Rose Goteiner believes that her sister, Ruth Konigstein, is shown in the middle of the bottom row of this 1946 photograph taken in Amsterdam. (Courtesy American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Global Archives)

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends.

BALTIMORE (JTA) – Picking up her mail about a year ago, 88-year-old Rose Goteiner stopped in her tracks upon seeing the photo on a newsletter cover.

Posing shortly after the Holocaust ended, 21 people were standing before a truck marked “American Joint Distribution Committee” — the relief organization later known as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. There were young children and teenagers, plus a few adults.

In the middle of the front row was a girl wearing a light-colored dress, hands at her sides and staring into the camera.

Goteiner believes it is her sister, Ruth Konigstein. And now Goteiner is hoping against hope that Ruth is still alive and that the sisters might miraculously reunite in their twilight years.

“I thought I was going to die when I saw it,” Goteiner, of Boca Raton, Fla., said of the picture. “Right away I knew it was her. My whole body was shaking. Right now, I’m shaking.”

Goteiner last saw Ruth, as well as two brothers, Herman and Alfred, and her parents, Heskel and Sheindel, in the Dubrowa ghetto in Poland in 1943. Ruth was 4 or 5 at the time; Rose was 17 or 18.

That year, the Nazis deported Goteiner, first to the Gelenau labor camp in Germany, then on a three-day march to Reichenbach, a sub-camp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp.

The fate of the others? Even now Goteiner doesn’t know. Shortly after being liberated, Goteiner heard from another survivor that they may have been deported to Auschwitz and, presumably, their deaths. (Three siblings who presumably were killed survived the war, and two of them are still alive.)

Still, their images remain fresh in Goteiner’s mind.

“I remember everyone’s face,” she said, no doubt aided by the treasured family photograph she has kept since the war. It sits in a frame atop her bedroom dresser, a formal portrait made of herself with her parents and siblings during their imprisonment at Dubrowa. Heskel and Herman, then about 13, are wearing the compulsory yellow Jewish star on their suit jackets. Rigid, harsh expressions characterize everyone’s face – all except Herman’s. His lips indicate a slight smile.

Herman also displays a bandage on his right cheek, where he was shot by German soldiers. The soldiers had stormed the family’s ghetto apartment after being tipped off that the Konigsteins were allowing butchered meat to be packaged in their kitchen and sold on the black market. Fearing their execution, the parents escaped out a window while Herman held off the intruders by pushing against the door – until being shot. Heskel and Sheindel hid for several weeks and eventually returned.

In both photographs, Ruth’s square countenance features ear-length hair parted above the left eye. The resemblance between the two might be so uncanny as to prove that Ruth survived the Holocaust, was assisted by the JDC – and may be found today, when she’d be about 75. Or perhaps Goteiner’s memory and yearning for good news after losing so much are playing tricks on her.

There’s no way to know which is correct — at least not yet. The JDC’s director of global archives, Linda Levi, said the organization’s records and ship manifests did not turn up the name Ruth Konigstein (or an alternative spelling, Konistein).

The name might have appeared in manifests of one ship in particular because the JDC’s caption states that the photograph shows “16 children who departed for the U.S. after their visas and immigration papers were arranged by the local offices of the JDC. These children went to America on the S.S. Marine Flasher.”

Another possibility is that the girl in the group picture is indeed Ruth, with her given name not appearing in records because it had been changed or was forgotten amid the Holocaust’s trauma.

The Marine Flasher made several journeys between Europe and the United States during that period, Levi said, often bringing Jewish orphans to America.

Levi said several people in the photograph have been identified by visitors to the JDC website and others who telephoned. One woman, Galia Kempis, of Brooklyn, N.Y., called to say that she is the girl in the front who’s holding a doll and that her brother, who lives in Canada, is the boy to her left wearing overalls.

The picture was one of 1,500 released by the JDC in its two-year campaign documenting its relief efforts during and after World War II. The JDC invites visitors to the project’s website to identify those pictured and relate some of the context.

If Ruth survived the Holocaust, it would reverse her loved ones’ assumptions. In separate documents filed with Yad Vashem in the 1980s and 1990s, Goteiner, her sister Eda Lehman and her brother Joseph Aris stated that Ruth had been killed in the Holocaust.

In 1992, an uncle, David Arthur Zyto, who resided in Stockholm, also filed a document with the Holocaust-commemoration institution. In it, he wrote that Ruth (whose date of birth was given as March 28, 1938) had been “murdered, probably together with her parents at Auschwitz.” While the documents, known as “pages of testimony,” enable people to memorialize their loved ones, they do not demand proof of their death.

William Connelly, a technical information specialist at Washington’s U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, said that Ruth’s name isn’t mentioned in any records of the International Tracing Service. The ITS documented the names of many survivors shortly after the Holocaust.

Should Ruth Konigstein ultimately be found through this article, she and her siblings will have their niece, Gloria Jaffe, to thank. Jaffe, of Cleveland, discovered “Seeking Kin” when she typed the words “long-lost relatives” into a search engine. She then contacted “Seeking Kin” to ask for assistance.

Goteiner and her late husband, Henry, raised two daughters, who produced three grandsons. And after the Holocaust, good luck delivered Goteiner the three siblings she had presumed gone.

Her elder brother, Joseph, had survived the war in Russia, settled in Israel and lived the rest of his life in the United States before he died. Older sisters Eda and Lena survived a number of camps; some together and some apart. Lena, now 90, lives in Cleveland, and Eda, 92, is in Arizona. Eda cries every time she looks at the JDC photo, Goteiner said.

Goteiner sheds her tears, too, including while being interviewed for this article. The portrait on her dresser is her only photograph of Ruth, Alfred and Herman. But Goteiner is hoping she’ll gain many more pictures when she sees her long-lost sister again.

“I hope she’s alive. Maybe she was adopted by somebody” after reaching America, Goteiner said of Ruth. “That’s her, 100 percent. I can swear by it. … I’d hug her, kiss her and cry, mostly just to know she’s alive.”

(Please email Hillel Kuttler at seekingkin@jta.org if you know the whereabouts of Ruth Konigstein. If you would like “Seeking Kin” to write about your search for long-lost relatives and friends, please include the principal facts and your contact information in a brief email. “Seeking Kin” is sponsored by Bryna Shuchat and Joshua Landes and family in loving memory of their mother and grandmother, Miriam Shuchat, a lifelong uniter of the Jewish people.)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — How do you confront hatred when it has no fixed address?

Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League national director, attempts to pin down an answer to the question in his latest book, “Viral Hate.”

Co-authored with privacy lawyer Christopher Wolf, the book chronicles the complications of countering hate on the Internet.

The takeaway? It’s up to us.

“Let’s take back responsibility for our culture — both online and off” is the book’s main conclusion. “Public involvement, concern, action, and, when necessary, outcry are key.”

Calling on the public to be alert and reactive to the dangers of bigotry is not new terrain for the ADL, which throughout its 100-year history has coupled behind-the-scenes suasions with public appeals to lobby leadership and engage with peers.

Yet while many of the book’s accounts of broad, spontaneous action against Internet hate speech end in triumph, Foxman’s reliance on more traditional ADL tactics in the digital age are less successful.

Efforts to engage with the powers that run the Internet — indeed, Foxman’s attempt to discover who those powers even are — peter out in frustration.

“We have been talking to the geniuses at Palo Alto,” Foxman said in an interview. “We have said to them, ‘thanks but no thanks. You developed a technology that has some wonderful things but also has unintended consequences.’ ”

Such dead ends do not mean the public is powerless, however. Foxman and Wolf cite the example of JuicyCampus, a gossip website brought to heel after direct appeals to the website went nowhere.

As the authors tell it, the website, established in 2007 as a clearinghouse for campus gossip, quickly devolved into speech replete with misogyny and race hatred. The site’s founding pledge to ban “unlawful, threatening, abusive, tortuous, defamatory, obscene, libelous or invasion of another person’s privacy” was honored mostly in the breach.

Efforts to ban its usage by the student government and administrators at Pepperdine University in Southern California — one of seven schools initially targeted by the site — kept rubbing up against First Amendment protections.

Ultimately, what led to the site’s demise was an independent campaign launched by a student at Pepperdine, a Christian school that does not allow alcohol on campus, urging boycotts of the site. The campaign went viral, advertisers abandoned the site and by February 2009 it folded.

Foxman and Wolf conclude the anecdote by contrasting the success of the student initiative with the impotence of administrators hobbled by the need to balance free speech with their desire to curb online hate.

“Viral Hate,” which comes out this month, recommends an array of countermeasures. They include an emphasis in schools on educating kids on reliable sources, and parents encouraging their children to adopt responsible Internet practices.

Consumers, according to the book, should report hate speech to social media and Internet providers using tools made available for such protests.

Providers should facilitate reporting, the book says, noting that Facebook’s reporting device is obscure, requiring a mouse rollover and a click on an unnamed dropdown menu, while YouTube features an obvious flag beneath its videos.

The ADL’s role is less clear. In its centenary year, the organization is grappling with the role it can play in an age when everyone is a publisher. The question was featured in a number of sessions at the ADL’s 100th anniversary conference in Washington in April.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a political communication expert at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication, told JTA that 20th century institutional arbiters like the ADL still had a role to play in the shifting landscape, noting their capacity to publicly shame peddlers of hate who might otherwise escape notice.

But Daniel Sieradski, a Jewish activist and digital media strategist, said the ADL often relies on emotional pitches that don’t resonate with the youthful online community. Instead, he said, the Jewish community should create an unaffiliated online clearinghouse, similar to the myth-busting Snopes website, that would gear itself to the fact-thirsty online community.

“They would have to attack the bigotry from a place of using logic and fact instead of emotionally charged responses,” said Sieradski, a former webmaster at JTA.

In the interview, Foxman acknowledged the anomaly of an organization like the ADL, which has striven for the mantle of authoritativeness, delegating authority to, well, everybody.

“The paradigms are changing,” he said multiple times.

Among the changes is the sheer volume of hatred pervading cyberspace. Another is the anonymity afforded by the Internet, a shield that Foxman likened to the masks that white supremacists wore until the 1950s, when the ADL led the effort to pass laws banning their use.

“It used to be if you wrote a letter to the editor, the newspaper would check your name,” Foxman said. “Today on the Internet you don’t have to provide identity.”

Last year, the ADL established a working group on Internet hate comprised of technology executives, academics and other like-minded groups. But the book casts its success in cautious terms.

Foxman described a reluctance on the part of industry leaders to fully engage, noting efforts over the years to persuade Google to address alleged manipulations of its algorithms by Jew Watch, an anti-Semitic site that pops up when one searches for “Jew.”

Google agreed to place a notification on the results page explaining it was not endorsing the views expressed on the site. But the company insists there is no manipulation taking place; if the site ranks high, it’s in part because “Jew” — as opposed to Jewish or Jewish people — is often used as a pejorative.

“Our message to the scientists was, you can’t say, look, these are unintended consequences,” Foxman said. “The providers need to take greater ownership. They don’t want regulation.”

The fact that the providers lack the same permanence of the authoritative media of yore also poses a problem; an Internet giant today may disappear by tomorrow.

“You can close a door,” Foxman said, “and it will come through the window.”

A Star of David in the architecture of the Van Ostade Jewish Housing Project in The Hague. (The Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, www.cidi.tv)

THE HAGUE, the Netherlands (JTA) — On a cold winter night in 2008, Wim Kortenoeven was startled by the crackling of a large fire raging near his home on the edge of this city’s last remaining Jewish enclave.

Rushing from his apartment, Kortenoeven walked 70 yards and crossed the line separating his Jewish-owned housing project from the predominantly Muslim borough containing what Dutch media have taken to calling the “Sharia triangle” — Sharia referring to Islamic law.

On the seam line, he encountered dozens of Dutch Moroccans looking at several parked cars that vandals had set on fire.

Fearing explosions, Kortenoeven shouted to the people looking down from their balconies to go back inside, but his intervention was ignored.

“Onlookers started closing in on me, shoving me, asking if I was police, what I was doing in ‘their neighborhood,’ ” he said. Kortenoeven scuffled with one man but managed to get away.

Kortenoeven has since moved, but about a dozen Jewish households remain in the little-known Jewish enclave known as the Van Ostade Housing Project. The gated community of 200 units built in the 1880s to house poor Jews is surrounded by the Schilderswijk neighborhood — 91 percent of its residents are foreign-born, half of them Moroccan or Turkish.

Earlier this month, Schilderswijk became national news after a Dutch newspaper reported that part of the neighborhood had become a “Sharia triangle” that police dare not enter. The report prompted a high-profile visit from the stridently anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders, whose party called this month for a government study of anti-Semitism among Muslim immigrants.

“It is unacceptable that women in skirts should be harassed here,” Wilders said during his visit. “This is Holland. Sharia does not apply here.”

Dutch police have denied that Schilderswijk has become a lawless territory and insist they have security under control. But the Holland Wilders fears is already a reality for some Jews of Van Ostade.

“You get a lot of stares and comments,” said Jewish resident Iris Tzur, who says it’s not comfortable for a blonde woman in a dress to walk the streets of Schilderswijk.

Pinchas Moelker, an Orthodox Jewish resident, says he hides his yarmulke under a hat and always tucks in the knitted fringes of his prayer shawl. He also installed a low-profile mezuzah that blends into the door frame. Others here have installed mezuzahs inside their doors.

Such concerns aside, the remaining Jews of Van Ostade have no plans to leave, saying they enjoy a sense of togetherness that richer, less immigrant-heavy neighborhoods lack. Moelker hosts weekly Shabbat dinners for his neighbors, “who get so drunk that they zigzag all the way back home.” And Avi Genosar, who served in an elite Israeli army unit before coming to Holland to study, says the area’s high crime levels don’t bother him.

“Here I can get fresh, cheap vegetables, tahini, olive oil and the other Middle Eastern foods I’m used to,” Genosar says.

Things were much different when the Van Ostade Jewish Housing Project was built by Jewish philanthropists more than a century ago.

In 1880, there were about 6,000 Jews in The Hague, many of them living in penury in the city’s disease-infested slums, according to the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. Van Ostade was one of Western Europe’s largest Jewish housing projects, bringing dozens of Jewish families in from the cold and charging them only a nominal rent.

By 1930, the city’s Jewish population had grown to 10,000 and many more families moved to Van Ostade, but even then Jews comprised only 35 percent of the project’s residents. Many Jewish families passed up the subsidized rent, preferring to live near the synagogue about a half-mile away.

During the Holocaust, virtually all of the city’s Jews were deported and murdered. Today, only about 250 self-identified Jews remain. When waves of Muslim immigrants arrived in the 1970s, the old synagogue became a mosque.

Still, Van Ostade remained in Jewish hands, even as the old Jewish neighborhood near the synagogue became the local Chinatown. The project is run by an all-Jewish board that rents out subsidized apartments to low-income tenants. Jewish residents are encouraged to spread the word among their Jewish friends, but there are few takers.

“The atmosphere in the Jewish neighborhood itself is very nice,” Kortenoeven says. “Everybody greets you hello. The people are good folks. Many of them are educated people, artists, some students. The problem is some elements in the environment around the neighborhood.”

The impact of Muslim immigration can be felt in other ways in Schilderswijk, as well. Earlier this month, De Telegraaf reported that a local school that had been a Jewish institution before the Holocaust shelved plans to install a commemorative plaque for fear it would upset Muslims. Separately, a sign advertising an exhibition about the school’s Jewish history had to be placed inside lest it upset the locals, a co-organizer of the event told De Telegraaf.

Gerard Brasjen, a spokesman for the school’s board, told JTA he was not aware of the sign issue. The plaque placement, he said, had nothing to do with Muslim sensitivities.

“The plan to place it stalled not so much because of the Jewish-Muslim issue but because it’s perhaps not very wise to put up any sort of plaque in the Schilderswijk,” Brasjen said. “It’s no quiet area, you know.”

Dina Gachman

(JTA) — The year I unwittingly decided to become Christian started innocently enough.

“There’s a sleepover at First Methodist on Friday and everyone is going,” I said to my parents. I was in the sixth grade, one of three Jews in class at our Texas public school. We lived in an area where there was at least one church on every block. It took us 45 minutes to get across town to temple, where we attended Hebrew school once a week.

“So, can I go? Please?! I’ll die if I don’t go!” I begged, neglecting to mention that missing a social event where Chad Williams was holding court was the real reason.

In this very non-Jewish area of Texas, where we devoured jalapeno poppers and matzah ball soup with equal gusto, my mother always understood the social dynamics we were up against. Her general motto for her four daughters (I was the oldest) was, “I’d rather you girls be social than sit at home like wallflowers,” so her immediate response was, “Sure!”

“Well, I don’t know,” my dad drawled. Whenever we complained about the long trek to synagogue, my father was the one who reminded us, “There just aren’t that many of us Jews anymore.”

When I was young, I hadn’t noticed that everyone headed to St. Anne’s on Sunday while we ate gefilte fish and listened to dinner table stories about ruthless Cossacks. But now I’d come to realize that nearly every social event involved some sort of church sleepover or church youth group, and I wanted in.

“It’s at the church?” my dad asked me. “What do you do all night?”

I wasn’t sure what they did all night at a church, but I answered, “Play games and watch movies and eat pizza.”

After some thought, he relented. “Well, OK. Just be careful,” he said.

That sleepover at church was pretty much as I’d imagined: We really did eat pizza and sit around and ogle Chad Williams before they separated the girls and the boys and we rolled out our sleeping bags and drifted off to sleep. There was nothing religious about it – except the fact that we were sleeping in a church.

After a few more church sleepovers, it started to feel pretty normal. Of course, my sisters and I still made the drive on Wednesday nights to Hebrew school, but I was most excited to do the church-related things that were the heartbeat of our preteen social scene.

Eventually I started going to church with friends. It’s what everyone I knew did on Sundays. I didn’t catch much of the service since my friends usually found excuses for us to “go to the bathroom,” i.e., loiter in the halls chewing gum trying to seem cool.

Since I wasn’t coming home holding rosary beads or handing out The Watchtower pamphlets at the dinner table, my parents saw this as a harmless social diversion. And it was. Until Jesus entered the picture.

Everyone in school seemed to be whispering and laughing about this secret Christian youth group that had weekly meetings at people’s houses. It was starting to become the center of our school’s social life.

“What do you guys do at the meetings?” I asked my friend Lisa, who had hosted a few get-togethers with her sisters.

“We hang out and eat and pretty much just talk,” Lisa said. “It’s nondenominational, you should totally come!” Of course I wanted to go. It was the thing to do. I could also hang out with Chad. In the sixth grade, that’s about as glamorous as it gets.

The next week I went to the meeting with Lisa, and at first I felt right at home. We had cookies and orange juice and sat around talking about important sixth-grade topics: what clothes we loved and what classes we hated. There was some covert, subtle flirting, too, along the lines of:

Chad Williams: “You’re tan.”

Me: “You’re tan, too.”

The end.

Then it happened.

“OK, everyone! Let’s gather around and hold hands!” said Lisa’s older sister, who was running the meeting. We gathered around and held hands. Everyone bowed their head. They started singing a song about Jesus. Suddenly I imagined my dad’s head floating above our prayer circle, looking down at me and saying, “There just aren’t that many of us anymore.”

I bowed my head but kept my eyes wide open, as if by closing my eyes I would get sucked into a vortex of baptisms and confessional booths. My stomach cramped in guilt. As they passionately belted out the Doobie Brothers song “Jesus Is Just Alright,” I imagined my grandparents looking down at me, reminding me of the Cossacks. I could just see my grandfather, Big Papa, wearing the powder blue suit that he refused to throw away, saying, “My parents escaped Russia and fought for their lives so their great-granddaughter could sing about Jesus?”

Maybe hanging out at a church youth group wasn’t just about talking to Chad about his amazing tan.

When they finally finished singing, I exhaled. I hadn’t realized I had been holding my breath for so long. Everyone around me was clapping and smiling, as if they’d just experienced the best concert of their lives. They ate more cookies, and settled around on chairs and on the floor like a cozy little tribe. I sat, too, but instead of looking elated, I looked a little stricken. No one seemed to notice. I watched these people I loved and understood that no matter how hard I tried I wouldn’t be the same as them – and I didn’t want to be. I was different. I clenched my smile and nodded along until I could finally leave and go home.

The next week at school, Lisa walked up to me in the hall after class. “Are you coming to the meeting tonight?” she asked. “It’s at Ashley’s house and her mom’s making s’mores, plus they have a pool.”

I loved s’mores, and I knew Chad would be doing perfect cannonballs off the diving board in his swimsuit. But I’d have to see him and the rest of my friends at the mall, at the movies, at McDonald’s, because I wasn’t going to go to any church activities again.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Have fun though.”

Deep down I knew my dad was right: There just aren’t that many of us anymore.

(Dina Gachman’s writing has been featured in Glamour, Forbes and the Los Angeles Times.  She lives in Los Angeles and can be found on Twitter @TheElf26.)

NEW YORK (Corriere della Sera Online) — His Wikipedia page remembers him, in at least 10 languages, as “the Italian police commissioner who saved thousands of Jews from being deported to Nazi extermination camps during the Second World War and for this was deported to the Dachau Concentration Camp, where he died.”

“For his actions,” according to the free encyclopedia, “Giovanni Palatucci was decorated with the ‘Medaglia d’oro’ award for civil merit, and honored as one of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ by Yad Vashem (September 12, 1990) and ‘Servant of God’ by the Catholic Church.”

But a growing chorus of historians and scholars who for years have been studying the most celebrated of “righteous” Italians are saying Palatucci is nothing but a myth, a sensational fraud orchestrated by the alleged hero’s friends and relatives who claim he saved more than 5,000 Jews in a region where there lived fewer than half that number of Jews.

The hypothesis of a massive rescue mission by Palatucci already had been categorically denied by the Italian Ministry of Internal Affairs in a memorandum dated July 1952, and later by Yad Vashem’s Institute of the Righteous commission
in 1990.

At a roundtable discussion organized by the Primo Levi Center at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo in New York, the ex-director of Yad Vashem, Mordecai Paldiel, said that under his supervision, Palatucci was recognized in 1990 as Righteous Among the Nations for having helped “just one woman,” Elena Aschkenasy, in 1940. Paldiel also said the commission “did not find any evidence or testimony that he might have assisted anyone outside of this case.”

Yet in 1955, the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities recognized Palatucci, and in 1995 the Italian government decorated him with the Medaglia d’oro award for civil merit. During the ecumenical ceremony for the Jubilee on May 7, 2000, Pope John Paul II included Palatucci among the martyrs of the 20th century. In 2004, the diocesan phase of the canonization process concluded officially naming the hero who died in Dachau in 1945, at age 36, a “Servant of God.”

But who conducted the historical research on which these recognitions were based? What spawned the myth of the “Italian Schindler”?

The official biographies — the latest of which, “Giovanni Palatucci: a right and a Christian martyr,” by Antonio De Simone and Michele Bianco with a preface by Cardinal Camillo Ruini — speak of thousands of Jews being sent to the internment camp in the town of Campagna. They would have been protected there by Bishop Giuseppe Maria Palatucci, Giovanni’s uncle — who in 1953 called the notorioius camp a “vacation spot.”

“Impossible,” replies Anna Pizzuti, editor of the database of foreign Jewish internees in Italy (www.annapizzuti.it),
“no more than 40 Fiume residents were interned in Campagna. A third of the group ended up in Auschwitz.”

The biographies then recall the 800 Jewish refugees who in 1939 secretly boarded a Greek ship, the Agia Zoni, that departed from Fiume on March 17, 1939 headed for Palestine in an operation organized personally by Palatucci.

But from the diary of the group’s guide preserved at Yad Vashem and the documents of the port authority collected in the Italian State Archives, it becomes clear that it actually was an operation of the Jewish Agency of Zurich carried out under the strict watch of Palatucci’s superiors. Not only did these superiors exact a painful process of extortion, they also sent back to the border the neediest refugees, the stateless and those who came from Dachau.

Also from the archives, we find that Palatucci was an officer of public security at the police headquarters in Fiume from 1937 to 1944, where he worked in the immigration bureau and was in charge of the census of Jewish citizens on the basis of which the Prefecture applied Mussolini’s racial laws. In Fiume, the census was conducted so thoroughly and the laws applied with such zeal that it provoked international protests and a reaction from the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

According to the monograph by Silva Bon titled “The Italian Jewish Communities of the Province of Kvarner Rijeka and Opatija (1924-1945)” and the data collected in the “The Book of Memory” by Liliana Picciotto, during Palatucci’s brief
regency the percentage of Jews deported from Fiume was among the highest in Italy. “There Would Be Enough,” the recently published family portrait by Silvia Cuttin, clearly and accurately depicts the tragic experience of the Jews of Fiume.

In “Giovanni Palatucci: A Proper Memory,” Marco Coslovich reconstructs the ambiguous professional profile of a 30-year-old vice commissioner of police who swears loyalty to the Republic of Salo.

“Palatucci never served as chief of police in Fiume,” Coslovich reveals, “but as an adjunct vice commissioner under the control
of superiors who were notoriously anti-Semitic.”

As opposed to being in conflict with superiors, documentation shows that Palatucci was considered a model public servant and fully enjoyed their favor. He was considered to be “irreplaceable” by the prefect Testa.

Between April 1944 and the beginning of September of that year, Palatucci was regent and directly dependent to the upper echelon of Salo, Tullio Tamburini and Eugenio Cerruti.

Historian Michele Sarfatti in the episode of the television program “La storia siamo noi”dedicated to Palatucci, expressed doubts in 2008 as to the plausibility of the disproportionate numbers attributed to a community that numbered just over 1,000. Further, between immigration and internment, the community was reduced to little more than 500 by October 1943.

According to the Venetian historian Simon Levis Sullam, the Palatucci affair is tied to the broader problem of how anti-Semitic persecution in fascist Italy — and the role Italians played in it — has been represented in the 68 years since the end of the war. Co-editor of a recent study on the Shoah in Italy published by UTET (2012), Sullam explains, “The myth of the good Italian has constituted a source of collective self-absolution after the Second World War regarding the support offered to anti-Semitic and racist politics in the period 1937-1945, in which thousands of Italians participated directly.”

Coslovich emphasizes how more than half of Palatucci’s personal dossier reflects the efforts carried out by his father, Felice, and his uncle, the bishop, aimed at completely rehabilitating the reputation of the commissioner with respect to ethnic cleansing. Additionally, the concession of a war pension accorded by law only to widows and orphans of the casualities of war (Palatucci was a bachelor) indicates the involvement of the Italian government in designating their relative as a “savior of Jews.”

Between 1952 and 1953, Bishop Giuseppe Maria Palatucci availed himself of the written collaboration of Rodolfo Grani, a Jew from Fiume of Hungarian origin whom he had met during Grani’s brief internment in Campagna. However, the historian Mauro Canali, an expert in the history of the fascist police system at the University of Camerino, maintains that in the copious documentary evidence regarding Grani, there is no indication that he ever met Giovanni Palatucci.

But someone who did meet Palatucci was the Baron Niel Sachs de Gric, also a Fiume-based Jew of Hungarian descent, a lawyer in the ecclesiastical court and representative of the Holy See for the Concordat with Jugoslavia. In 1952, the bishop sent de Gric an article for publication in the periodical Osservatore Romano with an “invitation” to take credit for its authorship. The documents attributed to Grani and de Gric — their authenticity demands to be verified, and neither received the commissioner’s assistance — launched the outsized version of Palatucci’s heroism.

The last piece of the legend to fall is the one connected to the circumstances of Palatucci’s death. The arrest warrant signed by Herbert Kappler and deposited in the Central Archives of State leaves no doubt: Palatucci was accused of treason by the Germans for having transmitted to the enemy (the British) documents of the Social Republic of Salo requesting negotiations for Fiume’s independence, not for having protected the Jews of that city.

(Alessandra Farkas is the New York correspondent for the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, where this story first appeared. The article was translated by Steve Baker.)

Mimi Gold, an Israeli Reform rabbi who won a Supreme Court case entitling her to a state salary, has yet to receive a paycheck a year later. (Facebook)

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Israel’s plans to move ahead with the funding of non-Orthodox rabbis appeared to be a landmark  achievement for Reform and Conservative leaders, who have long chafed at their second-class treatment by the Israeli government.

But even as they welcomed last week’s news that the Ministry of Religious Services was revamping its policies to permit non-Orthodox rabbis to receive government-funded salaries, Reform and Conservative leaders were cautious in their optimism — and perhaps with good reason.

Last year, Miri Gold, a Reform rabbi from the rural Kibbutz Gezer, won a Supreme Court case entitling her to a state salary. A year later, she has yet to see her first paycheck.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman, who leads a 300-family Reform synagogue in Jerusalem. “We’re a long way from it happening. I’m certainly not going to put in additional spending money yet.”

The ministry’s intentions were made public on Thursday in the response by the state’s attorney to a Supreme Court petition filed in January by Conservative and Reform leaders. The petition accused the government of discrimination for funding only Orthodox rabbis in city neighborhoods.

“The intention here is to create criteria that will set appropriate standards for funding communal rabbis without asking which denomination the relevant congregation belongs to,” the response said.

According to the state’s attorney, the ministry intends within six months to reform the current system, which grants the Orthodox a monopoly over state-funded rabbinic posts. In Jerusalem, all 157 state-appointed neighborhood rabbis are Orthodox.

Instead, the ministry would fund any city congregational rabbi — Orthodox or not — should the congregation meet certain yet-be-defined criteria.

But the leaders of Israel’s non-Orthodox movements fear a repeat of what happened with Gold, where criteria were established that made it nearly impossible for her to receive a state salary as the Supreme Court intended.

“The big question is if this will be implemented in a way that’s really equal,” said Yizhar Hess, CEO of the Israeli Conservative movement. “It’s too early to say what the criteria will be, when they will come up or whether they will be equal.”

The Religious Services Ministry offered no information about the criteria being formulated, or even when the standards would be decided.

“Now I can’t tell you anything about the criteria,” said Idit Druyan, spokeswoman for Deputy Religious Services Minister Eli Ben Dahan. “I have no schedule.”

The responsibility for implementing the policy change lies with Religious Services Minister Naftali Bennett, chairman of the right-wing Jewish Home party. Since taking office, Bennett has shown a penchant for effecting change quickly, enacting a trio of religious reforms two weeks ago and pushing a bill to change elections for chief rabbi.

Those reforms were more about process than substance. This change could threaten an anchor of Orthodoxy’s dominance of Jewish institutions in Israel — a move that could upset Bennett’s Modern Orthodox base and rally the haredi Orthodox opposition.

For now, however, Reform and Conservative leaders remain hopeful that change is on the way — even if it’s a long way off.

“We just have to keep up the vigil,” Gold said. “I don’t think anybody’s going to give up on this.”

Ned Lazarus and Nahanni Rous standing under the chuppah made from the fabric sheets brought by their guests, 2004. (Courtesy Nahanni Rous)

NEW YORK (JTA) — When Amanda Melpolder began planning her wedding to Jeff Greenberg, she hoped the ceremony would be unlike others.

Melpolder had become involved in an independent minyan in Brooklyn after converting to Judaism several years ago, and she and Greenberg wanted their their wedding this June to reflect the prayer group’s community spirit and sense of do-it-yourself camaraderie.

Friends were asked to lead prayers and narrate the signing of the ketubah, or marriage contract. Melpolder, a chef, solicited recipes from guests that would be bound in a souvenir cookbook. Assignments were given to friends based on personalities and interests.

“Since our Jewish community is one that we created and are actively part of, it made sense that our wedding would be the same theme, with people leading different parts of the ceremony,” Melpolder said.

Such participatory approaches to wedding planning might seem like a feature of the information age but may be just the latest incarnation of an older Jewish tradition.

“The word ‘crowdsourcing’ is a new word for an old thing,” said artist Nahanni Rous, who creates custom chuppahs, or wedding canopies.

“We are pretending that we just invented this idea of the shtetl. It’s like everybody would come to the wedding, and that was how a community got together to celebrate.”

In other words, it has always taken a village. It’s just that now the village looks quite different.

Based in Washington, D.C., Rous often incorporates crowdsourcing into her work, such as asking friends to submit fabric swatches.

Her chuppah-making career began, appropriately enough, at her own wedding. She and husband Ned Lazarus, who met in Israel and married in 2004, had two ceremonies, in Jerusalem and New Hampshire, to accommodate friends in far-flung locales. Each guest was asked to bring fabric that was pinned to a sheet at the wedding.

“We had people from every region of Israel and the Palestinian territories at the ceremony. We had everything from a kippah with a Magen David knitted on it to a Palestinian flag to a piece of someone’s wedding dress and a map,” Rous said. “It was a really beautiful hodgepodge.”

Since then, Rous has worked with couples to create custom chuppahs, incorporating everything from traditional Jewish symbols to quotes from poets such as e.e. cummings and Pablo Neruda. Some of her clients aren’t even Jewish but like the concept of the chuppah.

In some cases, crowdsourcing is a way to make guests feel more involved in a ceremony, but it can also be a way to make logistics a little easier for the bride and groom.

When Caroline Waxler and Michael Levitt married last summer, they came up with a Twitter hashtag for their wedding guests. Waxler, who runs a digital strategy company, knew her tech-obsessed friends would be tweeting photos from the ceremony and reception.

With the hashtag #waxlevittwedding, she was able to find them easily.

“When you’re making a commitment in public to one other person, it’s kind of also a reminder that in your life you are supported by people, not just by one other person,” Rous said.

While crowdsourcing methods can make family and friends feel more involved in the wedding, Melpolder admits that she may have other reasons for making the big day a little more social.

“I really hope someone hooks up at our wedding,” she said.

HIGHLAND PARK, N.J. (JTA) — Over the past few weeks, strangers have begun stopping high school computer science teacher Chaim Cohen on the street. A few accuse him of recording them without their knowledge. Even fewer blame him for all of society’s ills.

Chaim Cohen wearing his Google Glass. (Matthew Hersh/Hub City Communications)

But many just want an answer to a simple question: Is he wearing Google Glass?

Cohen is among the approximately 2,000 developers throughout the United States who are trying out the search giant’s much-hyped wearable computer, a futuristic Internet-connected gadget that users wear like a pair of glasses and enables them to stream information from the Web directly into their field of vision.

Using voice commands and hand gestures, Google Glass users can take pictures, record videos, get directions and send messages.

“I offer to let them try it on,” Cohen said. “My goal is to advocate for this and show people that this is not a bad thing. It’s a good thing.”

Well before Google Glass is expected to be publicly available sometime in 2014, the device already is generating controversy. Critics worry that users will be able to surreptitiously take photographs with an app that permits wearers to snap pictures just by winking. Some bars and casinos, citing privacy concerns, have preemptively banned the device. In West Virginia, legislators have tried to make it illegal to wear Glass while driving.

But none of this concerns Barry Schwartz, CEO of the Web development firm RustyBrick, who can hardly wait to get his hands on it. Schwartz is one of the 8,000 “explorers” chosen by Google to receive the device for $1,500 apiece.

“We would be programming Jewish-related apps to help Jewish people use the technology to live their Jewish lives,” said Schwartz, whose company has already developed popular Jewish applications for smartphones, like a digital prayer book and Hebrew translator.

Schwartz’s vision of a Glass-enabled Jewish life sounds incredibly futuristic. Notifications flash when it’s time to pray. Nearby synagogues or kosher restaurants are instantly located. Important Jewish dates such as yahrtzeits and holidays are never forgotten.

Recently, a Chabad rabbi at Stanford University set up a Google Glass tefillin stand. Men who chose to don the ritual leather straps then put on Glass and the blessing flashed before their eyes.

Potential Jewish applications for Glass are endless, Schwartz says.

“Let’s say you want to buy an etrog,” he said. “You can create a Google Hangout and have a rabbi look at the etrog as you are looking at it. The rabbi can ask you to turn it to the right and turn it to the left, and can give you an opinion about it right away.”

Mike Vidikan of the Washington, D.C.-based organization Innovaro, which provides insights about how new technologies will shape the future business environment, expects that Glass also could significantly change how consumers shop for kosher food.

“As they start inspecting a particular group of foods,” he explained, “notifications could pop up with information about the kosher certifications, as well as reviews, and who in their social networks recommend it.”

In education, where information technology already is transforming the classroom experience, Glass could be yet another game-changer. Hebrew school classes could tour Israel virtually, seeing the country though the eyes of a guide equipped with the device. Students in various locations could participate in classes together, following text as seen through the eyes of a teacher.

Cohen, who teaches at a public school in central New Jersey, plans to develop an application that will help him learn his students’ names.

“I don’t remember all the names of my students during the first weeks of school,” he said. “I want to be able to look at them and have their names overlapped on top.”

Despite the enthusiasm, tech experts from Jewish day schools are skeptical. Price is one factor. At $1,500, Glass is significantly more expensive than an iPad or similar devices.

Educators also are understandably uneasy about a device that can snap pictures, literally, with the wink of an eye. Others point out that since Glass’ apps are still being developed, its educational value remains to be seen.

“In a traditional classroom, I don’t see where wearing the computer on my face is an enormous quantum leap in ease of use, efficiency and productivity over traditional computer modalities,” said Seth Dimbert, director of educational technology at the Scheck Hillel Community School in North Miami Beach, Fla.

“It’s actually less useful if only I can see a computer screen. Classrooms are about collaboration with the people around you and making screens bigger and more portable, so more people can gather around them at once.”

Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky, director of educational technology at The Frisch School in Paramus, N.J., expressed doubts as well.

“Teenagers are freaked out by Google Glass,” he said. “Who would want to have these glasses on all the time? It’s scary.”

Ultimately, however, many believe that it’s just a matter of time before Glass becomes more widely accepted. Many technologies now considered indispensable were greeted initially with skepticism.

“If people adopt it at the rate that they adopted smartphones,” Schwartz predicts, “then it will have a huge impact on Jewish life.”

(JTA) — Itzik Shanan and Abbas Suan watched last week as 100,000 English soccer fans sang along to a live performance by a multiracial quartet at London’s Wembley Stadium.

Shanan, who started a campaign to eliminate racism from Israeli soccer, and Suan, a well-known Arab-Israeli player, were in Britain for five days of anti-hooliganism training in advance of Israel’s hosting next month of a major international soccer tournament.

For Shanan, the operatic rendition of “Abide With Me,” a Christian hymn that has become something of a soccer anthem, was a reminder of the sport’s potential — and its pitfalls.

“It was amazingly cultural,” Shanan told JTA. “It showed me soccer can be truly a cultural event, but [also] reminded me of the long road that lies ahead of Israeli soccer until we catch up to England.”

The ground Shanan believes Israeli soccer needs to cover is not on the field.

For the past decade, England’s Football Association, or F.A., has trained dozens of Israeli activists who hope to re-create what they view as the F.A.’s success in reducing widespread displays of racism that tarnished the image of English soccer. Shanan and Suan were part of a delegation of 10 Israeli Jews and Arabs in Britain last week for F.A. training.

England is described as “a world leader in dealing with soccer racism and hooliganism” on the website of the New Israel Fund, the U.S.-based social justice group that created and bankrolls Shanan’s nonprofit, Kick Racism Out of Israeli Football.

But a recent spate of anti-Semitic incidents in English soccer, and the F.A.’s refusal to fully adopt new European countermeasures, are making some question the association’s suitability to instruct others in countering racist tendencies among fans.

“Clearly, Britain has not resolved its soccer racism and violence problem and is therefore no model for Israel,” said Manfred Gerstenfeld, a Dutch-born scholar of European anti-Semitism at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Critics such as Gerstenfeld point to a string of troubling incidents over the past year.

In November, several West Ham fans hissed loudly to evoke the sound of Nazi gas chambers and gave what appeared to be the Nazi salute. The incident occurred during a match against the Tottenham Hotspurs, a club long associated with North London’s Jewish community. A statement from West Ham subsequently said that two supporters had been “cautioned for racially aggravated gesturing.”

Since then, Israeli midfielder Yossi Benayoun of Chelsea has been the repeated target of anti-Semitic hate speech. Police are investigating the latest incident, in which Benayoun was the target of an anti-Semitic epithet on Twitter. And in January, the Israeli-born Tal Ben Haim, who plays for the Queens Park Rangers, was subject to anti-Semitic abuse on the soccer club’s official Facebook page.

Meanwhile, anti-Semitic slogans are routinely heard at soccer matches elsewhere in Europe. In Budapest, fans shouted Nazi slogans at the Israeli national team during a friendly match in August. In Italy, fans of the Lazio club also chanted anti-Semitic slogans during a match against Tottenham; some are believed to have participated in the stabbing of a Tottenham fan at a Rome bar.

Incidents like these prompted the Union of European Football Associations, or UEFA, to introduce a 10-game ban on anyone caught engaging in racist abuse.

In England, the F.A. last week introduced a five-game ban, drawing sharp criticism. Jason Roberts, a black British soccer player, said it exposed “bad decisions, lack of will, lack of consultation and lack of leadership” by the F.A.

The chairman of England’s Kick It Out organization — one of the F.A.’s main partners in the fight against racism and the inspiration for Shanan’s outfit – warned, “We will look stupid if UEFA goes with 10 and we go with five.”

In December, Kick It Out Chairman Herman Ouseley criticized the F.A. for “delaying” a detailed plan to fight soccer racism.

David Bernstein, the F.A.’s Jewish chairman, told the BBC that a 10-game ban “lacks subtlety” and would limit the association’s ability to treat “different levels of offenses.”

F.A. spokesman Scott Field told JTA that his organization’s work in Israel “doesn’t mean we’re taking our eyes off the ball in England. Expressions of racism do sometimes occur here, but it’s not inappropriate for us to contribute to another community.”

Still, the F.A. does have a proven record on curbing racism, according to Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust, British Jewry’s anti-Semitism watchdog.

“In England of the 1980s, soccer stadiums became recruiting grounds for neo-Nazi groups, and members would regularly make racist and anti-Semitic chants,” Rich told JTA. That conduct “sometimes happens … [but has] largely disappeared from major English soccer matches.”

According to Rich, this has been achieved through a combination of F.A. action and the Kick It Out organization, which the F.A. helped establish in 1993. Focusing on preventing racism through education, Kick It Out organizes summer activities for children, workshops for soccer players and seminars for educators.

It also inspired Shanan’s Kick Racism Out of Israeli Football organization, which for the past decade has used Kick It Out tools with some local adaptations.

“One lesson we learned from England is to integrate Arab and Jewish children in one team instead of letting them play on opposite teams,” Shanan said.

As in Britain, Israeli soccer racism continues to be a problem despite the efforts of police and activists. The signing of two Chechen Muslims by Beitar Jerusalem this year led to the torching of the team’s trophy room. Last year, Beitar fans attacked several Arabs at Jerusalem’s Malha Mall.

Gerstenfeld, a Dutchman who moved to Jerusalem in 1968, acknowledges that racism exists in Israeli soccer, but is nothing compared to the violence endemic to British and Dutch soccer.

“I remember going to soccer matches as a boy in the Netherlands before racism and hooliganism set in,” he recalls. “Perhaps you need a psychiatrist to explain how it happened.”

Adam Green, a Londoner and Chelsea supporter in Amsterdam last week to watch his team battle Portugal’s Benfica in the Europa League final, offered a simpler distillation of the football hooligan’s credo.

“It’ll go fine if we win,” Green said. “But if we lose, you’re the enemy and we will burn this city the f*** down.”

Fortunately for Amsterdam, Chelsea defeated Benfica, 2-1.

Dov Lipman, an American-born haredi Orthodox Knesset member for the centrist Yesh Atid party, speaking on the Knesset floor, March 2013. (Miriam Alster/Flash90/JTA)

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Dov Lipman has staked his budding political career on his reputation as a moderate haredi Orthodox leader, someone uniquely positioned to broker compromise between Israel’s increasingly polarized secular and religious communities.

The problem is that Israel’s haredi leaders say he’s not actually haredi.

Once seen as a possible bridge between Israel’s growing haredi community and the secular majority, Lipman, a freshman member of Knesset from the centrist Yesh Atid party, has weathered a torrent of criticism aimed at discrediting his haredi bona fides since his election in January.

“He calls himself haredi and advocates positions that are universally rejected by the leading halachic representatives of the community and the community at large,” said Jonathan Rosenblum, a columnist for the haredi Mishpacha magazine. “It’s very hard for me to understand someone who is haredi being part of a party that signs off on these positions on [Jewish] conversion and homosexual marriage.”

Lipman supports a number of laws now being formulated that would roll back privileges long enjoyed by haredim in Israel, notably exemption from the military draft and the public funding of their schools. He favors the creation of an egalitarian prayer section at the Western Wall and belongs to a party that advocates the legalization of same-sex marriage.

And on top of all that, he wears a blue suit — not the traditional haredi black.

The attacks, Lipman says, show that haredi leaders are more interested in leveling personal attacks than debating policy. Laws under discussion — including one mandating the teaching of some secular subjects in haredi schools — benefit the haredi community, he says, without posing a threat to its way of life.

“It’s not a question of who’s haredi or not haredi,” he told JTA. “Let’s talk about the issues. Why should an ultra-Orthodox male not have math and English and enter the workforce?”

Lipman was a teacher and principal in Cincinnati and Maryland before moving to Israel in 2004 with his wife and three children. The Lipmans settled in Beit Shemesh, a Jerusalem suburb where simmering tensions between haredi and secular Jews erupted in 2011 after haredi men harassed an 8-year-old Modern Orthodox girl they believed was not dressing in a sufficiently modest manner.

Taking on the role of peacemaker, Lipman worked to find common ground between the sides. But local haredi leaders, the city’s mayor among them, believed he was opposing Beit Shemesh’s haredi sector.

In 2012, Lipman joined Yesh Atid, a new party that galvanized the Israeli middle class, in part with its promise to end the longstanding haredi draft exemption.

For the party, Lipman’s membership was a powerful symbol, a sign that Orthodox opposition to the draft was not universal. But Lipman’s support for the Yesh Atid agenda led to charges that he was being disingenuous and not truly a member of the community he claimed to represent.

“I ask one thing from MK Lipman,” Knesset member Yaakov Asher, of the haredi United Torah Judaism party, said in parliament on May 1. “Don’t speak as a haredi when you’re not really. Don’t make a joke out of people when you entered Knesset just because someone made a mistake and thought that because of how you look, you’re haredi.”

Lipman has said his ultimate goal is for Israeli haredim to adopt the lifestyle of their American counterparts, who often gain some secular education and work full-time jobs. But even American haredi leaders have lashed out at him.

Rabbi Aharon Feldman, who heads the Baltimore haredi yeshiva Ner Yisroel where Lipman was ordained a rabbi, called him “wicked.” And though Feldman apologized soon afterward, he has been unsparing in his criticism, calling Lipman “extremely misguided” and accusing him of eroding the holiness of the haredi community by compelling its students to study secular subjects.

“You attack the people who look like you the most,” said Menachem Friedman, an expert on the Israeli haredi community at Bar-Ilan University. “The most similar political opponents are seen as the biggest threats.”

Rosenblum, the columnist, said that what works in the United States won’t necessarily succeed in Israel. He noted that increasing numbers of Israeli haredim have been joining the army and the workforce of their own accord, and that compelling them to do so by law would push them into a defensive posture.

“If they see the government coming to change the haredi way of life, that’s a frontal attack,” he said. “When [politicians] seem to be in a mode of not simply coming to facilitate changes that are already taking place, the historical reaction is to resist with full force.”

Lipman hopes that once haredim deprived of government subsidies are forced to work, they will see the benefits of their changed circumstances. He acknowledged, though, that given the animosity he has faced, continued intransigence is at least as likely.

“The change will happen when they go to work and have education,” he said, adding, “It might take a generation or two.”

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