Residents of a Belarus town on the border with Poland made the macabre discovery that thousands of Jewish gravestones have been used to construct buildings, roads – and even garden paving.
The headstones have been turning up in locations all over Brest over the past six years, with around 1,500 discovered so far.
Hundreds were discovered in May during the construction of a supermarket, with headstones unearthed by diggers.
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NEWARK – It’s estimated that only 7 percent of Europe’s Jewish children, who were younger than 16, survived the Holocaust.
About 1.5 million children younger than 12 were murdered in concentration camps.
John Koenigsberg considers himself one of the lucky ones. He went into hiding with a Dutch family and survived.
The 77-year-old Gahanna resident shared his story with a group of about 40 people Saturday at the Newark branch of the Licking County Library.
MILWAUKEE — Eight female mannequins stand in an exhibition room of the Jewish Museum Milwaukee here, clad in smart and urbane apparel, the sort that might have come from a “Thin Man” film, or something with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. The clothing went on display about two weeks ago. The fashions are both text and textile, a story of life and death told in fabric, and a recollection during the High Holy Days of mortality and persecution.
The story began decades ago with a family divided between two continents and two destinies. For the purposes of the exhibition, “Stitching History From the Holocaust,” it also started on the day in 1997 when a lawyer named Burton Strnad introduced himself to Kathie Bernstein, an archivist collecting photographs and artifacts from Milwaukee’s Jewish community
MANCHESTER — The story began with a ceremony in a sunlit garden, descended into darkness, and rose again with a gift of enlightenment.
Illing Middle School paraprofessional Phil Axler and English teacher Ryan Parker recounted the story Friday in the school’s Holocaust Children’s Butterfly and Remembrance Garden.
Parker and other eighth-grade language arts teachers lead the school’s Holocaust studies unit. Axler, who started the remembrance garden four years ago, helps by talking to students about Jewish culture.
In June, Axler invited a Courant reporter to a culminating ceremony at the garden, where Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman spoke and students recited poems inspired by children lost in the Nazi genocide. A news story published on June 12 described Axler’s role in the Holocaust studies curriculum.
This video describes the Holocaust, Days of Remembrance, and why we as a nation remember these events.
This segment was originally broadcast on Dec. 17, 2006. It was updated on June 21, 2007.
For the first time, secrets of the Nazi Holocaust that have been hidden away for more than 60 years are finally being made available to the public. We’re not talking about a missing filing cabinet – we’re talking about thousands of filing cabinets, holding 50 million pages. It’s Hitler’s secret archive.
The Nazis were famous for record keeping but what 60 Minutes found ran from the bizarre to the horrifying. This Holocaust history was discovered by the Allies in dozens of concentration camps, as Germany fell in the spring of 1945.
As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, the documents were taken to a town in the middle of Germany, called Bad Arolsen, where they were sorted, filed and locked way, never to be seen by the public until now.
Jacques Herszkowicz—who now lives in Denmark and is known as Jacques Hersh—learned about his picture on the Remember Me? website from his niece, who lives in the United States. Jacques recognized his photograph right away and even remembered the sweater he was wearing in the picture.
Jacques’s parents, Mordka Herszkowicz and Helen (née Najman), immigrated to France from Poland during the 1930s. Mordka went first and was later joined by Helen and their two older children, Charles and Rosette (also known as Rachla). Mordka was a tailor, and Helen helped out with sewing at home while taking care of the family. Jacques was born in France in 1935.
World impact, maybe? The holocaust is a historical tragedy that affected the entire globe. There are still people alive today who suffered and survived the holocaust – they lost everything – their families,homes and cultural histories have been demolished.
If that does not merit “remembering” a devastating part of history I don’t know what does. How can anyone forget?
“He who does not learn from history, is doomed to repeat it.”
-George Santayana
Because it was a major event in history when millions of Jews and others were murdered. We need to remember the Holocaust so that we remember the horrors that innocent people were put through.
However, the main reason it should still be taught and thought about is to remind us of why it should never happen again. Even more so because the world we live in today is far more complex, which would make it even easier to build such mass killing machines. Our history can help us learn from our past and live for a better future.
Everyone should have the opportunity to learn and discover about the holocaust because it is the biggest known genocide ever. We should not forget about the innocent people who were murdered because Hitler didn’t agree with them. People should always learn from mistakes, and it makes things a lot less painful if they are not your own.
We need to remember the Holocaust so that we remember the horrors that innocent people were put through, and so this can’t happen again.
We should remember the holocaust so we can make sure that nothing like this will ever happen again. if this would happen again we would know what to do because the Holocaust educated us on this major events in history. Always keep in memory all those Jews and non Jews that were murdered.
We should do it out of the respect of the millions of innocent men womeN and children who were killed together in the most evil way you can ever imagine. They died a long death, often watching the ones they loved most suffer. Each and every single one of these people had friends, family, etc. They were ordinary people. Why were they killed? Simply because they were Jews. Another reason why is that it can be passed on to the future generations about the true horrors of rasism so something as terrible may never, ever happen again.
As a child growing up in the Bronx, the last four digits of Terry Noble’s phone number were 7401. Coincidence: When Terry was assigned a social security number, the last four digits were 7401. And years later, when he found himself as a volunteer on a kibbutz in Israel – where he now called himself Tuvia Ariel – he worked with a carpenter whom he respected. The carpenter was a wiry, solid man, dedicated, the silent type. Ariel learned that he was one of the few who had escaped Auschwitz and survived, that he then joined the Polish partisans, then the British Army. It sent him to Palestine, where he deserted to join the Palmach, the Jewish fighting force, and helped Israel win her independence in 1948.
Quite a history.
Ariel had read the number tattooed on his arm. The last four digits were 7401.
But more than awe piqued Ariel’s curiosity about this survivor’s experiences in the Holocaust. Ariel had read the number tattooed on his arm. The last four digits were 7401.
“Don’t talk about it!” Ariel recalls the carpenter telling him forcefully, painfully. “I lost my whole family, my mother, my father; there was a brother in back of me, a brother in front of me – I’m the only one left. Don’t bring it up again!”
Ariel didn’t. Except once.
Tuvia Ariel is a man with many stories. In fact, he is a story: the man who was once a famous musician’s adviser and arranged for kaddish to be recited for an estranged Jewish radical; the man who put in a stint at Yale Law School and was a soldier in the U.S. Army in Israel during the 1956 Sinai war. He tore the “USA” from his uniform and, looking like an Israeli, hitched his way down to the Sinai Peninsula, ready to fight, only to find that the war had ended two hours before.
I was told in advance how colorful Ariel was, but nothing prepared me for the likes of a comment he made one hour after I met him on Friday afternoon. I knew he had a new leg. I knew it was breakthrough for him. But who gives thought to such things? Who wonders what it is like to be without a leg, or with a new one?
Praying in the synagogue on Friday, I sensed nothing unusual as Mincha came to an end. Suddenly, Ariel approached me, almost in tears. “This is the first time in my life I prayed the Shemoneh Esrei standing up. I have never been able to address God like any other Jew, beginning the prayer by taking three steps forward, ending it with three steps backward…”
As follows:
He saved his life by cutting off his own leg as it got caught in a machine he operated on a kibbutz.
Ariel was raised in a non-observant home, in which the Shemoneh Esrei was not recited. Then he went to Israel to volunteer. In 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, he saved his life by cutting off his own leg as it got caught in a machine he operated on a kibbutz – a machine that sucked his leg into its grinder and from which the rest of his body escaped only by his quick and gruesome self-amputation. A little over ten years later he became a religiously observant Jew. By then he was rotating between a wheelchair, crutches, and artificial legs, which, however, could never keep him standing still long enough to pray the Shemoneh Esrei.
Then, that Friday, he did it. After walking home (only three blocks), he choked up again, “That’s the longest I’ve walked in 22 years.”
He was fitted with a new leg only shortly before – the day the Berlin Wall crumbled. He found his new leg innocently enough. Ariel was in the United States at the beginning of 1989 on a business trip. He saw an advertisement, featuring a new kind of plastic developed for spacecraft, also used for artificial limbs. The ad featured amputees engaged in vigorous basketball, not from wheelchairs, but standing up, running, passing, even jump-shooting. A regular game.
Not with people amputated below the knee, but above the knee.
Ariel thought to himself that seeing this was like seeing a grandmother, who had died long ago, suddenly walking down the street. When he lost his leg 22 years earlier, he never thought he would see himself live normally again – and here were people just like he was, playing basketball
He inquired and was directed to an advanced prosthetic clinic in Oklahoma City. For above-the-knee amputees the old system had the stump rest on the prosthesis, which caused pain and circulatory problems and often did not work well, sometimes not at all. Using the new, flexible, rubber-like plastic, the new prosthesis grips the stump, which not only relieves pain and circulatory problems, but also better channels the energy and movement of the stump into natural, leg-like movements.
Even in advance of receiving his own leg, Ariel was not satisfied to give himself new life. He wanted it for all the above-the-knee amputees in Israel. So he had a long talk with the prosthetists in Oklahoma City about bringing this technology to the Holy Land. They agreed to train Israeli prosthetists in Oklahoma City and to travel to Israel to train Israeli prosthetists there, provided only that Ariel supply the plane tickets.
Ariel’s goal reached even beyond making the technology available in Israel. He aspired to establish a “Hebrew Free Limb Society” to provide a limb to the amputee as a loan, until – only a person like Ariel has the right to make this pun – “the amputee gets back on his feet.”
Strictly speaking, it is not idealism that motivates Ariel. It is something more – his sense that he has been designated as an angel of God before. He has reason to think this, and the way he sees it, his years of suffering now make him a messenger again – to help those whom the world forgets. Why is he certain he has been an angel once before, thus able to be so once again?
Ariel volunteered on two kibbutzim. The one where he lost his leg preferred that he leave the country. He was an embarrassment to the kibbutz. But Ariel would not leave Israel, no matter what. It took him about five years of various struggles to get into tourism schools; and somehow, between cars, crutches and artificial limbs, which kept him in pain and then went bad altogether, he remained a tour guide for 15 years.
Toward the beginning of his career, when he was low man on the totem pole, he was assigned to pick up tourists at the international airport in Lod and to bring them to the main office, whereupon an experienced guide would take over.
He yanked up his sleeve to show Ariel a number tattooed on his arm. Ariel looked, almost went into shock.
One day he picked up an American, ostentatiously wealthy, ostentatiously dressed and mannered. Even crude. Ariel could not bring himself to be friendly, so he was formal. Halfway from Lod to Jerusalem, the tourist, a perceptive man, yelled, “Pull over!” Ariel pulled over. The man barked, “You think I’m just a materialistic American tourist, don’t you? Well, I’ve paid my dues!” He yanked up his sleeve to show Ariel a number tattooed on his arm. Ariel looked, almost went into shock, and before he knew what was happening the tourist was saying, “I lost my whole family … a brother in front of me, a brother in back of me…” Ariel’s mind burned.
The principal of an international school in Chicago was reassigned after an anti-Semitic bullying incident in which Jewish children were shown pictures of ovens and told to get in.
Principal Joshua VanderJagt asked to be moved after outrage grew, leading to the students involved in the bullying to be banned from graduation.
