Category: Learn

Jewish women in Budapest, October 1944. Photograph by Wikimedia Commons

(Haaretz) – On October 7, 1944, Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz blew up a crematorium in an attempted revolt that, while ultimately futile, has become a powerful rebuttal to the claim that Jews succumbed to the Nazis without a fight. Many know this story but few know the names Roza Robota, Estera Wajcblum, Regina Szafirsztajn and Ala Gertner, four women who smuggled gunpowder under their fingernails and stitched it into the seams of their clothes to make the uprising possible.

Their role has been diminished in historical accounts of the event, if mentioned at all, but a new exhibition by the American Jewish Historical Society in Manhattan, called “October 7, 1944,” seeks to reinsert them into the narrative. The exhibition, which opened last month on the 70th anniversary of the revolt and runs through December 30, makes its case in a most unorthodox way: It merges contemporary dance and archival material.

“Holocaust and dance are not common bedfellows,” choreographer Jonah Bokaer told Haaretz. Bokaer, an internationally renowned artist, was commissioned by the historical society to make a 30-minute dance film inspired by the story that is projected on a wall of the exhibition.

The film features four women moving through a stark, factory-like space. Unlike most exhibition films, which consist of archival footage in grainy black and white or static interviews, the modern look of Bokaer’s piece creates a bridge to today and brings a sense of urgency to the room.

An earlier dance film by Bokaer, also featuring four women, caught the eye of Rachel Lithgow, the director of the historical society and curator of the exhibit. It reminded her of the Auschwitz revolt (and is also included in this exhibition). She asked Bokaer if he would be interested in collaborating, but he was reluctant at first.

“Historical material and performance can be a dangerous combo,” he said. “I generally don’t touch it in my work.” Yet he found himself drawn to the story and began to do research of his own.
Full Article

Many called his story amazing, a few a testimony of perseverance and others said it left them shaken. Either way, it seemed the story of Holocaust survivor David Tuck had a significant impact on Gwynedd Mercy University students.

“From him I learned you should never give up,” said junior Jasmin Hall, 20, after the talk. “Determination was prevalent in his experience. The fact he could survive something so deathly was amazing.”

Tuck survived the Holocaust and with pride he said multiple times during his talk in University Hall at the university Nov. 19 that he is “still alive.”

“I am happy and alive,” he told students and faculty. “Now it’s my job to make sure you never forget.”

Approximately 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust during World War II. When Tuck was 10 years old, the Germans invaded his native country of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939 and for five years he was transported to three different internment camps where food was scarce, the work was laborious and sickness and death were all around him.

For Full Article, Click Here

Just before they were deported, the Slagers gave their jewelry to their next-door neighbors, who passed it down from generation to generation, with instructions to return them.

A Dutch historical society returned jewels to a Jewish family that had given them to neighbors for safekeeping before being deported by the Nazis.

The jewels were returned to a descendant of Benjamin Slager and Lena Slager-de Vries at a ceremony in the town hall of Winschoten in the north of the Netherlands on October 28, exactly 72 years after her relatives and 500 of the town’s Jews were sent to the Westerbork concentration camp, the Dagblad van het Noorden daily reported.

Only 46 of the town’s Jews survived the Holocaust.

For Full Article Click Here

Highland Park resident Steve Keller has many questions he’d like to ask his late father, Robert Keller, one of 50 Jewish children who were brought from Austria to America in 1939 as Nazi Germany was ratcheting up the evil apparatus that soon would become the Holocaust.

Keller’s father died 32 years ago in the Chicago area at age 55, and while he didn’t talk much about leaving his family at age 12 and sailing across the Atlantic to America in 1939, he often told his son that he should appreciate his good life in the U.S.

“It’s been a long time since I would have had a conversation with him about it, so now I’m sometimes wondering, did we have conversations about it so long ago I can’t remember all that much, or was I too young to be able ask the really good questions that I would have been able to come up with today?” Keller said.

On Oct. 21 at the Am Shalom Synagogue in Glencoe, the Washington D.C.-based United States Holocaust Memorial Museum held a public screening of the Emmy Award-nominated, hour-long documentary, “50 Children.”

For Full Story Click Here

The northeastern German state of Brandenburg has welcomed its first synagogue since before the Holocaust, which saw 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazi regime. The Jewish community there was reestablished in 1998.

In a symbolic handing-over of keys on Sunday, the Jewish community of Cottbus in Brandenburg, northeast Germany, was presented with the premises for a new synagogue – the first to exist in the city since November 9, 1938. The night, which came to be known as “Kristallnacht” or “Night of Broken Glass,” saw a series of coordinated attacks throughout Nazi Germany and Austria against Jewish homes, synagogues, businesses, schools and hospitals.

For Full Article Click Here

Eduard Harris and Tony Rossetti met for the first time two years ago, but they were together 67 years earlier in a place that bore witness to one of history’s most horrific atrocities.

One was a victim. The other a liberator.

They did not know it then, but they would both survive — and thrive — back in the United States. In their later years, they would settle within a few miles of each other, in Scottsdale.

And in November 2012, an Arizona Republic article would bring together Rossetti, the U.S. soldier who helped liberate Germany’s Buchenwald concentration camp, and Harris, one of the prisoners rescued there.

For Full Story Click Here

The Athens Holocaust Memorial was desecrated for the second time this year, when vandals spray painted the logo of an ultra-nationalist group on it.

The logo of the group known as the Unaligned Meander Nationalists was spray painted on the monument in blue paint on Oct. 30. The same group, which describes the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party as “moderates,” vandalized the Holocaust Monument on the island of Rhodes in October 2012.

The Greek Jewish community condemned the act and called on Greek authorities to effectively protect the monument.

“We call upon the municipal and state authorities to effectively protect the Holocaust Monument of the capital, in order to avoid repetition of such phenomena,” said a joint statement from the Jewish Community of Athens and the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece.

This is the second time this year that the Athens monument was desecrated. In June vandals painted threats against the Jewish community on it.

For Full Article Click Here

For Full Story Click Here

A message of hate bred on the tongues of terrorists now poison our college campuses today and it’s up to us, the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims to stand up for peace; it up the us, the students in pursuit of the freedom of education to push back and stop these radical, hate-driven organizations. Stop violence. Stop bigotry. Stop anti-Semitism.

Click Here to Watch Full Video