respects to the victims of Babi Yar - the greatest tragedy to have
occurred in this country during the Holocaust.

Hundreds of people came out for the solemn event, which involved FJC
President Lev Leviev, Israeli Finance Minister Benyamin Netanyahu,
Israel's Chief Sefardic Rabbi Shlomo Amar, Israeli Ambassador to Ukraine
Naomi Ben Ami, Chief Rabbi of Ukraine Azriel Chaikin, Chief Rabbi of
Russia Berel Lazar, Chabad Lubavitch emissaries from throughout Ukraine,
in addition to other public, political and religious figures, and Jews of
Ukraine.

These guests and many other delegates are currently visiting Kiev in order
to participate in the Forum of Jewish Communities of Ukraine. Organized by
the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine, this event welcomes
representatives from over 160 communities to discuss various questions
concerning present-day Jewish life in the country.

"Now, when anti-Semitism is still alive, 63 years after this tragedy, we
must not be resigned to tolerating it, but to draw attention to each and
every occurrence of anti-Semitism", stated FJC President Lev Leviev. He
further emphasized that the FJC and governments of the Former Soviet Union
countries are doing everything possible in the struggle against
anti-Semitism.

The spirit of the event was embodied in the suggestion by Chief Rabbi of
Zhitomir, Shlomo Wilhelm, to light a candle of tolerance to disperse the
darkness of anti-Semitism and terrorism. Participants in the event
accordingly followed suit.

(source: Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS)






CZECH REPUBLIC:

Spirit lived in a way station to Hitler's horror----Last stop before
dying: In a fortified town, the cultural life starred in the Nazis'
efforts to fool the outside world


TEREZIN, Czech Republic - Zdenka Fantlova remembers Terezin as the best of
the Nazi hells: a ghetto with a swing band, a concentration camp with shoe
stores and cafes. Here she wore her own clothes; here her family was still
alive.

Called Terezin by the Czechs and Theresienstadt by the Germans, this
fortified town held World War II's most improbable collection of artists,
musicians, scientists and scholars -Jews rounded up throughout Europe and
imprisoned here before being sent to Auschwitz and other death camps.

When Jews could not go to school, Terezin became their university:
2,430 lectures took place, on such topics as the Jews of Babylon, the
theory of relativity, Alexander the Great and German humor.

"Compared to all the others," recalls Lory Cahn, of Philadelphia, "it
was gold."

But Terezin was no retirement villa, as the Nazis had promised old and
prominent German Jews, like Cahn's father. For most, Terezin was a way
station to Adolf Hitler's Final Solution.

More than 150,000 Jews - first from the Czech lands of Bohemia and
Moravia, and then from Germany, Austria, Holland, Slovakia, Denmark and
Hungary - were forced into this 18th-century fortress 37 miles north of
Prague.

The Nazis created a Jewish Council of Elders and made them decide who
should ride the cattle cars East, to near certain death, and who could
stay.

Even staying in Terezin was no guarantee of survival. Half died of
malnutrition, disease or despair - like Otto Loewe, Sen. John Kerry's
great uncle.

As suspicions of mass murder grew, Terezin's cultural life - first
banned, then tolerated - wound up starring in the Nazis' efforts to dupe
foreign dignitaries and the International Red Cross. The Nazis planned to
exterminate Europe's 11 million Jews, and Terezin was key to the deception
- the show camp, the model settlement.

Propaganda movies were shot of the Jews - playing soccer, reading
novels, sipping coffee - to show how well they lived. After being filmed
joking with the commandant, children were sent to their deaths.

Since the 1989 collapse of communism, Terezin's legacy has spread far
beyond the city's walls. As the survivors' numbers dwindle - of 37,000,
only 2,000 remain - and fewer are left to tell their stories, the plays,
music, paintings and literature they created speak for them. The works are
enjoying a renaissance that is testimony to the strength and beauty that
can arise from the most horrific conditions.

"The Germans knew that we were sentenced to death," recalled Fantlova,
82. "And they thought, 'In the meantime, let them play, let them laugh,
let them sing, because soon the smile will be wiped off their faces.'

"Well, they were right, but we didn't know that, and we sort of danced
under the gallows."

Noose tightens: Fantlova's family was eating dinner in the fall of 1941
when the Gestapo came for her father. His crime: listening to BBC Radio.

Since March 15, 1939, when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the noose
had been tightening. Using the Nuremberg racial laws that restricted
everyday freedoms, the Nazis began to isolate, degrade and annihilate the
Jews of Europe.

Fantlova recalls her father's farewell: "Just stay calm. Remember,
calmness is strength."

A few months later they were shipped off to Terezin. How would her
father find them? He wouldn't. She never saw him again.

Emperor Joseph II had built the garrison in 1780 to protect the
Hapsburgs from Prussian invasion. In October 1941, the SS gave it a new
strategic role, the first of several Terezin would have during the war.

With its 13-yard-thick walls, moat and nearby Gestapo prison, the
fortress could contain Jews without many guards. The Nazis could cram
50,000 to 60,000 prisoners at a time into a place that had housed 7,000
soldiers and villagers.

Here they could warehouse Czech Jews - until their deportation to
Poland or the Soviet Union - a culling the Nazis wanted to hide from the
world.

"Now we are really prisoners": Edgar Krasa, then 21, knew something
didn't square.

If he volunteered for Terezin's set-up detail, a Jewish leader in
Prague had said, he might save his parents from being transported further
East.

What was "further East?"

The workers had six days to prepare the barracks before the first 1,000
Jews arrived.

"And as we entered," Krasa recalled, "the gate closed. We all knew, now
we are really prisoners."

Disillusion was immediate: To German Jews, the Nazis sold Terezin as a
spa. In exchange for signing over their property, they were promised
lifelong care.

At a January 1942 conference on Wannsee Lake outside Berlin, the Nazis
had announced that the stronghold would also house elderly, war-decorated
and prominent German and Austrian Jews.

They began arriving that summer, and their disillusion was immediate.

To make room, the Czech Gentiles who lived in the town moved out. But
the overcrowding was suffocating. By year's end, three out of every 10
German Jews who had arrived that summer were dead.

Inmate Egon Redlich, a Moravian, wrote in his diary: "Terezin is a
privileged ghetto where more than 100 people die daily."


"The big lie": In this purgatory, miraculously, Terezin's cultural life
flowered.

The first month, a Czech conductor, composer and pianist named Rafael
Schaecter cobbled together a small chorus.

In early December, a 22-year-old Czech pianist named Gideon Klein
started composing folk songs for the singers.

So many readings and plays followed that the Nazis soon insisted upon
approving each activity.

Terezin's first opera premiered in November 1942: Smetana's "The
Bartered Bride," the accompaniment provided on a legless piano prisoners
smuggled into the barracks.

"There's a paradox," recalled Krasa, who sang in the chorus. "It starts
out . . . Why shouldn't we rejoice?' And to sing it, you know, in the
ghetto. But it did bring the house down."

Dagmar Lieblova was 13: "It was something special, quite special, which
one wouldn't forget."

The audiences grew so quickly that the elders printed weekly programs
and issued tickets for admission. That December, prisoners staged 10
theatrical programs and two concerts and produced their first costumed
play.

The Nazis gave out musical instruments that earlier had been
confiscated. Musicians with cafe and nightclub experience performed, such
as Egon Ledec, of the Czech Philharmonic. Ledec formed the camp's first
string quartet.

The Nazis saw the advantage: If the Jews pacified themselves with
performance, they'd be less likely to rebel.

"You could have prepared a concert or prepared an opera and tomorrow
half the people were gone," says Hana Greenfield.

"That was the big lie."

The postcard came from Auschwitz, in a code the censors missed.

To Edith Salamon Listman, her cousin's message, scrawled in Hebrew
script, was too awful to contemplate: "Cain & Abel" and "naked."

Listman, who is now 86 and lives in Cherry Hill, N.J., was horrified.
"They are killing each other," she realized. "We are not going to a
ghetto."

Another warning sounded from the East. A former Terezin inmate named
Vitezslav Lederer escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944. According to Czech
historian Miroslav Karny, Lederer snuck back into Terezin to reveal what
really went on at the death camp.

Drummer wanted: For a while, Coco Schumann's blue eyes, blond hair and
strong Berlin accent kept him safe. He was 18, and Jewish on his mother's
side, a secret kept even from friends.

When the Nazis arrested Schumann in March 1943, Jews of mixed parentage
and Jews married to Gentiles were no longer spared from persecution. The
Nazis wanted Berlin "Judenfrei" - free of Jews - by April 20, for Hitler's
birthday.

When Schumann saw the camp's coffeehouse, he started talking with the
musicians, The Ghetto Swingers. Their drummer had just been sent to
Auschwitz.

"I said I can play drums,'" Schumann recalls. They invited him to
return the next morning.

"Every style was there," Schumann recalls.

Karel Ancerl, later a famous conductor, led an orchestra at Terezin.
There was also a string orchestra, chamber groups, a jazz quintet, piano
duos, a liturgical choir and exquisite soloists.

"They were really the next generation of leading figures in classical
music," said Mark Ludwig, who runs the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation in
Boston. "And they disappear off the face of the Earth."

Sent to Auschwitz: Streets were cleaned, houses painted and store
windows filled. Terezin would be having visitors.

The Allies had been pressing for inspections since December 1942, when
12 nations protested the Nazi treatment of Jews.

In December 1943, the Nazis decided Terezin could help deceive the
world.

"They created a kind of Potemkin-like village to fool the press, the
International Red Cross," says David Marwell, director of New York's
Museum of Jewish Heritage.

The Nazis planned the exact route visitors would take. Afterward, the
head of the group, Maurice Rossel, marveled at this "remarkable" Jewish
town in war-torn Europe.

He concluded that Terezin was a final destination - not a way station
to worse. He reported that inmates were fed well - 2,400 calories a day.
In reality, they didn't get half that.

A sham: "Oh, Uncle Rahm, sardines again?"

The children were well-rehearsed, joking with the commandant as the
cameras rolled. Nurses at the children's hospital delivered buttered
bread.

The film was so obviously a sham that during Karl Rahm's war crimes
trial in 1947, it was known as "Hitler's Gift to the Jews," according to
Dutch historian Karel Margry. The real name is no less cynical:
"Theresienstadt. A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area."

The film, completed by a Czech company in 1945, got little
distribution. By then, the extermination of European Jewry could not be
denied.

"Last Supper": Its purpose served, the Nazis began to liquidate Terezin
in fall 1944.

In one month, transports carried 18,402 prisoners East and sent some of
Europe's most talented artists to their deaths. There was Karel Ancerl and
his entire string orchestra - the Ghetto Swingers - Rafael Schaecter,
Viktor Ullmann, Egon Ledec and Gideon Klein.

As they boarded the cattle cars for Auschwitz, they were told one last
lie: They'd be establishing a new labor camp.

Zdenka Fantlova found herself sitting across from Schaecter, who for
three years had struggled to give his fellow prisoners music, comfort and
hope.

He had saved some sardines and bread. Before the train reached the
death camp, he asked Fantlova, "Put it all together. Here is my spoon. Mix
it all up and that will be my Last Supper."

"And so," she recalls, "I gave it to him, mixed it, he ate it with
great relish. And then we got to Auschwitz. He was selected and went to
the gas chamber."

(source: Knight Ridder News)





GERMANY:

Germany agonizes over neo-Nazis' resurgence


Neo-Nazi parties took seats in German legislatures this week for the first
time in 36 years. The top-selling film in German movie theatres was a
controversial new drama that portrays a sensitive, human Adolf Hitler. And
protests from Jewish groups and German activists failed to stop the
display of a collection allegedly assembled from the Nazi slave-labour
fortunes.

It was a bizarre and disquieting week in Germany, full of dark echoes of
the 1920s and featuring several bizarre spectacles. Whenever the newly
elected fascists were asked questions on TV news shows, politicians from
major parties got up, took off their microphones and stormed out of the
studios. A 35-year-old woman cartwheeled across an art-gallery floor
before kicking apart major works of modern art in a protest against owner
Friedrich Christian Flick, grandson of a Nazi war criminal.

The week's events left many Germans wondering if fascist extremism has
made a return to mainstream credibility, after being nearly unmentionable
in Germany since Hitler's suicide nearly 60 years ago.

There have been chilling echoes of the circumstances that saw Hitler sweep
to power in the late 1920s and early 1930s: a sustained period of growing
unemployment and economic malaise; angry and jobless young men in the
eastern provinces infuriated by the liberal, tolerant society of the west;
a widespread distrust of outsiders, immigrants and perceived non-Germans.

Neo-Nazi parties exploded into mainstream power in the former East Germany
on Sunday night, winning 9.2 per cent of the vote in Saxony only slightly
less than the governing Social Democratic Party and 4.2 per cent in
Brandenburg. Under the German electoral system this means the fascist
National Democratic Party (NPD), which German governments have twice tried
to outlaw since it was formed by members of illegal neo-Nazi parties, will
take seats in both regional legislatures for the first time since 1968.

Suddenly the voices of fascism are part of the national political dialogue
in Germany, if only in a limited capacity in provincial parliaments.
Mainstream politicians have spent the week reacting with fury, denial and
rejection.

On TV talk programs, representatives of the moderate Social Democrat,
Christian Democrat and Green parties stalked out when NPD members were
asked questions. Mainstream parties have vowed to shun political
relationships, even casual conversations, with the newly elected fascists
a pledge that could create awkward moments in the parliaments.

Last night, authorities in Berlin outlawed an NPD victory march scheduled
for today under the banner Keep Berlin German. Anyone who uses incitement
to separate people may not demonstrate in Berlin, declared city interior
minister Erhart Koerting.

Still, the ultra-right leaders celebrated their victories with the sort of
language many Germans have not heard in decades. It's a great day for
Germans who still want to be Germans, said Holger Apfel, NPD leader in
Saxony.

His party's campaign linked Germany's lingering unemployment crisis with
the presence of immigrants and non-whites in the country. Every foreigner
who does go home opens up a job for a German, one flyer said.

Germany's leaders, struggling to keep the results from tarnishing their
country's hard-won reputation for liberalism and tolerance, tried to play
down the results as a periodic anomaly.

Politicians should follow this closely, but they should not start
panicking, President Horst Kohler said. History tells us that after one or
possibly two legislative cycles it will be clear that they are capable of
nothing but mouthing slogans. I expect this to happen again.

His confidence is not shared by all of Germany's leaders. These Nazi
results challenge the entire democratic public and society, warned
Transportation Minister Manfred Stolpe, a Social Democrat. We must not
wait until this calms down by itself.

His sense of alarm, shared by many German commentators, seemed to explode
into the cultural sphere this week.

Screened at more than 400 cinemas, the movie The Downfall topped
box-office charts with its portrayal of Hitler in his final days.
Audiences saw a weeping, humanized Hitler that jarred with Germany's
near-total denunciation of the Nazi period as a moment of pure and
inexplicable evil.

The tabloid newspaper Bild echoed the angry response of many Germans in a
front-page headline: Should a monster be portrayed as a human being?

Explanations given by the film's creators alarmed many observers. I cannot
only hate this person, said Bruno Ganz, the Swiss actor who plays Hitler
in the film.

Some were outraged when screenwriter Bernd Eichinger told the BBC: He
[Hitler] is a human being, not a psychopath. It is true that he was
charming. He had his soft spots. He followed the statement immediately by
saying: This is what makes the whole thing so dangerous, because there's
an animal in all of us that's the message of the movie.

Meanwhile, protests were erupting at a new art gallery, the Flick
Collection, opened in Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof museum. The huge
collection of important modern art was assembled and financed by Mr.
Flick, who also paid for the new gallery with $12-million from his
personal fortune.

That fortune, critics say, came from his grandfather, Friedrich Flick, a
steel magnate who was sentenced to seven years in prison at the Nuremberg
trials for having employed thousands of Jewish slave labourers in his
weapons factories. Protesters believe the heir is seeking to use the money
to repair his family name, with the open acquiescence of top German
officials.

On Thursday, a protester broke into the exhibition, did hand-springs
across the gallery floor, and karate-kicked two modern sculptures,
damaging them. She was arrested, but protests from leading artists
continued.

Some commentators argued that fascism has become an acceptable and normal
part of mainstream society. But others say it would be misleading to look
for echoes of the 1930s in the week's events.

Eckhard Jesse, a professor who specializes in German extremist movements,
said the election results represent a protest vote by economically
disadvantaged easterners against mainstream parties, which are considering
deep cuts to welfare and unemployment-insurance benefits.

Wolfgang Benz, head of the Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism in Berlin,
said he saw no sign of a new extremism but rather a cynical rejection of
faith in democracy by residents of formerly Communist states.

The politicians must recognize the real danger: Protest votes aren't an
expression of ideological right-wing extremism, but an expression of the
unwillingness of many citizens, particularly those in the [formerly East]
German states, to participate in the democracy, he said.

(source: Globe and Mail)