Author: Webb

New Museum to Launch Israel Into Next Century of Holocaust Remembrance

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By Dina Kraft

Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM (AP) — An Israeli army officer stood before two sculptures, one depicting Jews trudging toward Nazi slaughter and the other portraying Jewish rebels, proud and muscular.

The officer told young recruits visiting Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, that Israel used to emphasize heroism in remembering the Holocaust but that today the victims of the Nazis who did not fight back are no longer scorned.

As the Jewish state enters a new century, Israel grapples with what to remember. Next week, immediately after Tuesday’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yad Vashem will break ground for a new $25 million museum that will reflect some of the changes in how the story of the Holocaust is being told.

James Young, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst who has written on Holocaust memorials, said the original Yad Vashem, established in 1953, reflected the need of the young embattled state to tell a Holocaust story that would lead to the creation of Israel.

“Now that the state is secure, a new generation is very willing to re-examine founding myths. Other people are coming into view and the plight of other histories is coming to Yad Vashem,” Young said.

[…]

Still, the murder of 6 million Jews during the Nazi occupation of Europe remains a cornerstone of Israeli identity and collective memory. “We don’t need to forget it, but (need to) decide what we want to remember,” said Tom Segev, an Israeli author who wrote about the impact of the Holocaust on Israel.

“We are arguing about what the Holocaust tells us,” Segev said.

Those involved in the museum say Yad Vashem remains devoted to telling the story of the Jewish Holocaust. “It’s a Jewish museum in the Land of Israel,” said Avner Shalev, the director of Yad Vashem.

[…]

Book Blasts WWII Rabbis

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AP-NY-04-28-00 1545EDT

By Mark Lavie, Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM (AP) — During the Holocaust, ultra-Orthodox American rabbis focused on saving several hundred Polish Talmudic scholars, ignoring the suffering of millions of other Jews who were eventually murdered by the Nazis, a new book charges.

The rabbis, organized as the Rescue Committee, feared that if the tiny group of scholars and their students were lost, the Jewish religion would vanish with them.

The group’s narrow goal brought it into conflict with mainstream American Jewish groups working to rescue as many Jews as possible and to influence reluctant American politicians to take action, wrote Holocaust historian and Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff.

The book, “The Response of Orthodox Jewry in the United States to the Holocaust,” is being released Tuesday to coincide with Israel’s annual memorial day for the 6 million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust.

Rabbi Menahem Porush, chairman of the Israel branch of Agudat Israel, a worldwide ultra-Orthodox group, said it was only natural for the rabbis to try to rescue those close to them.

“No one has to teach us, who live according to the Torah, the meaning of ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,'” he said.

Zuroff documents how the rabbis funneled scarce funds to scholars already safely in exile so they could maintain full-time Talmud studies, even as other Jews were being killed in death camps.

Menahem Brod of the ultra-Orthodox Habad movement said the refugees needed the money to survive.

According to Zuroff’s book, the Rescue Committee extorted money from mainstream Jewish groups, employed shady practices to transfer funds to Europe and even violated the Jewish Sabbath for its cause.

The Rescue Committee threatened to mount a rival fund-raising drive unless local Jewish federations handed over cash. Some complied, Zuroff wrote, but others refused, arguing that the mainstream rescue campaign would include the scholars anyway.

[…]

Educators Express Qualms over Teaching Holocaust

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By JANICE ARNOLD Staff Reporter

Canadian Jewish News [[email protected]] | April 6, 2000

www.cjnews.com/front5.htm

MONTREAL — One of the most difficult things about teaching the Holocaust is trying to convince students of the morality of arresting enfeebled 80-year-old men for alleged wartime crimes, say teachers in the English Montreal School Board (EMSB). Some admitted they themselves also question whether it’s the right thing to do.

These feelings came out following a presentation by York University history professor, Irving Abella, at a day-long Holocaust education seminar for the board’s moral and religious-education (MRE) teachers.

Forty elementary and high school teachers voluntarily attended the event, the first of its kind since the EMSB was created two years ago with the reorganization of the province’s school boards along linguistic lines. Many came from schools that were under the former Catholic boards and still Catholic in their orientation — schools like Holy Cross, St. Pius X, Michelangelo and Rosemount. Some had not taught the Holocaust before.

One young teacher, who identified herself as of Greek origin, suggested it might be time for “forgiveness” of Nazi war criminals. “A lot of my students want to know what is the purpose of sending these old men to jail after 50 years. I have trouble understanding it myself.”

Another older male teacher said he has run into the same problem. “Usually when a suspected war criminal is arrested, we hear that his neighbours liked him, he was a good family man, he worked at General Motors for 40 years. My students say, “Why are we picking on this nice old man?'”

A third teacher said she was didn’t know how to answer questions about what choice these men had had. Could they choose the unit they were in? What was the consequence of disobeying orders?

Abella, co-author of None is Too Many, said teachers should ask students, “If a gang came in and killed all your family and your neighbours, what would they want done? Do they think they should go free just because many years have passed?

“We cannot reward longevity,” Abella said. “Simply surviving long enough should not mean people don’t have to face justice.”

Other problems also surfaced. One teacher said he found it hard to explain how otherwise good family-loving, church-going people did not do more to save Jews, or worse, became those responsible for the deaths of Jews, who were their neighbours.

One teacher remarked that she thought it was important to stress that not all Germans were bad. She said children of German background in the class had felt “persecuted” after the Holocaust was taught.

The teaching of the Holocaust is not compulsory in the EMSB and whether the subject is dealt with is largely up to the individual teacher, said Laurie Greenspoon, the MRE consultant to the board, in an interview.

Many teachers are interested in including the Holocaust, but a problem has been the lack of curricular materials. “It’s a problem to find accurate and interesting material,” she said. Neither the education ministry or board supply anything and teachers usually have to improvise, using newspaper articles or movies as discussion catalysts. In addition, history and language arts teachers also teach the Holocaust.

Greenspoon said the board would like to develop a standardized teaching unit on the Holocaust. The EMSB has 45 elementary and 20 high schools. The Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, which co-sponsored the seminar with the Norbert and Gusta Roth Foundation, piloted a draft teacher’s Holocaust education kit during the day, which it hopes may answer these needs. It has sections providing an overview of Jews and anti-Semitism, a historical summary of the Holocaust, Canada and the Holocaust, survivors’ stories, and suggested films, readings and Web sites. Greenspoon said that she likes the kit, but funding will have to be found to publish it.

Greenspoon is well acquainted with the difficulties of teaching the Holocaust. She was a Grade 10 teacher at Lauren Hill High School in St. Laurent where she taught the Holocaust to a wide ethnic diversity. “Often, there is a strong prejudice against Jews. So I tried to tie in other genocides to help them relate to it better,” she said.

The seminar also included a presentation by survivors, Rena and Mayer Schondorf, who volunteer for the MHMC. The Schondorfs spoke of childhoods cut short by the Holocaust. When such presentations are made to classes, the students are asked afterwards to translate their own traditions and memories into writing, painting and drawing.

Another presentation, designed for high schools, was a critical examination of the unregulated flow of hate on the Internet.

Despite the difficulties teachers face on the Holocaust, MHMC education director Naomi Kramer said that in her 12 years, she has never seen such a demand from schools for help, be it materials, speakers or tours of the centre’s exhibitions.

She attributes the interest to the fact the Holocaust has become “so topical” in the news and in film. Kramer thinks that will only increase because Yom Hashoah is now officially recognized by the Quebec government. Holocaust education need not only be taught formally.

On April 11, New York private investigator Steve Rambam, who received media attention for tracking down suspected Nazi war criminals in Canada and elsewhere, will speak at Rosemount High School, under the co-sponsorship of the EMSB and the Roth Foundation.

Jewish Groups Lament anti-Semitism

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AP-NY-04-05-00 1835EDT

By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel on Wednesday urged lawmakers to fight re-emerging anti-Semitism and other prejudice around the world, telling a Senate committee that “hatred is still alive and well.”

“I belong to a traumatized generation that has witnessed the defeat of Nazism and communism, but not that of hatred,” said Wiesel, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize. “Had I considered the possibility hatred would re-emerge so soon, I would not have believed it.”

Wiesel testified at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that brought together a disparate group of witnesses to talk about the “Legacy of the Holocaust.”

Jewish groups urged the U.S. government to speak out against what they said is a revival of anti-Semitism in the Middle East, former Soviet Union and elsewhere. U.S. government officials brought the committee up to date on programs around the world to compensate Holocaust survivors and on the progress of a U.S. presidential commission that is investigating Holocaust-related issues in the states.

“Hatred did not die in Auschwitz,” Wiesel told the committee. “Jews perished there, not anti-Semitism. Hatred is still alive and well.”

“Nazis and neo-nazis are everywhere,” he said. “I don’t know who finances them, but they are active and vocal, and we find them everywhere.”

He raised the question of what should be done about those who deny the Holocaust or espouse hatred and prejudice.

“Should there be a way of checking when and where their words cross the line of free speech, which is so important to us?” he asked. “When it becomes a cycle of hate and violence, what are we to do? What can you do as the lawmakers of this land?” [note]

American Jewish Committee Executive Director David A. Harris urged the panel to look at what his organization called the “shocking revival of vitriolic anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial” across the Arab world.

“Islamic anti-Semitic activity in the Middle East can no longer be ignored or downplayed or viewed as little more than an Arab negotiating tactic in the complex Arab-Israeli peace talks,” he said in his prepared testimony.

“There is an urgent need to reject this behavior unconditionally,” he said, citing comments by the Mufti of Jerusalem trivializing the Holocaust during the Pope’s pilgrimage there last month.

And the National Conference on Soviet Jewry said U.S. officials should emphasize to their counterparts in former Soviet states the importance of democracy and minority rights.

“We would never have imagined a post-Soviet landscape littered with neo-Nazi and fascist-oriented extremists visibly trying to revive the … ideology against which the Russian people battled so fiercely,” said Mark B. Levin, executive director of the group, which advocates on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States and Eurasia.

“It is with sadness and frustration that we must face reality — ethnic hatred in Kosovo and Rwanda, nationalist hatred in Chechnya, political hatred in the Middle East,” Wiesel said.

Note: Holocaust revisionists (not “deniers,” as Wiesel and others mendaciously refer to them) are the victims of violence, not the cause of it. There is not one reported or known case of Holocaust revisionism leading to violence. There are, however, numerous cases of revisionists being harassed, beaten up, and even murdered for their views.

French Jewish chief under fire for Auschwitz jibe

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PARIS, March 30 (Reuters) — The head of France’s main Jewish religious body is under pressure to resign for writing to a long-time rival: “If Auschwitz had not existed, it is likely you would have invented it,” Jewish sources said on Thursday.

Jean Kahn, president of the Central Israelite Consistory of France, made the comment in an angry letter to Moise Cohen, president of the consistory for the Paris area, they told Reuters.

The consistory was created by Napoleon over 200 years ago to coordinate Jewish religious affairs with the state. Some 76,000 Jews from France died in wartime death camps, mostly Auschwitz.[…]

No breakfast for breakfast

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History lesson in person

  • Teens hear from Auschwitz survivor

By Shelly Whitehead, Post staff reporter

Publication date: 03-29-00

For awhile, Gene Deutsch’s teen-age years had been as carefree as those of the Dayton, Ky., students he talked with Tuesday: He liked to walk to school with his girlfriend, and he loved his family very much.

Then his world changed. It was 1943. Deutsch lived in Hungary. And he was Jewish.

“When we arrived at Auschwitz,” said Deutsch, a Cincinnati businessman recalling the day he rolled into the Nazi concentration camp in a crowded boxcar, “there was a sign that said in German, ‘Work will make you free.’ When people got off the train, most were directed to what they called the bathhouse, which was where the killing took place.

“Confusion soon took over. Children screamed for their mothers as they became lost. There was blood everywhere. The SS guards picked up the children who were screaming and hauled them away. And the poison gas was poured into the gas chambers from the outside so the people closest to the vents were the first to die. The others kept screaming for their life, but after about ten minutes, everything was quiet.”

[…]

Deutsch’s account of his first day at Auschwitz — and the last day to see his family — drew the rapt attention Tuesday of the junior history students he was speaking to in the school’s library. For two hours the students listened, watched and questioned continually.

[…]

“When were you allowed to eat,” a student wondered. “What did they give you?”

“In the morning for breakfast — there was no breakfast. We were supposed to have tea, but all it was was warm water. Then they took us to the camp and for lunch we had potatoes if they had them, but most of the time we got dog meat or mice… In the evening, back at camp, bread was issued, but it was black bread with a small piece of margarine added to it.”

[…]

The Great Pretenders

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In April 1998, the cover of The Jewish Journal featured the person who called himself Binjamin Wilkomirski. Naomi Pfefferman (“Memories of a Holocaust Childhood,” April 24, 1998) compared his writing — his one and only book, called “Fragments” — to that of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. During an emotionally filled performance at a Beverly Boulevard synagogue, Wilkomirski was accompanied by a lady who called herself Laura Grabowski. Both claimed to be soul mates who, at long last, were reunited survivors of Dr. Mengele’s experiments in Auschwitz.

Continue reading →

Michael Shermer: Liar or idiot — you decide!

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Please forward to Germar Rudolf.

Dear Germar:

I am Michael Shermer, Publisher of Skeptic magazine. I would like to ask you a few questions about your research. In Errol Morris’ film “Mr. Death,” he shows the fatal mistakes made by Fred Leuchter in his chemical analysis of the concrete and brick from numerous locations at Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. I would like to inquire if you made the same errors in your research and if not, how did your research take these problems into account:

  1. Since the gas chamber at Auschwitz 1 is a reconstruction, what would make him (or you) think that the particular section from which he chipped concrete was part of the original?
  2. The bricks at Kremas 2, 3, 4, 5 at Birkenau have been moved about the camp over the decades, some used by the locals to rebuild their homes. How can you be sure that the bricks you tested are from the actual gas chambers?
  3. Even if the bricks and concrete at Kremas 2, 3, 4, 5 at Birkenau were original, they have been exposed to half a century of brutal weathering. How did you adjust your findings accordingly?
  4. Leuchter chipped off huge chunks of concrete and brick and ground up the entire chunks into powder when they were analyzed (or, more to the point, the chemist whom he gave the samples to did because Leuchter didn’t tell him what they were), thereby diluting the Zyklon-B traces by hundreds of thousands of times. As you must know, Zyklon-B gas only penetrates about 10 microns into concrete (a human hair, by comparison, is 100 microns thick). What was your procedure for controlling for this problem?

Thank you for your attention.

Michael Shermer

[email protected]

Note: Others have responded to these questions from Shermer elsewhere, although one scarcely knows where to begin. Even after being exposed to the answers to these questions for years prior to the sending of this message, Shermer cannot or will not forsake his anti-revisionist bias in favor of skepticism. If as publisher of Skeptic magazine, Shermer is at the forefront of skeptics in the United States — if not the world — then skepticism is dead, as is independent thought.