Remarkable nonsense

Actors gain painful look into the past

By Yvette Craig

Star-Telegram Staff Writer

Updated: Saturday, Mar. 17, 2001 at 22:25 CST

FORT WORTH — It’s dress rehearsal at Sage & Silo Theater, and actor Kit Hussey is in the uniform of a Nazi SS captain.

Removing the costume’s black hat and lowering his eyes, Hussey asks 80-year-old Lena Factor to describe how Nazi soldiers treated her in the concentration camps.

[…]

‘Bent’ focuses not on Jews but on homosexuals, who were also victims of the Nazis. […] The play is for adults; a love story involving two men, it contains nudity and foul language.

Factor says she didn’t see gays persecuted firsthand but was aware of it. […] But she wanted to help them get the historical details right.

[…]

THOUSANDS OF IRISH AMERICANS WEAR A SHAMROCK TO CELEBRATE ST PAT’S DAY BUT BOSTON FOLK SAY IT’S LIKE A NAZI SWASTIKA … IT MAKES THEM FEEL UNWELCOME

Julian Brouwer

In New York

LOONY Americans are set to ban the Shamrock in Boston following complaints from minority groups.

They have bizarrely compared Ireland’s three-leafed emblem to the Nazi swastika.

Now the shamrock will become a thing of the past as the emblems are torn down from playgrounds, doors and windows in housing developments all over the city.

The decision has been made by Boston Housing Association following complaints from blacks and Hispanics.

Lydia Agro, BHA’s communications director said housing managers are advising residents that shamrocks and other “bias indicators” are offensive to some minority residents and should not be publicly displayed.

“There are a number of symbols that have been identified by some of our residents as making them uncomfortable and unwelcome,” she said.

“In response to those concerns, we’re including shamrocks along with swastikas, Confederate flags and other symbols which may give offence.

“We’re aware that symbols such as shamrocks can reflect racial and ethnic pride,” Miss Agro said.

“We respect that, but at the same time we want to promote a sense of community here. We’re asking our residents to avoid public displays of any bias indicators.”

The decision has been greeted with outrage by many of the city’s large population of Irish American residents.

Jean McDonald, who is leader of a residents group in Boston’s Mary Ellen McCormack Development, said elderly tenants are anxious about the policy.

She said it sent them the message that their traditions are no longer acceptable.

“Some of the women here already feel like they’re living in a prison colony,” she said. “Some of them have been here more than 20 years.

“You’d think they’d be entitled to some respect. Instead, they’re actually living in fear, not knowing what to expect next.”

James Kelly, president of the Boston City Council, said the percentage of whites and Irish Americans in the city’s public housing has been dropping sharply in recent years.

“There’s only a small number of Irish Americans left, mostly elderly on fixed income,” he said.

“Having them take down their shamrocks is a hateful way of letting them know their time has passed.

“Believe me, the ‘no Irish need apply’ mentality is very much alive and well at the BHA.”

According to Kelly, minority residents now constitute the majority of every family development in the city, and the BHA is administered almost exclusively by blacks and Hispanics.

Although the anti-shamrock policy was supposedly designed to foster harmony among a diverse population of residents, it is having the opposite effect.

But residents’ leader Jean McDonald is to defy the BHA ban by putting a wooden shamrock outside her home in the build-up to St Patrick’s Day.

“You’ll probably be seeing even more shamrocks around here now, and I hope we don’t have any violence over this,” added Miss McDonald.

Many residents are angry that the BHA is putting shamrocks and swastikas in the same category.

The shamrock, a trifoliate plant said to have been picked by St. Patrick as a symbol to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity, is regarded as the national emblem of Ireland, while the swastika is the anti-Semitic emblem of Nazi Germany.

Jeannie Flaherty from the McCormack development said that she’ll be putting a shamrock on her door any day now.

“I’d like to see someone try to get me to take it down,” she said. “There’s a Chinese man who lives across the hall with some kind of Oriental sign on his door.

“Maybe they should check that out when they come around to talk to me.”

A city youth worker added that shamrocks, which still adorn basketball courts and murals in the development, were symbols of pride when he was growing up there.

“Even the Italian kids wore shamrocks,” he said. “We had our differences, but we got along OK.

“Nowadays, the kids here would rather shoot heroin than basketballs.

“This place has been going downhill for years, and kids are literally dying from drugs. It’s a real sad situation, and the BHA’s talking about banning shamrocks?”

Sunday Mirror, February 18, 2001

Holocaust Education and Awareness Act of 2001 (Introduced in the House)

Continue reading →

SYDNEY, Australia, Dec. 24 (JTA) — A New Zealand university has apologized to the Jewish community for awarding a master’s degree to a student who had written a thesis denying the Holocaust.

The 1993 thesis by Joel Hayward is cited regularly by neo-Nazis and other Holocaust deniers as evidence that they have academic support for their positions.

[…]

In 1998, Fredrick Toben, whose advocacy of Holocaust denial has been found to be unlawful by both the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and the Federal Court of Justice in Germany, tried to submit Hayward’s thesis as his defense against charges that Holocaust denial was not a legitimate academic subject.

Canterbury University awarded a degree to the author of the thesis, “The Fate of Jews in German Hands,” but after a study has concluded that it had a “perverse and unjustified conclusion.”

The university’s vice chancellor, Daryl Le Grew, apologized to the Jewish community but said the university had no power to revoke the granting of the degree.

The president of the New Zealand Jewish Council, David Zwartz, said the council is “deeply concerned that after all that has happened the Jewish community is left with a Holocaust denial thesis.”

“There is a fundamental difference in our attitudes,” Zwartz said. “The university has been concerned with how the thesis came to be awarded a first-class honors M.A., and how it can prevent such things happening again. The Jewish council doesn’t want it to happen again, but it is also concerned with the effect the thesis has and will have in the future in encouraging Holocaust deniers to think they have academic support for their poisonous views.”

[…]

Source: jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/20001224Schoolapologizesfo.html
By Jeremy Jones
Published: 12/24/2000

Sigi Ziering; Tycoon Survived Nazi Camps

• Executive Became a Philanthropy and High-Tech Leader

By: MYRNA OLIVER TIMES STAFF WRITER

Obituaries

Los Angeles Times, Home Edition

Tuesday, November 14, 2000

Metro Section: Metro

Page B-6

SEE CORRECTION APPENDED

It must have been the “training” of the Holocaust, the self-described workaholic speculated to Fortune magazine a couple of years ago. “Unless you work,” he said, “you are destined for the gas chamber.”

And work he did — as a teenager relocated to the ghetto in Riga, Latvia, then to Fuhlsbuttel prison near Hamburg, Germany, and on to a Kiel concentration camp. He survived the Nazis but never stopped working until about a year ago, when he was diagnosed with brain cancer.

Sigi Ziering, who turned a chemist’s bright idea into Diagnostic Products Corp., one of Los Angeles’ most successful international high-tech companies, died Sunday. He was 72.

[…]

Toward the end of the war, the Zierings were moved to the Fuhlsbuttel prison. Every week, they watched Nazis load 10 or so Jews into a truck destined for Bergen-Belsen and the gas chambers. “With German precision,” Ziering told Fortune in 1998, “the guards went at their job alphabetically — and never got to Z.”

Later, the Zierings were marched to a Kiel concentration camp, where males were routinely murdered if they failed a physical test — running a mile carrying a heavy piece of wood. Ziering and his brother passed.

[…]

—- START OF CORRECTION —-

For the Record;

Los Angeles Times Saturday, November 18, 2000 Home Edition; Metro; Part B; Page 6; Metro Desk; 1 inches; 22 words;

Type of Material: Correction

Bergen-Belsen — The obituary of Sigi Ziering in Tuesday’s Times incorrectly stated that there were gas chambers at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

—- END CORRECTION TEXT —-

The Elderly Jews of South Florida … and 62 Years Ago Tonight

[…]

To many of you, World War II and the Holocaust probably seems like ancient history. The truth is, there are tens of thousands of people who lived through that horror, escaped the ovens, and are now living out their final years in South Florida. None of us can imagine what they went through; first to survive, and then to somehow make it to a country where they believed they would be free and their voice would be heard. These immigrants worked hard to raise families in America, contribute to our society, and make this country a better place for all of us. They took their citizenship duties very seriously, to the point where many of us have probably rolled our eyes a time or two over their extreme patriotism and love of America. Silly old people!

[…]

Yours,

Michael Moore

www.michaelmoore.com

Posted 11.10.00

By ALLISON COHEN, Special to The Times

Wednesday, August 23, 2000

www.latimes.com:80/editions/valley/sfnews/20000823/t000079124.html

Challenger Middle School teacher Bruce Galler of Palmdale once saved two students from expulsion from the Lancaster campus after they scratched swastikas onto test booklets.

Instead of expulsion, Galler “punished” the boys — one Latino, the other Caucasian — by sending them to an after-school screening of “Schindler’s List.”

The boys got the message, Galler said. “They just cried.”

Galler, 35, expects to shed more light on the Holocaust for his students this fall as a result of a three-week summer tour of some of Europe’s most infamous death camps where millions of Jews were killed by the Nazis.

“It was a surreal experience,” Galler said this week. “I had an awakening of what really took place.”

Galler was one of 43 secondary school teachers from across the country who participated in the 16th annual Summer Seminar on Holocaust and Jewish Resistance — a teacher training program founded by Holocaust survivor Vladka Meed.

“A trip like this will make me more credible,” said Galler, who teaches social science and English. “I thought I knew a whole bunch more than I did.”

Galler visited death camps in Auschwitz/Birkinau, Majdanek and Treblinka, as well as sites of the Jewish resistance, such as the Warsaw Ghetto.

The goal of the program is to improve instruction relating to the Holocaust in U.S. public secondary schools. Teachers pay 40% of the cost to attend the tour — for Galler, about $2,000 — and sponsoring groups and foundations pay the rest.

Already, Galler’s students read the “Diary of Anne Frank” and then visit the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

But now, having seen the fragments preserved from the Holocaust’s atrocities, Galler can provide photographs and a firsthand account. Among the stacks of belongings he saw that were left behind by Jews before they were gassed or shot by the Nazis are such items as shoes, luggage and eyeglasses.

One experience that deeply affected Galler was seeing a huge mound of ashes preserved next to a crematory at Majdanek.

“My credibility increases,” Galler said, “when I can say I’ve seen a crematorium … and I’ve seen ashes as big as [our] school.”

After the stops in Poland, the teachers studied at two Holocaust institutions in Jerusalem.

“I understand so much more now, and I’m anxious to pass the information on,” Galler said. “But I don’t think this is a history that anyone likes to teach.”

Since 1985, 701 teachers have participated in the program. For an application for next year’s tour, contact: American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, Attention: Vladka Meed, 122 W. 30th St., New York, NY 10001. Application deadline is April 15, 2001.

By Jack Katzenell

Associated Press

Sunday, August 6, 2000

Controversy raged in Israel on Sunday after a rabbi who heads the biggest ultra-Orthodox political party said the six million Jews who perished in the Nazi Holocaust died because they were reincarnations of sinners.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, leader of the Shas party, also declared that Prime Minister Ehud Barak has “no sense” because he is trying to make peace with the Palestinians, who are “snakes.”

Yosef was speaking in his weekly Saturday night sermon broadcast over the party’s radio stations and is even beamed overseas by satellite.

He called the Nazis “evil” and the victims “poor people,” but he said the six million “were reincarnations of the souls of sinners, people who transgressed and did all sorts of things which should not be done. They had been reincarnated in order to atone.”

Barak told the cabinet Sunday the statement is unworthy of a rabbi of Yosef’s status. “His words could harm the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust and could hurt the feelings of their families and the feelings of the entire nation,” the prime minister said.

Legislator Yosef (Tommy) Lapid, who heads the secularist Shinui party, said Rabbi Yosef is “an old fool” who has done a service to those who are trying to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler’s reputation.

“In the world it will be said that a distinguished rabbi in Israel is in effect confirming what Hitler said, that the Jews are sinners,” said Lapid, who is himself a Holocaust survivor.

The two main radio stations were inundated with phone calls and messages, most of them criticizing Yosef’s statement. Yehoshua Mashav, a listener, told Israel radio that in plain language Yosef was saying Hitler was innocent and that “he was simply the messenger of God sent to give the Jewish people their just desserts.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international center for Holocaust remembrance, said the rabbi absolved the perpetrators of the Holocaust of their responsibility. “If those Jews deserved to die for past sins, why blame those who carried out the death sentence?” said Ephraim Zuroff, director of the group’s Jerusalem office.

Israel’s Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, who is also a Holocaust survivor, said Judaism has a concept of reincarnation and of the righteous dying to atone for sin in a previous life, but he told Israel radio that did not account for the Holocaust.

“I have no explanation for the Holocaust,” said Lau, who was a child at the time and lost most of his family in the death camps. He appealed to Israelis to “stop probing into it (the Holocaust) in such a blatant, painful, hurtful manner.”

Shas chairman Eli Ishai said criticism of Yosef is unjustified. “Rabbi Ovadia weeps for every Jew who is killed … but nobody, not even a saint, has not sinned. Everyone dies in a state of sin. Nobody can be perfect all his life.”

Yosef, who ordered Shas to quit Barak’s coalition as the prime minister was leaving for the Camp David summit, described the Arabs as “snakes” interested mainly in murdering Jews. He said Barak, who is trying to achieve a permanent peace with the Palestinians, has “no sense.”

“What kind of peace is this?” Yosef said. “Will you put them beside us? You are bringing snakes beside us. … Will we make peace with a snake?”

Col. Jebril Rajoub, head of the Palestinian Preventive Security Service in the West Bank, said Yosef’s statement about Arabs was racist. A religious leader should be trying to promote tolerance among Jews, Muslims and Christians, Rajoub told Israel radio.