Joining hands and hearts to keep Holocaust memory alive, fighting hatred and genocide
Joining hands and hearts to keep Holocaust memory alive, fighting hatred and genocide
They went undercover, smuggled revolvers in teddy bears and were bearers of the truth. Why hadn’t I heard their stories? In 1943, Niuta Teitelbaum strolled into a Gestapo apartment on Chmielna Street in central Warsaw and faced three Nazis. A 24-year-old Jewish woman who had studied history at Warsaw University, Niuta was likely now dressed Continue Reading »
Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure By Menachem Kaiser Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 277 pages, $27 Menachem Kaiser’s third-generation Holocaust memoir, in keeping with the genre, is an act of reclamation – or at least an attempt at one. In “Plunder,” Kaiser admits to the limits of his project and confesses his envy Continue Reading »
Israel’s Ambassador to Ukraine on Tuesday lambasted the city of Ternopil after its council named a rebuilt soccer stadium after Roman Shukhevych, the leader of a Ukrainian nationalist brigade created by the occupying Germans during World War II. “We strongly condemn the decision of Ternopil city council to name the City Stadium after the infamous Hauptman of the SS Schutzmannschaft 201 Roman Shukhevych and Continue Reading »
(JTA) — Visiting Yad Vashem a decade ago, Alon Shaya got to see some of the Jerusalem Holocaust museum’s culinary artifacts that aren’t always on display to the public. It was the James Beard Award-winning chef’s introduction to the fact that concentration camp inmates distracted themselves by recalling and secretly writing recipes — on scraps Continue Reading »
It is the first time in Germany’s postwar history that a party represented in the federal Parliament has elicited this level of scrutiny as a potential threat to democracy. BERLIN — For the first time in its postwar history, Germany has placed its main opposition party under surveillance, one of the most dramatic steps yet by a Continue Reading »
The COVID-19 vaccination clinic for Holocaust survivors in a local synagogue started out a bit ominously: A police cruiser was stationed outside and a bomb-sniffing German Shepherd was deployed inside, zealously looking for explosives. “Unfortunately, it’s because we’re Jewish,” said Rabbi Danielle Eskow, who organized the clinic Thursday at Congregation Kehillath Israel, a conservative synagogue Continue Reading »
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — Eighty years ago on Thursday, this city was silent. The soft bell chimes of the ubiquitous trams, the main mode of local transportation and a constant presence to this day, were conspicuously absent. It was the start of a consequential yet often-overlooked milestone of the Holocaust: the February Strike. On Feb. 25, Continue Reading »
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — A prominent right-wing lawmaker in the Netherlands has provoked outrage by saying that the trials against Nazis in Nuremberg, Germany, were “illegitimate.” Thierry Baudet, leader of the right-wing Forum for Democracy party, which has two seats in Dutch parliament, made the statement on Monday during a rally in Gouda, near Amsterdam, ahead of Continue Reading »
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — The mayor of Amsterdam has asked a Dutch committee to reassess its decision on a Holocaust restitution claim that keeps a $22 million painting looted by the Nazis in the city’s hands. Mayor Femke Halsema said the Dutch Restitutions Committee should “re-evaluate” its 2018 ruling on “Painting with Houses,” a work by Wassily Kandinsky, which is Continue Reading »
(JTA) — An auction house in New York suspended the sale of a document that a Jewish community in Romania said had been stolen from it. Kestenbaum & Company, a Brooklyn firm that has specialized in the care of rare Judaic material culture for 25 years, on Wednesday pulled off its catalog what the Jewish Continue Reading »
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