August 25




ROMANIA:

Remembering the Holocaust in Romania


Historic synagogue being saved and brought back to life as Holocaust
memorial museum; government officials and international Jewish leaders to
attend dedication ceremony

On Sunday, September 11, 2005, the Jewish Architectural Heritage
Foundation (JAHF) and AMHN, its Romanian sister organization, will
dedicate Romania's first fully functional Holocaust memorial museum. A
formal ceremony will be held on the grounds of the museum in Simleu
Silvaniei, Romania, at 12:00 PM local time.

Supporters include the Romanian government, the Honorable Warren L. Miller,
Chairman, U.S. Commission for Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad,
prominent Holocaust survivors such as Elie Wiesel and Oliver Lustig,
American Jewish leaders Rabbis Andrew Baker and Shea Hecht, and many
others.

The Northern Transylvania Holocaust Memorial Museum will highlight the
Jewish life of the region before the Holocaust and the sequence of events
that led up to the darkest period in its history, focusing on regional
Romanian and Hungarian history at the time. A fully functioning
synagogue, which will be used during the upcoming dedication ceremony, is
also included. Other features include video presentations, survivor
testimonials and Jewish artifacts recently found at the site.

The old synagogue of Simleu Silvaniei, in this historic region of
Transylvania, was built in 1876. In May/June of 1944, the area's Jewish
population was forced out of their homes into the brutal Cehei ghetto and
from there packed into cattle cars and transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Over 160,000 Jews from the region perished.

Adam Aaron Wapniak, a Brooklyn native and architectural designer, became
interested in the abandoned synagogue's restoration on a 2003 visit,
sparking the interest of Dr. Alex Hecht, a New York dentist and son of
Holocaust survivors Zoltan and Stefania Hecht, who was born in the nearby
village of Nusfalau. Dr. Hecht had actually attended Hebrew school and
holiday prayers at the synagogue as a child. For the past two years he
and Mr. Wapniak have traveled back and forth between New York and Simleu
Silvaniei, vigorously driving the restoration and contributing as well as
raising funds. "While we have the support of several major Jewish
organizations," explains Dr. Hecht.

"We hope that once the greater world community sees a real museum
functioning to educate an interested population, they'll be encouraged to
help us generate a greater support base."

(source: PR Newswire)





USA:

President Bush Appoints Two New Members to United States Holocaust
Memorial Council

Current Council Member Joel M. Geiderman Appointed Vice-Chairman


President George W. Bush has appointed Michael A. Morris and Jay Stein to
the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the governing body of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The President has also named current Council Member Joel M. Geiderman of
Los Angeles, CA, Vice-Chairman of the Council, replacing Ruth B. Mandel in
that position.

The Council consists of 55 Presidential appointees, 10 Congressional
representatives and three ex-officio members from the departments of
Education, Interior and State.

"I welcome these dedicated individuals to the Council and look forward to
working with them to continue building upon the Museum's success," stated
Fred S. Zeidman, Council Chairman. "I also offer my congratulations to
Joel Geiderman on being named Council Vice-Chairman. As the child of a
Holocaust survivor, he brings an especially deep commitment and
sensitivity to fulfilling the Museum's vital mission, and I'm grateful to
the administration for continuing to recruit strong leadership to serve
this unique national institution."

Joel Geiderman, MD, Los Angeles, CA, the son of a Holocaust survivor, has
served on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council since 2002. Dr.
Geiderman is a nationally recognized leader in the specialty of emergency
medicine and is co-chair of the Emergency Department at Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center where he also serves on the Board of Directors. Dr.
Geiderman, who is also on the Board of Directors of the American Board of
Emergency Medicine, has authored over 70 textbook chapters and academic
papers, including some on the Holocaust. In 2004 he was honored by the
Sheba Medical Center in Israel with its Medical Visionary award.

Michael A. Morris, Atlanta, GA, is the President of Travelgirl magazine
and the former CEO of GMA Partners. A long-time supporter of the Museum,
Mr. Morris is an entrepreneur who has helped start investment banking and
technology companies. He serves on the boards of several charitable and
civic organizations, including The Morris Family Foundation, Inc., the
Marcus Foundation, Inc., the Centers for Disease Control Foundation Board
of Visitors, and the Israel Democracy Institute.

Jay Stein, Jacksonville, FL, is the Chairman and controlling shareholder
of Stein Mart, a retail chain founded by his grandfather Sam Stein. A
Founder of the Museum, Mr. Stein is active in philanthropic, civic and
educational endeavors, serving on the boards of the National Conference of
Christians and Jews and the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra. He is a
Trustee and member of the Executive Committees of the John F. Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts and New York University.

Created by unanimous act of Congress, the Museum is America's national
institution for Holocaust education and remembrance. A unique public-
private partnership, the Museum brings the history and lessons of
the Holocaust to Americans from all walks of life through educational
outreach, teacher training, traveling exhibitions, and scholarship. Since
its dedication in April 1993, the Museum has welcomed over 22 million
visitors, including more than 7 million children. For more information
on the Museum, visit http://www.ushmm.org.

(source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

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


US Stamp to Honor Holocaust-Era "Righteous Gentile"


Hiram "Harry" Bingham IV, a US diplomat who risked his career to help
save more than 2,000 of the world's leading writers, musicians, and
artists -- most of them Jewish refugees -- from the Nazis, will be
honored on a US postage stamp.

Bingham (1903-1988), a US vice-consul in France under the pro-Nazi Vichy
regime, secretly worked side-by-side with rescue activist Varian Fry until
the Roosevelt administration halted their activity in 1941, by refusing to
renew Fry's passport and transferring Bingham out of France.

The U.S. Postal Service has announced that Bingham will be one of six US
diplomats featured on forthcoming postage stamps, chosen from among more
than 50,000 stamp proposals that the Postal Service receives each year. He
will appear as part of a six-stamp souvenir sheet honoring unique American
diplomats, including the first Black US ambassador and the first woman US
ambassador.

(source: Israel National News)


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

Nazi guard dies before deportation


A former Lake Carmel man who served as a Nazi guard during World War II
has died before the federal government could deport him.

The Aug. 3 death of Jakob "Jack" Reimer, 86, of Elizabeth, N.J., resulted
in the Justice and Homeland Security departments withdrawing motions for a
hearing before a federal immigration judge, a Department of Justice
spokesman said.

"His death makes it a moot point," DOJ spokesman Matt Roper said.

The case highlights one problem the federal government faces as it
prosecutes more than 100 Nazi-related cases nationwide - aging defendants.

Reimer lived in the Putnam County hamlet of Lake Carmel for about 20
years, moving out in 1998, the same year a federal judge in Manhattan
ruled that he aided in the persecution of Polish Jews in the ghettos of
Warsaw and Czestochowa during World War II. At the time, Reimer, who lived
at 75 West Lakeshore Drive, said he moved out because of threats stemming
from the Manhattan hearing.

Reimer's U.S. citizenship was revoked after the hearing. He appealed, but
the decision was upheld last year.

In May, the federal government moved to deport Reimer, who came to the
U.S. in 1952 and became a citizen in 1959. Although Reimer argued at the
1998 hearing that he was a prisoner of war and did the Nazis' bidding
under threat of being killed, prosecutors noted that he received four
promotions and an award for meritorious service from the Nazis.

(source: The Journal News)






CZECH REPUBLIC:

Czechs apologize for mistreating German anti-Nazis in WWII


The Czech government apologized yesterday for wrongs done to ethnic
German compatriots who opposed the Nazis during World War II when
Germany occupied Czechoslovakia.

The gesture only includes a narrow group of people but touches upon very
sensitive ground in Czech-German relations, soured by the war and
subsequent expulsion of about 2.5 million to 3 million ethnic Germans.

"The government of the Czech Republic expresses its apology to all
affected active opponents of Nazism - regardless of their latter
citizenship and place of residence," the government resolution said.

The often violent expulsion and property confiscations remain a political
issue mainly in Bavaria, home to many of those expelled from
Czechoslovakia, a country that split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia
in 1993.

The expulsion and property confiscations in theory did not include those
who could prove an anti-Nazi stance, but some of them were still treated
as second-class citizens after the war.

According to historians, more than 200,000 ethnic Germans stayed in the
country after the expulsion, although only a small minority of those were
the proven anti-Nazis.

(source: Reuters)







AUSTRIA:

Music buried by the Nazis but reborn as memorials


Cultural festivals do not get much more glamorous than the one that takes
place every summer in this immaculately preserved Baroque city.

At the opera here late last month, the audience included men in sleek
tuxedos and women in gowns that evoked the splendor of imperial ages past.
You might have imagined that they were streaming in for some music by
Mozart, the local hero, but this summer Salzburg opened its festival on a
different, more complex note. Austria's elite was turning out for a dark
opera called "Die Gezeichneten" (The Branded) by Franz Schreker.

In a way it was as much a political event as a cultural one, a gesture of
musical reparation. Schreker, an Austrian-Jewish composer whose career
suffered under the Nazis, died in 1934 after a stroke. His music was later
banned and mostly forgotten. This year, the festival has tried to restore
some honor to his name and to remind the public of what was once in its
midst.

"Salzburg had a very strong Nazi movement," Helga Rabl-Stadler, the
president of the festival, explained in a recent interview. "We think it
is very important and necessary to bring the music we have never heard
because of the Third Reich." The audience response on opening night was
duly respectful but also somewhat tentative.

Schreker is not the only one receiving new attention. In both Salzburg and
Vienna, the music of exiled composers like Erich Korngold and Alexander
Zemlinsky is again being brought before the public. In Germany this year,
there have been dozens of performances of works by Karl Amadeus Hartmann,
a German composer who responded to his dark times with music of fierce
protest.

Sixty years after the end of World War II, across German-speaking Europe,
classical music has been invoked as a medium of public memory, an
accompaniment to the fitful process of reckoning with the past. In these
countries, as firsthand memories of the war dwindle, music is serving as a
kind of proxy allowing postwar generations to approach a difficult
history. But why, other than the convenience of an anniversary, is this
music being called to speak now? And what exactly can it remember?

In Germany, the effort to showcase the music of composers who suffered
under the Third Reich has been under way for a decade or more as part of a
broader imperative to confront the Nazi past. But this year in Germany,
the 60th anniversary of the war seemed to be met with a palpable sense of
guilt fatigue, despite the opening of the new Memorial to the Murdered
Jews of Europe. The German president, Horst Khler, has sympathized with
the suffering of German victims, including those who experienced the
allied bombing of the cities. The strategic wisdom and basic morality of
that campaign has also been questioned anew. Meanwhile, those born after
the war have other pressing problems, including the vexed aftermath of
unification.

Austria is a different case. Encouraged by the prevalent postwar myth that
it was not an aggressor but rather the first victim of Nazism, the nation
was slower to face its wartime legacy. Since the revelation in 1986 that
the country's president, Kurt Waldheim, had whitewashed his Nazi
connection, apologies and national soul-searching have ensued, but it is a
work in progress. Even as music by the nation's once-banned composers is
returning, a politician from the Freedom Party recently questioned the
existence of the gas chambers.

Both countries have used classical music more than any other art as a
conduit and a repository of memory. There are good reasons for this: Since
the 19th century, music has been a staging ground for the region's
political and ideological battles, and an echo chamber for questions of
cultural and national identity. Music also tracked the great German
downfall. The orchestras played almost every day in Auschwitz.

And then there is the medium of music itself: a symphony or a string
quartet, with its abstract musical language, can communicate powerful
emotions while remaining mute on the details of meaning.

Behind these emotions, however, lie the composers who produced them. And
their stories, particular, temporal and thoroughly human, speak in ways
all their own.

The 100th anniversary of Hartmann's birth in Munich is this month. The
centenary celebrations have included more than 60 performances of his
work, mostly in Munich but also across Germany. A new exhibition on his
life and music is at the Munich City Museum, and the summer festival of
the Bavarian State Opera opened in June with a successful performance of
his opera "Simplicius Simplicissimus."

On musical terms alone, the attention to Hartmann is long overdue. He was
a master German symphonist whose work drew deeply from almost three
centuries of Austro-German tradition, from Bach to Anton Webern, and
distilled these influences in his own deeply personal style, which spoke
with abundant power and emotional urgency.

But Hartmann's output is almost never cited without its dramatic context.
He was a great believer in the moral possibilities of art precisely at a
time when it was being so profoundly debased. Hartmann chose to stay in
Germany but was one of the disturbingly few composers who did not
collaborate with the Nazis. He withdrew from public musical life and
channeled his opposition into his music.

The works he composed under the Third Reich are indeed a powerful
testament. Perhaps the most famous is his searing "Concerto Funbre,"
written in 1939 to protest the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. Subversive
Czech tunes and Russian songs of revolution are smuggled into the music,
the memory of Hartmann's protest inscribed into the texture of the piece.

On other occasions, Hartmann declared his allegiances in the inscriptions
of his work.

He composed a piano sonata at the end of the war, after witnessing 20,000
inmates marching from the concentration camp at Dachau shortly before its
liberation. The score read, "Endless was the stream - endless the misery -
endless the sorrow."

These political commitments made his music unplayable at home. As the war
intensified, Hartmann buried his manuscripts deep in the mountains for
safekeeping. But he survived the war through his wife's family's wealth
and through a delicate dance with the authorities.

In a way the Hartmann centenary could not have been better timed with the
national mood in Germany. Hartmann was the textbook "inner emigrant," one
who remained in the country physically but spiritually withdrew from his
surroundings. His experiences of suffering under the Nazis while retaining
ethical integrity have all the makings of a perfect musical resistance
myth.

This is not to dismiss Hartmann's protest. His wartime record was
courageous, not to mention his outstanding postwar service in restoring
Germany's contemporary-music culture by founding the series Musica Viva.
But his example also resonates conveniently well with elements of the
country's new historical self-image. It makes for a certain reciprocal
appeal: Hartmann needs to be heard in Germany today, and today's Germany
needs its Hartmann.

Finally, Hartmann's example raises larger, difficult questions about the
very category of the inner emigrant, a status that was claimed after the
war by many German artists and writers far less deserving than Hartmann.
At its core, the concept is suffused with a troubling ethical ambiguity,
as if one could be present at the scene of a crime and yet morally absent.
Was it possible to live quietly through the Third Reich without being
partly implicated in what occurred?

The Austrian composer Schreker was at the other pole of musical memory
this summer. The new production of "The Branded," which tells the eerily
prescient story of an artistic utopia that mutates into a nightmare of
corruption, decadence and murder, capped the Salzburg Festival's four-year
series of operas by repressed composers.

Schreker was a major musical casualty of the Third Reich. His half-Jewish
ancestry and his progressive affiliations made inner emigration
impossible, and he was planning actual emigration in 1934 when he died. He
had already been forced out of prominent teaching positions in Berlin
after Hitler rose to power.

Unlike some composers who left behind only glimpses of their potential,
Schreker achieved demonstrable brilliance. A string of wildly successful
operas featured a kind of shimmering, intoxicated music that breathed
deeply of the Viennese Art Nouveau but brought its lushly textured
sensuality into an era of probing Expressionism.

During his heyday, Schreker was something of a contradiction in terms: a
truly popular modernist whose music was performed almost as often as the
music of Strauss. He was hailed by his champions as the true heir to
Wagner.

And yet artistic careers don't map neatly onto political timelines.
Schreker's star faded even before the Nazis arrived, when he failed to
keep up with the shifting fashions of the Weimar Republic. After the war,
the musical avant-garde had no time to look back. It was too busy forging
ahead with the legacy of Schreker's peer, Arnold Schnberg, creating
difficult serial music that promised a break with the seemingly tainted
traditions of the past. Schreker's life's work was simply left behind,
buried beneath the rubble.

Now with old prejudices about musical progress having fallen away,
Schreker's work is ripe for another shot at posterity. As his biographer
Christopher Hailey has argued, Schreker's lavish utopian sound-canvases
offered an alternative vision of modernism that was later lost in the
shuffle, a path not taken into the future of music.

We may finally be ready to appreciate Schreker's work on its own terms
and, in so doing, reclaim a broader founding vision of modernism.

Indeed, whether or not the recent performances can help Austrians remember
their past, they should certainly help music remember its own.

And yet there may be a tension between these two uses of music. As long as
these works continue to serve as memorials, they remain sequestered from
the repertory of which they were once a vital part.

From a strictly musical perspective, the question is whether composers
like Schreker can be unburdened from the task of so much symbolizing.

But from the perspective of a collective grappling with the past, the
questions grow more complicated. In some ways, classical music is
perfectly suited to the task of public memory in Austria and Germany,
precisely because of its privileged place in these societies.

But the broader limits of using music this way are also painfully
apparent. These programs reach only a limited part of an educated elite.
There is also the risk of offering an easy out: grappling with the past,
whether personal or collective, should entail more than an enjoyable night
at the opera. Music can be a beginning to this process, but surely not an
end.

In the end, memorials are about much more than just their contemplation;
they are about how that renewed memory is brought back into the world. The
scholar James Young has written about public monuments, but his words of
caution apply equally to this music: "Were we to passively remark only on
the contours of these memorials, were we to leave unexplored their genesis
and remain unchanged by the recollective act, it could be said that we
have not remembered at all."

(source: New York Times)