July 3

GLOBAL:

Billing Holocaust Victims


The success of Holocaust survivors in winning a $1.25 billion settlement
from Swiss banks, which they accused of helping the Nazis steal Jewish
holdings, was a small bright spot in that tragic piece of history. Burt
Neuborne, a New York University law professor who represented the
survivors, was rightly praised for his part in the effort. But now a
controversy has arisen over Mr. Neuborne's bill of more than $4 million.
The dollar amounts are troubling, and so are the slipshod hourly records
that Mr. Neuborne submitted.

After his work in helping win the settlement, Mr. Neuborne took the lead
in helping the court decide how to allocate the money among Holocaust
victims worldwide. It was an impossibly difficult task, and
unsurprisingly, not everyone was happy with the result. A group of
survivors who are dissatisfied are challenging his bill.

Mr. Neuborne, who worked pro bono on the first stage of the case, is
charging for his current work, and billing at $700 an hour money that
will come from the sum available to the survivors. Top corporate lawyers
sometimes charge that much, or more. But Holocaust victims are not Exxon
Mobil. It is an unseemly rate to be asking, made worse by the fact that
Mr. Neuborne is reserving his right to seek an "excellence" multiplier
that could, in theory, raise his hourly rate to $875 or more.

Mr. Neuborne, who received more than $4 million in fees in a previous
Holocaust case, no doubt worked very hard, but his time records were
unacceptable. They included, for example, 30.5 hours of work on one day,
and 25 on another, and often had large blocks of time with only vague
descriptions of what he did. He has since agreed to reduce his total
hours, though he insists he worked all the time he originally claimed,
even if not on the days he stated. The more than $4 million he is now
seeking reflects those reduced hours.

The survivors who say that Mr. Neuborne should have done all his work pro
bono are asking too much. No one should be expected to do arduous,
complicated legal work without pay. But when a lawyer's fee is excessive
or inadequately supported, courts should step in. U.S. Magistrate Judge
James Orenstein, who is reviewing his fee request, should scrutinize it
carefully, and keep the interest of the victims firmly in mind.

(source: Editorial, New York Times)




POLAND:

Poland prepares to mark pogrom anniversary


Historians call it Europe's last pogrom - neighbors and police setting
upon Jewish Holocaust survivors in the Polish town of Kielce with guns,
clubs and metal bars in a murderous rampage little more than a year after
the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Even as officials prepared to mark its 60th anniversary Tuesday with
wailing sirens and Hebrew prayers in the town's Jewish cemetery, the
Kielce massacre still darkens relations between Jews and Poles.

"How a normal population could indulge in such massive criminal behavior -
this was and is the most important question that Kielce raises," said Jan
T. Gross, the author of "Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz."

On July 4, 1946, townspeople and security officers, spurred by a false
rumor that Jews living at 7 Planty St., had kidnapped a Christian boy,
attacked Jewish Holocaust survivors living in the building. They killed 42
people, almost all Jews, over several hours, and about 30 more were killed
in a violent frenzy that spread across the area.

Kielce still looms as a symbol of a double tragedy suffered by some
European Jews: to survive the years of the Nazi terror in concentration
camps or in hiding, only to be massacred as they tried to rebuild their
lives in their prewar hometowns. An estimated 1,500 Jews were killed in
such violence in Poland, and there were other such cases on a smaller
scale in countries such as Hungary and Romania, according to Gross, a
Princeton University professor.

Gross' previous book, "Neighbors," about the collective murder of Jews in
the village of Jedwabne on one day in 1941 by their Polish neighbors,
forced Poles to re-examine their long-held view of themselves as solely
victims - and almost never perpetrators - of the brutality that engulfed
the nation during the war and occupation by Nazi Germany.

Gross, who was born in Poland, said he hopes "Fear" - which devotes two
out of its six chapters to the Kielce pogrom - will force more such
soul-searching on the issue of Polish anti-Semitism.

"The tragic death of (Poland's Jews) is something that has never been
properly mourned here," Gross said during an interview in Warsaw. "And
this absence of mourning is something that has to be remedied because it
weighs heavily on the collective consciousness of the society."

The pogrom set off a mass emigration of many of Poland's estimated 250,000
Jewish Holocaust survivors - what was left of the prewar Jewish population
of 3.5 million - and pushed other Polish Jews to hide their identities.
About 60,000 Jews fled Poland in the three months after the Kielce pogrom.

"For Jews, Kielce showed them the killing hadn't stopped," said Poland's
Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich. "The tragedy, the result of Kielce is that
Jews felt that they were no longer safe in Poland."

Poland's post-communist government apologized for the killings on the 50th
anniversary of the Kielce pogrom, but many Jewish groups and other critics
say Polish society at large has still largely failed to come to
acknowledge the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Poland during the war
era.

It touches a sore spot for many Poles, who feel it is unfair to equate
pogroms such as Kielce as the moral equivalent of the evil of the
Holocaust. Schudrich, a New Yorker, also said that as horrific as Kielce
was, it shouldn't be equated with the Nazi killings.

"Some people want to make Kielce into the continuation of the Holocaust,"
Schudrich said. "It was a postwar pogrom that was horrible and
unacceptable, but it wasn't the continuation of the Holocaust."

The Kielce anniversary comes at a sensitive time politically for Poland -
two months after the governing Law and Justice formed a coalition with two
small parties, including the League of Polish Families, a right-wing group
rooted in a prewar anti-Semitic party.

That coalition deal with the party, which also has a far-right youth
movement, sparked concerns within the European Union, Israel and Poland's
Jewish community that it could encourage anti-Semitism. Those concerns
took on greater urgency after Schudrich was attacked, though not injured,
in Warsaw in late May.

President Lech Kaczynski condemned the attack and said there was no place
in Poland for anti-Semitism. Police arrested the attacker last week.

Schudrich is to lead Jewish prayers during the ceremonies Tuesday.
Kaczynski was originally scheduled to deliver a speech, but he was sick
Monday and his office said it was unlikely he would be able to join
Poland's foreign and interior ministers at the ceremonies.

(source: Associated Press)




USA:

Jaap Penraat Dies at 88; Saved Hundreds in Holocaust


Jaap Penraat, an architect and industrial designer who saved 406 Jews in
the Nazi-occupied Netherlands by forging false documents and taking them
to safety, died last Sunday at his home in Catskill, N.Y. He was 88.

The cause was esophageal cancer, his daughter Nolle Penraat said.

Mr. Penraat, whose first name is pronounced "yahp," refused for many years
to talk about his wartime experience. When he finally did, he simply said
that he had done the decent thing.

"You do these things because in your mind there is no other way of doing
it," he said in an interview with The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2000.

He was imprisoned when his counterfeiting was discovered. He was tortured,
but told his captors nothing. There were harrowing experiences as he
shepherded Jews masquerading as construction workers across Europe.

Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to victims of the Holocaust,
awarded Mr. Penraat the designation "Righteous Among the Nations" and put
him on its honor roll in Jerusalem.

His medal carried this proverb: "He who saves a single human life saves
the entire universe."

Most Dutch Jews did not survive the Holocaust; of the 140,000 who lived
there before the Nazis invaded on May 10, 1940, about 110,000 died. Only
Poland lost a larger proportion of its Jewish population.

Jacob Penraat was born on April 11, 1918, in Amsterdam and studied design
there. As a boy, he switched off lights for Jewish neighbors at sunset on
Fridays, to help them avoid work, forbidden on the Sabbath.

He was a young architect and draftsman when Nazi occupiers took escalating
measures against Jews. First, they were prohibited from being air-raid
wardens, then barred from the civil service, then made to register.

A secret resistance formed to help them. Mr. Penraat, then in his 20's and
a nonpracticing Christian, marshaled his design talents to make fake
identity cards. A friend married to a German gave him copies of official
papers and stamps for models. He was soon discovered and went to prison
for several months.

The situation for Jews worsened, and resistance cells raced to make false
travel papers. But escaping the country was hard, because Germans
controlled countries and seas bordering the Netherlands.

Mr. Penraat and his friends devised a plan to disguise Jews as
construction workers for the wall that Hitler was building along France's
Atlantic Coast. He forged travel documents, using a real construction
company's letterhead.

He took the Jews to Lille, France, where he presented them to the French
underground for transport to neutral Spain. He made about 20 trips,
accompanying about 20 Jews each time.

Once, he approached German guards outside a school and told them his
laborers needed lodging. He complained about the food, but called this
"one of the first times a German Army played host to a bunch of Jews."

Only one of the men moved by Mr. Penraat died, and that man was
accidentally hit by a train. But Mr. Penraat trembled whenever he handed
papers to a clerk.

"You're there, a woman walks away and either she comes back with papers or
she comes back with soldiers," he said in an interview with The
Poughkeepsie Journal. "And they would shoot you right then and there, so
other people could see what happens when you do anything against the
German Army."

Hudson Talbott, a longtime friend of Mr. Penraat's who wrote a children's
book about his experiences ("Forging Freedom: A True Story of Heroism
During the Holocaust") said his research indicated there was a daredevil
aspect to the missions.

"The feeling I get is that he just loved the idea of putting one over on
the Nazis," Mr. Talbott said in an interview with The Albany Times Union.
"It wasn't a joke, or a game, but clearly there was something about
fooling them that was an important aspect of this."

After 1944, the trips were too risky, and Mr. Penraat hid in a village,
subsisting on sugar beets. After the war, he became a noted designer in
Amsterdam.

He came to the United States in 1958 and designed a Dutch mill cafe for
the 1964 New York World's Fair.

He began to talk about his wartime experiences only when his daughters
convinced him that his grandchildren should know about them. In his last
years, he spoke to school groups.

Mr. Penraat's wife of 52 years, the former Jettie Jongejans, died three
years ago. He is survived by his daughters, Marjolijn de Jager, of
Stamford, Conn., Mir Lewis, of Mattituck, N.Y., and Nolle, of Manhattan;
four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

(source: New York Times)


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


MO Governor Signs Missouri Holocaust Education Bill


In special ceremonies Friday at the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis,
Governor Matt Blunt signed Missouri's Holocaust Education bill into law.
Senate President Pro Tem Michael R. Gibbons, R-Kirkwood, sponsored the
bill that creates a Holocaust Commission charged with spreading awareness
and developing educational programs detailing the Holocaust in Europe
before and during World War II.

Gibbons said teaching future generations is a key to not repeating the
past. "The commission will make sure there is an awareness of the
Holocaust, of what happened and how it can happen in a civilized society,"
Gibbons said. "Remember, Germany in the 1930s was by no means a Third
World country."

Representatives from the St. Louis Holocaust Museum, Anti-Defamation
League and the St. Louis Police Department attended the ceremony Friday.
All three entities supported the bill's enactment.

Jean Cavender, Director of St. Louis Holocaust Museum & Learning Center,
said the Holocaust Commission will build on educational programs already
offered by the St. Louis Holocaust Museum. "The lessons of the Holocaust
are fundamental," Cavender said. "We need to start teaching kids at an
early age that differences are not wrong."

The Holocaust Education and Awareness Commission will consist of 12
members directed by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary
Education. The commission can sponsor programs or publications to educate
the public about the crimes of genocide in an effort to deter indifference
to crimes against humanity and human suffering wherever they occur.
The new law takes effect on August 28.

Attendees at the bill signing:
Jean Cavender - Director of HMLC
Lolle Boettcher - HMLC Volunteer Educator
Dr. Richard Kalfus - HMLC Volunteer Educator
Guenter Goldsmith - Holocaust Survivor
Chief Joe Mokwa - St. Louis City Police Dept.
Sgt. Sheila Pearson - St. Louis City Police Dept.
Denise DeCou - Anti-Defamation League
Mark Rosen - Anti-Defamation League
Stuart Berkowitz - Anti-Defamation League

Senate Bill 1189: This act creates the Holocaust Education and Awareness
Commission. The commission shall be housed in the Department of Elementary
and Secondary Education and shall promote implementation of holocaust
education and awareness programs. The commission shall be composed of
twelve members to be appointed by the governor with advice and consent of
the senate. The makeup of the commission is delineated in the act. The
term "holocaust" is defined in the act.

(source: Jewish in St. Louis News)