Tagged Yad Vashem

Susan Kasle is vice president of community services at Jewish Family & Children’s Services of Southern Arizona, which coordinates services for Holocaust survivors living in Southern Arizona. For Kasle, a highlight of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona’s recent interfaith mission was representing JFCS during the mission’s Nov. 3… Read more »

JERUSALEM (JTA) — An Israeli businessman will turn over to Yad Vashem a letter written by an 11-year-old Polish girl killed in the Holocaust after its sale by auction was blocked by a Tel Aviv court. Dudi Zilbershlag agreed to give the letter to the Holocaust memorial museum in… Read more »

TEL AVIV (JTA) – One evening as a child in Petach Tikvah, I was in my room listening to the Iraqi Jewish singer Salima Mourad when a siren pierced the air. I rose from my bed and stood in silence. The siren marked the start of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust… Read more »

(JTA) — President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil said that Nazism was a leftist movement following his visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. The far-right leader was asked on Tuesday during his visit to Israel if he agreed with a recent claim by his foreign minister, Ernesto Araujo,… Read more »

BERLIN (JTA) — Israeli author Eldad Beck regards Angela Merkel‘s engagement with Israel and Judaism as “spectacular.” Germany’s chancellor has “developed a very personal connection to the State of Israel and the Jewish people, one of the rare German politicians who – when speaking about lessons learned from the past – really knows what… Read more »

JERUSALEM (JTA) – For decades as an adult, Lore Mayerfeld kept a doll on a chair in an off-limits bedroom or high on a shelf. Her children – and later her grandchildren and great-grandchildren – knew not to play with the toy for fear of breaking it. Dressed in… Read more »

(JTA) — The Polish parliament’s bill to criminalize the use of the term “Polish death camps” prompted an avalanche of criticism in Israel by officials and individuals who warned that it is excessive and risks stifling research on the Holocaust. Following the bill’s passing Friday in the Sejm, or the lower… Read more »

Traveling to Israel is like entering a time machine, where you connect to the past amidst advanced technology. Rabbi Israel Becker and his wife Esther of Congregation Chofetz Chayim led five people on a spiritual journey to Israel Oct. 15-26 with the theme of “Where the Past Shapes Your… Read more »

Carolin Haase Atchison

For more than three years, I have been researching my family’s history — and I’m still at it. When I received the results of my DNA test a couple of years ago, I was surprised, like the actors in the Ancestry TV ads. Instead of being of mainly German… Read more »

JERUSALEM (JTA) — President Donald Trump will spend just 30 minutes at Yad Vashem on the second and last day of his visit to Israel, but the leadership of the Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem plans to use the brief time to deliver a powerful message. Rather than bombarding Trump with facts… 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 »

(JTA) — Shira Goldberg stepped across the stage at East Henderson High School in western North Carolina and presented a yellowed letter to Shani Lourie. The letter’s writer, a German woman seeking help in escaping the Nazis from an American man she believed was a relative, was Shira’s distant… Read more »

WARSAW (JTA) — In a carriage bound for the Warsaw Zoo, Moshe Tirosh could sense his parents’ fear and the strong odor of alcohol wafting from the direction of the driver and his horse. The trepidation that rainy night in 1940 was from the Nazi soldiers guarding the Kierbedzia… Read more »

Israeli arcaeologist Yoram Haimi, right, has been warning of threats to important historical artifacts at the Sobibor death camp in Poland, September 2013. (Courtesy of Yoram Haimi)

SOBIBOR, Poland (JTA) — After he uncovered the path that two of his uncles followed to the gas chambers at Sobibor, Yoram Haimi thought the complex he had worked years to unearth would be preserved for posterity. So when Polish authorities announced in 2011 that they would build a… Read more »

Pope Francis touches the wall that separates Israel from the West Bank on his way to celebrate a mass in Manger Square in Bethlehem, May 25, 2014. (Nour Shamaly/POOL/Flash90)

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Perhaps the most lasting image from Pope Francis’ trip to Israel and the West Bank will be the pontiff praying, eyes closed, with his head against a wall. It wasn’t the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest site and a necessary stop for visiting dignitaries. It… Read more »

The “Seeking Kin” column aims to help reunite long-lost friends and relatives. BALTIMORE (JTA) — For Carla Greenspan, the news was upsetting: A relative by marriage of the man who saved her mother’s life during the Holocaust was spurning an award from Yad Vashem. “It’s a sad legacy for… Read more »

Raymond-Raoul Lambert, seen in his Strasbourg office in the 1930s, founded the Committee for Assistance to Refugees. (Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum)

(JTA) — His hearing isn’t what it used to be, but Georges Loinger still remembers Adolf Hitler’s voice emanating from the radio at his Strasbourg home. Growing up in the heavily Germanic Alsace region of eastern France, Loinger and his family tuned in regularly to broadcasts of Hitler’s speeches.… Read more »

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,… Read more »

German officials laying a wreath at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as Claims Conference officials look on, May 2103.

NEW YORK (JTA) – The German government agreed to significantly expand its funding of home care for infirm Holocaust survivors and relax eligibility criteria for restitution programs to include Jews who spent time in so-called open ghettos. The agreement, reached after negotiations in Israel with the Claims Conference, will… Read more »

President Barack Obama, left, talking with Chief of Staff Jack Lew, center, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as they walk on the colonnade of the White House, shortly before the president announced Lew as hs nominee to replace Geithner as treasury secretary, Jan. 10, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Obama believes prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace are “bleak,” but he still will urge both sides to avoid unilateral actions that might further damage a process he hopes will be back on track within a year. That was the message Obama delivered Thursday in a meeting… Read more »