Tucsonan Bill Kugelman and teens from the Western region of the United States lead the March of the Living from Auschwitz to Birkenau in Poland on April 19. (Courtesy CJE) Holocaust survivor Bill Kugelman has been to Birkenau before, once on a previous March of the Living trip in 2006, and as a prisoner of the Nazis. From 1939 to 1945, Kugelman, 88, spent three and a half years in concentration camps, including Birkenau, and two and a half… Read more »
WEST BLOOMFIELD, Mich. (JTA) — A few months after my first child was born, I went to a bookstore to buy a few books that I thought needed to be on the bookshelf of my new baby’s nursery. Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” was one of those… Read more »
President Obama embraces Elie Wiesel before delivering a speech about the Holocaust and its meaning at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, April 23, 2012. (Courtesy USHMM) WASHINGTON (JTA) — One by one, the emails from the White House arrived in inboxes across Washington on Monday morning, each highlighting a unique initiative toward a different corner of the globe: Syria. Iran. Uganda. The unifying factor was the president’s appearance that day at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial… Read more »
NEW YORK (JTA) — Lithuania’s 800-year-old connection to its Jewish population broke down in 1941, when the Nazis invaded the country and murdered nearly all of its 200,000 Jews – often with the complicity of local Lithuanians. This month, 70 years on, Lithuania finally passed historic compensation legislation to… Read more »
The cover of artist Stan Lebovic’s book reads “Black is a Color, by a survivor’s son.” But in his search for meaning in the aftermath of the Holocaust, “I don’t focus on the negativity,” Lebovic promises. Instead, he finds hope and inspiration in the resilience of the Jewish people.… Read more »
Young Jews entering the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camp in Poland during the 2010 March of the Living. (March of Living International) NEW YORK (JTA) — Bernhard Storch grew up in a Jewish family in Silesia, near Poland’s border with Germany. Like many Polish Jews, he moved quickly from town to town as the Nazis advanced in 1939, trying to avoid capture. Before long he was caught and sent to a… Read more »
Eva Vavrecka contemplating the horrific living conditions that her mother and grandparents endured in the forest to survive World War II. (Bruce Konviser) TRSICE, Czech Republic (JTA) — Nearly 70 years after a Czech Jewish family sought refuge from the Nazis by retreating into a nearby forest and relying on non-Jewish locals for help, an American high school teacher has helped erect a permanent monument to their memory. Last week, several dozen… Read more »
Marion Achtentuch, 83, with her granddaughter, Shira Sheps, 25. (Shira Sheps) (JTA) — Shira Sheps remembers walking through an exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan and stumbling upon her grandmother’s long-ago school reports alongside family photos and her great-grandparents’ wedding invitation. Sheps, 25, had known that her grandmother shortly after Kristallnacht had left Furth, Germany, at… Read more »
Re: “Toulouse attack leaves French Jews shaken” (AJP 3/23/12). There’s an old French proverb, “Autres temps, autres moeurs.” English equivalent: “times change.” I thought of that saying after hearing about the world’s response to the recent murders of three Jewish children and a teacher at the Ozar Hatorah school… Read more »
The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost friends and relatives. KIBBUTZ YAD MORDECHAI, Israel (JTA) — In a far-off corner of this quiet farm a handful of miles from the Gaza Strip as the rocket flies, down a dirt road that peels off from an old Arab… Read more »
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Though the death last weekend of John Demjanjuk brought a close to the seemingly never-ending quest for justice in the case of a man long accused of being a Nazi war criminal, it also brought a premature end to the legal battle over his legacy. Though… Read more »
Sol Factor, who was given up by a mother who was in a displaced persons' camp, is looking for information about his family tree. (Courtesy Sol Factor) The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost friends and relatives. BALTIMORE (JTA) — Sol Factor recalls a happy childhood in circa-1950s Boston suburbia with his physician-father Joseph, teacher-mother Bernice and younger sister Rachel. His first life, as Meier Pollak — born in 1946 near a displaced persons’… Read more »
BALTIMORE (JTA) — Do the names Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Erwin Schulhoff and Viktor Ullman ring a bell? How about Ferdinand Hiller, Ignaz Moscheles, Henry Herz, Giacomo Meyerbeer and Karl Goldmark? They mean everything to Michael Wolpe, an Israeli pianist who considers himself first and foremost a composer —… Read more »
Evan Kaufmann, a U.S.-born hockey player whose great-grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, is now representing the German national team. (Courtesy Eishockey Magazin) WEST BLOOMFIELD, Mich. (JTA) — More than 65 years ago, Evan Kaufmann’s great-grandparents were murdered in the Auschwitz death camp. Now he is taking the ice for the German national hockey team. Following a successful hockey career at the University of Minnesota, Kaufmann tried out for several professional clubs… Read more »
Each stone at the Treblinka memorial represents a Jewish town or city that had its people exterminated at the camp. (Little Savage via CC) (JTA) — Scientists using ground-probing electronics may have discovered the missing mass graves at the site of Treblinka, one of the Nazis’ most notorious death camps. No actual bodies were found and the graves were not excavated, in keeping with Jewish law, but bones and bone fragments were discovered… Read more »
NEW YORK (JTA) — It is virtually impossible to imagine anything more reprehensible than the recent spectacle of haredi Orthodox Jewish boys wearing yellow stars of David and simulated striped black-and-white concentration camp uniforms at a demonstration in Jerusalem. Offended by the Israeli authorities’ efforts to curtail the verbal… Read more »
JTA’s new “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost friends and relatives. BALTIMORE (JTA) — Even after seven decades, Peter Nurnberger’s most basic biographical facts remain elusive. The Slovakian doesn’t know his birth date, his natural parents’ fate or whether they had any other children. Peter’s adoptive parents… Read more »
Alex Dunai, second from right, has become a leading purveyor of Jewish heritage tourism in Ukraine. (Alex Weisler) LVIV, Ukraine (JTA) — Alex Dunai is not Jewish. But over 15 years of leading Jewish tourists searching for their roots in Ukraine, he’s built up a serviceable knowledge of Yiddish — though sometimes he has to make things up. “I make up sayings — you have highway roads,… Read more »
Gustav Zoltay, left, the director of the Federation o Hungarian Jewish communities, and Peter Feldmajor, its president, at the founding of the new Hungarian Jewish Congress. (Szabolcs Panyi) BUDAPEST (JTA) — A whistle-blowing rabbi and a reform-minded lay leader are at the forefront of new efforts to shake up Hungary’s entrenched Jewish establishment. Late last year, Rabbi Zoltan Radnoti reportedly alerted authorities to complaints of embezzlement and tax fraud in the operation of Budapest’s main Jewish cemetery… Read more »
Rep. Ron Paul, a Republican candidate for president whose views on Israel have unsettled some Jewish conservatives, speaking at the Western Republican Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, Oct. 19, 2011. (Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons) / WASHINGTON (JTA) — Ron Paul’s unlikely rise in the Republican presidential race has Jewish conservatives on edge. The Texas congressman had been regarded as a fringe figure whose views, especially on foreign policy — including his opposition to the U.S.-Israel alliance — put him far outside the Republican mainstream.… Read more »
