Jan. 25




ISRAEL:

Jewish anger as pope reinstates Holocaust-denier


Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre on
Sunday slammed a Holocaust-denying English bishop whose ex-communication
has been cancelled by Pope Benedict XVI.

"It is scandalous that someone of this stature in the Church denies the
Holocaust," the institution said in a statement, referring to Bishop
Richard Williamson who has publicly denied the murder of six million Jews
during World War II.

"Denial of the Holocaust not only insults the survivors, memory of the
victims and the righteous among the nations who risked their lives to
rescue the Jews, it is a brutal attack on truth," Yad Vashem said.

"What kind of message is this sending regarding the Church's attitude
toward the Holocaust?"

The Wiesenthal Centre, an international Jewish human rights body, said:
"The Pope's decision to welcome back such a hater into the Church lends
moral credence to deniers of history's worst crime.

"In addition to Bishop Williamson's Holocaust denial looms the unchanging
virulent anti-Semitism of the Society of Saint Pius as a whole," it said.

The pope cancelled the ex-communication of Williamson and three other
bishops in a bid to heal a 20-year schism with traditionalists led by
rebel French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

The Roman Catholic Church published an edict lifting the 1998 sanction on
Lefebvre's successor Bernard Fellay and three other bishops in his
breakaway conservative movement, including Williamson.

He is on record as denying the existence of the gas chambers.

"I believe there were no gas chambers.... I think that 200,000 to 300,000
Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas
chambers," Williamson was quoted as saying in an interview with Swedish
SVT television.

"There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies,
lies!"

Italian Jewish groups criticised the decision as a "negative, worrying and
incomprehensible signal" on Saturday.

Uneasy relations between the Vatican and Israel have been further strained
by plans to declare Nazi-era Pope Pius XII a saint, despite widespread
criticism of his inaction during the Holocaust.

(source: Agence France-Presse)




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


Brit priest denial of Holocaust is probed


A BRITISH priest last night faced the threat of up to six months in jail
for denying the Holocaust.

Controversial Catholic clergyman Richard Williamson, 68, claimed the
murder of Jews in gas chambers is all lies.

He told a Swedish TV show: "I believe there were no gas chambers."

Six million died in concentration camps such as Auschwitz during World War
II, with many gassed to death.

German prosecutors are investigating the remarks broadcast last week.

A spokesman said: "This looks like a clear case of Holocaust denial."

Williamson, based in Argentina, could become the first British cleric to
face trial for denying Nazi atrocities.

He could be arrested if he returns to Europe. He has previously accused
the Vatican of being under the power of Satan.

He was ordered out of the Church, but German-born Pope Benedict XVI
cancelled the ban.

(source: The Sun)






LITHUANIA:

Muddling the Holocaust in Lithuania
By Steven F. Lawson
Mr. Lawson is a Professor of History at Rutgers University .

As Peter Novick argues in The Holocaust in American Life (1999), in the
late 1940s Americans, especially Jews, hesitated to discuss the Holocaust
openly. The Nuremburg Trials and the presentation of film footage of Nazi
atrocities in the concentration camps had appropriately shocked citizens
in the U.S. and allied countries. The conversion of postwar Germany into
an ally against the Soviet Union as the Cold War began did not change the
horror of the extermination of six million Jewish civilians by the Nazis
and their collaborators, but it did encourage American leaders to focus on
the "Red Fascism" of the U.S.S.R. instead of the German fascism that had
produced the Holocaust.

This has changed of course during the past sixty years. American
presidents have visited the sites of concentration camps, and Hollywood
has supplied a vast array of television series, documentaries, and feature
films testifying to the human misery inflicted by the Third Reich during
World War II. The end of the Cold War in the last decade of the twentieth
century further allowed the Holocaust to become a subject of public
discussion and analysis without upsetting the U.S.'s geopolitical demands
in battling Communism.

Yet the end of the Cold War has brought about ironic and dangerous twists
in remembering and depicting the Holocaust. The dissolution of the Soviet
Empire and the creation of independent republics in Eastern Europe and the
Baltic States brought political, economic, and intellectual freedoms.
However, this independence has posed challenges both for keeping the
memory of the Holocaust alive as well as for safeguarding those remaining
elderly Jews who fought on the Partisan side during World War II alongside
the Soviet Union. Such is the situation in Lithuania, where the Nazis and
their collaborators murdered over 200,000 Jews, around 95 percent of the
country's prewar Jewish population.

Ironically, as Lithuania has entered a closer alliance with the United
States through NATO and membership in the European Union, it has revived a
new internal cold war. Without rejecting the idea of the Jewish
Holocaust, the Lithuanian government has called for historical "symmetry,"
one that recognizes and even privileges the suffering of Lithuanians under
Soviet rule. In promoting a kind of holocaust equality, the Lithuanian
government financed an "International Commission for the Evaluation of the
Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania" and
established a "Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania" in
its capital, Vilnius. The problem is not in vindicating the historical
suffering of diverse victims of tyranny, but in using this anti-Soviet
sentiment to minimize Lithuania's enormous complicity in the destruction
of its wartime Jewish population. This is no attempt by the government to
engage in the shameful, anti-Semitic practice of Holocaust Denial, as
practiced by the Iranian government, but to confuse the issue in such a
way that diminishes sympathy and support for Jewish victims of the
Holocaust. The disreputable cause of Holocaust Denial has been replaced by
what one scholar, a professor at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, calls
"Holocaust Obfuscation." The term has been gaining traction since the
Economist published a piece on the subject last August, "Lithuania must
stop blaming the Victims."

The key to Holocaust Obfuscation is to stress the connection between
Jewish citizens who escaped certain extermination by joining the
Soviet-sponsored partisan groups in fighting the Nazis on the one hand;
and on the other the Stalinist regime that inflicted pain and terror upon
the Lithuanian people and upon its Jewish minority too. Undoubtedly
there were Lithuanian Jewish Communists (before the war well under 1
percent of the Jewish population), but placing their actions on a par with
the Nazi slaughter of millions of people masks a sophisticated and
pernicious form of anti-Semitism in the name of equality and tolerance.
Indeed, Vilniuss Genocide Research Center displays many books about Soviet
deportations, but almost none about the Jewish Holocaust. Its Genocide
Museum barely mentions the Holocaust at all.

To make matters worse, Lithuanian officials have recently sought to
question Lithuanian Jews on suspicion of "crimes against humanity." One
of them is Fania Brantsovsky, the 86-year-old librarian of the Vilnius
Yiddish Institute. A former partisan, Brantsovsky has been called "a
murderer" for her time fighting with the Soviet partisans against the
Nazis, and a local newspaper has demanded "she be put on trial." At the
urging of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, the American Embassy in Lithuania
honored Brantsovsky with a certificate of achievement last April, and in
August, the British Embassy organized a walking tour of the former Vilna
Ghetto, led by Brantsovsky, in which fifteen Western alliance embassies
participated (but none of the Baltic States).

Another target is Dr. Rachel Margolis, 87, a retired Vilnius University
biologist who helped set up a Holocaust exhibit in the city and published
a fine book of memoirs in 2006. She had also rediscovered, transcribed,
and published the lost diary of a Polish witness to the murders at Ponar
(Paneriai), the mass murder site outside Vilnius (an English edition,
Ponary Diary, was brought out by Yale in 2005). Some surmise that this
work inspired a craving for revenge, because the diary reveals exactly who
the killers were, a fact masked in many local treatments of the period,
and left wholly unmentioned by the new "genocide industry" in town. A dual
Lithuanian-Israeli citizen, Margolis is in Rehovot, unable to return to
her native city, Vilnius, for her annual lectures on the Holocaust. Last
May, armed plainclothes police came looking for her. Three American
congressmen took up her cause last August, but she has yet to receive
assurances of safe passage for return to Vilnius. A group of European
Union and NATO ambassadors has recently sent her a joint letter expressing
the wish to hear her lecture in Vilnius. They include representatives of
Austria, Britain, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Ireland, Sweden
and the United States.

All of this comes despite the poor record of the Lithuanian government in
pursuing non-Jewish war criminals. No Lithuanian collaborator of the Nazis
has been punished since the country achieved independence in 1991, and the
recent efforts to target Soviet anti-Nazi partisans seems to name only
Jews, who were a minority in the partisan movement. It also comes at a
time when anti-Semitism is on the rise in Vilnius, as witnessed by the
parade of some 200 neo-Nazis through the city on Independence Day, March
11, 2008, and the more recent painting of swastikas and anti-Semitic
slogans on the tiny number of Jewish community centers in the country.

The actions of the Lithuanian government have occasioned protests from the
tiny Jewish population remaining in Vilnius as well as from some academics
and staff associated with the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at the University
of Vilnius. But these folks at the Institute are running afoul of the
state security services and Genocide industry establishments, and may be
in danger of marginalization and losing their jobs. The government,
however, doesnt want bad publicity to interfere with its attempts to show
the western world, and especially American Jews, that Lithuania remembers
Jewish suffering, while at the same time they obfuscate the memory of the
Holocaust with their anti-Soviet priorities. It is vital for people to
rally around the truth tellers in the Yiddish Institute and let the
Lithuanian government and academy know that, in the words of the 1960s,
"the whole world is watching."

(source: History News Network)






SLOVAKIA:

Harabin: Almost All Holocaust Compensation Claims of Victims Handled


The Justice Ministry has now recompensed almost all legally-justified
requests from Holocaust victims and there remain only three open cases,
the ministry's spokesman Michal Jurci told TASR on Sunday.

Almost 370,000 has been paid out since the beginning of Justice Minister
Stefan Harabin's term of office and the ministry plans to handle all the
justified requests in the agenda by the end of 2009.

"I marked the compensations for victims of Nazi concentration camps and
the Holocaust as one of my priorities when I took office. That's why the
speed of handling these requests has been upped considerably and every
single request has already been examined. In the last open cases, we're
waiting for the submission of necessary documents," Harabin said.

These cases were waiting to be handled for many years, as the requests
were sent between 1999-2002. Jurci noted that in July 2007 there were
still more than 12,000 such requests. The beefing up of personnel
followed, and a substantial amount of money was devoted to this, Jurci
said.

"This is a sign of respect for the victims. They simply can't wait long
years for recompensations, because they may not live long enough to see
it," Harabin added.

(source: TASR)





GREECE:

Thessaloniki Jews who perished in Holocaust remembered (RECASTS)


The memory of the Greek Jews of Thessaloniki who perished in Nazi
concentration camps was commemorated on Sunday at an event at the
Holocaust Museum, organised by the prefecture of Thessaloniki and the
local Jewish community.

Greetings were addressed by Macedonia-Thrace minister Stavros Kalafatis,
Israeli ambassador to Greece Ali Yahya, German ambassador to Greece
Wolfgang Schultheiss -- who read out a message from minister of state for
Europe Gunther Gloser -- Thessaloniki Prefect Panayotis Psomiadis, the
chairman of the Central Jewish Council of Greece Moses Constantines, and
president of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki David Saltiel.

The keynote address was delivered by main opposition PASOK MP Evangelos
Venizelos, who said that "we all bow to the memory of the Holocaust
victims and hear their silent cry," stressing that Greek society reacted
strongly against the violence in Gaza.

Also present at the memorial event were Archbishop Demetrios of America,
the consuls of the US, Spain, France and Romania, representatives of
consulates, several MPs and representatives of local governments.

The Radical Left Coalition (SYRIZA) did not send a representative,
explaining in an announcement that it honors the memory of Greek Jews but
that the attendance of the Israeli ambassador rendered its own
participation impossible, and consequently SYRIZA will honor the memory of
the victims separately at the Holocaust Monument.

(source: ANA)





AUSTRALIA/GERMANY:

Revisionist historian to challenge German law



A revisionist historian living in Australia has vowed to travel to
Germany to test whether his Holocaust denial views are criminal.

Dr. Fredrick Toben, the founder of the notorious Adelaide Institute, was
imprisoned in London for more than one month last year before a British
judge ruled invalid the arrest warrant from German prosecutors who wanted
to charge him with Holocaust denial.

In a video posted on YouTube, Toben stood in front of Parliament House in
Canberra and promised to challenge in court Andreas Grossman, the Mannheim
prosecutor who brought the case against him last year.

In the near future I shall be traveling to Germany, he said. We shall see
whether truth will prevail whether we can in fact get some justice or
whether you are simply going to criminalize my thoughts and therefore
further kill the German soul.

Toben, 64, also hinted that he would again participate in an upcoming
Holocaust denial conference in Iran, which he said would help liberate
people who are oppressed by the Holocaust ideology."

In 1999, Toben was imprisoned for seven months in Germany, where Holocaust
denial is punishable by up to five years in jail. He is still awaiting the
verdict of a contempt-of-court case brought by the Executive Council of
Australian Jewry, which accuses Toben of continuing to publish
anti-Semitic material on his Web site. In 2002, a federal court judge
ordered Toben to remove all anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial material.

(source: JTA)





ROMANIA:

Roma Holocaust victims speak out


Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January is an occasion for Jews and Roma
(Gypsies) to remind the world how their families were terrorised and
butchered by the Nazis in World War II.

Roma in Vlasca, a village in southeastern Romania, told the BBC's Delia
Radu about their wartime ordeal.

The wartime suffering of many Roma villagers is not well documented

The Roma people of Vlasca - traditional metal workers called Kalderash -
are closed and inward-looking. They are reluctant to talk to anyone from
outside the community.

It took weeks of negotiation to hear the accounts of Holocaust survivors
in the village.

Historians often call it "the forgotten Holocaust". Up to 500,000 Roma are
believed to have died in mass shootings and Nazi gas chambers.

Recent studies have brought more of their suffering to public attention,
but to this day little is known about the Roma targeted for persecution
and extermination by the allies of the Third Reich on the eastern front.

The men are the first to speak - and later, when it is the women's turn,
they leave the room.

Dumping ground

Sandu Stanescu remembers how, in the early summer of 1942, some policemen
installed a table by the road, covered it with papers and made lists: Roma
families, extended families, communities - shatras.

The Nazi-backed ruler of Romania - military dictator Ion Antonescu - had
just received his reward for attacking the Soviet Union: Trans-Dniester,
"the land beyond the Dniester". It was a chunk of land in the east,
between the rivers Dniester and Bug.

The territory, most of it part of today's Ukraine, became Nazi Romania's
ethnic "dustbin" for Jews and Roma.

Conveniently the nomadic Roma had carts and horses and the police only had
to escort them across the border.

But as soon as the convoys reached Trans-Dniester, the Romanian
authorities confiscated everything.

"We lost our carts, horses, all our baggage and all the gold our fathers
had hidden in the carts' shafts," Mr Stanescu says.

In freezing cold, with no food, thousands of Roma were marched towards the
river Bug. The survivors were forced to live in camps of flimsy hovels on
the outskirts of war-torn villages, or in stables on deserted collective
farms, to provide forced labour.

"My father, Mihai Gheorghe, died there, my mother Maria died there, both
my brothers died there," says Mihai Gogu.

"They died because of the bitter cold, because there was nothing to eat
and you couldn't wash. I think filth was the main killer: lice were
crawling everywhere, like teeming ants in an anthill. That was our
ordeal."

Scavenging for food

One man speaks of "beatings, disease and bitterness in the fields".

My mother... managed to find another way to sneak back into the village -
we waited and waited, fearing she might never come back -- Mihai Iorga

Mihai Iorga recalls how his mother had "brought with her some embroidered
pieces of cloth, like those ones people arrange on walls under the icons".

His sharp grey eyes are moist and he stands in the middle of the gathering
to tell the story better.

"She tried to sell those in the neighbouring village, for food. But a
Romanian policeman and a Ukrainian guard saw her, beat her badly and
threatened to shoot her. She rushed back home crying.

"Me and my brothers begged her not to go again. But the following day off
she went. She did what she did and managed to find another way to sneak
back into the village.

"We waited and waited, fearing she might never come back... But lo and
behold, there she was, carrying two buckets of potatoes and sweet
cornflour! Oh, how we hugged her, how we kissed her! She then baked those
potatoes straight on the flame because we were left with nothing, not even
a pan or dish for cooking.

"Afterwards she managed to find a small tin. She melted some snow in it,
there was no other source of water, and made a nice tiny polenta. It was
so good! We felt so good!"

In 1944, when the war front moved west and the Romanian administration
withdrew from Trans-Dniester, the Roma had to walk back hundreds of miles,
"covered in mud, covered in bitterness".

A teenager at the time, Mihai Gogu was the only survivor in his family and
saw many children dying on the road.

"We walked back, barefoot. Parents carried children on their shoulders.
But time and again, one of these little ones would slip and fall off the
grown-up's back. They died of hunger."

Mihai Iorga's father was taken ill and died during the return journey. It
was his mother who managed to see her children safely to Romania.
Vlasca's Roma are close-knit and maintain a traditional lifestyle

Girls targeted

The men leave, the women enter in their flowery scarves.

During the deportation pregnant Roma women were killed because they were
unable to walk fast enough.

"A heavily pregnant woman was shot before my eyes," Maria Mihai recalls.
"She fell on the ground. And the baby started struggling inside her."

The women remember how their mothers had to find water and food miles away
from the camps, there were long queues at the wells, sometimes the water
sources had dried up. They remember their mothers making clothes out of
thick brown paper potato sacks.

But most stories revolve around the constant fear of being raped by the
armed guards.

"Both my parents died. I was only a girl, in the flower of my youth. That
was very dangerous. They tried to take us young girls by force," says
Natalia Mihai.

There were horsemen hunting women and little girls hiding under their
mothers' long-layered Gypsy skirts.

"Once they put a gun at a girl's neck and raped her, something like a
whole committee raped her and they were shouting and chanting," says
Floarea Stanescu. But Natalia Mihai asks her to stop: "Don't remind me of
all that, I feel like dying".
Maria Mihai says she and fellow Roma were reduced to eating dog meat

A report by the International Commission for the Study of the Romanian
Holocaust says the number of Roma victims in Trans-Dniester is difficult
to establish, mainly because the lists of deportees were negligently put
together.

Some 25,000 Roma deportees are accounted for and the number of dead is
thought to be 11,000. According to the report, half of the deported Roma
were children and the women were frequently subjected to brutal sexual
attacks.

Now that the Roma women in Vlasca have finished their stories, the men are
back.

Both groups make a few final comments about the food in Trans-Dniester.
"The Ukrainians used to catch those underground creatures, moles, you
know", says Maria Mihai. "They skinned these animals and either ate them
or sold them to us."

"Yes," says Mihai Iorga, "I ate moles too, on the banks of the Bug".

"And when we saw those moles, we wept with revulsion," continues Maria
Mihai. "And we ate dogs, too Yes, dead dogs, sweet Jesus, we were given
dog meat, too."

"But in the summer, the mussels in the Bug were a luxury," says Mihai
Iorga. "She knew how to cook those, my poor mum."

Most of the Holocaust survivors in Vlasca have received compensation via
the International Organization for Migration, in Geneva. The IOM says
survivors and their close relatives receive up to 7,000 euros (6,590;
$9,070) each.

The compensation is paid under an IOM partnership with Germany.

(source: BBC News)






GERMANY:

Strife continues over art looted by Nazis


A Jewish man fighting to regain possession of thousands of rare posters
seized from his father by the Nazis appeared to score a victory on
Tuesday when a Berlin court indicated it believed his father was the
owner in 1938 when they were taken.

But the Berlin administrative court hearing failed to resolve the suit
filed by Peter Sachs, 71, of Sarasota, Florida, and both sides vowed to
press their cases further.

The judges said they needed to deliberate whether further arguments were
necessary before they could issue a verdict on the case involving about a
third of the 12,500 rare posters seized from the home of Hans Sachs, in
1938 on the orders of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.

The Sachs family fled shortly Germany afterward, making a new home in the
United States and assuming the posters they'd left behind were lost
forever. It wasn't until the mid-1960s that Hans Sachs learned that an
East Berlin museum had some and wrote to the communist authorities about
viewing them, but to no avail. He died in 1974 without seeing them again.

After communism fell, the collection was turned over to the German
Historical Museum in 1990. Today the museum possesses more than 4,000 of
the posters, worth an estimated euro4.5 million ($5.9 million).

The posters include advertisements for exhibitions, cabarets, movies, and
consumer products, as well as political propaganda all rare, with only
small original print runs. Only a handful of the posters on display at any
given time but museum officials say they form an integral part of its
80,000-piece collection.

(source: Associated Press)