Tagged Auschwitz

(JTA) — Utensils, tools and scraps of leather were found in a prisoners’ block at Auschwitz during renovation and restoration work. The objects were discovered last month hidden beneath a chimney flue in block 17 of the main camp, Austria’s National Fund for Victims of National Socialism told the… Read more »

(JTA) — A senior Islamic leader will visit Auschwitz as part of a memorandum of understanding signed between the Muslim World League and the American Jewish Committee. Dr. Mohammad Abdulkarim Al-Issa, secretary general of the Muslim World League, will join American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris at the 75th… Read more »

KRAKOW, Poland (JTA) — At the age of 93, Holocaust survivor Ed Mosberg is saying his goodbyes to the city of his birth. Flanked by two physicians who accompanied him all the way from New Jersey, Mosberg, who made his fortune in construction after surviving several Nazi concentration camps,… Read more »

(JTA) — Vice President Mike Pence will visit Auschwitz, his first visit to the Nazi death camp in Poland. Pence will visit the site on Friday with Polish President Andrzej Duda, The Washington Post reported Tuesday, citing a senior White House official. The vice president will be in Warsaw… Read more »

(JTA) — The British soccer club Chelsea is planning to send fans who are caught chanting anti-Semitic songs on a tour of the former death camp Auschwitz rather than punishing them. The team’s owner, Roman Abramovich, who is Jewish, has spearheaded the initiative to combat anti-Semitism, according to a… Read more »

It takes a special kind of courage to revisit your worst memories. When Holocaust survivor Pawel Lichter of Tucson accompanied a group of Jewish teens on the 29th annual March of the Living, April 19-May 3, he stepped back to 1939. In a basement on Warszawska Street, in his… Read more »

  OSWIECIM, Poland (JTA) — I did a shameful thing on my first visit 20 years ago to the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In a guestbook outside an Auschwitz museum exhibit featuring information on 70,000 Polish non-Jews who were murdered here, I downplayed the significance of their deaths… Read more »

  OSWIECIM, Poland (JTA) — Long before he moved here to become the spokesman for the Auschwitz museum and lead its social media effort, Pawel Sawicki’s life was intricately connected to this sleepy town near Krakow. A Warsaw-area radio journalist, Sawicki used to visit Oswiecim as a boy on… Read more »

Jonathan McMahan, Rural/Metro Fire Department chief in Pima County, was recently in Poland as one of seven U.S. fire chiefs invited to present a symposium on American firefighting expertise at the Main School of the Fire Service in Warsaw. This was the first delegation of U.S. fire chiefs invited… Read more »

SEEKING KIN The Seeking Kin column aims to help reunite long-lost relatives and friends. NIR GALIM, Israel (JTA) – On a recent afternoon in a museum in this moshav community near the port city of Ashdod, Hodaya Gadba held up a black-and-white photograph of a three-story building and pronounced,… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) — The evening before we visited Auschwitz, over pizza with a group of young people in Oswiecim, the town on whose outskirts lies that infamous symbol, one of my students approached me with tears in her eyes. Tears are hardly uncommon to visitors of sites of… Read more »

The anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Jan. 27 was a cold, snowy, windy day. The slush surrounding the former concentration camp was frozen into icy slurry when I arrived by bus from Krakow in the early morning. It was on this day 70 years ago that Red… Read more »

(L-R): Johnny Pekats (U.S.); Mordechai Ronen (Canada); Ronald Lauder; Rose Schindler (U.S.); Joseph Madrowitz (U.S.) (Courtesy Shahar Azran)

AUSCHWITZ, POLAND– Fifteen Auschwitz survivors, aged 80-94, returned this morning, Monday January 26, to the infamous death camp, Auschwitz, some for the first time. Ahead of the 70th anniversary celebration of the Auschwitz liberation on January 27, the World Jewish Congress (WJC), the USC Shoah Foundation, organized the historic visit… Read more »

KRAKOW, Poland (JTA) — Holocaust survivors gathered in Krakow on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz amid unease regarding the safety of Jews in Europe. Some 100 survivors from 19 countries — each with a child, grandchild or companion — are expected to attend official ceremonies on… Read more »

Youth from Ioannina's Greek community, in traditional dress, hold candles to be lit in memory of more than 500 children who were deported to Auschwitz. (Gavin Rabinowitz)

IOANNINA, Greece (JTA) — When the Jews of Ioannina gathered in their whitewashed-stone synagogue over the weekend, it was to commemorate 70 years since the Nazis destroyed their community. But the March 30 gathering also served to highlight a source of present-day sadness: the withering of the unique 2,300… Read more »

Pope John Paul II places a letter between the stones of Jerusalem's Western Wall on March 26, 2000. (Amos Ben Gershom/Israel Government Press Office via Getty Images)

(JTA) — Popes John XXIII and John Paul II are being declared saints of the Roman Catholic church on April 27, the day that is also the eve of Yom Hashoah.  It’s a coincidence but a notable one.  These two post-Holocaust pontiffs revolutionized relations between Catholics and Jews, fostering… Read more »

Fifty-eight Israeli lawmakers marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day at Auschwitz, Jan. 27, 2014. (Cnaan Liphshiz)

OSWIECIM, Poland (JTA) — Watching thousands of Poles dance to Klezmer music just 50 miles from the Auschwitz death camp, Johnny Daniels could feel an ambitious plan taking shape. The experience last year at Krakow’s annual Jewish Culture Festival prompted Daniels, a 28-year-old Israeli and Holocaust educator, to organize… Read more »

Michaela Davenport at the Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. (Courtesy Michaela Davenport)

                      Walking through the famous gate “arbeit macht frei” at Auschwitz, I felt sick to my stomach. I’d seen that gate, with its infamous Nazi inscription, “work makes you free,” in history textbooks, photos and movies, but seeing it… Read more »

BERLIN (JTA) — I was 23 when I first met my cousin Gilbert Michlin. He was sitting at a brasserie near his office in Paris wearing a dark suit with a folded handkerchief poking out of the breast pocket. His short, dark hair was perfectly combed. He said, in… Read more »

George McGovern signing his book "Abraham Lincoln" at the Richard M. Nixon Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif., August 2009. (Scott Clarkson via CC)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — George McGovern is widely remembered for advocating immediate American withdrawal from Vietnam and sharp reductions in defense spending. Yet despite his reputation as a pacifist, the former U.S. senator and 1972 presidential candidate, who died Sunday at 90, did believe there were times when America should… Read more »