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KRISTALLNACHT SEVENTY YEARS LATER"Was There No Space in the World for Us?"by Rabbi Marvin Hier, Simon Wiesenthal Center Founder and DeanSeventy years ago, while Jews in America gathered at the Algonquin Hotel and Waldorf Astoria at banquets in support of Jewish causes or in personal celebration of a Simcha, the most notorious pogrom was unleashed by Hitler’s Germany. On this day was born the Night of Broken Glass, Kristallnacht.The Nazis said it was in reaction to the killing of a German official in Paris, but as documents showed, it was a state organized pogrom involving the highest officials of Nazi...

Poland is not Shoah-land From Warsaw Business Journal A recent incident in which 35 Hasidic Jewish tourists forcibly entered the museum of the Majdanek concentration camp after the facility's closing time, removing gates from their hinges and breaking into one of the barracks, has highlighted the misunderstandings so prevalent in the hugely complicated relationship between modern Jews and modern Poland. To be fair, the tourists in this case spoke very little English and no Polish, and were not able to understand what the museum's security guard was telling them. Still, it seems hard to imagine that they didn't understand that...

According to a article in German that was published in the German magazine "Der Spiegel" the ruthless French nazi-collaborator Maurice Papon died in the age of 96 years on February 17, 2007. As secretary general of the prefecture Bordeaux Papon signed orders for the imprisonment and deportation or the jews in that area. Altogether there were 76.000 jews -among them 12.000 kids- arrested in France and displaced into the concentration camps of the nazis. Only 2.500 survived the Holocaust. Papon is definitly responsible for the deportation of 1,560 Jewish men, women and children. The majority were sent directly to detention...

40 institutes boycott Iran think tank over Holocaust conference By The Associated Press PARIS - Nearly 40 European and North American research institutes will suspend contacts with a leading Iranian think tank that helped organize last week's conference in Tehran of Holocaust deniers, a Paris-based researcher said Saturday. The institutes, from Warsaw to Washington and beyond, have agreed to suspend ongoing programs with the Iranian Institute for Political and International Studies, or IPIS, according to a statement issued by Francois Heisbourg, who organized the boycott. They have also refused participation in IPIS meetings or invite IPIS staff to their own...

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ermany condemned a planned Iranian conference on the Holocaust and summoned Iran's charge d'affaires to the Foreign Ministry, saying Friday that attempts to question the Nazis' murder of Jews were "shocking and unacceptable." The conference, scheduled for Sunday and Monday, was organized by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called the systematic killing of some 6 million Jews a "myth" and "exaggerated." Some 67 foreign researchers from 30 countries are scheduled to attend the two-day meeting. "We condemn all past and future attempts of anyone who gives a platform to those who relativize or question the Holocaust," Foreign Ministry spokesman...

Holocaust survivor leads crusade to track down fugitive Nazis Elliot Welles, a Holocaust survivor who found the officer who ordered his mother's death and turned that personal triumph into a relentless crusade to track down fugitive Nazis, has died. He was 79. Welles died of an apparent heart attack at his Bronx home last Tuesday, his son, Mark Welles, of Roslyn, N.Y. said on Sunday. Welles retired in 2003 after more than 20 years as head of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League's Nazi-hunting operations. Finding ex-Nazis who had eluded post-World War II justice "was an overriding passion in his life,"...

An initiative to refurbish the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp has sparked a storm among Holocaust survivors in Israel. The initiative was announced last month by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum's new director, who claimed that the current exhibits were outdated and insufficiently attractive to visitors. A detailed refurbishing plan has yet to be drawn up, but participants at a recent meeting of Holocaust survivors' organizations warned against moves to "beautify" the site, as has been done with other Nazi concentration camps. "Dachau and Sachsenhausen have already become well-kept gardens; we won't allow the same to happen to Auschwitz," they said....

THE scale of the Holocaust has been "greatly exaggerated", Iran's foreign ministry spokesman said today, adding he had visited several former concentration camps in eastern Europe. “When I was ambassador I saw several of these camps in (the former) East Germany and Poland. In my opinion it has been greatly exaggerated. It is far from what is being publicised,” Hamid Reza Asefi said. His comments come ahead of a conference to be held on December 11 in Iran which the Islamic republic hopes will present “hidden aspects” of the slaughter of Jews under Nazi Germany. “Different opinions which affirm and...

Bialystok Jewish ghetto uprising anniversary 16.08.2006 Events marking the 63rd anniversary of the uprising in the Bialystok Jewish ghetto in eastern Poland are being held in the city today. It was the second biggest Jewish armed rising against Nazi Germans during World War II, after the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto Uprising. Over 40,000 people lived in the ghetto, which the Nazis began to liquidate in 1943. Some 800 people were killed on the spot and the rest started to be transported to death camps. The uprising lasted for almost a week. Some 300 to 400 insurgents had only 25 guns and...

On 13 July, the French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy inaugurated the first regional Shoah memorial in France in the Hauts-de-Seine subdivision. The memorial was placed in a glade of the prestigious park of Sceaux, located south of Paris. New memorials are to be built throughout France to increase awareness of the genocide. Paris consitoire chairman Joel Mergui said the aim was to commemorate the Shoah on a regional level in the places where the victims lived before they were deported to Nazi death camps. Sarkozy, who is also the head of the local council of Hauts-de-Seine, agreed two years ago...

A few months ago, Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a posthumous award for "constructive dissent" to Hiram (or Harry) Bingham, IV. For over fifty years, the State Department resisted any attempt to honor Bingham. For them he was an insubordinate member of the US diplomatic service, a dangerous maverick who was eventually demoted. Now, after his death, he has been officially recognized as a hero. Bingham came from an illustrious family. His father (on whom the fictional character Indiana Jones was based) was the archeologist who unearthed the Inca City of Machu Picchu, Peru, in 1911. Harry entered the...

Polish Jewish Museum A Tough Sell Here Some philanthropists dismissive of historical institution on site of Warsaw Ghetto. Steve Lipman - Staff Writer Victor Markowicz, a Siberian-born philanthropist who grew up in Poland and later moved to the United States, spends much of his time these days asking fellow Jewish philanthropists in the U.S. to contribute to a Jewish museum to be built in Warsaw in the next few years. Markowicz’s friends, in turn, ask him something: “Why in Warsaw? Why in Poland?” Many American Jews — born here or in the Old Country — support the idea of a...

Apr. 25, 2006 2:55 | Updated Apr. 25, 2006 19:43 Never Again As the nation marks Holocaust Remembrance Day, we remember history's greatest crime against humanity, the industrialization of murder that took the lives of six million Jews and millions of other people in Nazi concentration camps. We note the unfinished business relating directly to the Holocaust, including the failure of several countries - including Austria, Norway, Sweden, Syria and Ukraine - to prosecute still-living Nazi war criminals. However what is striking about this day in 2006 is not so much that anti-Semitic violence and neo-Nazi movements persist in the...

Tuesday, April 25, 2006 On Holocaust Remembrance Day: Calls For A New Holocaust The enemies of Israel and the Jewish people picked Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) to call for a new Holocaust, one that would destroy Israel. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahemdinejad, renewing his calls for Israel to be destroyed, said:We say that this fake regime cannot not logically continue to live and addedOpen the doors [of Europe] and let the Jews go back to their own countries conveniently ignoring the fact that a majority of Israel's Jewish population didn't come from Europe and has no ties to that continent....

Jews in Poland Speak of Shoah Remembrance as a Curse. by Jane Ulman, Contributing Writer This tale is about two visions of Poland. In one, Poland is about pain and loss. It’s the place where 3 million of a total population of 3.3 million Polish Jews perished in the Shoah, where Jews have nothing left, where indeed there are almost no Jews other than a few languishing, aged survivors who can’t even scrape together a Shabbat morning minyan. Poland is Auschwitz; it’s Never Again. Defining this Poland is the March of the Living, an annual event that lays bare Poland’s...

Wednesday, April 19, 2006 Remembering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 19 April 1943 63 years ago today was the eve of Passover and the 50,000 - 60,000 (out of more than half a million who had been forced into the narrow streets of this confined space) suriving Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto were slated to be finally and completely annihilated. When the SS troops entered the ghetto to renew the deportations to the death camps, however, they met with unexpected resistance. Fewer than 500 young fighters, girls and boys --the youngest aged 12 but most in their late teens and...

CERTAIN GROUPS claim the Holocaust never happened. Almost from the beginning of the discovery of this widespread destruction of European Jewry before and during World War II, Nazi apologists, anti-Semites, and selfstyled “skeptics” have tried to discredit the accepted history of this period. Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University has termed this phenomenon “Holocaust denial.” While originally an obscure movement, since the rise of the internet in the mid-1990s, Holocaust denial has grown significantly, and new adherents continue to set up web sites dedicated to “debunking the myth.” The upside to the growing awareness of Holocaust denial is that organizations and...

Amid pledges from Iran to "wipe Israel off the map" and to hold a conference examining whether the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews is a "myth," America's Holocaust Museum is under fire for its silence about Arab assistance to the Nazis during World War II, and about the intensifying hatred of Jews in the Arab Middle East today. Leading the charge is Holocaust Museum Watch, a national organization formed 18 months ago to spur the museum toward meaningful acknowledgment of Arab anti-Semitism. 'snip' Rabbi Herzfeld and other critics argued that the museum's silence on Arab anti-Semitism was likely the...

Polish lawmakers condemn Iranian president's calling the Holocaust a myth By The Associated Press WARSAW - Polish lawmakers condemned Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday for recently dismissing the Holocaust as a myth, and said such statements were "absolutely unacceptable for Poland, on whose land Nazis set up death camps." "The memory of the Holocaust in Poland is vivid and painfully present," the parliamentary commission on foreign relations said in a statement. "Millions of Polish citizens fell victim to the genocidal and anti-Semitic policies of the Third Reich." Polish lawmakers also expressed "anxiety and indignation" with Ahmadinejad's call for the elimination...

COLOGNE, Germany (AP) -- German-born Pope Benedict XVI on Friday became the second pope to visit a synagogue, entering to the haunting tones of a ram's horn, praying before a Holocaust memorial and lamenting a rise in anti-Semitism. "We need to show respect for one another and to love one another," Benedict said, pressing a theme of interfaith understanding that has marked his first foreign trip as pope. The hourlong stop, for which Cologne's Jews stood and applauded, was filled with significance for the 78-year-old Benedict, who grew up in Nazi Germany. He called those times "the darkest period of...

The association of former Poles in Israel has launched a public campaign against a bill to return private property to its owners that is now being discussed by the Polish parliament, charging that it grants de facto recognition to the Nazi regime's Nuremberg laws. In a letter sent to the leaders of every parliamentary faction in Poland, the organization warned that the bill "would make Poland the only country in the world that grants legal validity to the Nuremberg laws, at least with regard to Jewish property." The bill, which is currently being discussed in committee prior to its final...

BERLIN _ Germany opened a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin on Tuesday, marking the 60th anniversary of the Nazi regime's capitulation, as many young people here ponder over whether they should be continually apologetic for crimes they did not commit. Journalists visit the underground exhibition below Germany's national Holocaust memorial during a media preview in Berlin on May 6. In background are pictures of jews who were murdered by the Nazis. AP-Yonhap Even though German politicians, such as Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, do not hesitate using terms like ``shame'' for its past and even asking for ``forgiveness''...

BOSTON (AP) - White supremacists clashed with an angry crowd outside Faneuil Hall, where Holocaust survivors and their families were commemorating the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Two people were arrested during Sunday's confrontation, officer John Boyle said. Sunday was the 60th anniversary of the end of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. Inside the historic meeting house, Holocaust survivors, their children and grandchildren lit white candles to commemorate the estimated 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis. Germany's consul-general to New England, Wolfgang Vorwerk, spoke of his country's role. Outside, 10 to 15 members of the Arkansas-based group White...

BERLIN, Germany's highest court on Friday dismissed an appeal by the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) to march around Berlin's Holocaust memorial on May 8th. Some of Germany's neo-Nazi thugs German Interior Minister Otto Schily welcomed the decision, saying that it made neo-nazis unable to dishonor the remembrance of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Thousands of leftists would stage a rally around eastern Berlin' s main square Alexanderplatz to protest and block off NPD's planned march on May 8th, local media reported. Berlin authorities expected high tensions and confrontations between leftists and neo-nazis and planned to...

Sixty years on, the world must not forget Belsen, says liberator Sixty years ago 24-year-old Dick Williams set off through the woods of northern Germany in search of a "refugee" camp. The previous day, a German officer had agreed to hand the camp over to the advancing British. With only a map reference to guide him, Williams crossed the German frontline by jeep and turned left down an unmarked track. It was then that he found it: a vast concentration camp surrounded by a 10ft high barbed-wire fence and still guarded by armed SS soldiers. Yesterday Major Williams, now 84,...

WEIMAR, Germany - Elderly survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp laid flowers and observed a moment of silence for victims of the Nazis, 60 years after U.S. troops liberated the camp. Flags from some 30 nations hung in the cold drizzle on Sunday, representing the nations from which the camp's 240,000 prisoners came between 1937 and 1945. About 56,000 died - either worked to death, shot or killed in medical experiments. Ukrainian concentration camp survivor Petro Mischtschuk, 78, holds a white flag at former Nazi death camp Buchenwald in Germany, Sunday. (AP) German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and U.S. veterans...

THE Moderator of the Church of Scotland, Dr Alison Elliot, is to visit Auschwitz to pay respects to the only known Scots victim of the Holocaust. Dr Elliot will travel to Poland and the Czech Republic next week, and will visit the notorious death camp on Tuesday. While there she will pay tribute to Jane Haining, who was born at Dunscore, Dumfriesshire, and worked with children at the Church of Scotland Mission to the Jews in Budapest. Miss Hanning refused to abandon the children in her care, and as a consequence was arrested by Nazi forces after their advance...

Staring certain death straight in the face, the 18-year-old Dutch teen did not flinch. It was 1943 in Nazi-occupied Holland, with the Nazi deportation of Dutch Jews in full swing. In a rural farm in south-central of the country, Hilde van Straten-Duizer stood facing a group of German soldiers who were searching her mother's home for any Jews who were in hiding. (Dutch Jews are marched to the Amersfoot internment camp under heavy German guard, 1942.) After completing a thorough search of the entire house, the teen knew where the ever-so-thorough- German soldiers would undoubtedly go next: the storage...

Schindler’s risk A North Carolina professor finds that the man who rescued 1,000 Jews from the Holocaust was a spy as well as a savior By MARTHA WAGGONER The Associated Press OSKAR SCHINDLER: THE UNTOLD ACCOUNT OF HIS LIFE, WARTIME ACTIVITIES, AND THE TRUE STORY BEHIND THE LIST by David Crowe (Westview Press, 766 pages, $30) ELON, N.C. — David Crowe began researching Oskar Schindler with an open mind, wondering how much of the Academy Award-winning movie about the European industrialist who saved more than 1,000 Jews could possibly be true. Early findings shook the historian in Crowe: Schindler spied...

CINCINNATI (AP) - As the Nazis took power in Germany and the world turned its back on Jewish refugees, four brothers who ran a cigar factory in the Philippines worked quietly to help 1,200 Jews flee to Manila. The Frieder brothers never talked about their part in the little-known rescue. But some 65 years later, the remaining refugees want the world to know what Philip, Alex, Morris and Herbert Frieder achieved. "The Frieder brothers were just ordinary Jewish businessmen, but they went out of their way to save lives," said Frank Ephraim, who was eight years old when his family...

Sixty years after the world learned that bored Germans flung Jewish babies into the air for target practice at the Auschwitz death camp, our oily pals at the United Nations have officially acknowledged the Holocaust. Enjoy it quickly, because if yesterday was any indication, the anti-American, anti-Semitic rats infesting the banks of the East River — a species alternately known as the "French," "Germans" and "Libyans," among others — will forget the lessons of Auschwitz, or just insist the camp didn't exist. Only one man spoke the truth about anti-Semitism. But that man was not Israeli or American, but Italian....

Jan. 22, 2005 22:39 | Updated Jan. 24, 2005 18:18 German party protests tribute to victims By ASSOCIATED PRESS BERLIN A top leader of Germany's main Jewish group called on Germans to fight more strongly against far-right groups on Saturday, a day after legislators from a nationalist party walked out of a state parliament to protest a tribute honoring victims of Nazi aggression. All 12 members of the National Democratic Party stood up and headed for the door of the eastern state of Saxony's parliament Friday after parliament president Erich Iltgen called for a moment of silence to mark the...

Jan. 24, 2005 19:31 Germany's Fischer reaffirms commitment to Israel By JPOST.COM STAFF At the special session of the UN to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Germany's Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer began by saying, "The Shoah is the ultimate crime against humanity of the Twentieth Century." He said, "Democratic Germany has learned its lessons the Holocaust has left an indelible mark." Explaining one aspect of this indelible mark, Fischer reiterated Germany's commitment to the State of Israel. "The State of Israel's right to exist and its people to security will always remain nonnegotiable fixtures of German...

Oskar Gröning was at his local philately club when a fellow stamp collector cast doubts on the Holocaust. Gröning knew he was wrong - because 50 years earlier he had served at Auschwitz. Laurence Rees on what happened when the ex-SS soldier decided to finally confront his past After the war, Oskar Gröning took up a hobby. He worked as a manager in a glass factory near Hamburg, but in his own time he became a keen stamp collector. It was at a meeting of his local philately club, in the late 1980s, that Gröning found himself chatting to a...

IsraelNN.com) Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, Israel, today announced its historic Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names to the Internet has gone online. The Database was presented and an international 11th Hour Campaign to collect more names of victims was announced. Special video messages from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Professor Elie Wiesel, and Simone Veil were presented as well. The Database, which will allow online public interaction and contributions of new names and materials, seeks to capture the names of as many Jewish Holocaust victims as possible. The sophisticated technology allows users worldwide to...

Opportunity finally presented itself to read noted Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel's "Night," after hearing it mentioned by a well known Evangelical Pastor in a radio broadcast sermon. It is one of the more well known recorded accounts of that long nightmare, a short but graphic and powerful postmortem of one of the more infamous abominations to occur in the "enlightened," progressive twentieth century. I will leave the hideous details to the reader shrewd enough to take the time to read it, to go back these, what, sixty short years to that time? I was a little startled recently, while getting...