April 6



USA//CALIFORNIA:

Disturbing trend

Increased bigotry shows need for vigilance


California is one of the most diverse places on the planet. It's also one
of the most tolerant. So is it possible that our beloved state has become
a hotbed of anti-Semitism?

The facts, as reported by the Anti-Defamation League, are highly
disturbing. Anti-Semitic incidents have gone up by a frightening 17
percent nationwide, reaching their highest level in 17 years. The increase
is even more dramatic in California, where anti-Semitic incidents have
skyrocketed by 30 percent.

ADL leaders suspect that the cause may be that for today's youth, the
Holocaust is ancient history. They are simply unaware of how hurtful a
swastika can be, or how terrible the Third Reich really was.

Our children are blessed to be raised in a time and place where bigotry
has been mostly -- but not entirely -- banished. Yet this blessing
contains a hidden curse: We can become lackadaisical in our efforts to
root out prejudice, or blind to its creeping resurgence.

But as the ADL's report reminds us, we must be ever vigilant in our
efforts to fight prejudice.

(source: Los Angeles Daily News)

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MISSISSIPPI:

Lessons of the Holocaust



Dozens of state teachers met at the University of Southern Mississippi's
Gulf Park campus to learn more about the atrocities of the Holocaust and
how to better teach the lessons from that dark period of history.

Poplarville resident Shirley Shipman Johnson was on hand Monday with
Warren Marcus from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, D.C., and Judy Couey from the Mississippi Department of
Education to share her personal story.

Johnson has written a book, "A Soldier's Promise: The Alvin W. Shipman
Story," about her father's participation in the liberation of 30,000
prisoners from a Nazi death camp in Austria 60 years ago.

Of particular importance was what Johnson's father smuggled from the Nazi
prison camp - the only known deathbed confession of a Nazi camp
commandant, now on permanent loan at the National D-Day Museum in New
Orleans. Sharing with teachers in South Mississippi was one more step in
fulfilling a promise she made to her dying father in 1979 to inform the
world about the reality of the Holocaust.

On Tuesday, a similar workshop was held in Hattiesburg.

Johnson is behind the establishment of the Mississippi Commission on the
Holocaust. In April of last year, Gov. Haley Barbour signed a bill
establishing the commission and placed Johnson on its board.

Ann Gillis Productions, a documentary production team from Nashville,
filmed the Monday workshop for an upcoming documentary, "A Daughter's
Promise: The Shirley Shipman Johnson Story."

Marcus, as director of teacher workshops and conferences for the Holocaust
Museum, travels the country speaking to teachers.

He said the personal connection involving a Mississippi soldier will have
"particular poignancy in the state" for both children and teachers alike.

"The kids can learn so much more how to act responsibly, how to treat
people fairly and not to discriminate," Marcus said. "So the connection to
the state through Mrs. Johnson's actions are so important and hopefully
will help to continue this important educational mission."

Couey is the bureau director of curriculum and instruction for the
Mississippi Department of Education. "When we talk about the lessons of
tolerance," she said, "when we talk about the power of one - how one
person can make a difference, I think it's important for all of our
students... . So when I think about the influence of our teachers and the
teachers attending these two workshops today will potentially influence
2,000 children per year, I think we see the outreach it has in the lessons
of tolerance in our state."

Last month, Johnson and two USM representatives met with Steven
Spielberg's Shoah Foundation in California to bring its Holocaust
education tools to the university. Through Shoah, USM students will have
access to some 55,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors along with its
other teaching materials.

(source: Biloxi Sun Herald)

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(in) NEW YORK:

Holocaust heroism


Robert Jacobvitz spent much of the last 20 years in obscurity trying to
rectify the image of a World War II era diplomat few had heard of, let
alone remembered.

Tonight, Jacobvitz will take center stage in New York, receiving a medal
from the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation at the Museum of Jewish
Heritage. Jacobvitz is being honored for his efforts to commemorate
Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in France in 1940 who
defied his government for three days, issuing 30,000 visas -- 10,000 to
Jews -- to people trying to flee the Nazis.

It's a thrilling milestone for the San Jose resident, proving that if you
can't change the world, you can change how people view it.

``For us, this is very important,'' said Jacobvitz, executive director of
the Building Owners and Managers Association of Silicon Valley. ``We gave
dignity to a family who wouldn't otherwise have had any dignity at all.''

The Portuguese government in the 1930s and '40s admired fascism. It fired
Sousa Mendes and stripped him of his diplomatic status, labeled him a
pariah, wrote him out of the official history books and blacklisted his 14
children. He died a pauper in 1954. Many of his children ended up
wandering the world; several came to the Bay Area.

Jacobvitz will share the honor with San Francisco attorney Anne Treseder,
who met one of Sousa Mendes' grandsons in 1985 when she hired him as a
Portuguese tutor, and Antonio Rodrigues, a retired Portuguese butler who
restored the Sousa Mendes home in Portugal. All are credited with helping
convince the world that Sousa Mendes was a hero.

``These people deserve it more than anyone else,'' said Joao Crisostono,
60, of Woodside, N.Y., vice president of the Raoul Wallenberg foundation,
named after the Swedish diplomat who issued fake passports to Jews who
faced death in the German concentration camps. ``They did the rough work.
They have never been recognized.''

For Jacobvitz, the story began in 1986 when he picked up a copy of the
Oakland Tribune and read about John Paul de Sousa Mendes do Amaral a
Abranches, the 13th of Sousa Mendes' 14 children. The article told of how
Abranches, now 74, and his wife, Joan, now 72, were typing letters in
their Dublin garage to the Portuguese government trying to set the facts
straight about Abranches' father.

``Nothing was successful,'' said Abranches, who now lives in Pleasanton.
``Then my wife suggested we circulate a petition to the Portuguese
government, sort of American-style. We collected 400 names at church right
before Easter.''

Abranches, who likely could have been a doctor or diplomat in Portugal,
was flunked out of high school after his teacher learned who his father
was. At 19, he moved to San Francisco, where he worked in a laundry and
other menial jobs, until he became a draftsman for the Hoffman Co.

``It felt bad, people turned their backs on me,'' Abranches said about his
youth. ``But it's like my father once said, `If so many Jews have to
suffer because of one Catholic -- Hitler -- it's perfectly all right for
Catholics to suffer for some Jews. I have no regrets.' My father is a
saint in the eyes of God.''

When Jacobvitz joined the Sousa Mendes cause, he was the executive
director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Greater East Bay
in Oakland. Israel was the only entity that had recognized Sousa Mendes,
naming him a Righteous Gentile at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in
Jerusalem in 1967.

``While we all knew about Raoul Wallenberg and Schindler, I didn't know
anything about Aristides,'' Jacobvitz said. ``It shocked me.''

He quickly connected with John Paul and Joan Abranches, and Treseder, who
used to be a prosecutor. They all worked together to restore the family
name. Treseder used her connections with lawyers, journalists and an old
friend who worked as a Portuguese diplomat. Jacobvitz wrote to Jewish
agencies across the country and hired Joan as a part-time secretary. They
gave themselves an important-sounding name: The International Committee to
Commemorate Dr. Aristides de Sousa Mendes and created a letterhead with
the official family crest.

``It's amazing what you can do with a little chutzpah and a lot of
imagination,'' Treseder said.

Then one day at an American Israel Public Affairs Committee luncheon,
Jacobvitz, by chance, sat next to the campaign manager of then-Rep. Tony
Coelho, the Democratic whip from Merced who is also Portuguese-American.
The congressman understood the significance of the mission, drew up a
petition of congressional leaders to lend clout to the cause, and
personally called upon the Portuguese government to rectify Sousa Mendes'
name.

In 1987, then-Portuguese President Mario Soares posthumously awarded his
country's highest civilian medal -- Portugal's Order of Liberty -- to
Sousa Mendes at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. The next year, Soares
apologized to the Sousa Mendes family.

Those were the watershed events. But the award in New York is also special
for the everyday folks who worked without recognition for so long.

``We thought for a time we'd be lost in history -- the foot soldiers who
started it all,'' said Jacobvitz. ``We weren't flashy, we had no money. It
shows that one person can make a change.''

(source: San Jose Mercury News)




ISRAEL:

Custodian General gets Holocaust victims land after 20 years talks

The Israel Land Administration boycotted a ceremony transferring land from
the JNF to the Custodian General.


The Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the Ministry of Justice Custodian
General today signed an agreement transferring handling of land belonging
to Holocaust victims from the JNF to the Ministry of Justice. The
agreement follows 20 years of discussions on the issue.

The land in question amounts to 465 dunam (116.5 acres) in different
locations around Israel, which a Zionist Congress decided to transfer to
the JNF in 1947. Jews in Europe bought the land in the 1930s, and later
died in the Holocaust, leaving no heirs.

At the last minute, the Israel Land Administration (ILA) decided to
boycott a ceremony for transferring the land. The ILA also announced that
it would not transfer 26 lots under its management.

The ILA gave no explanation of its decision, taken yesterday at the
Ministry of Justice and the JNF. Only 126 of the 152 lots registered to
the JNF and managed by the ILA were transferred.

At the ceremony, JNF World Chairman Yehiel Leket said that the ILAs
management was confused regarding its role. Its job is to manage land
owned by the JNF, but it does not own the land. The ILA is inclined to
forget this fact, he commented.

Custodian General Adv. Shlomo Shahar expressed hope that the 26 lots would
be transferred to his management in the near future. As of web posting, no
response was available from the ILA.

(source: Israel Business News)





GERMANY:

The Nazis Jewish policy evolved over time


As Europe prepares to observe the 60th anniversary of the end of World War
II on May 8, historians still debate one of the central questions of the
Holocaust: When and why did the Nazis move from a policy of random
killings and forced emigration to the systematic murder of Jews?

Christopher Browning, a distinguished historian at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides compelling answers in The Origins of the
Final Solution (The University of Nebraska Press), a first-rate study.

He claims the cataclysmic shift occurred over a 30-month period from the
outbreak of the war in September 1939 through March 1942. In his view, the
Nazis Jewish policy evolved from a judenfrei (Jew-free) Germany and Europe
by means of expulsion to the Holocaust.

Using cosmic imagery, Browning dispenses with the notion that a big bang
theory explains its antecedents. The Holocaust was not predicated on a
single decision, though the Wannsee conference in January 1942 hastened
its realization.

"The decision-making process was prolonged and incremental," he writes.

Previously best known for Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and
the Final Solution in Poland, Browning maintains that Adolf Hitler's role
in the Holocaust was absolutely pivotal. "His obsession with the Jewish
question ensured that the Nazi commitment would not slacken."

Browning adds: "Hitler's anti-Semitism was both obsessive and central to
his political outlook. For him the "Jewish question" was the key to all
other problems and hence the ultimate problem." [In The Hitler Book, a work
published recently in Germany, historian Matthias Uhl says that Hitler was
personally involved in the details of planning the Holocaust.]

Browning suggests that while prominent Nazis took their cue from Hitler
when it came to the Holocaust, the German bureaucrats who actually
implemented it did so cynically in the interests of careerism, opportunism
and accommodation. So much for human nature.

Germany's conquest of Poland, where some three million Jews lived, was a
decisive event in Nazi Jewish policy. The numbers were such that Germany
had to devise a radical solution to its Jewish problem, as Joseph
Goebbels, the propaganda minister, declared after visiting the Lodz
ghetto.

At the outset, the Nazis perpetrated hit-and-run atrocities. These were
carried out by three different groups: the Waffen-SS, the Einsatzgruppen
(mobile killing units), and vigilante bands of ethnic Germans.

As Browning delves deeper, he discusses the role of the German army, the
Wehrmacht, in the events leading up to the Holocaust.

The armys top brass knew what lay in store for Jews (and Polish elites).
But soldiers in the field, including generals, who had not been privy to
this information expressed shock after witnessing atrocities.

He cites the case of a high-ranking officer named Helmuth Stieff who, in a
letter to his wife, wrote, "I am ashamed to be a German."

On balance, the army not only tolerated ethnic cleansing, but was an
outright participant in the crusade against the "Jewish Bolshevik" enemy.
According to Browning, Germany's victory over France in 1940 completed the
transformation of such attitudes in the Wehrmachts officer corps.

Brownings analysis of the still-born Madagascar plan is informative.

France's imminent defeat prompted certain Nazi officials in the foreign
ministry, notably the director of its Jewish desk, Franz Rademacher, to
recommend resettling hundreds of thousands of Jews on this tropical French
island off the coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean.

Hitler supported the idea, but Germanys failure to subdue Britain
ultimately shelved it. Still, as Browning notes, the ill-fated Madagascar
plan "was an important psychological step on the road to the Final
Solution."

The resettlement of Jews in sealed ghettos, especially in Poland, was of
crucial importance as well, since it enabled the Nazis to concentrate Jews
in small, confined spaces.

The first major ghetto was in Lodz, where Jews comprised one-third of the
population before the war. By January 1940, the Lodz ghetto was home to
219,000 Jews. Ghettoization, based on the Lodz model, spread to Warsaw,
Cracow, Radom and Lublin.

Nazi "pragmatists" concerned with maximizing the economic potential of the
ghettos won a victory by using Jewish labour to produce all manner of
goods, some relatively vital to the German war effort. But in the end, the
Jews were eminently dispensable.

The Nazis' ruthless exploitation of Jewish manpower, combined with a
totally inadequate food supply, terrible overcrowding in sub-standard
housing and utterly inadequate sanitation and medical care, transformed
Polish Jews into what Browing describes as a starving, disease-ridden,
impoverished community that dovetailed with Nazi anti-Semitic stereotypes.

It soon became evident to the Nazis that they could not starve Jews and
exploit their labour. They resolved the dilemma by liquidating the ghettos
and deporting their inhabitants to death camps.

Hans Frank, the German overseer of Nazi-occupied Poland, said in December
1941: "We must put an end to the Jews, that I want to say quite openly.
The fuhrer (Hitler) once spoke these words Thus vis-a-vis the Jews, I will in
principle proceed only on the assumption that they will disappear. They
must go We must destroy the Jews, wherever we encounter them and wherever
it is possible."

In a similar vein, Hitler made this abundantly clear in a conversation
with the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, in
Berlin: Germany's objective would be solely the destruction of the Jewish
element residing in the Arab sphere.

Browning, in common with most specialists on the Holocaust, subscribes to
the theory that the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union -
Operation Barbarossa - had an intensely radicalizing effect on Germany's
Jewish policy.

As he puts it, "The time was ripe to break the vicious cycle, to ensure
that further gains in territory did not mean an increasing burden of Jews.
Murder was in the air as the Germans prepared for a war of destruction
against the Soviet Union, and in these circumstances Soviet Jews could
hardly be spared the fate awaiting so many others."

From almost the moment of its invasion of the Soviet Union, Germany
adopted a policy of terror. Two examples will suffice.

More than 3,000 Jews were rounded up and summarily shot in Zhitomir on
Sept. 19, 1941. And in Kharkov, at least 20,000 Jews were murdered between
December 1941 and January 1942.

In places such as Lithuania and Latvia, local collaborators stepped
forward to help the Germans annihilate Jews. And in a few cases, pogroms
erupted even before the arrival of German troops.

The staggering task of murdering so many Jews by firing squad presented
logistical and psychological problems.

As a result, the Nazis devised more efficient, detached and secret methods
to eliminate Jews. The gas van seemed like a solution, but it was found
wanting. And so the death camp was seized upon as an expedient solution.

"By the end of October 1941, the conception of the Final Solution had
taken shape," Browning observes.

In a reference to camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka, he writes, "The
Jews of Europe were to be deported to secret camps designed to perpetrate
mass murder... This program could not get fully underway until the spring
of 1942."

The persecution, demonization, segregation and exploitation of Jews passed
through several phases in Germany.

Anti-Semitic laws, edicts, prohibitions and regulations paved the way for
Kristallnacht in November 1938. The Nazis permitted so-called "Jew
houses," but ruled out mass ghettoization on German soil.

They initially encouraged emigration, but eventually stopped it, thereby
sealing the fate of German Jews left behind.

Quoting scholars Ian Kershaw and David Bankier, Browning claims the
majority of Germans did not consider Hitler's anti-Semitic policies an
urgent priority. But due to apathy and indifference, most Germans accepted
the persecution of German Jews.

By the close of 1941, European Jews in Nazi-occupied zones were doomed.

As Browning writes: "The vision of the Final Solution - a program aimed at
murdering every last Jew in the German grasp - had crystallized in the
minds of the Nazi leadership and was henceforth being turned into a
reality."

(sourcec: Canadian Jewish News)