July 5



POLAND:

Jewish Museum Planned at Former Warsaw Ghetto Site


A new museum will open in 2008 in the heart of Warsaw's wartime ghetto to
tell the story of Europe's largest Jewish community before it was wiped
out by the Nazis, the project's director said on Monday.

After a ten-year struggle for funding, Poland's government and Jewish
groups agreed to build the $30 million museum in a square next to the
Warsaw Ghetto memorial.

It will trace several centuries of Jewish history in Poland and pay homage
to famous Polish-born Jews including director Roman Polanski, film
producer Samuel Goldwyn and Israel's first prime minister, David Ben
Gurion.

The building, designed by little-known Finnish architects Ilmari Lahdelma
and Rainer Mahlamaki, will have an austere blue-glass exterior encasing a
red, cave-like structure meant to symbolize Moses' parting of the Red Sea.

``Many of the designs were spectacular from the outside, but we also
wanted something that had a magical interior,'' said project director and
historian Jerzy Halbersztadt. ``This design is open, it draws people in.''

Poland has made strenuous efforts to improve relations with Israel since
the end of communism, aware that the post-war decades were sullied by a 1946
pogrom and an anti-Semitic campaign in 1968 that drove out many remaining
Jews.

Twelve years after Steven Spielberg's Holocaust film Schindler's List
brought the southern city of Krakow worldwide fame, thousands of tourists
come to Poland annually to visit the often well-preserved ruins of former
Nazi German camps.

Poland's Jewish community numbered 3 million residents before Nazi leader
Adolf Hitler's forces invaded the country in 1939. It is estimated that up
to 20,000 remain.

Studies for the museum project say it should attract up to half a million
visitors annually.

(source: Reuters)




ROMANIA:

Romanian FM: High time we face up to our Holocaust past


Romanian Foreign Minister Mihai-Razvan Ungureanu, a scholar who has done
extensive research on Romanian Jewry, said on Monday night that his
country is involved in an earnest effort to face its Holocaust history.

Addressing an audience at the Hebrew University's Vidal Sassoon Center for
the Study of Anti-Semitism, Ungureanu, 36, described as "an issue of
conscience" his country's post-communist reinvestigation of World War
II-era atrocities. An estimated 280,000-380,000 Jews were killed in areas
under Romanian control during the war.

Romania has been "desperately seeking absolution" since survivors began
telling their stories in the past several years, Ungureanu said. He added
that one-fourth of secondary school pupils in Romania would begin studying
a voluntary curriculum on the Holocaust and that Romania would soon
establish a Holocaust education institute. He also said that he felt that
a monument to Romanian victims should be erected in Bucharest.

"When survivors can not forget [their suffering]," he said, others "should
not forget either... no matter what their religion."

Ungureanu also discussed his studies in Jewish history, which formed a
large part of his work toward a Ph.D.

"I suffered a lot for my interest in Jewish studies," he said. In 1994,
while collecting data on Romanian Holocaust victims, "someone came up to
me and said, 'You're a traitor; you're corroding the very nature of our
country.'"

Such a response, he said, "made me think that I must be on the right
path."

Beyond the study of the Holocaust, Ungureanu said that his countrymen were
currently studying modern anti-Semitism and its connection to global
terrorism.

Earlier in the day, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom thanked Ungureanu for
his government's decision to discontinue its membership in the UN's
Committee on Palestinian Rights, which has repeatedly adopted anti-Israel
resolutions.

(source: Jerusalem Post)