Author: Eternal Flame

Just 18 and in a foreign county, Linus Jansen is living in a homeless shelter — by choice.

Jansen, of Frankfurt, Germany, is living in a shelter with 14 Jewish men and women, all aged 60 or older, as part of his own faith’s quest to atone for the Holocaust. The shelter is run by Dorot, a social service agency that provides services for older people, and is located in an old brownstone on Manhattan’s upper west side. According to Sara Peller, associate director of programs, Dorot strives to end social isolation and bring the generations together for their mutual benefit. Finding permanent housing for seniors who are homeless, or face eviction, is one of the services Dorot provides.

The lanky Jansen was assigned to work at Dorot’s shelter as a volunteer with Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, a German non-profit organization established by the German Lutheran Church to make amends for the Holocaust.

Jansen is one of this year’s 25 German secondary school graduates that Action Reconciliation has sent to the United States to work in agencies that help the poor, the mentally and physically challenged, and Holocaust survivors.

The literal translation of the organization’s German name refers to atonement, said Jansen, who says he does not feel a need to atone for what his grandparent’s generation did. “I don’t think that is my responsibility,” he said. But he says he will strive to do his share to bring the German and Jewish communities closer.

Jansen makes dinner for shelter residents, varying the menu. “I make a different salad each night, adding nuts or herbs to the greens,” he said.

Jansen also monitors clients who have been placed in permanent housing and invites them to join Dorot programs that make them feel part of a larger family. “Recently, we took a group to the circus,” he said. “We offer people things to see that are hard to afford in New York if you don’t have much money.”

Working in the homeless shelter has been a challenging learning experience for Jansen. “It’s made me appreciate what I have,” he said.

Jansen first learned he was being assigned to a homeless shelter on September 9, the day he arrived in the United States with the 24 other Action Reconciliation volunteers.

He says his experience in the homeless shelter has helped him realize how vulnerable people are.

“A woman resident who used to volunteer to work with the poor ended up in the shelter because of a series of unlucky events in her life,” he wrote in a recent diary entry. “It can happen to any one of us.”

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Ask the average person their image of an archivist and the likely answer you’ll get is someone resembling Wally Cox — a mild mannered bespectacled man behind a counter with rows of document shelves towering behind him.

My most distinct memory of Robert Wolfe is quite different: It is of a short, stocky man shaking with anger, banging on the door of an archive near Stuttgart and demanding access to the Nazi-era documents inside as a chill rain drizzled down on both of us, .

“In the name of history, open this door,” Wolfe bellowed — a phrase each of us started shouting again and again.

For decades, Wolfe, who died December 10 at the age of 93, was the chief archivist for captured Nazi documents at the National Archives in Washington. But by time we found ourselves standing together outside the archive near Stuttgart, he was retired and now volunteering his invaluable expertise to my project.

Together, we were seeking documents related to the IBM Corporation’s willing cooperation with the Nazi regime to facilitate the Holocaust. IBM, we would ultimately discover, eagerly helped the Nazis with its then cutting edge punch card technology to organize and systemize census data and thereby locate millions of Jews for shipment to the camps.
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School district officials in Rialto have received death threats in connection to a class assignment instructing students to debate the veracity of the Holocaust, according to reports Monday.

Rialto Unified School District officials first responded last week to reports of the assignment, which asked students to compose a written debate over whether the Holocaust was “merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain.”

The controversial question in the assignment read: “…write an argumentative essay, based upon cited textual evidence, in which you explain whether or not you believe this was an actual event in history or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain wealth…”

The district initially defended the eighth-grade assignment – which was one part of an 18-piece essay – as an exercise to help students “evaluate the quality of evidence made by advocates or opponents of an issue.”

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A Tel Aviv Court rejected a demand by the Greek Jewish community that an Israeli organization turn over shares worth up to NIS 1 million in the Jewish Colonial Trust, the predecessor of Bank Leumi.

The contentious case pits two Holocaust restitution bodies against each other.

Greece’s Heirless Property and Jewish Rehabilitation Fund (OPAIE) – an independent arm of that country’s Jewish community, established to take charge of heirless property that victims of the Nazi genocide left behind – had asserted that the Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims’ Assets (Hashava) had no right to the 512 shares of JCT it was holding.

OPAIE argued that since those assets had not been located in Israel at the time of the Holocaust, the Israeli body should not be administering them.

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January 20, 1942. In the villa at 56–58 Am Großen Wannsee, the administrative leaders of various Nazi government departments meet for the implementation of the “final solution to the Jewish question”. The Holocaust.

One of Melbourne’s grandest romances began on another continent in a different world, in the shadow of history so horrific it can seem a wonder any hope survived. Now married 67 years, Abe and Cesia Goldberg look back on a childhood of shared horrors that gave way to a lifetime of love.

Though they didn’t know it, they had grown up together, both young lives scarred by unimaginable trauma. First they were prisoners in the same ghetto, forced into a Jewish enclave in Poland annexed by the Nazis. They lived three streets apart. In the latter days of World War II, they were both sent to Auschwitz. They saw their parents perish. Through all this, they never met.

“We didn’t know,” recalls Mr Goldberg, who recently turned 90. “We were in Auschwitz and also in the ghetto together but we didn’t know. But even if I knew … my wife is five years younger than I am. A 15-year-old boy doesn’t look at a 10-year-old girl.”

It wasn’t until after the war, at a youth camp in Brussels, that these two orphans of the Holocaust finally met. It began with the simplest of encounters, Mr Goldberg recalls. “I was playing table tennis and she came in.” She was quite taken by the “good looking boy” and those early smitten moments matured into love, and eventually marriage, in 1947. Three years later, as part of the wave of Jewish migrants to Australia in the post-war period, they boarded a boat to Melbourne, a place about which they knew little other than that it put all the distance possible between their old lives and their new one.

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Watch the trailer for the documentary about the making of a remarkable and harrowing film: the 1945 study of the Nazi death camps as they were liberated by Allied forces. Despite the involvement of such luminaries as Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder, Memory of the Camps (aka F3080) was shelved by the British and US governments, and only rediscovered in the 1980s. Night Will Fall, directed by André Singer, outlines the story behind Memory of the Camps, and is released in the UK on 19 September

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Polish and Israeli Holocaust researchers say they have discovered the exact location of the building that housed gas chambers at Sobibor, one of the death camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland.

Israel’s Yad Vashem and the Majdanek State Museum in Poland, which oversees Sobibor, announced the finding Wednesday, calling it an important discovery in the field of Holocaust research.

Historians already knew that the Germans operated the gas chambers at Sobibor from April 1942 to October 1943, killing an estimated 250,000 Jews brought from across Europe.

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