May 28




ISRAEL:

Israel to publish first list of Holocaust victims' assets


The Company for Locating and Retrieving Assets of People who were Killed
in the Holocaust intends to publish a list of properties and invite heirs
of the victims to claim them.

However, the banks have refused to cooperate with the company and transfer
the accounts of Holocaust victims' to it. Two MKs from the Knesset's
Constitution, Law and Justice Committee yesterday threatened to petition
the High Court of Justice to force the banks to return the money to the
Holocaust victims' heirs.

The company's acting head, Yishai Amrami, said a list of some 500 lots,
some 50 apartments and NIS 60 million in various bank accounts, is to be
released in two weeks. This will be the first publication of a list of
Holocaust victims' assets that have been held in Israel.

The move is intended to launch the process of returning of the Holocaust
victims' property and funds - many years after a similar process took
place in European states.

The company for Locating and Retrieving Assets of People who were Killed
in the Holocaust is in charge of concentrating all the assets, locating
the victims' heirs and returning the property to them.

Amrami yesterday briefed the Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice
Committee about the company's activities, including its talks to reclaim
victims' property from other bodies.

The Custodian General recently transferred 335 lots, 53 apartments and NIS
60 million and 1,000 files of Holocaust victims' assets to the company.
The company will publish the details of every file.

The negotiations with the Custodian General over the final sum to be given
the company, including profits on assets, interest and linkage have yet to
begin.

The Jewish National Fund (JNF) and Himanuta Ltd., a wholly-owned JNF
subsidiary, have begun transferring 136 lots to the company.

These properties that the Custodian General, JNF and Himanuta have handed
over to the company will comprise the first list, as well as details of
9,000 bank accounts that were located by the parliamentary inquiry
committee to locate and reclaim Holocaust victims' assets.

The Israel Lands Administration (ILA), which received 56 other lots, has
leased them. The company has begun negotiating over payment for these
lots.

"We asked Bank Leumi for all the data and documents it had. We were
refused," the company's officials reported to the Constitution Committee.

Bank Hamizrahi told the company that it rejected the results of the
parliamentary inquiry committee, and Discount Bank denied having any
assets of victims.

"I stand shamefacedly before people who have been waiting for seven years
for us to return the money they deserve, and none of them has received
anything yet," said MK Colette Avital, who headed the parliamentary
inquiry committee. She and MK Marina Solodkin (Kadima) said at yesterday's
meeting that they would petition the High Court to make the banks return
the Holocaust victims' money to the heirs.

"It's scandalous that Bank Leumi isn't giving the money. We must ask the
High Court to revoke the bank's license," Solodkin said.

Bank Leumi head of foreign relations and public relations Gideon Shor said
the bank was "cooperating with the company with a lot of good will."

He said the bank has allocated NIS 35 million to cover its debts to
Holocaust victims and is waiting for the company to submit its own
estimate as a basis for negotiation.

Constitution Committee chair Menachem Ben Sasson said he would meet
directors of the bodies holding Holocaust victims' property and demand
they transfer the assets.

(source: Ha'aretz)




GLOBAL:

Open up the Holocaust archives

Members of the families of some people who disappeared during the
Holocaust still dont know what happened to them, despite the existence of
archives that could answer their questions. Those archives have been in
existence since World War II but have not been accessible to the public
for half a century.

The archives, records kept by the Nazi exterminators, contain at least
17.5 million names.

In 1955, a group of 11 countries in charge of the archives decided to
close them to the public. The idea was to safeguard the privacy of victims
and their families. Some information could be obtained, through the
International Tracing Service. But recently the 11 nations, including the
United States, agreed that it is time to provide easier access to the
information, perhaps making it available directly to the public. The
sooner that can be done the better. Families of Holocaust victims deserve
to know what happened to their loved ones.

(source: Editorial, Williamsport Sun-Gazette)





VATICAN CITY:

Pius XII Biography Rejects Anti-Semitism Charges


Accusations that wartime Pope Pius XII was an anti-Semite who turned a
blind eye to the Holocaust are part of a black legend.


Accusations that wartime Pope Pius XII was an anti-Semite who turned a
blind eye to the Holocaust are part of a "black legend" not supported by
historical documents, the author of a new biography says.

The book by Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli -- his fourth on Pius --
is being published weeks after the Vatican put Pius a step closer to
sainthood, a move that angered some Jews.

Some Jews have accused Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, of being
indifferent to the Holocaust and not speaking out against Hitler. His
supporters consider him a holy man who worked behind the scenes to help
Jews throughout Europe.

"This is a black legend that refuses to die. Pius XII has become a
lightning rod for all the presumed responsibilities of the Catholic Church
in that period," Tornielli said in an interview with Reuters.

Tornielli, a journalist with the newspaper Il Giornale, has called his
650-page biography "Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, A Man on the Throne of St
Peter." Eugenio Pacelli was Pius' name before he became pope.

In the book, Tornielli cites new documents from the Pacelli family
archives showing that as a high school student Eugenio had a close
friendship with a Jewish classmate, Guido Mendes.

As Pacelli rose in the Church, he never forgot his Jewish friend, helping
the Mendes family when wartime dictator Benito Mussolini enacted the
"racial laws" against Jews in 1938, a year before Pacelli was elected
pontiff.

Pacelli, then a cardinal and Vatican secretary of state, helped the Mendes
family slip into Switzerland, from where they moved to Israel, the book
says.

The Anti-Defamation League has asked Pope Benedict to suspend the
sainthood process until the Vatican declassifies its World War Two -era
archives "so that the full record of the Pope's actions during the
Holocaust may finally be known".

LETTERS HOME

Tornielli's latest book, published by Mondadori, also includes excerpts
from letters the future pope wrote to his family in the early 1930s when
he was Vatican ambassador in Germany, expressing concern over the rise of
Hitler.

"It is impossible to have a calm historical debate about Pius because he
has been branded 'the Nazi Pope' and this a clear distortion of history,"
Tornielli said.

This month, the Vatican's saint-making department voted in favour of a
decree recognising Pius' "heroic virtues", a major hurdle in a long
process toward sainthood that began in 1967.

If Pope Benedict approves the decree, Pius can move toward beatification,
the last step before sainthood.

Diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Israel were briefly tested
last month over a photo caption critical of Pius under his picture at a
state Holocaust memorial in Israel.

The Vatican maintains Pius did not speak out more forcefully against the
Holocaust because he was afraid of provoking Nazi reprisals and worsening
the fate of Catholics and Jews.

Supporters say Pius ordered churches and convents in Rome to take in Jews
after the Germans occupied the city in 1943. "He believed that was the
best way to save lives," Tornielli said.

"The Vatican was surrounded by Italy, a totalitarian state and Hitler's
principal ally. The Vatican was spied on," he said.

"Perhaps another pope would have done it differently or spoken out more.
The question is: 'what would the result for the victims have been?'"
Tornielli said.

(source: Javno)





LITHUANIA/JAPAN:

Japanese Emperor visits monument to diplomat who helped Jews flee Nazis



Japanese Emperor Akihito and his wife Empress Michiko have visited in
Vilnius, Lithuania, a monument to Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese
diplomat who during WWII defied the orders of the Japanese government by
issuing exit visas to thousands of Polish, Lithuanian and German Jews,
allowing them to flee Nazi occupation.

Sugihara was based in the southern Lithuanian city of Kaunas during the
war.

I told the emperor that Sugihara issued just 2,139 visas, but they saved
more than 6,000 lives," Lithuanian Foreign Minister Petras Vaitekunas
said.

Vaitekunas said Akihito asked how the site in Vilnius where the monument
stands was related to Sugihara.

"I told him that in fact Sugihara worked in Kaunas, but the place where
the monument stands is the place where common values meet, and this is
important because Lithuanian and Japanese hearts come together here,"
Vaitekunas said.

During his visit to Lithuania, the Japanese Emperor praised the courage of
Lithuanians in the face of occupation and other hardships.

"We go back in our memories to the hardships of World War II and later
history which was full of trials, and are deeply impressed by the courage
and dignity with which your people met all the troubles," Akihito said in
a speech at a luncheon in his honour at the presidential palace.

He also stressed that restoration of independence of the three Baltic
states in 1991 was "an exclusive event that marked the great flow of the
history".

Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko were in Vilnius on the fourth leg of a
visit to Europe which has taken members of the Japanese royal family into
former Soviet territory for the first time.

(source: Agence France Presse)





USA//RHODE ISLAND:

R.I. woman accused of shipping painting taken by Nazis to Germany


A fight over a 19th-century painting allegedly auctioned off under duress
in Nazi Germany lands in federal court in Providence.

The estate of a late Jewish art dealer wants to inspect the painting by
Franz Xaver Winterhalter titled "Girl from the Sabiner Mountains."

It's currently owned by 83-year-old German baroness Maria-Luise
Bissonnette, who lives in Providence.

Bissonnette inherited the work from her stepfather, a Nazi doctor. She
says she has a receipt to prove he paid for it. She also says he disagreed
with the Nazis and held a meaningless title during Hitler's regime.

Bissonnette last year sent the painting to Germany-a move the art dealer's
estate says was meant to circumvent the lawsuit.

The estate is scheduled to ask a federal judge next week to order
Bissonnette to stop moving the artwork.

(source: Associated Press)






ITALY/RUSSIA:

Hunt for Jewish library stolen by the Nazis turns to Russia


A priceless collection of antique manuscripts and books that has been
missing since Nazi troops looted it from the synagogue in Rome may be
languishing in an abandoned Soviet military archive.

After leads from Italy to Germany, Poland, France, Ukraine and the US,
researchers have secured an agreement with Russia to help to find the
7,000-volume library, which that dates back to the 16th century.

There is good reason to believe that the collection could be in a
warehouse or other undocumented location, Dario Tedeschi, a lawyer who has
been leading efforts on behalf of the Italian Government, said. Yesterday
he described the decades-long hunt as trying to unravel a historical
mystery.

This week Enrico Letta, an Italian undersecretary, signed an agreement
with Ekaterina Genieva, director of the Library of Foreign Literature in
Moscow, to pursue the Soviet trail in an effort to bring the collection
home. Ms Genieva, an expert in tracing documents, was responsible for the
return of the Vienna Jewish communitys collection. The research is being
funded by Unicredit Private Banking with a donation of 30,000 (20,400).

The collection, known as the Library of the Jewish Communities, includes
illuminated manuscripts, books and Torahs and Bibles printed in the 16th
and 17th century. There are works of philosophy, mathematics and
astronomy, as well as religious works. A 1324 copy of a treatise on
medicine by the Arabic scholar and philosopher Avicenna was one of the
librarys gems.

Two collections were housed in the synagogue complex in Romes ancient
ghetto. One group of books was taken in October 1943, around the time that
more than 1,000 Jews were rounded up to be sent to Nazi camps such as
Auschwitz. The other was taken that December.

Most of the volumes originally from the rabbinical college collection were
later returned from Frankfurt, said Mr Tedeschi. But the Jewish
Communities collection may have been taken to Raciborz, near Auschwitz, or
to Hungen in the Rhineland. As Soviet troops pushed back the German
forces, they may have taken possession of the collection.

Mr Tedeschi said that all the earlier searching had hinted at an eventual
destination in Russia. Its a job of looking through archives, he said.

(source: The Times)