AMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES FOR YAD … · ASYV Annual Spring Luncheon ... Deborah’s...

IN THIS ISSUEASYV and Jewish Life Foundation Annual Benefit Gala.....................1, 8,16

The unbelievable heroic story of Ireland’s “Oskar Schindler”....................2

The Holocaust: Who are the missing million?....................................................3

Roses in a Forbidden Garden.........................................................................4

Japan and the Jews.........................................................................................5

The clear and present danger facing Sweden’s Jews.......................................6

ASYV Annual Spring Luncheon............................................................................9

The Mufti and the Holocaust, revisited........................................................12

for children of survivors, the trauma’s in the genes..................................14

He remarkably escaped the Holocaust........................................................15

Vol. 43-No. 5 ISSN 0892-1571 May/June 2017-Iyyar/Sivan 5777

AMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES FOR YAD VASHEMAMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES FOR YAD VASHEM

There wasn’t an empty seat or adry eye in the Beverly Wilshire

Hotel Ballroom as the AmericanSociety for Yad Vashem — WesternRegion and the Jewish LifeFoundation hosted their annual benefitgala on June 14, 2017. The eveninghonored the late Edita and AbrahamSpiegel family, represented by daugh-ter Rita Spiegel; the featurefilm Denial; and world-renowned musi-cian, singer and famed KISSco-founder Gene Simmonsand his mother, Holocaust sur-vivor Flora Klein.

Karen Sandler served asthe gala chair and introducedChairman of the Yad VashemDirectorate Avner Shalev,who began the program witha powerful message welcom-ing the guests and recogniz-ing the evening’s honorees.Lenny Wilf, chairman ofASYV, enumerated several ofthe important areas of YadVashem’s efforts, includingthe ongoing work of theHolocaust History Museum,and the International Schoolfor Holocaust Studies, whicheducates tens of thousandsof scholars and educatorsthroughout the world in howto teach the Holocaust tofuture generations. Lennyrecognized the ongoing sup-port of the Hollywood community,which “has for many years been anessential partner; starting in 1945, theyear that marked the end of WorldWar II and the liberation of the con-centration camps, films and docu-

mentaries dealing with the incompre-hensible reality that was theHolocaust were being produced.” Wilfannounced an eight-day international,multigenerational mission to Viennaand Israel in July, 2018 markingIsrael’s 70th anniversary year, andinvited all to participate.

Consul General of Israel for LosAngeles Sam Grundwerg also

noted the contributions of the enter-

tainment community, stating, “Wesalute Hollywood to show apprecia-tion for those who use their God-giventalents and voice to insure that thestories, lessons and truths of theHolocaust will never be

forgotten…will never be twisted, dis-torted or denied. In this room tonight,we bridge a powerful nexus ofHollywood and legacy.”

Bill Bernstein, Western Region direc-tor of institutional advancement ofASYV, recognized the 40 Holocaustsurvivors that were in attendance andintroduced Max Webb, the oldestHolocaust survivor in Los Angeles,who recently celebrated his 100th

birthday. Bernstein stated, “For me, atthis challenging time in world history,Yad Vashem takes on a very specialmeaning and responsibility. It isthrough the lessons learned from theHolocaust that we must remain vigilantin reminding the world that it is incum-bent on us…that without concertedeffort from every corner of this earth,this terrible human tragedy will contin-ue to rear its ugly head.”

Phil Blazer, founder and presi-dent of JLTV, introduced his

long-time friend and a Holocaust sur-vivor, Jack Nagel, who recited theHaMotzi blessing. Blazer, celebratingover five decades in media, reflectedon the powerful platform that JLTVhas provided in telling the stories ofHolocaust survivors and the deep

commitment that these heroes haveshown in becoming vital parts of theircommunities.

As the number of Holocaust sur-vivors continues to diminish everyday, the importance of keeping thememories alive plays a crucial role ineducating future generations aboutthe Holocaust. Shaya Ben Yehuda,Yad Vashem’s managing director ofthe International Relations Division,

reinforced this concept in hispoignant remarks, when hestated, “We will continue tokeep the flame of remem-brance shining bright.”

Following video messagesfrom Harvard Law ProfessorEmeritus Alan Dershowitz andfrom Deborah Lipstadt, authorof the book History on Trial:My Day in Court with aHolocaust Denier, on whichthe feature film Denial wasbased, Jonathan King, execu-tive vice-president ofParticipant Media, presentedthe Vanguard Award to Denialproducer Gary Foster. “Wehave been overwhelmed bythe response to the film,” saidFoster. “Deborah’s story hasmoved people to tears andemboldened them to speakout. We live in a world wherefacts mean nothing and falsenarratives are everywhere. So

how do we differentiate between truthand lies?” He continued, “That is whywe need places like Yad Vashem. Itgives us our best chance to make animpact on future generations.”

“It would’ve been enough to tellDeborah’s story, but to have a film thatelevates an issue that is so much in thenews and on our minds these daysmade it even better,” Foster said.“There is a difference between truth,lies and opinion. There is a difference.”

Ron Meier, ASYV executive direc-tor, paid tribute to the Spiegel fami-ly, heralding their building of theChildren’s Memorial at Yad Vashemas Edita and Abraham’s “crowningachievement.” He went on to say,“Wha t t hey bu i l t changed t he

(Continued on page 16)

WE WILL CONTINUE TO KEEP THE FLAME

OF REMEMBRANCE SHINING BRIGHTANNUAL BENEFIT GALA IN LOS ANGELES

Lenny Wilf, chairman of the American Society for Yad Vashem; Gene Simmons, recipient of Legacy Award; Rita Spiegel,

recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award; Gary Foster, recipient of the Vanguard Award; Ron Meier, executive director

of the ASYV.

MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE May/June 2017 - Iyyar/Sivan 5777

BY MICHAEL RIORDAN, THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

As the Gestapo surrounds thepalace of an Italian anti-Fascist

aristocrat, an Irish priest dashes tothe cellar. He is wanted by the Nazisfor his role in the daring rescues ofJews, POWs and refugees, but thistime it seems there is no escape.Miraculously, a coal delivery beingmade to the palace offers the perfectcover — the cleric blackens his face,hides his cassock and slips away tofreedom through the narrow cobbledstreets of Rome.

This dramatic scene, recreated inthe 1983 movie The Scarlet and theBlack starring Gregory Peck asMonsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, was justone of a number of close shaves forthe doughty Irish priest and Vaticandiplomat during his heroic campaignto thwart the Gestapo in the EternalCity during World War II.

“Monsignor O’Flaherty left the safe-ty of the Vatican to run his escapeline,” said Jerry O’Grady, chairman ofthe Monsignor Hugh O’FlahertyMemorial Society in the priest’shometown in Killarney, Ireland. “TheGestapo had a price on his head andthey tried to kidnap him many times.”

The Society is now preparing an

application to Yad Vashem to have itslocal hero, who is credited with con-cealing hundreds of Jews from theGestapo, listed as Righteous Amongthe Nations.

O’Flaherty grew up the son of a golfsteward in Killarney, Ireland, and hisskill at the game helped ease his way

into Roman society. The priest playedwith social luminaries such asMussolini’s son-in-law CountGaleazzo Ciano, as well as the formerSpanish King Alfonso. All his connec-tions were to become very usefulwhen he took on the unforeseen man-tle of rescuer.

In the last years of the war, as the

Italian government collapsedO’Flaherty organized a group ofpriests, anti-Fascists and diplomats tohelp shelter Jews, escaped POWsand refugees. He set up a network ofsafe havens in rented apartments andreligious houses throughout Rome.

Claudio-Ilan Jacobi, now living inIsrael, is one of the JewsO’Flaherty saved. He wasaway from the ghettowhen the Gestapo raidedit.

“I saw the Monsignormany times,” Jacobi wrotein his statement for YadVashem. “He helped mymother, my grandparentsand me find refuge fromthe Nazis.”

“He got false papers forus from the Vatican as wellas food cards,” Jacobisaid. “I remember thegreat appreciation mymother had for all he did.”

On one occasion O’Flaherty eventhreatened the doorman of Jacobi’sapartment with excommunication forspeaking too freely about the Jewishfamily hiding inside.

“The test for recognition by YadVashem is very rigorous,” saidO’Grady, “so we are continuing to tryto trace Jewish survivors or their fam-

ilies from the city.”

As the Nazis began transportingRoman Jews to the camps,

O’Flaherty walked Ines Ghiron andher friends through the Gestapo-filledstreets relying on false Vatican papersfor safe passage. Ghiron wrote in hermemoirs that they all arrived safely ata convent in Monteverde run byCanadian nuns.

After the Gestapo became aware ofO’Flaherty’s activities, it painted a whiteline across St. Peter’s Square, dividingthe neutral Vatican from Fascist-con-trolled Rome. Guards were placednearby ready to snatch the monsignorif he ever crossed. As a result,O’Flaherty became known locally asthe Scarlet Pimpernel because of themany disguises he donned during hisforays into the capital.

The modest monsignor only cameto public attention in the 1960s whenbooks about his exploits were pub-lished.

Holocaust survivor Tomi Reichental,who was the keynote speaker at the2013 presentation of the annualhumanitarian award named in honorof O’Flaherty, told The Times of Israelthat “If he saved one Jew it’s as if hesaved thousands.”

O’Flaherty died in 1963 — just ashis exploits were becoming the stuffof legend.

THE UNBELIEVABLE HEROIC STORY

OF IRELAND’S OVERLOOKED “OSKAR SCHINDLER”

BY RAFAEL MEDOFF, THE JERUSALEM POST

If only Alonzo Hamby had metGeorge McGovern!

Hamby is the author of a new biog-raphy of president Franklin D.Roosevelt which defends FDR’ s fail-ure to bomb Auschwitz, on thegrounds that it was too far away forUS planes to reach. McGovern, theUS senator and 1972 Democraticpresidential nominee, was one of theWorld War II pilots who actuallybombed oil sites at Auschwitz — prov-ing that it was, in fact, not out of reachat all.

Hamby is a prominent historian andthe author of a biography of Harry S.Truman as well as several other well-received books.

Reviewers are already heapingpraise on his new FDR biography, aswell. Evidently they are unaware ofthe colossal error he makes in hisaccount of Roosevelt’s response tothe Holocaust.

“The death camps were located inareas largely beyond the reach ofAmerican military power,” Hambywrites in Man of Destiny: FDR and theMaking of the American Century. And:“Auschwitz was in a Soviet area ofoperations and at the outer limit ofAmerican bomber range.”

And yet, American bombers didrepeatedly bomb German oil factories

that were situated in the slave laborsections of Auschwitz.

On August 7, 1944, US bombersattacked the Trzebinia oil refineries, just21 km. from the gas chambers. OnAugust 20, a squadron of 127 USbombers, accompanied by the all–African American unit known as theTuskegee Airmen, struck oil factoriesless than 8 km. from the gas chambers.

A teenage slave laborer named ElieWiesel witnessed the August 20 raid.A glance at Wiesel’s best-selling bookNight would have enlightened Hamby.Wiesel wrote: “If a bomb had fallen onthe blocks [the prisoners’ barracks], italone would have claimed hundredsof victims on the spot. But we were nolonger afraid of death; at any rate, notof that death. Every bomb thatexploded filled us with joy and gaveus new confidence in life. The raidlasted over an hour. If it could onlyhave lasted ten times ten hours!”

There were additional Allied bomb-ings of the Auschwitz oil factoriesthroughout the autumn. Alliedbombers also flew close to Auschwitzin 1944 to resupply the Polish HomeArmy forces that were fighting theGermans in Warsaw. On August 8,British planes began air-droppingsupplies to the Poles. Their flightroute took them within a few kilome-ters of Auschwitz. They would fly thatroute 22 times during the two weeksto follow. In September, PresidentRoosevelt ordered US planes to take

part in the Warsaw airlift.When George McGovern first men-

tioned publicly, in 2004, that he hadbeen one of the pilots who bombedthe Auschwitz area in 1944, interview-ers from the David S. Wyman Institutefor Holocaust Studies flew to SouthDakota to videotape his recollections.

McGovern described to them how,at age 22, he piloted one of the B-24“Liberator” bombers that targeted theoil factories at Auschwitz.

“There is no question we shouldhave attempted... to go afterAuschwitz,” McGovern said. “Therewas a pretty good chance we couldhave blasted those rail lines off theface of the earth, which would haveinterrupted the flow of people to thosedeath chambers, and we had a prettygood chance of knocking out thosegas ovens.”

Even if there was a danger of acci-dentally harming some of the prison-ers, “it was certainly worth the effort,despite all the risks,” McGovern said,because the prisoners were already“doomed to death” and an Alliedbombing attack might have sloweddown the mass murder process, thussaving many more lives.

McGovern noted that he remainedan ardent admirer of PresidentRoosevelt.

“Franklin Roosevelt was a greatman and he was my political hero,” hesaid in the interview. “But I think hemade two great mistakes in World

War II.” One was the internment ofJapanese Americans; the other wasthe decision “not to go afterAuschwitz.... God forgive us for thattragic miscalculation.”

It’s a shame Hamby never metMcGovern — he would have disabusedHamby of the absurd notion thatAuschwitz was out of America’s reach.

But then again, McGovern’sstatements about bombing

Auschwitz have been widely availableon the Internet for more than adecade now. Hamby could havelocated them with even the most cur-sory search of the literature on thesubject. Thus one suspects that evenif Hamby had known of McGovern’sexperiences he would have looked forsome other way to exonerate theRoosevelt administration for itsrefusal to bomb Auschwitz.

But FDR and his administration donot deserve to be exonerated.Dropping a few bombs on Auschwitzor the railway lines leading to it wouldnot have undermined the war effort; itsimply would have conflicted withRoosevelt’s view that the war againstthe Jews was a sideshow which wasnot America’s concern. The presidentwho presented himself to the publicas the champion of the “forgottenman,” as someone who embodiedhumane values and cared about thedowntrodden, turned his back on themost compelling moral challenge ofour times.

NEW WHITEWASH OF FDR’S FAILURE TO BOMB AUSCHWITZ

Lieutenant General John C.H. Lee presenting the US Medal of

Freedom to Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty.

May/June 2017 - Iyyar/Sivan 5777 MARTYRDOM & RESISTANCE

BY RAFFI BERG, BBC NEWS

Giselle Cycowicz (born Friedman)remembers her father, Wolf, as

a warm, kind and religious man. “Hewas a scholar,” she says, “he alwayshad a book open, studying Talmud,but he was also a businessman andhe looked after his family.”

Before the war, the Friedmans liveda happy, comfortable life in Khust, aCzechoslovak town with a largeJewish population on the fringes ofHungary. All that changed after 1939,when pro-Nazi Hungarian troops, andlater Nazi Germany, invaded, and allthe town’s Jews were deported toAuschwitz.

Giselle last saw her father, “strongand healthy,” hours after the familyarrived at the Birkenau section of thedeath camp. Wolf had been selectedfor a workforce, but a fellow prisonerunder orders would not let her go tohim.

“That would have been my chanceto maybe kiss him the last time,”

Giselle, now 89, says, her voicecracking with emotion.

Giselle, her mother and a sister sur-vived, somehow, five months in “thehell” of Auschwitz. She later learnedthat in October 1944 “a skeletal man”had passed by the women’s campand relayed a message to anyonealive in there from Khust.

“Tell them just now 200 men werebrought back from the coal mine. Tellthem that tomorrow we won’t be hereanymore.” The man was WolfFriedman. He was gassed the nextday.

Six million Jews were murdered bythe Nazis and their accomplices duringWorld War II. In many cases entiretowns’ Jewish populations were wipedout, with no survivors to bear wit-ness — part of the Nazis’ plan for thetotal annihilation of European Jewry.

Since 1954, Israel’s Holocaustmemorial, Yad Vashem, has beenworking to recover the names of allthe victims, and to date has managedto identify some 4.7 million.

“Every name is very important tous,” says Dr. Alexander Avram, direc-tor of Yad Vashem’s Hall of Namesand the Central Database of Shoah[Holocaust] Victims’ Names.

“Every new name we can add to ourdatabase is a victory against theNazis, against the intent of the Nazisto wipe out the Jewish people. Everynew name is a small victory againstoblivion.”

The institution, a sprawling complexof buildings, trees and gardens on thewestern slopes of Mount Herzl, gath-ers details about the victims in twoways: through information from thosewith knowledge of the deceased, andfrom archive sources, ranging fromNazi deportation lists to Jewishschool yearbooks.

Today Giselle has come to dedicateher father’s name, nearly 73 yearsafter he was killed, a small piece in avast jigsaw.

She is helped by trained staffthrough the process of recordingWolf’s details on a Page of Testimony,a one-page form for documentingbiographical information about thedeceased, such as where they livedbefore the war, their occupation andthe members of their family, and, ifavailable, a photograph.

“Only two-thirds of the way down dowe ask where they were during thewar and what happened to them,”Cynthia Wroclawski, deputy directorof Yad Vashem’s Archives Division,points out.

“We’re interested in seeing a personas a person and who they werebefore they became a victim.”

It is, the institution says, a kind ofpaper tombstone. So far Yad Vashemhas collected 2.7 million Pages ofTestimony.

They are stored in black boxes,each containing 300 pages — 9,000boxes in all. They are kept in climate-controlled conditions on shelves sur-rounding a central installation, a 30-foot-high conical structure lined withthe faces of men, women and childrenwho were murdered, rising uptowards the sky.

Here in the Hall of Names, groups ofvisitors pass through in quiet contem-plation. There is space on the shelvesfor 11,000 more boxes — or six mil-lion names in all.

With the last survivors dying out,Yad Vashem is facing a race againsttime to prevent more than a millionunidentified victims disappearingwithout a trace.

This is apparent in the decreasingnumber of Pages of Testimony itreceives — down from at least 2,000

per month five years ago to about1,600 per month currently.

The memorial is trying to raiseawareness, including among

Holocaust survivors who have not yetcome forward. For decades, for manyof them, the experience was still toopainful to talk about.

“It’s quite a common occurrence,not only in Holocaust survivors butsurvivors of prolonged and extremetrauma in childhood,” says Dr. MartinAuerbach, Clinical Director atAMCHA, a support service inJerusalem for Holocaust survivors.

That began to change, he says,after about 30 or 40 years, whenmany survivors started talking aboutwhat happened, not with theirchildr.en but with their inquisitivegrandchildr.en. Dr. Auerbach sees theNames Recovery Project as a valu-able part of the healing process.

“Filling out this page of informationsaying this was my father, mother,grandfather, nephews and nieces —you cannot bury your relatives whoperished, but you can rememberthem in a way that will commemoratethem forever, so this is very importantand also therapeutic for many sur-vivors.”

While Yad Vashem has made greatstrides in identifying victims fromWestern and Central Europe —about 95% have now beennamed — far fewer names havebeen uncovered in Nazi-occupiedareas of Eastern Europe, where

about 4.5 million Jews were mur-dered.

This is because while there was an

organized, official process of arrestand deportation further west, in theeast whole communities weremarched off and massacred withoutany such formalities.

An estimated 1.5 million Jews alonewere shot to death by theEinsatzgruppen (mobile killingsquads) in what has become knownas the Holocaust by Bullets, after NaziGermany invaded the Soviet Union inJune 1941.

In Babi Yar, in Ukraine, for instance,of the 33,000 Jews from Kiev and itssurroundings who were slaughteredin a ravine in September 1941 in thelargest massacre of its kind, abouthalf are yet to be identified.

Others not murdered by theEinsatzgruppen died, without a trace,from starvation or exhaustion in ghet-tos and labor camps, or were killed innearby extermination camps, wherethey had been herded without anykind of processing.

Yad Vashem is working withJewish organizations in those

countries to try to reach remainingsurvivors in the former Soviet Union,where the Holocaust was not officiallycommemorated, who may have littleawareness of the memorial’s exis-

tence.It is a massive and often complex

task. The memorial holds some 205million Holocaust-related documents,which are examined meticulouslyin the search for names.


THE HOLOCAUST: WHO ARE THE MISSING MILLION?

Two-thirds of European Jewry was murdered by the Nazis.

Edik Tonkonogi from Satanov in Ukraine was murdered after the Nazis entered the town in 1941.

In Western Europe, the Nazis kept records of victims, such as this Frankfurt to Theresienstadtdeportation list.


A Mother’s Diary: Surviving theHolocaust in Ukraine, 1941–1944.

By Sosia Gottesfeld Zimmerman.Bookstand Publishing: Morgan HillCA , 2015. 180 pp. $18.95 softcover.

REVIEWED BY DR. DIANE CYPKIN

“The Ukrainians were more thanwilling to carry out the extermina-tion. They enjoyed watching theJews being killed in the streetsand fields, robbing them of theirpossessions and clothes afterdeath, and their unquenched thirstfor Jewish blood never ceased.The Ukrainian intellectuals andclergy urged Hitler to acceleratethe ‘final solution.’ If at all possi-ble, their enthusiasm for killingJews and orgy of blood might havesurpassed that of their masters.”

From the Forward by DanielZimmerman and VivianZimmerman Furman-Rubin toA Mother’s Diary: Survivingthe Holocaust in Ukraine,1941–1944

Outside of Holocaust survivors,few people know of the eager

collaborators Hitler and the Nazisfound to murder Jews as they madetheir determined, relentless, andbloody path through Eastern Europe.It’s way past time they were more fully“recognized”! There were theLithuanians. There were the Latvians.There were the Estonians. Therewere the Ukrainians. It’s very difficultto figure out which group was worst!Unfortunately, they all tie for that infa-mous position!

In the slim, absorbing volume bySosia Gottesfeld Zimmerman enti-

tled, A Mother’s Diary: Surviving theHolocaust in Ukraine, 1941–1944, weread the heart-wrenching and heart-stopping tale of surviving not just theNazis, but their “conscientious” andloyal helpers, the Ukrainians. Thus,set in Skala, a typicalshtetl in eastern Poland(Galicia), the Diaryclearly and interestinglyreveals with what obvi-ous jubilance theUkrainians awaitedtheir supposed “libera-tors,” the Nazis, fromtheir overlords, theSoviets. It reveals withwhat appetite theUkrainians awaited themoment they couldpounce on all that theJews in their midst pos-sessed, making it theirown. At the same timewe follow the story ofSosia and her immediate family — ahusband and son — in their desper-ate efforts to survive the evil of theirUkrainian neighbors and the Nazis,who couldn’t have been happier withthe more-than-willing accomplicesthey discovered.

Needless to say, just as they dideverywhere, when the Nazis came toSkala in July 1941, they immediatelybegan their destruction of the lives ofthe 1,550 Jews who lived there.Jewish homes were ransacked. Jewswere attacked and murdered on the

streets. Jews were soon ordered tolive in a ghetto. A Judenrat was estab-lished to fulfill Nazi orders vis-à-visthe Jews of Skala. At the start, theseorders dealt with supplying the Naziswith workers for their labor camps.“The only purpose of this work was toexhaust the workers.” Indeed, “it was

impossible to survivein the camps forlong,” as laborersworked hours withoutend, continually beat-en by Nazi andUkrainian guards.

Then in September1942, hundreds ofJews from Skalawere put on trains forextermination . . . atBelzec. Assisting inthis, too, were theUkrainians — whoknew, better than theNazis, just who theJews were, andwhere, if they took

flight from the ghetto, they could behiding. For that matter, at times theUkrainians, having organized them-selves into militias, rounded up Jewson their own and presented them tothe Gestapo! During these ruthlesscaptures, Ukrainians also stole asmuch Jewish property as possible —even returning with wagons to col-lect piles of more Jewish posses-sions they couldn’t initially carryaway. In fact, the Diary plainly pro-claims that it was “like a holiday forthem.”

How Sosia and her little familylived through all of this is nothingless than a miracle. Sosia creditsher husband, Zysio Zimmerman. Hewas always somehow able to findthat unique Ukrainian farmer who —for payment of money or gifts —would take the family in for a shortwhile. She also credits one particu-lar Ukrainian farmer who — despitethe shrewish anti-Semitism of hiswife, forever threatening to throwthem out — kept the family for a totalof fourteen months. In return thisfarmer took everything the familyhad. Still, it must be remembered,some Ukrainian farmers took every-thing Jews had, supposedly as pay-ment for hiding them . . . and thenbetrayed them to the Nazis!

Finally, the Diary made thisreviewer think of her own fami-

ly and their survival among theLithuanians. Rabbi Ephraim Oshry,one of the few, if not the only rabbi tosurvive the Kovno ghetto to be liber-ated by the Russians, once told herthat for the Jews of Lithuania, theLithuanians were their umglik (dis-aster). They, like the Ukrainians,knew just who the Jews were, wherethey could be hiding, and took pleas-ure in identifying them for the Nazis.It appears that for the Jews in Skalaand the accompanying region, theumglik was the Ukrainians!

Dr. Diane Cypkin is a Professor ofMedia, Communication, and VisualArts at Pace University.

A MOTHER’S DIARY:

SURVIVING THE HOLOCAUST IN UKRAINE, 1941–1944

Roses in a Forbidden Garden: AHolocaust Love Story.

By Elise Garibaldi. DecalogueBooks: New York, 2016. 236 pp.$19.95 paperback.

REVIEWED BY ART SHOSTAK

Desperate to improve his family’schances to avoid Holocaust

martyrdom, Carl Katz, a former suc-cessful businessman, agreed to helpadminister a major dorm facility inTheresienstadt, a Nazi transit camp.His dual role — vulnerable captiveand yet also camp administrator —was held in various forms by compa-rable victims in hundreds of otherNazi camps. Like Carl, many suchmen and women, to their everlastingcredit, became secret resisters.

Inge Katz, Carl’s young daughter,had a tender romance while impris-oned in Theresienstadt, proving thatlife there, at least for some, althoughincredibly difficult and precariouslyuncertain, was not devoid of positivehuman experiences. Many decadesafter captivity, Inge’s account of theentire experience details how resoluteprisoners like Carl and his daughtereffectively resisted dehumanization.

We also learn about valiant effortsInge’s fiancé, Schmuel Berger, madeto survive his own horror story. Sentby train with other young men to theAuschwitz death camp, he wasspared on arrival forslave labor and notsent to a gas cham-ber. Later he wastransferred to theDachau concentra-tion camp. When itwas evacuated byNazi collaborators, heescaped from aderailed train strafedby several low-flyingAllied aircraft. Hesought aid thereafterfrom German citizensby pretending to be alaborer who hadcome from the east towork. Before his liber-ation by Americanforces, Schmuel drew strength fromunswerving faith in God’s protectionand his heartfelt desire to be reunitedwith Inge.

Throughout the book attention ispaid to little-known forbidden efforts

certain Jewish prisoners dared tomake to aid others, in defiance ofunforgettable and unforgivable evil.Identified now as acts of stealth altru-ism, these prohibited behaviors

involved bravery,compassion, empa-thy, morality and sac-rifice. In bringingstealth altruism infrom the shadows,Roses in a ForbiddenGarden adds to theconventional horrorstory an overdueredemptive andinspiring help story. Itscombination of horrorand help offers a wel-come contrast to apredominantly woefulHolocaust narrative.

Finally, this enlight-ening and upliftingbiography is distinctive

in that its author, Elise Garibaldi, is anAmerican-born family member. Onehopes far more relatives of aging sur-vivors, especially creative and ener-getic grandchildren, will soon adapt herexample and provide their own engag-

ing accounts of ways other Jewish vic-tims — much like Carl, Inge andSchmuel — refused to be victimized.

The holding camp that held theKatz family was best known for

its extraordinary cultural life, onecomplete with a secret “university,”many musical organizations, ateenage-produced magazine, andeven hidden late-night cabaretswhere humor offered invaluable com-fort and distraction. Tragically, it wasalso an overcrowded, disease-ridden,high-anxiety site from which onlyabout 17,100 of nearly 141,000 Jewsheld at one time or another survivedto liberation. About 33,500 prisonersdied in the camp itself from disease,and exposure to the elements, filth,malnutrition, overcrowding, over-work, plagues, starvation, torture, andso on. Almost 90,000 were sent bytrain to gas chambers elsewhere.

Carl was asked by the Council ofJewish Elders (aka Judenrat), a gov-erning body beholden to the SS, toadminister a very large dormitory thathoused the frail elderly, the camp’sinsane inmates, and a large cookingsite. In return, he would receive


ROSES IN A FORBIDDEN GARDEN


BY NINA SIEGAL, THE NEW YORK TIMES

Hania Rosenberg was born in1934 in Oswiecim, an industrial

town in the Galicia region of southernPoland. The concentration and exter-mination camp the Germans builtthere after their 1939 invasion, calledAuschwitz-Birkenau, would take thelives of 1.1 million people.

“No one was poor, no one was rich:We were all about average, like anysmall town,” Ms. Rosenberg, 82,recalled. “I remember our backyard,with dogs, hens and geese, where wehad a cow, which my father boughtwhen I was born because he said youshould have your own milk. It was ahappy childhood.”

Her father imported and exportedstraw, hay and coal. He died in thecamps, along with most of the town’sJewish community. Ms. Rosenbergand her mother survived the war —she hid with a gentile family, and hermother endured forced labor at amunitions plant. They later made theirway to Sweden.

Her grandparents had a three-storyhouse and a general store, farmlandand two garden plots in the nearbytown of Ledziny. During theCommunist era, the house and storewere expropriated. A shopping malland new houses stand on what wasonce farmland. But two garden plots

— still in the name of her grandfather— remain, and Ms. Rosenberg isfighting for their ownership, so thatshe can give them to the family whosaved her.

“In Poland, there was no officialprocess for this: You have to go to thecourts,” she said in a phone interview

from Stockholm. “We did go to thecourts, but it was like a carousel: Yougo around and around and aroundand around. You have to produce thedocuments that they need, and thenit’s not enough. There are alwaysmore documents you need to pro-vide.”

Poland is the only European Unionnation that has not established formalprocedures to resolve claims made by

people whose property was seizedduring the Holocaust, according to anew report by the European ShoahLegacy Institute, based in Prague.

The report, more than 1,200pages, was based on three

years of research in 47 countries thatendorsed a 2009 pledge, known as

the Terezin Declaration, to establish arestitution process for “immovableproperty” like land, homes and busi-nesses.

It found that Poland had only partlycomplied with an obligation to returncommunal Jewish property like syna-gogues and cemeteries.

The issue of restitution is especiallyfraught for Poland, which hadEurope’s largest Jewish community

before the war. About three millionPolish Jews were murdered in theHolocaust, along with at least 1.9 mil-lion other Polish civilians.

The report says that Holocaust vic-tims across Europe — not only Jews,but also Roma, gays, disabled peopleand others — “had to navigate a fre-quently unclear path to recover theirproperty from governments andneighbors who had failed to protectthem, and often, who had been com-plicit in their persecution.”

It added, “Law was not the sur-vivors’ ally; more often it was theirenemy, providing impunity for thievesand those who held stolen property.”

In Poland, the injustice was com-pounded because “comprehensiveprivate property restitution legislationin the post-Communist era” wasnever enacted, according to thereport.

Although the issue is longstanding,it has been complicated by the rise topower in 2015 of the right-wing Lawand Justice Party. Party officialsacknowledge the enormity of theHolocaust, but they emphasize thatPoland was the victim of both Germanand Soviet oppression and that manyminorities suffered; debates overremembrance have bedeviled proj-ects like a new World War II museumin the seaside city of Gdansk.

“On what basis should Polanddecide that those with Jewish ances-


HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS IN POLAND

FIND RESTITUTION CLAIMS “LIKE A CAROUSEL”

BY SHELDON KIRSHNER, THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

Japan’s attitude and policiestoward Jews from 1933 to 1945 —the years that coincided with therise and fall of Nazi Germany — isthe subject of Meron Medzini’s fineand fascinating work of scholar-ship, Under the Shadow of the

Rising Sun: Japan and the Jews

During the Holocaust Era, pub-lished by Academic Studies Press.

The historiography of theHolocaust is rife with books

about the mass murder of EuropeanJews, yet Japan — a member of theAxis alliance and a close ally of NaziGermany — is rarely mentioned inthis grim catalog of terror and massmurder. The reason is clear. Whilemany of the 40,000 Jews living inJapan and its overseas possessionswere subjected to restrictions andtheft of property due to their status asforeign nationals, they were nothumiliated or persecuted becausethey were Jews. Nor were they sin-gled out for extermination. Indeed,one Japanese diplomat single-hand-edly saved thousands of Jews.

Medzini, a Hebrew University histo-rian, is one of the few scholars whohas exhaustively delved into this

intriguing topic. Nevertheless, itremains still largely untapped.Medzini’s wide-ranging book fills thegap quite admirably. He deals with theinflux of Jews into Japan from themid-19th century, the image of Jewsin Japanese society, the export ofanti-Semitism to Japan, the treatmentmeted out to Jews in Japanese-occu-pied Manchuria, China and SoutheastAsia and the policies Japan formulat-ed with respect to Jewish refugees.

Portuguese conversos — Jewishconverts to Christianity — were thefirst Jews to visit Japan. Jewishtraders and entrepreneurs estab-lished themselves in Japan in the late1850s, following the arrival of anAmerican flotilla commanded byMathew C. Perry. The majority of thenewcomers were initially fromSoutheast Asia, China and WesternEurope. Later, Jews arrived from theMiddle East, Eastern Europe and theUnited States. They largely settled inthe cities of Nagasaki, Yokohama andKobe.

The majority of Jewish migrantswere businessmen, but Albert Mosse,a German Jew, played an importantrole in the development of the 1889Meiji constitution. Still other Jews,though not residents of Japan, wereof immense assistance to the country.

The American banker and financier,Jacob Schiff, was instrumental insecuring loans for Japan during itswar with Russia.

Medzini claims that The Merchant ofVenice, translated into Japanese in the1880s, had an impact on Japaneseperceptions of Jews. “Many Japanesereaders thought that the typical Jewwas Shylock: clever, sly, untrustworthy,and given to devious intrigues andmanipulations,” he writes, adding thatthis stereotype would reappear withgreater strength from the 1920sonward. Japan’s ruling elites had akeen interest, verging on admiration,for Jews, who they believed pos-sessed special talents in finance andinternational politics and wielded vastinfluence over governments.

Anti-Semitism seeped into Japanafter Japanese forces entered

Siberia in 1918. Japanese officers,having been exposed to WhiteRussians who poured scorn on the1917 Bolshevik revolution and dis-played hatred of Jews, brought backthese ideas to Japan. By no coinci-dence, the army officer who translat-ed the Protocols of the Elders ofZion into Japanese had been postedin Siberia. An infantry officer, GeneralShioden Nobutaka, would becomethe most well-known and outspoken

anti-Semite in Japan during the 20thcentury. He had been influenced byFrench anti-Semites while serving asJapan’s military attache in Paris dur-ing World War I.

Nevertheless, the few thousandJews living in Japan before WorldWar II were never seen as fifth colum-nists determined to undermineJapanese culture, says Medzini.“They were, at best, part of the foreigncommunity, and therefore they did notarouse the passionate, often hysteri-cal response [Jews] encountered inNazi Germany. Since they were neverseen as an integral part of Japan, andsubsequently were not viewed asenemies of that country, Japan’s soci-ety saw no need to destroy them.”

Nazi ideas infiltrated into Japantoward the end of the 1930s as AdolfHitler’s Mein Kampf and AlfredRosenberg’s The Myth of theTwentieth Century were retranslatedand distributed. These turgid tractsmay have reinforced the Japanesenotion that Jews were disseminatorsof liberal, secular, universal, demo-cratic and Marxist ideas.

The Japanese government support-ed Zionist aspirations for a Jewishnational homeland in Palestine andendorsed the Balfour Declaration


Hania Rosenberg, who now lives in Stockholm, Sweden, survived the Holocaust and is now trying

to get back the properties that her family had in Poland.

JAPAN AND THE JEWS


BY DORIAN GEIGER

Philip Riteman was just 13 whenthe Nazis shoved him and his

family onto a train bound forAuschwitz from the Pruzhany ghettoin Poland. At the time, he and his fam-ily had no idea they were being cartedto their deaths.

“Three o’clock in the morning,somebody [yells] and I see theGerman sitting with a gun andscreaming, yelling, ‘Out, out, youJews!’” Riteman recalled.

They walked to the railroad tracksand Riteman saw freight trainsstretching as far as his eyes couldsee. Riteman, a Polish Jew, saidabout 100 people were crammed intothe trains, which measured roughly 8by 20 feet. The Nazis told them itwould be an hour’s ride.

“Two hours gone, three hoursgone — all day on the train. [On] thetrain we shake. The train slow, slow,you hear rifle shooting, but you can’tsee it because you look to the boards.And we stay, all glued together. Couldyou picture this? Can you imagine? Iwouldn’t do this to animals.”

As the train clicked along the trackson the seemingly endless ride, a mansoon dropped dead at Riteman’s

feet — the first casualty of this tragicjourney.

“A fellow behind me, a tall fellow, hesays, ‘Maybe you can try shifting,move your feet, maybe one inch,everybody moves an inch, and see ifwe can put the dead body to the wall.’We did this.”

The train continued rolling throughthe countryside. Forwhat felt like days, ayoung mother’s babybegan crying. Itsscreams still tormentRiteman to this day.Then, it stopped.

“The baby died in themother’s arms,” saidRiteman bitterly. “Shewas hysterical.”

Six or seven dayspassed. There was no,food, water or bath-rooms.

“I peed every day inmy pants. Everybody

[defecates] in their pants and pees,and everybody screaming, crying —unbelievable they could do this tohuman beings.”

Then, one morning, they finallyarrived at Auschwitz. Riteman wasseparated from his family, and it wasthe last time he would ever see them .

“In the afternoon, my parentsalready was gassed,” he said, withtears in his eyes.

“Trains after trains coming in. Theygas them. Could you imagine? I could-n’t believe it. I was there a month and Ididn’t believe they’d do this. I thought Iwas still going to see my parents. I willstill see my sisters, my brothers. Then Ifound out. I see people going to thecrematoriums, and they gassed 5,000,10,000 at one time. It’s very, very hardfor me to talk about it.”

Riteman’s entire family was extermi-nated by the Nazis. His father, moth-er, five brothers, two sisters, grand-parents, and nine uncles and aunts

were annihilated in Auschwitz.Riteman was later transferred to

Dachau concentration camp. Afterbeing liberated by the Americans in1945, he spent time in a displacedpersons camp. He weighed just 34kilograms.

Then, in 1946, he landed inNewfoundland, then pre-Confederation Canada.

This is just one gruesome snapshotof the Holocaust, which claimed thelives of about six million Jews duringWorld War II. More than a millionJews like Riteman were hauled off toAuschwitz, but only a handful made itout alive. At least 960,000 perishedthere.

According to The Blue Card, aninternational organization that

provides financial assistance andother resources to Holocaust sur-vivors, there are an estimated100,000 survivors stillalive today, many ofwhom live in poverty.

“I will never forgive,and I will never forget,”said Fanny Starr, 95,a n o t h e r P o l i s hHolocaust survivorwho endured the ter-rors of Auschwitz.

Starr, who now livesin Denver, Colorado,lost her mother, two ofher siblings, and manyother family membersto the gas chambers ofthe German concentration camp. Sheremembers the atrocities well. Ashesof burnt bodies fell like snow from theAuschwitz crematoriums, she said.

“That was such a heinous crimeagainst humanity to try to annihilateour race,” Starr added. “But thankGod, they didn’t succeed. Six millionpeople lost. People who committedno crime, they killed nobody, withoutno reason, we were just slaughtered.”

The black tattoo ink on Riteman’s

left arm — the numbers, 98706, hisAuschwitz prisoner ID — are foreveretched there. Although the ink on hisarm has faded, the horrific memorieshave not. The pain — and bitter-ness — from his time in Auschwitz stillring heavily in his voice.

“That’s got to be told to our children,our grandchildren, great, great, great-grandchildren. So long as the worldexists, they should make sure thatdoesn’t happen to anybody. Period.”

Today, Riteman is 95. He’s tired,and hard of hearing. Yet, he’s stillquite spry. At his quaint Canadianhome in Halifax, Nova Scotia, whichhe shares with his 85-year-old wifeDorothy, whom he met in Montreal in1947, Riteman stares off into the dis-tance.

For decades, he didn’t speak aboutthe horrors of the Holocaust, but it’s asubject he now discusses openly —

and something he treats as a duty —largely so history doesn’t repeat itself.

“You people are lucky,” he said.“You’re living in heaven. You don’teven know it. I want you to wake upand make sure it doesn’t happenagain. That’s the reason I’m speakingin schools, universities. Make sure[you] don’t hate nobody, don’t do noharm to anyone. Be a good person.Maybe we could make a better worldto live for everybody.”

Who is really stirring up anti-Semitism to new heights inSweden? It’s not who you thought.BY DANIEL RADOMSKI, HAARETZ

In 1945, my paternal grandparentswere brought to the Swedish sea-

side industrial town of Malmö onbuses organized by Count FolkeBernadotte’s Red Cross. Recentlysaved from the unspeakable horrorsof Auschwitz, Frajda Rozental andJankel Radomski did not know eachother upon arrival in Sweden. Theyhad both suffered dreadful losses —but they had survived.

For Jankel, his parents and siblings,as well as his newly founded youngfamily, had all been executed. Frajdalost her father, her mother and all hersiblings except one sister, a Zionist,who had left for Palestine before thewar, and as a result was consideredthe black sheep of their small Hasidic

village. As was often the case withsurvivors, Frajda and Jankel, in an actof perseverance and survival, formeda new bond upon their arrival. Thefirst result of this union came in 1946,in the shape of their firstborn — myfather, Chaim.

My grandparents worked hard tointegrate into Swedish society and tobuild a new life. The Sweden thatoffered a new beginning had chosena self-proclaimed neutrality through-out the war, with the clear and prag-matic intention to protect the countryagainst invasion at all costs. Thisincluded allowing the German troopsof the Engelbrecht battalion free pas-sage via railroad to Norway, enablingits occupation. Subsequently, over1,000 Norwegian Jews perished inthe concentration camps. Toward theend of the war the tide turned, andSweden allowed Allied bombers torefuel on its territory, acting as the

destination for the extraordinary res-cue of Danish Jews across the Straitsof Öresund, and as the home for theWhite Buses that rescued my grand-parents.

In 1969, my family again experi-enced the embrace of Swedish

salvation. My mother Dora, a 19-year-old Polish student of chemistry, wasgiven a way to escape from the newwave of anti-Semitism that engulfedPoland in the late 1960s. Sweden’sprovision of yet another new future formy family secured my everlastinggratitude. However, the country’s war-time history still soiled its virtue. Whencompiling a high school essay onSweden during World War II, Iencountered graphic photographs ofstudents of my very own schooldemonstrating in Stockholm’s Öster-malmstorg Square in 1942. On theirplacards: “Stop the Import of Jews.”

As children of the postwar genera-

tion, we were taught to approach ourJudaism as a distinctive but guardedbond. Non-Jews were commonlyreferred to as “Swedes” by my par-ents, and, even though I never knewany other homeland, for many yearsthis paradox seemed natural to me.We took great pride in being part of aminority that united us and gave usstrength as well as a sense of identi-ty — unique features that willinglyseparated us from the Swedish main-stream. Although the Jews integratedafter the war and subsequentlyexcelled both in academia and in awide array of professional pursuits,the internal will to retain the group’sseparate and special standing wasalways present.

Many Jews who sought either aZionist or Jewish religious lifestylewould seek it elsewhere, in Israel, theU.S. or the U.K. Leaving Sweden was


WHY REMEMBERING THE HOLOCAUST MATTERS MORE THAN EVER

Philip Riteman was just 13 when the Nazis forced him and his fam-

ily onto a train bound for Auschwitz.

Fanny Starr.

THE CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER FACING SWEDEN’S JEWS


(Continued from page 3)“There is a lot of documentation

where there are names that are veryscattered,” says Dr. Avram. “Namesmentioned in a letter here or a reportthere. This can be very labor inten-sive. Sometimes you have to gothrough thousands and thousands ofpages just to retrieve a few dozennames.”

The difficulty is compounded by thefact that sources can be in 30 to 40different languages; most are hand-written and can be in different scripts,such as Latin, Hebrew and Cyrillic.“Our staff not only need to be linguistsbut they need to know calligraphy,”says Dr.. Avram, himself a languageexpert.

One of the biggest gaps is with chil-dr.en, of whom some 1.5 million weremurdered in the Holocaust. Onlyabout half have been identified.

“It’s one of the saddest things,” saysDr. Avram. “We have reports whereparents are named with, say, three orfour childr.en, unnamed. They werelittle childr.en and people just don’tremember.”

The aim is to turn them from anony-mous statistics into human beingsagain, like seven-year-old EdikTonkonogi, from Satanov in Ukraine.His childish innocence and sweet-ness of character come across in aletter he wrote in 1941 to his parents,who were travelling with a Russiantheater troupe.

Edik was murdered after the Nazisentered the town that same year. Hisname was later memorialized in aPage of Testimony by a relative.

As time moves on, the task offinding missing names is get-

ting harder in some respects but eas-ier in others. The availability of source

material is greater than ever, andadvances in technology mean it canbe a less arduous task to gather infor-mation and manipulate the data.

However, the fewer the names leftto uncover, the more activity it takesto find them.

The digital age also means there

are more tools at researchers’ dispos-al than ever before. The departmentsearching for names recently took tosocial media, including Facebook, ina push to reach untapped survivors.The campaign generated many newPages of Testimony.

“When you’re talking about socialmedia, you have the younger genera-tion now understanding that thosenames are not in our database andtrying to find out the information fromtheir family members,” says SaraBerkowitz, manager of the NamesRecovery Project.

There is another significant, some-times life-changing, outcome of thegrowth of the names database, which

has been available online since 2004.It has led to emotional reunions ofsurvivors who had lived their lives notknowing there was anyone else fromtheir family left alive.

Last year two sets of familiesbelonging to two sisters, each ofwhom thought the other had perished

in the Holocaust, were united after achance discovery through the Pagesof Testimony. It transpired the sistershad lived out their lives just 25 min-utes away from each other in northernIsrael, but passed away without everbeing aware.

In 2015 a pair of half-siblings, nei-ther of whom knew the other was

alive, were reunited as a result ofsearching the database, and in 2006a brother and sister, one living inCanada and the other in Israel, werereunited 65 years after becoming sep-arated in their hometown in Romania.

The project has also brought to lightother, unfortunate findings.Argentinean-born Claudia de Levie,

whose parents fled Germany in the1930s, believed she had lost four orfive relatives in the Holocaust. Asearch of the database to help withher daughter’s homework revealedthat in fact 180 family members hadbeen killed.

Further research, however, revealedthrough a signature on a Page ofTestimony the existence of cousins ofher husband, living in Hamburg. Thefamilies now speak to each othereach week on Skype.

Ironically, a chief architect of theHolocaust, Adolf Eichmann, lived as afugitive in the same neighborhood asClaudia when she was a child inArgentina, as she would later learn.

The importance of the mission torecover victims’ names received glob-al recognition in 2013 when theUnited Nations cultural agency,UNESCO, included the collection inits Memory of the World register.

The agency lauded it as “unprece-dented in human history,” pointing outthat the project had given rise to sim-ilar efforts in other places of genocide,such as Rwanda and Cambodia.

Despite the millions of namesrecorded so far, there is still a longway to go if all six million are ever tobe recovered, but those behind theproject remain determined.

“I personally would like that we doreach that goal, that at least amongthose who perished there won’t be aperson who remains unknown. It’sour moral imperative,” says SaraBerkowitz.

“Until I sit in the office and days willpass by and I won’t have work to do,I’ll know that we’ve more or lessraked the universe to try to get toevery name and there is no morethere.”

THE HOLOCAUST: WHO ARE THE MISSING MILLION?

Claudia de Levie lost many family members in the Holocaust, but found new living relatives.

(Continued from page 5)tors get compensated, whereasBelarussians, Poles, Ukrainians orCrimean Karaites, or Tatars andGermans — all of whom used to livehere before the war — shouldn’t becompensated?” Jaroslaw Kaczynski,the leader of the governing party,asked supporters last year. (TheKaraites and Tatars are minoritygroups that speak Turkic languages.)

“Is Poland able to turn back time andcompensate all those who suffered inthose tragic events?” he asked. “Doesit mean that the descendants of poorPoles are supposed to pay thedescendants of those who were rich?This is what it comes down to.”

There is also a morass of legalissues. Poland says it is not to blamefor the crimes of Nazi Germany, and itpoints to a 1952 agreement in whichWest Germany agreed to pay Israelreparations for wartime crimes.Communist-era governments alsoreached agreements with several

countries, including the United States,to resolve wartime property claims,Polish officials say.

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, a histori-an who has written about restitutionissues, said the report focused toonarrowly on Jewish victims. WhilePolish Jews “faced the extraordinaryterror of total extermination,” he said,Polish Christians “faced the ordinaryterror of partial annihilation.”

Last year, Poland’s constitutionalcourt upheld a 2015 law that sig-

nificantly limits the restitution rights ofthose whose property in Warsaw wasseized during the war.

“Polish law treats everyone equally,”the foreign minister, WitoldWaszczykowski, said in Israel lastyear. “Any legal or natural person, ortheir heir, is entitled to recover prewarproperty unlawfully seized by the NaziGerman or the Soviet authorities, orthe postwar Communist regime.”

However, Leslaw Piszewski, chair-man of the board of the Union of

Jewish Religious Communities inPoland, said current policies made itfar too difficult for claimants — effec-tively denying justice by delaying it.

“Attitudes have not changed at all,”he said. “Courts issue negative deci-sions or prolong the process to theextent that the claimant resigns fromthe process.”

The new report was presented at aconference in Brussels organized byHolocaust survivors and groups thatrepresent them, and hosted by theEuropean Parliament.

Gideon Taylor, the operations chair-man of one of the groups, the WorldJewish Restitution Organization, saidhe hoped the conference would be a“rallying call” before time ran out forsurvivors, 72 years after the war’send.

“We have a very narrow window oftime, while survivors are still alive, tocarry out some kind of symbolic jus-tice, some kind of recognition of whathas happened,” he said.

The issue is not just symbolic butalso practical, said Mr.

Piszewski, whose group representsnine officially recognized Jewish com-munities, with an estimated 10,000 to20,000 members. “Restitution is theonly financial tool to maintain Jewishcommunities as well as the Jewishheritage, including 1,200 cemeteries,”he said.

Ms. Rosenberg told her story at theconference, after much hesitation.The family that saved her has beenrecognized by Yad Vashem, theHolocaust remembrance center inJerusalem, as being among theRighteous Among the Nations, non-Jews who risked their lives to saveJews. A house her father owned inOswiecim has been given to the fam-ily.

“Maybe this conference will make adifference,” she said. “I really hopeso. We have been trying on our ownfor 26 years. They say that maybesomething will change in 20 years,

HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS IN POLAND

FIND RESTITUTION CLAIMS “LIKE A CAROUSEL”


PHOTO HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE ANNUAL BENEFIT GALA

OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR YAD VASHEM

AND THE JEWISH LIFE FOUNDATION

Nathan Sandler, Karen Sandler, gala chair; Beth and Lenny Wilf.Holocaust survivor Dr. Erica Miller; Bill Bernstein, Western Region director of institutional

advancement of the ASYV; Gerri Knilans.

Sheldon and Dr. Miriam Adelson, Patrons of the Mount of Remembrance, Yad Vashem.

Michael Fisher, director of the American Desk of the International Relations Division; Shaya Ben

Yehuda, managing director of the International Relations Division; Helmut Biemann; Yossie

Hollander, Visionary Member, Yad Vashem.

Gitta and Jack Nagel, donors; Edward and Elissa Czuker, honorary co-chairs. Fela Shapell and Rochelle Shapell Buchman, Visionaries of Yad Vashem.


PHOTO HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE AMERICAN SOSIETY

FOR YAD VASHEM ANNUAL SPRING LUNCHEON

Ron Meier, executive director of the ASYV; Dr. Na’ama Shik, featured speaker from Yad Vashem

Jerusalem, Israel; Leonard Wilf, chairman of the ASYV; and Tova Friedman, featured speaker

and Holocaust survivor.

Mark Moskowitz, Rose Moskowitz, Spring Luncheon Committee; and Adina Burian, Luncheon

Committee.

Merry Cohen, Rebecca Altman, Marilyn Rubenstein, Helene Dorfman, Leslie Adler, Susan Levy,

Judy Bloom, Susan Goodstadt.

Shelley Paradis, Sharon Halpern, Gladys Halpern, Maeira Werthenschlag, Luncheon Committee

members; and Jaci Paradis, Luncheon co-chair.

Eillene Lesitner, chief development officer, ASYV; Abby Kaufthal, Luncheon co-chair; Goldie

Hertz, Luncheon Committee; and Shara Levy.Sarita Rausnitz, Shirley Podolsky, Rachel Shnay, Luncheon co-chair; Gabriela Shnay.


BY DEBORAH FINEBLUM, JNS.ORG

When Fania Bilkay and her son,Evgeni, stepped up to her

desk, Sima Velkovich was windingdown an ordinary work day in thearchives division of Yad Vashem inJerusalem. She was then suddenlypulled into the center of a complexfamily drama that reached its climaxin mid-December of last year.

During a recent tour of Poland toexplore her roots, Bilkay had visited aWarsaw synagogue, where she dis-covered a document from YadVashem’s Central Database of ShoahVictims’ Names that counted herfather, Nisan Band, and his familyamong those killed by the Nazis.

“Why is he listed as murdered?” sheasked, confused — given that herfather survived the Holocaust and diedof natural causes in 1983, though helost three children during the war andhad always told Bilkay and her brother,Gennadi, that their entire extendedfamily had been wiped out.

The document that erroneouslyreported Nisan’s death had beencompleted in the 1950s by SymchaBorenstein, husband of Nisan’s sister,Jenta. By disputing the record of herfather’s death, Bilkay spurred YadVashem researchers to discover thatJenta and Nisan both survived theHolocaust, and both spent their livesthinking they were the sole remainingmembers of their immediate family.

In a tear-filled scene at theJerusalem museum on December 13,Fania and Gennadi were united withtheir first cousins, sisters HeniaBorenstein Moskowitz and RyvkaBorenstein Patchnik.

“It is difficult to describe how I feel,”said Bilkay. “My father alwayssearched for members of his familyand dreamed of finding them. He wasalone. But in this meeting today, hisdream has finally come true.”

Jenta’s daughters had also grownup believing “that we had no family,that everyone was murdered inPoland,” Henia said.

“If someone on the phone told youthat you have firstcousins who wantto meet you, youcould be suspi-cious,” said LitalBeer, director ofYad Vashem’sReference andI n f o r m a t i o nServices. “But thesisters — Heniaand Ryvka — werevery open andexcited. Their meet-ing was so moving.They brought familyphotos to share anddiscovered, to their amazement, thatthey’ve all been living all these yearsnear Tel Aviv.”

“I felt a connection at first sight. Myfamily has grown overnight,” saidHenia. “Thanks to Yad Vashem, wediscovered that we are not alone.”

Such a reunion is perhaps theultimate defeat of Hitler, said Dr.

Thomas Kuehne, director of theStrassler Center for Holocaust andGenocide Studies at Clark Universityin Worcester, Mass.

“The Nazis wanted to kill the Jewsbut also to erase the memory ofthem,” he told JNS.org. “If they hadbeen completely successful, not only

would the Jews be gone, but therewould be no trace of them. This kindof reunion proves that they failed.”

The Band/Borenstein family mys-tery, however, is not completelysolved. The two Borenstein sistersknow that their brothers Avram andHercz-Lejb survived the war, but theylost track of them decades ago. “Wehaven’t given up,” said Yad Vashemspokesman Simmy Allen. “The broth-

ers are what our researchers areworking on now.”

To date, Yad Vashem has identi-fied more than two-thirds — 4.6

million — of the Jews who were mur-dered during the Holocaust, recordedin the Central Database of ShoahVictims’ Names. It’s an ongoing taskthat Chairman of the Yad VashemDirectorate Avner Shalev calls “a mis-sion to uncover the names of thosewho have no one to remember them.”

Holocaust survivor Rabbi YisraelMeir Lau, the former Ashkenazi chiefrabbi of Israel and current chair of theYad Vashem Council, said, “Our obli-gation, above all, is to complete the

database of names of our 6 millionvictims. The candle is about to beextinguished. With the number ofpeople with their Auschwitz numberstattooed on their arms growing eversmaller, it’s very important and neces-sary that all this information be con-centrated in one single database withsix million names.”

The simple act of adding a relative’sname to Yad Vashem’s database canalso prove therapeutic for families,noted Myra Giberovitch, author of the2014 book Recovering fromGenocidal Trauma.

“Submitting this information enablesfamily members to find some peaceby knowing they have fulfilled theirholy mission to bear witness,”Giberovitch said.

Family members’ names can beadded to the database of Holocaustvictims by contacting the ShoahVictims’ Names Recovery Project [email protected] names are ultimately added tothe Pages of Testimony in YadVashem’s Hall of Names. The pages,said Giberovitch, “are a paper ceme-tery that provides a final resting placefor their loved ones, thereby preserv-ing their memory for future genera-tions. In the words of one survivor: ‘Itlessens my pain.’”

But for the Band and Borensteinfamilies, this week is less about painand more about celebrating. WhenYad Vashem staffers offered theBorenstein sisters a ride home afterthe reunion, they politely declinedbecause their newfound cousinsinsisted on driving them.

“The five of them squeezed into thecar together,” said Yad Vashem’s Beer.“After all these years, they are family.”

COUSINS TORN APART BY THE HOLOCAUST

MEET FOR THE FIRST TIME AT YAD VASHEM

The Band and Borenstein families unite at Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names

in Jerusalem.

BY RICHARD HUROWITZ, LOS ANGELES TIMES

This year marks the 75th anniver-sary of the release of

Casablanca, which immortalized quietacts of resistance against Fascism atthe murky crossroads that waswartime Morocco.

The legendary scene at Rick’s Cafein which refugees, led by PaulHenreid, drown out Nazi officers bysinging “La Marseillaise” became aninstant inspiration to moviegoers asWorld War II was raging.

The location of the film was no acci-dent: Casablanca was a haven forthose fleeing for their lives. And it wasalso the scene of a much greater —and real-life — act of heroism, one fartoo little known or recognized: theprotection of the Jews of Morocco bythe young Sultan Mohammed V.

At a time when anti-Semitism andIslamophobia are on the rise globally,we should honor this overlooked butremarkable example of enlightened

leadership.Born the third son of the reigning

sultan’s younger brother, Mohammedwas an unlikely ruler from the start

and certainly an unexpected hero.A series of international disputes

between France and Germany led tothe Treaty of Fez in 1912 and Frenchcontrol of Morocco. Mohammed’s

father, Moulay Yousef, replaced hisolder sibling on the throne when hisbrother abdicated because of thetreaty.

Fifteen years later, upon his father’sdeath, 16-year-old Mohammed wasnamed sultan largely because theFrench viewed him as more docilethan his older brothers. This turned

out to be one of the great misjudg-ments in French colonial history.

When Paris fell to the Germans inJuly 1940, the sultan, then 30, wasput in a precarious position asMorocco came under the rule of thecollaborationist French Vichy regime.

Among their first acts, the new over-seers sought to impose anti-Semiticlaws in Morocco, as per Nazi protocol.

Jews had lived in that part of theworld since well before Carthage

fell, and over a quarter of a millioncalled Morocco their home in 1940.

Members of the community hadserved the sultans’ court as ministers,diplomats and advisors. MohammedV took seriously his role asCommander of the Faithful, which heviewed to include all “people of thebook,” meaning everyone belongingto the Abrahamic faiths — Jews,Christians and Muslims. He bravely,publicly declined to assist in the per-secution of his own Jewish citizens.

“There are no Jews in Morocco,” he (Continued on page 13)

A MOROCCAN HERO TO JEWS

Morocco’s Mohammed V, wearing white robes, walking with the country’s Grand Vizier Si

Mohammed El Mokri after he placed a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior at the Arc

de Triomphe during a visit to Paris, France around July 4, 1930.


(Continued from page 4)somewhat better living quarters,along with an implied promise that aslong as he performed well, he and hiswife and daughter would not beshipped out to a death camp. (Sucharrangements existed in many othermajor Nazi camps.)

Only after the family moved in didthey learn their room was locateddirectly above a ward of insane pris-oners, from whom screams andshrieks were endlessly heard. As well,it lacked windows and included insa-tiable bloodsucking bedbugs whosebites left Inge so ill she almost died.

Taking great care, Carl chose tomake secret desperate efforts to savelives, as when, for example, helearned a particular train soon toleave Theresienstadt for a deathcamp would not accept bedriddenpassengers. He rushed about thedorm urging his elderly wards to

become and/or stay bedridden, there-by exempting many from at least thatparticular deadly trip. Had his rusebeen discovered, his entire familycould have been sent to the gaschamber: the Third Reich was deter-mined to repress evidence that theranks of the untermensch [subhu-mans] included some who were com-passionate, ethical, and moral humanbeings willing to risk all to help others.

Little wonder, accordingly, thatsurvey interviews secured by

survivor/scholar Alexander J. Grothand his associates from 251 survivorsin the late 1990s found that “manymore see Jews [like Carl Katz] asdoing what they could to help andameliorate conditions for fellow Jewsrather than the opposite.” In a fashionconsistent with this research endorse-ment, Carl, on returning to Bremen in1945 after liberation, reestablishedthe Jewish Community Center he had

led before being sent toTheresienstadt.

Inge’s participation in stealth altru-ism had her, as a keeper of officialdata on daily deaths, dare to secretlykeep a separate record of the namesand death dates of Jews from herhometown. She thought this “the onlyway she could think of to honor them;that is, to retain some record of theirexistence and of their death.”Discovery of her unauthorized illegalrecord would probably have had theentire family sent to the gas chamber.

In sum, then, three memorable pro-files distinguish the story of the

Katz family experiences inTheresienstadt. We take away theinstructive model of Carl Katz, amench whose integrity as both a pris-oner and an administrator helpedsave lives. We learn from Inge Katzhow to stay human in an atrocioussetting. We are inspired by Schmuel

Berger’s rewards from bravery,prayer, and romantic commitment.Taken together, this artfully told storyemphasizes altruism rather thanatrocities; care, rather than cruelty;and valor rather than victimization. Ithighlights our ability as care-valuingJews to transcend the worst if we helpone another hold on to the best.

Art Shostak is an academic sociolo-gist with degrees from Cornell andPrinceton. He has taught at theWharton School, University ofPennsylvania and Drexel University.He is the author of 34 sociology booksand over 160 articles. He is the recipi-ent of the Distinguished Career Awardfor the Practice of Sociology. Since1971 Art Shostak has made 10 studyvisits to Israel, and in 2017, a relatedbook of his was published: StealthAltruism: Forbidden Care as JewishResistance in the Holocaust.

ROSES IN A FORBIDDEN GARDEN

(Continued from page 5)when it was issued by Britain inNovember 1917. In explaining whyJapan backed the Zionist movement,Medzini says Japanese decision-makers had an inflated view of Jewishpower and placed the Middle East lowon the totem pole of Japan’s priorities.

Outside of Japan, Jews found them-selves under direct Japanese ruleafter Japan’s occupation ofManchuria in 1931. Many of theseJews lacked any nationality andsought the protection of the Japanesearmy. Japan acceded to their request,hoping its benevolence would promptwealthy Jews to invest funds in thedevelopment of Manchuria’s vital coaland steel industries.

Japan’s fixation with Jewish capi-tal gave rise to the Fugu Plan, a

scheme hatched in 1934 by the pres-ident of the Southern ManchurianRailway, Matsuoka Yosuke, to lure50,000 German Jews to Manchuria.Key officials in the Japanese govern-ment supported it, but it remainedstillborn, never having been accom-panied by a detailed operational plan.

Nonetheless, Japan cultivated arelationship with Jews. A seniorJapanese army officer whoaddressed a meeting of the FirstCongress of the Jews in East Asia inHarbin in 1937 told delegates thatJapan held no prejudices againstJews, did not subscribe to racist ide-ology, welcomed friendly ties withJews and was ready to cooperatewith them in economic and commer-cial spheres. After Japan joined theAxis Pact in 1940, the Japanese for-eign minister, speaking on behalf ofJapan’s emperor, told Lev Zykman, aleader of Harbin’s Jewish community,that Germany’s anti-Semitic policiesdid not obligate Japan to adopt thesame position.

The Jewish refugee question turnedinto an important issue for Japan

because it was bound up withGerman-Japanese relations. “Theproblem was how to avoid doing any-thing positive for Jews that wouldharm Japan’s ties with Nazi Germanywhile also avoiding alienatingAmerican Jews, whose economicpower was seen by Japan as domi-nant,” writes Medzini.

Given such conflicting considera-tions, he goes on to say, Japan strucksomething of a compromise towardrefugees, deciding that no visaswould be issued to stateless Jewish

refugees and that Jews holding validGerman and Austrian passportsshould be persuaded to seek shelterin countries other than Japan. Jewsalready holding entry visas to a thirdcountry would be permitted to obtaintransit visas to Japan.

Medzini’s chapter on Shanghaideals, of course, with refugees. From1938 to 1941, 15,450 Jewishrefugees, the bulk from Germany andAustria, streamed into the Chinesecity of Shanghai, which came underdirect Japanese rule in the summer of1937. By then, there was already anestablished Jewish community there.The first wave of Jewish settlers hadarrived from Iraq, Persia and India inthe middle of the 19th century, fol-lowed by Russian Jews in the wake ofthe Bolshevik revolution.

Jews arriving in Shanghai from thelate 1930s onwards did not require

entry and residence permits. Japantreated them and other foreigners fairlywhile maintaining close surveillanceover their activities. The situationchanged after the arrival of Germancolonel Joseph Meisinger in July 1942.The Gestapo’s senior representative inJapan, he had committed war crimesagainst Jews in Poland.

In conversations with Japanesearmy officers, Meisinger called for

a series of stringent measures to beenacted against Jews in Shanghai.Japan rejected most of his draconian

suggestions, but onFebruary 18, 1943,Japanese authorities estab-lished a “designated area”for 14,000 stateless Jewishrefugees in the working-class district of Hongkew.Russian Jews were exclud-ed from this ordinance. Lifewas hard for the residentsof the Hongkew ghetto, butthey were not physicallymolested, and American

Jewish organizations were permittedto send funds for their upkeep.

Jews residing in other Japanese-controlled Chinese cities, like Mukdenand Tianjin, were not harmed either.But in Hong Kong, Manila, Singapore,Batavia and Rangoon, the localJapanese ruler confiscated thehomes and real estate holdings ofJews, froze their bank accounts, andseized their gold and jewels. InThailand, an ally of Japan until almostthe end of the war, Jews with U.S.and British passports were interned.German, Austrian, Iraqi and SyrianJews were left alone. In keeping withits stated policy of maintaining racialharmony in the occupied areas,Japan gave short shrift to Germany’sgenocidal approach to Jews.

W h e n e v e r p o s s i b l e ,however, Japan tried to mollifyGermany. The case of Chiune

Sugihara, the Japanese vice-consulin Kaunas, Lithuania, is indicative ofJapan’s balancing act. The Japanesegovernment forbade him to issuetransit visas to Japan to a group ofPolish Jews, but he ignored his supe-riors’ order and issued 6,000 visas forindividuals and entire families. Amongthe Jews he rescued from 1940onwards were 300 rabbis and yeshivastudents. After being transferred toBerlin, he issued 69 transit visas toGerman Jews.

In Japan itself, American and BritishJews were interned, but Jews holdingother foreign passports seem to havefaced no problems. Neither the emper-or nor government ministers everissued statements about Jews, but in1944, the home minister made it clearthat Japan’s policy was to eradicatediscrimination based on race.

Still, 170 anti-Semitic books werepublished in Japan from 1936 until1945. Some major dailies,notably Asahi Shimbun, carried anti-Semitic articles, but refrained frompublishing stories about Nazi atroci-ties in Europe. The German embassyin Tokyo disseminated anti-Jewishmaterial to the Japanese media, butthe Nazi regime never considered theJewish Question a high-priority issuein its deliberations with the Japanesegovernment. In any event, mostJapanese people were oblivious toJews and, therefore, anti-Semitism.

Documents examined by Medziniindicate that Japanese officials hadlittle or no detailed information aboutthe Holocaust. “There were virtuallyno Japanese reports of the masskillings of Jews,” he says. Japanesediplomatic and consular documentsrelating to Jews focused instead onvisas and other matters pertaining toJewish migration.

In short, as Medzini suggests,Japan was neither obsessed by Jewsnor infected by anti-Semitism.

JAPAN AND THE JEWS


BY BEN COHEN, JNS

“If a man was a Jew, it was goodenough for him to be killed or

stamped out,” wrote a senior Britishofficial serving abroad to his superiorsin London in 1929.

From where was this gentleman —Major Alan Saunders — writing hisdispatch? From Munich or Berlin orany of the other German cities whereHitler’s Nazi Party was gaining sup-porters and street thugs? In fact, no.

Major Saunders was the head of theBritish police in Palestine during themandate period, and his statementconcerned the massacre by Arabs, inAugust 1929, of 69 Jews in Hebron, acity where their community had beena continuous presence for at least twomillennia.

I was reminded of Major Saunders’spithy summary of the motive behindthe Hebron pogrom when news brokeof Israeli Prime Minister BenjaminNetanyahu’s speech to the WorldZionist Congress in Jerusalem, inwhich he essentially argued that itwas the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Aminal-Husseini, who crystallized the ideaof the mass extermination of the Jewsin Adolf Hitler’s mind. But before I talkabout the controversy that followedthese comments, I want to makesome more general observations byway of introduction.

The first is that, while Hitler unar-guably remains the most powerfuland devastating anti-Semite to everhold state power, he was far from theonly one at that time to approach the“Jewish question” in exterminationistterms. As Major Saunders relatedfrom faraway Palestine, about anepisode that presaged the Nazi atroc-ities that were to follow in Germanyand then in occupied Europe andNorth Africa, the same hatred of Jewssimply for being Jews was in painfulevidence there. For there were thou-sands, even millions, of ordinary peo-ple in Europe and the Middle Eastwho regarded the Jews as a socialand religious poison and wanted them— all of them — dead. In that sense,

the Führer was their representativeand their master.

The second is that, as an IsraeliJew, Netanyahu is naturally sensitiveto the Palestinian Arab dimension ofthe broader issue of collaboration withthe Nazis, something I can relate to.As a kid, I remember sitting aroundmy grandfather’s table with his rela-tives from Bosnia — men with sadeyes and the muscles and paunchesof retired boxers, who had spent theiryouths in the Socialist-ZionistHashomer Hatzair movement, gradu-

ating to fight with Marshal Tito’sCommunist partisans against the Nazioccupation of Yugoslavia that began in1941. Men who, I realized with awe,had actually killed some of these Nazisthat I’d seen in the movies.

And yet, when they spoke about thewar, their anger really flowed whenthey remembered the locals who hadassisted the Germans. LikeNetanyahu now, what they foundhardest to stomach was the spectacleof those non-Jews who lived along-side them collaborating with the Naziextermination program.

In the pantheon of Nazi collabora-tors, Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini is

right up there with Pavelić in Croatia,Pétain in France, Horthy in Hungary,and all the other quislings — theirname comes from the collaborationistleader in Norway, Vidkun Quisling —who implemented Hitler’s will. It was,ironically, the British authorities whoappointed him to his position in 1921.During the 1929 massacre in Hebron,as during the openly anti-Semitic1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine, al-Husseini proved himself a confirmedJew-hater and the natural ally of Hitlerin the Arab and Muslim worlds.

It wasn’t until November 1941 thatthe mufti met Hitler in person.Significantly, in the view of many his-torians, that encounter in Berlin tookplace two months before theWannsee conference, where leadingNazis led by Hitler’s security chief,Reinhard Heydrich, plotted the imple-mentation of the “Final Solution” —the extermination of the Jews.

In the official German record of their

discussions (not an exact transcript,but a summary of what was said), itwas clear that both Hitler and themufti were already in agreement thatthe Holocaust had to be visited uponthe Jews. For his part, the muftiexpressed his appreciation ofGermany’s commitment to the “elimi-nation of the Jewish national home,”while Hitler restated his “active oppo-sition to the Jewish national home inPalestine, which was nothing otherthan a center, in the form of a state,for the exercise of destructive influ-ence by Jewish interests.”

For good measure, the Führeradded that “Germany was also awarethat the assertion that the Jews werecarrying out the functions of econom-ic pioneers in Palestine was a lie. Thework there was done only by theArabs, not by the Jews” — a slanderthat could easily be expressed in theexact same words by the Boycott,Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)movement that targets the “Jewishnational home” in our own time.

That last point highlights a criticalfactor which the furor aroundNetanyahu’s speech — much of itgenerated by visceral opponents ofIsrael who only talk about theHolocaust when it justifies their back-ing of Palestinian violence againstJews now — has largely missed.

During the 1930s, both Germanyand Palestine were the sites of

mob violence, boycotts, and discrimi-natory laws and regulations againstJews. The Nazis’ consolidation ofpower in the 1930s was what enabledthem to launch their campaign of warand genocide at the end of thatdecade.

Had Palestine been conquered bythe Germans from the British, there isno doubt that the mufti would have

been installed as the local quisling,and that the entire Jewish populationwould have been shipped to concen-tration and death camps in Europe —assuming that the Germans and theirArab militias didn’t build similarcamps in the vicinity, of course. That

was the mutual vision expressed inBerlin in 1941, the distinctly Arab con-tribution to the achievement of the“Thousand-Year Reich.”

As the German historian MatthiasKuentzel has noted, the 700,000Jews in the Middle East were inHitler’s sights when he received themufti.

“As Hitler envisaged it, after theassault on the Soviet Union, theWehrmacht would also occupy theCaucasus and so open the way to theMiddle East....Part of this scenariowas the killing of the Jews,” Kuentzelwrites. Even though this grand ambi-tion failed, the mufti was still able, asthe prominent Israeli Holocaust histo-rian Yehuda Bauer put it, to be “anactive partner in devising the FinalSolution.” The mufti also played a rolein its implementation, raising three SSdivisions composed of Bosnian andAlbanian Muslims in the westernBalkans.

Nor did the mufti forget Palestine.The Israeli scholar Edy Cohen hasrevealed how, in May 1943, heblocked a deal agreed to by theBritish and the Germans to allow4,000 Jewish children to enterPalestine in exchange for 20,000German prisoners of war, while in1944, he parachuted a terror cell intoTel Aviv with the intention of poisoningthe local water supply.

The mufti, disgracefully, escaped theNuremburg trials of Nazi war criminalsand ended his days in Beirut in 1974.His legacy survives in the daily incite-ment against Jews that emanates fromPalestinian official and social media.So, when considering the latestNetanyahu controversy, pleaseremember this: Those Holocaustscholars who criticized Netanyahu’sspeech nonetheless recognize the fun-

damental, bitter fact of Palestinian anti-Semitism and the mufti’s position infomenting it. It is the Palestinian lead-ership and its supporters — who haveoffered neither an apology nor repara-tions for the mufti’s crimes against theJews — who don’t.

THE MUFTI AND THE HOLOCAUST, REVISITED

Hajj Amin al-Husseini meeting with Heinrich Himmler (1943).

November 1943, al-Husseini greeting Bosnian Waffen-SS volunteers with a Nazi salute.


(Continued from page 6)and is a case of pull rather than push,as the established spectrum of pro-Israeli or religious activities here is notcomprehensive and distinctiveenough for some Swedish Jews. Iknow, as I was one of these Jews thatleft for Israel at the age of 18 to fulfillboth Zionist and religious aspirationsby volunteering at a kibbutz, studyingat a yeshiva academy on Israel’snorthern border and serving in theIsrael Defense Forces. At no pointwas this due to persecution or eventhe lack of acceptance of my religionby my fellow Swedes; rather, it wasthe manifestation of my own convic-tions.

Asimilar choice is currently beingmade by many Jewish families

in Malmö, a town now globally infa-mous for anti-Semitism. These fami-lies may leave Malmö, but rather thangoing to Israel, they settle in the larg-er and more vibrant Jewish communi-ty of Stockholm. They have chosen aninternal emigration rather than leavingSweden’s borders. Bearing in mindthe reports, articles and surveys thatdetail the anti-Semitic atmosphere inSweden, what is behind this choice?Why would the Jews of Malmö riskstaying in Sweden instead of leavingthe country? Why would any Jew?Are the Jews of Sweden wishfulthinkers or just ignorant? Doesn’t themajority of Swedish Jewry see theclear and present danger that is beingdescribed, not least by the SimonWiesenthal Center and other interna-tional anti-racist organizations?

To understand the answers to thesequestions, we need to look beyondthe convenient and glib “truth” that Ihear too many times in Israel:“Europe — a continent of anti-Semites and Muslims — is lost. Allsensible Jews should make aliyahand get the hell out of there!” As anadvocate for Israel, I have grownaccustomed to the sweeping general-izations made by our adversaries.These generalizations — directed atIsraeli settlements, wartime con-quests, Israeli public opinion and

many other subjects — are usuallybased on ignorance or malice, andfrequently both. We now risk makingthe same generalization regardingSweden, without looking at the coreissues at hand.

It is no coincidence that Malmö, withits large Muslim population, has seena vast increase in anti-Semiticattacks. Let me explain why. First, apoint of order: Swedes are sticklersfor order and administration, evencompared to their fellow EU citizens,and this includes the proper registra-tion of crimes. This goes some waytoward explaining the country’s dis-heartening statistics reported inrecent EU surveys.

Secondly, and more importantly, therecent rise in anti-Semitic activity inSweden originates largely from theArab and Muslim communities. Here,many immigrants have backgroundsthat are directly linked to the Israeli-Arab conflict, and hail from countrieswhere classic anti-Semitism is com-monly accepted, encouraged bypoliticians and even taught in schools.Anti-Semitism in Sweden is common-ly hidden under a very thin veil of anti-Zionism and anti-Israeli sentiments.Therefore it’s relatively easy to seethe direct correlation between certainevents in the Middle East, such as theSecond Lebanon War in 2006, and anincrease in local anti-Semitic attacks.

Thirdly, most crucially and discour-agingly, the current political climate inSweden is a key enabler for the riseof anti-Semitic attacks. This isSwedish Jewry’s real clear and pres-ent danger; a fatal combination ofpolitical correctness, self-righteous-ness and obliviousness, as leadingpoliticians and opinion makers partic-ipate in or blatantly ignore a dispro-portionate demonization of Israel thatfrequently crosses the line into anti-Semitism. This has created a climatewhere it is acceptable and encour-aged to support calls for Israel’sdestruction, deliberately ignoring theeffect such support has as a vehiclefor the rise in Swedish anti-Semitism.

The ever-so-convenient distinction

between hate for Israel and hate forJews, although very popular withSwedish media and politicians, is notrespected by the enemies of eitherIsrael or the Jews. The public accept-ance of this type of anti-Israel attitude,which directly harbors anti-Semitism,is compounded by — among others —the leading Social Democrat and for-mer Malmö mayor Illmar Reepalu, whostated publicly that his city’s Jews werethemselves to blame for the rise ofanti-Semitic attacks, as they did notdistance themselves clearly enoughfrom Israel. After the end of his term,Reepalu was promoted by his party,Sweden’s largest, to a seat on its pow-erful executive committee.

We need to call a spade aspade: There is no general

deterioration in the quality of life forJews in Sweden because of anti-Jewish laws or a general persecutionof Jews. The recent debates regard-ing circumcision and kosher slaughterare symptoms of Swedish societyunsuccessfully trying to come to gripswith its colossal failure in integratingthe recent waves of Muslim immi-grants. As in many other countries,there are right-wing political partiesthat are more than ready to cross thecommon line of political correctnessand pick up these issues in the pop-ulist pursuit of votes.

A city like Malmö has vast socialissues to be resolved, which is the rea-son for many inhabitants, includingJews, to seek their fortunes elsewhere.

However, the problem is not Malmö,or even the predictable hate againstboth Israel and Jews that is being dis-played and acted upon by certain ele-ments of its population. It is the eager-ness, with a small number of out-standing exceptions, of the main-stream media, politicians and opinionmakers to ignore and hide currentanti-Semitism under the cover of dis-proportionate and unjustified criticismof Israel. These attitudes should notbe tolerated in modern Swedish soci-ety, and until they are recognized andopenly discussed, the tide of anti-Semitism against Swedish Jews willcontinue to rise.

THE CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

FACING SWEDEN’S JEWS

Jewish refugees are ferried out of Denmark aboard Danish fishing boats bound for Sweden.

October 1, 1943.

Anti-Semitic hate cimes on the rise in Sweden.

(Continued from page 10)declared. “There are only Moroccansubjects.”

Vichy authorities soon forcedMohammed V to promulgate two lawsrestricting certain professions andschools to Jews and requiring them tolive in ghettos. In an act of resistance,the sultan declined to fully enforce thelaws. A direct descendant ofMuhammad, the founder of Islam,through Muhammad’s daughterFatimah, the sultan refused to beintimidated. A French governmenttelegram, discovered in Parisarchives four decades later, reportedthat relations between France andMorocco became “much more tensesince the day” the laws went intoeffect. In 1941, for the first time,Mohammed V made a point of invitingsenior representatives of the Jewishcommunity to the annual banquet cel-ebrating the anniversary of his sul-tanate and placing them in the bestseats next to the French officials.

“I absolutely do not approve of thenew anti-Semitic laws and I refuse toassociate myself with a measure I dis-agree with,” he told the French offi-cials. “I reiterate as I did in the pastthat the Jews are under my protectionand I reject any distinction that shouldbe made amongst my people.”

Although there were limits to hispower, Mohammed V ensured thatthere were never roundups of Jews inMorocco; it remained a haven to theextent possible. During Vichy rule —which lasted more than two years —no Moroccan Jews were deported orkilled; nor were they forced to wear theyellow star. When Allied troops liberat-ed North Africa, the Moroccan Jewishcommunity was essentially intact.

The sultan’s actions offer a contrastwith those of other leaders who ralliedto the side of the Axis powers inhopes of driving the Jews fromPalestine and the British from theMiddle East. The grand mufti ofJerusalem, Haj Amin Husseini, forexample, spent the war years inBerlin, courting Adolf Hitler andHeinrich Himmler, plotting the exter-mination of the Jews and recruitingEastern European Muslims to fight forthe Nazi cause.

Mohammed V, on the other hand,was a strong supporter of the Allies.Throughout the sultan’s reign, he con-tinued to protect his Jewish subjects.When the Arab world reacted violent-ly to the declaration of the state ofIsrael in 1948, the sultan remindedMoroccans that Jews had alwaysbeen protected in their country andshould not be harmed.

Mohammed V died suddenly in1961, just four years after Moroccobecame an independent constitution-al monarchy and he gained the title ofking. The outpouring of grief wasimmense. Some 75,000 Jews publiclymourned, the chief rabbi delivered amemorial address by radio, and Jewswere prominent participants at thecoronation of his son Hassan II and atthe new king’s initial prayer services.

A MOROCCAN HERO

TO JEWS


BY SARAH FARNSWORTH, ABC NEWS

For Phillip Maisel the stories ofHolocaust survivors are like

watching lava bubbling up from deepinside: a burning trauma they need torelease.

“Testimony is a process where peo-ple expose their inner life to the pub-lic, and my aim as the interviewer is toget all the facts as close to the truth.”

For the past 25 years, the tech-savvy 94-year-old has been recordingthe stories of survivors in his ownmakeshift studio at the MelbourneHolocaust Center. He’s helped by asmall band of volunteers.

“If people survived, it was a mira-cle,” he said.

“When I want to convince people togive a testimony, I just tell them ‘Youhad the privilege to survive theHolocaust, you should talk for thosethat can’t do it anymore.’”

He’s recorded 1,600 testimonies.The longest runs for 10 hours.

“When I’m interviewing I’m a

machine. I am listening and recordingit, but when I go home and start tothink about it, then yes, I feel pain.”

“THE LAST TIME SHE SAW ME”

In and among the DVDs and tapesstacking up around him, is a story

very close to his heart, that of his twinsister Bella Hirshorn.

Bella rarely talks about the

Holocaust. It is too upsetting. However,her love for her brother was madeclear in her recorded 1993 testimony.

“I have two brothers. A twin brotherwho is the best thing that ever hap-pened to me in my life. I am verygrateful to my parents for him,” Bellasaid in the testimony.

Growing up in Vilna, then inPoland, the Maisel twins were

inseparable.“We would wear similar outfits. We

were at school together, at hometogether, on holidaystogether,” Phillip recalls.

They also shared anunusual Yiddish accent.Not that they needed tospeak much.

“Wherever I went, mysister went with me.”

When the Germansarrived in Vilna in 1941,their lives changed dra-matically.

By September, Jewishfamilies were being given20 minutes to pack their

belongings and leave their homes.Phillip and his father were forced to

move to the Jewish ghetto, an area of

Vilna where the Germans forced tensof thousands to live.

Bella managed to avoid the harshand miserable conditions of the ghet-to. Using fake papers, she hid in plainsight, pretending to be Polish.

“It’s extremely traumatic to live out-side the ghetto and pretend that youare a Pole when you are a Jew,”Phillip explained.

Two years passed before Phillipwas ripped from his sister completely.She watched on as soldiers, liquidat-ing the ghetto, arrested her brother inthe street and dragged him away.

“I was working for a German institu-tion which could protect the Jewsfrom being arrested and deported,”Phillip said.

“So I showed him my papers and[the solider] said ‘not today, no papersare valid.”

“That was the last time she saw mein Vilna.”

Bella told a yet-to-be-aired docu-mentary called Not Without You,about the day her brother was taken.


BY VIVIEN FELLEGI, NOW MAGAZINE

Pearl Goodman didn’t feel safe inher own bedroom.

Lying awake in her room late atnight, heart pumping, ears tuned tonoises outside, she was terrified evenby the sounds of fire engines rushingto the aid of the injured.

“Someone is in a life-threatening sit-uation,” she thought. “Maybe me.”

Goodman’s childhood fears werenot entirely self-created. To her, theywere somehow linked to her parents’tragic experiences during theHolocaust. Her Polish mother sur-vived a slave labor camp. Her fatherendured a concentration camp.

“I inherited their sensibility that awfulthings can happen at any time,” saysGoodman.

Her mother was constantly on highalert, concerned for her children’ssafety. When Pearl was in the bath-tub, her mother would knock severaltimes to make sure she was okay, asif her child could drown. She distrust-ed her daughter’s friends and worriedabout Pearl when she went on sleep-overs. She could never say, “Go outand have a good time”; she had lefther father and brother at a train sta-tion during World War II, thinkingnothing of it until they never returnedhome.

Goodman’s parents’ overprotective-ness made it difficult for them to sep-arate emotionally from her, too.

“My parents couldn’t allow me to justfeel differently about something with-out being threatened.”

As a teenager, Goodman spoke upagainst some of her parents’ views.Heated arguments ensued. She

always felt overwhelming guilt after-ward. “My parents lived through theHolocaust. My issues paled in com-parison to that,” she says.

While we used to think that geneswere immutable, they can actuallychange in response to the environ-ment, says Rachel Yehuda, director ofthe Traumatic Stress Studies Divisionat the Mount Sinai School of Medicinein New York City, who along withMallory Bowers co-authored a studyon the subject of “epigenetics” lastyear.

Their research shows that humangenes can change in order to

help the body adapt to a stressfulenvironment. Trauma survivors oftensay, “I am not the same person — Ileft myself on the battlefield,” saysYehuda. These people have the sameDNA, but something fundamental hasshifted as a result of what happenedto them. And these alterations can bepassed down to the next generation.

Bowers, a postdoctoral fellow in

psychiatry, says many Holocaust sur-vivors acquired a modification of agene that amplifies arousal.

“This heightened attentivenessmakes you more aware of your sur-roundings,” she says.

That might help you live through aconcentration camp, but the pumped-up stress response can also lead toanxiety and post-traumatic stress insurvivors and their children.

But not all the problems ofHolocaust survivors and their familieshave to do with genetic mishaps, says

Baycrest social worker ShoshanaYaakobi.

As a result of trauma, manyHolocaust survivors had difficulty giv-ing of themselves emotionally, saysYaakobi. Stressful situations dealingwith their own kids exposed their vul-nerability, which could surface in theform of heightened anxiety.

Rather than nurture their children,some expected their kids to make upfor what had happened to them, she

says. Fearful of another genocide,Yaakobi says, Holocaust survivorswere often overprotective andfrowned on their children’s engagingwith outsiders.

Children of survivors felt oppressedby that tight grip, but guilt stoppedthem from rebelling. “It was difficult torebel against parents if they had suf-fered,” says Yaakobi.

In spite of these challenges, manysecond-generation Holocaust vic-

tims became successful occupation-ally; their parents usually valued edu-cation as a means of promoting theirchildren’s survival.

Bowers hopes researchers willsomeday figure out how to undo theepigenetic changes brought about bythe Holocaust. For now, though, sherecommends social support.

Yaakobi agrees. Participating in agroup therapy setting can be veryhelpful. “It’s very healing to be under-stood,” she says.

What helped Goodman was findingout that trauma can be passed downthrough the generations, a fact shediscovered during her training tobecome a psychotherapist.

“It was like a light bulb went on forme,” she says.

Suddenly, the events of her child-hood began to make sense. Thisrecognition eventually led her to writeher memoir, When Their MemoriesBecame Mine: Moving Beyond MyParents’ Past.

Goodman says she’s come to termswith her family’s legacy. She valuesthe justice, integrity and sense ofhumor instilled in her by her parents.“In my soul I embody a sense thatthere was tragedy, and it’s terrible,”she says. “But I’m all right.”

HOLOCAUST REGENERATION: FOR CHILDREN OF SURVIVORS,

THE TRAUMA’S IN THE GENES

PHILLIP MAISEL AND HIS PURPOSE

Phillip Maisel has been recording the testimony of Holocaust

survivors for 25 years.


(Continued from page 14)“My father was very, very upset and

said I should have gone with him,”she said.

For years the twins struggled to sur-vive, each not knowing what had hap-pened to the other.

Phillip was taken from Vilna to ahard labor camp in Estonia, then tonumerous concentration campsacross occupied Europe.

At one point both twins ended up atthe Stutthof concentration camp at thesame time, but neither knew the otherwas there.

A SAD KIND OF FREEDOM

Phillip was liberated in 1945 whileon a death march.

“First I was very happy. I was free,”he said.

“But then I realized that I was some-where in Germany .... I didn’t knowwhat had happened to my family. Itwas a very, very sad feeling.”

He was all alone.He would later discover his father

was killed at Klooga.Yet a chance meeting with a man

from the American-controlled zone of

Germany returned hope to Phillip’slife. The man was looking for his ownfamily when he struck up a conversa-tion with Phillip.

“He said you have a very funnyYiddish [accent] and I know anothergirl who speaks with a similar accent.She is in my camp,” he said.

“I said to him I know her name. It’s

my sister.”Phillip rode his motorbike the equiv-

alent of 500 kilometers to collect hissister.

Three million Polish Jews werekilled during the Holocaust.

Seventy-two years on, Phillip ringshis sister every morning to ask how sheis and tell her the weather forecast.

“TELL THE WORLD

WHAT HAPPENED”

It was while struggling to survivein an Estonian work camp that

Phillip made a promise he has keptto this day.

“When you ask me is it sometimesdifficult to listen to the testimonies, Iam fulfilling something that I prom-ised, and this makes it a little bit eas-ier.”

The survivors’ stories have beentold and retold to Phillip over thedecades. He says memories changeand over time things become moreimportant to those who survived.

He has also started to interview thethird generation, to see if the traumaof the Holocaust has affected thedescendants of Holocaust survivors.

At 94, Phillip can still be found film-ing at the Jewish Holocaust Center.

He’d like to see his work publiclyaccessible one day.

“If the human race wants to sur-vive, we should be fully conscious ofbeing human beings, we should loveeach other instead of hate, and theresult of hate is terrible.”

Bella and Phillip, in 1929, could communicate just by “looking at each other.”

PHILLIP MAISEL AND HIS PURPOSE

BY ELLA NAYOR, FLORIDA WEEKLY

Cesare Frustaci may be aHungarian version of our own

Forrest Gump.On his own as a 7-year-old, he

evaded the Nazis in 1941 inBudapest, Hungary, for monthsbefore being captured and moved toa detention camp, where he wasimprisoned until the liberation.

But a number of chance encoun-ters with famous people, such asItaly’s foreign minister and a futurepope, would change his life.

Forced out of Italy as a child withhis Jewish mother, the renownedHungarian ballerina Margit Wolf, hewas relocated to the Jewish ghetto inNazi-occupied Budapest. His father,Italian composer Pasquale Frustaci,a Roman Catholic, was forced toremain in Italy.

Fearing that life in the ghetto wasabout to turn for the worse, his moth-er smuggled him out of the ghetto,gave him his baptismal certificate —although he was Jewish by birth, hewas baptized in his father’s religion— and told him not to return. Hebegan to live on the streets ofBudapest, as a 7-year-old.

“It was well known that children andteenagers were rounded up by theNazis and drowned every day,” saidMr. Frustaci. “My mother was arather smart woman to separate fromher son. She thought I might be saferon the street.”

Soon after, his mother was sent toSpandau concentration camp nearBerlin, Germany.

So, for the next couple of months,Cesare hid in the cellar of an apart-ment building. During the day hestrategized ways to survive.

He collected tennis balls for tips atthe nearby tennis club. The moneyhe made went for food. Then heasked management at one of theclubs if he could clean the bath-rooms, for free. This allowed him totake care of his hygiene needs.

One day, Cesarerecalled, he was walk-

ing along the bridge thatstretches over the DanubeRiver when he heard shout-ing. He recalls a young SSofficer shouting at a youngwoman carrying a baby.

Cesare watched the guardhurl the baby into the riverand shoot the woman.

“That was the atmospherein the summer of 1941,” hesaid. “What was surprisingwere the pedestrians. Theydidn’t do anything. They justwalked away. It was like itwas just a normal day.”

Shortly after that incident,Cesare was captured andsent to a juvenile detentioncamp.

There, life was harsh.“I remember waking up next to

dead children,” Mr. Frustaci said.The end of the war liberated the

detention center and Cesare.But he would have a longer way to

go in his journey. Unaccompaniedchildren, like Cesare, were placed inadoptive homes since their parentswere presumed dead.

They were often placed in agricul-tural settings where they could workand help rebuild war-torn farms. Akind pig farmer and his family adopt-ed Cesare and renamed him GezaBabaly. He moved to a small villagenamed Apaggy, about 20 miles northof Budapest.

A fter liberation, Cesare’s motherset out from Spandau in

Germany to find her son. She walked

all the way to Budapest. Mr. Frustacicompares his mother’s trek to that ofwalking from Florida to Canada.

She combed through nearly 200villages carrying a newspaper imageof Cesare as a young child. When hewas in kindergarten, he was pickedto give a bouquet of flowers to visit-ing Italian dignitary Count Galeazzo

Ciano — the son-in-law of BenitoMussolini. A news photographer cap-tured an image of Cesare falling intothe dignitary’s arms as he stumbledto give the flowers to him. After thewar, Cesare’s mother went back toher damaged apartment and foundthe photo clipping, and set out to findher son.

After a year and half of searchingvillage to village, she finally foundhim.

“She never gave up (trying) to findme,” Mr. Frustaci said.

The pair continued to live behindthe Iron Curtain, as Hungary was aSoviet satellite. There, Cesare com-pleted his primary education. As anexceptional student, especially inmath and engineering, he wanted togo to a university in Italy. But theCommunists said no. They didn’twant to lose a talented future engi-neer.

So, Cesare was again trapped.However, his mother’s friend knew

a priest who thought he could helppersuade the Hungarian governmentto allow Cesare to return to Italy. TheRev. Angelo Roncalli used what pullhe had, and Cesare emigrated fromHungary to Italy, where he complet-ed his engineering studies.

Father Roncalli went on to becomePope John XXIII.

Today, Mr. Frustaci spends his timetraveling around the country sharinghis story.

“It is my mission since 2004 to passthe torch to the younger genera-tions — the history of Second WorldWar and the Holocaust,” he said.

HE REMARKABLY ESCAPED THE HOLOCAUST

Cesare Frustaci.

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Martyrdom & Resistance

Ron B. Meier, Ph.D.,

Editor-in-Chief

Yefim Krasnyanskiy, M.A.,

Editor

*Published Bimonthly by the American Society

for Yad Vashem, Inc.500 Fifth Avenue, 42nd Floor

New York, NY 10110(212) 220-4304

EDITORIAL BOARD

Eli Zborowski**

Marvin Zborowski

Mark Palmer

Sam Skura**

Israel Krakowski**

William Mandell

Sam Halpern**

Isidore Karten**

Norman Belfer

Joseph Bukiet**

*1974-85, as Newsletter for the AmericanFederation of Jewish Fighters, CampInmates, and Nazi Victims**deceased

FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION:

A PLANNED GIFT TO ASYVEmpower, educate and strengthen our

future by making an endowment gift to the

American Society for Yad Vashem. Your

legacy will help to support Yad Vashem in

Jerusalem and keep the memory of the

Shoah, its victims, survivors and heroes

alive forever.

You can make a generous contribution

through a bequest in your will by desig-

nating ASYV as a beneficiary of a

Charitable Remainder Trust or Charitable

Gift Annuity. You can also contribute

through a life insurance or retirement plan, by naming ASYV as a beneficiary of a

life insurance policy, IRA or other retirement vehicle.

Our ASYV staff are here to help you accomplish your estate planning goals.

For more information or assistance with your estate plan, please contact Chris

Morton, Director of Planned Giving: [email protected] or by phone at:

212-220-4304, extension 213.

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(Continued from page 1)face of Yad Vashem; memorializedtheir first son Uziel, murdered inAuschwitz, and all of the childrenwho perished in the Shoah andproved to be an inestimablegift to the Jewish people andall humanity.”

Dr. Miriam and SheldonAdelson, long-time friends

of the late Edita and AbrahamSpiegel, presented the LifetimeAchievement Award to RitaSpiegel on behalf of the entireSpiegel family. Sheldon Adelsonstated, “Miri and I visited YadVashem and the Children’sMemorial in the late 1980’s andwere incredibly moved. Abeand Edita’s unique contributionwas a catalyst for us. When wereturned home, I contacted Abeand we began to deepen ourrelationship along with our com-mitment to Yad Vashem. Ritahas continued her family’s sup-port of the work of Yad Vashemand the maintenance of theChildren’s Memorial,” he contin-ued. “She demonstrated hercommitment to Israel and theJewish people through her lead-ership in philanthropy, educa-tion and community activities,while living in southernCalifornia and during the four-teen years she spent in Israel.”

In accepting the award, Rita echoedthe words that her father had spokenat the dedication of the Children’sMemorial: “Inside this building is achamber illuminated by one and a halfmillion separate points of light. Eachlittle light symbolizes the soul of a

Jewish child prematurely snuffed out.The mirrors reflect and multiply thelights to infinity, to remind us that notonly did these children perish, butwith them, their offspring, whom they

would have parented. These eternallights will not bring back all thosechildren — those ruined lives. All itcan serve is as a concrete reminderthat this great evil could happen —did happen — and must never hap-pen again.”

Longtime major donors Elissa andEdward Czuker, honorary co-

chairs of the evening, led the audi-ence through a short memorial serv-ice in remembrance of the six million.

As the lights went down, andcandles and stars illuminatedthe ballroom, Cantor SethEttinger of Wilshire BoulevardTemple, along with a string trio,left the audience teary-eyedwith a magical performance of“We Remember Them.”

Lenny Wilf returned to thestage to present the LegacyAward to Gene Simmons,who accepted the honor forhimself and his mother,Holocaust survivor FloraKlein. “While achievingexceptional success inAmerica,” said Wilf, “Genestill considers Israel hishome. He returned there in2011 for the first time sinceleaving as a child, and hasbeen a lifelong ardent sup-porter of Israel. He has beena vocal advocate for Israel inpublic and within the enter-tainment community.” Gene’semotional and heartfeltresponse noted that theJewish people’s gift to theworld, as reflected in thewords of the Ten

Commandments, particularly thoserelated to honoring thy mother andfather, were critically important to him.For without the encouragement of hismother, herself a teenage survivor ofAuschwitz, and her instilling in him the“will to win,” he would have neverachieved professional success.

WE WILL CONTINUE TO KEEP THE FLAME

OF REMEMBRANCE SHINING BRIGHT

Rita Spiegel, recipient of Lifetime Achievement Award; Donna

Elyassian, ASYV West Coast development staff.

AMERICAN & INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES FOR YAD … · ASYV Annual Spring Luncheon ... Deborah’s...

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