Jan. 3


GLOBAL:

Deny legitimacy to Holocaust deniers


"There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say
that two plus two equals four is punished with death. And the issue is not
what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The
issue is simply whether or not two plus two equals four." - Albert Camus,
"The Plague"


Bridges for a Just Community (formerly the NCCJ of Greater Cincinnati)
condemns the recently held conference in Iran, "Review of the Holocaust
Global Vision," sponsored by the Iranian Foreign Ministry and initiated by
Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as an affront to the entire
civilized world.

In the face of documents, films, artifacts and eyewitness reports
confirming the atrocities of World War II, 67 Holocaust deniers from 30
countries met to question whether the mass murder of 6 million Jews
occurred, and whether gas chambers as tools of extermination even existed.
Among those in attendance was David Duke, former imperial wizard of the Ku
Klux Klan.


The Holocaust happened, period. Still, it is necessary to deny legitimacy
to this latest group of deniers. "I have been to Auschwitz. I saw the
machinery of the Holocaust. It certainly looked real to me," said
Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations criticized the motives of the
conference sponsors: "No legitimate cause or agenda can ever be advanced
by denying or belittling the immense human suffering caused by the murder
of millions of Jews and other minority groups by the Nazi regime and its
allies during World War II." So, too, has the American Jewish Committee,
which in a statement said, "the conference ... seeks to embolden efforts
to delegitimize Israel's right to exist and dehumanize Jews by supporting
the vicious claim that Jews created the Holocaust for financial and
territorial gain."

Joining with the governments of the United States, Great Britain, Germany
and the Vatican, and people worldwide, Bridges rejects the irrational
hatred of the current Iranian government and calls upon all people of good
will to do likewise.

In our experience, truth-deniers are peddlers of prejudice. In this case,
the poison is that of anti-Semitism, and the antidote is defending the
truth, honoring the truth, and most importantly, learning from the truth.

(source: Charleston C.K. Wang is chair of the Issues Committee for Bridges
for a Just Community)





ENGLAND:

British Holocaust denier backs Gibson's anti-Semitism

In press conference after recent release from Austrian prison, Holocaust
denier David Irving slurs Jews, blacks, expresses support for Mel Gibson's
recent anti-Semitic comments that 'Jews are responsible for all wars'

British writer David Irving wasted no time Friday offending Jews and black
people at a news conference, a day after his return from Austria where he
was imprisoned for denying the Holocaust.

At a news conference in London, Irving endorsed actor Mel Gibson's drunken
comments earlier this year that Jews were responsible for all modern wars.
He also referred to his success as an author in the 1970s by talking about
how be used cash to buy a Rolls-Royce - the color of which he described by
using a racial slur against blacks.

Irving, 68, was sentenced to three years in prison for his views on the
Holocaust. Vienna's highest court on Wednesday granted Irving's appeal to
convert two-thirds of his sentence into probation. Authorities deported
him to Britain and banned him indefinitely from Austria.

Asked Friday if he was anti-Semitic, Irving said: "No, I like to think I
am not."

But then he said: "In many respects Mel Gibson was right."

"They (Jews) should ask themselves the question, 'Why have they been so
hated for 3,000 years that there has been pogrom after pogrom in country
after country?' and it's the one question they seem to be very shy of,"
Irving said.

Irving told reporters that he had done research on the Holocaust that
other historians had not, but acknowledged he had been mistaken on the
subject in the past.

"My books will be the ones that survive into the next century," he said.

He said sales from his book on World War II German Gen. Erwin Rommel
enabled him to walk into a car showroom with a paper bag stuffed with cash
to buy a "(racial slur) brown" Rolls-Royce.

(source: YNetNews)





USA//OHIO:

13 million pennies collection to honor Holocaust victims


Students in a Hebrew class are hoping to collect 13 million pennies - one
for each person killed in the Holocaust.

Laura Hood, who teaches the class at Temple Israel, said the project will
help students grasp the scope of the tragedy.

The 14 students have collected 65,000 pennies so far and are seeking
donations from residents citywide.

"I want anyone who donates to hold a handful of pennies and imagine that
they are holding the terrified hands of the humans who were marched into
the gas chambers," Hood said.

Money raised in the effort will be donated to Temple Israel, the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and Yad Vashem, a memorial
in Jerusalem.

Temple Israel student Kyle Gersman, 11, said it's important for his
generation to learn about the Holocaust.

"It was a bad time. A lot of people died for no reason," he said. "We need
to know about what happened so we can prevent something like that from
happening again."

The project was inspired by Whitwell Middle School in east Tennessee,
which set out in 1998 to collect 6 million paper clips - representing each
Jew who died in the Holocaust - and received several times that number.

The Tennessee students decided to collect paper clips because they
discovered that paper clips were invented by Norwegians and that
Norwegians wore them on their lapels as a silent protest against Nazi
occupation during the war.

(source: Associated Press)


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

US Presses for Quicker Opening of Nazi Archives

About 50 million documents are stored in Bad Arolsen


American lawmakers are concerned that further delays in granting access to
the Nazi files constitutes an injustice to elderly Holocaust survivors.

American lawmakers, including the incoming head of the US Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, are pushing foreign governments to speed up the
ratification process of an agreement that will grant access to millions of
Nazi-era German documents.

"Further delay in the release of this archive material would be unjust to
Holocaust survivors -- virtually all of whom are now elderly -- still
seeking compensation for the unspeakable crimes of the Nazi regime,"
Senator Joseph Biden, a member of the Democratic Party who takes over the
Senate committee Thursday, wrote in a letter to British Ambassador Sir
David Manning.

"We owe it to them as well as their relatives to act promptly," he wrote.

The letter echoed others sent to other countries on the commission that
oversees the archive.

Dangerously deluded

Last spring, the 11-nation governing commission of the International Red
Cross' International Tracing Service, which oversees the archive in Bad
Arolsen, agreed to provide greater access to the information contained in
it. Prior German concerns over privacy rights had kept the files closed
for five decades.

The ongoing delay is due to the member countries' failing to ratify the
agreement at home. The agreement's signatories are: Germany, the US,
Israel, Britain, France, Luxembourg, Greece, Italy, Belgium, Poland and
the Netherlands.

There are still many family members unaccounted for

US lawmakers said that the archive is also important to refuting the
claims of Holocaust deniers: "(The documents will provide) further proof,
if any were still needed that those who deny the occurrence of the
Holocaust are dangerously deluded," wrote Biden.

That issue resurged recently after Iran held a much-criticized conference
which debated whether the Holocaust actually happened.

A travesty

Other lawmakers added that access to the files is important for survivors
and their families in regards to restitution and compensation issues as
well as information about lost family members.

Lawyer Sam Dubbin, who represents Holocaust survivors, told the Associated
Press that such issues are often overlooked.

"We know that so much information has been hidden, and there have been so
many surprises when these Nazi records are actually examined," he said.

"It would be a travesty to allow past restitution arrangements to stand
until survivors and family members are given complete access to the
entirety of the files."

(source: Deutsche Welle)





ISRAEL:

Bill to aid poor Holocaust survivors passes in committee


A bill aimed at improving the status of Holocaust survivors passed its
second and third readings on Monday at a session of the Knesset Committee
for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs.

The bill was submitted by MK Yuri Shtern (Israel Beiteinu).

"This law brings justice to needy Holocaust survivors in Israel and will
provide them with an assured income," commented committee chairman, MK
Professor Michael Nudelman (Kadima).

"Our aim now is to bring it to the Knesset plenum Tuesday for a closing
vote," said a spokeswoman for Shtern following the meeting. "We hope that
very soon this will be a new law in the State of Israel."

Shtern's representative added that the new law would become a reality as
soon as July 1, 2007, providing many victims of Nazi atrocities living in
Israel with a range of benefits to improve their daily living conditions.

The benefits package outlined in the new law includes an additional 10
percent in rental assistance from the Housing Ministry as well as priority
status for public housing; an annual allowance of 15 percent of the
average salary to be received each August; and a total exemption from the
annual television license fee.

The additional income and tax exemptions will allow many elderly Holocaust
survivors to live the last years of their lives in dignity, said Shtern's
spokeswoman. She said that a survey by the JDC-Brookdale Institute into
the living conditions of the country's Holocaust survivors found that more
than 2,000 people, most of them over the age of 85, would benefit from the
new law.

A 2005 study by the Fund for the Welfare of Holocaust Survivors in Israel
found that more than 40% of Israel's estimated 260,000 survivors live
below the poverty line.

While the government of Israel provides NIS20 million for Holocaust
survivors and the Claims Conference (the conference on material claims
against Germany) a further $35 m., some Holocaust survivors who arrived in
Israel over the past 15 years from the former Soviet Union receive little
or no social benefits.

(source: Jerusalem Post)





VATICAN CITY:

Pontiff-to-be helped rescue thousands of Hungary's Jews



Newly discovered records document the role of Monsignor Angelo Roncalli,
a Vatican diplomat in Istanbul during World War II who later became Pope
John XXIII, in helping rescue thousands of Hungarian Jews from the
Holocaust.

They also lend weight to arguments that Pope Pius XII, who was pontiff
during the war, failed to do all he could to prevent the systematic
massacre of millions of Jews.

The memoirs, documents and letters stashed away in the private
collection of a Jewish associate of Monsignor Roncalli describe frequent
late-night meetings in the Vatican compound in the heart of Istanbul.

There, the two men composed urgent messages to the Holy See and
obtained false papers to enable Jews to escape the reach of the Nazis and
their allies.

Examined recently by Tel Aviv University professor Dina Porat, an
internationally respected authority on the Holocaust, the documents attest
to a unique relationship that had consequences of historic importance.

Monsignor Roncalli was serving as papal nuncio in Istanbul, essentially
the Vatican's ambassador. He went on to become one of the most
beloved popes and, by convening the Second Vatican Council in 1962, opened
the Catholic Church to a wave of modernization that included a revised
liturgy and major efforts to unite with other Christian denominations.

His ally in the effort was Chaim Barlas, who had been sent to Istanbul
as an emissary of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee, established by the
Jewish community in what was then Palestine to try to save European Jews
from the Nazis.

"Roncalli allowed Barlas to meet him in the middle of the night to
draft urgent letters to Pope Pius XII about the plight of Hungarian
Jewry," Mrs. Porat said in an interview. "He told Barlas that he sent
cables to [Pius], but did not receive replies. It seemed to him that his
ecclesiastical superiors who could act did not, and he wondered why."

Mrs. Porat said she found several handwritten letters from Monsignor
Roncalli to the pontiff, composed with the help of Mr. Barlas, which
included criticism of the Vatican and others for failing to do enough to
help the Jews.

The men intensified their efforts after the receipt in June 1944 of a
report by two Slovakian Jews who had escaped a month earlier from the
Auschwitz death camp in Poland.

That and a subsequent account describing the grisly massacre under way
there came to be known as the Auschwitz Protocols.

Mr. Barlas "translated it into German, drafted a precise summary dated
June 23, 1944, and was granted an audience with Roncalli a day later,"
Mrs. Porat said. "Roncalli wept upon reading its contents and relayed it
immediately to the Vatican."

Pius subsequently wrote a letter to Adm. Miklos Horthy, a Nazi ally
serving as president of Hungary, urging him to halt the deportation of
Hungarian Jews to Poland, which was being expedited by Nazi officer Adolf
Eichmann.

"By July 7, 1944, they were stopped," Mrs. Porat said.

Yitzhak Minerbi, one of Israel's leading specialists on the Vatican's
conduct and policies during World War II, said Monsignor Roncalli's
contribution goes far beyond alerting the Holy See to the genocide.

As confirmed by the Barlas papers, he also issued transit passes and
approved false baptismal certificates that enabled 12,000 Jews to escape
Hungary, Mr. Minerbi said.

Monsignor Roncalli's efforts also have been lauded by Baruch
Tenenbaum, head of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, named
after the Swedish diplomat who plucked outbound Jews from deportation
trains and hid them in safe houses throughout the Hungarian capital.

Asked about Pope John XXIII, Mr. Tenenbaum said: "He should be cited
by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, as the foremost name on its
list of righteous gentiles."

Those honored at the memorial are non-Jews who risked their lives to
rescue Jews from the Nazis.

(source: Washington Times)





IRELAND:

Nazi background of prominent Irish publisher exposed


The Nazi past of Ireland's foremost educational publisher is to be
highlighted in a television programme to be broadcast on the state system,
RTE, this month. The programme details the record of Albert Folens, a
Belgian who after fleeing to Ireland following the war built up a highly
successful business producing school textbooks.

Folens, who died in 2003 at 86, had not denied working for the Germans but
minimised his part in the war. But his involvement with both the Gestapo
and Waffen SS is to be revealed.

He was among a small number of Germans, Belgians and Dutch who arrived in
the Irish Republic after 1945. Although some were suspected of having
worked for Hitler, there was no determined official effort to weed them
out.

Folens' general sympathies were no secret, though the particulars of his
role were not generally known.

He was, the programme says, a volunteer in the Waffen SS Flemish legion,
serving on the eastern front until he was wounded. After treatment in an
SS hospital, he joined the Gestapo, working at their Brussels
headquarters, he claimed, as a translator.

His name is said to have appeared on the US Army's Central Registry of War
Criminals and Security Suspects, known as Crowcass. But Folens always
denied any involvement in torture or inhumane treatment.

Arrested by the British Army in Germany, he was sentenced to 10 years
after a military trial. But he escaped after 30 months and fled to the
Republic, on a false passport. In Dublin, he worked as a teacher then set
up a publishing company, producing textbooks and copybooks for generations
of Irish children. The concern flourished and he became a well-known
figure.

At the time of his death, a dissident Irish republican organisation paid
tribute to him as "a big-hearted benefactor of republican prisoners during
the 1970s and 1980s", saying thousands of prisoners' children had
benefited from his generosity.

A sympathetic obituary of him in a Dublin newspaper said he had joined
Hitler's "Flemish Legion" - the 27th Freiwilligen Sturmbrigade Langemarck
- for the specific task of fighting the Red Army. Another former Nazi
lived in Belfast after the war. Werner Heubeck, a colourful businessman
who had been a member of the Hitler Youth movement, and made no secret of
his record, became managing director of the official transport company
Ulsterbus.

His speciality during the Troubles, when many of his vehicles were set on
fire and blown up, was to enter buses in which possible explosive devices
had been placed. In many instances, he carried the devices off the
vehicles.

(source: The Independent)