May 13





USA://FLORIDA:

Holocaust studies at the University of Florida gets funding to recruit top
scholar


The Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida is seeking to
elevate the prominence of its Holocaust research program, and a couple
from south Florida feel that attracting a national authority on the
subject is one way to do that.

It was announced today that Irma and Norman Braman, of Miami, Fla., have
given $1 million toward establishing an endowed chair at the center. The
gift, along with funds raised from other interested donors, will allow UF
to hire a distinguished senior professor of Holocaust studies.

This significant show of private support for a faculty position is exactly
what the university needs to continue to excel, particularly in these
times of state budget cuts, said UF President Bernie Machen. We are
grateful to the Bramans for their generosity and foresight.

The senior-level position will galvanize our curriculum, said Jack
Kugelmass, Sam Melton Professor and director of the Center for Jewish
Studies at UF.

Recruiting a distinguished scholar in this field of study will amplify the
quality of our course offerings in general and will encourage more
graduate students to pursue masters and doctoral research in this
particular area, according to Kugelmass.

Today the field has become a core area of Jewish studies and helps to link
Jewish studies with various European area studies programs, as well as to
departments of comparative literature, film and philosophy. Indeed, the
Holocaust as a subject of study has become integral to much of the
humanities.

The Center for Jewish Studies at UF was established in 1973 by the College
of Liberal Arts and Sciences. It offers both a major and minor, as well as
study abroad programs. Overall, UF has at least five faculty members in
different disciplines teaching in the area of Holocaust studies.

We feel a very strong commitment to supporting Holocaust studies on the
university level, said Norman Braman. The murder of 6,000,000 Jews for no
crime other than being Jewish must be studied so that the world will never
have to endure such inhumanity again. Our high opinion of the Center for
Jewish Studies led us to direct our resources to UF.

We are also appreciative of the level of education our grandson (Alex
Shack) received at UF, continued Braman. He came to UF four years ago as a
boy and is graduating as a man.

In recognition of their gift the faculty position will be named the Norman
and Irma Braman Chair in Holocaust Studies.

Funds received for the endowed position are eligible for matching funds
from the state of Florida Trust Fund for Major Gifts, which would increase
the value of the endowment for the chair significantly.

A national search for the position is expected to begin next fall.

The University of Florida is currently in a seven-year capital campaign
themed Florida Tomorrow. As of March 31st, $646 million had been raised
toward a goal of $1.5 billion. More information can be found at
www.floridatomorrow.ufl.edu.

(source: University of Florida News)

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


USA//CALIFORNIA:

Quilt of Memory honors Holocaust victims ---- Breathtaking piece of art is
unveiled during remembrance ceremony


With loving care, people who lost a loved one in the Holocaust created
fabric squares for a quilt.

Each square is unique. Each one tells a story of tragedy and hope.

On Sunday, the dedication of the Mount Sinai Shoah Quilt of Memory was
part of the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day held at Mount Sinai Memorial
Parks and Mortuaries in Simi Valley.

More than 400 people gathered in the Kamenir Chapel for the ceremony and
unveiling of three kingsized quilts.

"In some cases, people used a photo transfer of a family member on their
square," said Leonard Lawrence, general manager of the memorial park.
"Some are sewing and etching, and some have things attached. They each
have a story."

Erin Zucker, a 10th-grader at Westlake High School, created a simple
hand-sewn square of a lighted candle with the word "remember" to honor her
grandfather, Michael Mark, a Holocaust survivor. "It's part of my life and
my grandpa's. I thought it would be a special thing to do," said Zucker,
who attended the memorial observance with her grandfather, her aunt and
her mother. "It symbolizes everybody and their lives. The flame keeps them
going."


Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark was sent to a concentration camp when he was
18 years old, along with his parents and extended family. "We were taken,
and everyone was killed the same day, those who were not selected as
slaves," Mark said. "My mother survived the camp and was taken to Sweden
to recuperate, but she died five months later. At least she has a grave
site that I can visit."

Quilt project coordinator Lesley Rich has received more than 150 squares
from several countries. Residents of Simi Valley and communities
throughout Southern California contributed squares as well.

"We sent a mailing out and invited people to submit squares that
commemorated or spoke to the Holocaust in any way they wanted. The
response was overwhelming," Lawrence said. "We originally were hoping to
make one quilt. We now have three quilts, and we're still getting
squares."

Marlene Alonge, a fabric artist from Santa Monica, assembled the quilts-
backed with blue taffeta and suede material- from December to April. "The
squares started arriving slowly, and I started getting nervous," Alonge
said.

"Then all of sudden we got this incredible response. I studied the squares
and read the stories. It was a joyous gift."

During Sunday's dedication ceremony, the Long Beach Opera Company
presented selections from the opera "The Diary of Anne Frank," sung by
soprano Cheri Stark.

A short video ran highlighting some of the square makers and their
stories.

Rabbi David Wolfe, senior rabbi at Sinai Temple of Los Angeles, was guest
speaker.

Recently named by Newsweek magazine as one of the 50 most influential
rabbis in America, Wolfe said the reasons for remembering those who died
in the Holocaust are twofold.

"Firstly, those who died deserve to be remembered. Secondly, we hope the
memory will spur people to goodness, to action," Wolfe said. "In places in
the world where things like this threaten people, we have a responsibility
to take action."

The ceremony concluded with a blessing by Cantor Joseph Gole of Sinai
Temple in the Grove of the Righteous Rescuers.

The quilts will be on display at the memorial park before making a tour to
local schools and other venues open to the public.

"Everyone who died (in the Holocaust) lived. They all had families. They
all had joys and sorrows and then it was taken away," Wolfe said. "Left
behind was a memory, a slight echo of a name. Even if we only remember a
name, that is a powerful tribute."

(source: Simi Valley Acorn)






POLAND:

Irena Sendler, 98; member of resistance saved lives of 2,500 Polish Jews


Fate may have led Irena Sendler to the moment almost 70 years ago when she
began to risk her life for the children of strangers. But for this humble
Polish Catholic social worker, who was barely 30 when one of history's
most nightmarish chapters unfolded before her, the pivotal influence was
something her parents had drummed into her.

"I was taught that if you see a person drowning," she said, "you must jump
into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not."

When the Nazis occupying Poland began rounding up Jews in 1940 and
sending them to the Warsaw ghetto, Sendler plunged in.

With daring and ingenuity, she saved the lives of more than 2,500 Jews,
most of them children, a feat that went largely unrecognized until the
last years of her life.

Sendler, 98, who died of pneumonia Monday in Warsaw, has been called the
female Oskar Schindler, but she saved twice as many lives as the German
industrialist, who sheltered 1,200 of his Jewish workers. Unlike
Schindler, whose story received international attention in the 1993 movie
"Schindler's List," Sendler and her heroic actions were almost lost to
history until four Kansas schoolgirls wrote a play about her nine years
ago.

The lesson Sendler taught them was that "one person can make a
difference," Megan Felt, one of the authors of the play, said Monday.

"Irena wasn't even 5 feet tall, but she walked into the Warsaw ghetto
daily and faced certain death if she was caught. Her strength and courage
showed us we can stand up for what we believe in, as well," said Felt, who
is now 23 and helps raise funds for aging Holocaust rescuers.

Sendler was born Feb. 15, 1910, in Otwock, a small town southeast of
Warsaw. She was an only child of parents who devoted much of their
energies to helping workers.

She was especially influenced by her father, a doctor who defied
anti-Semites by treating sick Jews during outbreaks of typhoid fever. He
died of the disease when Sendler was 9.

She studied at Warsaw University and was a social worker in Warsaw when
the German occupation of Poland began in 1939. In 1940, after the Nazis
herded Jews into the ghetto and built a wall separating it from the rest
of the city, disease, especially typhoid, ran rampant. Social workers were
not allowed inside the ghetto, but Sendler, imagining "the horror of life
behind the walls," obtained fake identification and passed herself off as
a nurse, allowed to bring in food, clothes and medicine.

By 1942, when the deadly intentions of the Nazis had become clear, Sendler
joined a Polish underground organization, Zegota. She recruited 10 close
friends -- a group that would eventually grow to 25, all but one of them
women -- and began rescuing Jewish children.

She and her friends smuggled the children out in boxes, suitcases, sacks
and coffins, sedating babies to quiet their cries. Some were spirited away
through a network of basements and secret passages. Operations were timed
to the second. One of Sendler's children told of waiting by a gate in
darkness as a German soldier patrolled nearby. When the soldier passed,
the boy counted to 30, then made a mad dash to the middle of the street,
where a manhole cover opened and he was taken down into the sewers and
eventually to safety.

Decades later, Sendler was still haunted by the parents' pleas,
particularly of those who ultimately could not bear to be apart from their
children.

"The one question every parent asked me was 'Can you guarantee they will
live?' We had to admit honestly that we could not, as we did not even know
if we would succeed in leaving the ghetto that day. The only guarantee,"
she said, "was that the children would most likely die if they stayed."

Most of the children who left with Sendler's group were taken into Roman
Catholic convents, orphanages and homes and given non-Jewish aliases.
Sendler recorded their true names on thin rolls of paper in the hope that
she could reunite them with their families later. She preserved the
precious scraps in jars and buried them in a friend's garden.

In 1943, she was captured by the Nazis and tortured but refused to tell
her captors who her co-conspirators were or where the bottles were buried.
She also resisted in other ways. According to Felt, when Sendler worked in
the prison laundry, she and her co-workers made holes in the German
soldiers' underwear. When the officers discovered what they had done, they
lined up all the women and shot every other one. It was just one of many
close calls for Sendler.

During one particularly brutal torture session, her captors broke her feet
and legs, and she passed out. When she awoke, a Gestapo officer told her
he had accepted a bribe from her comrades in the resistance to help her
escape. The officer added her name to a list of executed prisoners.
Sendler went into hiding but continued her rescue efforts.

Felt said that Sendler had begun her rescue operation before she joined
the organized resistance and helped a number of adults escape, including
the man she later married. "We think she saved about 500 people before she
joined Zegota," Felt said, which would mean that Sendler ultimately helped
rescue about 3,000 Polish Jews.

When the war ended, Sendler unearthed the jars and began trying to return
the children to their families. For the vast majority, there was no family
left. Many of the children were adopted by Polish families; others were
sent to Israel.

In 1965, she was recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust authority,
as a Righteous Gentile, an honor given to non-Jews who risked their lives
to save Jews during the Nazi reign. In her own country, however, she was
unsung, in part because Polish anti-Semitism remained strong after the war
and many rescuers were persecuted.

Her status began to change in 2000, when Felt and her classmates learned
that the woman who had inspired them was still alive. Through the
sponsorship of a local Jewish organization, they traveled to Warsaw in
2001 to meet Sendler, who helped the students improve and expand the play.
Called "Life in a Jar," it has been performed more than 250 times in the
United States, Canada and Poland and generated media attention that cast a
spotlight on the wizened, round-faced nonagenarian.

After each performance, Felt and the other cast members passed a jar for
Sendler, raising enough money to move her into a Catholic nursing home
with round-the-clock care. They and the teacher who assigned them the play
project, Norman Conard, started the Life in a Jar Foundation, which has
raised more than $70,000 to help pay for medical and other needs of
Holocaust rescuers.

Last year, Sendler was honored by the Polish Senate and nominated for the
Nobel Peace Prize, which brought dozens of reporters to her door. She told
one of them she was wearying of the attention.

"Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on
this Earth," she said, "and not a title to glory."

Sendler, who was the last living member of her group of rescuers, is
survived by a daughter and a granddaughter.

For more information on Irena Sendler, or to contribute to the Life In a
Jar Foundation, go to www.irenasendler.org

(source: Los Angeles Times)





GERMANY:

Berlin's Holocaust memorial to host open-air concert


Berlin's Holocaust memorial plays host on Friday to an open-air concert
that will see musicians spreading out across the field of concrete
slabs to perform a modern experimental piece.

The performance by the Kammersymphonie Berlin of composer Harald Weiss'
new piece "Vor dem Verstummen" ("Before Silence Falls") marks the third
anniversary of the monument's opening to the public.

The orchestra is to be scattered among the memorial's 2,711 gray concrete
slabs. Conductor Lothar Zagrosek will preside over the early-evening
concert from the center of the 19,000 square-meter (204,500 square-foot)
monument. Television monitors will enable further-flung musicians who
will be positioned up to 50 yards (meters) away to see him.

"We tested it and it worked fantastically," said Daniel-Jan Girl, who
helped organize the event. "Every visitor will hear and see something
different."

Weiss's work is scored for chamber orchestra and a solo mezzo-soprano,
Tanja Simic. He said of the piece's approach that "the only thing more
beautiful than music is silence."

Weiss based the new work on a poem by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, a native
of Czernowitz, then in Romania and now in Ukraine, who died in December
1942 at a Nazi SS labor camp at Mikhailovska.

Located adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate and the Tiergarten park, the
striking Holocaust memorial has quickly become a key Berlin landmark
attracting more than 8 million visitors since its inauguration on May 10,
2005.

Designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial cost 27.6
million (US$42.4 million) to build. The site is open to the public around
the clock.


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

Berlin Pays Tribute to Gay-Rights Activist Persecuted by Nazis


Berlin renamed a stretch of the Spree River in honor of a gay-rights
activist persecuted by the Nazis in the 1930s as the city's biggest
hospital opened an exhibition devoted to the sex researcher.

A stretch of the Spree River in central Berlin was named after gay-rights
activist and sexual researcher Magnus Hirschfeld in a dedication ceremony
on Tuesday, May 6.

On the same day 75 years ago, the Nazis plundered his offices and later
burned hundreds of his books.

Hirschfeld had founded the world's first institute dedicated to fighting
discrimination against homosexuals. He went into exile in France and died
there in 1935.

The stretch of river bank named after Hirschfeld is near his former
institute.

"A first step"

According to Germany's Lesbian and Gay Association (LSVD) and the Mitte
district of Berlin, where "Magnus-Hirschfeld-Ufer" is located, a bronze
monument to Hirschfeld will also be erected along the river.

The Charite hospital also commemorated Hirschfeld with an exhibition which
opened on Tuesday at its Medical Historical Museum. Called "Sex Burns,"
the exhibition focuses on Hirschfeld's work and his persecution by the
Nazis.

The tributes to Hirschfeld are "a clear acknowledgment for gays that
persecution has taken place and that reparation is necessary," said the
head of Germany's Lesbian and Gay Association, Alexander Zinn, said at the
dedication ceremony.

"That is a first step in the right direction," he said.

The Nazis declared homosexuality an aberration.

(source for both: Associated Press)



POLAND:

Holocaust Memorial Train Ends Journey at Auschwitz

More than 200,000 people saw the memorial train exhibition since November


A memorial train featuring an exhibition on the thousands of children
deported and murdered by the Nazis during World War II completed its
journey near the former Auschwitz death camp in southern Poland.

Some 200 people marched on Thursday from the railway station in Oswiecim,
where the train arrived, to a platform at the nearby Auschwitz camp, where
more than 1.1 million people, including one million European Jews, were
killed there between 1941-45.

"It's not easy to confront ourselves because we are not the victims but we
are the sons and daughters of the perpetrators," organizer Hans Minow
said.

"We say this knowing that perhaps our fathers and mothers -- if not
participated -- did not do what they had to do when the crimes started,"
he said.

The train's arrival at Auschwitz coincided with the 63rd anniversary of
the end of the Second World War in Europe on May 8, 1945.

Controversial exhibit

The exhibit, which originated in the western German city of Frankfurt in
November, provoked controversy after the state-owned rail operator
Deutsche Bahn refused permission for the train to stop in Berlin's
gleaming new Hauptbahnhof central station.

Deutsche Bahn said at the time that this would have caused major
disruption to normal services. The exhibition took place instead at
Ostbahnhof, the main train station of the former East Berlin.

The Train of Commemoration Foundation also complained that, despite
Deutsche Bahn's historic involvement in the transportation of prisoners to
Nazi death camps, the company had invoiced the foundation for rail-track
use.

After the foundation threatened to publicly shame the company, Deutsche
Bahn admitted that it was charging the group the same toll for track use
as it charged other private train operators. A Bahn spokesman said the
company had to treat all customers equally and that no one could use the
tracks for free.

Symbolic journey

Organizers said that more than 225,000 people viewed the exhibition during
its six-month voyage.

Detailing the fate of Jewish children and teenagers deported by the Nazis
between October 1940 to December 1944, the "Memorial Train" focuses on the
biographies of several such children.

The organizers created an exhibit that symbolically travelled through the
country on the very railways that were used in the deportations after
hearing of a 2003 French exhibition organized by French Nazi hunters and
activists Beate and Serge Klarsfeld.

The initiative was also intended to encourage visitors to search for
traces of Jewish people who had vanished from their towns or region during
the war.

(source: Deutsche Welle)





CANADA----film

Moving documentary details Nazi art theft


The Rape of Europa ***
Directed by: Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnham
Rated: PG


It's common knowledge that Adolf Hitler was a third-rate painter before
becoming a Third Reich leader. His contemporary, famed painter Oskar
Kokoschka, once joked that if Hitler had made it in the Vienna art scene,
he would have done a lot less harm, and Kokoschka would have run Europe
very differently.

But when the little painter that couldn't started his march across Europe,
he systematically looted cities of their art treasures, carting the best
of them back to Germany and destroying or selling off anything he deemed
degenerate or not Aryan enough.

The Rape of Europa, directed by Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Nicole
Newnham, is a sobering look at how manic but also efficient the Nazis were
when it came to art collecting.

The sheer numbers are staggering. When the Allies entered Germany at the
end of the war, they found a salt mine that contained, alongside the
collected gold reserves of the Third Reich, a cache of 400 tonnes of art.
In another mine, Hitler had salted away a trove that took more than a year
to remove and was eventually packed into dozens of rail cars for
transportation back to from where it came.

Nazi Germany seems to have almost contained a ministry of plundering, with
art lover and Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering as its unofficial head.
The government went so far as to draw up lists of great art abroad, the
better to steal it when they invaded. Hitler was an avid personal
collector, commissioned a gallery in Munich to house his ill-gotten gains
and planned an even bigger museum in his hometown of Linz, Austria.

The Rape of Europa also chronicles the efforts of the rest of Europe to
hide their art from the Nazis. In Paris, 300 trucks were used to carry the
collected works of the Louvre to castles across the country. There was
even a special, climate-controlled ambulance to transport La Joconde, also
known as the Mona Lisa. In Russia's Hermitage museum, art was taken to the
cellars to spare it from bombing; 46 curators died of cold and hunger
during the siege of the city.

The Allies did what they could during the war, but in one tragedy, the
art-laden monastery of Monte Cassino in Italy was destroyed when it was
assumed the Germans were using it as an observation post; in fact, they
had never been there. Pilots attacking other cities carried maps of
no-bombing zones where ancient statues and other treasures were located.

Of course, the most tragic element of this story is not the art destroyed
or lost, but the Jewish families robbed of not only their heritage but
their lives. The filmmakers interview a German historian who is trying to
return Jewish religious art to its owners or their descendants. Reparation
can be difficult, as governments often see themselves as the rightful or
most adept curators of fragile artwork.

The filmmakers do a good job covering all the elements of wartime art
theft, repatriation and reparation. The Rape of Europa may be a
straightforward documentary, with talking heads, archival footage and
photographs, but its subject is important and still timely, as even today
looted works occasionally resurface and must be returned to their rightful
owners.

(source: Ottawa Citizen)