August 23



GREECE:

Video shows young man urinating on Holocaust monument on the Greek island
of Rhodes

Inaugurated in June 2002, the Holocaust Monument in Rhodes commemorates
the extermination by the Nazis in Auschwitz of 1,694 Jews from Rhodes and
the nearby island of Cos.


The Central Jewish Board, the umbrella organisation of Jews in Greece,
has denounced the broadcasting on YouTube of a video showing a young man
urinating on a Holocaust Memorial on the Greek Aegean island of Rhodes.

The video was posted on Friday on a site of "a group of students" from the
Venetokleio high school of Rhodes (http://venetokleio.hi5.com), one of the
most prestigious in Greece.

The group appears to be made of young neo-Nazis.

The Central Jewish Board sent a letter to Greek Interior Minister Prokopi
Pavlopoulo asking "for extra security for the synagogue in Rhodes as a
large number of Jewish tourists are expected during the upcoming High
Holidays."

In the site, the self-proclaimed anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi secret group of
students of the Venetoklio High School of Rhodes write that they "do not
digg at all the Jews who wish to turn the island of Rhodes into a second
"Land of Canaan."

They add: "After all the propaganda fed even in religion school books over
the chosen people and other bullshit, we have decided to take the
situation into our own hands and show to everyone with deeds of how much
do we really agree with this view."

In a reaction, Giannis Papadomarkakis, the schools headmaster, told EJP
that he refuses to accept the idea that the culprits were his students.
"I bet my life that they are not students of our school," he said.

Speaking about the site, he said: "This kind of malicious acts does not
represent our school. Be assured that if students of our school are
involved I will send them for prosecution."

Inaugurated in June 2002, the Holocaust Monument commemorates the
extermination by the Nazis of 1,694 Jews from the island and the nearby
island of Cos who were deported to Auschwitz on July 24, 1944.

The monument already suffered in the past years. During its construction,
workers protested of being harassed by bystanders who shouted "Get out
Jews," "You'll turn us all into Jews," "You'll bring Sharon here" and even
hurled stones. A 24 hour police protection was needed to complete the
works.

Later, however, unknown people badly damaged the monument by erasing the
engraved lettering.

A demand by the Jews of Rhodes to the archaeological service for
permission to built a bulletproof glass and protective rail around the
monument was denied on the ground that visitors should be able to have
close proximity to the monument.

2002 was reportedly one of the worst years concerning anti-Semitism in
Greece with incidents rerported in Athens, Salonika, Rhodes and Ioannina.

Once dubbed "Little Jerusalem," Rhodes took in several hundred Jews
expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 15th century who joined those
already on the island.

Between the two world wars, the Jewish population of Rhodes reached about
6,000.

Today, only 40 Jews still live on the island.

Some 67,000 Greek Jews perished in the Holocaust, 86 percent of the
country's entire Jewish community.

The Jewish community of Greece today numbers around 6,000 people.

(source: EJP)





GERMANY:

Another Berlin holocaust memorial vandalized

Berlin's memorial to the Jews murdered during the Nazi era was
desecrated Saturday, only a week after a similar memorial to gays and
lesbians persecuted by the Nazis was vandalized, police reported.

In Germany's national memorial to European Jewish victims of the
holocaust, seven of the steles that make up the monument were desecrated
with 11 Nazi swastikas in red and black paint.

On Saturday last week, a viewing window was broken and a fence pushed over
at the monument for homosexuals, located across the street from Jewish
memorial.

In response to last week's act of vandalism, 200 people protested in front
of the gay and lesbian monument on Monday.

(source: Top News)





ISRAEL:

Holocaust scholars in new plea for exhibit on WWII rescue group


A group of more than 50 Holocaust scholars from around the world on
Thursday urged Yad Vashem to include an exhibit in its museum about a WWII
rescue group.

The scholars' appeal to add information about the Bergson Group in the
Holocaust museum came two months after Yad Vashem surprisingly rebuffed an
earlier petition by a cross-section of Israeli political and cultural
figures on the issue.

The Bergson Group was a maverick activist group in the US in the 1940s
that raised public awareness of the Holocaust and campaigned for US rescue
action to save the Jews of Europe during WWII.

Led by Hillel Kook, a nephew of Israel's first chief rabbi who worked
under the pseudonym of Peter Bergson, the organization was viewed by
mainstream US Jewish leaders during the war as being too direct in its
criticism of the Roosevelt administration's blatant failure to rescue
Jewish refugees, although in recent years most scholars have come to
recognize the group's crucial contribution to the infamously belated
rescue effort.

"As scholars who have researched and written about the Holocaust, we
support the recent appeal, by a wide cross-section of Israeli scholars and
political and cultural figures, urging Yad Vashem to add to its exhibit
materials about the Bergson Group's role in promoting rescue from the
Holocaust," the August 21 letter to Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev read.

"Yad Vashem's exhibit already includes material about the failure of the
United States to admit significant numbers of refugees or to bomb
Auschwitz. But this chapter of Holocaust history is incomplete without
reference to those in America who did act to bring about the rescue of
Jews from the Nazis," the letter states.

The signatories to the letter include Dr. Irving Greenberg, chairman
emeritus of the US Holocaust Memorial Council, which governs the US
Holocaust Museum.

In contrast to Yad Vashem's surprisingly steadfast refusal to include such
an exhibit in its museum, the museum in Washington DC earlier this summer
added information about the Bergson Group to its museum on the heels of a
similar public campaign.

The American Holocaust Institute, which is leading the campaign to include
an exhibit on the Bergson Group in Yad Vashem, said Thursday the Israeli
museum needed to amend its historical omission.

"More than 50 leading Holocaust historians have urged Yad Vashem to
correct its inexplicable omission of the Bergson Group's rescue campaign,"
said Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the Washington DC-based David S. Wyman
Institute for Holocaust Studies. "This is a body of serious scholarly
opinion that no Holocaust institution can reasonably ignore."

But Yad Vashem said Thursday inserting information about the Bergson Group
in its Museum without "the overall context" would be "misleading."

"It is unclear if all those who signed on to the letter are familiar with
Yad Vashem and the Holocaust History Museum, and with the presentation of
this subject in Yad Vashem's research and educational activities," a Yad
Vashem representative said in a written response.

"The Holocaust History Museum does not presume to include every person,
event, and place connected with the Holocaust, but rather to present the
visitor with the story of the Holocaust, providing an experience that will
hopefully encourage the visitor to learn more via books, the Web site, and
other sources - available at Yad Vashem and elsewhere."

The Bergson Group is credited with helping to persuade the president in
1944 to establish the War Refugee Board, which ultimately saved 200,000
Jewish lives during the Holocaust. "Omitting the saving of 200,000 lives
is a mistake," said Prof. David S. Wyman, a leading international
authority on America's response to the Holocaust, and author of the highly
acclaimed The Abandonment of the Jews.

Despite opposition from mainstream American Jewish leaders, the group
actively campaigned to save the doomed Jews of Europe through theatrical
pageants, lobbying on Capitol Hill, newspaper advertisements and
organizing a march in Washington by 400 Rabbis, which was the only rally
for rescue held in the nation's capital during the Holocaust.

(source: Jerusalem Post)







UKRAINE:

Ukrainian Holocaust memorial vandalized


A Holocaust monument was vandalized in western Ukraine.

The Holocaust memorial in Lvov was smeared with paint, swastikas and
anti-Semitic graffiti. It stands outside the Valley of Death, a site near
the city's Janowska death camp, where more than 200,000 Jews were murdered
between 1941 and 1943.

The memorial was constructed in 1992 by Dr. Aleksandr Schwarz, a retired
scientist living in Munich who believes he is the camp's last living
survivor. As a teenager he watched the shooting of his father and was
assigned to bury the bodies of Jews shot to death in the Valley of Death.

A group of German tourists discovered the vandalized memorial last week
and alerted authorities.

It was not the first time that Jewish memorials in Lvov were vandalized
this year. It is unclear whether law enforcement agencies are
investigating the monument case.

(source: JTA)






SWEDEN:

Swedish teachers lack Holocaust knowledge

Swedish teachers lack sufficient knowledge about the Holocaust, with
7 out of 10 primary and high school educators answering 8 of 11 questions
incorrectly, a study by Sweden's Living History Forum showed.

Only two of the 5,081 teachers who responded to the Forum's questionnaire
answered all 11 multiple choice questions correctly, and another 14 made
one mistake, the report released yesterday showed.

"A little more than 70 % of teachers answered incorrectly to at least 8
out of 11 questions," the study said, noting that "knowledge levels about
the Holocaust among respondents appear to be low."

Only one in 20 teachers in Sweden knew how many Jewish children in Europe
were killed during World War II (the correct answer was "more than 80 %"),
and almost 40 % said they thought the Gulag was an extermination camp for
Jews.

95 % were however able to correctly identify Treblinka as an
extermination camp.

A total of 47 % of the teachers surveyed had been teaching for more
than 15 years.

While 98 % of teachers said they considered instruction on the Holocaust
to be an important part of the school curriculum, 40 % said they
themselves had received no instruction on the Holocaust during their own
schooling and training.

Just under 5 % said they had had 10 or more hours of teaching on the
subject.

(source: The Peninsula)






NEW ZEALAND:

Nazi hunter scolds New Zealand


Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff scolded the New Zealand government for turning a
blind eye to Nazis hiding there after World War II.

"New Zealand was the only Anglo-Saxon democracy which faced this problem
and chose to ignore it," Efraim Zuroff, the The Simon Wiesenthal Center's
Israel director, told a local newspaper Saturday. New Zealand's response
on this issue should be a source of embarrassment.

In 1990, Zuroff claimed as many as 40 Nazi war criminals escaped to New
Zealand following the Holocaust.

New Zealand responded by establishing a small investigations unit in 1991.
Seventeen Nazis were believed to be alive, but the unit cleared 15 of war
crimes. Only one was deemed a possible war criminal, but in 1992 the
national government decided it did not believe it had enough evidence for
a successful prosecution.

Zuroff last visited New Zealand in 2006 to raise awareness for Operation
Last Chance, a final effort to flush out Nazi war criminals in the
twilight of their lives.

One who was alive and living in Auckland was Jonas Pukas, a Lithuanian who
served in the 12th Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalion, which murdered
tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania and
Belarus, Zuroff told the Otago Daily Times on Saturday.

He has previously accused Australia of being a paradise for Nazi war
criminals.

(source: JTA)