April 21




USA//PENNSYLVANIA:

Holocaust victims will be recognized


The community will pause this weekend to remember the horrors and
atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust during World War II that claimed 12
million victims, including 6 million Jews, and to once again proclaim that
it never should happen again.

In 1959, Israel's Knesset set aside the 27th day of Nisan on the Jewish
calendar, which is April 25 on the Gregorian calendar this year, to
observe Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this day, the world is
called upon to remember the Jews who perished from 1938 to 1945 in more
than 1,800 concentration camps scattered throughout Europe as far north as
Norway, east to Ukraine, west to France and south to Libya.

In Hebrew, Shoah means catastrophe or utter destruction. The 6 million
victims, including 11/2 million children, represented nearly one-third of
world Jewry at that time. Yom HaShoah is a national holiday in Israel.

Many of the survivors who moved to Harrisburg after 1945 grew up in
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands or
France.

The annual "Reading of the Names" program on Monday is the centerpiece of
the local observance. Starting at 7:30 p.m. with a service at Temple Beth
Shalom, 913 Allendale Road, Mechanicsburg, the names of victims of the
Holocaust will be read aloud over 24 hours.

"Unto Every Person There is a Name" seeks to dignify the memories of the
victims of the Shoah (the Holocaust) who were stripped of their names and
tattooed with numbers, according to Lillian Rappaport, director of Jewish
Education Services at the Jewish Community Center.

The program is designed to restore a portion of their humanity and to
retrieve them from anonymity.

Sam Sherron of Lower Paxton Twp., who survived six concentration camps,
will talk about his experiences at a community observance at 11 a.m.
Sunday at the Holocaust Monument at Front and Sayford streets in
Harrisburg. Winners of the Schwab Holocaust Essay contest will read their
essays.

Sherron, who has worn a six-digit identification number on his left arm
since he was 9 and was sent to a concentration camp from his home in
Lithuania, lost 72 relatives, including his mother, sisters, aunts, uncles
and cousins, in the Holocaust.

The Pennsylvania Jewish Coalition will sponsor the annual Holocaust Civic
Commemoration at noon Tuesday near the fountain outside the East Wing of
the Capitol. If it rains, the ceremony will move to the Keystone Building
at Commonwealth and North streets.

Gov. Ed Rendell is expected to participate. The program will include
candlelighting by Holocaust survivors and musical selections from the
Holocaust era.

(source: The Patriot-News)



UKRAINE:

Spielberg shoots Ukranian Holocaust


There are a lot of Holocaust documentaries, but not many that have been
filmed in Ukraine. Add one to the list.

A new documentary, co-produced by the Los Angeles-based Shoah Foundation,
is shooting in Ukraine. The film should be completed by September, in time
for the 65th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre.

The 70-minute documentary will focus on Babi Yar, the infamous ravine just
outside Kiev where some 33,000 Jews were slaughtered in the last few days
of September 1941.

It also will deal with the larger history of the Holocaust in Ukraine,
according to the Shoah Foundation's president and chief executive officer,
Douglas Greenberg. Both Greenberg and Spielberg have family roots in
Ukraine.

The bulk of the film's material will come from the video archives of the
USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, created
by filmmaker Steven Spielberg after he finished his 1994 Oscar
award-winning Schindler's List, said Greenberg.

The foundation has so far collected 52,000 video testimonies of Holocaust
survivors in 56 countries, speaking in 32 languages, including 3,200
interviews with Ukrainian survivors.

According to Greenberg, the foundation's mission now is to bring these
testimonies back to the countries they were collected in order to educate
the local populations about the Holocaust.

He said he hopes the film will eventually be distributed in Ukrainian
schools. Work is under way to create a teacher's guide so Ukrainian
teachers can use the film in their Holocaust lessons.

Approximately one-fifth of the film will be new material shot in Ukraine
this past year, Greenberg said. Interviews with Ukrainian Jews remembering
the country's prewar Jewish community will make up much of this material.

The documentary is co-produced by Ukrainian Jewish oligarch Viktor
Pinchuk, a son-in-law of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and a
major donor to the Jewish community in his native Dnepropetrovsk. Budget
figures have not been disclosed.

Greenberg says Spielberg and Pinchuk were introduced to each other by a
mutual friend a year and a half ago.

"We've always wanted to make a documentary film about the Holocaust in
Ukraine, because it's such an important chapter" in the overall history of
the Holocaust, Greenberg said. "And there was Mr. Pinchuk, who was also
interested in the subject."

Pinchuk's spokesman, Thomas Eymond-Laritaz, described his boss's
participation in the project as "a tribute to the Jewish community he was
brought up in" as well as his "desire to participate in something that
would eventually benefit the wider world community."

Film director Sergey Bukovsky, a 20-year veteran of the local film
industry, said that the subject matter doesn't lend itself to much
"creative directing," but said he would try to make it as engaging as
possible.

"We looked for other solutions to avoid having just 'talking heads,' "
Bukovsky said. "There will be Jewish artifacts and scenes from the old
Jewish towns in western Ukraine in the film."

Bukovsky, who is not Jewish, said he had to resist the temptation to
editorialize. "The biggest challenge for me has been finding a balance
between educating and moralizing in the film," he said.

One thing that makes the Ukrainian project stand out from similar
documentaries produced by the Shoah Foundation in other countries,
Greenberg said, is that it will include the testimony of Ukrainians who
helped Jews during World War II.

Distribution plans have yet to be finalized, but Greenberg said he expects
the film will be shown on Ukrainian television, and he hopes for a
theatrical release in Ukraine as well.

The film will be released in both Ukrainian and Russian, and will be
subtitled in English for the United States, Europe and Israel.

"This is a story that isn't Ukrainian or American, Polish or German,"
Greenberg said. "It's a human story, and from this point of view, the fact
that it's going to be told about Ukrainians and in the languages that
Ukrainians speak makes it very important."

(source: Jerusalem Post)




GERMANY:

Belgian Holocaust denier faces German trial


BRUSSELS Holocaust denier and Belgian national Siegfried Verbeke has been
ordered to stand trial in Mannheim in Germany.

Besides Verbeke, two Holocaust deniers of German nationality will also
stand trial, a spokesman from Mannheim Court said.

Verbeke was arrested in November 2005 at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam on
request from German justice officials.

He is accused of spreading doubts via the internet about the Holocaust
(the murder of 6 million Jews during World War II).

Verbeke is currently being held on remand detention in Germany and has
previously been convicted in Belgium for denying the Holocaust.

(source: Expatica News)


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






Archive on Hitler's victims holds millions of names


Row upon row of plain metal cabinets at the International Tracing Service
hold the key to the lives - and often the deaths - of 17.5 million of
Adolf Hitler's victims.

Much inside the cabinets is simple, solemn fact, such as a name on a
concentration camp death list. Other documents relate to mental illness,
homosexuality, medical treatment, even the presence of head lice - leading
to privacy concerns that have held up the opening of center's 30 million
documents to historians and the public.

That restriction could end soon under pressure from Holocaust researchers
and Jewish organizations when the countries that run the archive meet in
Luxembourg on May 16. In a key breakthrough, the German government said
Tuesday it was ready to work with the United States on the issue, though
no final agreement has been reached.

Maria Raabe, assistant to the center's director, said it will ultimately
be up to the 11 countries - Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy,
Israel, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, UK and the United States - whose
representatives meet only once a year.

"It's there that a decision will be taken on opening the archives and in
what way," she said.

"We have very delicate and sensitive information about illness,
homosexuality, dementia."

One card shows the name of a Frenchman taken to Norway and forced to work
as a carpenter in Oslo building a submarine pen for the German navy.
Another lists a Hungarian suffering from schizophrenia. Another document
bears the name of a German imprisoned at Buchenwald for saying anti-Nazi
slogans, and says the U.S. Army ordered him released on May 7, 1945 - the
day the war ended.

Many of the records are simple registration documents, ID cards or lists.
Yet they are a powerful testament to the lives and deaths of people who
were imprisoned, forced to work for German industry or killed in
concentration and concentration camps during World War II.

The agency, which opened in 1943 operating out of London and moved to
Germany in 1945, helps relatives of those lost in the flames of the Third
Reich to discover their fate, whether living or dead.

More than 50 million references to the victims have been catalogued,
cross-referenced and, in most cases, digitally scanned to form a massive
database. It has been used for purposes such as augmenting compensation
cases over being forced to work for German industry or being sent to
concentration camps. It dealt with 150,000 requests for information last
year alone.

The information is set to become completely computerized by the end of
2007. It fills 4.5 terabytes of data now, and will envelop eight terabytes
when it's done.

It is by far the most complete listing of those who suffered in World War
II, said Udo Jost, the archival manager for the ITS. But not all are
listed, he said.

Some death camps, he told The Associated Press, "didn't have much use for
records." In other cases, the records were destroyed by the Nazis as the
Russians advanced from the east and the allies from the west.

Other camps, however, were ardent record keepers.

One concentration camp, Mauthausen, in Austria, diligently recorded the
deaths of its inmates there, listing them by name, serial and prisoner
number as well as the place and date of their birth.

"It also shows how they died," Jost said, showing a copy of the camp's
Totenbuch, or Death Book, from 1942 and 1943. "These prisoners were killed
every two minutes with a shot to the back of the head." In a few hours,
300 were executed on April 20, 1942.

"That was Hitler's birthday. The camp commandant did it as a birthday gift
for him," he said.

The Nazis were meticulous, documenting everything from the mundane - how
many meals a forced laborer received - to the horrific - in describing a
concentration camp prisoner's death in painstaking detail.

People who seek information about themselves or relatives have their
requests prioritized. Those who are old or sick get their requests acted
on more quickly while others who need information for legal settlements
also get faster treatment.

However, it still takes three-and-a-half years on average, Raabe said.

(source: Assoicated Press)



FRANCE:

Found: Schiele masterpiece that was looted by Nazis then lost for 68 years

Family's search ends after two generation--6m price tag is last twist in
chequered history


It was one of those moments that art connoisseurs dream about. In
December, two experts from Christie's were asked to do a routine valuation
at a home in France. They had been sent a photograph of a painting, and
assumed it was a copy of a lost masterpiece by Egon Schiele.

But when they walked into the apartment, "we took one look at the picture
and immediately turned to each other, incredulous", said Christie's expert
Thomas Seydoux. "There was no doubt that we were standing in front of the
Schiele masterpiece. It was an intense experience."

The painting is to be auctioned in London in June, with a conservative
estimate of 4m-6m. But all eyes will be on whether it could top the
Schiele record, set in 2003 at 12.3m by a landscape that had been
estimated at 5m-7m.

The work - known as Wilted Sunflowers - is an important work by Schiele,
part of a group he painted in the village of Krumau in 1914. It
disappeared without trace, and was missing for 68 years. "Whereabouts
unknown", the scholarly books simply stated.

About a metre tall, it depicts a clump of drooping sunflowers set against
a landscape over which hovers a dour sun, half veiled by cloud. It refers
to Van Gogh's sunflower paintings, but gives the subject a sense of
melancholia, decay and deathliness.

The painting had been bought shortly after the first world war by Karl
Grnwald, a Jewish art, textiles and antiques dealer based in Vienna. He
had served as Schiele's superior officer during the first world war, and
had helped get the man he recognised as a genius diverted from the front
line and appointed a war artist.

Friends

The men became friends. Grnwald modelled for the artist, and the men's
families holidayed together in the summer before Schiele succumbed to
influenza in 1918.

In 1938, Grnwald and his family fled Austria in the wake of the anschluss,
and reached Paris. Grnwald tried to safeguard his art collection, but it
was confiscated by the Nazis in Strasbourg, where it had been put in
storage.

In 1942 it was auctioned off "from the back of a truck to raise cash",
according to Christie's European president, Jussi Pylkknen. There was no
record of what had become of them.

Grnwald lost his wife and one of his four children in a concentration camp
during the war. He spent the rest of his life trying to get his collection
back. After his death aged 80 in 1964, his surviving children, especially
his son Frdric, took up the search.

They found one key piece: the Schiele portrait of their father, which was
successfully restored to them. They also identified a Klimt called Die
Erfllung, which had ended up in a Strasbourg museum. The fight to get it
back turned into an epic struggle, culminating in the family suing the
city of Strasbourg, a case that took 13 years to resolve. It was formally
restituted, at long last, in 2000.

Frdric died in 2004, but, according to his daughter Cory Pollack, "my
father talked about Wilted Sunflowers as he was dying", urging the
surviving family to continue the hunt. The work was the jewel of the
collection, and, according to Ms Pollack: "The struggle to reclaim our
stolen art has become part of our family legacy."

It is ironic, then, that Wilted Sunflowers turned up out of the blue, not
as a result of the Grnwald family's efforts to run it to ground. The
anonymous Frenchman who had called in the Christie's experts, in all
innocence of its troubled provenance, was told of the painting's history.

He recognised that the painting should be restored to the Grnwald family
and Karl's descendants, now scattered between France and the US, were
traced by Christie's at the Frenchman's request.

"It was a fantastically noble situation," said Mr Pylkknen. And an unusual
one. Had the painting stayed in Austria, where it is likely to have ended
up in a museum, chances are that restitution would have proved much more
arduous. The descendants of Alma Mahler (composer Gustav Mahler's wife)
have, for instance, been trying since 1953 to regain the Munch she was
forced to leave behind as she escaped Vienna in 1938. That painting still
hangs in the Austrian Gallery in Vienna.

Emotion

Last month Ms Pollack flew to London to see for the first time the
painting that had become her family's obsession. "I was very emotional.
Overwhelmed with joy, though emotion makes you cry too," she said. "We
have a feeling of peace and resolution. It's wonderful thing, part of the
healing process. It has been brought full circle and resolved in an
amicable way."

Asked whether the family had considered holding on to the painting rather
than immediately putting it up for auction, she said: "Truthfully, we felt
it would be more appropriate for it to be somewhere where many people
could see it. And it would make me too nervous to have it. How could you
keep something like that at home? It's not about money - the fact is it
has been discovered. It is part of our family history."

Several members of the family gathered in London yesterday, some of whom
had seen the work for the first time on Thursday. Ms Pollack declined to
say how the family intended to split the proceeds of the sale between
them. "It will be done in the right way," she said.

Mr Pylkknen said: "We are not overstating this when we say it is a
masterpiece. It would grace any national gallery, and we hope and assume
that major institutions will bid for this."

(source: The Guardian)




POLAND:

Nazi Death Camp Museum in Poland Bans Planned Jesus Musical


The Majdanek Museum in eastern Poland banned performances of the musical
``Jesus Christ Superstar'' planned on the grounds of the former Nazi
death camp, saying the proposal had attracted too much criticism.

``Majdanek is a place of memory, unity and brotherhood,'' museum director
Edward Balawejder told a press conference today. ``We don't want any
production of this play to destroy that.''

The Majdanek concentration camp in the eastern Polish town of Lublin,
second only to Auschwitz in size, was built by Adolf Hitler's regime to
intern and later kill its inmates. An estimated 230,000 prisoners died
there, mostly Jews and Poles who had been declared enemies of the Nazi
state.

Jewish groups said the former concentration camp is an inappropriate venue
for performances of the musical, German press agency DPA reported.

According to Jacek Boniecki, artistic director of the theater planning the
performance, Majdanek is the perfect location for a production of ``Jesus
Christ Superstar.''

``It's about intolerance, misunderstanding, but also love toward people,''
the regional daily newspaper Dziennik Wschodni cited him as saying. ``If
anyone thinks that Majdanek isn't an appropriate place to present such
values, it would just be from plain spite.''

The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, which tells the story of the last days of
Christ before his crucifixion, first premiered in New York 1971 and was
then made into a film in 1973 that was nominated for an Oscar the
following year.

(source: Bloomberg News)






RUSSIA:

Russian Police Detain Young Men for Posing with Nazi Flag


Five young men were detained in St. Petersburg early on Thursday morning
for taking pictures under a Nazi flag, the Interfax news agency reported
on Thursday, quoting a source in the local police.

Five young men taking pictures near the Griboyedov monument next to the
Young Spectator Theatre were apprehended at 3:00 a.m. on Thursday. They
were holding Russian and Nazi flags bundled together, the source said.

The men were taken to a police station, and an administrative protocol was
filled out, he said.

St. Petersburg has become the site of a recent spate of racist attacks.
During one of such attacks a black student was shot dead with a shotgun
decorated with a swastika.

(source: Moscow News)