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In Eastern Europe, Holocaust museums are missing from key historical sites

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The House of Fates Holocaust museum, housed in a former railway station that deported Jews to concentration camps, seen in Budapest, Jan. 21, 2019. It has not opened to the public despite having been finished five years ago. (Ferenc Isza/AFP/Getty Images)
The House of Fates Holocaust museum, housed in a former railway station that deported Jews to concentration camps, seen in Budapest, Jan. 21, 2019. It has not opened to the public despite having been finished five years ago. (Ferenc Isza/AFP/Getty Images)

The House of Fates Holocaust museum, housed in a former railway station that deported Jews to concentration camps, seen in Budapest, Jan. 21, 2019. It has not opened to the public despite having been finished five years ago. (Ferenc Isza/AFP/Getty Images)

(JTA) – In Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, an institution formerly known as the Museum of Genocide Victims barely mentions the murder of nearly all the country’s Jews by Nazis and locals, focusing instead on the years of abusive Soviet rule.

In Kaunas, Lithuania’s second-largest city, another so-called museum hosts festivals and summer camps on the grounds of a former concentration camp for Jews known as the Seventh Fort, where the victims are not commemorated. [Read more…]

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Today’s Google doodle celebrates Chiune Sugihara, a diplomat who saved Jews during the Holocaust

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The Google doodle for July 29, 2019, featuring Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara. (Google)
The Google doodle for July 29, 2019, featuring Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara. (Google)

The Google doodle for July 29, 2019, featuring Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara. (Google)

(JTA) – Monday’s Google doodle is of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat stationed in Lithuania during World War II who defied the Nazis by issuing life-saving visas to thousands of Jews.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center estimates that as many as 40,000 people are alive today because of Sugihara’s efforts, which put his own career in danger. He ignored orders from Tokyo and helped Jews escape to places like Curacao, via Russia, China and Japan. [Read more…]

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How poetry literally saved the life of a famed Yiddish writer

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Abraham Sutzkever with his granddaughter Hadas in Tel Aviv, 2008. (Courtesy of Hadas Kalderon-Sutzkever)
Abraham Sutzkever with his granddaughter Hadas in Tel Aviv, 2008. (Courtesy of Hadas Kalderon-Sutzkever)

Avraham Sutzkever with his granddaughter Hadas in Tel Aviv, 2008. (Courtesy of Hadas Kalderon-Sutzkever)

(JTA) – When Yiddish poet Avraham Sutzkever said that poetry saved his life, he meant it more literally than many of his listeners realized.

In 1944, Sutzkever and his wife, Freydke, needed to walk through a minefield to reach the plane that would take them to freedom. And to do so, they stepped to the rhythm of poetic meter – short, short, long, and sometimes long, short, long. [Read more…]

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From the Editor: We know not to trivialize the Holocaust

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Michael Regenstreif

Michael Regenstreif, Editor

Last month, U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a left-wing progressive who was first elected in her New York district in 2018, came under attack when she referred to the detention centres used by the United States government to warehouse Central American migrants – including children needlessly separated from their parents – as “concentration camps.”

As horrible as the conditions are at those detention centres – and from all credible reports the conditions are truly horrible – Ocasio-Cortez quickly came under sharp attack from political opponents, scholars, and several American Jewish organizations for her use of a term that conjures comparisons to the camps used by Germany’s Nazi regime in its perpetration of the Holocaust, a genocide in which six million Jews were murdered in an attempt to eradicate European Jewry. [Read more…]

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A View from the Bleachers: The power of a word to clarify or create obfuscation

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Rabbi Steven H. Garten

Rabbi Steven H. Garten

Words are important. Words are so important that, in our Jewish tradition, if a word of Torah is mispronounced during worship services, it must be repeated correctly. Words can have multiple meanings. Shalom is a prime example. Hello, goodbye, wholeness, are just a few of the meanings associated with the three root letters: Shin, Lamed and Mem. Words are also the means that we have for communication. They are also the most basic tool we have for creating obfuscation, misleading, and massaging messages. Two seemingly disconnected situations reinforced the power of words to me.

I recently returned from a two-week journey in four Baltic countries: Finland, Russia, Estonia and Latvia. I travelled with my wife’s choir, the Ottawa Choir Society, to Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Tallinin and Riga. While she and 75 other beautiful voices offered concerts in historic churches and concert venues, I served as a roadie/schlepper. While many in the choir enjoyed the 14-centuries-old towns of Riga and Tallinn, and the czarist beauty of St. Petersburg, a few of us explored the rich Jewish history and the current situation of Jews in these countries. It was not a journey for the faint of heart. [Read more…]

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Holocaust survivors get a raise and non-Jewish rescuers receive benefits under new agreement

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Holocaust survivor Roman Kent tells his story to German State Secretary Dr. Rolf Bösing and visitors to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. (Courtesy of Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany)

Holocaust survivor Roman Kent tells his story to German State Secretary Rolf Bösing and visitors to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. (Courtesy of Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany)

(JTA) – The spouse of a Holocaust survivor will continue to receive a monthly pension for nine months after the survivor’s death under new agreements with the German government.

The agreements negotiated by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany also provides a $50 million US increase in funding for social welfare services for survivors, bringing the total for 2020 funded by Germany to over $587 million US. Also, monthly pensions will increase by 46 per cent from now until Jan. 1 to about $650 US a month. [Read more…]

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Dutch Railways to compensate Holocaust survivors it helped transport

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AMSTERDAM (JTA) – The Netherlands’ national rail company said it will compensate hundreds of Holocaust victims for its role in the genocide.

Dutch Railways announced its plan Wednesday in a statement, specifying one-time payments of about $17,000 to each living Holocaust survivor it helped ship to death camps when the Netherlands was occupied by the Nazis. [Read more…]

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Hundreds mark 90th birthday of Anne Frank in her birth city of Frankfurt

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Anne Frank in 1942

Anne Frank in 1942

(JTA) – Several hundred people gathered at a church in Frankfurt, the city of Anne Frank’s birth, on the occasion of the teenage diarist’s 90th birthday.

The event, organized Wednesday at the iconic St. Paul’s Church by the municipality of the German city and the Basel-based Anne Frank Foundation, featured an address by philosopher Agnes Heller, a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor who was born one month before Frank. [Read more…]

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Volkswagen, once a Nazi symbol, is now empowering the ADL to fight European anti-Semitism

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Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess signs a guest book at Auschwitz, where the company runs an educational program for apprentices, Nov. 30, 2018. (Courtesy of Volkswagen)
Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess signs a guest book at Auschwitz, where the company runs an educational program for apprentices, Nov. 30, 2018. (Courtesy of Volkswagen)

Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess signs a guest book at Auschwitz, where the company runs an educational program for apprentices, Nov. 30, 2018. (Courtesy of Volkswagen)

WASHINGTON (JTA) – Herbert Diess believes he has a special obligation to combat the rise of the far right in Europe because the company he leads was once quite literally its engine.

“Volkswagen has because of its history, and our history in the Second World War, we have an obligation to care about anti-Semitism and racism,” the Volkswagen CEO told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a rare interview this week. “We have more obligation than others. The whole company was built up by the Nazi regime.” [Read more…]

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France launches project to return Nazi-looted artworks to Jewish families

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The courtyard of the Louvre museum in Paris. (Wikimedia Commons)

The courtyard of the Louvre museum in Paris. (Wikimedia Commons)

(JTA) – France created a task force to return cultural artifacts taken from Jews during World War II to their owners and descendants.

The Culture Ministry said Wednesday that the project will look into such objects held by French museums, AFP reported. French institutions hold some 2,000 items brought from Germany whose owners have yet to be identified, according to the French news agency.

“This is our duty to the victims of plundering,” Culture Minister Franck Riester said. “It’s about memory and justice.”

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