April 16----




POLAND:

Thousands remember Holocaust victims


Holocaust survivors led prayers yesterday as thousands of people
remembered victims of the Nazis Final Solution at the annual March of the
Living at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in southern Poland.

Six survivors intoned the kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, from a
podium at the railhead at the Birkenau annex of the camp where Nazi guards
selected new arrivals at the World War II death factory: some were sent to
immediate death in the gas chambers, others to miserable existences as
slave labourers.

The kaddish brought to a close a two-hour ceremony at the end of the March
of the Living, a tribute to the estimated six million Jews -- half of them
from Poland, which before World War II had Europes biggest Jewish
populationwho perished in the Holocaust. The march has been held since
1988, and is aimed at stilling the voices of Holocaust deniers. It is open
to people of all faiths.

We came here to remember the evil of the murderers and the wickedness of
those who try to deny it, Israeli government minister Rafi Eitan said at a
stark stone memorial to victims of the Holocaust that stands amid the
rubble of two gas chambers at Birkenau.

The Nazi industry of evil took the lives of six million Jews and Holocaust
deniers seek to erase these deaths. We will not allow it, said Eitan,
singling out Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Eitan, a former Mossad agent, in 1960 helped to capture Nazi fugitive
Adolf Eichmann, considered to be one of the main architects of the
campaign to exterminate the Jews. Some 8,000 people, mostly youngsters but
also dozens of elderly Holocaust survivors, took part in this years March
of the Living.

They took two hours to cover the three kilometres (two miles) from the
infamous Arbeit macht Frei (Work Brings Freedom) gateway that leads out of
Auschwitz--the Germanicised name given by the Nazis to the town of
Oswiecim--to the ruins of the gas chambers of Birkenau.

(source: Agence France Presse)





HUNGARY:

Hungarian premier marks Holocaust day with hate speech manifesto


In Budapest, Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany on Monday called for
all members of parliament to sign a 'zero tolerance' manifesto against
hate speech as parliament marked Holocaust Memorial Day.

'Words and acts can give birth to violence, but can also set an example,'
Gyurcsany wrote in the manifesto, which he read out in parliament. 'We
know that anti-Semitism and racism paved the way for the Holocaust, the
most inhumane event in our history.'

'We warn those who speak of their responsibility, just as we warn those
who remain silent and turn away,' he continued. 'This memorial day does
not just recall the victims, but those who stood idly by.'

Hungary's main right-wing opposition party Fidesz, which normally walks
out when Gyurcsany speaks, remained in parliament during the speech out of
respect for the memorial event.

Fidesz has boycotted Gyurcsany's speeches since last October, when a tape
on which he admitted lying to the nation was leaked to the press.

Earlier in the day, a member of Gyurcsany's ruling Socialist Party had
said he wanted to see hate speech made illegal.

Gergely Barandy said that the law he would attempt to put forward would
make it illegal to damage the dignity of certain groups in society, either
by words or actions.

Hungary began remembering the victims of the holocaust on Sunday, when
Gyurcsany joined Jewish leaders and other politicians on a torch-lit march
through Budapest.

The marchers - including Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's
chief Nazi-hunter - made their way from a holocaust memorial museum to the
downtown Dohany Synagogue, the largest synagogue in Europe.

The synagogue sits at the edge of the Jewish ghetto that was set up during
the Second World War.

Soviet troops liberated the ghetto on January 18, 1945, releasing around
70,000 Jews from their captivity.

Approximately 30,000-40,000 Jews survived outside of the ghetto, kept safe
with the help of foreign diplomats and ordinary citizens.

However, around half of the 200,000 Jews living in Budapest prior to the
outbreak of war perished during the conflict, many of them sent to
concentration camps or lined up on the banks of the Danube and shot.

In total, over 400,000 Jews were sent to death camps from Hungary in 1944,
mainly from other towns and villages.

Much of the butchery was carried out under the direction of Nazi-aligned
Hungarian Arrow Cross Party, which came to power briefly in 1944.

(source: Deutsche Presse-Agentur)





GERMANY:

Holocaust mass grave dedicated near Stuttgart


Thirty-four Jews who died serving as slave laborers for the Nazis were
honored with the dedication of gravestones in a ceremony at the US Army
airfield where their mass grave was recently discovered, the US military
said Monday.

More than 200 mourners were on hand for Sunday's ceremony to mark
International Holocaust Remembrance Day, dedicating the gravestones to the
anonymous victims of the Echterdingen concentration camp that were
discovered in September 2005 during construction work at the airfield.

Benjamin Gelhorn, a survivor of the Nazi camp system who spent three
months at Echterdingen, said the Kaddish prayer of mourning to close the
ceremony, the US European Command said in a statement.

"The Lord gave me the power to be here in 2007 and to make the Kaddish for
these people," Gelhorn, 86, was quoted as saying. "I'm really happy I'm
alive."

(source: Associated Press)





USA//NEBRASKA:

Nebraska Dedicates Holocaust Memorial


Holocaust Remembrance Day was acknowledged in ceremonies around the world
Monday.

The international day of recognition came one day after the sculpture Star
of Remembrance, Nebraskas only official Holocaust memorial, was dedicated
at Wyuka Cemetery in Lincoln as some 200 people looked on.

Canadian sculptor Morton Katz, creator of the stainless steel monument,
attended the ceremony. The sculpture is 16-feet high, consisting of two
triangle frames forming a three-dimensional star representing the three
stages of the Nazi war against humanity: isolation, deportation and
extermination. Images of men, women, and children and concentration camps
are depicted.

Elie Wiesel, author and winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, said in
interview Monday that he did not believe the Jews could be the victims of
another such Holocaust. However, he offered this thought:

We've learned something from history: to put more trust in the enemy's
threats than in the promises of the friend."

(source: Nebraska State Paper)




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

USA//TEXAS:

Waxahachie ISD Comments On Holocaust Project


Thursday the Waxahachie Independent School District responded to
criticism over a nearly three-week school experiment about the Holocaust.

District officials say the Advanced Placement Geography Study at
Waxahachie Ninth Grade Academy was meant to, "teach and discuss tolerance
and the ills of discrimination."

The class project, Bystanders in the Holocaust", included in part - a
class trip to the Holocaust Museum in Dallas, meeting with a Holocaust
survivor, student discussion with a Rabbi, and a role-playing simulation
of the prejudices during World War II.

It's that role-playing simulation that had some parents outraged. One
parent, who did not want to be identified, had a child who participated in
the three week project. Anywhere from 50-100 9th graders were designated
as Jews and made to wear a Star of David on their I. D. badge. Other
students were designated as Germans.

Reports circulated that some students had been spit on, pushed, kicked and
tripped. The parent said, if the reports were true, it was, "totally
uncalled for. It should not have been allowed to happen. If they would
have stopped it sooner, it wouldnt have got to that point.

According to students and teachers, the assigned Jews were forced to stand
against the wall as the German students passed by in the hallway. The
Jewish students ate lunch last and had to pick up every one's garbage. But
some students say things began to escalate.

"We made beating sticks to hit the kids with," said Texas Medley, a
student at the school. They were spit on. It was a good lesson but it went
on too long.

John Aune, principal of Waxahachie Ninth Grade Center, said he and his
staff carefully monitored the project and have seen the positive effects
on students.

Currently, his administrative team is interviewing students to see if any
have actually experienced any repercussions as a result of the program. On
Wednesday, Mr. Aune even visited with the teacher and students in each AP
World Geography class. School officials say they have not found any
student who has experienced any repercussions as a result of the project;
however they will continue to investigate the situation.

Principal Aune says this is the 5th year Waxahachie Ninth Grade Academy
has run the Jews and Germans school project. Waxahachie ISD administrators
say they will carefully reevaluate the project, as they do every program
and project, to make certain that it is best for our students and their
education.

(source: CBS News, April 12)



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


USA//CALIFORNIA:

Fortunoff Archive preserves Holocaust testimonies


Until his 50th birthday, Geoffrey Hartman had little Jewish involvement
after fleeing Nazi Germany as part of the Kindertransport to England.
Instead, this Sterling professor emeritus of English and comparative
literature at Yale University devoted time to establishing his reputation
as a scholar of Wordsworth, Keats and the romantic poets.

It took a non-Jewish colleague, Bart Giammati, Yale's president at the
time, to re-direct Hartman's energies to the task of elevating and
expanding the Jewish studies curriculum at the university and
simultaneously preserving memories of the Holocaust. In the 1980s, Hartman
helped establish the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, a
Yale-based collection of videotaped Holocaust testimonies he continues to
head. The archive preceded Spielberg's Shoah Visual History Foundation by
more than a decade.

"I have always thought of literature as dealing with extreme situations.
It wasn't just a sense of duty that motivated me. Rather because it is a
part of the human condition, the Holocaust is what the humanities should
be studying. While it was a change in my direction, I felt no
discontinuity," said Hartman, who is now in his late 70s.

During a recent stay in Los Angeles as a Getty scholar, Hartman met with
students of the UCLA Jewish studies program and addressed an audience
comprised largely of Holocaust survivors and their families at the
American Jewish University (AJU), formerly the University of Judaism.

In his talk at the AJU, given under the auspices of the Sigi Ziering
Institute and titled, "Holocaust Testimony in a Genocidal Era," Hartman
touched on a number of salient contemporary issues, among them what he
described as "the globalization of grief."

"The Shoah was not the end of all genocide. Each collective trauma has its
own unique character, and as long as eyewitnesses are able to testify, we
must preserve their memories," he said, adding that no one has a monopoly
on suffering.

"We surely have no intention to show that Jewish suffering is special," he
said.

As Hartman began his efforts to expand teaching resources for Yale's
Judaic studies program, his wife was volunteering to help a grass-roots
group in New Haven that had begun videotaping Holocaust witnesses. Founded
by television journalist Laurel Vlock and Holocaust survivor Dr. Dori
Laub, a psychiatrist, the Holocaust Survivors Film Project was having
trouble reaching a national audience, let alone an international one.

"I was struck by the project's relevance for education in an audiovisual
age, and convinced the university to adopt the project and lend it its
name and prestige," he said.

Hartman joined with Vlock, Laub and William Rosenberg, president of the
New Haven Farband and the New Haven survivors fellowship group, to expand
its scope to Europe, Israel and wherever survivors could be found. Their
efforts resulted in an initial collection of almost 200 videotaped
testimonies, as well as the 1981 Emmy Award-winning documentary, "Forever
Yesterday," produced by New York's WNEW.

Hartman emphasized that when gathering the testimonies, trained volunteer
interviewers use no prepared set of questions and allow the survivors to
speak freely for as long as they wish.

"We're interested in their memories, not history, and we strive to cover
the survivor's life before, during and after the Holocaust. This has
resulted in deeply emotional responses and adds an important sociological
dimension," he said.

With support from the Revson Foundation, Yale provided space for the
testimonies, as well as technical assistance in 1981. The project received
a major grant from the Fortunoff Family Foundation in 1987, and became
known thereafter as the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.
While the Fortunoff grant is adequate to support the archive's ongoing
operations and maintenance, Hartman said that some $800,000 is now needed
to digitize the testimonies, which were recorded more than a quarter
century ago using technology that has become obsolete.

The archive currently holds more than 4,300 testimonies, comprising more
than 10,000 hours of videotape. The tapes are housed at the Sterling
Memorial Library at Yale University and are available to the general
public.

In addition to the testimonies available through the Fortunoff archive, as
well as USC's Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education,
Hartman believes the proliferation of genocide documentaries and
docudramas have value in educating people about the Holocaust and other
examples of genocide. But he cautioned that there is also the danger that
showing so much violence tends to create a sanitizing effect.

He said that some survivors who reacted to those depictions have said,
"First we were killed and now they're taking our stories away."

(source: The Greater Jewish Journal of L.A.)





GLOBAL:

How Women Endured the Holocaust----A new exhibit studies not what was done
to women in the camps and ghettos but what they did to keep their spirits
alive.


A tiny piece of cellophane smudged with bright red lipstick, a bra
hand-sewn with thread from a blanket, a comb made out of scrap wire and a
camp uniform adorned with a single bead. These are some of the artifacts
on show at a new exhibition at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in
Jerusalem. Spots of Light is a stunning multimedia exhibition
that displays Holocaust experiences from a feminine perspective for the
first time, pinpointing the ways in which women held on to their identity
under unbearable circumstances.

More than 3 million womenJews and other minoritiesfrom all over Europe
were sent to the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Unlike
standard documentation of the Holocaust, this is not an exhibition of
blame or a catalog of evidence but a glimpse into the most intimate
moments of women struggling to live against all odds. Women in ghettos,
partisans hiding out in forests, young brides who write letters to their
mothers explaining that their loved ones will soon returnall are given a
place here. So although many of the women did not survive the atrocities,
a few of them succeeded in retaining a grain of humanity. "Rather than
asking what the Nazis did to them, we asked what they did," says Yehudit
Inbar, the exhibition's curator. The result is a very personal look at the
shattered lives of girlfriends, daughters and mothers.

In what at first glance appears to be an empty gallery, changing fragments
of women's lives are illuminated on stark white walls in poems, letters,
journals and even make-believe recipeschocolate mousse, honey cake and
vanilla sugar. "We ate with our thoughts, one prisoner wrote. I wrote what
others said about food on whatever scraps of paper I could find, on
pictures of Hitler."

Clinging to life, a 17-year-old Romanian wrote to her boyfriend before
being deported to her death: "The heaviest weight of all [is] to see that
no one needs me, to know, to think, I'll fade into nothingness like
smoke." Miriam Sperzling, a Polish woman, held on by carefully applying
lipstick every time she moved camp and before every selection. Margot Fink
always made a point of tidying up her hair with the crude comb and two
rollers she hid in her pocket from the watchful eyes of her captors. And
almost ludicrously unhinged from reality, Lina Beresin wore a bra she had
made out of the coarse lining of men's jackets for every day of the seven
months she was held in a concentration camp.

At the opening last week, a few hundred visitors stood in silence as a
chilling new video by artist Michal Rovner was shown in an alcove off the
main gallery. In the video, entitled To be a Human Being, fragments of the
testimony of 10 women survivors are set against blurry images in a
changing forest, and tiny figures are almost swallowed up by crude smudges
of color moving slowly across the screen. In the background is an eerie,
continuous clicking sound. "This is the pulse of the video," Rovner said
at the opening. "It's shooting in the distance, it's a train on the track,
it's a typewriter and it's flames crackling in the sky."

Rovner filmed each woman separately using several cameras at different
angles, later juxtaposing images of the same woman in repose as she
reflects. "I was looking for a moment of the imagination that creates an
alter reality," says Rovner. One of the women tells how she was given a
mirror by her grandparents, and told: "We will not be with you. But you
will get up in the morning and look yourself in the eyes."

Re-examining the Holocaust

A visitor to this exhibition will not come away with a deeper
understanding of the processes that fired the Holocaust but will grasp a
little of what these women went through in their moments of daily heroism.
"It's not about the power of history," Inbar explains, "it's about the
power of people."

(source: Newsweek)






CANADA:

Canada's top court snubs Holocaust denier Zundel


An extreme-right wing extremist who was deported from Canada to face
trial in Germany for spreading racist propaganda over the Internet was
denied an audience with Canadas top justices Thursday.

The Supreme Court of Canada rejected Ernst Zundels appeal that he was
unlawfully detained and deported from Canada in 2005, after being ruled a
threat to national security because of his links to white supremacists and
neo-Nazi groups.

Zundel, 67, had sought 10 million Canadian dollars (around 6,5 million
euros) in damages.

In February, a German court convicted Zundel on 14 counts of incitement of
racial hatred, causing offence, and disturbing the peace of the dead by
publishing and distributing anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi materials.

He was sentenced to five years in prison -- the maximum sentence allowed
under German law for denying the Holocaust.

Zundel authored "The Hitler We Loved and Why" and helped disseminate
several books denying the Holocaust, the systematic murder of some six
million Jews by the Nazis during World War II.

He was arrested on an international warrant issued in 2003 and was held in
Canada for two years while he fought extradition.

Zundel had lived in Canada from 1958.

(source: Associated Press)





FRANCE:

French rival attacks Sarkozy over Holocaust remark


French centrist Francois Bayrou on Friday accused his rightist
presidential rival Nicolas Sarkozy of sending a chilling message
to EU partner Germany with recent remarks on the Holocaust.

Bayrou, who has narrowed the gap with frontrunners Sarkozy and Socialist
Segolene Royal in recent opinion polls, said the rightist candidate was
trying to lure far-right National Front voters with his comments.

"(There are) many signs, many comments that show Nicolas Sarkozy has
decided to get closer to the National Front in the first round" of
elections on April 22, Bayrou told France 2 television.

"He has said things for example about Germany, imputing to the German
people the responsibility for the final solution, the Shoah, the
extermination of Jews, which makes one shiver in terms of future relations
within the European Union."

At a rally in the southern city of Nice last month Sarkozy said France
should not be ashamed of its history: "It has not carried out a genocide.
It did not invent the final solution. It invented human rights and it's
the country in the world which has fought the most for freedom."

The comments, carried on the website of the ruling centre-right UMP party,
come on top of comments Sarkozy made in a recent interview with a leading
French philosopher.

"It's an enigma that a great democratic people could participate, through
elections, in the Nazi madness," Sarkozy said in the April edition of
Philosophie Magazine.

"There are a lot of nations across the world which have gone through
social, monetary and political crises and who have not invented the final
solution, nor decreed the extermination of a race," he said in an
interview with philosopher Michel Onfray.

Sarkozy has pledged to make Berlin his first port of call should he win
election on May 6, in a bid to inject new life into the Franco-German
relationship and seek to break a deadlock over EU institutional reform.

Bayrou said Sarkozy's Holocaust comments were outrageous and boded ill for
European cooperation in the future. Germany is France's biggest trading
partner.

"How do you expect the German people and the German government not to
shiver at such forthright accusations, which take the German people back
to the drama and crime of Hitler?" Bayrou said.

Former French presidents would not have talked in that manner to German
chancellors of their day, he said.

"Can you imagine (Charles) de Gaulle saying that of the German people when
he was in touch with (Konrad) Adenauer? Or (Francois) Mitterrand with
Helmut Kohl or (Valery) Giscard (d'Estaing) with (Helmut) Schmidt?" Bayrou
said.

France's presidential election campaign has increasingly focused on
questions of national identity and crime recently.

Sarkozy has proposed creating a ministry for immigration and national
identity, and Socialist Royal has called on compatriots to keep a French
flag at home and wave it on public holidays.

Recent opinion polls show Sarkozy leading over his rivals ahead of the
April 22 first round of the vote.

(source: Reuters, Friday, April 13)




ISRAEL:

Pensioners: 'Boycott Holocaust Day'

Pensioners' rights group Ken Lazaken called Thursday for a boycott of
official Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies to protest the government's
failure to sufficiently help the more than 70,000 Holocaust survivors who
live in poverty in Israel.

"People should not participate in ceremonies to remember the dead, when
really we should be remembering and helping those who are still living,"
Nathan Lavon, director of Ken Lazaken, said in an interview with The
Jerusalem Post..

He said 35 percent of Israel's estimated 250,000 Holocaust survivors live
below the poverty line, according to a study conducted by the JDC-Brookdale
Institute. Many of them have to choose on a daily basis between buying food
and paying for other basic needs, he said.

"There needs to be a comprehensive law to ensure that Holocaust survivors do
not have to chose between food or medicine, to make sure they will be cared
for until the end of their days," Levon said, adding that while he usually
attends one of the official events, this year he plans to participate in an
alternative ceremony - scheduled to take place on Monday at noon opposite
the Knesset - to highlight survivors' needs.

Levon said he was shocked earlier this week during a meeting of the Knesset
lobby for Holocaust survivors, which heard about the problems they encounter
when asking the Finance Ministry to approve medical assistance. Several
survivors described how the ministry panel responsible for allocating
additional aid had demanded they prove their medical conditions or
disabilities stemmed directly from Nazi persecution.

"How can they possibly prove that these ailments came from the Holocaust?"
Levon fumed. "And why should Holocaust survivors have to make a special
request for glasses or dentures anyway? They should automatically get a
discount for medicine."

He also expressed anger over the government's stalling of funding for a law
sponsored by the late MK Yuri Stern (Israel Beiteinu), which passed in
January and is supposed to provide survivors with additional rent assistance
and up to a 75% discount on medicine as soon as July.

In response, Pensioners Affairs Minister Rafi Eitan told the Post that his
office had made progress in improving the situation. He highlighted
increases in budget for the Fund for the Welfare of Holocaust Survivors in
Israel, more hours of home help for survivors and a potential enlargement of
the monthly stipend, which currently stands at NIS 1,000- 1,200 per month.

"People think I can perform magic, that I am like Uri Geller and can bend
spoons with my little finger, but I don't do magic, I do what I can do,"
said Eitan. "We are a new political party and are still finding ourselves."

In response to Levon's demand for a comprehensive bill to help survivors as
opposed to periodical legislative changes and increases in aid, Eitan said:
"A law without financial backing helps no one, but increasing funding
without a law does help people. Nathan Levon has been working on this for
the last 10 years but he has not managed to get a law or money."

(source: The Jerusalem Post, Fri., April 13)