Elie Wiesel tells Hungary to ban Holocaust denial

VOLUME 24 NUMBER 1
JANUARY 2010
Elie Wiesel tells Hungary to ban Holocaust denial
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungary should consider
banning Holocaust denial to improve its image abroad
and contain lurking hostility towards its minorities,
Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner
Elie Wiesel said recently.
Hungary is grappling with its worst economic
downturn in almost two decades and rising aversion
towards ethnic groups, mainly the country’s large
Roma population, lifted the far-right Jobbik party into
the European Parliament earlier this year.
Based on poll readings Jobbik is also likely to
win enough votes in next year’s elections to get into
parliament.
“Wherever in the world I come and the word
Hungary is mentioned, the next word is antisemitism,” said Wiesel, 81, who was
deported along with hundreds of thousands of other Jews to Nazi death camps
during World War Two.“I urge you to do even more to denounce antisemitic
elements and racist expressions in your political environment and in certain
publications,” Wiesel said.
“I believe that they bring shame to your nation and they bring fear to its Jewish
community and other minorities, such as the Roma,” Wiesel, who won the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1986 told a meeting of Jewish and Hungarian leaders in parliament.
In July a court ruling dissolved the far-right Hungarian Guard, a radical
nationalist organization, which staged intimidating marches against Roma
nationwide, in black uniforms and insignia, which critics say are reminiscent of
the Nazi era.
“I ask you, why don’t you follow the example of France and Germany and
declare Holocaust denial not only indecent, but illegal? In those countries Holocaust
deniers go to jail,” Wiesel said.
Wiesel warned against what he called the perils of indifference and said
Hungarians were responsible for how they handle memories of the past.
Hungary at present has no law protecting communities against imflammatory
remarks. Attempts to outlaw such language have failed to pass in parliament or
win the approval of President Laszlo Solyom.
Anti-Roma tensions have heightened in the country where 6-7 percent of the
10 million population are Gypsies.
“Hungary does not meet European Union standards in this respect as there is
no efficient protection for communities against hate speech,” Gyorgy Kollath,
constitutional law expert told Reuters.
After Hungary’s occupation by Nazi Germany in 1944 the Hungarian
government actively collaborated in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of
Jews to death camps. (Reporting by Gergely Szakacs; editing by Ralph Boulton)
PIUS XII FASTRACKED TO SAINTHOOD
until a consensus on his actions—or
inaction—concerning the persecution of
millions of Jews in the Holocaust is
established, a beatification is inopportune
and premature. While it is entirely a matter
for the Catholic Church to decide on whom
religious honors are bestowed, there are
strong concerns about Pope Pius XII’s
political role during World War II which
should not be ignored.”
Most Jewish leaders, including Yad
Vashem’s Avner Shalev, have repeatedly
asked for the beatification process to be
stopped until the Vatican’s secret archives, containing thousands of documents,
is opened for review. But the Vatican says the 16 million files relating to Pius
XII’s 19-year reign will not be ready for public viewing until 2014 at the earliest.
The issue has been a thorn in the side of relations between Israel and the
Vatican for years. Israeli Social Affairs Minister Isaac Herzog once called sainthood
for Pius XII unacceptable, and President Shimon Peres believes that Pius XII did
not try hard enough to save Jews.
When Benedict XVI signed the papers, he placed Pius XII just two steps
away from full canonization. In 2007, Benedict asked for time for reflection in
order calm down interfaith tensions. That’s why his latest move is a surprise.
Once a member of the Hitler Youth, the current pope maintains that Pius XII
saved many Jews by hiding them in religious institutions, and that he kept silent to
avoid aggravating their situation.
Abraham Foxman, a Holocaust survivor and the director of the US-based
Anti-Defamation League, said “We are saddened and disappointed that the pontiff
would feel compelled to fast-track Pope Pius at a point where the issue of the
In a move that surprised Vatican watchers and Jewish and Israeli leaders,
Pope Benedict XVI signed a decree on December 19, 2009 recognizing the “heroic
virtues” of Pope John Paul II and Pope Pius XII, a move that moves them both
on a faster track to sainthood. Benedict waived the customary five-year waiting
period and allowed the investigation into John Paul’s life and virtues to begin
immediately. But it was venerating Pius XII that has infuriated Holocaust survivors,
who were already angered by the disappearance, just a day earlier of the iconic
“Work Makes Free” sign above the gates to Auschwitz.
In response, the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their
Descendants issued the following statement: “One day after the Nazi death camp
Auschwitz is desecrated, Holocaust survivors are shaken by the profoundly
insensitive and thoughtless Vatican announcement advancing the wartime Pope
Pius XII on the path to sainthood.”
Elan Steinberg, vice president of the organization said that pairing the
announcement on Pius—who remained publicly silent during the Holocaust—
with that of John Paul II, himself a victim of the Nazis, is a particularly disturbing
and callous act. Steinberg added that it went against private assurances the Vatican
had given the Jewish community. “No documents have been released altering the
view of Pius as ‘the silent pope.’”
Steinberg noted that less than a year after Richard Williamson, a bishop from
the Society of Pius X, publicly denied the Holocaust, “we are left bereft in our
feelings and appeal to the Vatican to prevent the inevitable blow to interfaith
relations which will follow from this.”
The World Jewish Congress (WJC) also criticized the decision by Pope
Benedict XVI to pave the way for the beatification of his controversial war-time
predecessor Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), who was pontiff of the Catholic Church
from 1939 to 1958. WJC President Ronald S. Lauder declared: “As long as the
archives of Pope Pius about the crucial period 1939 to 1945 remain closed, and
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TOGETHER 1
“Don’t let the light go out”
TOGETHER
by MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT
“Don’t let the light go out, it’s lasted for so many
years” sang Peter, Paul and Mary in “Light One
Candle,” my favorite Chanukah song.
In late December 1948, my parents said a very
special shehecheyanu prayer as they lit the Chanukah
candles in the Displaced Persons camp of BergenBelsen in Germany.
Barely five years after their entire families had been
murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, they could
not truly thank God for granting them life or for sustaining them as part of the
small surviving remnant of European Jewry that had emerged from the Holocaust.
Too many faces were missing—their parents, their siblings, my mother’s first
husband and her five-and-a-half year old son, my father¹s first wife and her
daughter.
But for the first time, they were celebrating the festival of lights with their
son—I was then almost eight months old—and their focus must have been on this
moment of rebirth, of renewal. Their shehecheyanu, I suspect, was in large part
for me seeing the burning Chanukah candles for the first time, with no memories
of the past, of death and destruction, of other flames.
Fast forward 61 years.
On the first night of Chanukah, 2009, a display for a fragile Torah scroll
which was brought from Hamburg, Germany, to the United States in 1939 by
Rabbi Alfred Veis is dedicated at Congregation Ohabai Sholom in Nashville,
Tennessee.
Two days later, my wife Jeanie and I attend a memorial service for Rabbi
Alfred Gottschalk, the long-time President and Chancellor of the Reform
Movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion who fled Nazi
Germany as a nine-year-old boy and who died three months ago. On the sixth
night of Chanukah, I am in the Grand Foyer of the White House together with
several hundred other American Jews as the children of Commander Scott Moran,
a U.S. Navy officer presently deployed in Iraq, light the candles on a 19th-century
silver Chanukah menorah on loan from the Jewish Museum in Prague.
Standing beside them are President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle
Obama, and Vice President Joe Biden. Chanukah, President Obama tells us, “was
a triumph of the few over the many; of right over might; of the light of freedom
over the darkness of despair.”
He recalls how over the centuries “Jews have lit the Chanukah candles as
symbols of resilience in times of peace, and in times of persecution—in
concentration camps and ghettos; war zones and unfamiliar lands. Their light
inspires us to hope beyond hope; to believe that miracles are possible even in the
darkest of hours.”
During the few moments I am able to speak with President Obama afterwards,
he tells me of his deep admiration and affection for Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Elie Wiesel who had accompanied him to Buchenwald in June 2009.
“Light one candle for the strength that we need to never become our own
foe,” goes another verse from “Light One Candle.” Following the ceremony, a
group of us gather in one of the adjoining rooms, surrounded by Christmas wreaths,
for the evening Ma’ariv service.
Rabbi Avraham Shemtov, the head of the international umbrella organization
of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim, prays alongside Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the President
of the Union for Reform Judaism. Elsewhere, members of the liberal, peaceoriented J Street advocacy group are engaged in intense conversations with leaders
of AIPAC, the more conservative pro-Israel lobby.
In the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons camp, the Jewish survivors of the
Holocaust, religious and secular, Yiddishists and Hebraists, lived and struggled
together, as did Zionists covering the broad political spectrum from left to right
who coexisted easily with non-Zionists.
They understood that they had suffered a shared fate and faced a common
future. In the White House during the Chanukah celebration, Jewish leaders of
all stripes and denominations seemed to let go of their differences, if only for a
few hours, and revel in the freedom and dignity of America.
“Light one candle to find us together with peace as the song in our hearts.”
On the flight back to New York, I sit beside a stranger and we begin talking.
He is David Vise, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Washington Post reporter.
His grandfather was Rabbi Alfred Veis of Nashville, Tennessee. In 1939, David’s
father came to the United States from Germany on the same boat as Alfred
Gottschalk, and the two became good friends.
“Don’t let the light go out; let it shine through our love and our tears.”
Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and vice president of the
American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.
TOGETHER 2
January 2010
c •o •n • t •e •n •t •s
Volume 24 Number 1
Pope Pius XII Fastracked to Sainthood...........................................................1
Elie Wiesel Tells Hungary to Ban Holocaust Denial........................................1
“Don’t Let the Light Go Out” by Menachem Rosensaft..................................2
Remembering the Past..................................................................................3
Peres Honors Survivors on Chanukah............................................................3
Ghetto Pension Payments Reviewed.................................... .........................4
Arbeit Macht Frei Sign Recovered.................................................................4
The Financial Sustainability of Holocaust Museums by Gail Beckerman.........5
Never Forget: Holding Collaborators Accountable..........................................6
Holocaust Denier Fined by German Court by Jamie Romm............................6
Gretel Bergmann: A Leap into History...........................................................7
30 years later, Holocaust Center Rededicated at Teaneck High.......................7
Chanukah Miracles All Around by Yuval Azoulay..........................................8
New View of the State Department’s Shameful Past by Gregory J. Wallance.....8
Kristallnacht Commemorated at UN..............................................................9
Holocaust Survivor Heirs Sue for Van Gogh Drawing by Dan McCue............9
By Working Together We Can Accomplish Miracles by Gloria Jacaruso.....10
Judges slam survivor benefit law as unclear by Ofra Edelman......................10
90-Year-Old Charged in Nazi Massacre by David Rising .............................11
Krakow Ghetto by Rita B.Ross...................................................................11
Singer Exhibit Honors Artists.......................................................................12
Killing Kasztner: A Posthumous Thank You................................................12
Through the Generations by Joyce Ann.......................................................13
They Didn’t Know What Hit Them by Gerhson Ron..................................14
Bergen-Belsen survivors reunited after 64 years by David A. Schwartz........14
US Appeals Court Nixes Vatican Bank Holocaust Suit by Nicole Winfield....15
Announcements..........................................................................................16
In Memoriam..............................................................................................17
A Soup Surprise by Rose Dorfman............................................................20
It’s a Shoo-id by Sheldon P. Hersh............................................................22
Searches (contributing editor Serena Woolrich).............................................23
“Searches” is a project of Allgenerations, Inc.
NOTICE TO HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
NEEDING ASSISTANCE
Financial assistance is available for needy Holocaust survivors. If
you have an urgent situation regarding housing, health care, food or other
emergency, you may be eligible for a one-time grant. These grants are
funded by the Claims Conference.
If there is a Jewish Family Service agency in your area, please
discuss your situation with them. If there is no such agency nearby,
mail a written inquiry describing your situation to:
Emergency Holocaust Survivor Assistance
P.O. Box 765
Murray Hill Station
New York, NY 10156
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January 2010
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Pius XII Fastracked
cont’d from p. 1
record, the history and the coming to a judgment, is
still wide open.”
“We do not forget the deportations of Jews from
Italy and in particular the train that deported 1021
people on October 16, 1943, which left Rome’s
Tiburtina station for Auschwitz to the silence of Pius
XII,’’ said one statement.
“While it is obviously up to the Vatican to
determine who its saints are, the church’s repeated
insistence that it seeks mutually respectful ties with
the Jewish community ought to mean taking our
sensitivities into account on this most crucial historical
era,” said David Harris, executive director of the
American Jewish Committee.
“I can’t understand the rush, especially while
there are still survivors who are alive who feel the
issue very, very deeply and are being told the files
need time to be processed. What’s the imperative?”
Mr Foxman said.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry concurred, saying
Pius’ actions are worthy of a “thorough historical
examination. History will be the judge of this
matter.”
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January 2010
Peres honors survivors on
Chanukah
Child Survivors Meet:
Remembering the Past
By GREER FAY CASHMAN
More than 400 survivors and their descendants
came to Newton, Massachusetts in October for the
2009 World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of
the Holocaust, 21st Annual International Conference.
Organized by the Greater Boston Child Survivor
Group and the Boston Generations After, a local
Second Generation organization, its participants
included two members of the American Gathering
Council, Isaac Kot and Lillian Fox, who also served
on the 24-member team led by Marianne Kronenberg
and Eva Paddok, leaders of the organization.
As Kronenberg said, “We gathered to celebrate
the life of our survivor community and honor the lives
of loved ones whom we so tragically lost. We also
celebrated the next generations of Jewish women
and men, girls and boys, who will carry the memory
of the Holocaust into the future.”
The main focus of Kronenberg’s remarks was
Holocaust denial, a subject that was addressed by
keynote speaker Prof. Deborah Lipstadt (Dorot
Associate Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust
Studies at Emory University) and by Menachem
Rosensaft, Vice President of the American Gathering.
American Gathering officers, including Chairman
Roman R. Kent, Vice President Stephanie Seltzer
(president of the World Federation of Jewish Child
Survivors of the Holocaust), Vice President Dr. Eva
Fogelman (author of Conscience and Courage:
President Shimon Peres acknowledged the
contribution made by Holocaust survivors to the
establishment, security and continued existence of
the state at a Chanukah candle-lighting ceremony at
Beit Hanassi.
Speaking to
some 250 survivors,
most of them in
their 80s, Peres told
them that he stood
before them with a
great deal of humility
and respect. He
was aware that
each of them
carried a heavy
burden of trauma
and loss of family,
that each of them
was haunted at
night by the
shadows of the
past, and yet each morning they swept away the
nightmares, and with hope and courage faced a new
day.
Whoever emerged from the horrors of the
atrocities of the Holocaust, who experienced that
Satanic evil and did not abandon his trust in humanity,
symbolizes the purity of spirit and the miracle wrought
by hope, said Peres.
“As far as I’m concerned, you’re nothing less
than heroes. Holocaust survivors made a very
significant contribution to the victories of the State
of Israel against her enemies. In the War of
Independence, only three years after the Holocaust,
the yishuv stood with its back to the wall, and the
fate of the Jewish state hung in the balance.” The
survivors made the difference, he emphasized.
During the years of World War II and
immediately afterward, 70,000 European Jews, most
of them young, served as soldiers in the War of
Independence, said Peres.
In the midst of the War of Independence, more
than 25,000 volunteers came from the refugee camps
of Europe and together with the recruits from
overseas went straight from the boats to the frontlines
of the battlefield. This reinforcement enabled the IDF
to triumph in such a fateful conflict.
Among those who came to fight, recalled Peres,
were soldiers who were the sole survivors of their
families. Some fell in battle, anonymous heroes, with
no one left to mourn them.
“Our history is full of sadness,” said Peres, “but
the festival of Chanukah is a festival of heroism and
light. Just as Chanukah also symbolizes the victory
of the few against the many, so Israel’s independence
is both a victory and a miracle. Here too, it was the
few against the many—and the few did great things.”
“The light of the candles that we lit here tonight is
the light of life and hope, of prayer and triumph in which
light conquered the darkness of evil.”
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Stephanie Seltzer, president of the World Federation of
Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust
Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust), and
council members Isaac Kot (treasurer of the
conference and of Generations After in Boston) and
Lillian Fox (LICSW, founder of Second Generation
Connections and Resources, board member
and events chair of Generations After in Boston) led
workshops that addressed the issues of the day—
from how to live with joy in the shadow of the past,
to restitution issues and the Conference on Jewish
Material Claims against Germany.
Fogelman presented her pioneering film, Breaking
the Silence, as well as a Second Generation
workshop with Rosensaft on “What is the Meaning
of Our Voices.” Jeanette Friedman, founder of
Second Generation North Jersey (1979), and author
with David Gold of Why Should I Care? Lessons
from the Holocaust, presented a workshop on
publishing one’s memoirs. Stephanie Seltzer discussed
writing ethical wills, and Kot presented “Telling our
Parents’ and Grandparents’ History.”
As Kronenberg noted, “It is up to the next
generations to confront the lies about the Holocaust.
They are the ones that will have to remember the stories
of their parents and grandparents, the stories of
inhumanity and hate...As the generations change, we
place our legacy into their hands. It is their heritage, and
I am convinced they will give their all to protect it.”
TOGETHER 3
Ghetto Pension Payments Reviewed
Previously rejected applications from Holocaust
survivors for German “Ghetto Pension” payments are
automatically being re-evaluated,
following three court decisions this
summer that greatly liberalized the criteria
for these German Social Security
Payments.
The Claims Conference initiated a
Monitoring Group together with the
German Ministry of Labor and Social
Affairs. The Monitoring Group is ensuring the
successful reopening, under liberalized guidelines, of
nearly 70,000 social security pension claims rejected
since 2002. The Monitoring Group examined key
points of processing, criteria and administration. There
are major open issues such as the date of back
payment of newly approved cases and the speed of
processing.
The Claims Conference is not involved in any
way in the processing or administration of these
claims. Information about previously submitted
applications is available from German Regional
Pension Institutions, which are organized based on
the current country of residence of the applicant.
Germany’s social insurance legislation of 2002
(ZRBG, or “Ghetto Pension”) admits payments of
old age pensions under certain conditions to survivors
of Nazi occupied or incorporated ghettos (including
Transnistria) who performed “voluntary and
remunerated work.” However, inconsistent and overly
strict interpretation of eligibility criteria by local
German authorities resulted in widespread denial of
claims. The Claims Conference has been pressing
for changes in the law’s implementation and eventually
spearheaded an international campaign for the
liberalization of the ZRBG conducted by governments,
grassroots organizations of survivors and community
advocacy groups.
Through the Monitoring Group, the Claims
Conference has insisted on the following conditions
that the Federal Social Court and the National Pension
Board are using to reexamine denied claims:
All rejected claims are being reopened
automatically, and denied claimants do not need to
do anything to initiate the review of their claim. Social
Security offices are examining claims in order of
date of birth, with the oldest claimants being
processed first.
Guidelines related to remuneration and “voluntary
work” are to be considered in the broadest possible
terms. The kind of remuneration received for the
work performed (money, food, clothes, etc.) is no
longer a decisive factor, and remuneration need not
have been provided directly to the claimant. The court
decisions in June also stated that ghettos in
Transnistria should be covered under the Ghetto
Pension law.
Additionally, individuals who are already receiving
a Ghetto Pension may, under certain circumstances,
be eligible for a re-assessment based on their age
and circumstances during the years 1945-1949.
These re-assessments must be requested by the
pensioner (applied for) in writing.
It should be noted that the ZRBG/Ghetto Pension
and the one-time “Ghetto Fund” payment of Euro
2000 (established in 2007 to recognize work
performed in a ghetto) are separate programs. The
one-time payment does not preclude filing for, and
award of, a ZRBG pension. However, receipt of a
ZRBG pension precludes payment of the Euro 2000
compensation.
Arbeit Macht Frei sign
recovered
had trouble imagining who would steal the sign.
“If they are pranksters, they’d have to be sick
pranksters, or someone with a political agenda. But
whoever has done it has desecrated world memory,”
Schudrich said.
The sign, unscrewed from one side of its supports,
broken off the other and then cut into three pieces,
was stolen in the hours after midnight a week before
Christmas. It was then carried out through a hole in a
concrete wall surrounding the camp. The gap was
left to preserve a poplar tree that dates back to the
time of the war. Tracks in the snow
showed that the sign had been
dragged to a waiting vehicle. An
exact replica of the sign, produced
when the original received
restoration work years ago, was
quickly hung in its place.
Polish police indicated the men
arrested for the crime were not
neo-Nazis but common thieves
with previous police records.
Andrzej Rokita, district police chief in Krakow, the
closest city to Auschwitz said, “We’ll be able to say
later whether the crime was ordered or they acted
on their own initiative.”
Polish inmates made the original sign in the
camp’s iron workshop after the camp was
opened. This was the first major act of vandalism at
the site, which has suffered graffiti including spraypainted swastikas. Other Holocaust sites in
Europe have also suffered neo-Nazi vandalism,
including memorials in Germany, Ukraine, Hungary,
Romania and France.
After a $40,000 reward was posted and 100 tips
received, Polish police arrested five men ranging in
age from 20 to 39 for stealing the 16 foot-long Arbeit
Macht Frei sign that hung over the gates of
Auschwitz. The sign, an icon of the Holocaust, reads
in German, “Work Will Make You Free.”
When the theft was originally reported, Israeli
and Jewish groups feared that the act was politically
motivated. “The theft of the
symbol of Auschwitz was not
merely an act of vandalism, it
was a crime against mankind and
memory,” the American
Gathering of Holocaust
Survivors and their Descendants
said in a statement.
“The theft of such a symbolic
object is an attack on the
memory of the Holocaust, and
an escalation from those elements that would like to
return us to darker days,” said Yad Vashem Chairman
Avner Shalev. “I call on all enlightened forces in the
world who fight against antisemitism, racism,
xenophobia and the hatred of the other, to join together
to combat these trends.”
In Jerusalem, the International Auschwitz
Committee said the theft “deeply unsettles the
survivors. The sign has to be found,” said Noach Flug,
an Auschwitz survivor and president of the committee.
“The slogan and the camp itself will tell what happened
even when we won’t be able to tell anymore.”
Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said he
TOGETHER 4
More information on the criteria for Ghetto
Pension and several current changes is available
on the Claims Conference website at
www.claimscon.org/ghettopension.
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
American Gathering lauds
Czech action against
Holocaust memorial
vandals
By JPOST.COM STAFF
The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust
Survivors and Their Descendants commended the
Czech government recently for the stiff penalties
handed out for vandalizing the Holocaust Memorial
at Terezin.
Miroslave Dano, Libor Mirga and Petr Hricko were
convicted for causing more than $100,000 worth of
damage when they stole 824 bronze plaques from the
site in 2008 and sold them to a scrap dealer. Mirga and
Hricko, who fled to London, were sentenced in absentia
to 4 1/2 and 3 1/2 years in jail respectively, while Dano,
who was in police custody, was sentenced to four years.
“Vandalism against places of Holocaust
martyrdom have become all-too-frequent in Europe
and are especially painful to those who suffered
through the horrors of that time,” said American
Gathering President Sam E. Bloch. “It is reassuring
that authorities in Eastern and Central Europe
recognize the critical importance of punishing those
who would vandalize the sites where thousands upon
thousands were murdered, and desecrate the memory
of the victims of the Holocaust. We are gratified that
neo-Nazis, skinheads and other thugs now know that
their despicable actions have consequences.”
TO ALL SURVIVORS
WHO PREVIOUSLY
APPLIED FOR A
GHETTO PENSION
OR WOULD LIKE
TO APPLY FOR
SUCH A PENSION
NOW:
We, at the New York Legal Assistance
Group (“NYLAG”), have provided advice
and representation to thousands of
survivors and their families since 2000
concerning all Holocaust-related restitution
programs, including the Ghetto Pension
Program. Our legal services are entirely
free-of-charge.
If you or a member of your family applied
for a ghetto pension in the past, and the
application was denied, please contact us
for information. We are eager to answer any
questions regarding recent developments.
If you never applied for a ghetto pension
on your own behalf or on behalf of your late
spouse, please contact us.
We welcome your inquiries, and are
eager to provide advice and representation
free-of-charge. We are the only legal
services organization in New York with the
expertise and experience to do so.
CONTACT: Phyllis Brochstein or Laura
Davis
Phone:
(212) 688-0710
Fax:
(212) 750-0820
January 2010
The Financial Sustainability of Holocaust Museums
by Gal Beckerman
The numbers speak for themselves: There are
now 16 Holocaust museums in the United States, from
Albuquerque, N.M., to Houston, to Richmond, Va.
And these are just the biggest of nearly 150 Holocaust
centers all over the country.
The proliferation of museums detailing the story
of what happened to European Jewry during World
War II has been largely a phenomenon of the 1990s,
part of the general increase in Holocaust awareness
in the culture at large. But it has by no means slowed:
The most recent museum, in Skokie, Ill., opened last
spring, while construction continues on a second Los
Angeles museum, to open in the summer of 2010.
With a substantial, federally-backed national
museum in Washington, critics are increasingly
wondering about the need for so many local museums.
Even more important, the question of whether these
institutions will be able to financially sustain
themselves into the future – given the heavy costs of
maintaining collections, and the dying off of the
Holocaust survivors who founded them – is of great
concern to museum directors.
“We just had a board meeting in December in
New York City, and we
all talked about the
dwindling of funds,”
said Susan Myers,
executive director of
the Holocaust Museum
Houston and vice
president of the
Association
of
H o l o c a u s t
Organizations,
referring to her fellow
museum directors.
“We’re all competing for the same money. It’s an
everyday conversation we’re having.”
Those who defend the existence of the regional
museums do so on the grounds that they serve
populations that cannot visit the nation’s capital.
William Shulman is president of the association,
which was founded in 1985 with 25 members and
now has 282 affiliated Holocaust centers worldwide,
the majority of which are in the United States. He
denied that there are any serious, long-term financial
concerns for these institutions, and emphasized
instead that the museums are playing a critical role in
Holocaust and genocide education.
“The rationale for having them is because most
people don’t get to Washington,” Shulman said.
Even Sara Bloomfield, director of the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum – the institution
that, by most accounts, would have to bear the burden
in the future of caring for the collections of any
museums that can no longer support themselves –
agrees that these local museums are important.
“The national museum is becoming so national
and global in our work that we now are depending on
these smaller, local organizations to be on the ground
everyday in their communities,” Bloomfield said,
“because we can’t be in all 50 states at once.”
The concerns about these institutions fall into two
broad categories. First is the worry that heavy
investment in Holocaust museums and monuments is
taking away funds from other more critical needs in
the community.
“There is a very profound question of how much
of our limited resources we are going to put into that
as opposed to other things,” said Jonathan Tobin,
January 2010
executive editor of Commentary magazine. “This is
a time when Jewish education is going begging, when
Jewish schools are under siege financially, as well
as having the need to maintain basic social services
for the elderly and the poor. These things have to
be taken into consideration. It begs the question of
how many of these institutions do we need in this
country.”
But the even greater worry about these local
institutions – shared by those who run them – is
how to keep them financially viable.
Unlike the national museum in Washington,
which, according to Bloomfield, is almost halfway
toward its goal of raising a
$400 million endowment, the
majority of the regional
museums were started by
survivors, with the goal of
keeping alive the memory of
the Holocaust in their
communities. The generation
that strongly supported them
is beginning to die out. Only
the larger of these museums
have endowments at all, and
then relatively small ones.
In Richmond, the
Virginia Holocaust Museum
was started in 1997 by Jay
Ipson, who was born in
Lithuania and was still a
young boy when he arrived
in the United States as a
survivor. The museum was
housed first in five small
rooms at a local synagogue,
and mostly told the story
of Ipson’s family. In
2000, the State of
Virginia donated a
dilapidated 120,000
square-foot tobacco
warehouse as a new
site. Ipson also managed
to get the backing of
Marcus Weinstein, a real
estate mogul and local
Jewish philanthropist.
According to Ipson, who calls Weinstein his
“angel,” the philanthropist has underwritten the
transformation of the massive warehouse into a
sprawling museum that opened in 2003. It has no
endowment, and Ipson’s hope is that Weinstein’s
promise of supporting the museum in perpetuity
holds true.
“I’ve been told – I haven’t seen the paperwork
– that he left in his will that we should continue to
get those funds at a minimum,” Ipson said.
Weinstein said he would support the museum
as long as there’s funding. “I can’t say what will
happen in a hundred years,” he said. As for his will,
he declined to comment.
Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar who
is the director of the Sigi Ziering Institute at
American Jewish University, is not opposed to the
proliferation of these local Holocaust initiatives and
has even acted as a consultant for many of them.
But he, too, has concerns about the future. “The
generation that would give huge money to create
that is moving on,” Berenbaum said. “The survivor
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
who was 18 when he survived is now 82. The
survivor who was 30 is now 94. That generation is
unfortunately going the way of all flesh, and
therefore the question for every institution is, how
do you create for the future. Endowments in
particular used to look like the safest bet, but these
past years have shown us that they are not such a
secure choice anymore, which is why the presidents
of museum boards are pulling their hair out of their
heads.”
For many Holocaust museum directors across
the country, the solution has been to look outside
the Jewish community for support.
Myers said that 50% of her donors in Houston
are non-Jews. She has also
reached out to such corporate
sponsors as AT&T and
Continental Airlines. The shift
in focus away from a Jewish
audience and donor base has
also affected the content of the
museum, which is evidenced,
Myers pointed out, in its two
current exhibits: one about John
Paul II’s role in Catholic-Jewish
reconciliation, and the other
about Muslims who saved Jews during the
Holocaust.
And still, the building of new museums continues.
The latest is in Los Angeles. In a city that already
has a Holocaust institution in the Museum of
Tolerance, a new 30,000 square-foot building is being
constructed for an older institution, the Los Angeles
Museum of the Holocaust, now housed on the ground
floor of the ORT building, on Wilshire Boulevard.
Mark Rothman, executive director, was
unapologetic about the addition of yet another
museum to the Holocaust landscape. The Museum
of Tolerance, he said,
was more generally
focused on human rights
– “It’s in the name,” he
said – while his museum
more narrowly tells the
story of the Jewish
experience of World War
II.
Rothman
sees
hypocrisy in those who
criticize the building of Holocaust museums while
using the Holocaust to raise funds for other
community needs, including for the local federation.
“As soon as they can stop using the Holocaust in
some way to raise money, I think that at that point
it’s valid to say maybe it’s not reasonable to spend
community resources on museums,” he said.
With a projected endowment of $2 million to $3
million – not yet raised – he, too, sees problems that
his institution might face in the future. But, he added,
they are no different from the challenges that will
confront all institutions of Jewish life.
“In 15 years, I think the questions being raised
about Holocaust institutions are also going to need
to be answered by every Jewish federation in the
country,” Rothman said. “In general, your profile
remains older people who are not going to be with
us at some very near point in the future. That’s the
profile of our donors, and that’s the profile of the
donors for every Jewish organization in Los
Angeles.”
This article originally appeared in The Jewish Daily
Forward; reprinted with permission.
TOGETHER 5
Never Forget: Holding Collaborators Accountable
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Bipartisan legislation reintroduced in the House by Reps. Carolyn Maloney
(D-NY), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Ileana RosLehtinen (R-FL) would hold accountable those railroad
companies who worked with the Nazis during World
War II by making them subject to legal action in U.S.
courts. More than 75,000 Jews were transported
from France to concentration camps by French
railroad companies.
“Almost 70 years after enabling the largest mass
murder of the 20th Century, railroads that transported
tens of thousands to their deaths should finally be
held accountable,” Maloney said. “Nothing will ever
make up for the unthinkable atrocities undertaken by
Nazi Germany and its sympathizers during World War
II, but every bit of justice is important. This bill allows
some measure of closure for those who have suffered
for far too long.”
“Companies that benefited from the deportation
of persons to concentration camps during the
Holocaust must be held accountable for their
despicable actions. This bill will help ensure that
Holocaust survivors and heirs of victims are able to
seek legal redress against those who sought to gain
from the blood of innocent people,” said Ros-Lehtinen.
“The atrocities of the Holocaust would have been
impossible if not for the Nazis’ many willing
accomplices,” said Nadler. “Among those many
accomplices, the French national railway knowingly
transported tens of thousands of Jews and others to
concentration camps during World War II, and, for
this, it has yet to be held accountable. This legislation
would ensure that survivors of the Holocaust can
confront the railway and hold it accountable for its
terrible history.”
The bill provides plaintiffs the right to seek
damages against the French National Railway
(Société Nationale Des Chemins De Fer Francais SNCF) in Federal Court for its transportation of
French and other Jews to Auschwitz as well as its
supply of personnel to facilitate the transportation and
the assessed charges per person. The French
Government claims immunity from legal action due
to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, yet the FSIA
was passed 30 years after the action causing the
damages for which the plaintiffs seek. The bill allows
the plaintiffs to sue regardless of the strictures of the
FSIA.
For complete bill text, visit http://
maloney.house.gov/documents/foreign/israel/100709
SNCF 111th Congress.pdf
Demjanjuk goes on trial in Germany
John Demjanjuk, 88, who worked and lived in Cleveland, Ohio for 50 years, and who was tried in Israel as
a Nazi war criminal, is now on trial in Munich for the murder of 27,900 Jews. He will probably be the last Nazi
war criminal, and the lowest ranking, brought to trial. Claiming to be a Red Army soldier captured by the Nazis
and turned, he became a volunteer in the SS, and is accused of shepherding the Jews into the gas chambers
of Sobibor. He denies the charges, and is facing a sentence of 15 years in prison.
In 1986, the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, headed by a son of survivors, Eli
Rosenbaum, deported Demjanjuk to Israel. He was accused of being a notorious guard known as Ivan the
Terrible at the Treblinka death camp. Sentenced to death 1988 and after several years in prison the Israeli
Supreme Court overturned Demjanjuk’s convictionafter a judge decided that there was reasonable doubt.
Demjanjuk returned to the US, and then, in 2001, was accused the murders in Sobibor. Germany agreed to put
him on trial in April 2009.
His lawyer claims that since Demjanjuk is a Ukrainian, he is receiving harsher treatment than a Germanborn Nazi would have gotten. “How can you say that those who gave the orders were innocent ...and the one
who received the orders is guilty?” Mr. Busch asked the court. “There is a moral and legal double standard
being applied today.”
He also put the defendant “on the same level” as Holocaust victims, because his client was a “forced
laborer.” This assertion was greeted with anger by Holocaust survivors.
On November 30, Demjanjuk was brought into court on a stretcher, and is said to be terminally ill. Doctors
have limited the trial to two 90-minute sessions a day.
Demjanjuk claims he is a victim of mistaken identity. He said that after his capture he was forced to fight
against the Soviets as they approached Berlin in World War II’s final months, but one eyewitness, Alex
Nagorny, who himself may be guilty of war crimes in Treblinka, will testify on behalf of the state.
R
E
G
I
S
T
R
Y
The Survivors Registry maintains the single most comprehensive listing
of Holocaust survivors in the world. The Registry has existed for over two
decades and currently contains over 195,000 names of survivors and their
spouses and descendants (including children, their spouses, and
grandchildren).
Visitors to the Registry’s public area at the Holocaust Museum in
Washington, D.C. can access basic information about survivors and their
family members via touch-screen computers. This information is based on
registration forms submitted by survivors and their relatives. The Registry
is an invaluable resource for survivors still searching for family and friends,
as well as for historians and genealogists.
Further information can be found at http://www.ushmm.org/
remembrance/registry
Survivors Registry
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
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TOGETHER 6
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H OLOCAUST DENIER
GERMAN COURT
FINED BY
By JAMIE ROMM, JPOST.COM
While Jewish groups are upset over Pope Benedict
XVI’s efforts to reach out to a breakaway Catholic
group that includes a Holocaust-denier, Rabbi David
Rosen of the American Jewish Committee recently
announced he would be “very surprised” if the group
were readmitted to the Catholic Church.
The Vatican held talks recently with a delegation
from the Society of St. Pius X, that it said were held
in a “cordial, respectful and constructive climate” and
would continue frequently over the coming months.
One of the main sticking points to allowing the
society back in to the church stems from former
excommunicated British Bishop Richard Williamson’s
comments regarding the Holocaust.
Williamson was shown on Swedish state television
in January saying historical evidence “is hugely against
six million Jews having been deliberately gassed”
during World War II. Williamson was recently fined
•120,000 by a German court for the remarks. He
received a penal order to pay the fine for inciting
racial hatred.
Rosen, director of the AJC’s Department for
Interreligious Affairs, said that Williamson’s
statements on the Holocaust lead him to believe that
the society will not be let back into thechurch.
“Now they are truly under the magnifying glass,”
Rosen said. “In the past they may have been able to
slip under the ‘door,’ but after his [Williamson’s]
comments, it won’t be so easy to slip in.”
The society, founded in 1969 by the late
ultraconservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, split
from Rome over the modernizing reforms of the
Second Vatican Council, particularly its outreach to
Jews and to non-Catholic Christians. Vatican II also
allowed for the celebration of mass in the vernacular,
rather than in Latin.
In 1988, the Vatican excommunicated Lefebvre
and four of his bishops, including Williamson, after
Lefebvre consecrated them without papal consent.
In 2007, Benedict relaxed restrictions on
celebrating the old Latin Mass, which the
traditionalists had demanded. In January, he accepted
another one of their demands by approving a decree
lifting the bishops’ excommunication.
The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust
Survivors and Their Descendants issued a statement
calling on Benedict to “exhibit great caution in the
Vatican discussions with Society of Saint Pius X—so
as not to touch on the dignity of the Jewish people or
to trivialize the memory of the victims of the Shoah.
“The crisis in Jewish-Catholic relations sparked
by the Vatican’s earlier overtures to the Holocaust
denier Richard Williamson must not be repeated,”
the statement said. “But the problematic nature of
Society of Saint Pius X goes beyond Bishop
Williamson and centers on the tenuous state of
Catholic-Jewish relations before Vatican II.”
For Jews and the vast majority of Catholics, there
can be no compromise on the society’s acceptance,
the group concluded.
The Vatican has set out conditions for Williamson
to be fully brought back in, saying he must “absolutely
and unequivocally” distance himself from his
Holocaust remarks if he ever wants to again be a
prelate in the church.
Williamson has apologized for embarrassing the
pope, but hasn’t publicly repudiated his views.
January 2010
Gretel Bergmann: A Leap into History
Gretel Bergmann, also known as Margaret
Bergmann-Lambert (born 12 April 1914) is a German
Jewish athlete who competed as a high jumper during
the 1930s.
Born in Laupheim, Germany, to Jewish parents,
she began her career in athletics in Laupheim. In
1930 she joined Ulmer FV
1894, achieving a German
record in high jumping in
1931 when, during the South
German Championships, she
crossed 1.51 metres.
After the Nazis’
accession to power on 30
January 1933, she was
expelled from the club for
being Jewish. That April, her
parents sent her to the
United Kingdom, where in 1934 she took part in the
British Championships and won the high jump by
crossing 1.55 metres.
The German government wanted her to return
to Germany in order to help portray the nation as a
liberal-minded, tolerant country. Members of her
family, who had stayed behind, were threatened with
reprisals if she did not return. She complied and
returned to Germany, where she was allowed to
prepare for the 1936 Olympic Games. She won the
Württembergian Championships in the high jump
in 1935. On 30 June, 1936, one month prior to the
opening of the Olympic Games, she tied the
German record by crossing 1.60 metres. However,
two weeks before the opening of the Olympics,
she received a letter from the German sport
authorities that she would be withdrawn from the
national team because her performance was not
sufficient to compete on an international level.
Instead, she was
replaced by high
jumper
(and
roommate) Dora
Ratjen, who was
later revealed to
be a man.
In 1937, Bergmann emigrated to
the U.S., eventually
settling in New York, where she
made a living doing casual work.
That year, she married Bruno Lambert, a doctor,
whom she aided in his leaving of Germany through
financial support, calling herself from then on
Margaret Bergmann-Lambert.
Also that year, she managed to win the U.S.
women’s high jump and shotput championships, and
in 1938 she repeated the feat by again winning the
high jump.
With the beginning of World War II in
September 1939, her career in sports ended.
She received United States citizenship in 1942.
In August 1995, a sport complex in BerlinWilmersdorf was named after her on the instigation
30 years later, Holocaust Center rededicated at Teaneck High
by JEANETTE FRIEDMAN, Jewish Standard
The 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht was a “back to
school” night of sorts. Teaneck, NJ residents, high
school faculty members, students, and alumni gathered
at Teaneck High School for the rededication of New
Jersey’s first Holocaust Center, established in 1975
by history teacher and Holocaust education pioneer
Ed Reynolds. Reynolds, who marveled at the fact
that he hadn’t walked “these halls” for 17 years, was
the keynote speaker. Addressing some 60 people, he
described the long educational journey that began with
a telephone call, in 1975, from the Anti-Defamation
League in New York. Reynolds was asked if he and
teachers Richard Flaim, Ken Turburtini, and Harry
Furman in Vineland would be interested in designing
a curriculum for a course or unit to teach the
Holocaust in New Jersey public schools.
At that time, history textbooks, if they covered
the Holocaust at all (and most did not), limited
coverage to approximately one paragraph. But there
was a need to address the subject in the classroom,
at a time when antisemitism and Holocaust denial
were beginning to seep through the cracks of
America’s civilized veneer.
Some parts of the journey weren’t pretty. When
they trained other teachers, Reynolds said, the
educators were accused by many of their colleagues
of bringing a Jewish subject, written by Jews for Jews,
into the public schools. At one National Education
Association meeting, hearing this accusation for the
umpteenth time, Reynolds told the teachers that a
Catholic, a Mormon, a Presbyterian deacon, and a
Jewish son of Holocaust survivors were writing and
implementing this innovative program. Parts of the
curriculum were also challenged by Holocaust
survivors and their descendants as being inappropriate.
It was definitely an uphill battle, but the hearts and
minds at Teaneck High had been won from the outset.
As part of that project, Reynolds created a
January 2010
Holocaust Center on the third floor of the school as a
resource for students and faculty and brought in
Holocaust survivors to tell their stories. As the first
of its kind in New Jersey, it predated the creation of
the three major Holocaust museums in the United
States. Today, there are approximately 400 such
centers in New Jersey schools.
Now, 34 years after it all began, the Teaneck
High Holocaust Center has come back to life. A small
neglected room off to the side of the Student Center
has been refurbished and restocked with resource
At the rededication
of the Holocaust
Center at Teaneck
High School are (lr) Ed Reynolds,
Yona
McGraw,
Linda Kraar, and
Michal Krauthamer.
materials, including copies of the original TeaneckVineland curriculum and many posters. It is decorated
with a mural by student Michal Krauthamer. Principal
Angela Davis, faculty members Goldie Minkowitz —
who emceed the program — and Al Kirschman, as
well as a long list of others on staff, encouraged
students Sharon Leonor, Samara Rosner, and Yael
Osman and others who one year ago decided to
clean up the room and make the center viable once
more. David Bicofsky, spokesman for the school
district, summed it up this way: “Our Holocaust
Center is much more than a classroom for all our
students. It is a living memorial and testament to
the triumph of the human condition; of light over
darkness; of knowledge over ignorance and of life
over death.” The students behind the project, he
added, were to be highly commended for their
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
of the German National Sports Federation.
Bergmann, who had vowed never to set foot on
German soil again, did not attend the festivities.
In 1996, she was admitted to the National
Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in the United States.
In 1999, she received the Georg von Opel-Preis
for achievements in the sphere of sports and society
without the prospect of
material gains.
In Laupheim, her
birthplace, a stadium
was named after her in
1999. Bergmann attended the dedication
ceremony in person
even though, initially,
she did not want to
participate “but when I was told that they were
naming the facilities for me so that when young
people ask, ‘Who was Gretel Bergmann?’ they will
be told my story, and the story of those times. I
felt it was important to remember, and so I agreed
to return to the place I swore I’d never go again.
But I had stopped speaking German and didn’t even
try when I was there. They provided a translator.”[1]
On November 23, 2009 her German national
record (1.60m) from 1936 was finally acknowledged.
Margaret Bergmann Lambert’s memoirs, By Leaps
and Bounds, was published in 2005 by the
Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project and the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Reprinted from Wikipedia
efforts.
Alumnus Carol Faber, a daughter of survivors
whose father died recently, was there. She no longer
lives in Teaneck, but said, “I always come to
Kristallnacht commemorations here when they have
them.” She found the rededication particularly
poignant.
Alumnus Hank London was also there. He had
been a student determined to create a Jewish Studies
course way back, when Reynolds was chairman of
the history department. He had butted heads with
the board of education and Reynolds, who was
originally against the idea, for two years before the
course became a reality. Now he was happy to see
the school hadn’t forgotten its pioneers.
Teaneck resident Linda Kraar read from Album
of My Life, the posthumously published memoir of
her mother, Ann Szedlecki, a survivor of
concentration camps and Siberia. Kraar’s daughter,
Yona McGraw, sang an original composition about
the importance of remembering the past for the sake
of the future.
Al Kirschman, a Teaneck H.S. faculty member
for more than 35 years whose father served in
Patton’s Third Army, liberating Buchenwald, recalled
that his father taught him to remember the
photographs he had taken in the camps. Kirschman
said his parents, safe in America, lost all their
relatives in Europe, except for one survivor on each
side.
The Teaneck-Vineland curriculum project led
to the creation of Gov. Thomas Kean’s Holocaust
Education Council, which evolved into today’s
Holocaust Commission. The thin book has turned
into a massive two-volume resource and curriculum
guide for teachers around the state. Working with
Matthew Feldman, a Teaneck resident who had been
president of the state Senate, the teachers and their
supporters saw to it that Holocaust education
became mandatory in New Jersey, setting an
example for the rest of the United States.
TOGETHER 7
Chanukah miracles all
around
New View of the State
Department’s Shameful Past
By YUVAL AZOULAY, Haaretz
by GREGORY J. WALLANCE, The Jewish Press
Recently, the Romanian government unveiled a long
overdue memorial to the 300,000 Romanian Jews and
Roma who perished in World War II at the hands of
their own government and the Nazis. Unfortunately,
the U.S. State Department, whose wartime diplomats
doomed tens of thousands of the Romanian Jews
commemorated by the memorial, has yet to
acknowledge its own role in the Romanian Holocaust.
During the war, the Romanian government
forced hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jewish
men, women and children out of their homes and
made them march hundreds of miles to the killing
fields of Transnistria, where the survivors were
expected to die from cold, disease or starvation. A
gift from Hitler to his Romanian ally, Transnistria was
a grotesque chunk of land carved out of the Nazioccupied Ukraine.
Romania turned it into the world’s largest
concentration camp. In one Transnistrian town, tens
of thousands of the deported Jews had to live in just
a few hundred small houses made of clay, many in
ruins from bombing and shelling.
“As to the Jews,” the Romanian leader, Marshal
Ion Antonescu, told officials of his government, “I have
taken measures to remove them entirely once and for
all from these regions [of Romania]. If I do not purify
the Romanian nation, then I have achieved nothing.”
In early 1943, the German army and its allies
suffered a devastating defeat at the battle of
Stalingrad. The Romanian army alone had 160,000
casualties. Antonescu, no longer confident about the
outcome of the war and seeking to ease harsh peace
terms, offered to allow the surviving Transnistrian
Jews to emigrate to Palestine (after the war the
Russians executed him anyway). The Romanian
government requested $50 per Jew as a bribe.
By mid-1943, Jewish groups in the United
States and Switzerland had put together an
elaborate rescue plan, including escrowing the
bribe monies in blocked Swiss bank accounts, and
managed to get it before FDR.
”This is a very fair proposal,” FDR told his
secretary of the treasury, who then issued the
necessary license for the Jewish groups to transfer
private funds for the rescue. Roosevelt assured them
that “the matter is now awaiting a further exchange
of cables between the State Department and our
mission in Bern regarding some of the details.”
But very few Jews, blacks or women served in
the wartime State Department and the few who did
were largely relegated to backwater posts. The State
Department bureaucracy was run by a cadre of
diplomats who were
callous toward Jewish
suffering far beyond even
the antisemitic norms of
the era. Their elite,
cloistered upbringings
had cut them off from the
ethnically divergent
American mainstream
and imbued them with a
deep-rooted sense of
Anglo-Saxon superiority,
Breckinridge Long,
a “don’t rock the boat”
Assistant Secretary of
mentality, and disdain State with jurisdiction
for Jews and other
over immigration and
minorities.
refugee issues during
Whatever nerves
World War II.
More than 55
million colorful
Chanukah candles
were made by the
Menorah Candle
Company factory in
Sderot in the past
two months. Most
are sold in Israel, but
many are shipped abroad, to Europe, Australia and the
United States. The owner of the company, 82-yearold Holocaust survivor Yisrael Sheiner, says he “can’t
complain.” Not about the distance between Sderot and
Tel Aviv, about the Qassam rockets, or about the global
economic crisis.
He seems to take it all this with a good measure
of resignation—what’s a Qassam to someone who
spent most of World War Two II the Polish woods,
hiding with his family from Nazi soldiers? Sheiner
sees it as symbolic that the most-bombarded city in
Israel is producing millions of candles that stand for
Jewish heroism and resilience. Sheiner’s own story
and that of his factory and its workers both have
their share of determination, faith and miracles.
Evidence of one such miracle can be found in
the scarred asphalt of the factory’s loading yard.
Two years ago, when “cast lead” referred only to
a Chanukah dreidel, or spinning top, a Qassam
rocket hit the plant. It missed the thin aluminum
roof of the factory and landed in the yard. The
blast sent doors flying off their hinges and blew
out the factory windows. The workers, who were
inside packing the candle cartons, were sure it was
the end. “The explosion was very powerful, and
we all ran breathless for the bomb shelter,” relates
Natasha Kosichevsky, 58, who has worked in the
plant for 14 of the 15 years she has lived in Israel.
“We didn’t go on working that day, we all went to
get medical checkups. All the workers who used
to ignore the alarms and stay out of the shelter
realized we were all a target too, and that our very
survival was a miracle,” Kosichevsky said.
“But I’d rather be here with my friends even
during the worst of it,” she adds. “We had work to
do and orders to ship, and besides, there’s nothing
worse than sitting at home on your own in times
like these.”
Sheiner runs the factory from his office in south
Tel Aviv, but there’s hardly a candle that leaves
Menora without Seiner making sure it will last and
keep burning. “He’s a world expert on candlemaking,” factory manager Nir Ziv says. “He can
take one look at a candle and tell you how long it
will last and the quality of the flame.”
“It was the first thing I did when I came to
Israel—buy a candle factory,” Sheiner says. “It’s
an act of closure for me. All I wanted was a candle
factory in Israel. I wanted to give people work
more than I wanted to make money.”
The closure Sheiner speaks of refers to his own
miraculous story. When he was 11 he, his parents
and his three siblings escaped from the Polish town
of Pinczow into the woods, fleeing the Nazi
occupiers. Hanukkah came as they were on the
run. Seiner wanted to light the traditional hanukkiah.
“I drew the chanukiah I remembered from home,
took a piece of wood and carved it out,” he says.
“We celebrated Chanukah in some bunker in the
middle of the woods, but the important thing is that
we all survived.”
TOGETHER 8
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transmit normal human empathy had simply atrophied
in these officials. And, like all good bureaucrats, as
one Washington journalist observed, these diplomats
were “masters of the negative, the gentle objection,
the postponement, the misplaced paper, the need
for further consideration.”
The diplomats argued that the British would never
permit the Transnistrian Jews, whom they termed
“enemy aliens,” to emigrate to Palestine and therefore
there was no place to put the dying Jews. After the
American mission in Switzerland reported to the State
Department on the Jewish massacres in Europe and
on the plight of the Transnistrian Jews—“60,000 had
already died and 70,000 were starving...living conditions
indescribable”—the State Department dispatched a
cable directing the mission to stop sending any reports
about the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews, told inquiring
U.S. senators that there was no foundation to the
Romanian offer, and refused even to forward the
Treasury Department license to the Jewish groups.
In late 1943, young, middle-class Christian
lawyers at the Treasury Department, tough-minded
bureaucratic infighters dedicated to the defeat of
Nazi Germany, discovered the State Department’s
sabotage of the Transnistrian rescue and cover-up
of the Nazi extermination plan. They described the
State Department officials as “an underground
movement to let the Jews be killed,” “vicious men”
who were “accomplices of Hitler,” and “war
criminals in every sense of the term.”
In memoranda, the young lawyers explicitly
accused the State Department of “willful attempts
to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews
from Hitler,” effectively charging their own
government with complicity in genocide.
Their morally redeeming outrage (and their direct
threat to go public) eventually forced FDR to take
refugee and rescue affairs away from the State
Department. The new rescue agency, the War
Refugee Board, which is generally credited with
saving 200,000 Jewish lives in occupied Europe, did
help to get thousands of Jews out of Transnistria.
Had the U.S. acted earlier, tens of thousands more
Romanian Jews would have survived.
Short of defeating Nazi Germany, the U.S. had
no means to rescue most of the Jews who ultimately
perished in concentration camps such as
Auschwitz. But that was not true of the
Transnistrian Jews and therefore their plight
became a morally defining moment. The State
Department should acknowledge its shameful past
by creating its own memorial to the Romanian
Holocaust victims. The memorial would not simply
be an act of expiation, but rather a permanent
reminder that, as the Talmudic saying goes, “To
save one life is as if you have saved the world.”
Gregory J. Wallance, a lawyer and the author of Two Men
Before the Storm, about the Dred Scott case, is the author of the
forthcoming America’s Soul in the Balance, about the State
Department’s response to the Holocaust.(Reprinted with
permission.)
Sheerit Hapletah of
Metropolitan Chicago
64th Annual Memorial Service
Sheerit Hapletah of Metropolitan Chicago, the
umbrella organization for Chicago-area Holocaust survivor groups, announces its 64th Annual Collective Memorial Service to be held
Sunday, April 11, 2010 at 1:30 p.m. at the
Skokie Valley Agudath Jacob Synagogue,
8825 East Prairie Road, Skokie, IL.
January 2010
KRISTALLNACHT COMMEMORATED AT UN
UNITED NATIONS, NY—In observance of the
anniversary of the Kristallnacht Pogrom of 9
November 1938, in Germany and Austria, the United
Nations Outreach Programme organized the
screening of the documentary film, As Seen through
These Eyes by Los Angeles 2G Hilary Helstein, at
United Nations headquarters in New York City. A
conversation with Helstein, the film’s director,
producer, and writer, followed the screening, and
focused on learning about the Holocaust through art.
More than 200 people, including Holocaust survivors
and their descendants, as well as diplomats and others
attended the event.
On that same night, the UN Department of Public
Information launched The Holocaust and the United
Nations Discussion Papers Journal, a publication
filled with articles by nine scholars of Holocaust and
Genocide Studies from around the world. The event
was opened with remarks from Under-SecretaryGeneral Kiyo Akasaka and was organized by
Kimberly Mann.
Filmmaker Helstein travelled the world for more
than 12 years, looking for artists who survived the
Holocaust to speak to, including Nazi-hunter Simon
Wiesenthal. The film uses their art work and music in
an attempt to combat prejudice, bigotry and intolerance.
Each conversation she had with the artists
brought with it the realization that every painting or
sketch on a torn scrap of paper is a Holocaust diary.
As shown in the movie, their artistic words and images
are profoundly moving, and communicate the horror,
while also expressing hope.
The film is narrated by Maya Angelou and
produced in association with Sundance Channel. It is
hoped that the film will become required viewing in
primary art survey courses at universities around the
world.
Helstein began her career at
Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the
Shoah Visual History Foundation,
where she directed and produced over
200 segments and interviewed many
prominent Holocaust survivors, military
liberators and rescuers. She also
traveled to remote areas to interview
survivors with unique experiences,
including several members of the
Varian Fry rescue mission, Chief of
Staff of the US Army, and a “Mengele
twin.”
As Executive Director of the
Los Angeles Film Festi-val, for four
years, Hilary has been single-handedly producing
a week-long event featuring the newest American
and international films that celebrate the diversity
of the Jewish culture. Her role includes: fundraising
and sponsorship, programming, developing
partnerships with organizations (i.e., the ADL,
Jewish World Watch and JDate), consulates and
synagogues throughout the city, organizing events
and venues, creating the festival brochure and
program guide, marketing and advertising; and
talent coordination.
In 2005, Hilary she directed a film about Rabbi
Holocaust Survivor Heirs
Sue for Van Gogh Drawing
Maries de la
Mer,” and another, “Garden of
Flowers.”
Eventually,
she showed about
a half dozen of
Van
Gogh’s
works in her
“Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer”
adopted home
city of Berlin. In 1906, she undertook the first
translation of his letters into German, and published
articles on his work in Kunst & Kunstler, a German
art journal.
But that came when the Nazis enacted laws
barring “non-Aryans” from employment. Mauthner
and her family were dispossessed of almost all their
property, and their livelihoods.
To survive and finance the flight from Germany,
Orkin said Mauthner sold her home, its furnishings
and important artworks in her collection at bargain
basement prices. Orkin says Mauthner asked for
12,500 Swiss francs for the drawing, but accepted a
counteroffer of 10,000 Swiss francs.
Reinhart donated his collection of 18th to 20th
century European art to the city of Winterthur,
Switzerland, in 1940. Most of his collection has been
displayed at the defendant Museum Oskar Reinhart
am Stadtgarten since 1951. He bequeathed the rest
of his collection to the Switzerland in 1958. That
collection was opened to the public in 1970.
In May 2007, a U.S. Appeals Court upheld a
ruling that the statute of limitations had expired for
Orkin in his claim against Elizabeth Taylor, seeking
the return Van Gogh’s “Vue de l’Asile et de la
Chapelle de Saint-Remy,” then valued at more than
$10 million.
In that case, filed in 2005, Orkin claimed that the
By DAN MCCUE, Courthouse News
MANHATTAN (CN) - A Canadian attorney and his
family sued the Swiss government and a prominent
Swiss museum for a Vincent Van Gogh pen-and-ink
drawing they say their great-grandmother sold under
duress as her family tried to flee the Nazis in their
native Germany.
Andrew Orkin, of Ontario, claims Oskar Reinhart,
the Swiss art collector who bought the drawing and
bequeathed it to the Museum Oskar Reinhart am
Stadtgarten, took advantage of Margarethe
Mauthner’s dire circumstances and bought the
drawing for considerably less than its market value.
To bolster his complaint in Manhattan Federal
Court, Orkin cited precedents set by other museums,
and the findings of the Swiss Federal Council on Naziera Activities and Dealings, a government commission
which concluded that the circumstances surrounding
Reinhart’s purchase of the drawing were “morally
questionable.”
Orkin, who unsuccessfully sued the actress
Elizabeth Taylor in 2005 for return of a Van Gogh oil
painting believed to have been plundered by the Nazis
during World War II, wants the drawing declared a
“flight asset,” which never legitimately passed from
Mauthner to Reinhart. Therefore, Orkin says,
Mauthner’s heirs should get it back or be compensated
at its current $5 million market value.
The survivors include Orkin, his two siblings and
two maternal cousins.
The complaint describes Mauthner, a Jew, as a
pioneer collector of avant-garde art in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. She acquired numerous works
by Van Gogh after his death in 1890, including the 1888
drawing that is the focus of this action, “Les Saintes-
January 2010
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Harold M. Schulweis, the co-founder of The Jewish
Foundation of the Righteous. It premiered at a special
event for an audience of over 1200 people including
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and important members
of the clergy, including Rabbi Harold Kushner and
Cardinal Mahoney.
In 2004, she curated an exhibition of paintings,
Samuel Bak: Between Worlds on
the surrealist for the Finegood Art
Gallery and before that co-curated
the exhibit, Memory and Meaning:
the Holocaust Through the Eyes of
the Artist, for the Jewish
Federation’s Los Angeles Museum
of the Holocaust.
As Helstein herself notes, these
artists, some of whom passed on
before the film was completed, have
given us something that history
couldn’t—a journal of the Holocaust
as seen through their eyes, the eyes
of people who by the very act of
creating, rebelled and risked their lives by doing what
they were forbidden to do.
The film will be screened in Miami at the Cosford
Cinema beginning December 18 and will also be
shown in an exclusive event at the United Nations in
Vienna, Austria on January 27 as part of the
international Holocaust Remembrance Program. It
will also show at the Port Washington (NY) Library
in conjunction with Community Synagogue on
January 31 for Holocaust Remembrance.
actress, who bought the painting in 1963 at a Sotheby’s
auction, failed to examine papers that detailed the
painting’s provenance.
But the appeals court ruled in 2007 that Orkin
and his family did not have the right to sue for the
return of confiscated property. The U.S. Supreme
Court declined to hear the case.
Afterward, Orkin said his family was proud to
have brought the Holocaust-related art claim. “We
anticipated from the outset it would be a long and
tough case, and were not mistaken,” Orkin wrote.
“Our claim, like thousands of others in recent years,
was prompted by the US 1998 Holocaust Victims
Redress Act and related U.S. laws, which were
premised on the necessary setting-aside of commongarden statutes of limitations.”
Orkin claimed that the “knee-jerk application ...
of the statute of limitations does not disprove the
fundamental legitimacy of our claim against Ms. Taylor.
We have now established — at least in California and
with respect to Ms. Taylor — that these Holocaust
‘redress’ laws were an empty promise.
“We look forward to a day when the fruits of
genocide-related ‘thefticide’ are restored to their
rightful owners without the unjust application of
technical defenses,” he wrote.
Orkin’ s attorney, Richard Altman said the facts
of the case and the fact standards in applied in case
against a private person are different that those against
a foreign government, markedly distinguish the current
case against the Liz Taylor action. Moreover, New
York law is much more favorable to the recovery of
stolen property such as Nazi-era artworks that
California, which is as it should be, Altman said.
In the new case, Orkin asserts claims for
recovery of chattel, rescission and conversion, and
seeks damages for unjust enrichment and violation
of international law.
TOGETHER 9
By Working Together We Can Accomplish Miracles
By GLORIA JACARUSO
Among the most popular features of Together are
Allgenerations’ SEARCHES which are published in
every issue and on the American Gathering’s web
site. These SEARCHES seek to find information
and locate family members and friends of
Holocaust survivors whose fate has not been
determined since the horrendous years of World
War II. Some were last seen in a ghetto or camp,
others at the moment of liberation. Often, they are
vague memories from childhood days, a name or
part of a name, mostly with only sketchy additional
information, if that.
These often moving and always fascinating
searches are the product of Washington, D.C. based
Serena Woolrich, née Wolvovits, the daughter of a
Hungarian Holocaust survivor.
Serena is the founder and
president of Allgenerations, Inc.,
a 501(c) (3) not-for-profit
corporation.
Allgenerations, a unique email Network composed primarily
of Holocaust Survivors, their
children (2g’s) and grandchildren
(3g’s)—in Serena’s words, it
embraces “all the generations”—
is
an
educational
and
informational resource whose
purpose is to disseminate and
share information about the
Holocaust and Israel, related
issues and events, and to keep the
unique community of survivors
and their descendants informed
and connected. Beside Serena,
its three-member Board of
Directors, includes Audrey Kirzner Syatt, VicePresident, a 2g and attorney, in Boston,
Massachusetts; and Ashley Taubman, Secretary, a
3g and graduate student at Columbia, in New York,
New York.
Allgenerations’ membership also includes
educators, historians, Holocaust centers, museums
and related organizations, social service
agencies, colleges and universities, students
from elementary school to graduate school, along with
authors, filmmakers, genealogists, and other individuals
and institutions interested in the Holocaust and its
aftermath.
Serena is Allgenerations’ hub, receiving a steady
stream of inquiries on a wide range of Holocaust-
related issues which she then disseminates to the
group’s membership via e-mails and e-letters.
According to Serena among the most important
and rewarding services that Allgenerations provides
are the SEARCHES, a compilation of
inquiries received from members about missing
relatives and friends., sent out in e-Letters to
Allgenerations’ international membership. “By
working with the American Gathering, which
publishes the SEARCHES in Together and on its
website,” she explains, “we have been able to
increase the dissemination of the SEARCHES to
Together’s readership, thereby greatly increasing the
number of possible responses.”
Serena told me of one ”SEARCH” she received
where a 2g in Michigan, was
looking for anyone who might
have remembered her father
from the concentration camps
or a post-war Displaced Persons
camp. A survivor in Melbourne,
Australia responded that he had
known her father in the Radom
ghetto and in Dachau and sent
her a photograph of her father
and his brother, in their
concentration camp uniforms.
Another successful SEARCH
was when a survivor in West
Hartford, Connecticut sent an
inquiry to Allgenerations seeking
her elementary school classmate
from Vilna, Lithuania. This
SEARCH was published in
Together, and a survivor living
in Florida read the SEARCH,
and saw that the person sought was his brother.
He called his brother in Israel and told him that
someone in the United States was looking for him.
After several e-mails and phone calls a connection
was made after 50 years!
Serena is retired from the FDIC and lives in
Washington, D.C. Born in 1947 in Brooklyn, New
York and raised in West Hempstead, New York, over
the last 30 or so years Serena has participated in
Second Generation groups in both Israel (Beer Sheva
and Netanya) and in the U.S. (Fort Lauderdale,
Atlanta, Hartford, Connecticut, and Boston). She has
been the president and board member of several of
these 2g groups, and has served on local and state
committees for Yom HaShoah commemorations.
Israeli Judges slam
survivor benefit law as
unclear
“We must admit: The law does not create a
practical way for Holocaust survivors, their
representatives or judicial panels to determine
eligibility in a simple, easy, short and fast process.”
The law was intended to provide a monthly stipend
and other benefits to former concentration camp, work
camp and ghetto survivors who do not receive any
such support from Israel, Germany or any other
country.
The law says that the people eligible for benefits
are those who received a one-time payment from
Germany under the agreement with the Conference
on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or
received compensation from certain other German
and Austrian funds.
The court criticized the Knesset’s decision to refer
to criteria set by foreign organizations.
“It is not even a reference to a foreign law. It is
By OFRA EDELMAN, Haaretz
The 2007 Holocaust survivor benefit law is
unclear, making it difficult for survivors to know
whether they are entitled to state support, the Tel Aviv
Magistrate’s court stated recently, in its role as the
appeals panel under the Disabled Victims of Nazi
Persecution Law. This was the first decision regarding
the law and the rights it grants survivors.
“The vision of those who drafted the benefits law
was that eligibility would be determined by a simple,
easy, short and fast process...without the need for
complicated, drawn-out bureaucracy and lawyers,”
the judges wrote.
TOGETHER 10
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Serena was an interviewer for Steven Spielberg’s
Shoah Foun-dation.
The membership of Allgenerations has grown
tremendously, from the original 30 members to
almost 1,700, and mainly accomplished by “wordof-mouth,” members’ recommendations, professional
referrals and referrals from Holocaust related
museums and organizations, and direct requests from
people who have heard of them and what they do.
Allgenerations provides educational tools
and research resources which are utilized by
educators, historians, students at all grade levels,
authors, and others. Allgenerations also assists with
school projects, facilitates contacting of Survivors or
their descendants for interviews, and obtaining
speakers. It also keeps its members updated about
Holocaust related events, seminars, educational trips,
books and documentaries.
Allgenerations’ members are deeply appreciative
of Serena’s efforts. According to one 2g from
Sacramento, California, “Almost as soon as I got
online, Serena connected me with a dear man across
the country who was one of the few survivors from
my mother’s shtetl in Poland. He wrote me and sent
me pictures. It was the first time in 65 years we found
out what had happened to everyone my mother grew
up with.”
And according to another 2G from Brisbane,
Australia, “Apart from being an amazing resource –
[Allgenerations] is also a surrogate extended family
and makes those of us so geographically far apart
feel connected to this global community of those
affected by the Holocaust.”
Serena said that by working together,
Allgenerations and Together have been remarkably
effective in finding information and locating friends
and relatives of Survivors who have been sought. And
with a rapidly growing membership, and exponentially
a growing number of SEARCHES, Allgenerations is
pleased to be expanding its outreach through
Together.
Allgenerations has become a global resource for
information about the Holocaust. Serena said that as
the organization continues to grow, it is constantly
developing new projects and initiatives. Serena hopes
to seek new avenues of funding to continue with its
efforts and plans for future endeavors, and seeks new
forums to display Allgenerations’ SEARCHES. “My
reason for founding Allgenerations was to provide a
clearinghouse for Holocaust information for our
members, and to educate and promote tolerance and
understanding, through awareness and knowledge. I
am convinced that by working together, we can
accomplish miracles.”
Serena can be reached: [email protected]
even worse, it is a reference to an administrative
decision by foreign statutory bodies and foreign
governments, which were not published openly and
officially,” said the judges.
The court quoted a meeting of the Knesset
Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora
Affairs, where representatives of the Justice and
Finance ministries said the process was intended to
make it easier for survivors. But despite the good
intentions, in practice there is no way to appeal to
any body or receive information on whether a specific
camp or ghetto is recognized, said the judges.
The court also attempted to receive such
information itself, as a note to the law says the
agreements involved have been deposited with the
Finance Ministry, but it turned out not to be so simple.
“The German reparations law is a thick book
cont’d on p. 11
January 2010
90-Year-Old Charged in Nazi
Massacre
By DAVID RISING, AP
BERLIN — A former SS sergeant who worked unnoticed for decades as a train-station manager was
charged with 58 counts of murder recently after a
student doing undergraduate research uncovered his
alleged involvement in a massacre of Jewish forced
laborers.
University of Vienna student Andreas Forster
was working on a project about the slaying in a forest
near the Austrian village of Deutsch Schuetzen when
he stumbled across Adolf Storms’ name in witness
testimony. Forster then obtained files from federal
archives in Berlin that enabled him to link the former
sergeant to the massacre, his professor Walter
Manoschek told The Associated Press.
Manoschek visited Storms, 90, at his home in the
city of Duisburg several times last year after finding
him in the phone book. The professor conducted
about 12 hours of interviews in which Storms repeatedly said that he does not remember the killings.
Forster and Manoschek notified authorities and
state prosecutors near Storms' hometown in the industrial Ruhrgebiet region of western Germany filed
the charges against him.
Storms and unidentified accomplices are accused of forcing at least 57 of the Jewish laborers
to hand over their valuables and kneel by a grave
before fatally shooting them from behind. A day
after the March 29, 1945, massacre, Storms is also
accused of shooting another Jew who could no
longer walk during a forced march in Austria from
Deutsch Schuetzen to the village of Hartberg.
The court described the suspect simply as a “retiree from Duisburg,” but German authorities have
previously identified him as Adolf S. His full name
was given in previous trials in Austria related to other
suspects in the massacre. He also been identified as
a former member of the 5th SS Panzer Division
"Wiking."
The Duisburg court still must decide whether
Israeli judges slam survivor
benefit law
cont’d from p. 10
written in German, with the law and its explanations
combined in a Continental fashion,” wrote judge Shlomo
Friedlander.
The judges got an English version of the law
establishing the German fund, but it referred to the
German reparations law for the list of camps whose
survivors are eligible for benefits.
“The German language is not an official language
in Israel, and most citizens don’t speak it,” admonished
Friedlander. He also said the long lists of names were
different in different languages.
The Austrian law lacked a list of relevant camps,
and cited no source for such information, while the
agreement with the Claims Conference had no official
text in either Hebrew or English.
Friedlander said the German government later
published a list of camps included in the agreement,
but it was not complete.
He recommended the Israeli law be changed to
state that entitlement should be set by Israel, “as after
all, Israeli money is being granted here to Holocaust
survivors, and not German or Austrian money.”
Friedlander also wrote that it would be proper if
an appropriate Israeli authority would set the criteria
and publish them in Hebrew, and expand the list to
include other places where Jews suffered from Nazi
persecution.
January 2010
there is enough evidence to bring the case to trial.
Authorities did not disclose his attorney's name and
the phone at his home in Duisburg went unanswered.
Storms does not appear on the Simon
WiesenthalCenter's list of most-wanted Nazi war
criminals, but the organization's top Nazi-hunter,
Efraim Zuroff, said he was “very encouraged by the
indictment.”
"He wasn't on our radar — he wasn't on anyone's
radar — and this is a case that clearly shows it is
possible, even at this point, to identify perpetrators
who bear responsibility for serious crimes committed during World War II and bring them to justice,"
Zuroff said.
The remains of the victims of the Deutsch
Schuetzen massacre were found in 1995 in a mass
grave by the Austrian Jewish association. A plaque
now marks the site.
Storms was interned in an American prisoner of
war camp following the war, but was released in 1946.
It was not uncommon for possible war criminals to
go undetected in the chaotic aftermath of the war.
Storms worked as a train-station manager after
the war until his retirement. The Austrian press has
reported he changed the spelling of his name.
Manoschek described Storms as “fully there”
mentally but in poor physical health.
Prosecutor Andreas Brendel said there no living
witnesses to the forest massacre but statements made
during an Austrian trial of others involved can be
used as evidence against the suspect. Brendel said
three former members of the Hitler Youth who were
helping the SS guard the prisoners on the march have
provided witness statements in Austria. A fourth
former Hitler Youth member, now living in Canada,
is being interviewed this week, he told the AP.
According to Manoschek, several of the former
Hitler Youth were tried in 1946 and convicted and
sentenced to two years in prison for their involvement.
Associated Press Writer Veronika Oleksyn contributed to this report from Vienna.
Kindertransport survivor is
knighted
(JTA) — A Jewish refugee from the Nazis who
arrived in England on the Kindertransport was
recently knighted.
Erich Reich, 74, has raised millions of dollars for
local charities through his company, Classic Tours,
which organizes overseas fundraising challenges.
Reich, chairman
of the Kindertransport Group of
the Association of
Jewish Refugees,
organized
the
celebration last year
of the 70th anniversary of the
decision by Britain’s
parliament to accept
the children escaping
Nazi-occupied
Europe on the eve of
World War II.
“I want to thank the people of Britain for allowing
the Kinder to come to the UK and for this amazing
honor,” he said.
Reich arrived in Britain at the age of 4 and never
saw his parents again.
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
KRAKOW GHETTO
by RITA B.ROSS, author of Running from Home
(This episode is dedicated to my
beautiful, brave mother, Freda
Schmelkes, v ww g , who singlehandedly saved my brother and
me from the jaws of Auschwitz.)
By the time we arrived at the
Krakow Ghetto we had been
evading the Nazis and the zealous
Polish antisemites by assuming a
Catholic identity. We had hidden in
churches, a furniture factory and the homes of Polish
people, who turned a blind eye to our identities and
for the payment of a few zlotys rented rooms for us
to hide in for short periods of time. The ghetto is our
last refuge. We are hungry, freezing, and tired of
hiding, as well as desperate for a roof over our heads
to shield us from the brutal winter. We are running
out of hiding places and have to get off the icy streets
and howling wind. I am six years old and my brother,
Bubbi (his nickname) is four.
...My mother, because of her Aryan looks, perfect
command of German and Polish is pressed into
service. She is handed a black woolen coat. “Don’t
ask where it comes from,” she is told by the rabbi’s
wife. “Just take it and wear it. The owner will never
use it again.”
She removes the yellow armband from the coat
and trudges through the streets of Poland, bargaining
with shopkeepers for potatoes, half rotten carrots,
anything she can get to keep us and the occupants of
the room we share from starving, thereby staying
alive for one more day.
While she is away, Bubbi and I stay in the room,
playing under the table with the other children. In
that small space I feel protected and safe until dusk
creeps into the little room. It is dark and she has not
returned. Panic stabs my heart sending out currents
of terror that radiate through my chest. I take her
photograph and hold it against the window pane,
willing her to come back. In my mind, she has been
caught, tortured, mutilated. I see her beaten and
bloodied. Even though I am just six, I have been
listening to many adult conversations and know all
too well about the terrible things that happen to Jews
who are found outside the ghetto It doesn’t take long
for my imagination to transport me to the forest of
the orphan: abandoned, alone and frightened. No one
has time to comfort two small children. Everyone in
the little room is preoccupied with his own hunger,
pain and loss.
I am ignored and left to my coping skill. I comfort
Bubbi, who is crying loudly.
“Shhh.” I whisper to him. “Mutti will be back
soon,” I say, even though I am already making plans
for our abandonment. I put my arms around him and
rock him back and forth. “Bubbi, Bubbi,” I croon, “I
will never leave you.”
Suddenly she’s back. She’s safe and beautiful
and smelling of snow. She has had an exceptional
day outside the ghetto. She comes in with a loaf of
bread, three tiny potatoes, a jar of yogurt and a maggot
infested slab of meat. The kosher people won’t eat
the meat, but we do. “This is war,” she says. “You
eat what you can.”
Rita B. Ross was born in Vienna, two years before the
annexation of Austria, just before Hitler’s troops stormed
the country. She came to America in 1945 to begin a new
life.Running from Home, Hamilton Books, gives an
eyewitness account of her family’s survival.
TOGETHER 11
SINGER EXHIBIT HONORS ARTISTS
the vanished world of Polish Jews prior to and during
Members of the American
the First World War, and in his
Tam, which was the
Gathering of Jewish Holocaust
collection of eleven short stories
critically acclaimed
Survivors and Their Descendants
constituting The Spinoza of Market
mainstage production
were in attendance at the October
Street, published in 1961, and later
for the theatre in the
15 opening reception for the special
novels he depicted a post-Holocaust
fall of 2008.
exhibition, “Isaac Bashevis Singer
world, no longer provincial but rife with
The program was
and His Artists,” at the galleries of
contemporary chaos and paranoia.
organized and curated
the Hebrew Union College Institute
Based on his observations and genuine
by Jean Bloch RosenJean Bloch Rosensaft
Dr. Jerome Chanes and
of Jewish Religion in New York, in addresses attendees.
love of pious, superstitious, earthy,
saft, Senior National Mahli Lieblich.
cooperation with the newspaper, The
heroic, resourceful, and tragic figures,
Director for Public
Forward.
his works continue to live in our collective memories.
Affairs and Institutional Planning for the university,
The exhibition, which runs until late June 2010,
Artist Irene Lieblich, a Holocaust survivor from
who is a vice president of the American Gathering
presents the work of 17 artists who illustrated 25 of
Poland, shared a mutually life-enhancing friendship
and Laura Kruger, curator of the HUC museum.
Singer’s novels and short stories, including Larry
with Singer. Her memories of village life captured
Among the guests were American Gathering Vice
River, Maurice Sendak, Raphael Soyer, Roman
with joyous naivete the evocative landscape that was
President, Dr. Eva Fogelman, and her husband, Dr.
Vishniac, William Pene Du Bois and Holocaust
faithful to Singer’s recollections of the shtetl. Singer
Jerome Chanes.
survivor Irene Lieblich.
wrote that “Her works are rooted in Jewish folklore
Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel
Zalmen Mlotek, a 2G himself, the Artistic
and faithful to Jewish life and spirit.”
Prize for Literature, created a legacy of 86 books
Director, National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene directed
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated
and numerous stories that continue to delight people
and accompanied members of the cast as they
catalogue. For group tours or other information
of every age, circumstance, and nationality. He
performed from the score of Singer’s story Gimpl
information, call Katie Moscowitz, 212-824-2293.
depicted with a sense of humanity, humor, and clarity
KILLING KASZTNER: A POSTHUMOUS THANK YOU
Holocaust survivors who
left Budapest on June 30,
1944 on a train organized by
Rezso Kasztner and others
gathered in New York City
at the YIVO Institute for
Jewish Research on
October 20 to pay tribute to
Killing Kasztner, Emmy
Award-winning filmmaker
Gaylen Ross, and Kasztner family members. Ross’
film describes, how, after the war, Kasztner, a
spokesman for the Israel government working on
recovering looted Jewish assets in Hungary for the
Ben-Gurion government, was reviled by some who
were not able to board the train. They accused him
of being a Nazi collaborator and a thief, discounting
the fact that he was able to save approximately 20,000
Jewish lives.
The elderly survivors came to YIVO to pay their
respects to the man who saved their lives and to meet
his daughter Zsuzsi, and his granddaughters Michal,
Keren and Merav, so that they could personally say
thank you.
Kasztner, the Hungarian Zionist leader and liaison
to the Jewish Agency (the Sachnut), managed to
ransom 1,684 Jews who departed Nazi-occupied
Budapest in June 1944 for freedom in Palestine via
Switzerland. Because so few Hungarian Jews
actually managed to survive, there was a backlash of
rage and resentment toward Kasztner.
The film reveals that the arrangement, part of
much broader Nazi negotiations that began in Slovakia
with Rabbi Michoel Ber Weissmandl and his cousin,
Slovakian Zionist leader Gisi Fleischmann, was a
backdoor attempt to save as many Jews as possible
despite worldwide antipathy and condemnation.
Working together in Nazi-occupied territory and in
Switzerland with Zionists and the Vaad Hatzolah, an
association of Orthodox Jews in New York seeking
to rescue members of the yeshiva world, millions had
to be raised for ransom from individuals and Jewish
organizations. History proves how unreceptive Jewish
organizations were and how they sought to condemn
those efforts.
TOGETHER 12
himself, Ze’ev Eckstein, who was
For those who managed to
recruited by Shin Bet to spy on a
board the train, it was hardly an
small right-wing radical group and
uneventful trip. Most of them were
then join them. He became part of
held hostage in Bergen-Belsen for
a cabal to destroy Kasztner and
six months before they were
perhaps, as a result, bring down the
released near St. Gallen, SwitzerIsraeli government. Eckstein, the
land. But in the end they were
film’s major focus, was sentenced
saved, and most historians agree
Gaylen
Ross
and
YIVO
Exec
Dir.
to life and served approximately
that the negotiations landed
seven years. His accomplices,
approximately 18,000 others in Jonathan Brent.
Joseph Menkes and Dan Shemer,
labor camps in Austria, where they
received the same sentence and also
were held as potential bargaining
served just seven years. Israeli Prime
chips with the Allies instead of being
Minister Ben-Gurion even asked the
deported to Auschwitz.
Kasztner family to give their approval
In 1953, Kasztner, then living in
to the release. His wife, Bogyo, said
Israel, was publicly accused by
no. His daughter, ZsuZsi, said yes, in
Malchiel Gruenwald, a Holocaust
order to spare the families of all
survivor, of a host of charges:
Zsuzsi Kastner and her
involved more pain and anguish—she
collaborating with the Nazis, stealing
daughter Merav.
sensed Ben-Gurion was going to let
ransom money, and essentially
them go anyway.
causing the destruction of
According to the film, Shmuel
Hungarian Jewry. The Israeli
Tamir, the defense attorney for
government, on behalf of Kasztner,
Gruenwald, had been a member of
a spokesman for the ministry of
the Irgun, while Kasztner, covering
trade and industry, sued
for the Sachnut, did not want to
Gruenwald for libel. During a trial
admit that he wrote affidavits on its
replete with political overtones,
the judge, Benjamin Halevi, Kasztner survivors Friedman, Spira behalf for Kurt Becher and his
cronies—the Nazi officials who
accused Kasztner of having sold and Mayer.
looted Hungarian Jewry. The Sachnut and later the
his soul to the devil for making a deal with the Nazis.
Israeli government under Ben-Gurion sought to
Gruenwald was acquitted of libel on several counts
recover Jewish goods and funds looted by the Nazis
and fined a mere $1. After Kasztner was assassinated
and didn’t want people to know that they were in
in front of his Tel Aviv house on the night of March
direct negotiations with war criminals. When asked
3-4, 1957, the High Court overturned the Gruenwald
about the affidavit he gave to the Allies on behalf of
decision. But it was too late. Kasztner’s name was
Becher, Kasztner lied on the stand to protect the
besmirched. People even spat on his young daughter
Sachnut. The Zionists didn’t want anyone to know
and threw rocks at her.
that everything Kasztner did was done at their behest,
With the U.S. opening of the new documentary
and Ross shows documents in the film, discovered
Killing Kasztner, the controversy surrounding the
since the assassination, that bear this out. They had
negotiations for Jewish lives with Hitler’s deputies
not been released during his trial.
(Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, Dieter Wisliceny,
The film received rave reviews during its limited
and Kurt Becher) is back on the front burner. For
New York run, and the survivors at YIVO were glad
some, this is a very personal story involving Kasztner’s
that the controversial Kasztner was finally receiving
family and the families of the Kasztner survivors.
For others, it is the story of political terrorism,
recognition as the hero who saved their lives.
described in full in the film by Kasztner’s murderer
Photos by Eric Weiss.
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
January 2010
Through the Generations
by JOYCE ANN (ABRDIGED)
In 1922, Israel Wygodny, at the age of 3, walked home
from his neighbor’s house chewing a big piece of
kielbasa, wonderfully flavored Polish pork sausage.
He didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to eat the nonkosher meat and his mother told him it was forbidden
and took it away from him. That’s how my father,
Israel, began learning about the differences between
himself and his Catholic neighbors. Growing up Jewish
in Sladkow Maly, Poland, a small farming
village, where only five of the 50 families were Jewish,
my father’s neighbors were his friends. They
remained his friends throughout WWII when Jews
all over Europe were being slaughtered.
After experiencing the horror of the Holocaust,
my grandfather, Itzchak Wygodny, told his son, “If
you survive the war, don’t remain Jewish. You cannot
build a five-story building on a one-story foundation.”
But even after being put through various work
and concentration camps during the war, my father,
now Irwin Wygodny, married a Chicago girl. Together
they raised four children. His three sisters, Helen,
Esther, and Linda also survived, but lost their mother,
father and brother, Elchanan, who was only 17 years
old to the Nazis and their collaborators.
“I would never have believed I would have 10
Jewish grandchildren,” Irwin often said proudly. Yet,
in raising us Jewish, through the pride, a sadness looms
because his parents never knew this joy. My father
also expressed guilt for not following his father’s last
words of advice.
One day in 1986, my father told me he was going
to Poland. “Well, then I’m going too,” was my
response. I knew that this would be a chance of a
lifetime. Two weeks later my parents, siblings and I
were in Poland and we just did what my father wanted
to do, saw what he wanted to see and visited places
he had learned about as a child in school and never
got a chance to visit.
Several times as we walked down the Polish
streets, we saw men asking for money. More than
once my dad said to us, “That man’s a Jew.” Then
he would ask the man if he was Jewish, and he always
received an affirmative answer. I was perplexed. I
asked my dad how he knew, and he responded,
“because he speaks Polish with a Yiddish accent.”
How could that be? I grew up in suburban America.
Jews were not beggars! But they were in Poland in
1986.
Our visit to Chmielnik, where my father went to
school, was the start of a journey into my father’s
childhood. It was a once thriving town of 12,000
people, 75% Jewish. He showed us where his school
had been, as well as the bombed out bakery where
he hid for two weeks during the war. We met many
people who remembered him or his sisters and
had conversations with familiar people, and as we
walked around he relayed his memories to us
We visited the synagogue but we were unable to
enter it. We found the old cemetery next door, but
needed to find the new one where my greatgrandfather and uncle were buried. We found it in
a large field with a single tombstone. We walked
through tall grass and weeds, but couldn’t read the
stone because it was worn down. I looked at my
father’s face and will never forget the profound
sadness in it. The rest of the stones had been placed
in an old building or were used to pave roads.
Leaving Chmielnik, we walked four kilometers
to Dad’s hometown, Sladkow Maly. Alongside us
were horse-driven carriages and men riding bicycles
returning from church in Chmielnik. Dad began to
recognize and greet more people. We saw chickens
running free, and fly infested thatched roofed homes
and barns. My father became tearful when he saw a
man with whom he used to play. Dad said, “He was
a nice guy as a kid.”
Kids were beginning to hang around and stare at
us. Word was out that Israel Wygodny was back in
Sladkow Maly
town after 41 years. We met Stanislaw (Stach)
Pietzcyk, a strong looking, weather beaten 65-yearold , who purchased the land from my father after
the war. Stach told my father that he dreamed about
him two weeks earlier. In his dream my father
returned to Poland to see him. We were the only
Jewish family to return to Sladkow Maly and,
according to my father, that was because our family
was the only one of the five who survived.
Stach invited us to his home, which sat in the
same spot where my fathers’ two-roomed, dirt-floored
house used to be. There were fresh tomatoes,
cucumbers, pickles, tea, open-faced corned beef and
schmaltz sandwiches, hot compote, homemade
sausage, and vodka. “Eat, eat” they said, but they
themselves did not all eat.
Stach’s children and grand-children joined us. In
no time, we bonded and were racing after them,
running up the heather covered hill behind my father’s
house, playing tag, and laughing with them, exploring
lands and streams that were formerly my greatgrandfather ’s property. We saw my greatgrandfather’s farmhouse and stable, where daily
prayer services had taken place and the village Torah
had been stored.
Twenty-two years later, in 2008, we returned to
Poland for the rededication ceremony of the Jewish
cemetery and the sixth annual Jewish Festival in
Chmielnik. This time my father, 88, was not afraid.
Chmielnik was now a town of 4,200 people—
none Jewish—but we were we were warmly and
eagerly welcomed as friends, hugging, laughing. In the
morning, I looked out the window and saw what my
father had seen as a child. The children we played
with 22 years ago were now parents, and my sons
played with their children as we had with them.
During our first visit to Poland in 1986, I
saw women pulling their cows on leashes and whole
families riding in horse-driven carts. Now the town
square—a cobblestoned center with outside tables
and umbrellas—was thriving, with small food stands,
a statue and a fountain. People dressed in modern
clothing, jeans or skirts and high heels. There were
no carts and horses, only cars.
Yet, underneath, I wasn’t sure if much had
changed at all. During the Jewish Festival, great
efforts were made to welcome and honor the four
survivors and their families who came to visit from
Israel and the United States. We were greeted by
the mayor and we were honored during Sunday
morning mass and given a written English translation
of the priest’s sermon. We visited Auschwitz with
Polish teenagers interested in meeting Jewish
teenagers.
I chatted with a Polish man whose grandfather
was being honored for hiding five Jews for several
years. It was heart-warming when a group of Polish
kids came to say goodbye to them the day we left for
home, watching them exchange e-mail addresses.
At the rededication of the cemetery, hundreds
of townspeople gathered to hear the mayor,
government officials, and survivors speak. Polish
children stood at attention and sang Hebrew songs.
When my mother saw the sparsely placed nameless
stones in the Jewish cemeterythis, she said, “I realize
now that there is no life in Poland for Jews anymore.”
My strong reaction took place when I visited the
remains of the Chmielnik synagogue built in the
1600s. Standing in the balcony area of the almost
empty synagogue I could see some remnants of
decoration on the walls. I looked at the original window
frames leaning against the wall. There was no glass
or windows, just the raw frame where the windows
had been. A spiral staircase led into further darkness.
I saw children running around and laughing, exploring
the nooks and crannies of the ruined synagogue, not
realizing the building was once the center of
vital Jewish life.
Bittersweet is the only way I can describe
Poland.Some Jews question Polish motives in
creating Jewish festivals. My father never questioned
their intentions. In June of 2009, at 89, my father took
his last trip to Poland and returned to the United States,
feeling contented. On July 11, 2009, my father passed
away.
Though Irwin Wygodny was one of only a few
survivors who bore witness to the darkest, most evil
side of mankind, the Holocaust did not define my
father. His willingness to build a new life in a new
country and raise four children with my mother, is a
tribute to his strength and character. And though his
contentment from his visits to Poland later in his life
attest to his memories. He is remembered as a friend
to all—a gentle man, a man who adored his family,
built his own business and had a special way with
animals. As a Holocaust survivor, he remembered
what he experienced and managed to survive and
move forward.
From Ayelet Rubinstein, a 3g in Modi’in, Israel:
I am looking for my grandfather’s niece, Nina Bella Goltz (maiden name), born 5-4-1942 and her mother, Lea Goltz from the town of Kaunas,
Lithuania. My grandfather, Chaim Tzemach (Cemac/Semah/Zemach), now living in Israel, was born in Skidel, which is a town in Belarus today
and was in Poland before World War II. Lea Goltz also had a relative named Moshe Selz who lived in Skidel. Lea Goltz lost her first husband,
Yitzak Tzemach, in 1941 when he was killed in front of her in the Vilnius ghetto. She was pregnant at the time. After the war in Germany she married Mr. Goltz who
adopted Nina-Bella. They emigrated from Germany to New York in 1949. They initially resided in Manhattan and then in Brooklyn (1949). My grandfather received
a few letters from them from New York City in the early 1950s but then the connection “disconnected.” I would be thankful if you can help me.
January 2010
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
TOGETHER 13
THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT HIT THEM
BY GERSHON RON (FROM MY LITTLE BLUE TATOO)
After a few days of lingering around the tent
camp and getting bored, the gates opened. Men in
Hungarian military uniforms marched in. Those
were the Jews who served with the Hungarian army
as slave laborers. To fit with the behavior of
Hungarian gentlemen, they marched like soldiers,
like the English in the movie The Bridge over the
River Kwai. But they didn’t whistle!
We old timers, the striped ones (they called us
that because of our uniforms), lined up at the
entrance road to the camp, cheering the Hungarians
on. The poor bastards; they didn’t know what hit
them. They had no inkling about what hell they
were marching into.
Zoli, my childhood friend, and I, stood next to
each other and joined in taunting the newcomers.
We stopped abruptly. We recognized two familiar
figures. They were Zoli’s father and his uncle. They
also recognized us. They broke ranks and started
to hug Zoli, each other, and cry. I stood there and
hoped that my father would also be marching in.
He did not!
The four tents filled up in no time. The rest of
the newcomers were camping out under the stars.
The slave laborers had marched from Hungary and
had a little food in their backpacks. They tried to
protect what little food they had, but were no match
for us 2,000 hungry wolves. Their food disappeared
in the most mysterious ways. The Hungarians were
cursing and chasing us but didn’t dare touch us.
One night a plane flew by and dropped a bomb.
Unfortunately the pilot missed its target and the
bomb fell in the camp. Some 40 people were killed,
and who knows how many were injured? I slept
through the whole incident.
It was less than a month before liberation!
A week or two before liberation, we were
ordered to pack. To pack what? As I mentioned
before, we always traveled light.
We were moving again. The Hungarian slave
laborers lined up again as soldiers do. We, the
striped ones, marched at the end of the column,
clowning around, trying to imitate the Hungarians.
And a bunch of clowns we were!
On the road, women prisoners joined the
exodus. They looked terrible, maybe worse than
we did.
At the villages that we passed, people watched
with amazement, but not one dared to approach
us, or god forbid, give us a piece of bread. We
passed a potato field. The prisoners, like crazies,
ran from the formation and dug for potatoes. They
ate the potatoes raw. The guards had a hard time
restoring order. There was no shooting and no
beating. Most of the prisoners who dared to step
out from the formation were women.
I salute them!
As darkness fell, we stopped at a meadow
close to a forest. I looked for Zoli but to no avail.
He was marching with his father and uncle. To
look for him was like looking for a needle in a
haystack. On the road, two Slovak kids stuck with
me. One was 14, and the other 12 years old.
The idea of getting food from the kitchen didn’t
look very promising. Roaming on the edge of the
forest, I found snails crawling all over. I decided
to cook a gourmet dinner. I sent the two kids to
find as many snails as possible.
When it came to food, my imagination ran wild.
I had never cooked in my life, not even a hardboiled
egg. When the kids came back with the snails, I
had water boiling in a pot. I dumped the snails into
the boiling water. The smell was overwhelming.
We didn’t see the German guard approaching.
It was too late to grab the pot. The guard kicked
the pot. The snail soup spilled, together with the
half-cooked snails. Then he made us put out the
fire. To make a fire next to the trees wasn’t the
smartest thing to do.
When the guard left, we picked up the halfcooked snails. Instead of a well made gourmet
meal, which we would have preferred, with a little
snail soup to wash it down, we had to be satisfied
with a medium rare dish. Nobody complained.
Nobody asked for seconds, either. As we were
munching on the snails, a young Polish kid
approached us. He finished the leftovers and joined
our small group.
The next morning we arrived at our destination;
another camp. The gate had no welcome sign and
the orchestra was absent. The only similarity was
Bergen-Belsen survivors reunited after 64 years
By DAVID A. SCHWARTZ, Palm Beach Jewish Journal
Teenagers Rosalyn Gross and Lucy Gliuck,
imprisoned at Bergen-Belsen, met in April, 1945
when British soldiers liberated the death camp.
Recently, the two women, now Rosalyn Haber and
Lucy Jacobs, met again—64 years later at a Café
Europa luncheon to reunite Holocaust survivors.
“I just had a feeling to come today,” Haber, 78.
of Boca Raton said.
“God sent you,” said Jacobs, 80, who lives at
Century Village in Boca Raton.
Almost 70 years ago it may have been Jacobs
who God sent to Haber during their last days at the
concentration camp in Germany. In the says
immediately after liberation, 14-year-old- Rosalyn
Gross was sick with typhus and Jacobs cared for
her, hiding the young girl in the barracks of German
soldiers and nursing her back to health. “I saved her
life,” Jacobs said, explaining that she was afraid the
girl only two years younger than herself would die in
a hospital. That was the fate of many at Bergen-
TOGETHER 14
Belsen in the weeks following liberation.
Finding Jacobs at the luncheon was a “miracle,”
said Haber, who has been searching for Holocaust
survivors from her home town of Muncach,
Czechoslovakia since the end of the war. “All these
years I‘ve been searching for one of them,” said
Haber. “I said,” ‘This is a familiar face.’ I asked her
from where are you and did you know Grosses?”
Jacobs replied that she had dated a young man
named Gross, said Haber, realizing that Jacobs knew
one of her six brothers, all of whom survived the
Holocaust. And then the woman learned that they
were together again after so many years.
Almost 450 Holocaust survivors attended the
Café Europa luncheon at B’nai Torah Congregation
in Boca Raton.
It was the ninth Café Europa luncheon in South
Palm Beach since 2005. The luncheon, put on by the
Ruth Rales Jewish Family Service, are sponsored in
June by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims
Against Germany and the Humanitarian Aid
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
the barbed wire fence. I don’t think it was
electrified.
It seemed to me that the camp had just been
erected. We, the striped ones, got the barracks.
Most of the Hungarians camped out under the
trees. As soon as we arrived, it started to rain.
The ground turned into mud. It was hard to walk.
The lice were eating us alive. There was hardly
any food. People got sick. An epidemic of typhoid
broke out. Dead bodies were lying everywhere.
It was the end of April 1945!
The Red Cross delivered a truckload of food.
Everybody who could manage to stand on two feet,
lined up in front of a building next to the barracks.
Standing in the line, I met a schoolmate of mine;
Finias. He was originally from Hust in
Karpatorussia. We decided to support each other,
because everybody was pushing to get to the front.
To fall into the mud was as good, as saying good
bye to this wonderful world!
The distribution started in an orderly fashion,
then, like on a command, the throng started to push.
Everybody grabbed whatever their hands reached.
The German guards tried to keep the prisoners back
with their rifle butts, when this failed, they opened
fire. A lot of people were killed. My schoolmate,
Finias, was one of them. I came back with empty
hands. My two Slovak friends and the Polish kid
were also disappointed.
We slept next to each other; actually, more on
top of each other. I woke up in the morning, opened
my eyes and saw a strange look in my Polish
friend’s eyes. He was dead!
We heard explosions all day. The day of
liberation seemed to be close. We didn’t know
which army was closing in; Americans, English, or
Russians. To us, it made no difference.
I told my two little friends that I am going to
escape. Their eyes lit up.
Late the same evening, we saw a commotion.
The Hungarians told us that the gate wasn’t
guarded. We went to investigate. They were right.
The guards were gone. We didn’t go back to the
barracks. The three of us took off in the direction
of the explosions.
We were on our way to freedom!
Mazal Tov!
Foundation and in December by Jill and Cliff Viner
of Boca Raton.
Larry Blair, chairman of the Ruth Rales board of
directors, said the luncheons are an opportunity to
bring people together to reunite with friends and
family from the past. “It’s an opportunity for two
individuals that hadn’t seen each other in 60 years to
reconnect,” he added.
“One success story like this is worth whatever it
takes,” said Stanley Gilbert, Holocaust Survivors Club
of Boca Raton president, who brought people in two
busses to the luncheon form Century Village west of
Boca Raton.
“It’s just the happiest day of our life,” Jacobs
said. “From now on we’ll be together.”
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January 2010
US APPEALS COURT NIXES
VATICAN BANK HOLOCAUST SUIT
By NICOLE WINFIELD
VATICAN CITY (AP) - An American appeals court
recently dismissed a lawsuit by Holocaust survivors
who alleged the Vatican bank accepted millions of
dollars of their valuables stolen by Nazi sympathizers.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco
upheld a lower court ruling that said the Vatican bank
was immune from such a lawsuit under the 1976
Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which generally
protects foreign countries from being sued in U.S.
courts.
Holocaust survivors from Croatia, Ukraine and
Yugoslavia had filed suit against the Vatican bank in
1999, alleging that it stored and laundered the looted
assets of thousands of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies who
were killed or captured by the Nazi-backed Ustasha
regime that controlled Croatia.
They sought an accounting from the Vatican, as
well as restitution and damages.
The court didn’t rule on the allegations. In its
decision, the court said the Vatican bank, formally
known as the Institute for the Works of Religion, or
IOR, was a sovereign entity entitled to the protections
of the foreign sovereign immunities act, and that
therefore U.S. courts had no jurisdiction.
The pope himself has been granted such
protections in U.S. courts hearing clerical sex abuse
cases.
Jeffrey Lena, who represented the Vatican Bank
in the case, said he was gratified with the ruling since
the court decided not only that the IOR was a
sovereign entity but that as such it was immune from
U.S. jurisdiction.
“In defending the lawsuit, the IOR did not
challenge the allegations of the plaintiffs that they
had suffered terrible losses at the hands of the
Ustasha,” he told The Associated Press. “Rather the
challenge was simply to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts
over the IOR.”
Jonathan Levy, who represents the survivors, said
he thought he had sufficiently shown that the Vatican
bank engaged in commercial activities in the United
States, which can serve as an exemption to the
protections granted by the immunities act.
“The reason we’re disappointed is the court found
that dealing in gold teeth from concentration camps
was not a commercial act,” he said.
In its ruling, the court said that the Vatican banks’
U.S. commercial activities were “too tangentially
related to their legal claims to be considered the basis
for the suit.”
Levy said he didn’t plan to appeal the judgment.
The victims are also suing the Franciscans, the Roman
Catholic order, on identical charges, and that portion
of the lawsuit is going ahead, he said.
The survivors filed suit against the Vatican Bank
a year after Swiss Banks agreed to pay some $1.25
billion to Nazi victims and their families who accused
the banks of stealing, concealing or sending to the
Nazis hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Jewish
holdings.
The Vatican bank was famously implicated in a
scandal over the collapse of Italy’s Banco
Ambrosiano in the 1980s. Roberto Calvi, the head of
the Banco Ambrosiano, was found hanging from
Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982. The
circumstances remain mysterious.
More recently, Italian news reports said last
month that Italian financial police were scrutinizing
tens of millions of euros worth of Vatican bank
transactions to see if they violated money laundering
regulations.
January 2010
Why has Pope Benedict chosen now to beatify Nazi-era
pontiff?
the windows of the Holy See. True, other Roman
By ROBERT WISTRICH
Exactly ten years ago, on a cold winter morning
in New York City, the Catholic-Jewish Historical
Commission, established to investigate Pope Pius XII’s
response to the Holocaust, met for the first time to
discuss its future work. I was the only Israeli historian
among the six scholars (three Catholics and three
Jews) designated by the Vatican and leading Jewish
organizations to study this hotly contested issue.
A little under two years later, the project was
abandoned as a result of the Holy See’s unwillingness
to release materials from its own archives that could
help clarify issues that our team of scholars raised in
our provisional report.
Already at that time, in the last years of Pope
John Paul’s pontificate, there were moves afoot to
place Pius XII on the fast track to sainthood, but they
were probably slowed down by Israeli and Jewish
protests and a desire by Church authorities to prevent
a serious rupture in Catholic-Jewish relations.
At issue was the silence of Pius XII during the
Holocaust and his indirect complicity in the Nazi mass
murder of Jews. These allegations, which first
emerged around 1964, had prompted the Vatican to
publish eleven volumes of its own documents (edited
by four trusted Jesuit scholars), most of them
appearing in the 1970s. It was these documents in
Italian, German, French, Latin, and English that we
were originally asked to review. The million or so
unpublished documents from the pontificate of Pius
XII (1939?1958) according to the Vatican’s most
recent estimate, will only be available in about four
year’s time. It is in this context that we need to see
the recent decree onthe “heroic virtues” of Pius XII,
just signed by Pope Benedict XVI. Most Jews have
interpreted this act as yet another signal that the
Vatican is determined to beatify the controversial
wartime pope—whom some even consider to have
been antisemitic—regardless of what the historical
evidence may indicate. The sharp response of Jewish
leaders to Benedict’s decree prompted the Vatican’s
Press Office Director, Father Federico Lombardi, S.J.,
to release a conciliatory note distinguishing between
the historical judgment of Pius XII’s actions (still an
open question) and the saintly Christian life he
apparently led. In particular, Father Lombardi was
concerned to disclaim any notion that this decree was
“a hostile act towards the Jewish people” or an obstacle
to Catholic-Jewish dialogue. In the light of the pope’s
forthcoming visit to the Synagogue of Rome, this was
a politically astute and welcome reassurance.
Nevertheless, the decree on Pius XII still raises
concern not only about the continuing drive to beatify
the wartime pontiff but also about the present pope
and the state of relations between the Catholic Church
and the Jewish people. Regarding Pius XII, I
personally have never seen him either as “Hitler’s
Pope” (the theory of British historian John Cornwell—
a “lapsed” Catholic), or as the “Righteous Gentile”
evoked by Rabbi David Dallin. My own provisional
conclusion drawn from the study of thousands of
documents is that the mass murder of Jews was fairly
low on his list of priorities. Of course, much the same
could be said of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, but
they did not claim to be the “Vicar of Christ” or to
represent the Christian conscience. Pius XII strikes
me as a polished diplomat far more worried about
the Allied bombing of Rome than about the thousand
Roman Jews who were being deported by the
Germans to their deaths in Auschwitz, virtually under
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
Jews were discreetly given sanctuary in ecclesiastical
establishments in and around Rome after October
1943, but it remains unclear if this was the result of a
direct papal instruction. In some instances we know
that Pius XII did try to intervene against Nazi or racist
antisemitic legislation, but in general this was almost
always on behalf of baptized Jews since they were
protected by the Church as Catholics. Pius’ rare
references to the mass murder of the Jews were
invariably veiled and very abstract, as if he found it
difficult to utter the word itself. Was it fear of further
German reprisals? A latent antisemitism? Was it his
visceral anti-Communism which also led him to hope
for a Nazi victory in the East? Or perhaps the desire
to spare German Catholics a conflict of conscience
between their loyalty to Hitler, the fatherland, or their
Church? Whatever the reasons, this was hardly heroic
conduct. So why has Benedict XVI chosen to take
this step now? Why risk unnecessary damage to
Catholic-Jewish relations?
My own inclination is to think that the present
pope regards Pius XII as a soulmate—both
theologically and politically. He shares with the
wartime pontiff an authoritarian centralist world-view
and a deep distrust of liberalism, modernity, and the
ravages of moral relativism. He was 31 years old
when Pius XII died in 1958, and already then regarded
him as a venerated role model. Moreover, the Germanborn Joseph Ratzinger (today Benedict XVI) certainly
knew that Pius XII (an artistocratic Roman) was also
a passionate Germanophile, surrounded by German
aides during and after the war, fluent in the German
language, and a great admirer of the German Catholic
Church. Not only that, but Ratzinger probably knows
that Pius XII personally intervened after 1945 to
commute the sentences of convicted German war
criminals. This solicitude for Nazi criminals contrasts
sharply with Pius XII ignoring all entreaties to make
a public statement against antisemitism even after
the full horrors of the death camps had been revealed
in 1945. In this context it is profoundly unsettling to
think that the ultraconservative Benedict XVI and
his entourage can identify so completely with Pius
XII as a man of “heroic virtue.”
The present pope, no doubt, deplores antisemitism, though his statements on the subject have
been noticeably less robust than those of his
predecessor, John Paul II. At Yad Vashem last
summer he expressed no personal regret as a German
for the unspeakable horrors of the Shoah, even though
he had once been a member of the Hitler Youth. True,
he had little choice in the matter. However, he was
disturbingly vague about the truly monstrous German
role in the Holocaust. Earlier this year Benedict also
showed remarkably poor judgment (to put it
charitably) in reinstating an unrepentant Holocaustdenying British bishop into the mainstream Catholic
Church, an action he only retracted after worldwide
Jewish and Catholic protests. These serious mistakes
appear to follow a pattern and may even indicate a
regression from the real progress in Catholic-Jewish
relations under Benedict’s predecessor. One can only
hope they are not irreversible since the stakes are
high and no sane person can be interested in
undermining the bridges across the abyss that have
been so painstakingly constructed.
Prof. Robert S. Wistrich is the director of The Vidal Sassoon
International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem (http://sicsa.huji.ac.il/).
TOGETHER 15
please contact Tosia Schneider at:
[email protected]
I am undertaking a new project that involves Holocaust survivors. The
idea for this project arose when I was volunteering with the Red Cross,
assisting with the missing persons register. Part of what I did was enter
information from letters sent in searching for family members missing
after World War II. These letters often contained copies of the last
correspondence received from the missing family member. I found these
letters incredibly touching. They made history come alive in a way nothing
I had ever read before had. These letters were rendered all the more touching by the knowledge that for these
people, it did, indeed, become too late. I found myself crying as I entered the information, but also getting a
sense of what it meant to face the prospect of having to flee one’s home in a way I never had before.
I would very much like to collect as many of these last letters as possible and publish them as a book. I do
not plan to add much to the text of the letters themselves, as there is very little one could add. Each letter will
be photographed and the photograph will be shown on one page. The text will be translated, if necessary, and
typed out on another page. If there is a photograph available of the person, I would like to show that, as well
as any commentary the family would like to include.
My first hurdle, obviously, is finding these families and the letters, especially after so many years. I am
hoping that you could help, by passing along my request in Together. I realize that this is a delicate, and sad,
request, but I hope that the value of the letters in educating people, of both current and future generations, and
giving them insight into the day-to-day concerns and considerations of people who were realizing that there
was a time limit on how long they could safely remain in their home country, will outweigh the sadness.
Elisabeth Pollaert Smith
My colleagues and I are college professors and filmmakers currently working on a documentary film about
Czech prodigy, Petr Ginz. Petr, who was murdered at Auschwitz when he was 16, wrote five novels and
produced 200 drawings and paintings by the time of his death. Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon took one of Petr’s
drawings, Moon Landscape, into space with him aboard the Columbia space shuttle. My colleagues and I are
working with Yad Vashem and with Petr’s sole surviving family member, Chava Pressburger, on the project.
The film is being supported by the Yavitz Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. (For more
about our work and our graduate program, see www.jou.ufl.edu/documentary)
I was hoping your organization might be able to help us in our search to find individuals who may have
known Petr Ginz. We are looking only for people who knew Petr personally and had interactions with him in
Prague and/or Terezin. We have individuals who describe Terezin in general, the terrible conditions and
heartbreak, but we need individuals who had specific encounters with Petr Ginz.
Cara Pilson, The Documentary Institute, University of Florida, PO Box 118400, Gainesville, FL 32611
From Merle Funkenberg
The survivors of concentration camps, who decided to appear as witnesses before a German court in the
1960 and the 1970, made an important contribution to the prosecution of the crime of the Nazis. The victims
had to report on their experience in the Concentration camps. They suffered mentally: Talking about torture,
mindless violence and captivity was a daunting task for the survivors and the public seemed to be more on the
side of the accused.
These witnesses were supported by German volunteers. The contact between the survivors and the
german volunteers were the first peaceful meetings characterized by trust, understanding and sensivity. Despite
that, the support of the witnesses had been overlooked by the scientific research.
The aim of my dissertation is, to analyze the meaning of the volunteer work for the witnesses and its
particular importance for the international understanding and the controversy about the Nazi dictatorship in
the 1960 and 1970. To realize this project, I am looking for survivors who testified at German courts.
Lichtenbergstr. 1 • 37075 Göttingen • Germany
Telefon +49 (0)179 9056470 • e-mail [email protected]
From Rainier Voss, Head of County Archives, Celle,
Germany:
I live in Celle, where I am the head of the county
archives. Celle is about 20 miles south of BergenBelsen, in northern Germany. As the Bergen-Belsen
area became part of our county after World War II
there are quite a few files about Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp, DP camp and the Memorial in
my archives. Moreover parts of the V-2rocket that
was assembled in Mittelbau-Dora were produced in
our county and the death marches and transports from
Mittelbau-Dora and its subcamps to Bergen-Belsen
also came through our county.
I am looking urgently for information on a death
march that passed through Celle on April 10, 1945 on
its way to Bergen-Belsen. This march was part of
the evacuation of Klein Bodungen, a subcamp of
Mittelbau-Dora. This death march of about 500
prisoners left Klein Bodungen at the beginning of April
and passed through Celle in the early afternoon of
April 10th. Just northwest of Celle, in Gross Hehlen,
the prisoners wanted to rest for the night, but they
were driven further on by the SS. Just outside Gross
Hehlen, the group ran into fire by the German
Wehrmacht who had dug themselves in the woods.
Several people were killed. The survivors went on
TOGETHER 16
towards Bergen-Belsen and spent the night in
Wittbeck, about half way between Celle and BergenBelsen.
I am looking for any information on this march,
especially on what happened in the Celle area, names,
details, etc. This death march had always been mixed
up with the march that took place after the bombing
of the Celle train station on April 8, 1945, when two
transports with concentration camp inmates were hit.
After the bombing, the survivors were chased
by German police, soldiers, and even inhabitants of
Celle, and many were killed after they had survived
the bombing. This became infamous as the “Celle
Hasenjagd” (“rabbit hunt” or “hare chase” of
Celle). These survivors were then put on a death march
to Bergen-Belsen on the morning of April 10th. The
difference between these two marches is just a few
hours. That may be the reason, why so far, everyone
has thought that there had only been one march.
Information on the death march after the Celle
bombing would also be much appreciated. Many
details about that march are still unknown as well.
If anyone has any information about either of
theese two death marches, please contact me directly
at: [email protected].
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
From Bernd Horstmann, Custodian for the
Registry of Names, Department of Research
and Documentation at the Bergen-Belsen
Memorial:
I am the Custodian for the Registry of Names
here in the Department of Research and
Documentation at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial,
Anne-Frank-Platz, 29303 Lohheide, Germany.
I am working on compiling and registering the
names and data of the former prisoners of the BergenBelsen concentration camp.
Since 1990 contact has been made with about
3,000 former prisoners of the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp. There are also many family
members who are asking for information about their
sisters and brothers, parents, grandparents and other
relatives.
Contact with the Holocaust Survivors and with
the members of the next generations—all the
generations—is very important for us. Our permanent
exhibition which opened in 2007 would not have been
possible without their enormous support.
About myself: I was born 20 years after WW II.
I am not Jewish and my parents and grandparents
were not persecuted by Nazi Germany, so I am not a
member of the 2nd or 3rd generation. I studied politics
and literature at Hannover University (my title is MA)
and I live in Hannover. I have been doing this work
for about 10 years, getting in contact with many
Survivors of Bergen-Belsen and also members of the
second generation.
I would appreciate any assistance in contacting
Survivors of Bergen-Belsen and their descendants. I
can be reached directly at: bernd.horstmann
@stiftung-ng.de
If anyone has facility in any of the following languages
(Albanian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish,
Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Galician, Greek, Hungarian,
Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian,
Romani, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Sloven,
Ukrainian) and is willing to assist the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in translating
documents, please contact: Larry Garfinkel, Project
Coordinator, Registry of Holocaust Survivors, 202488-6145, [email protected].
Worse Than War, an epic new documentary set
for release on PBS in 2010, takes viewers on an
extraordinary journey with noted Holocaust scholar
Daniel Goldhagen as he travels to the sites in over
eight countries of the worst mass slaughters in the
past century. Together we encounter killers, survivors,
witnesses, journalists and political leaders whose
stories provide powerful insights into why genocides
continue to plague our planet. More than 60 years
after the Holocaust inspired cries of “Never Again,”
is it possible for us to prevent genocide and save
millions of lives? The film shows us how.
“The real challenge in recalling any trauma is not
how many facts are preserved, but how our memory
of the past prevents a recurrence of its horrors for
any potential victim,” according to Brad Hirschfield,
President of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for
Learning and Leadership. “We need to learn how to
remember forward, and this film helps us do just that.”
Rabbi Hirschfield’s most recent book, You Don’t
Have to Be Wrong For Me to Be Right: Finding
Faith Without Fanaticism, addresses the need to
combat extremism, be it religious, political or personal,
by nurturing commitment and openness
simultaneously.
January 2010
Yitzhak “Ike” Aharonovitch
By Eli Ashkenazi, Haaretz
The captain of the legendary pre-state Jewish
immigrant ship Exodus, Yitzhak “Ike” Aharonovitch,
died recently in Hadera at the age of 86.
Aharonovitch was born in Germany and came to
Palestine as a child in 1932 with his family. At the
age of 17, he stole away on a ship and sought to join
the Soviet army to fight the Germans, but he was
caught and returned to Palestine.
He later joined the Palyam, the naval unit of the
pre-state Palmach Jewish military force. He went to
London to study seamanship, but returned to Palestine
without completing his studies to get involved in
bringing in illegal Jewish immigrants.
In 1946, he boarded the Exodus in Baltimore and
worked on the ship’s renovation. When the ship’s
captain resigned, Aharonovitch, then 23, assumed the
post. The ship left France in July of that year with
4,515 Holocaust survivors on board. After two months
of run-ins with the British, its passengers were
returned to France; when they refused to disembark
there, they were deported to Hamburg, Germany.
Aharonovitch was shown to be a fascinating
figure. He charmed those around him, with his calm,
his determination and his devotion.
Israel Berkenwald
Israel Berkenwald, 86, of West Palm Beach, FL, died
Oct. 18, 2009. Born in Lodz, Poland, he formerly lived
in Bloomfield, New Jersey and New York City.
Berkenwald arrived in New York City in May
1946 on the Marine Flasher, the first ship of
Holocaust survivors to enter the United States. He
was the sole survivor of his large family. After a few
years as an operator in the garment trade, he became
an executive in the ILGWU, becoming the northern
region’s Administrative Supervisor until his
retirement.
He was active in the Workmen’s Circle, the
Liberal Party of New York City, taught at the Fashion
Institute of Technology, and in retirement, was active
in Holocaust Survivor organizations.
William H. Donat
William Donat was born in
Poland in 1937. After
Germany invaded Poland,
he and his parents were
confined to the Warsaw
Ghetto. He is one of a
handful of young children
from the Warsaw Ghetto to
have survived.
When he was 5, he was smuggled out of the
ghetto and given to Christian friends of his parents.
Shortly thereafter, he was betrayed and had to spend
the remainder of the war in a Catholic orphanage.
Meanwhile, his parents were sent to various
concentration camps where they spent the remaining
years of the war. Fortunately, both survived and the
family was reunited after the war.
Immediately after World War II, he was brought
to the United States where he grew up in New York
City. He attended public schools and graduated from
the Bronx High School of Science in 1956. He
January 2010
received a B.A.from Colgate University in 1960. After
graduation he was married, and then went on active
duty with the U.S. Army.
His professional career was spent in book
publishing and in graphic arts. He simultaneously
devoted much of his time working pro bono as an
editor, and then as the chairman of the non-profit
Holocaust Library, which published 56 books about
Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe. He was a
member of the Editorial Committee of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and an
active speaker for the Museum of Jewish Heritage
in New York.
He participated in the editing of the republished
version of Alexander Donat’s The Holocaust
Kingdom, which is his father’s classic wartime
memoir of their family. He subsequently participated
in a series of fundraising events where he was the
keynote speaker for the publisher, the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum.
Jake Heifetz
By Samara Kalk Derby
Jake Heifetz, who survived the Holocaust in Germanoccupied Poland after three years in the woods
fighting with the resistance, has died of cancer. He
was 92.
Heifetz grew up in a family of seven children in
Lachwa, Poland. In September 1942, Heifetz and
another brother fled into the forest to escape the
destruction of their town by the Nazis. The rest of
his family perished.
Her father was a freedom fighter, Pauline Heifetz
said. Young guys such as her father were in charge
of going into the villages at night and getting food,
drink and clothing, she said. A lot of the women would
stay back and make the meals and take care of the
children, she added. It was in the underground camps
where her father met her mother, Fania.
“She never learned English. Her experience was
worse than Dad’s as far as not having anyone left.
They burned her village,” Pauline Heifetz said. “She
was just happy to have anything. Her wedding ring
was a wedding, a new life, a new start. They were
very happy just to be alive.”
The couple decided to come to Madison where
Heifetz’ older brother settled.
Heifetz worked as a carpenter in Madison, and
after his retirement in 1974, he and Fania became
the caretakers for their synagogue. Even five weeks
ago he was mowing the temple’s lawn, said Rabbi
Joshua Ben Gideon. “Jake was the heart and soul of
the congregation in a lot of ways,” Gideon said.
Given his life story, many people would be bitter
and nasty, but not her father, Pauline Heifetz said.
He told everyone, ‘Life is short, live it.’”
Victor Lewis
Victor Lewis (Wiktor
Lezerkiewicz), a Holo-caust
survivor from Krakow,
Poland, who escaped a train
transport from the Krakow
Ghetto to the Belzec death
camp and became a Plaszow
camp prisoner and Schindler’s List survivor, died on
October 5th in Queens, NYC, at the age of 90.
Lewis’ Holocaust experiences and transport
escape were documented in testimonies to the Shoah
Foundation Institute (1994), in a chapter on his life in
the book, Schindler’s Legacy (1994), in his autobiographical memoir Hardships and Near-Death
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
Experiences at the Hands of the Nazi SS and
Gestapo (1942-1945)(2000), in various interviews,
speeches, and published articles, and in Churban, a
documentary film currently being produced about the
lives of several Holocaust survivors.
As the only Jewish worker in the Krakow Ghetto
auto repair shop, Lewis stole a hacksaw blade from
the shop after witnessing the first bloody liquidation
of the ghetto in June 1942. “I kept the blade in my
boot in case I would need it someday,” Lewis often
said. That day would come four months later, on
October 28, 1942, when Lewis was rounded up in
the ghetto for transport and extermination to the
Belzec death camp along with his parents, sister,
brother, his future wife’s mother and two sisters, and
4,500 other Jews in the Krakow Ghetto.
After being forced into cattle cars, Lewis
informed his family of his plan to use his hacksaw to
saw the bars of the cattle car and escape from the
transport. Victor and his brother, Leon, both jumped
off of the train to save their lives. Their parents,
Abraham and Bertha, and sister, Greta, decided not
to jump. The Lewis brothers never saw their parents
or sister again, and never again saw anyone else they
knew on the transport.
Both brothers survived the Holocaust, immigrated
to the U.S., and raised families in the New York
metropolitan area.
At the October 1965 Nazi War Crimes testimony
in Kiel, Germany, against SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer
Martin Fellenz, the Nazi commander of the Krakow
ghetto deportations, Lewis testified against the alleged
suspect, recounting the roundup, Fellenz’ role, and
Lewis’ escape from the train. Fellenz was convicted
the following year of war crimes and sentenced to
prison.
In the United States, Lewis became a founder of
the New Cracow Friendship Society in 1965 and
served continuously on its Board of Directors. He
served on the Board of Directors of Beit Halochem
(Friends of Israel Disabled Veterans) and was
honored to represent Krakow in candle lighting
ceremonies at the American Gathering of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors’ commemoration ceremonies at
Temple Emanu-El and at Madison Square Garden in
Manhattan.
Naava Piatka
Multitalented nternationally
known artist/actress/playwright/author, Naava Piatka,
died peacefully at age 57 on
September 17, 2009 after a
brave struggle with cancer.
Born in Cape Town,
South Africa to Holocaust
survivor parents, Naava began her performing career
as a child, singing on stage with her cabaret star
mother, Chayela Rosenthal. She taught at the
Gertrude Haas Entertainment Educational Center, did
radio work and held her sold-out first art exhibition of
paintings of Jerusalem at the age of 22.
After moving to Johannesburg, she worked as a
freelance journalist, started the art department at a
local private school, exhibited her artwork in local
galleries and co-founded Stages, a children’s theater
company. After marrying and immigrating to the USA,
Naava continued exhibiting and selling her fine art,
working as an actress in regional theater, writing and
directing original musicals for Showstoppers, the
theater troupe for children she began at the Newton
JCC.
cont’d on p. 18
TOGETHER 17
As a writer,
Naava received
a Massachusetts
Cultural Council
Grant to stage her
full-length
musical, won several Boston Playwrights’ New Plays
competitions and received commissions for her musical
plays. Naava’s debut book No Goodbyes, a fatherdaughter memoir about love, war and resurrection, that
she finished while battling her cancer and other
health complications, was just published.
As an actress, Naava was best known for her
internationally acclaimed solo musical performance
piece, Better Don’t Talk (aka Finding My Mother’s
Voice) about the remarkable life and times of her
Holocaust survivor actress mother, star of the Vilna
Ghetto.
Alice Pfeffer
by Deanna Pfeffer Blair
Alice Pfeffer nee Lilienfeld passed away at the age
of 94½. She came to this country in 1938, escaping
the horrors of the Nazis. My Aunt Blanche (Lilienfeld)
Israel (1909 – 2001), her sister, followed her in 1939.
She was a victim of Nazi abuse on Kristallnacht
whose parents were killed in Auschwitz. My father,
Isaac Pfeffer (1909 – 1981), also lost his parents and
sister in the Holocaust. My Mother never forgot their
loss. She always said that she had “Survivor’s Guilt.”
When she came to this country she settled in New
York City. She worked as a milliner, designing hats for
John Fredricks, Mr. John, Halston and Bergdorf
Goodman. She made hats for the movie Gone with
the Wind, and well-known individuals like Jackie O.
My mother was an intelligent woman. She was
an active member of the Rego Park Jewish Center,
where the Sisterhood depended on her creativity for
all their functions.
Once the Anchorage Times came from Alaska
to interview her about the emigration of German
Jews during the Holocaust. During the war, her
cousins tried to flee Nazi German by requesting
asylum in Alaska, but theywere denied access. They
remained in Germany, were placed in concentration
camps and executed.
We all miss her very much, but take solace in
knowing she is with my Dad and her parents again.
Abe Pollin
The American Gathering
offers condolences to
the Pollin family on
their loss. The Gathering was founded at a
conference for Holocaust Survivors and
their descendants in
Washington, D.C. in
1983. Ben Meed, our
president, was able to rent Mr. Pollin’s Capital
Centre for the opening ceremony on very short
notice.American Gathering Chairman Roman R.
Kent describes what happened next: “When the
opening ceremonies were over, we wanted to pay
our bill, about $150,000, so Ben Meed and I made
an appointment to see Mr. Pollin, and we took
our wives along. We wanted to thank him for
making the site available to us at such short notice,
and to express our appreciation for the
professionalism and thoughtfulness of his staff.
“We were impressed when Mr. Pollin greeted
us not as the owner of the Capital Centre, but as
TOGETHER 18
a gracious host. He invited us into his office and
offered us refreshments. When we started to write
the check, I will never forget how he took the
invoice and tore it up in front of us. His words
still ring in my ears: ‘You don’t owe me anything...It is I who am indebted to you for bringing
under my roof 20,000 survivors who endured the
horrors of the Holocaust, the President of the
United States, and a considerable number of
renowned dignitaries.’ He said it was an
experience he would remember for the rest of his
life.”
Abe Pollin and the example of heartfelt
generosity he set for the Jewish people will always
be remembered with deep respect and fondness
by Holocaust survivors and their descendants.
May his memory be a blessing.
Abe Pollin, a longtime supporter of Israel and
Jewish causes, has died at the age of 85. Best known
as the owner of the Washington Wizards basketball
team and the Verizon Center the team played in, Pollin
served on the boards of AIPAC, Hillel, and The Israel
Project, and was involved in numerous philanthropic
activities in and outside the Jewish community. More
recently, Pollin was one of three Washington realestate developers who in 2004 bought and restored
the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, the former home
of the Adas Israel synagogue before it could be turned
into a nightclub. The facility is now a magnet for the
city’s younger Jews, sponsoring a variety of Jewish
and cultural programming, and is in the same
neighborhood Pollin revitalized when he built the
Verizon Center.
Pollin was born on 3 December 1923 to Mr. and
Mrs. Morris Pollin. When he was 8, Pollin’s family
moved to the Washington area from Philadelphia.
Pollin graduated from George Washington University
in 1945 and took a job with his family’s construction
company that lasted for 12 years. Pollin launched his
own construction company in 1957.
A successful contractor in the Washington area,
he headed an investment group that bought the then
Baltimore Bullets in 1964. He moved the team to the
Washington area in 1973 after building the Capital
Centre and renamed it the Washington Wizards in
1996. (Abridged from story by Eric Fingerhut, JTA.)
Martin Marcel
Preisler
Martin Marcel Preisler, 86, of
Elkhart recently passed away
in South Bend, IN.
Born November 5th 1922,
in Cluj/Transylvania, Romania
to Adalbert and Hermina
(Lowinger) Preisler, he also had a sister Judith. His
parents and sister died in the Holocaust. However,
born of tragedy would be a man of heroic action the
world should know and never forget.
His career was in the hospitality industry working
in many five-star facilities in Europe and owning the
Tea Break in Paris. He married Dr. Sylvia Yvette
(March) Preisler in Miami, FL on July 2, 1979.
Fred Silberstein
Fred Silberstein, 80, a survivor of Auschwitz who gave
evidence at the Nuremberg Trials has died in New
Zealand. Silberstein, who was 14 when he was taken
to Auschwitz in 1943, spent much of his life educating
people in New Zealand about the horrors of the
Holocaust and the subsequent dangers of racism. The
president of the New Zealand Jewish Council,
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
Stephen Goodman, described him as a righteous
person. “For 60 years he worked tirelessly bearing
witness to the horrors of the Holocaust,” Goodman
said. “He was a modest and humble man.”
Silberstein survived operations by Nazi “doctor”
Josef Mengele and avoided near-certain death by
telling camp guards he was 15 and able to do manual
labor. His evidence at the Nuremburg trials in 1946
helped to convict Nazi leaders Hermann Göring and
Rudolf Heß. He moved to New Zealand in 1948.
Sali Szlam
By Rick Badie, The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
In 1942, a young Sali Szlam
was herded from her home
along with thousands of other
Romanian Jews. German
soldiers marched them
through the woods for
several weeks. Eventually,
they were packed on a train
like sardines, then shipped to a ghetto in Transnistria,
near the Ukraine border. There, her father died.
Miraculously, she, her mother and her sister survived.
In 1968, due to rising antisemitism in Poland, Mrs.
Szlam and her family migrated elsewhere. By then,
she was married with two children. Her daughter,
Melita, moved to Israel. The rest of the family settled
in Rome, Italy, but had their eyes set on America.
In 1970, with the aid of the Jewish Federation of
Greater Atlanta, they relocated to Atlanta.
Through the years, Mrs. Szlam expressed
gratitude for the Jewish organizations that helped the
family settle in America. She also was grateful for
surviving the Holocaust. She showed it through action,
not words.
“The empathy, caring for others, being involved
in the community—it came from her heart,” said a
son, Aleksander Szlam of Alpharetta. “Nothing
else. She was always doing things for other people. I
grew up with this and understood the calling.”
Leopold and Sali Szlam were honored as
Holocaust Survivors by the Jewish National
Fund. The couple met in Poland after the war. He
was 99 when he died.
In June, Mrs. Szlam was diagnosed with ovarian
cancer. It spread quickly. She died at her home from
complications of the disease. She was 84.
Richard
Weilheimer
At the age of 7 Richard
Weilheimer witnessed the
arrest of his father, the
destruction of his home, and
the burning of his synagogue
on Kristallnacht. In October
1940 his entire family was
deported to Camp de Gurs in
Vichy-controlled France. Several months later the
Quakers arranged for Richard and his younger
brother to be placed in an orphanage in Aspet, southern
France. His mother died in 1941 and two years later
his father was gassed in Sobibor. Subsequently, the
Quakers arranged for Richard and his brother to be
on the last ship out of Europe just five days before
Adolf Eichmann came to Paris to demand the “Final
Solution of the Jewish Question.”
Richard arrived in the United States at the age
of 10. He integrated into American society, fought in
In addition to writing three books about his
cont’d on p. 19
January 2010
MAREK EDELMAN (1919—2009): A REMINISCENCE
by JERZY B. WARMAN
Marek Edelman, the last commander of the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, died in Warsaw on October
2, 2009. He was fated to become a hero at the age of
24 and, after the war, a complex symbol of Jewish
resistance to the Nazis. He was the best known figure
among the surviving remnant of Jews in Poland, the
personification of courage and a chafing embodiment
of moral authority. Since the burning days of April
1943 he stood wholeheartedly in opposition to tyranny
and evil, always on the side of the weak, the powerless,
and the suffering. Before the memory of the man
inevitably becomes a monument carved in the white
marble of piety, I want to remember Marek as a man
who was—for a son of his comrades—a childhood
idol, a stern and sometimes sarcastic
critic, a constant point of reference
and an unwitting mentor.
Marek was born in Homel,
White Russia, and was orphaned as
a child. He was raised by friends of
his parents, members of the Bund,
the General Jewish Workers Party
of Poland and Lithuania, at the time
the largest Jewish political
organization in Poland. The Bund
was his cradle, his home and school,
and the most significant formative
influence in life. It was through his
spiritual grandfathers in the Bund,
Henryk Erlich and Wiktor Alter, that
he became a Yiddish socialist, and
through Abrasha Blum, Bernard
Goldstein and Maurycy Orzech, his
political fathers in the Warsaw
Ghetto, that he joined the resistance.
As a representative of the Bund,
Marek was a deputy commander of the Jewish
Fighting Organization (¯OB), which began
preparations for an armed revolt against the Nazis in
the horrifying summer of 1942. During the Ghetto
Uprising he commanded the Brushmakers’ factory
area. After Mordechai Anielewicz’s death he became
the last commander of the dwindling resistance forces.
He and Ziviah Lubetkin led a handful of the surviving
fighters out of the ghetto flames to the “Aryan Side”
and into hiding.
With the ghetto gone, with Itzhak “Antek”
Zuckerman he organized and managed an
underground network to aid Jews in hiding. Marek
fought the German army in the Warsaw Uprising in
August-September 1944, in the Jewish unit accepted
by the communist-led People’s Army during the
battle’s first days.
When
Warsaw
surrendered, a group of about
15 Jewish fighters, including
Marek, Ziviah, Antek, and my
parents, Marysia Feinmesser
and Zygmunt Warman, hid for
six weeks in a cellar until they
were miraculously smuggled
out of Warsaw by rescuers led
by Alina Margolis, Marek’s wife
after the war.
Soon after the liberation
most of the Jewish survivors left
Poland. Marek stayed. This
decision made him a
controversial, if not a wholly
suspect figure, in Israel and with
North American Jewry. Yet it
was not in the least a betrayal
or evidence of political
opportunism. To the contrary—
always faithful to the ideals of his youth, Marek was
instrumental in the Bund decision, made in 1948, to
cont’d from p. 18
the Korean conflict, and had a successful career in the fashion accessory
industry. He wrote a book for his wife and children, Be Happy, Be Free,
Dance! A Holocaust Survivor’s Message to His Grandchilden and
was involved with The Child Survivors/Hidden Children group of Florida.
He passed away on November 27, 2009.
Leon Weliczker Wells
Leon Weliczker Wells was born in Stojanow near Lvov, Poland in March 1925. He lived
through the Russian and German occupations, and was arrested with his father and one
brother. Released three days later, he was rearrested and incarcerated in the Janowska
Camp in 1942. He worked as a glazier, and after recovering from typhus managed to
escape during a mass shooting. He returned to his shtetl to discover his sisters had been
murdered and his parents deported when the town was liquidated. He lived with his two
remaining brothers in Lvov until June 1943, when he was rearrested and taken to Janowska
Camp, where he was put into a sonderkommando that destroyed the bodies (evidence)
of the people murdered there. He escaped again, was hidden by a Catholic family who
saved 22 Jews and was liberated by Soviet troops.
Wells came to the U.S., and earned a doctorate in engineering and did post-graduate work in physics.
From 1950 to 1953, he was an associate researcher at New York University and graduated from the School
of Mathematics and Mechanics. He served as research director at Commerce International and was a project
engineer at Curtis-Wright Aeronautics.
Wells was a primary witness at the Nuremburg war crimes trials and at the Eichmann trial in Tel Aviv.
In addition to writing three books about his experiences during the Holocaust—Death Brigade (1978)
repinted as The Janowska Road (1999), Who Speaks for the Vanquished (1988) and Shattered Faith
(1995)—he published many papers on engineering and held several patents. He was one of the early pioneers
of VHS technology.
A member of the National Council of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their
Descendants, Leon Wells passed away on December 19, 2009.
dissolve instead of yielding to communist pressure to
merge with the Polish Workers’ Party. But he could
not abandon the place that defined him for the rest of
his life.
In 1945 Marek and Ala settled in £ódŸ, in the
villa of Dr. Anna Margolis, his mother-in-law, and
studied medicine. The couple became renowned
physicians—Ala as a pediatrician and a respected
authority on childhood diabetes, and Marek as a
cardiologist. In the 1970s Marek conceived of and,
together with Professor Jan Moll, designed an
innovative surgical procedure for heart attack patients
who suffered usually fatal, extensive heart-muscle
damage.
Even during the vicious antisemitic purges,
launched by the government in 1968, Marek refused
to budge. His wife and children immigrated to France
but he would not let others define him or tell him
where he could live. He felt it was his duty to stand
guard over the ashes of Poland’s Jews, to keep the
memory of his fallen comrades alive, and to serve as
an eyewitness for young generations of Poles.
He signed public protests against communist
attempts to sovietize Poland. In 1976 he joined the
Committee for the Defense of Workers (“KOR”)
which became the intellectual godparent of Solidarity.
After the fall of communism in 1989, he was among
the most important public figures in democratic Poland.
He condemned contemporary assaults on human
dignity, advocated various humanitarian causes, and
opposed nationalism, antisemitism, the semi-fascist
fringe, and the right-wingers in Polish politics. Poland
honored him with its highest distinction, the Order of
the White Eagle; France made him a Chevalier de
Legion d’Honneur; and he received honorary
doctorates from Yale and Jagiellonian Universities.
These bare facts of Marek’s official biography
cannot capture the essence of the man. What was it
like to be a walking history and still be human—facing
each day with a sense of ethical duty, love for his
children, devotion to friends, anger at much that was
happening in the world, sadness of immeasurable
losses, and an extraordinary sense of professional
responsibility to his patients? What does it mean to
exist as a living memory?
At every opportunity Marek retold his
unvarnished memories of the Warsaw Ghetto. He
insisted that what he and other young boys and girls
did in April 1943 was not heroism. They fought without
hope, their only goal to die the way they chose for
themselves and to take a few Germans along with
them. Not to “die with dignity”—the phrase made
him livid—because he saw both dignity and even
greater courage in the mass of humanity he watched
every day on the Umschlagplatz as inhabitants of
the ghetto were pushed into the cattle cars waiting to
transport them to Treblinka.
It is not for me to write about Marek’s
experiences in the ghetto. He spoke about these things
himself, as the author of The Ghetto Fights, a
brochure written in 1945, and later in several booklength interviews. No one has captured Marek’s voice
better than Hanna Krall, a prominent journalist and
child survivor, in her Zd¹¿yæ Przed Panem Bogiem,
a life story told in the mid-1970s, published in English
in 1986 as Shielding the Flame. In that book he
speaks with such intensity that he sounds as if he
were sitting across the table from the reader.
Even among his friends Marek was special. He
could be gruff, even rude, but it was impossible to
ignore him or dismiss what he said. His wisdom did
not originate from scholarly books or training with
great masters. It sprang from being forced to confront
himself in the most extreme circumstances, from
cont’d on p. 21
January 2010
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
TOGETHER 19
“VOS IS GEVEYN IS GEVEYN
IS MEHR NISHT DU”
In Memoriam: Leon Wells, 1925-2009
Leon Wells was a gentle, quiet man who vented his
rage at injustice by bearing witness to the past.
He testified at the Nuremburg war crimes trials and
at the Eichmann trial. His books, The Death Brigade
(reprinted by the USHMM as Janowska Road), Who
Speaks for the Vanquished? and Shattered
Faith told the stories of those he left behind and never
forgot.
Though raised in a home and shtetl that could
come straight from a Sholom Aleichem story, Leon’s
life was radically changed with the outbreak of World
War II. His story echoes the stories of thousands of
other survivor stories, each unique, each containing
its own horror, as the Jewish people slowly fell into
the abyss. As a sonderkommando in Janowska camp
in Lvov, his experiences were particularly bitter.
Despite the agony, Leon’s eloquence and
determination to be completely honest never waned.
He thought before he spoke, weighing each word
carefully, so that the brutality he had to describe might
be less painful to the listener—and yet not a detail
was dismissed and the obligation to remember was
first and foremost in his heart.
When reminiscing about his childhood, his faith
in Judaism and God, he would say, “Vos iz geveyn is
geveyn iz mehr nisht du.” What was, was and is no
more.
These words echoed in Leon’s mind every Yom
A Soup Surprise
By ROSE DORFMAN (MALCMAN)
Now that the Holocaust is an “in” subject, people
who have experienced it first hand are talking with
others even if it is painful; some in turn listen with
sympathy and understanding. I would like to tell you
of an amusing incident that happened to me an the
two sisters who befriended me when I was left atone.
It happened in the concentration camp in
Skarzysko (Poland) on a blistering cold
Sunday morning during the winter of 1943.
The exact month I do not remember but I
cannot forget the cold, the wind, the fine
powdery snow blowing in the sunshine, the
growing pain of hunger and the hopelessness
of abandonment,
Sunday was our day off from work in
the munitions factory. We could sleep longer
and didn’t have to be in line early in the
morning to be looked over and counted
repeatedly before being taken to work. We
could sleep and stay in bed which was
something called pryeze. It was rough hewn
wood made four levels high by four or six
low narrow compartments wide, with some
straw onto it. We three happened to have the
corner pryeze on the second level into which
you could slide from two sides.
As a young teenager I was’ prone to
sleeping as !ate as possible. Many times Leah
would threaten me that she would not keep
on waking me up every few min-utes to get ready
for the lineup. She said she would let me sleep and
that “they will come and just take you away.” Anyway,
it was cold and getting late and time to get in line for
the daily soup ration which always smelled like burnt
lentil beans. It wasn’t a smell that was in any way
appealing, but rather the thought of a warm liquid
TOGETHER 20
Kippur. He tried to conform to normative Jewish
observance, but really could not. He came to
Chavurah Beth Shalom on Shabbat mornings to listen
to and debate with his rabbi, Jack Bemporad, because
he said, “A rabbi who talks about Plato is worth
learning from.”
Leon loved Plato, and knew very well that the
“cave-dwellers” would prefer to keep him quiet. Yet
almost to the end, he refused to be silenced. He told
the story of our legacy the way it needed to be told,
and called Jewish leaders and world leaders to
account. Near the end, he was still writing letters
and articles about Jewish and political injustice to local
newspapers and Together. In his gentlemanly manner,
Leon never let leadership, Jewish or non-Jewish, ever
intimidate him.
Leon summed up his philosophy of life
in Shattered Faith, where he described visiting the
synagogue in Warsaw in 1994. He concluded his
memoirs with these thoughts:
“The synagogue was small, over 100 seats
downstairs and about the same number in the balcony
for the women. It looked freshly painted, all white,
restored and quite beautiful in its stark simplicity. It
was Orthodox, like most synagogues prior to the war,
But when my wife and I arrived for Kol Nidre, it
bore no resemblance to the Kol Nidre from before
the war. There were no lighted candles, there was
no sense of awe, no one without shoes or in slippers,
no aura of fear for the Day of Judgment. The prayers
were mumbled routinely, quickly and without any
special melody or sense of urgency....
“This synagogue for me was proof that what
was, was, and is no more. That sentence keeps
repeating in my mind again and again. As in the prayer
of Hallel, it is not the dead who praise the Lord, it is
not those who go down in silence. Dead is dead. It is
all gone, completely eradicated, as it was on that first
Yom Kippur after my liberation...
“The love song of Kol Nidre that was once sung
by the angels still echoes in my inner ear as a distant
remembrance. It may have ended only for those who
suffered, were tortured and burned. For the living it
goes on and on, year after year. Yom Kippur is for
the living, and they will praise you God. The ones
lowered into the dark depths, the charred and the
maimed will be muted forever, and their pain will not
be felt by the living.
“He feedeth on ashes.”(Isaiah, 44:20) ...and so
the cycle goes on and on...And I, too, with the love
of my family, in spite of knowing the pains and truths,
will continue in the same way. Therefore let every
man remember all that happened from the day of
Abraham, beginning of time until this hour. As it is
said, ‘Remember these oh Jacob and Israel (Isaiah
44:21).’
“Oh that my words were now written! Oh that
they were printed in a book! (Job 19:23).”
As Leon always said, “Vos iz geveyn is geveyn
iz mehr nisht du. What was, was, and is no more!”
And yet he never stopped caring and placed his faith
in young people, hoping that they would break the
cycle of misery and violence to help repair the world.
—Jeanette Friedman
flowing into the throat that got one moving.
The soup used to come to camp in large kettles
and was dished out with long-handled measuring cups.
The distributing was done by the kapos who were
careful not to mix the soup and disturb the solids that
settled to the bottom. That they kept for themselves
and their girlfriends. Sometimes those who were first
in line were better off because when the .lids of the
kettles were removed the kapo made mixing gestures,
of which they were experts, lowered the handle to
People used to try to figure out where to stand in
line for the best chance of mixing time. However, if
one got out of. line in order to go to the end, the
beating and abuse was not worth the pain and
humiliation. So, you just stood in line hoping that his
arm would be making circle motions in the kettle.
Getting back to the amusing side of this story, it
was cold and blustery and as always it fell on Leah
to go out and get the soup. She dressed in all the rags
we had, put my coat which supposedly was the
warmest, took the one pot we had and went
out. After she left we didn’t sleep. We just
listened to the sounds around us, the coughing
and grunting and also the lack of sounds from
those who no longer were making any, those
who would be taken out later. One by one
other people kept coming in and the smell of
the soup penetrated the air. Suddenly there
was Leah, the clean cold smell of the outdoors
was all around her, the snow flakes still
cling-ing to her eyelashes, and the soup pot
in her hands.
In an excited but hushed voice she kept
on saying, “Get up, get up! Something fell into
the soup.” We didn’t need to hear any more.
Swiftly we slid to the edge of the bed where
Leah had put the pot. We reached under the
straw at the head of the bed for our spoons.
We plunged into the pot like true hunters
seeking the prize that was to be ours.
The humor of the situation didn’t strike
us then, but now when we meet yearly in
Miami, we do talk about those sad times and laugh
about our big prize in the soup. It isn’t a belly laugh
that comes out, it’s more of a hollow sound, but I still
remember well the sickening feeling of disappointment
when we had pulled out our prize and found it to be a
piece of dish cloth. We wrung it out as best we could
and finished the soup to the last drop.
almost the middle, never the bottom, and pretended
to vigorously mix. Some, of the soup actually did get
mixed and those few lucky ones who happened to be
in line at that moment of mixing were rewarded with
a piece of potato or a morsel of horse meat. When
such s solid substance hit the tin cup it was a sound
of joy to behold.
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
January 2010
MAREK EDELMAN (1919—2009):
A REMINISCENCE
cont’d from p. 19
having to face his own weaknesses, perhaps even a
long-remembered failure to do what may have been
beyond possible. And it was informed by the everpresent memory of the fallen, those he deemed better
than he and more deserving to survive.
Marek rescued many, and he was himself rescued
by others. He owed his life to Dr. Anna Braude-Heller,
the director of the Bersons and Baumans Children
Hospital in the ghetto, where he was a messenger
and took his first steps into armed conspiracy.
During the Great Deportation in the summer of
1942 only those with official work permits could avoid
deportation to Treblinka. The Germans gave them
out sparingly—they issued so few for the Children’s
Hospital that only a fraction of the staff could be
spared. Dr. Braude-Heller had to decide who would
get one and who would not. She did not keep one for
herself. Instead, she bet on youth. She believed that
young people had a better chance of survival and a
greater claim to life. Marek and several others, my
mother among them, received these “numbers for
life.” What a bet Dr. Braude-Heller made! And how
much had she won in return…
Marek was later saved by Simha “Kazik”
Ratajzer, who coerced two water workers in Warsaw
to lead him through the sewers into the dying ghetto,
where he found the remaining fighters and brought
them to the “Aryan Side.” He was hidden in a secret
apartment in Warsaw by Marysia Sawicka, Vladka
Meed and other girls who were indispensable ¯OB
messengers and caretakers of its hiding places. He
was rescued again by Anna and Ala Margolis from
the deserted ruins of Warsaw in November 1944.
Marek knew he had a debt to the dead and to the
living. And he repaid it throughout the rest of his life,
splendidly. He did it by teaching younger generations
and serving as their role model. He repaid it by being
the closest friend to his surviving comrades-in-arms
and their children, and through his political and
humanitarian actions.
But he repaid it most of all to the ill and infirm
from all walks of life. For Marek was an incredible
doctor. He had an unbelievable diagnostic intuition, a
sixth sense almost. I am told that this is a gift,
something that cannot be learned from textbooks or
in medical school. But I wonder. A few times, I
watched him examine my parents’ friends. If their
problem was beyond medicine’s power he would
dismiss their complaints, almost derisively saying there
was nothing seriously wrong with them. But if he
knew that something could be done to cure or help,
he would devote hours talking to the patient and
conducting the most thorough examination. I am
convinced that his experiences in the ghetto—where
he had only seconds to decide who could be helped
and who had to be let go; in the ¯OB, where he had
to judge in a blink of an eye the essence of a fellow
fighter’s character; or in hiding where only instinct
could tell him whom to trust—were what honed his
unerring perceptiveness as a doctor.
All of us who knew him, children and friends,
sensed this. He was someone who knew. Marek
appeared to be a skeptic, even a cynic—more often
than not, a pessimist. He used to say that man was
by nature a wild beast, an evil creature. He learned
truths of which others had only a vague inkling. And
he told these truths in startling and confounding ways.
In the preface to the reissue of The Ghetto Fights
he wrote: “In principle, the most important thing is
life. And when there is life, freedom becomes the
most important. Then you give your life for freedom.
So, in the end, it’s impossible to know what is most
important…”
He made you feel as if he knew you better than
Special “Matzevah Marker”
Available for Survivors’ Graves
Survival has placed upon us the
responsibility of making sure that the
Holocaust is remembered forever. Each of
us has the sacred obligation to share this
task while we still can. However, with the
passage of each year, we realize that time is
against us, and we must make sure to utilize
all means for future remembrance.
A permanent step toward achieving this
important goal can be realized by placing a
unique and visible maker on the gravestone
of every survivor. The most meaningful
symbol for this purpose is our Survivor
logo, inscribed with the words
HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR. This simple, yet
dramatic, maker will re-affirm our
uniqueness and our place in history for
future generations.
Our impressive MATZEVAH marker is
now available for purchase. It is cast in solid
bronze, measuring 5x7 inches, and can be
attached to new or existing tombstones.
The cost of each marker is $125.
Additional donations are gratefully
appreciated.
Let us buy the marker now and leave
structions in our wills for its use. This will
enable every one of us to leave on this earth
visible proof of our miraculous survival and
The cost of each marker is US $125 including shipping & handling.
Make checks payable to: American Gathering
and mail to:
American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants
122 West 30th Street, Suite 205
New York, NY 10001
Please allow sixty (60) days for delivery.
Name ________________________________________________
Address_______________________________________________
City ________________________________State __ Zip ________
Phone_________________________________________________
Number of Markers _____________
Total Amount Enclosed $__________
January 2010
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
you knew yourself. Even if you sensed that you were
not quite up to his expectations, you also felt that he
still had faith in you. This was the essence of his
authority: his very presence challenged you for the
better. He provoked awe that, in turn, inspired hope
and the desire to join his side in the eternal battle on
behalf of ideals.
American Gathering
compliments Polish judge
The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust
Survivors and Their Descendants commends and
applauds a Polish judge who has fined the Catholic
magazine Gosc Niedzielny •7,400 for comparing a
woman’s desire to have an abortion to medical
experiments perpetrated by Nazi war criminals at
Auschwitz.
Judge Ewa Nowicky also ordered the magazine
to issue a formal apology to the woman, Alicja
Tysiac, who had unsuccessfully sought an abortion
and whom the magazine had accused of wanting,
but “not being able to kill her child.”
“Comparing a mother’s always painful decision
to terminate a pregnancy for health reasons to the
reprehensible crimes committed by the notorious Dr.
Joseph Mengele and other SS doctors at Auschwitz
trivializes the memory of the Holocaust and makes
offensive analogies that border on the obscene,” said
Menachem Rosensaft, Vice President of the
American Gathering. “It is gratifying that Judge
Nowicky had the moral courage to declare such
unseemly exploitation of Holocaust imagery off
limits.”
The article followed a ruling by the European
Court of Justice which had ordered the Polish
government to pay Ms. Tysiac • 25,000 in
compensation for denying her an abortion.
Sao Paulo sets Shoah
Remembrance Day
RIO DE JANEIRO (JTA) — Sao Paulo Mayor
Gilberto Kassab recently signed a measure that sets
Jan. 27 as a municipal day to honor Shoah victims.
Sao Paulo Municipal Holocaust Remembrance Day
will be held for the first time in 2010.
“The Holocaust was a terrible period
in the history of humanity,” Kassab told
Brazilian media. “This date is our
opportunity for the city of Sao Paulo to
have a special day of reflection.”
Jewish council member Floriano
Pesaro had proposed the bill.
Several Jewish officials attended the
announcement, including the presidents
of the Holocaust Survivors Brazilian
Association, the Latin American Jewish
Congress, the Brazilian Israelite
Confederation and Sao Paulo State
Jewish Federation. At the end of the
ceremony, the fourth Chanukah candle
was lit.
Sao Paulo is the capital city of Sao
Paulo state, which has a 60,000-member
Jewish community, or half of Brazil’s
Jews.
PLEASE SEND US YOUR STORIES, ARTICLES,
POEMS, AND LETTERS FOR INCLUSION IN
TOGETHER AND OUR WEB SITE. PLEASE
UNDERSTAND THAT WE CANNOT PRINT
EVERYTHING THAT IS SUBMITTED.
SEND TO: [email protected]
TOGETHER 21
IT’S A SHOO-ID
by SHELDON P. HERSH
As the number of Yiddish speaking individuals
continues to decline, some pivotal Yiddish expressions
have fallen by the wayside, unfortunate victims of
neglect and non-use. For those of us who sprinkle
our daily conversation with the confection that is
Yiddish, this unfortunate turn of events has started to
whittle away at our appreciation and command of
this most expressive of languages—leaving us
deprived of the schmaltz that makes idiomatic Yiddish
so engaging.
Shoo-Id or Shawd (the proper pronunciation
depends upon where in Europe one’s forbearers called
home) is one such word that Yiddish dabblers fail to
use with any regularity—a shoo-id and a bit of a
shande to boot. As simple translation of “it’s a shooid” would be inadequate and does little justice to
words or phrases that are endowed with
overflowing content. Word for word translation
certainly offers convenience but the subtle
nuances that make up “it’s a shoo-id” would
inevitably be lost—a clear disadvantage for
those seeking to become more acquainted with
the ins and outs of the Yiddish language. (Alas,
another shoo-id.)
Simply put, a shoo-id is translated as a
pity or a waste. For example, when served a
pastrami sandwich without a pickle, one would
say it is a shoo-id (pity) that I didn’t get a
pickle for it would have made the sandwich so
much better. But in the event that part of the
sandwich is left over, it would be a shoo-id
(waste) to leave behind perfectly good food
that will end up in the trash. Many readers may
remember 24- hour-yahrtzeit candles in small
juice-sized glasses. Subscribing to the wise
adage, waste not; want not, my parents, along
with many other obsessive savers, were
recycling candle holders into juice glasses as it
was both a pity and waste to throw out these perfectlysized glass chalices. Once they had amassed enough
glasses to supply a small catering establishment, my
parents finally murmured it’s a shoo-id as they
begrudgingly tossed out any new arrivals.
So to appreciate “it’s a shoo-id,” requires
clarifying examples—without them, Yiddish
terminology, like our fragile greenery, will likely be
devoid of color and vibrancy and with time, will wither
away.
“It’s a shoo-id” predates the Holocaust years,
but became all the more poignant and exceptional
during that tragic time. Starvation and deprivation
were rampant and the bare essentials of daily living—
food, adequate clothing, protection from the elements
and minimal health care—were nowhere to be found.
Nothing went to waste as one never knew when any
object might mean the difference between life and
death. Waste was unimaginable and patently
unforgivable. Shoo-id was no longer simply a
perfunctory remark but was infused with palpable
relevance as the barbarity of the Holocaust
unfolded.
A broken stick or pieces of discarded wood could
provide a bit of warmth during brutal, frigid Eastern
European winters. Worn clothing or rags were
commonly wrapped around feet and hands as many
had no shoes or gloves. Crumbs, peels and scraps
that would have been discarded during better times,
now attracted skeletal figures rummaging about
looking for anything that would help stave off
TOGETHER 22
starvation for just a little while longer. Words, like
“it’s a shoo-id,” took on new meaning and conveyed
an added sense of importance to so many of the little
things in life that we so often take for granted.
So who but a Holocaust survivor is better
prepared to provide a true understanding and
appreciation of “It’s a shoo-id.” The time spent in
ghettos and slave labor camps left survivors with a
compulsion to save and conserve and an impulse to
hold on to items that may one day prove instrumental
in assuring one’s survival. For those who struggled to
stay alive wasteful behavior was an unforgivable sin.
My parents, typical survivors, had the phrase
permanently embedded in their vocabulary. Caged in
the hermetically sealed Lodz Ghetto, they never let
anything go to waste and started a collection of odds
and ends once they took up residence in America. With
a conviction that many religious zealots would envy,
they stockpiled orphaned objects in case they should
eventually be needed. Our basement was a storeroom
for random articles, carefully boxed and catalogued
as though by a staff of devoted museum curators.
Here one could find an eclectic potpourri of doodads
and knick-knacks or spur of the moment purchases
others had tired of or no longer needed. Whenever I
looked askance and questioned the need for objects
that appeared outdated or superfluous, I was
immediately put in my place by a timely parental
rejoinder. “Who is so smart to know what tomorrow
will bring? Perhaps one day you will finally
understand.”
My father was attracted to the voluminous trash
our neighbors so casually discarded. Lumber, clothing,
tools and the like adorning the sidewalk prompted
him to observe with a note of dismay that many, if
not all, of the things waiting to be picked up by the
sanitation department would have been fiercely
fought over and picked clean in the Ghetto. “It’s a
shoo-id,” (pity), he would sadly whisper, “It’s a shooid” (waste). “People’s lives could have been saved
just with the things that lay here for the taking.”
“It’s a shoo-id” was never part of my vocabulary
and was as foreign to me as baseball was to my father.
I was often at odds with my parents about a concept
that had such little relevance in a country awash in
food and consumer goods and services. The notion
of “it’s a shoo-id” was of little concern to many
Americans as the blessings of abundance blinded a
naive public to the realities beyond America’s
borders. Many Holocaust survivors were now citizens
in a land of plenty but found it difficult to let go of a
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
philosophy that had proven so critical to their survival.
When it came to food, “It’s a shoo-id” took on
the status of a biblical injunction. Wasting food was
sacrilegious and intolerable. Hunger and the misery
and disease it brought were everywhere…in the
ghettos, in the camps, in the forests. Food was life.
Given their experiences, there is little wonder that
my parents were incapable of wasting food. They
were clever improvisers who would immediately jump
into action at the first indication that food was about
to turn. The food was carefully examined and if
deemed salvageable, was immediately incorporated
into an innovative dish such as compote, kugel or
cholent. All were tried and true recipes and nearly
always guaranteed satisfaction to its consumers. My
mother would place heaping portions onto our plates—
a reaction to a time when parents had so little to offer
their starving children. This led to occasions when
food remained on our plates; an act that would cause
visible concern and more often than not, gave rise to
a spontaneous chorus of “It’s a shoo-id!”
accompanied by an assortment of sorrowful
tales of hunger in the ghetto that were
intended to instruct and inspire naive children
to eat.
Dieting left my parents perplexed and
without words. It was viewed as the height
of folly for normal, healthy individuals to place
limits on the types or amounts of food they
consumed to lose weight. More than once,
when I discussed the possibility of dieting,
my mother would look at me in disbelief and
exclaim “For five years, your father and I
were on enough of a diet in the ghettos and
camps—no one else here should have to diet.
It’s a shoo-id (pity and waste) to even think
about it.”
They were of the opinion that anyone
appearing too thin was likely ill, while those
amply filled out in all directions were clearly
symbols of good health.
Rebelling against “it’s a shoo-id” in my
youth, I had imagined that one of the benefits of
adulthood would be the freedom to waste things and
overwhelmed with guilt. I tried and failed abysmally
as a result of a defining moment.
While in a bagel store a number of years ago, I
stood behind a customer who asked for a scooped
out bagel, something heretofore unfamiliar to me. The
counter person grabbed the innocent bagel, gouged
out its’ soft innards and nonchalantly discarded the
heart of the bagel into a trash can filled with other
bagel remains. “It’s a shoo-id,” I heard myself
whisper, “It’s a pity and a monumental waste of a
perfectly good bagel.”
I was overcome with a sense of purpose, and
neglected teachings took on new-found relevance as
images of starving ghetto dwellers grabbing wildly at
discarded bagel innards began dancing in my head.
At that moment, I decided to practice a modified
version of “it’s a shoo-id,” one that would fit my
suburban lifestyle. With my priorities and perspectives
somewhat altered, visitors who happen to pass
through my overcrowded basement, are quickly taken
aback by my expansive collection of oddities and
unexpected artifacts. My response to their wide-eyed
bewilderment is usually along the lines of “Hey, you
never know when some of this stuff will come in
handy.” I never ask for a scooped out bagel and I
have become quite adept at making great compote
and an above-average kugel. And why not? It would
be a shoo-id not to.
January 2010
FROM ALLGENERATIONS, Inc.
SERENA WOOLRICH,
PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER
PLEASE SEND RELEVANT RESPONSES
TO: [email protected]
From Steve Moss:
I’m looking for Jewish immigrants who returned to Europe to fight the Nazis with
the Allied forces. I’m particularly interested in finding Jews from New England.
Contact SteveM@thejewish advocate.com.
From Clara Spektor Grossman, a survivor in Florida:
I’m looking for my brother, David Spektor, who lived with his family before WWII
until he went into hiding with our father. Since that time I have not heard from him
and wonder if he is still alive.
From Peter Wittman in Deland, FL:
Does anyone know any member of the Wittman family from Budapest, Hungary?
I would like to find some members or friends of my family.
From Joseph Wolfowicz, a survivor in Brookline, MA:
I am desperately trying to find the whereabouts of Mr. & Mrs. David Linder.
From Vera Hecht, a Survivor in Brooklyn, New York:
I am looking for Survivors who were in the same block in Auschwitz with me
and Elly Berkovits Gross: Auschwitz-2 / Birkenau - Lager C. Block
18, June, July and August 1944. The Block Elteste was Miri Leichner
from Bratislava; her assistants were Ibi from Valea Lui Mihaly
(Mihályfalva) and Brochy from Marghita. In this block there were
over 1,000 female deportees from Northern Transylvania mostly from
the Bihor Region. There was a young girl there who carried water in
a large pot for everyone; we called her “Elly kis kalyhas hozzal vizet”
(Elly little kind bring water). She carried the water to the beds every
day. Elly [Berkovits Gross] was deported from Simleu-Silvaniei,
Romania. Maybe one of you were there and remembers me and/
or Elly. I survived with my mother.
From Oleg Ignatyev (Aleh Ihnatsyeu), a 3g in Minsk, Belarus:
I am searching for any information about my grandfather who disappeared during
the Second World War. His name was Ivan Antonovich Brengosh (Ivan Antonavich
Brengosh in Belarusian). My family has been doing research for several decades. From local official bodies I have received negative answers to my questions about information on my grandfather. By September, 1941 Minsk had been
occupied for three months by the Fascists. One day there was an Aktion, to
search and catch Jews. Armed soldiers of the Vermacht entered the courtyard
and silently took away my grandfather. During this period the Germans still kept
detailed accounts of those who had been killed, or sent to Germany. My
grandfather’s name does not appear on any list I have found. Please help me to
learn about the fate of my grandfather. My mother is still alive and all her life has
also searched for him. His wife, my grandmother, died 40 years ago in ignorance
of his fate.Do you know of any organizations for me to contact where it is possible to learn about the fate of people who were lost during the war; with data on
communities of people originally from the Soviet Union that may be helpful with
this search?
From Gunther Katz, a Survivor in Encino, CA:
On February 22, 1943, I crossed from France to Switzerland at Annemasse as part
of a rescue of OSE children. There were 18 or 19 of us. I have always wondered
how all these people fared after the war. After crossing we all wound up at a
vacant school, Les Charmilles, in Geneva until we were moved to various “children’s
homes.” Some of us wound up at Lilly Volkert in Askona. One girl in particular that
I wonder about was a dark-haired 14-year-old from Belgium who had been hidden
in a convent in France. Another was Ernst Kirschheimer (now Hirsch), with whom
I am in contact. Anyone out there have any information for me?
I am a 2g; my mother is a Holocaust survivor who left Berlin, Germany via the
Kindertransport. I am interested in writing a book about Nazi survivors and their
pets; specifically what actions they observed or were forced to take with regard
to their pets (i.e., abandonment, death of, attempts to save them) and the ensuing
impact on their lives of these circumstances. Any narratives can be forwarded to
[email protected]
January 2010
I am a Holocaust survivor that was in several concentration camps. In the
winter of 1945, I was in the city of Bendorf, Germany. During our time there, we
marched at night to some sort of elevator that went below ground. After two
more elevator rides, we entered a tunnel that looked like salt mines. We walked
for a while and then climbed a flight of stairs. The stairs led to a munitions factory
where we were told to work silently. We sorted different metal parts. We worked
there for about three weeks. I am trying to find anyone that also worked in this
munitions factory in Bendorf or knows any information about this place. Contact:
[email protected]
From Rose Berl, a 2g in Amsterdam, the Netherlands:
My aunt, Hilda Berl (maiden name) and her husband, Kurt Hirsh, were from
the Czech Republic. She lived in Krnov in Silesia and later in Prague. I believe
that my Uncle Kurt through marriage) also lived in Prague before being transported.
They married inTerezin. My aunt was murdered in Auschwitz and my Uncle
Kurt died or was murdered in Dachau on January 24, 1945, I believe. I have not
been able to find out if any of my uncle‘s family survived. Further, I am looking
for any relatives who were on the Kindertransport of Mr. Nicholas Winton.
From Evelyne Haendel, a Survivor in Belgium, and Director of Family Tracing
Services, Hidden Child Foundation in New York, New York:
Perhaps someone knows something about Perl Farkasova (Freymowitz). She
was approximately 10 years old at the onset of WWII. She lived with her parents,
Abraham and Kreindla, in Belovarec (near Khust), Czechoslovakia. She
had five older sisters and two brothers. It is believed that she may have survived,
perhaps having been taken out of the Khust ghetto and possibly adopted. She
may still be living today under another identity.
From Kathi Keys (Fenyves), a 2g in Auckland, New Zealand:
My father was Fenyves Gyula; he was born (July 1915) and
raised in Budapest.
He attended Piarista. He was a munkaszolgalatos and was
also sent on the road to Russia.My mother was Antal Jutka
(Csuti) before she married my father. She was also born in
Budapest (September 1925). She had a sister, Antal Lili (b.
1923 approximately), who emigrated to Israel around
1948.Does anyone know my family, or by some miracle
is related to us?
From Betty Weiss, nee Fleischman, a 2g in Skokie, Illinois:
My mother, Sara Fleichmanova, z”l, nee Schulcz, survived both Auschwitz and
Allendorf (she had been in a Hungarian transport). She had a brother, Jozsi
Schulz, who lived in Budapest on Mazsa utca 10, Budapest X kerulet. He was
married to Magda Fogel and they had a son named Laci Schulz, born April 1943
in Budapest. Before they were transported to Auschwitz, a nurse named Hilda
Schulz (a cousin) made arrangements in Budapest with an opera singer for Laci’s
safety. We know Laci was saved by an unknown woman, and possiblely was
taken to Israel or the US under false papers, a different name, etc. - we do not
know. The nurse passed away just last year and told the story to my brother in
Galanta (Slovakia). (My mother, z”l was from Galanta and I was born there in
1957). My husband is from Bratislava, but lived in Galanta). Since we escaped
the Communists and immigrated to the US in 1981, I have been searching, but no
luck - only dead ends. There are no records of a “Laci Schulcz.” but he might be
also under the name, “Laci Fogel.”
From Roxanne Dennis:
Surname: Dudinskas or Dudinskaite
Given Name: Reiza
Nationality: Lithuanian
Date of Birth: 18 September 1918
I am trying to find information about my great grandmother. My family does not
have much information about her, and what we do have leaves a lot of our past
shrouded in mystery. I would love to be able to get into contact with any of our
family members or their surviving relatives.
From Deborah Ross, a 2g in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada:
If anyone knows the fate of my grandmother, Devora Baltupski Ramm, or my
uncle, Israel Ramm (her son) or my grandfather, Chaim Ramm from Vilna,
Lithuania, I would LOVE to know. My mother’s name was Nechama Baltupski
Ramm and she was married (before she married my father) to Yonia Fain, also
from Vilna. Would love to be connected with others from Vilna or anyone with
either of those last names.
visit our website at www.americangathering.com
TOGETHER 23
An Urgent
Appeal
to Our
Readers
For 26 years the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, the largest
umbrella organization of survivors, has been at the forefront of all issues pertaining to survivors and their
families. Despite extraordinary economic challenges and confrontations with Holocaust deniers, this past
year has been no exception. We are determined to continue our work and know that together, with your
generous contributions, we will be able to insure that our fight for remembrance will live on.
With your support and that of the more than 80,000 survivor families who make up our organization, we
will be able to continue our critical work in the coming year and build on our past accomplishments.
Please send what you can. Contributors of $180 or more will receive a special gift, and contributors of
$500 or more will be acknowledged and listed in forthcoming editions of our newspaper, Together.
In 2009 alone we have:
· Represented survivors’ interests at diplomatic conferences and negotiations in Berlin, Washington and
Prague to secure and increase reparations and restitution for those victimized by Nazi persecution and
plunder;
· Fought those who would deny or trivialize the evils of the Holocaust, both here and abroad;
· Ensured that survivors receive proper care and assistance through our work with social agencies like
the Jewish Board of Family Services, Self-Help and The Blue Card;
· Advocated our cause in newspapers and on television, with more than a dozen columns since the
beginning of 2009;
· Promoted Holocaust education, with the participation of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, Yad Vashem, and the Study Center of
Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot, by sponsoring the nonsectarian Summer Seminar Program on Holocaust
The
and Jewish Resistance that takes American teachers
American
to Poland, Israel and Washington to give them a
Gathering
personal appreciation of the Holocaust;
· Worked with the U.S. Justice Department in the
search for and prosecution of Nazi war criminals,
including the recent successful deportation to Germany
of the notorious John Demjanjuk;
· Promoted the search for “lost survivors” sought by
relatives and friends, in cooperation
with AllGenerations, Inc., headed by Serena Woolrich;
now
accepts
Visa,
Mastercard,
American Express, and Discover
by phone and in person for your
convenience.
(212) 239-4230
· Continued the solemn observance of Yom Hashoah,
Holocaust Remembrance Day, with the largest annual commemoration in the United States, in association
with New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage – a Living Memorial to the Holocaust;
· Maintained and updated the Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
which now includes the records of over 185,000 survivors and their families who came to North America
after World War II;
· Disseminated Holocaust-related news and other items of interest to the survivor community on our
website, www.americangathering.com.
In order to continue these important efforts, the American Gathering needs your ongoing financial
commitment and support, NOW more than ever. We face tremendous fundraising challenges and are
confident that we can count on you, our Survivor family, to help us continue making the difference we do.
Your generous, tax-exempt (U.S.) contribution to the American Gathering will help us greatly in our
continued activities.
We thank you in advance for your generosity, and wish you health and happiness in the coming year.
American Gathering, 122 West 30th Street, Suite 205, New York, NY 10001
Please make a meaningful,
tax deductible
contribution payable to the
“American Gathering.”
Thank you.
TOGETHER 24
Name:
___________________________________________________________________________
Address:
___________________________________________________________________________
City:
State:
Zip:
Phone:
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January 2010