March 2



MICHIGAN:

Judge Removes U.S. Citizenship of Ex - Nazi


In Detroit, afederal judge stripped a man of his citizenship because he
hid his past as a guard at a Nazi labor camp and should never have entered
the United States.

U.S. District Judge Paul Gadola agreed with government prosecutors who
said Iwan Mandycz was an armed guard at the Poniatowa labor camp near
Lublin, Poland, for nearly six months in 1943, the Detroit Free Press
reported in Wednesday's editions.

The Justice Department first initiated denaturalization proceedings
against Mandycz in April 2000.

``The government has proved by clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence
that defendant assisted in the persecution of civilian populations during
World War II,'' the decision reads.

Mandycz, who is in his 80s, can appeal. If the ruling stands, the
government could initiate deportation proceedings against him.

An attorney for Mandycz did not return telephone calls from the Free
Press. Repeated calls from the newspaper to Mandycz' home were met with a
busy signal.

Mandycz has denied working at the camp and has said he spent World War II
working at his parents' farm in Poland and, later, as a forced laborer at
a farm in Austria. He immigrated to the United States in 1949 and became a
U.S. citizen in 1955. He has lived in the Detroit area ever since.

``There is no evidence that Mandycz harmed or attempted to harm anyone,''
defense attorney Andrew Hawliw said in a court filing.

Hawliw said Mandycz suffers from dementia and has been unable to assist in
``any meaningful way'' with the defense, although that is not a
requirement in denaturalization proceedings.

Thousands of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war died or were killed at
Poniatowa, including about 14,000 Jews who were massacred by the Nazis in
a single day as they prepared to liquidate the camp.

(source: Associated Press)





GERMANY:

Gallery to return paintings to Holocaust heirs


A municipal art gallery in the western German city of Wuppertal is to
return three paintings to the heirs of former German owners who died in
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1944.

A municipal spokeswoman said on Wednesday the city now accepted the heirs
had the right to the pictures hanging in the Von der Heydt Museum. The art
had been confiscated by the Nazis between 1937 and 1939 and sold at
auction.

The decision was preceded by a 15-month dispute among lawyers and
political figures over the paintings by Otto Scholderer (1834-1902),
Adolph Menzel (1815-1905) and Hans von Marees (1837-1887). The city
originally maintained that

purchase gave it valid title to the art.

The earlier Jewish owners fled Nazi Germany to Amsterdam, but were
arrested after the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. Writer Anne Frank was
among many Jews from the Netherlands who died of starvation and disease in
Bergen-Belsen, which is in northern Germany.

(soure: Expatica)



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

Holocaust denier faces jail in Germany


German state prosecutors have charged one of the world's most notorious
Holocaust deniers with inciting racial hatred, ending a 10-year battle by
the country's legal authorities to bring him to justice.

Ernst Zundel, who once described Adolf Hitler as a "decent and peaceful
man", was extradited from Canada and bundled on to a flight to Frankfurt
on Tuesday after a decade on the run from the German authorities.
Yesterday, state prosecutors in Mainz charged the 65-year-old German
citizen with inciting racial hatred and denying the Holocaust, a crime in
Germany punishable by a maximum five-year prison term.

Mr Zundel made no comment as the charges were read out in closed court. He
will remain in custody until his trial this year, a court spokesman said.
The white supremacist, a friend of the British historian and Holocaust
denier David Irving who is banned from entering Germany, emigrated to
Canada in 1958. In the 1970s, he set up Samisdat Publishing, one of the
world's main distributors of Nazi propaganda.

In 1995, his firm developed a website dedicated to Holocaust denial. Mr
Zundel's publications include a book entitled The Hitler We Loved And Why
and countless leaflets and internet files with titles such as The
Auschwitz Lie and Did Six Million Really Die?

When German authorities tried to extradite him, he claimed immunity
because of his Canadian residency. Then in 2003, prosecutors obtained a
warrant for his arrest after judges ruled that because his website could
be read in Germany, he could be brought to trial there.

In Canada, his activities became the subject of a legal wrangle which
ended only last week. In 1988, a Canadian judge convicted Mr Zundel of
"knowingly publishing false news" but the supreme court overturned the
ruling four years later, decreeing that it violated freedom of expression.

Canada declared in 2000 that Mr Zundel's overtly racist website was in
breach of the country's constitution, so he fled to the United States. He
was sent back to Canada in 2003 for being in breach of US immigration law.
Last week a Canadian court ruled his activities a threat to the
"international community of nations" and agreed to his extradition.

(source: The Independent)





ISRAEL:

Holocaust museum is woven into the fabric of Israeli society


Schoolchildren, heads of state, soldiers and tourists all pass through its
gates into a hush of religious solemnity.

It is the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, whose stone buildings, razor-wire
sculptures and even trees are soaked with meaning and the memory of those
murdered in the Holocaust.

Yad Vashem, set in the hills of a Jerusalem pine forest, has become the
physical symbol of remembering the Holocaust in Israel. It has also become
part of the national landscape and a central site of collective Israeli
identity.

As Israel makes its way in the new century, Yad Vashem is about to open a
new $56 million dollar museum aimed at giving voice to the personal
stories of the 6 million Jews killed in the Nazi genocide. The ceremonial
opening is slated for March 16; it will open to the public at the end of
March.

Since it opened in 1973, Yad Vashem has been the first stop on visiting
dignitaries official tours. It is where Israeli schoolchildren Arab and
Jewish often get their first real sense of what it means to be part of a
country founded in the aftermath of the most wide-scale genocide in
history.

During her recent visit here, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
emerged from the section memorializing the more than 1 million children
who were murdered symbolized by a single candle reflected a million times
by a maze of mirrors and wrote in Yad Vashems guest book:

This is a place that causes all to remember those who perished and to
accept that it must never happen again; that good men and women do not
act.

And the importance of memorializing the Holocaust is one of the few issues
still uniting Israelis.

On Holocaust Memorial Day, they turn on their television sets to watch the
somber state ceremony of remembrance. On tours of Jerusalem, Yad Vashem is
a regular stop for Israelis from all walks of life, from the most left
wing and secular to the most politically conservative and religious.

Yad Vashem today has become a holy site in a way, like the Western Wall, a
site that places the memory of the Holocaust as a central part of Israeli
history, said historian Roni Stauber, who has written on the origins of
Holocaust commemoration in Israel and the beginnings of Yad Vashem.

Because of this, Yad Vashem has become one of the main institutions of the
country, said Stauber, who is affiliated with Tel Aviv University.

In Jerusalem, the author and historian Tom Segev says there are three
sites that are central to Israels identity: Yad Vashem, the military
cemetery on neighboring Mount Herzl and the Western Wall.

These three places symbolize most the worth and the ethos of what it means
to be Israelis and Jews, said Segev, who wrote the groundbreaking Seventh
Million, which explored attitudes toward the Holocaust and its survivors
during the early years of the state.

The sprawling Yad Vashem complex is more than the museum of the history of
the Holocaust, which opened in 1973. It is also home to a vast archive, a
research center, an international school and a library. Yad Vashem
officials also recently launched a vast online database of victims names.

Today Yad Vashem sees vast numbers of visitors each year. Its peak year
was 2000, when 2 million visitors came. Last year, the number was 850,000,
according to officials.

Among the visitors are 100,000 school-age students and 50,000 soldiers.
Both Israeli and foreign teachers come to Yad Vashem for courses on how to
teach the Holocaust.

The first voices calling for a memorial for the Jewish victims of the
Nazis were raised as early as 1942, while the war still was being fought.

In 1953, following the passage of a special law in the Knesset, Yad Vashem
was established to commemorate the victims and document the events of the
Holocaust in order to educate future generations about its meaning and
legacy.

In the early years of the state, there was great ambivalence about how to
handle the memory of the Holocaust, historians say.

As a young country focused on building a future, a place where people had
an ideological preference for heroism over victimhood, the Holocaust was
thorny territory.

The 1960 trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem marked the beginnings
of a sea change in Israelis attitude toward the Holocaust.

As Israelis came to terms with what happened to their people under Nazi
rule, the standing of Yad Vashem, in turn, took on greater importance to
the Israeli public.

As the issue of Holocaust memory became more central in Israel and Israeli
identity, the institution became more and more sacred, Stauber said,
referring to Yad Vashem. Its a development that took place with the
passing of years. It did not happen all at once.

James Young, a professor of English and Judaic studies at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst, is a leading expert on memorials,
particularly Holocaust memorials.

He recently sat on the jury to select the memorial for the World Trade
Center and also was on the jury that selected the Berlin memorial to Jews
killed in the Holocaust.

Young said that with its new museum, Yad Vashem is poised to speak to a
new generation of Israelis, who are more interested in the Diaspora
experience than the founding generations had been. Those earlier Israelis
preferred to cut themselves off from their pasts in Europe and so focused
on a highly nationalist and Zionist interpretation of the Holocaust.

In a telephone interview from Amherst, Young said the Yad Vashem Memorial
Authority is recognizing that the new generation of Israelis, including
many Jews from the former Soviet Union, are validating the Galut
experience in ways the older generation did not. Galut, the Hebrew word
for exile, is used to refer to the Diaspora.

Life in the Galut led only to holocaust, according to the Zionist
narrative, he said. The new generation does not see things that way.

They are willing to look at their former lives in the Galut as what they
bring as people, as immigrants with whole immigrant experiences, he said.

Yad Vashem, according to Young, is an essential part of Israels national
story itself, a story that tells Israelis why they are here.

Shulamit Imber, pedagogical director at Yad Vashems International School
for Holocaust Studies, said more Israeli schoolchildren have been coming
to Yad Vashem in recent years, and therefore the experience is woven into
their understanding of the Holocaust.

Built on Har Hazikaron, Hebrew for Memorial Mountain, Yad Vashem gives
people a feeling, she said, that they are coming to a place with meaning.

(source: VirtualJerusalem.com)




UKRAINE:

Ukraine tycoon funds documentary about Holocaust


A Ukrainian tycoon will team up with Steven Spielberg to produce a
documentary about Holocaust victims in Ukraine, an official from
a Holocaust foundation said Tuesday.

Viktor Pinchuk, a coal and steel magnate, and Spielberg will be
co-executive producers of a documentary about the Holocaust in Ukraine
based on more than 3,000 videotaped interviews of survivors and witnesses,
said Douglas Greenberg, the director of the Shoah Visual History
Foundation based in Los Angeles.

"Mr. Pinchuk is funding it,'' Greenberg said in a telephone interview.

Spielberg's office was not immediately available for comment.

Pinchuk's spokesman Laurent Dondey has said that the wealthy businessman,
who is a prominent member of Ukraine's Jewish community and is a
son-in-law of former President Leonid Kuchma, "is involved in the making
of the movie.''

"He will co-produce it,'' he said.

Spielberg founded the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which collects
videotaped testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses, in 1994 after
filming the Oscar-winning movie "Schindler's List.''

Millions of Ukrainian Jews perished during the Holocaust. The Nazis
slaughtered tens of thousands at Babi Yar, a ravine in the capital Kiev.

The Shoah Visual History foundation is still in the process of "research
and preparations'' for the documentary, which should be finished in about
18 months, Greenberg said. He said that the director would be known in
June.

"We haven't yet decided how we will release it, whether it will be in
theaters or on TV,'' he said.

(source: Associated Press)





ITALY:

BORROMEO, SAVED JEWS FROM THE NAZIS WITH "K"


Borromeo saved dozens of Jews from the nazis during the Nazi occpation of
Rome in 1943-1944 by admitting them as patients to the Fatebenefratelli
hospital on the Tiberina island and inventing a disease for the: "K"
which didn't refer to the Koch pathology, tuberculosis, which scared the
Germans but rather referred to Kesserling, the commander of the Wermacht
in Italy.

Today, 40 years after his death, Giovanni Borromeo who was the head of
the Fatebenefratelli hospital during the war years, was recognized as a
hero by the nation of Israel which added his name to the list of the just
among nations. The Israeli Ambassador, Ehud Gol gave Borromeo's children
two medals and the just among nations award which is the highest
recognition given by the nation of Israel. The name of the Italian doctor
(1898-1961) will be added to the list of the just among nations in the
mausoleum of Yad Vashem in jerusalem whch was built to remember the
martyrs and the heros of the holocaust.

Borromeo's name will be added to the names of Palatucci and Perlasca who
risked their lives to save jews in the Italy of racist persecution.
Ambassador gol stressed during the ceremony which was held in the Tiberina
hospital: "No activity deserves greater recognition than acts to save a
human life". He remarked upon the centuries old collaboration between ther
hospital and the jewish community and between Fatebenefratelli and the
jewish hospital on the same island in the Tiber.

(source: AGI)