Nov. 22



USA:

At Holocaust Museum, Turning a Number Into a Name


What is known of their lives has always been dwarfed by a single, almost
sacred number - six million. But each of the victims of the Holocaust had
a name, an address, a place of birth, a place of death.

Now, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and archive in Jerusalem, has
assembled the largest and most comprehensive listing of Jewish victims'
names - more than three million, or half of those who perished - along
with biographical details, photographs and nutshell memoirs, and will
start to make the information available online on Monday at
www.yadvashem.org.

The project is seen not only as a signal act of commemoration for Jews who
often lost the relatives who might have remembered them, but also as
another refutation to those who have campaigned to deny the scope of the
systematic slaughter of Europe's Jews.

The database will allow children, grandchildren and future descendants to
research the histories of their families, and in some cases permit the
dwindling ranks of survivors to trace relatives whose fate is still
unknown. Many survivors realized after World War II that their kin had
been swept up in massacres or deported to concentration camps, but they
never knew for certain where and when they had been killed.

"The moment persons entered Auschwitz they lost their names - they became
a number," said Elie Wiesel, a spokesman for Holocaust survivors and a
recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. "Six million names were evaporated,
turned into dust and ashes. A hundred years from now, we will know where
to turn and know something about their genealogy and where they came
from."

Avner Shalev, chairman of the directorate of Yad Vashem, said that as word
of the project spread, the list would be greatly expanded by new entries
to the Yad Vashem Web site.

Yad Vashem began assembling so-called pages of testimony - records filled
out by relatives in Israel and abroad - in 1955, two years after it was
created by the Israeli Parliament as the country's "remembrance
authority." The pages included 22 items of information, including
hometown, year of birth, occupation and relatives. Later, Yad Vashem
placed advertisements seeking more names, interviewed survivors and
borrowed lists from other archives.

By this year, it had gathered pages for two million victims and those were
supplemented by information gleaned from hundreds of bureaucratic lists
kept by the Nazis and their collaborators, like lists of concentration
camp inmates and manifests of railroad transports.

The half-century effort could not identify all the six million, Mr. Shalev
said. In large parts of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, no
documentation was kept by the squads who shot to death entire Jewish
populations of some towns or by Nazi troops who dispatched ghetto
inhabitants to death camps, where they were gassed upon arrival. In
Hungary, most of the lists of the 437,000 Jews rounded up by the Hungarian
police and sent to Auschwitz in a period of 56 days in 1944 were never
located, Mr. Shalev said.

The number six million was calculated after the war by comparing prewar
censuses with lists of survivors compiled by the Red Cross and other
relief organizations. There were almost nine million Jews in the countries
of Europe that fell under Nazi control, and the Nazis killed two of every
three. The Yad Vashem Web site will not include non-Jews, like Gypsies,
who were also systematically slaughtered by the Nazis.

Compiling a list of distinct individuals presented thorny problems because
names and towns were spelled in so many variations. "Jews spell Isaac 700
ways," said Mr. Shalev. "And Cohen? - there are a thousand ways to spell
Cohen." The Yad Vashem search engine takes account of such discrepancies
and also tries to eliminate duplicates.

The database, which Mr. Shalev said cost $15 million to $17 million to
create, is searchable in both English and Hebrew. Users will be able to
add names, submit missing information and photographs or correct
misinformation, entries that will be checked for accuracy. They can also
look up the pages of testimony filled out in the survivors' handwriting.

Irving Roth, a 75-year-old Slovakian survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald
and a retired engineer who lives in Williston Park, N.Y., said the names
were crucial because "it takes the mass of six million and places a name,
a face, a history to the person." Few of the dead, he noted, were buried
in graves marked by tombstones.

Mr. Roth spoke about his grandfather, Shimon Rosenwasser, who was killed
at Auschwitz. Mr. Roth remembered him "as an observant Jew but also an
outdoorsy type who owned a lumber business and could pick up a hatchet and
cut a tree down." He hopes his own grandchildren will learn about his
grandfather from the Web site.

"These were human beings," he said, "who lived, laughed, cursed, fought,
who did the things human beings do."

(source: New York Times)



GLOBAL:

Kocaust claims chief says billions of dollars could go astray


Billions of dollars that have been deposited in humanitarian funds in
memory of the Holocaust could fall into foreign hands and be used
for projects that are not of prime importance to the Jewish people,
according to Jewish leaders in New York.

The funds were set up over the past four years after agreements were
signed with Swiss banks and the German government to pay reparations to
Holocaust survivors and to Nazi victims who were not Jewish.

The largest of these funds is in France, with billions of euros, and
another is in Germany and consists of DM 800 million; the other funds are
in Norway, Holland and Belgium.

Altogether they amount to some $2.5 billion, the Jewish sources say. These
are meant to be funds of "contrition and conscience," intended as a
gesture to the local communities rather than as payment to individual
victims.

The World Jewish Congress's executive committee will convene Monday in
Jerusalem and begin discussing a plan of action aimed at counteracting
expected attempts on the part of organizations and bodies in the various
European countries to lay hands on the monies.

The president of the Claims Conference, Dr. Israel Singer, will outline
operative proposals for ensuring that Jewish organizations can have access
to the funds.

"The money deposited in the funds comes from Jewish property that was
looted by the Nazis and which has no heirs," Singer says. "It is our duty
to ensure that the funds do not go to targets that are not Jewish."

Singer lambasts the Jewish organizations that are busy fighting among
themselves over the spoils instead of uniting to retrieve the Jewish
assets from the Holocaust that have not yet been returned. He says that
the concept prevailing among his colleagues on the Claims Conference
committee, that the question of reparations has been resolved, is mistaken
and misleading.

"We must act in unison to get back what belongs to the Jewish people and
is still in gentile hands," he says.

According to Singer, one example is that of some 200,000 paintings looted
by the Nazis from Jews and never returned. Many of them are in respectable
museums and others got into the hands of collectors, including Jews.

There is a serious interest on the part of humanitarian organizations in
Europe to get hold of the funds, he says. "The number of Holocaust
survivors is dwindling and eventually the money will go toward funding
projects in developing countries," he adds.

Singer is proposing that an ad hoc committee representing major Jewish
organizations, survivors and the Israeli government be set up to draw up
specific projects that can be offered to each of the funds. He mentions a
worldwide struggle against anti-Semitism, a special campaign for
inter-faith understanding and a project to improve relations between Jews
and moderate Muslims as the type of objectives to which the funds should
be dedicated.

(source: Ha' Aretz)


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Eternalizing the names of Holocaust victims


Eternalizing the Holocaust-related saying "Unto Every Person There is a
Name," Yad Vashem on Monday launched an Internet database listing the
names of three million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, encapsulating five
decades of research with an eye to the future generations.

The on-line listing -- which is accessible free of charge worldwide via a
link on Yad Vashem's Internet site www.yadvashem.org -- is the largest
and most comprehensive database of Holocaust victims in the world.

The introduction of the state of the art $22 million database is one of
the major events Yad Vashem is planning to mark its jubilee year, which
culminates with the opening of the new ultra modern Holocaust History
Museum in March, and aims at putting a name and face to what has become an
almost sacred number: the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust by
the Nazis and their allies.

The database includes the names of 3 million -- or half -- of the Jewish
Holocaust victims, 2.2 million of which were compiled from so-called
'Pages of Testimony' filed out by survivors, relatives and friends of
Holocaust victims over the last five decades, and an additional one
million names taken from deportation and census lists compiled in Yad
Vashem's archives.

With Monday's establishment of the Internet database, called 'The Central
Database for Shoah Victims' Names,' Yad Vashem hopes to get as many as
five million of the six million names of Jewish victims of the Holocaust,
said Yad Vashem's Director of the 'Hall of Names', Alexander Avraham.

"We suppose we will never have all of the victims'
names," Avraham said, noting that entire families and communities in
eastern Europe were wiped out in the Holocaust.

He added that the brunt of testimony Yad Vashem
expects to receive from the launching of the database will likely come
from North America.

"The database creates a link not only with the dead, but also with the
living," said Elie Wiesel, a spokesman for Holocaust survivors and a
recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, in a taped video address that was
played at the Jerusalem inauguration of the database.

The biggest ever on-line listing of Holocaust victims will also be
accessible from other Holocaust museums around the world, both in Europe
and the US.

The site will allow people to search for family
members, using their names, date of birth, or place of residence prior to
deportation. A unique feature, allowing various phonetic spellings of
names at the click of a button, will provide additional listings.

In some cases, the database can provide searchers such details as the
train number their family member was deported on, the point of departure,
and the number of people in the transport. Two-thirds of the names come
with pages of testimony.

Internet users will be able to submit unrecorded names of Holocaust
victims via the site, in English or in Hebrew, which will be received and
verified by Yad Vashem archivists. After a two month processing and
verification time, the names will appear on the site.

"Unable to express the complete life story of each victim -- of each world
that was extinguished -- Yad Vashem sought to convey its loss through
gathering for eternity the one symbol of identity the victims left
behind: their names," the Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate, Avner
Shalev, said.

"This is an eleventh hour rescue project to redeem the names still
lingering in memory, and to build awareness in a new era of
commemoration," he added.

The database includes more than 116,000 occurrences of the name Esther,
over 90,000 Sarahs, over 70,000 Abrahams, and nearly 50,000 Davids.

(source: Jerusalem Post)




BRAZIL:

Tearful German minister offers Holocaust apology


In Sao Paolo, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer offered an emotional
apology for the Holocaust yesterday to Brazil's large Jewish community,
many of whom are descendants of refugees who fled the Nazis.

Mr. Fischer fought back tears as he expressed Germany's shame over the
murder of six million European Jews to Sao Paolo's Congregacao Israelita
Paulista.

"In their racist insanity, the Nazis destroyed a blossoming, century-old
culture. Germany damaged a major part of its own soul."

(source: Agence France Presse, Nov. 20)





CROATIA:

Croatia to open Holocaust center at site of camp


Croatia will open its first educational center on the Holocaust
at the site of its most infamous World War II concentration camp,
Jasenovac, officials said yesterday.

The idea of the center is to "focus on the victims and their personal
stories," said Natasa Jovicic, who heads the memorial built at the site
after the war.

Shackles, letters written by camp inmates, photographs and other relics
already exhibited in Jasenovac would be used to illustrate the fates of
the victims, she said.

Jasenovac was the worst of about 40 concentration camps run by Croatia's
World War II Nazi puppet regime. Tens - perhaps hundreds - of thousands of
Jews, Serbs, Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats were tortured and killed
there in 1941-45.

Organized groups of pupils and others are expected to visit the center
when it opens later this year. Many in Croatia have yet to confront the
country's checkered past.

The country was criticized in the 1990s for cultivating the kind of
nationalism that harked back to World War II, and some Croats still deny
or justify the atrocities committed by the Nazis.

The new government openly condemns fascism, and lessons on the Holocaust
were introduced in schools nationwide last year.

(source: Associated Press)