Feb. 27




USA:

A Push for Citizenship to Honor Anne Frank, but Its No Easy Sell


A congressman from Long Island wants the United States government to
grant honorary citizenship to Anne Frank, at least in part to atone for
having denied her family entry in the years before her arrest and
deportation to a Nazi concentration camp.

Christopher Bodkin, a Long Island town councilman, has promoted
citizenship for Anne Frank for three years. The effort resumed after Mr.
Frank's papers were rediscovered, showing his futile efforts to obtain
visas.

The House of Representatives is likely to take up the question this year,
yet the proposal is not quite as easy and unobjectionable as it sounds.
Only six people in history have been granted the honor, and some of Anne
Franks relatives are not supporting it.

How the issue came to emerge from this old seaside Long Island village is
almost as intriguing as the question itself. In a compact grid of a dozen
square blocks that seem cut from a Currier and Ives catalogue, there are
11 churches and zero synagogues.

The idea was proposed three years ago on the 75th anniversary of Anne
Franks birth by a Sayville resident named Christopher Bodkin, a Republican
town councilman who is known around town as a kind of serial memorializer.
Over the years Mr. Bodkin, 59, has researched, documented and led
successful campaigns to erect memorials to Sayville citizens who died in
World War II and in the Vietnam War.

His campaign for Anne Franks citizenship, however, is of a different
order, he said in an interview: "When you come from a town like this, you
tend to grow up thinking that the whole world has always been like this.
Placid. Settled. Its amazing to me how much people dont know about what
came before us."

The story of Anne Frank has enchanted him from the time he first read her
diary as a boy. And though she has no obvious connection to his hometown
or his personal background he is Episcopalian Mr. Bodkin said Anne
Franks genius seemed to bridge time and space and the illusion of
otherness that for many Americans drapes the identities of the victims of
the Holocaust.

He first enlisted a friend, Representative Steve Israel of Long Island, a
Democrat, in efforts to have a commemorative stamp issued in her honor by
the United States Postal Service. The Postal Service, however, informed
them that it issued stamps only in honor of deceased American citizens or
"American-related subjects," a permitted category that has allowed stamps
produced in honor of Mickey Mouse, Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk.

Representative Israel proposed honorary citizenship in 2004, but the bill
died. Then a few days ago prompted in part by the release of documents
earlier this month showing that Anne Frank's father tried desperately in
1941 to obtain a United States visa to leave Nazi-occupied Holland he
introduced it again.

"The best way we can honor Anne Frank in death is to give her what her
father sought for her in life," the congressman said.

Seventeen House members from both parties have signed on as co-sponsors.
It would make Anne Frank only the seventh person to be granted honorary
citizenship in the history of the country.

The others are Winston S. Churchill; the Marquis de Lafayette; Mother
Teresa; the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who worked to save Jews in
World War II; William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania; and his wife
Hannah Callowhill Penn.

Relatives of Anne, who died at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration
camp in 1945, said they were not so certain that this would have been the
familys wish.

"I cannot see the point," said Bernd Elias, a first cousin and president
of
the Anne Frank Foundation, a charitable organization based in Basel,
Switzerland. "She saw herself as Dutch. That is the country she wanted to
be a citizen of."

Mr. Elias said his cousin would no more have wanted to become an American
citizen than she would have wanted to become a Cuban citizen.

Letters among the papers of Otto Frank, Annes father which were
rediscovered only in 2005 and disclosed on Feb. 14 by the YIVO Institute
for Jewish Research, which owns them showed that among the strategies Mr.
Frank pursued to save Anne and her sister, Margot, were efforts to obtain
visas to enter the United States and Cuba.

Despite contacts high in the United States government, Mr. Franks efforts
were thwarted by bureaucratic inertia, wartime fear of German-born
immigrants, and what Holocaust scholars generally identify as an
underlying anti-Semitism in American society.

Edith Gordon, a cousin of Anne Frank who lives in San Diego, was cool to
the idea of honorary citizenship when she spoke to the Long Island
newspaper Newsday recently: "It doesn't seem right to me somehow, when we
didnt let her into the country."

Mr. Israel said, "I realize there is no way of knowing what Anne Frank
herself would have wanted, but we do know from her diary that she loved
the values this country stands for. It would be a way of admitting we made
a terrible mistake."

A number of people interviewed were asked: Would it be unseemly, even
presumptuous, at this point to honor someone in death who, when alive, was
lost in a maze of impersonal and bureaucratic rejection? Does the United
States have a right to claim her?

"No one has ever claimed her, remember," Mr. Bodkin said. "She is a
stateless person."

Deborah E. Lipstadt, director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory
University and a Holocaust scholar, dismissed the idea as somewhat
pointless.

"There were thousands and thousands of refugees who tried to get in, just
like the Franks," she said. "Granting citizenship now to Anne Frank
strikes
me as a little too easy. The way this country turned its back on Jewish
refugees in that period is a blot on our country. Nothing will change
that. "

Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, described the
effort, however, as "very poignant." He said in a telephone interview: "I
think it is a wonderful idea. Nobody can resurrect the dead. But symbolic
gestures such as this can only help us preserve memory."

(source: New York Times)









INDIANA:

Artist remembers Holocaust with 'Shoes'


Jenny Stoltzenberg's powerful art was inspired by a powerful,
devastatingly emotional source.

"Shoes of Memory" consists of 70 pairs of ceramic shoes created by the
London artist after she visited Auschwitz. There, she saw images of piles of
clothing, hair, glasses, suitcases and shoes left from the estimated 1
million Jewish victims killed there by the Nazis during the Holocaust. The
shoes stuck with her the most. Stoltzenberg sees the shoes as a sense of
identity to the men, women and children who died.

Stoltzenberg's late father was a Holocaust survivor, making it through
Buchenwald and Dachau. She said he never talked about his experience. The
artist started creating the shoes after his passing.

"If he were alive, I think he would be very, very sad to see my work," said
Stoltzenberg from her home.

"Shoes of Memory" opens Monday and runs through March 9 at Purdue
University's Patty and Rusty Rueff galleries inside Pao Hall for the Visual
and Performing Arts. An opening reception will be from 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday.
New York singer-songwriter Jerry Silverman will perform music inspired by
the Holocaust.

The ceramic shoes were created in clay and modeled like the styles of the
World War II era. She represents almost every kind of footwear, from boots
to ballet slippers. Most of the 70 pairs of shoes are mismatched.

"They are all odd pairs because it was often impossible to find an actual
pair of (matching) shoes in the camps," Stoltzenberg said.

"Shoes of Memory" is part of a larger project called "Forgive and do not
Forget." Stoltzenberg said she has made more than 1,000 shoes in the past
few years. Most of the rest of the pieces are on display in London and other
European locations. She said viewers are moved by her work. Holocaust
survivors have "mixed, but mostly positive" reactions.

"They are happy that such a memorial exists to help people not forget,"
Stoltzenberg said.

West Lafayette artist Arne Kvaalen and his wife, Ruth, were instrumental in
bringing "Shoes of Memory" to Purdue. The exhibit marks the beginning of the
annual Greater Lafayette Holocaust Remembrance Conference, which continues
through March 9.

Kvaalen expects the exhibit to be "quite impressive." He gives his respect
to Stoltzenberg for being able to create art out of a subject so
"horrendous and horrible."

"One of the sages said, 'Art is the calculated trap for meditation,' "
Kvaalen said. "I think these shoes could be an example of that."

Kvaalen hopes Purdue students will see Stoltzenberg's art.

"I hope it'll arrest attention and make them think of things they haven't
thought about before," Kvaalen said. "A whole generation doesn't know about
the Holocaust. It's not taught in some schools. Sometimes, Purdue is the
first place they hear of it."

"Shoes of Memory" by London artist Jenny Stoltzenberg opens Monday and runs
through March 9 at Purdue University's Patty and Rusty Rueff galleries
inside Pao Hall for the Visual and Performing Arts. An opening reception
will be from 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday. New York singer-songwriter Jerry
Silverman will perform music inspired by the Holocaust.

(source: New York Times)







KOREA:

Korean comic author: Jews rule U.S.


The author of a best-selling comic book series intended to teach children
about other countries said Monday he would change a chapter on Jews that
has been called anti-Semitic and similar to Nazi propaganda.

Rhie Won-bok maintained, however, that his depiction of Jewish control of
American media and politics was based on fact and "commonly believed."

"The Jews are the invisible force that controls the U.S.," Rhie, a
professor of visual arts at Duksung Women's University in Seoul, told The
Associated Press. "I wrote the chapter to let people know that you can't
understand the U.S. without knowing the Jewish community."

More than 10 million copies from the 12-book series titled "Meon Nara,
Yiwoot Nara," or "Far Countries, Near Countries," have been sold since it
was first published in 1987, according to its publisher, Gimm-Young
Publishers. The company boasts that at least one volume is in every South
Korean home in this country of 48 million people.

The comics with playfully drawn figures have sought to explain European
countries, the U.S., Japan and even Korea itself.

The first volume of three focusing on the United States was published in
2004. In a chapter titled "You have to know the Jews to see the U.S.,"
Rhie takes a wide-ranging look at Jewish history, mentioning the Holocaust
and Jews being spread throughout the world without a homeland.

Although noting that Jews have faced prejudice for many centuries, the
book takes a more sinister view of their role in the United States.

Rhie said the September 11 attacks occurred because of Arab terrorists'
hatred for the U.S. he blamed on Jews who "move the U.S. in the way they
want using money and the media as their weapon."

The book also says Korean-Americans are diligent and successful in the
U.S. "but in the end, always run into the wall called the Jews." The
accompanying picture shows an exasperated man walking up a hill only to be
blocked by a brick wall with a Star of David and the word "STOP" in
English.

Images from the book "echo classic Nazi canards," Rabbi Abraham Cooper of
the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a statement earlier
this month. In a letter sent to the publishers, Cooper urged them to
review "the slanders in this book that historically have led to
anti-Semitism, violence, hatred and even genocide."

Rhie asserted he is "not at all anti-Semitic" and that he would remove the
parts that have drawn offense or write them differently. "The last thing I
want is a conflict between the Koreans and the Jews because of my book,"
he said.

There is no established Jewish community in Korea.

(source: Associated Press)