A force for constructive communal consciousness
Holocaust survivor Elly Gotz spent four years as a teenage slave labourer at Dachau. (Hasnain Dattu)
Elly Gotz will tell the story of how he survived the Holocaust at Ottawa’s Yom HaShoah commemoration on Wednesday, May 1, 7 pm, at the Soloway Jewish Community Centre.
It’s a story the veteran Holocaust educator has told many times before. In the past year alone, Gotz spoke to more than 17,000 students at Canadian high schools and universities. [Read more…]
(JTA) – Two swastikas were painted on a monument marking the mass graves of 2,000 Jews from Otwock, in central Poland.
The swastikas painted by unknown vandals were discovered on Saturday. On the same day, they were washed away by a local priest and a local businessman. [Read more…]
The Crate: A Story of War, a Murder, and Justice
By Deborah Vadas Levison
WildBlue Press
312 pages
Although she now lives in the U.S., author Deborah Vadas Levison – the daughter of Holocaust survivors from Hungary who immigrated to Canada in 1956 – grew up in Toronto and returns there and to the family cottage in Bracebridge in the Muskoka region regularly. The cottage was built by her father and was a place of treasured memories for the family; a place of refuge from the horrors her parents had lived through, and left, in Europe.
In 2010, Levison was with her husband and children in Florida for a baseball tournament her son was playing in when she received a phone call from her older brother. A woman’s dismembered body had been discovered in a crate in a crawl space underneath the cottage – and a murder investigation had begun. The victim was later identified as Samantha Collins, a young woman with a troubled past who had been living in Bracebridge with her partner and child when she disappeared in 2007. [Read more…]
Critics accuse Pope Pius XII of having turned a blind eye to Jewish suffering during World War II. (Wikimedia Commons)
(JTA) – The Vatican secret archive relating to controversial Holocaust-era Pope Pius XII will be opened next year.
Pope Francis made the announcement at an audience with managers and staff of the Vatican Archives.
In a decision made public Monday, he said the archives would be opened on March 2, 2020. “The Church is not afraid of history,” Francis said. [Read more…]
(JTA) – A mass grave containing bones from hundreds of bodies was discovered during construction atop what used to be the ghetto of Brest, in present-day Belarus.
Human remains belonging to men, women and children as well as clothes, shoes and other personal items were uncovered last month on the construction site managed by the contractor Pribuzhsky Kwartia, according to a report Wednesday on the Virtual Brest news site. [Read more…]
(JTA) – More than three-quarters of Israelis believe that Poland has yet to take sufficient responsibility for the role Poles played in the Holocaust, according to a survey commissioned by the Polish embassy in Tel Aviv.
Keevoon Global Research surveyed more than 1,027 Israelis in December, with 76 per cent faulting Poland for not fully acknowledging Polish responsibility for what happened to Jews in the country during World War II, and 49 per cent saying that they see the eastern European nation in an unfavourable light. [Read more…]
WASHINGTON (JTA) – The U.S. State Department is ready to allot the second half of the $60 million US in compensation for survivors deported to Nazi camps via the French rail system, and their spouses and descendants.
Claimants will receive virtually double the amount they were allotted after the governments of the United States and France reached agreement on the $60 million in 2014. [Read more…]
(JTA) – A Cameroon government minister said that the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves because they wielded all the economic power.
The African nation’s government disavowed the comments made by Jean de Dieu Momo, the deputy justice minister, in a primetime interview on public television. Momo warned opposition leader Maurice Kamto that he was leading the native Bamileke people to a fate similar to that of the Jews during the Holocaust, the French news service AFP reported. [Read more…]
Child of the Holocaust: A Jewish Child in Christian Disguise
By Jack Kuper
Penguin Random House Canada
256 pages
Child of the Holocaust: A Jewish Child in Christian Disguise, Jack Kuper’s autobiographical memoir was originally published in 1967. A new edition, with a new foreword by the author, has just been published.
Shortly before Kuper’s book first came out, Jerzy Kosinski published his novel, The Painted Bird, which became a sensational and sensationalist success. Both books deal primarily with the experiences of a young boy alone, facing the multiple dangers of Eastern Poland: Nazis, local partisans of the left and right, local villagers and farmers who had negative perceptions of Jews and were themselves under threat from the Germans for harbouring Jews, Gypsies and other “enemies.” Even the weather held its own menace. [Read more…]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with Polish President Andrzej Duda at the United Nations headquarters, in New York City, Sept. 26, 2018. (Avi Ohayon/GPO)
JERUSALEM (JTA) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to establish close ties with the European Union’s Central European members has met with pushback from a perhaps unlikely source: Holocaust historians and activists protective of Israel’s role in preserving the memories of the Nazis’ victims.
Netanyahu has justified his outreach to leaders in countries like Poland and Hungary as a way to counterbalance the EU’s more Palestinian-friendly western states. [Read more…]