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Post by Bonobo on May 3, 2009 18:37:58 GMT 1
Israel thought in Polish.by Szewach Weiss
In my several books with Jewish anecdotes there was such one: in 1940s, one Jewish politician says to another: If not for that XYZ ( a foreign Jew), we would be able to speak only Polish with each other. Polish archivist wins righteous gentile award May 12, 2009 NEW YORK (JTA) -- An archivist who has spent his life trying to preserve Jewish monuments in Poland will receive a San Francisco foundation's annual righteous gentile award. Jan Jagielski, chief archivist at the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, will receive the Irena Sendler Memorial Award from the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture. Jagielski was the first to initiate in the pre-1989 communist era a project to document and preserve what remained of Jewish monuments in Poland. He has co-produced numerous guidebooks about prewar Jewish history in Warsaw and leads a conservation program at the institute. The award, named for the late righteous gentile who saved some 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, is given each year to a non-Jewish Pole who helps preserve Jewish life in the country. Jagielski will receive the award at the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow on July 1.
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Post by Bonobo on May 9, 2009 22:31:06 GMT 1
Saved by a Polish family
MONIQUE POLAK The Montreal Gazette Saturday, April 11, 2009
Clara's War By Clara Kramer with Stephen Glantz McClelland & Stewart, 340 pages, $32.99
Clara Kramer was 12, one of 5,000 Jews in the Polish town of Zolkiew, when the war broke out. Only 50 of Zolkiew's Jews survived the Holocaust. Clara, her parents, a niece and nephew, and three other families - 18 people in all - were saved by a Polish gentile family named Beck.
Though Clara's War is a harrowing account of Kramer's experience, the most fascinating characters are the Becks.
Julia Beck was the housekeeper in Clara's home. Her husband, Valentin, was a boozer, womanizer and unabashed anti-Semite. And yet the Becks and their daughter risked their lives to save this group of Jews.
Clara and the others spent 18 months in a bunker dug out beneath the home the Becks lived in. Though at first the Becks were paid for providing shelter, they continued to protect the group after the money ran out.
Valentin Beck emerges as a rougher, working-class version of Oskar Schindler. Like Schindler, Beck consorted with the Nazis and tormented his wife with his infidelities. The situation in the bunker is destabilized when Beck has an affair with one of its residents, a woman who before the war was his wife's closest friend.
This book is full of heart-wrenching details. Valentin beats Julia when she complains about his infidelities. A fire breaks out in the house; Clara's sister runs off, straight into the hands of the Nazis. The inhabitants of the bunker hear screams and gunfire when Zolkiew's Jewish ghetto is destroyed. Afterward, "the silence was worse."
And yet, somehow, miraculously, mercifully, humanity finds its way into this story. Clara teaches her nephew to read. The starving women argue about which type of raisins are best in noodle pudding, a purely theoretical argument. Clara's mother insists Clara keep a diary. In a wonderful twist that could only happen in real life, that diary helps save the Becks' lives.
Now 81 and living in New Jersey, Clara has dedicated her life to Holocaust education. After the war, she and her family emigrated to Israel, where her family lived on the same street as the families with whom they had lived in the bunker. To this day, the families - and now their descendants - gather for important celebrations. Valentin and Julia Beck are dead, but in 2005, their grandchildren, who still live in Poland, joined the group on a visit to Zhukova, the town once known as Zolkiew.
Monique Polak's latest novel is What World Is Left.-------------------------------------------------
CBS presents the story of unknown Holocaust hero Tuesday April 14th, 2009 BY SARAH KELFORD TV MEDIA
It is hard to say if you would put your life at risk for a complete stranger. We all would like to say we would, but for one woman in Nazi-invaded Poland, there was no other choice. Click to Enlarge The heroic story of Irena Sendler is coming to the small screen on Sunday, April 19, on CBS with Academy Award winner Anna Paquin (shown at right) playing the woman credited with saving the lives of 2,500 Jewish children from Nazi-invaded Poland.
Nobel Peace Prize nominee Irena Sendler put her life at risk day after day for years, saving 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War.
Her story, "The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler," is being brought to the small screen, airing Sunday, April 19, on CBS, courtesy of Hallmark Hall of Fame productions.
Academy Award winner Anna Paquin ("The Piano") will portray Sendler, while Academy Award winner Marcia Gay Harden ("Mystic River") will play Irena's mother, Janina. Rounding out the cast are Goran Visnjic ("ER") and Nathaniel Parker ("The Inspector Lynley Mysteries").
Parker plays Dr. Majkowski, the head of Warsaw's Department of Health, who helped Sendler obtain important resources and documents for her mission.Visnjic portrays Stefan, a former university friend with whom she fell in love when she started her work in the Warsaw ghetto.
In 1942, the newly created Children's Section of the Zegota (Council for Aid to Jews) nominated Sendler, under her secret name Jolanta, to head its children's department.
Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker, wasn't even 30 years old when she led the conspiracy of women who moved in and out of the Warsaw ghetto disguised as nurses, smuggling Jewish children away from the Nazis.The group worked under the guise of attempting to prevent and contain typhus and spotted fever, as rampant diseases were a major concern for the Nazis.
Sendler had the difficult task of convincing Jewish parents to give up their children to a stranger, while risking her life. Once in her hands, the children were hidden inside boxes, coffins and suitcases to rescue them from deportation to death camps.
The children, all 2,500 of them, were given new identities and placed under the care of equally courageous Polish families and convents, with the hope that some day they would reunite with their family.
Sendler kept a hidden record of every child's birth name and location to help them after the war.
In 1943, the Nazis figured out what Sendler was doing, and they arrested and tortured her. On the day of her scheduled execution, she was rescued by the underground network with which she worked. The women had bribed the Nazi officer, who let Sendler go. Still wanted by the Gestapo, she remained in hiding until the war was over.harvest.canadaeast.com/image.php?id=277194&size=500x0---------------------------------------------------------
A Righteous Role Anna Paquin stars as Catholic social worker turned Warsaw Ghetto rescuer in "The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler."
By Naomi Pfefferman
JewishJournal. com
4/16/09
Paquin as Irena Sendler
Paquin as Irena Sendler
Anna Paquin was 11 when she won an Oscar for her performance in "The Piano" and in her mid-20s when she took the 2009 Golden Globe for her leading role in HBO's vampire series, "True Blood," but as she locked up her bicycle on a funky stretch of Abbot Kinney Boulevard the other day, she looked like just another young woman from the neighborhood. "Thanks for schlepping down to Venice," she said as a greeting.
In person, the 26-year-old Paquin is as cheery and down-to-earth — and at the same time as direct and determined — as her "True Blood" character, a telepathic waitress with a penchant for short shorts and the 173-year-old vampire Bill played by Stephen Moyer, who is also Paquin's real-life boyfriend. On this day, the New Zealand native wore bicycle shorts, her blonde hair was in a ponytail and her face had no sign of makeup. She was both accessible and upbeat, despite the fact that she had gotten off work from the second season of "True Blood" at 4 a.m., slept a few hours, then had to bike to the interview, since she does not know how to drive.
"No worries," she said of her schedule. "The rest of the world doesn't run on vampire hours just because I do."
Paquin came to discuss her upcoming Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, "The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler," in which she plays the titular Catholic Polish social worker who organized the rescue of some 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. The movie airs April 19 on CBS.
For 16 months, starting in 1942, Sendler — who was nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize — organized fellow volunteers in the Polish underground to smuggle children out of the ghetto in sacks and suitcases, in packages and body bags, through sewers and subterranean passages. When the Gestapo arrested and tortured Sendler in 1943, she refused to divulge details of her operation, so they broke her legs and feet, leaving her permanently disabled.
The Hallmark film is not a sweeping saga of the Holocaust in the style of "The Pianist" or "Schindler's List," but rather a more intimate drama focused on what must have been Sendler's most excruciating task: convincing terrified parents to relinquish their children to an uncertain fate.
Paquin says she was drawn to the project not only for the chance to play an inspiring heroine, but also because the part marks a milestone in her own career. "I feel like this is the first time I have ever really played an adult in a film, not just as far as the age indicated in the character description, but in terms of the world in which Irena was living, her interactions with others and the decisions she makes," the actress said. "I loved not being allowed to act in any way like a child.'"
The movie's writer and director, John Kent Harrison, said Paquin was his first choice to play Sendler. "Irena was matter-of-fact, almost cold-hearted in her approach to asking parents to give up their children, because in those dire times there was no room for sentimentality, " he said by telephone. "And Anna has a toughness at her center, having started in the business so young. She's been making movies since she was 9, and, at 26, she's a veteran." Irena Sendler
The third and youngest child of school teachers, Paquin had no acting experience when, on a lark, she accompanied her older sister, Katya, to an audition for "The Piano." Jane Campion's lyrical screenplay revolved around a mute piano virtuoso, Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), who arrives in rural New Zealand as a mail-order bride in the 1850s with her daughter, Flora (Paquin), in tow. Initially, Paquin caught Campion's attention because she resembled Hunter, but she won the part over some 5,000 other girls by delivering an intense reading from the script and proved mesmerizing as the precocious, ferocious Flora, who spins fanciful yarns about her dead father, spies on her mother's illicit trysts and ultimately betrays Ada to her husband.
At the Oscars two years later, Paquin looked adorable in her blue dress and matching cap — as well as stunned — when Gene Hackman called her name as the winner of the best supporting actress category. The saucer-eyed little girl walked to the podium, which she barely was able to peer over, gulping and gasping for a full half minute before gaining her composure to thank Campion, et al. She literally stole the show from her category's more seasoned competitors, including Winona Ryder ("The Age of Innocence") and Emma Thompson ("In the Name of the Father").
It was during that Oscar season that Paquin says she received her first introduction to the subject of the Holocaust, since 1993 was also the year that "Schindler's List" swept the awards and won for best picture. "We hadn't studied that period in history yet," Paquin said of her elementary school in Wellington, New Zealand. "My parents did not allow me to see the movie, but they did explain what it was about."
After Paquin became the second-youngest Academy Award-winner in history, the actress went on to work with Spielberg, playing the young Queen Isabella II in 1997's "Amistad." She has also portrayed troubled sirens in independent films such as "25th Hour" and "The Squid and the Whale" as well as, famously, Rogue in the three "X-Men" films. "True Blood" features similar themes of bias toward the "other," and Paquin campaigned hard to convince series creator Alan Ball ("Six Feet Under") to cast her as the telepathic Sookie Stackhouse. The frothy, sexy series operates in part as an allegory for gay rights, featuring vampires as creatures fighting to obtain the right to marry and to live among humans. Paquin has once again proven herself, playing Sookie's emotions straight, without camping up the Southern or gothic aspects of the story. Irena Sendler
Anna Paquin and Rebecca Windheim in "The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler." Photo by Erik Heinila
In the pilot, Paquin's character used a heavy chain as a weapon to save vampire Bill Compton from becoming a hate-crime statistic: "The show is fun and fluffy," the actress said, "but there is also the idea of how we as a society assign a stricter and non-equitable set of rules to particular groups. It is also about how the process of trying to integrate into society as an outside group is messy and ugly, and many people aren't as open-minded as they should be. In our show, these ideas are presented in this very amusing and fantasy level, but they are completely grounded in our world and how people really behave.
"I'm generally not drawn to projects that work only on a surface level," she added. "And a topic that unfortunately always seems timely is prejudice. As a species we haven't overcome it, obviously. It keeps on needing to be addressed, in different ways — in everything from light fantasy to serious drama."
When her agent sent her Harrison's screenplay of "The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler," she was on vacation with Moyer in London last October: "I read it in about an hour on his iPhone, just staring at the screen with my mouth open," she recalled. "I couldn't quite believe she was actually a real person. I was just absolutely fascinated and in awe at how someone so young could be so strong in such a terrifying period of time. And I said, `OK, where do I sign up?'" The Piano
"The Piano"
Harrison sent Paquin a rough translation of Anna Mieszkowska' s "Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irena Sendler," a biography that had been published only in Polish, German and Hebrew, but has not yet come out in English. She "rapidly tore through" it and spent the following two weeks watching movies and reading books on the period: "What I found most powerful and helpful was a book titled `Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts From the Warsaw Ghetto,' which is composed of journal and diary entries," Paquin recalled. "I read about how guards would torture prisoners in front of others to scare them — really horrendous things like tying people up and letting dogs half-eat them; or the sort of ease with which people would be randomly shot. Those eyewitness accounts were as close as I could get to Irena's world — and what came through strongly was just how absolutely terrified and out of control people felt."
Sendler's sympathy for the Jewish plight began when she was growing up in and around Warsaw. Her father was the only physician in their town of Otwock willing to treat Jewish patients during a typhoid epidemic; he himself caught the disease and died in 1917, when Irena was 7.
Sendler followed his heroic example after Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were sealed off from the rest of the city by 10-foot-high walls. In 1942, she gathered a network of fellow social workers and volunteers — all sympathetic Polish Catholics — and began her operation to save children under the auspices of Zegota, a code name for the Council for Aid to Jews, a program of the Polish government in exile. The social workers were mostly female, which proved helpful because a woman could more easily walk past officials holding the hand of a Jewish child as if he or she were her own, often through corridors of a courthouse leading out of the ghetto to the Aryan side of the city.
After the children were ensconced in temporary housing, they were drilled in Catholic songs and prayers, their black hair was bleached blond and some boys were dressed as girls to trick the Gestapo out of checking to see whether they had been circumcised. The lucky ones received Catholic papers and were placed in a convent, an orphanage or with other rescuers for the duration of the war.
One mother tearfully handed over her infant, Elzbieta Ficowska, who was drugged, placed in a box with a silver spoon and hidden in a truck hauling bricks out of the ghetto; the scene is recreated in the film.
Because Sendler hoped to eventually reunite the children with their parents, she scribbled each one's name and location on scraps of paper and placed the notes in jars which she buried under an apple tree in an associate's yard in Warsaw. True Blood
"True Blood" Photo by John P Johnson
In 1943, the owner of a laundry that served as a safe house betrayed Sendler under torture. On Oct. 20 of that year, Gestapo agents arrested Sendler, tortured her for three months in the infamous Pawiak Prison and then sentenced her to death. Just before her execution, however, an officer bribed by Zegota arranged for her name to appear on a list of prisoners who had already been executed. Sendler escaped, and until the end of the war she continued to help children while living in hiding. Twenty years later, she became one of the first "Righteous Gentiles" to be honored by Yad Vashem. She saved twice the number of Jews as Oskar Schindler, the inspiration for "Schindler's List."
In Poland, however, the anti-Semitic communist regime was unimpressed by Sendler's wartime deeds. She remained in obscurity until 1999, when a group of Kansas high school students came across a short article on her in a 1994 issue of U.S. News & World Report and decided to turn her story into a history project. Because they assumed Sendler had died, the students contacted the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous to locate her grave. Instead they learned she was still living in Warsaw, though ailing and in a wheelchair. The students promptly wrote her a letter, and thus began a friendship that would lead to an interactive play "Life in a Jar," which the students performed all over the world, making international headlines. They also eventually visited the elderly rescuer.
Harrison wasn't so lucky; while writing his script in Warsaw last year, he had set up an interview with the 98-year-old social worker, but their meeting was canceled when Sendler was hospitalized with pneumonia; she died on May 12, 2008. Harrison attended the funeral at the Powazki cemetery and watched as Jewish community leaders, survivors, Polish ministers and the Israeli ambassador to Poland turned out to pay their last respects. A rabbi recited the Kaddish, Catholics chanted Christian prayers and Chopin's "Funeral March" was played during the burial.
Back at the Venice café, Paquin put down her cup of coffee and looked shocked when asked whether actors seek roles in Holocaust-themed films in order to win awards, as charged by The New York Times last year. "That's not what I find interesting about this kind of work. What is interesting is the chance to portray a strong, powerful woman, because there is such a dearth of such roles. Actresses often end up playing `the girlfriend' or the sex object; I love getting to be a part of a story that has nothing to do with that," she said.
Even so, when Paquin set off for the three-week shoot in Riga, Latvia, last winter, she did so with trepidation. "I spent the first week terrified that I wasn't doing a good enough job, because how could you possibly feel [the pain and fear] enough," she said. "But after a while you have to forgive yourself for not knowing what it's like to be tortured, and just do the best you can."
To play Sendler, Paquin at times accessed some of her own feelings about her sister's recent surgery; the 30-year-old Katya has had three operations so far for a brain tumor.
"It's that feeling of powerlessness, but at the same time having to buck up and be strong for somebody, because if you're scared, it doesn't even compare to how scared they are," the actress said.
"To play Irena you don't get to cry, you don't get to show that you're frightened. You have to be strong for the children and their parents, and I found that very empowering," she said.
"For Irena, being frightened of her own death was not the worst thing in the world. Far worse was the dilemma of the parents trying to decide whether to stay with their children or let them go — an almost impossible choice."
"The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler" airs April 19 on CBS.
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Post by Bonobo on May 10, 2009 21:51:14 GMT 1
Construction of the Jewish historical museum in Warsaw to start soon Polish Market 2009-05-04 A consortium led by Polimeks Cekop has won a tender for the construction of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The museum is to be built on the site of the former Jewish ghetto razed to the ground by the Nazis during WWI following an abortive rising in the ghetto in 1943. A third of Warsaw's inhabitants before the war were Jews, but after the fall of the rising, the remaining inhabitants of the ghetto were transported to Nazi death camps. After the Holocaust, only a handful of Jews were left in Poland. Rafal Kiepuszewski reports on the museum project. A group of Israeli students is on a tour of what used to be Warsaw's Jewish ghetto. They come here as part of their history classes. But apart from the Holocaust memorial sites, there is little in Warsaw to remind them of the fact that Poland was once the focus of Jewish civilisation in Europe. In a bid to help Poles and foreign visitors find out more about the role of Jews in Polish history, a new museum and information centre is being built in the middle of the former Jewish ghetto. Scheduled to open next year, it will include galleries featuring famous Polish Jewish politicians, scientists and artists, a recreation of East European Jewish architecture, as well as interactive displays. For now visitors like this Canadian Jewish student can get a glimpse of the project in a tent pitched up on the site. `Being that I'm of Jewish ancestry, this is both a very enlightening, enjoyable and also slightly saddening experience, because there are efforts being made to preserve what remains of the Jewish heritage. You need more cross-cultural co-operation, introspection and enlightenment. ' Poland's tiny remaining Jewish community has enthusiastically embraced the museum project. Director Jerzy Halbersztadt says then idea is to educate visitors about the history of Polish Jews, their civilization and culture which goes back 1000 years. `We want to fill a void' Halbersztadt says poignantly, meaning that after the Nazi Holocaust, evidence of Jewish culture in Poland was not easy to find. Historian Joanna Fikus is on a team of historians who are putting together the exhibition. She says that the idea is to allow different groups of visitors to fill gaps in their understanding of the role of Jews in Poland's life in the past. `In a different way we want to lead young Israeli youth who come here to see almost only death camps, and in a different way groups of Poles who may not have heard anough.' At a recent ceremony in Tel Aviv during which the concept of the museum was unveiled, Polish ambassador to Israel Agnieszka Magdziak-Miszewska said she hoped that a visit to the museum will be just as useful to young Poles as to young Jewish visitors. `I would like to see as much as it's possible Israeli students visiting this museum to learn, to understand and to be proud.' But the final message of the museum promises to be one of hope. In the most contemporary section the focus will be on young Polish Jewish artists like singer Nina Stiller. Her album of very modern versions of traditional Jewish ballads, performed in Yiddish, the language of East European Jews, recently became one of Poland's biggest music sensations. Nina Stiller's songs, as well as works by other contemporary Polish Jewish artists, the organisers say, are symbolic proof that neither the Nazis, nor the communists, managed to make Jewish life a closed chapter of Polish history.--------------------------------------------------------------
Polish and Israeli postal services issue stamp
thenews.pl
06.05.2009
Poczta Polska and the Israeli Post formally launched a special commemorative stamp on Tuesday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw . The ceremony, which was attended by the Israeli Ambassador to Poland and representatives of both nation's postal services was followed by a concert of Chopin music and a banquet. The 3 zloty stamp – which is being released in conjunction with the Polish Year in Israel – depicts a portrait of Berek Joselewicz, who issued a call to arms of Polish Jews during the Koœciuszko uprising in 1794, sitting on a horse, wearing a captain's uniform, and heading a regiment formed during the battle of Kock. The image on the postage stamp is a copy of a painting made in 1893 by an outstanding Polish painter, Juliusz Kossak. The Polish Year in Israel is a cultural and scientific event which aims to demonstrate the positive legacy of Poland on Jewish life and is coordinated with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw .
----------------------------------------------------------- Kobylanski libel case opens in Warsaw court thenews.pl 08.05.2009 A libel case brought by far-right businessman Jan Kobylanski against prominent journalists and ambassadors began in Warsaw today. In November 2007, the 86 year old Kobylanski brought a law suit against 18 well-known journalists and ambassadors, who he has accused of defamation and has demanded 100,000 zlotys in compensation plus court costs. Among many other accusations, newspapers reported four years ago that Kobylanski denounced Jews to the Nazis during WW II. Jan Kobylanski is a Polish millionaire residing in Uruguay who was removed from his post in 2000 as honorary council in Paraguay after ambassadors in the region complained about his behaviour and alleged anti-Semitic statements he made. Kobylanski - a long time sponsor of the ultra-conservative Catholic radio station Radio Maryja - is a founder of the Union of Polish Associations and Organizations in Latin America (USOPAL), the largest immigrant organization in Latin America. Four years ago newspapers in Poland reported anti-Semitic statements that he was alleged to have made and wrote about the Institute of National Remembrance' s suspicions that the Polish businessman denounced Jews to Nazis during WW II. Over thirty people gathered in the Mokotow District Court in Warsaw today. The prosecutor stated that the publications had defamed and humiliated Kobylanski, representing him as "a spy, denouncer, forger, adulterer, cheat, bribe-taker and megalomaniac. " In reality, said his legal representative, he is "a genuine Polish patriot". Among those accused of libeling Kobylanski are: Adam Michnik (an editor-in-chief of a daily Gazeta Wyborcza), Jerzy Baczynski (an editor-in-chief of a weekly Polityka), Grzegorz Gauden (a former editor-in-chief of a daily Rzeczpospolita) , Tomasz Wroblewski (a former editor-in-chief of a weekly Newsweek Polska), Ryszard Schnepf (an ambassador to Madrid), Daniel Passent (a former ambassador to Chile and a journalist) Jaroslaw Gugala (a former ambassador to Uruguay and a journalist).--------------------------------------------------------------- Polish city gets memorial to kids who fled Nazis 2009-05-06 WARSAW, Poland (AP) - A monument was unveiled Wednesday in the Polish port city of Gdansk remembering 10,000 Jewish children evacuated to Britain to save them from the Nazis. The bronze memorial commemorating a program known as the Kindertransport shows five children with suitcases. It went up in front of the main train station in Gdansk, a city on the Baltic Sea coast that at the time was Danzig, a free city lost to Germany after World War I. The children were sent to foster homes in Britain after the Kristallnacht pogrom on Nov. 9, 1938, in which Jewish businesses were ransacked across Germany and about 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up. The children were saved from the Nazi ghettos and death camps, but most never saw their parents again. The children came mainly from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Danzig. The monument was designed by Frank Meisler, a sculptor who was himself on one of the transports and who has also designed Kindertransport monuments in Berlin and London.
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Post by Bonobo on May 19, 2009 19:10:18 GMT 1
Oh, my, I am so sorry I wasn`t there. www.chabad.org/news/article_cdo/aid/888906/jewish/Procession-Fills-Polish-Citys-Historic-Streets.htm photo gallery Procession Fills Polish City’s Historic Streets May 6, 2009 1:00 PM
Hundreds of people, including visiting Jewish leaders from the United States and Israel, filled the streets of Krakow, Poland, last month to dedicate a Torah scroll at the historic Rema Synagogue in memory of Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Yossie Raichik.
The late director of Chabad’s Children of Chernobyl had made it one of his goals to find a Torah for the 16th-centry shul, which is named after Raichik’s ancestor, Rabbi Moses Isserles, a sage whose glosses appear embedded in the text of the Code of Jewish Law.
“This is completing a circle,” said the rabbi’s widow, Dina Raichik. “It was something he wanted, something he started and didn’t finish.”
The ceremonies last month began at the historic Izaak Synagogue, which was filled with guests. After filling in the new Torah’s last letters, a procession carried the holy scroll through Krakow’s streets and on to the Rema Synagogue, 10 minutes away.
Aided by a ritual scribe, a participant in the celebration fills one of the scroll’s last letters. Acquaintances of Raichik’s in Argentina paid for the new Torah.
The Torah procession wound its way through Krakow’s historic Jewish quarter.
Hundreds of people filled the streets.
The Torah is lifted for all to see.
Secure in its holy ark, the new scroll is the Rema Synagogue’s only kosher Torah.
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Post by tufta on Jun 25, 2009 18:24:17 GMT 1
David Miliband visits family grave in Poland
Kamil Tchorek in Warsaw
David Miliband has thanked Poles for saving his Jewish mother’s life during the Holocaust, an act to which he owes his life.
"My mother was born here, her life was saved by those who risked theirs sheltering her from Nazi oppression," the Foreign Secretary said on an official visit to Poland yesterday.
Mr Miliband , who lost many family members to the Nazis, broke off from his official visit to pay respects at his family tomb in the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw after meeting museum officials at Brandt Square, the leafy park soon to be the location of Warsaw’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
"He’s gone to visit the family grave," Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, leader of the museum’s Development Team, said. "This is quite a homecoming."
Mr Miliband’s Jewish mother, Marion Kozak, is from Czestochowa in southern Poland, from where she emigrated in the 1950s. His paternal grandparents were also Polish Jews and emigrated after fighting for the Soviets in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-21.
When Hitler and Stalin occupied Poland in 1939, 80 members of Mr Miliband’s family were killed in the ensuing Holocaust, many of them at the German extermination camp of Auschwitz.
"I am fortunate in that it is my parents' generation that encountered fascism, not me," Mr Miliband said this month. "But when I say [the BNP] are the descendants of the people we fought in the 1940s, I am thinking of my Dad and my Mum and my relatives."
In a speech later in the day, Mr Miliband spoke of the "deep and real bonds" between Poland and the UK, and said he considers himself one of the million of Britons with Polish blood.
"Jews and Poles are becoming more aware of the bonds they have with one another," Ms Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said. "There is a stereotype among some Jews that Poles are and always have been anti-Semitic, which is nonsense."
The American historian Richard C. Lukas has estimated that up to 3 million Polish Gentiles were in some way involved in rescuing Jews during the Holocaust, which may have led to about 450,000 Jewish lives being saved. Israel has awarded more than 6,000 Righteous Among the Nations medals to Poles, the highest number given to any nation.
About 70 per cent of American Jews and 60 per cent of Israelis have roots in Poland, according to Tad Taube, of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture.
Poland is currently experiencing a "Jewish Revival", embodied in such events as the annual Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, which starts this weekend.
Representatives of the Foreign Secretary declined to add detail to his mother's war story. www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6564505.ece
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Post by Bonobo on Jun 25, 2009 19:03:20 GMT 1
David Miliband thanks the Poles for saving his Jewish mother from Nazi oppression By Kamil Tchorek 23rd June 2009 Daily Mail, UK
David Miliband today thanked Poles for saving his Jewish mother's life during the Holocaust, without which he would not be alive.
During an official visit to Poland today, the Foreign Secretary said: `My mother was born here, her life was saved by those who risked theirs [by] sheltering her from Nazi oppression.'
The extraordinary revelation comes shortly after the government failed to prevent the recent electoral success of the British National Party, a disaster for Labour. David Miliband Foreign Secretary David Miliband pictured on an official visit to Poland today where he thanked Poles for sheltering his mother from Nazi Oppression It also had a personal resonance for Miliband, who lost many family members in the Holocaust and today compared the Nazis to the BNP. Miliband also stepped away from the limelight to quietly pay respects at his family tomb in Warsaw's Jewish Cemetery.
In brilliant sunshine this morning, Miliband walked through Brandt Square, a leafy park soon to be the location of Warsaw's Museum of the History of Polish Jews. He sat with museum organizers to discuss the project, before speeding away with bodyguards in a convoy of unmarked cars.
`He's gone to visit the family grave,' said Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett, leader of the museum's Development Team. `This is quite a homecoming,' she added, with a proud smile. Miliband's Polish Jewish mother, Marion Kozak, is from Czestochowa in southern Poland and emigrated in the 1950s. His paternal grandparents were also Polish Jews.
Miliband attended a park soon to be the location of Warsaw's Museum of the History of Polish Jews, pictured here with museum's director Jerzy Halbersztadt
When Hitler and Stalin occupied Poland in 1939, 80 members of Miliband's family were killed in the ensuing Holocaust, many of them at the German extermination camp of Auschwitz.
`I am fortunate in that it is my parents' generation that encountered fascism, not me,' Miliband said earlier this month.
`But when I say [the BNP] are the descendants of the people we fought in the 1940s, I am thinking of my dad and my mum and my relatives.'
In a speech later in the day, Miliband spoke of the `deep and real bonds' between Poland and the UK, and said he considers himself one of the million Britons with Polish blood. `Jews and Poles are becoming more aware the bonds they have with one another,' Kirshenblatt- Gimblett also said. `There is a stereotype among some Jews that Poles are and always have been anti-Semitic, which is nonsense.'
American historian Richard C. Lukas has estimated that up to three million Polish gentiles were in some way involved in rescuing Jews during the Holocaust, which may have led to around 450,000 Jewish lives being saved. Israel has awarded over 6,000 'Righteous Among the Nations' medals, a tribute to people who helped Jews, to Poles, more than to any other nation. Around 70 per cent of American Jews and 60 per cent of Israelis have roots in Poland, according to Tad Taube, of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture. Poland is currently experiencing a `Jewish Revival', embodied in such events as the annual Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, which starts this weekend. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Polish prisoners to renovate Jewish historical sites MICHAEL FREUND THE JERUSALEM POST Jun. 23, 2009
The Polish government and a local Jewish organization have signed an unprecedented cooperation agreement under which prison inmates will help to refurbish Jewish historical sites throughout the country.
The deal was inked on Friday between Poland's Central Board of Prisons Service and the Warsaw-based Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland, and is believed to be the first of its kind in Europe.
It will make use of funds provided to Poland by the European Union under a program which sponsors a variety of projects for those serving time in the correctional system.
Inmates from 85 Polish jails are expected to take part.
"The agreement is based on the idea that prisoners will help to maintain and fix up Jewish cemeteries and other historical Jewish sites as part of their rehabilitation process," Foundation CEO Monika Krawczyk told The Jerusalem Post.
"It will also involve an educational component, such as teaching them about Jews and Jewish history in Poland," she added.
The idea behind the program arose after the Polish Prisons Service and its Israeli counterpart agreed several months ago to cooperate in jointly restoring the Jewish cemetery in the city of Radom, 100 km. south of Warsaw.
"After that initiative was launched, we thought: Why limit it to Radom? Why not do it more generally throughout Poland?" explained Krawczyk, whose foundation is responsible for more than 1,100 Jewish cemeteries across the country, many of which are in dire need of repair.
"I think this agreement is a good and very constructive example to follow, because it is based on respect for history but is also directed to the future," she said.
The refurbishing of Jewish burial grounds will be carried out under the supervision of the Polish Rabbinical Commission on Cemeteries, which is headed by Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich.
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Post by tufta on Jun 26, 2009 8:53:26 GMT 1
David Miliband visits family grave in Poland
Kamil Tchorek in Warsaw
David Miliband has thanked Poles for saving his Jewish mother’s life during the Holocaust, an act to which he owes his life.
"My mother was born here, her life was saved by those who risked theirs sheltering her from Nazi oppression," the Foreign Secretary said on an official visit to Poland yesterday.
Mr Miliband , who lost many family members to the Nazis, broke off from his official visit to pay respects at his family tomb in the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw after meeting museum officials at Brandt Square, the leafy park soon to be the location of Warsaw’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
"He’s gone to visit the family grave," Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, leader of the museum’s Development Team, said. "This is quite a homecoming."
Mr Miliband’s Jewish mother, Marion Kozak, is from Czestochowa in southern Poland, from where she emigrated in the 1950s. His paternal grandparents were also Polish Jews and emigrated after fighting for the Soviets in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-21.
When Hitler and Stalin occupied Poland in 1939, 80 members of Mr Miliband’s family were killed in the ensuing Holocaust, many of them at the German extermination camp of Auschwitz.
"I am fortunate in that it is my parents' generation that encountered fascism, not me," Mr Miliband said this month. "But when I say [the BNP] are the descendants of the people we fought in the 1940s, I am thinking of my Dad and my Mum and my relatives."
In a speech later in the day, Mr Miliband spoke of the "deep and real bonds" between Poland and the UK, and said he considers himself one of the million of Britons with Polish blood.
"Jews and Poles are becoming more aware of the bonds they have with one another," Ms Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said. "There is a stereotype among some Jews that Poles are and always have been anti-Semitic, which is nonsense."
The American historian Richard C. Lukas has estimated that up to 3 million Polish Gentiles were in some way involved in rescuing Jews during the Holocaust, which may have led to about 450,000 Jewish lives being saved. Israel has awarded more than 6,000 Righteous Among the Nations medals to Poles, the highest number given to any nation.
About 70 per cent of American Jews and 60 per cent of Israelis have roots in Poland, according to Tad Taube, of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture.
Poland is currently experiencing a "Jewish Revival", embodied in such events as the annual Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, which starts this weekend.
Representatives of the Foreign Secretary declined to add detail to his mother's war story. www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6564505.ece Strange, I saw this same message in the neighbourhood of troubles ;D
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Post by tufta on Jul 13, 2009 16:54:06 GMT 1
One year ago died Bronislaw Geremek. He used to be Lech Walesa's key adviser during Solidarnosc union fight with commnism. Later he became foreign affairs minister. Bronisław Geremek was of of the key figures behind Polish success in toppling communist rule and joing NATO and European Union. He was a Pole of Jewish roots, escaped as a boy with his mother from Warsaw Ghetto. Professor Bronisław Geremek [brɔˈɲiswaf ɡɛˈrɛmɛk] ( listen) (born Benjamin Lewertow[1] on March 6, 1932 in Warsaw, died July 13, 2008 in Lubień, close to Nowy Tomyśl, Poland), was a Polish social historian and politician. Early life and EducationGeremek was born in Warsaw, Poland on March 6, 1932. His father, a fur merchant,[1] was murdered in Auschwitz[2]. His mother and he were smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 and were sheltered by Stefan Geremek. Geremek later married Bronisław’s mother and Bronisław was further raised in a Roman Catholic tradition [1]. In his adult life he considered himself neither a Jew nor a Catholic. His grandfather was a maggid, his brother Jerry, living in New York is a Jew and his sons living in Poland are Roman Catholics[1].
In 1954 Bronisław Geremek graduated from the Faculty of History at the Warsaw University, and in 1956-1958 he completed postgraduate studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. He completed his PhD in 1960 and in 1972 he was granted a postdoctoral degree at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). In 1989 he was appointed associate professor.
The chief domain of Geremek’s scholarly work was research on the history of culture and medieval society. His scholarly achievements included numerous articles and lectures, as well as ten books, which have been translated into ten languages. His doctoral thesis (1960) concerned the labour market in medieval Paris, including prostitution. His postdoctoral thesis (1972) concerned underworld groups in medieval Paris.
Almost the whole of Geremek's scholarly career was connected with the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where he worked from 1955 to 1985. However, from 1960 to 1965 he was a lecturer at the Sorbonne in Paris and the manager of the Polish Culture Centre of that university. Geremek was given honorary degrees by the University of Bologna, Utrecht University, the Sorbonne, Columbia University and Jagiellonian University in Krakow. In 1992 he was designated visiting professor at the College de France. He was a member of Academia Europea, the PEN Club, the Societe Europeenne de Culture, and numerous other societies and associations.
[edit] Political activity
[edit] History of Poland (1945–1989)
In 1950 Geremek joined the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR). He was the second secretary of the Basic Party Organisation (POP) of the PZPR at Warsaw University. In 1968, however, he withdrew from the party in protest against the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia.
In the 1970s Geremek was considered one of the leading figures in the Polish democratic opposition. In 1978 he co-founded the Society for Educational Courses, for which he gave lectures. In August 1980 he joined the Gdańsk workers' protest movement and became one of the advisers of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union Solidarność (Polish for "Solidarity") - NSZZ. In 1981 he chaired the Program Commission of the First National Convention of Solidarity. After martial law was declared in December 1981 he was interned until December 1982, when he once again became an adviser to the then-illegal Solidarity, working closely with Lech Wałęsa. In 1983 he was arrested by the Polish authorities.
[edit] History of Poland (1989–present)
[edit] Polish Round Table Agreement
Between 1987 and 1989 Geremek was the leader of the Commission for Political Reforms of the Civic Committee, which prepared proposals for peaceful democratic transformation in Poland. In 1989 he played a crucial role during the debates between Solidarity and the authorities that led to free parliamentary elections and the establishment of the ‘Contract Sejm’.
Geremek then became one of the founders of the The Democratic Union (later merged into the The Freedom Union) and was the leader of the Democratic Union’s parliamentary group from 1990 to 1997. After the elections in 1991 President Lech Wałęsa asked him to form a new government, but Geremek failed to do so and Jan Olszewski was appointed Prime Minister instead.
From 1989 to 2001 Geremek was a member of the lower house of the Polish parliament, the Sejm, and chairman of the Political Council of the Freedom Union. He chaired the Sejm's Committee on Foreign Affairs from 1989 to 1997, its Constitutional Committee from 1989 to 1991 and its European Law Committee from 2000 to 2001.
After a coalition government was formed in October 1997 by the Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS) and the Freedom Union Geremek served as Minister of Foreign Affairs under Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek until 2000. In March 1999 he signed the treaty under which Poland joined NATO.
[edit] European Parliament Deputy
In the election to the European Parliament in June 2004 Geremek was elected as a candidate of the Freedom Union, winning the largest number of votes in Warsaw. In the European Parliament he was a member of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe.
In April 2007 Geremek refused to declare that he had never collaborated with the Communist secret service, which he was being asked to do under a new vetting law. In May 2007 the Constitutional Tribunal of the Republic of Poland) rejected most of the new vetting law, including the clause that would have made it mandatory for nearly 700,000 Poles to sign declarations certifying that they had never collaborated with the secret services under the old regime.
Geremek was a Member of the Global Leadership Foundation, an organization which works to promote good governance around the world[3].
[edit] Decorations
Geremek received many decorations and distinctions, such as the Großes Verdienstkreuz mit Stern - the Grand Cross with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Pour le Mérite, and, in 1998, the Karlspreis (Charlemagne Award) of the city of Aachen . He was an Officer of the French Légion d’honneur. In 2002 President Aleksander Kwaśniewski honoured him with the most important Polish decoration, the Order of the White Eagle.
[edit] Death
Geremek died in a car accident on National Road no. 2 near Nowy Tomyśl[4], when the car he was driving hit an oncoming van on the opposite lane, probably due to Geremek falling asleep behind the wheel. He was granted a state funeral, held in Warsaw in the Cathedral of St John. His funeral was attended, among others, by president Lech Kaczyński, prime minister Donald Tusk, and former president Lech Wałęsa.
[edit] Posthumous honors
In January 2009, the European Parliament named the main courtyard of the "Louise Weiss", its principal building, after Bronisław Geremek. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronis%C5%82aw_Geremek
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Post by Bonobo on Aug 30, 2009 21:16:41 GMT 1
A Lost Culture, Found Online
by Marjorie Backman 13 August 2009
From tending graveyards to creating online shtetls, more non-Jewish Poles are resuscitating their country’s Jewish heritage.
For 11 years, Kamila Klauzinska has cared for the Jewish cemetery by her home in Zdunska Wola, in central Poland, on a volunteer basis.
A doctoral student in Jewish history at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, she has painstakingly identified every grave, despite all documentation being lost. Initially “everybody asked why,” she says of her volunteer work. “It’s a part of our history. It’s a part of our culture.”
She recounts the story of a family who came from Israel to arrange a tombstone for a grandmother and saw a photo that Klauzinska had found in the archives. The grandson had never met his grandmother; her son, back in Israel, hadn’t seen her image in more than 60 years. “I love this,” Klauzinska says. “The most interesting people I met in the cemetery – or because of it.”
Klauzinska, 36, has Catholic roots but says she’s not religious. She leads cemetery tours for school groups and has helped create a local organization to host cultural activities, such as an essay contest on the Jewish history of Zdunska Wola or a celebration of its Jewish community’s founding.
www.tol.cz/cgi-bin/get_img?NrArticle=20764&NrImage=7NrSection=3&NrIssue=334&IdPublication=4 The Jewish neighborhood in Zdunska Wola before 1939.
With Daniel Wagner, an Israeli professor with a grandmother from Zdunska Wola, Klauzinska reconstructed the town’s Jewish family trees by merging separate genealogical data.
But her work is reaching well beyond Poland. She is one of the many non-Jewish administrators in Poland for an online effort launched in June called the Virtual Shtetl.
KNOCKING DOWN BARRIERS
Historian Albert Stankowski, the portal’s creator, envisioned it as “a museum without walls,” debuting three years before the scheduled 2012 opening of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
By launching the site in Polish and English, he hopes to engage two groups with a stake in uncovering and retelling Poland’s 1,000-year-long Jewish history: Polish Catholics living in towns formerly inhabited by Jews, and Jews whose ancestors resided in Poland’s Jewish settlements, or shtetls.
Poland lost nearly all its Jewish population in World War II, although previously Jews had comprised 10 percent of the population, even 50 percent of some towns. (Several historians estimate that half of the Jews slain in the Holocaust came from Poland.) During the Nazi years and the communist period, public discussion about Jewish culture was impossible, according to Chief Rabbi of Poland Michael Schudrich. Only after 1989 came “honest appraisal of what the Jewish presence meant in Poland.” For 50 years, Jewish-Polish relations were “in the freezer.”
But now, he says, “There are more non-Jewish Poles working on saving Jewish cemeteries, creating more Jewish festivals, adding courses in the high school than in any other country in Europe.”
Although a small remnant of Polish Jews resurfaced after the Holocaust, many left the country. Some, hidden as children by non-Jewish neighbors, didn’t learn of their Jewish roots until very recently.
With the atmosphere of increased openness over the past two decades, many Catholic Poles are volunteering to research the former Jewish communities, preserve or locate remains of synagogues or cemeteries, and record memories. Even Polish high-schoolers research Jewish history as a hobby, combing their towns for memorabilia, photographing sites of Jewish interest, and interviewing neighbors about former Jewish residents. A few Poles, even teens, have created websites about Jewish culture within their towns.
Yet because of language barriers, these local-history efforts often bypassed a potential audience: Jews living outside Poland.
Now, Stankowski, the child of a Polish Holocaust survivor and a Catholic mother, has recruited many of Poland’s Jewish history “enthusiasts” for the museum’s Virtual Shtetl, conceived as an English-Polish portal, with interactive features and wiki-style publishing to swiftly capture stories from the war generation.
Dynamic maps present Poland’s provinces before 1939 and after 1945. The portal’s heart is a clickable A-to-Z list of 950 shtetls, with alternate names in other languages once spoken there and a current interactive map. If Stankowski has guessed right, visitors will add photos, video, and text about each Jewish community’s life before 1989, its monuments and contemporary news. Historical descriptions are already posted for 800 shtetls. The Virtual Shtetl will draw excerpts from Yizkor books, or memory books by survivors describing their towns, as well as from Polish archives, with the help of a team of translators. In a further extension of the museum-without- walls concept, Stankowski says, the portal can guide travelers to the exact spots of Jewish monuments, through the maps’ GPS tags. So one could explore a Jewish shtetl in person and retrace the footsteps of, say, a grandfather, from the synagogue to the yeshiva to the cemetery.
The Virtual Shtetl is unlike any other museum website, says New York University professor Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett, who leads the team developing the core Warsaw museum exhibition. Usually such portals serve as a “window” into a museum, a preview of exhibits. But the Virtual Shtetl is not just about putting pictures on a web page, she says; its visitors will communicate, share information, create relationships – and build a real community.
Outside Poland, Jews with roots from there might have family photos or objects but desire information from Polish archives and not know the language or how to reach authorities. “The great potential is for inhabitants of those localities to connect with the Jewish descendants of those towns who live all over the world,” Kirshenblatt- Gimblett says. The Virtual Shtetl will serve as a catalyst, prompting Poles to engage with the Jewish past of their locality, and as a “social space,” connecting scattered people working on local Jewish history. “Think of it as a town square” for anyone interested in Poland’s Jewish presence.
When the portal really takes off, Kirshenblatt- Gimblett predicts, travel will result, but not today’s sort, whereby Jews trek to the cemetery in an ancestral town, wander in silence, then leave. Instead, current residents, genuinely interested in the Jewish past, will be happy to welcome such visitors, she says. “That will be a transformative experience.” Jewish descendants befriending their peers in Polish towns will be of great importance to both; otherwise it’s a closed story, she says. The Virtual Shtetl “opens the story up into the present and the future.”
TRACING THE PAST
Stankowski drew inspiration for the Virtual Shtetl from his experiences in 2000 to 2003 organizing Days of Tolerance, with dialogues between Israeli and Polish students, and from traveling to Poland’s small towns from 2003 to 2007 for the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland to conserve Jewish cemeteries and synagogues.
Many Jewish cemeteries in Poland fell into disrepair after World War II’s devastation. Although the Nazis may have expropriated the tombstones, such cemeteries are significant according to Jewish law.
After Ronald Weiser of Ann Arbor, Michigan, moved to Slovakia in 2001 as its U.S. ambassador, he figured out where his father’s shtetl lay: just across the Tatra Mountains in the resort of Zakopane, Poland. He tried to locate family graves, but the Nazis had leveled the Jewish cemetery.
Zakopane’s former mayor, a guide and wilderness aficionado, found the cemetery by studying mountains in photos showing the Nazis wrecking it (secretly taken by a partisan, an official Nazi photographer) . With Stankowski’s help, Weiser had cemetery land returned to the Jewish community, restored the grounds, and erected a monument and a gate. Weiser recalls the moving rededication ceremony gathering from all over Poland Jews originally of Zakopane, with Catholics and the bishop of Krakow. There are “still survivors all over the world, and in Poland,” Weiser says, citing the Virtual Shtetl’s potential to “record that history” with electronic access all over the world.
A CADRE OF POLISH RESEARCHERS
Serving as gatekeepers for the portal are Jewish history buffs, many non-Jewish, such as Krzysztof Bielawski, 37, of Warsaw. During a short trip to the northeastern town of Tykocin in 2005, he happened upon a Jewish cemetery and found a new hobby: exploring and researching Jewish cemeteries all over Poland. By that December he was posting cemetery photos on his own website, www.kirkuty. xip.pl. He has since added historical sketches and English translations.
www.tol.cz/cgi-bin/get_img?NrArticle=20764&NrImage=6NrSection=3&NrIssue=334&IdPublication=4 Hershel Frankiel, a Holocaust survivor from Los Angeles, talks with priest Wojciech Lemanski at the site of a mass incineration of Jews in 1941 in the village of Jedwabne. Photo from the Virtual Shtetl website by Krzysztof Bielawski.
“When I was young,” Bielawski says, “sometimes I went places that people called kirkut, [Jewish cemetery]. People didn’t want to talk too much” about it and considered this a “very mysterious place.” Bielawski, who comes from a Catholic family but is agnostic, now hears from Jews around the world, asking advice about finding cemeteries in Poland. (After landing on his site, a businesswoman , not Jewish, decided to restore a forgotten Jewish cemetery in another Polish town.) Now Bielawski is the Virtual Shtetl’s administrator for information on cemeteries and victims of Nazism.
Other site administrators include 39-year-old Adam Marczewski from the southwestern Opole and Silesia provinces and Artur Cyruk, 40, of Hajnowka, near the Bialowieska forest in the east.
Marczewski, a chemical plant supervisor and a Christian, learned about Jewish history through Bible study. In 2002 he created a website about Poland’s Jewish history, www.izrael.badacz. org. He photographed Jewish monuments all over Poland. The Virtual Shtetl acquired hundreds of his photos and text in 2007.
Cyruk, a prison educator and a member of the Polish Orthodox Church, cleans up Jewish cemeteries in his spare time. After Rabbi Schudrich lectured at his prison about Poland’s Jewish legacy, some prisoners expressed interest and now join Cyruk in cemetery cleanups. A scrap metal facility provided Cyruk with a 1936 bronze Torah cover; he’s donated it to the museum along with his 502 photos already on the Virtual Shtetl.
Explaining the reason for this upsurge in interest in Jewish history among Poland’s non-Jews, Schudrich says, “Because Jews played such an important role in their country. Because it was denied them for so long. It goes to the definition of what is Poland. Is Poland only defined as Catholic? Or do Poles want to understand that their country was always multiethnic and multireligious?”
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Post by Bonobo on Sept 3, 2009 20:31:19 GMT 1
Poland marks 65th Lodz ghetto anniversary By VANESSA GERA (AP) 8/27/09
LODZ, Poland — Aging Holocaust survivors gathered Thursday to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the last deportations from the Lodz ghetto to Nazi death camps, while Poland's president recalled their suffering and praised the heroism of Poles who risked their lives to save Jews.
Polish President Lech Kaczynski dedicated a memorial — incorporating a Polish eagle into a Star of David — that his office said is the first in the world to commemorate those Polish Christians who rescued their Jewish neighbors during the more than five years of Nazi Germany's occupation of Poland.
Lodz was the second-largest city in prewar Poland, after Warsaw, and home to the second-largest Jewish population, with 231,000 Jews representing more than one-third of the city's population.
"The liquidation of the Lodz ghetto, the murder of some 70,000 people, was the last act in the annihilation of Poland's Jews, who have lived here at least since the 12th century," Kaczynski told a crowd of hundreds, many who had come from as far as Los Angeles, California, and Haifa, Israel.
"Today we honor those who were killed and those who survived and those who — showing t he greatest courage — saved their fellow citizens."
Thursday's commemorations began at the aging brown wooden Radegast train station, where about 145,000 Jews began their final journey to Nazi death camps. Wooden cattle cars with flaking rust-colored paint, still stamped with the Nazi-era "Deutsche Reichsbahn," sit in the station as grim reminders of the death trains.
Kasimira Rosmarinowsky, 86, a survivor who lives in Germany, said she attended the ceremonies to honor her parents and 142 other relatives killed in the Holocaust because she has no graves to visit.
"It's my duty; it's the only thing I can do for my parents," she said.
The survivors, many accompanied by their grown children, then marched 1.5 kilometers (one mile) to Survivor's Park, where the president unveiled the memorial: a concrete eagle, Poland's national symbol, on a pedestal that forms one corner in a giant Star of David. The star's edges are inscribed with the names of the Poles who saved Jews from extermination.
Lodz Mayor Jerzy Kropiwnicki stressed the role played by non-Jewish Poles who hid Jews or smuggled them to safety. He noted that it was not only those caught directly aiding Jews who faced death, but their families as well.
In recent years, Polish officials have sought to commemorate such people as part of an ef fort led by Kaczynski to dispel the stereotype that Poland was a deeply anti-Semitic country.
Thomas Blatt, 82, a survivor of the Sobibor death camp, said he welcomed efforts to honor such Poles, and considers any person who rescued Jews during the war a "holy man."
"It was really dangerous to do something for Jews, and those who did it are heroes," he said.
However, Blatt said he would also like to see Poland do more to acknowledge its shameful episodes in the war.
"Unfortunately a lot of Poles collaborated in the case of capturing Jews," he said. "The Germans didn't know who was a Jew or not, but the helpers did know — and that's what killed us."
The Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939. In April of the following year, the Germans sealed the Lodz ghetto with barbed wire, concentrating Jews in a tightly packed section cut off from the outside world.
About 45,000 Jews from other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe, including Luxembourg, Austria and Germany, as well as about 5,000 Gypsies, were forced into the Lodz ghetto. Used as forced labor, many ghetto residents died from the horrific conditions. The Nazis decided to kill those remaining in August 1944.
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Penderecki composes Lodz Ghetto tributethenews.pl 20.08.2009
Composer Krzysztof Penderecki has written a work for the 65th anniversary of the liquidation of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, the Jewish quarter in Nazi occupied Poland in the city of Lodz, central Poland.
The work will be premiered during a gala concert in the city's Grand Opera on 29 August, under the composer's own baton.
The piece is scored for orchestra, men's choir and solo voices. It is entitled Kaddish - to All Lodz Abrameks Who Desired to Live and to the Poles Who Saved the Jews. The lyrics used by the composer include poems by Abram Cytryn, a Lodz poet who was taken in 1944 from the city's Ghetto to the Auschwitz concentration camp where he died before his 18th birthday.
The programme of the concert also includes Penderecki's Seven Gates of Jerusalem, a large-scale work for five voices, three choirs and orchestra. It had its premiere in 1997 during the celebrations of the 3000 years of Jerusalem.
The Litzmannstadt Ghetto was the second largest in Nazi occupied Poland after the one in Warsaw. It was used by the Nazis as an industrial production area and consequently existed till 1944 – the Warsaw Ghetto was destroyed in 1943. The Nazis finally broke up the area when all the inhabitants were sent to the Auschwitz death camp.
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Post by Bonobo on Oct 28, 2009 14:28:29 GMT 1
Poland dedicates Treblinka monument
A monument honoring some 40,000 Jews deported to the Treblinka death camp in 1942 was dedicated in the Polish city of Czestochowa.
The monument, designed by the Czestochowa-born Israeli artist Samuel Willenberg, was unveiled Oct. 20 as part of a three-day gathering of the World Society of Czestochowa Jews and their descendants.
The monument is designed in the form of a cracked wall and includes a Star of David made of railway track. — jta
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Post by Bonobo on Oct 29, 2009 22:01:28 GMT 1
Lodz, Poland (dpa) - Lodz' Jewish cemetery is an impressive sight, with its long avenues, old trees, mausoleums that look like ancient temples and thousands of headstones.
Some are badly weathered and it is impossible to read the inscriptions on many. Graves are covered in ivy and most of them date back to before the Second World War.
Today, Lodz's Jewish community is small compared to what it once was. At one time, it was the largest in Poland after Warsaw's. The cemetery is the biggest of its kind in Europe, with 180,000 graves, many of which are of historic interest.
There are bigger Jewish cemeteries in terms of area in Europe, such as the graveyard in Berlin's Weisensse district. But they have far fewer graves than in Lodz.
However, the cemetery is remarkable in other ways. Perhaps the biggest surprise the cemetery has to offer is that it still exists. The German occupying forces during World War II not only tried to exterminate the city's Jewish population, but destroyed almost all of its synagogues and attempted to wipe out all traces of Jewish culture. Lodz's Jewish cemetery was not spared.
"In the 19th century, a third of Lodz's residents were Jews. At the beginning of the war about 230,000 lived here," says Anna Jozwiak as she points to the Star of David on the cemetery gates. The Nazis turned a portion of Lodz into a ghetto called Litzmannstadt.
"About 200,000 Jews were held in the ghetto. Only a small portion - perhaps 800 - survived."
Some of those who died in the ghetto were buried in Lodz's Jewish cemetery. But most of the graves are older and date back to the time when Lodz was a growing industrial centre. It expanded faster than any other in the region.
Merchants, bankers and other notable people accumulated wealth and influence in that time and displayed that in the city's graveyards - no matter what religion they were. The Jewish cemetery has some stunning examples of opulent graves built by a middle class who were prepared to spend almost as much money on mausoleums as they did on houses for the living.
In his day, Izrael Poznanski, for example, was the most well known Jewish factory owner in the city and accrued a fortune from textile manufacturing. He lies buried with his wife Leonia in a mausoleum that cost a fortune to build.
"It is the biggest Jewish tomb in Europe at seven metres high and 10 metres wide," says Anna Jozwiak. "The interior is decorated with two million mosaic pieces."
The name Poznanski adorns the tomb's facade in large letters. Tourists can often be found crowding outside trying to get a look inside.
There are many other fine examples of ostentatious graves in the cemetery.
The tomb of the Prussak family is a domed roof supported by four columns with four steps. Many of the tombs were built in the art nouveau style, such as that for the Rapppaport family. The parents of the classical pianist Artur Rubinstein are also buried in the cemetery. Their comparatively simple gravestone survived the war along with thousands of other ordinary headstones.
The headstones are usually made of sandstone or limestone and are often decorated with a Star of David or a hand in blessing. The image of a book indicates the headstone marks the grave of a learned person.
"A candlestick shows that the grave is of a woman," explains Anna Jozwiak. "Women had the job of lighting the candles at the beginning of Sabbath."
Most of the Jews murdered in the Lodz Ghetto during World War Two do not have any grave. However, their relatives who survived the war and went on to live in the United States, Australia and other European countries have placed a plaque on the cemetery wall in their memory.
Internet: www.cityoflodz.pl.
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Post by Bonobo on Nov 27, 2009 21:22:08 GMT 1
Convicts help rescue neglected Jewish cemeteries in Poland Reuters 11/20/09
Nearly a dozen Polish prisons and detention centers have signed up their inmates to an unusual form of labor - rescuing overgrown, long-neglected Jewish cemeteries.
Poland was home to an estimated third of the world's Jews before World War II but the vast majority perished in the Holocaust during Nazi Germany's occupation of the country.
With few if any relatives left to tend family graves, Jewish cemeteries have fallen into a bad state of disrepair over the decades. The Polish interior ministry's cemetery renewal program is now aimed at reversing this process.
"For sure there is time here to reflect on our life mistakes and sins, but doing work for others like this also helps our self-esteem, " said convict Andrzej, who would only give his first name as he swept leaves at the Trzebinia cemetery in southern Poland.
Trzebinia is about 30 km (22 miles) northeast of Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp where some 1.3 million people were murdered during the war.
Local historian Andrzej Kostka said the prisoners had helped uncover lost tombstones and Hebrew inscriptions.
"People come here looking for their grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and they are very glad when they manage to find here a grave belonging to a relative," Kostka said.
Ten prisons across Poland are taking part in the program. Prisoners receive instruction in Jewish religion and culture before starting work.
The work is not only physically demanding as they remove decades' worth of tangled vegetation and flotsam, it must also conform to stringent Jewish religious rules concerning the dead.
They had to get special permission before touching gravestones.
"The attitude of the prisoners involved can change while working here, they can discover new perspectives on life," said prison warden Tomasz Waclawek.
"The aim of the program is to learn about our common culture and heritage and to build up respect and care for it," he added.
Rabbi Szlomo Kucera, head of the Jewish community in the southern city of Katowice, praised the work of the convicts.
"Respecting the dead is...a very important commandment in the Jewish religion, and looking after graves is a very big spiritual feat. Of course Jews should mainly look after a Jewish cemetery but given the situation in which we find ourselves in we are grateful for any help," he said.
"Anybody who does something demonstrating respect for our dead will receive their reward in heaven."
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Post by Bonobo on Jan 17, 2010 0:22:43 GMT 1
Over 300 Hasidic Jews flocked to the small village of Aleksandrow Lodzki , central Poland, to pray at the tomb of their spiritual leader Rabi Yerachmiel Yisroel Yitzchok Dancyger.
The occasion marks the 100 anniversary of Rabi Yerachmiel Yisroel Yitzchok Dancyger death.
The followers are visiting places significant to the Alexander Hasidic movement in Lodz and prayers at the tombs of their spiritual leaders.
The Alexander Hasidic movement flourished in Poland from 1880 until it was crushed by Nazi Germany during World War II.
The Alexander Hasidim were the second largest Hasidic group in pre-war Poland. The Alexander Dynasty was reborn mainly in Israel, but there are several communities in the USA, Belgium, London and Australia.
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Post by Bonobo on Apr 20, 2010 21:36:55 GMT 1
March in commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 19.04.2010 13:10 Today marks the 67th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The fights opened under the leadership of Mordechaj Anielewicz and Marek Edelman. It was an attempt to stop the liquidation of the Ghetto, which the Nazis started on January 1943.
From the 70 000 Jews, who lived in the Ghetto when the Uprising started, 14 000 were killed, while the rest had been transported to concentration and extermination camps.
After days of uneven fights, the Nazi German occupier of Warsaw liquidated the Ghetto in May 1943. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the ghettos which Nazi Germans started setting up in 1940 set up on Polish territory. It concentrated some 400 thousand people.
Today’s anniversary is commemorated by a march which started from the Monument to theHeroes of the Warsaw Ghetto and led through the sites of Jewish martyrdom in Nazi occupied Warsaw ,winding up at Umschlagplatz, the place where Nazis gathered Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto for deportation to extermination camps. www.thenews.pl/national/artykul129882_march-in-commemoration-of-the-warsaw-ghetto-uprising.html
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Post by Bonobo on Apr 21, 2010 19:59:12 GMT 1
Jewish Motifs Film Festival in Warsaw 21.04.2010 10:30
Over forty documentaries, features as well as short and animated films by directors from Poland, Israel, France, Russia, the Czech Republic and Britain are on the programme of the ‘Jewish Motifs’ Film Festival which has opened in Warsaw.
The films focus on various aspects of the history, national and cultural identity and tradition of the Jewish nation. The programme includes such highly-acclaimed films as Pizza in Auschwitz by the Israeli director Moshe Zimerman, a moving account of a visit to Auschwitz by its former prisoner taking his children around the camp. The film won the top award at the prestigious IDFA Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam. An Ordinary March by the Polish director Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz probes into what lay behind social support for the anti-Semitic actions of the communist authorities in Poland in March 1968. The Bałuty Ghetto is a joint Polish-Czech production about the plight of Czech Jews deported to the Jewish Ghetto in the Łódź district of Bałuty.
The festival, now in its seventh edition, ends on Sunday.www.thenews.pl/culture/artykul130033_jewish-motifs-film-festival-in-warsaw.html============================================ Extraordinary unknown photograph from WW2 06.04.2010 14:21
A table in a sunlit garden, on it a vase of flowers and bottles of vodka. Around it a gathering of people with drinks in their hands, visibly enjoying themselves, though some are wearing the infamous arm-bands with the Star of David. An extraordinary unknown photograph from WW2, taken at a Polish-Jewish party in Lublin, has electrified historians.
This photograph has just come to the Grodzka Gate NN Theatre in Lublin. It was probably taken before the ghetto was created by Nazis in Lublin in March 1941. After that date, say historians, it was no longer possible for Poles and Jews to meet.
Elżbieta Krajewska spoke to Tomasz Pietrusiewicz, director of Grodzka Gate to ask about this very singular document. www.thenews.pl/culture/artykul128891_extraordinary-unknown-photograph-from-ww2.html============================================= Innovative History of Polish Jew Atlas published 26.03.2010 07:33 An Atlas of the History of Polish Jews has been launched in Warsaw by Demart Publishers, including an exclusive world map of the Jewish diaspora.
The texts by renowned specialists draw a comprehensive picture of the over 1000 year-long common history of Poles and Jews. They are supplemented with 166 maps, 461 photographs and sketches and 95 diagrams.
The director of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Jerzy Halbersztadt, has described the book as one of fundamental importance.
He said during the launch that a historical map is time and space melted into one.
“For centuries, Jewish civilisation had been developing in the Diaspora. The changing geography of Jewish settlement, enormous importance of religious, cultural, economic and family ties between particular centres – all this can be best explored by running the finger over a map and thus discovering unknown details or noticing spatial relationships and dependencies,” Halbersztadt said.
The maps and diagrams were produced specially for the Atlas. They will be used in the displays in the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, currently under construction.
The texts in the book discuss the beginnings of Jewish statehood and culture in ancienty times, the Diaspora and migration of Jews to Central and Eastern Europe, and the history of Jews in Poland from the Middle Ages to the present.
At the end of the 19th century, over 2.1 million Jews lived in the territory of what was then partitioned Poland. By 1939, their number grew to 3.3 million, accounting for 10 percent of Poland’s population. Ninety percent of them w perished during the Nazi occupation of Poland.
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Post by Bonobo on May 9, 2010 20:38:06 GMT 1
Poles receive Yad Vashem honour 08.05.2010 08:48
Eight Poles have been decorated with the Righteous Among the Nations medals for helping Jews during the Holocaust.
The medals of the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem were handed over to their relatives by the Israeli ambassador to Poland Zvi Rav-Ner at a ceremony in Wrocław. He recalled that all those who gave shelter to Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked their life and the lives of their family members.
During the ceremony, a group of 12 Poles, who had earlier received the Righteous Among the Nations medals, were granted the honorary citizenship of Israel.
Some 23, 000 people have so far received the medals from the Yad Vashem Institute. Over 6, 000 of them are Poles.www.thenews.pl/international/artykul131160_poles-receive-yad-vashem-honour.html================================================
White Stork Synagogue restored 07.05.2010 09:20
Events to mark the opening of a newly-restored Synagogue under the White Stork are being held in Wroclaw, south-western Poland.
Prayers were said by the Chief Rabbi of Poland Michael Schudrich, the Ambassadors of Israel and Norway delivered special addresses and several Jews who left Wroclaw in the 1930s and 1960s shared their recollections of Jewish life in the city.
The ceremony was graced by a concert of Hebrew liturgical music performed by cantor Joseph Malovany from New York. Malovany will give two more concerts. Tomorrow he will perform with the Wrocław Symphony Orchestra under Krzysztof Penderecki and on Sunday with the Synagogue Choir.
The events also include an international academic conference ‘Religion and Beyond: Jewish Religious Life in Breslau/Wrocław’, exhibitions, and the unveiling of a plague commemorating Willy Cohn, a local historian and author of a diary describing the day-to-day life in Wrocław in the 1920s and 30s.
The White Stork Synagogue was built in 1829. It was designed by the prominent architect Carl Ferdinand Langhans jr. During the Crystal Night on 9 November 1938 the Nazis devastated the interior of the synagogue which was then in Germany before borders were re-drawn after WW II.
In 1945 they converted it into a garage and a warehouse for stolen Jewish property. After the war it fell into ruin. In 1996, it was handed over to the city’s Jewish community and after a painstaking restoration project it has been brought back to its former splendour.
The Jewish community in Wrocław numbers 327 people at present.
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Post by Bonobo on Sept 3, 2010 23:51:54 GMT 1
Kielce marks 68th anniversary of ghetto liquidation 29.08.2010 11:39
Menora monument to the victims of the Kielce ghetto. Photo: jankarski.org.pl
Joint prayers are being held in the southern town of Kielce, Sunday, to commemorate the 68th anniversary of the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in 1942.
The prayer ceremony is to take place at the city’s Menora memorial to the ghetto victims on Sunday evening.
“We will also remember the Righteous among the Nations – people who came from our region, and who risked their lives by saving Jews during World War II,” informs Bogdan Bialek, head of the Jan Karski Association, the organiser of the ceremony.
The liquidation of the Kielce ghetto was performed in three stages. On 20 August, 1942, SS and Ukrainian formations entered the one of the ghetto districts and gave residents 30 minutes to pack one item of personal luggage.
Jewish Ghetto Police units started to pull people out of their homes, with stragglers being shot in the head by Nazi-led units. On the first day of the ghetto liquidation, about 7,000 Jews were tranported to the Treblinka extermination camp.
The second stage occurred two days later, on 22 August, when SS units murdered children from the orphange, with the extermination of the sick at the hospital and elderly at the old people’s home a day later. The third stage took place on the 24 August with the murder of pregnant women and a number of the Jewish Ghetto Police.
In all, 21,000 Jews were forced out of the Kielce ghetto, with 1,500 people murdered during its liquidation. The former ghetto was then used as a barracks for 2,000 forced labourers before being sent to other camps.
400 people survived the liquidation, including 18 Jews from Vienna. www.thenews.pl/national/artykul138583_kielce-marks-68th-anniversary-of-ghetto-liquidation.html
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Post by pjotr on Sept 10, 2010 20:48:20 GMT 1
In this second week of my vacation, this friday I have read a lot of topics on this Forum and especially this one about the Jewish history in Poland and Lithuania. About the significant role the large Jewish minority played in Poland. I have to say I read a lot about it already and had the benefit of reading books of the Dutch Jewish writer Milo Anstadt of Polish-Jewish origin. I read his book 'Polen en Joden' (Poland and Jews). He is poud to be of Polish-Jewish origin, that he speaks Polish and that he received his Polish passport after the collapse of Communism by the new Non-Communist embassador of Poland in the early ninetees. He traveled back to Poland and has Polish friends, and he did translation jobs for Poles. He has a text firm. Next to ' Polen en Joden' I read a book about Poland from him, called ' Polen, land, volk, cultuur.' ( Poland, country, people, culture), a fair and honest report about Poland. Milo AnstadtSamuel Marek (Milo) Anstadt (born July 10, 1920 in Lwów) is a Dutch Jewish writer. BiographyHe lived in Lwów Poland until 1930. At the age of 10, Milo, his parents and sister Sera emigrated to the Netherlands. In Holland, he completed primary school but did not go to secondary school. When Anstadt was fourteen years old, he worked for the Transformator-fabriek Besra in Amsterdam, he often went to ANSKI a cultural club for mostly jewish eastern European immigrants where you could assist at political and other lectures and all kind of performances, where he also received mentoring and was helped to become more spiritually developed. Later, he received a masters degree in law from the University of Amsterdam, specializing in criminology. In 1941, he married Lydia Bleiberg, and they had a daughter Irka in March 1942. After a warning in the evening of the 9th of July 1942, they had to go immediately into hiding. Their daughter was taken afterwards to a foster family in Beverwijk by the Resistance. From 1945 to 1950, he was an editor for the magazine Vrij Nederland. Next, he worked as a journalist with the Dutch Radio Union, and wrote the spoken parts of 1955 documentary programs for television such as In, Televisierechtbank, Spiegel der Kunsten (" Mirror of Arts") and Bezetting (" Occupation"). For the latter two, he received the 1960 Television Award of the Prince Bernhard Foundation. In 1960, he received the request from Wereldvenster Publishing to write a book about Poland. It was published in 1962 under the title Polen, land, volk, cultuur. As an employee of NRC Handelsblad, Anstadt wrote a large number of opinion articles. In 1994, he was appointed as a knight in the Order of Orange Nassau.
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Post by tufta on Dec 18, 2010 9:33:37 GMT 1
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Post by tufta on Jan 28, 2011 9:20:38 GMT 1
Shevach Weiss is an Israeli political scientist and a politician, used to be Knesset speaker and Israeli ambassador to Poland. He wrote on the occasion of International Holocaust day about unjustified ascribing the participation in Holocaust to Poles. He outwardly mentions Jan Gross, and states that although in his books he is writing about events which actually did take place, at the same time he is making generalisations out of marginal pathology. Marginal pathology which got unleashed during the war, in conditions of horrific terror of German occupation. Weiss protests against the notion that Poles have done too little to save their Jewish neighbours. He writes - How can we judge people who were in such a difficult situation? Human nature is such that he mainly cares about own life and life of the loved ones. While helping the Jews was punished with death by Germans occupants. He admits that exposing oneself and own children to death to save a stranger, requires great courage. To require that the ordinary people terrorized by the occupant display it is too much. The Jewish people themselves have not passed such a test. In Polish: www.rp.pl/artykul/600404_Polacy-pozostali-niezlomni.htmlIn poor English: translate.google.pl/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=pl&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=pl&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rp.pl%2Fartykul%2F600404_Polacy-pozostali-niezlomni.htmlI have admired Shevah Weiss since a long time. His honesty, courage and insight. Once again he demonstrates all these merits
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Post by Bonobo on Mar 27, 2011 21:31:38 GMT 1
Israel decorates 13 more Polish 'Righteous' 25.03.2011 12:17 6200 Polish names honoured in gardens of Yad Vashem Israel's ambassador to Poland, Zvi Rav-Ner, decorated 13 Poles in Warsaw yesterday for aiding Jews during the German Nazi occupation of Poland during WW II.
The newly championed 'Righteous Gentiles', in some cases represented by their families, were from various localities, both urban and rural.
Amongst those recognised was Bronislawa Ogoniewska, originally from the city of Stanislawow (now Ukraine), who helped hide some 32 Jews.
With over 6200 now honoured, Poland has the highest number of righteous gentiles in comparison with other countries.
However, it is accepted that the numbers of people involved in aiding Jews was vastly higher. For a gentile to be officially honoured, the testimony of a Jewish survivor must be given, or incontrovertible evidence to support the candidacy.
Most of those that were aided are now no longer alive, whilst others were executed along with their saviours. The official penalty for aiding Jews was the death sentence (often meted out to the entire family) although this was not always practised.
Similarly, some families have avoided applying for Righteous status, noting that their acts were done out of a sense of duty, rather than as a means of winning awards.
Yesterday's ceremony provided a heartening interlude in a month where the uglier side of Polish-Jewish relations was at the forefront of public debate, owing to a new book by Princeton historian Jan T.Gross.
In his book, Golden Harvest, Gross argued that about 20,000 Jews were murdered by their Polish compatriots during the war.
Research on this less-publicised strand of Polish history is ongoing, but representatives of the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research have confirmed a similar figure.
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Post by Bonobo on Apr 3, 2011 16:08:09 GMT 1
Israeli exhibition opens in Polish parliament 31.03.2011 11:58
An exhibition devoted to contemporary Israel has opened at the Parliament building in Warsaw, as part of events marking the Day of Friendship with Israel.
The display presents a photographic record of the history of Israel since its birth in 1948 till the present day.
Parliamentary speaker Grzegorz Schetyna, who opened the display together with the Israeli ambassador to Poland Zvi Ravi-Ner, said Poles can be proud that Israel was built by Jewish people of Polish origin. “Those people who were born and lived here left for Palestine, fought for and built the independence of Israel, and managed to defend it. We are proud, too, and we speak out about it,” Schetyna said.
Ambassador Zvi Ravi-Ner pointed out that the foundations and origins of Israeli political life were in Poland.
“David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was from [the Polish city of] Plonsk. About fifty percent of deputies in the Israeli parliament in 1948 were from Poland. Five political parties, from left to right, had representatives in the Polish Seym before the war,” he said.
The exhibition, now on in the Polish parliament, was originally prepared to mark the 60th anniversary of Israel.
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Post by Bonobo on Jul 25, 2011 13:56:01 GMT 1
Warsaw synagogue being reconstructed for museum By JEREMY SHARON 07/25/2011 02:51
Ukranian Gwozdziec synagogue, built between 1700 and 1731, was a largely wooden structure, with carved and decorated cupola ceiling. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews based in Warsaw has begun a project to reconstruct the ceiling of the renowned Ukranian Gwozdziec synagogue in the town of Sanok, southeastern Poland.
The synagogue, built between 1700 and 1731, was a largely wooden structure with an ornately carved and decorated cupola ceiling, resplendent with Hebrew inscriptions and intricately painted images of the zodiacs, animals and vegetation. It was destroyed, along with approximately 200 other wooden synagogues, during the German occupation of Poland in World War II.
A series of workshops in the nearby town of Rzeszów has already begun recreating and painting the elaborate wooden panels of the original Gwozdziec synagogue and additional workshops on the premises of the Tempel synagogue in Krakow started on Sunday.
An international team of professional carpenters, artisans and architects have come from the US, Canada, Great Britain, Denmark and Poland to help in the construction of the synagogue, which will, when complete, comprise 450 individual pieces of timber measuring 5,000 meters end-to-end.
The completed cupola structure will be installed in the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw as a central part of the permanent exhibition.
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Post by Bonobo on Jul 28, 2011 17:46:43 GMT 1
It is a story of a Jewish family who spent 14 months in Lvov sewers, saved by a Polish sewer worker. The story comes a from the book The Girl in the Green Sweater by Krystyna Chiger, one of Lvov Holocaust survivors. The Chiger family found an unlikely savior in a seemingly ordinary Polish sewer worker, Leopold Socha, a former black-marketeer who brought them food every day, always by different manholes so as not to arouse suspicion. He also brought them a Jewish prayer book which he had found in the now deserted ghetto. Angels in the Dark
By Rabbi Shmuel Burstein
It was the end of May, 1943, and Jewish Lvov was burning. Once home to Poland’s third largest Jewish community, Lvov’s 100,000 Jews numbered less than 8,000. “They are killing the Jewish police! This is the end!” came a cry from the ghetto. Huge buildings, entire blocks were on fire. Jews ran in all directions.
Hundreds made a dash for the sewers, hoping to avoid detection by vicious German dogs and their inhuman masters.Jewish children were rounded up and tossed into awaiting trucks like sacks of raw potatoes. Watching helplessly at the fate of their children, some women threw themselves down from several stories high. Little Krystyna Chiger beheld all of this in fear and terror.
For months, a small group of Jews were preparing for this moment. Yaakov Berestycki understood the fate of Lvov’s already martyred Jews would soon be his own. Daily, he and a few others clawed away at a concrete floor with spoons and forks and small tools from the apartment of a Jew named Weiss to gain entry into the sewers.
Ignacy Chiger was their leader. Weeks before the ghetto’s destruction they broke through and lowered themselves into the sewers of Lvov. As they searched for a place that might be their ‘home,’ they were discovered by three Polish sewer workers.
The three Poles could have easily handed them over to the Nazis for a reward of badly needed food. With no options before them, Weiss and Chiger explained what they had done. A cherubic-looking Pole named Leopold Socha was amused. He followed the diggers and raised himself up through the floor of the ghetto apartment. He beheld a defiant Jewish mother, Paulina Chiger, clutching two children closely to her chest. Deeply moved by the frightened youngsters, he broke out in a magnificent smile.
Leopold Socha was not merely any sewer worker; he was Chief Supervisor of all of Lvov’s sewers. He knew the best places to hide and how to lead prowling German inspectors in a direction away from clandestine Jews.
For Krystyna, her brother Pavel and the rest, the escape into the sewers was a nightmare. Accompanied by screams and shrieking in a stone and lime chamber that trapped all sound, the Jews entered a world of cold darkness. The deafening sound of the river waters terrified Krystyna. Her subterranean world was inhabited by rats that made no secret of their presence, and she could not see where she was going.
Lvov’s labyrinth underground system was actually a complicated work of art, designed by early 20th century Italian engineers. As it wove its way beneath the city’s major landmarks and streets, the 20-foot wide Peltew River roared, charging mightily. It snatched all those who got too close, including Krystyna’s beloved Uncle Kuba.
Another Jew who descended that terrible day in May 1943 was a resourceful, spirited Jew named Mundek Margolies. His name was on several deportation lists. Each time he somehow managed to escape. While in the ghetto he grew fond of Klara Keller. Mundek convinced her to take a chance with life by coming with him into the sewers, leaving her sister, Mania, behind.
Socha promised Chiger that he would protect 20 Jews – for a price. The Chigers provided the lion’s share of the money, having stashed some cash and valuables away before the war. Socha brought whatever food he could each day, as well as news from a place called Earth. He gave them pages of newspapers and took their clothes home to clean each week. On Passover he provided potatoes.
Over time the 20 hidden Jews shrank to ten. Some died. After living under inhuman conditions for several months, some left out of sheer madness. A newborn baby was smothered by its mother to save the lives of the others who trembled at the sound of his pitiful cries.
This small group of Jews struggled to maintain some semblance of Jewish life in their underground hiding place. Yaakov Berestycki, a chassid, found a relatively clean place to put on tefillin each morning.
Paulina Chiger asked Socha if he could bring her some candles. She wished to bring light of Shabbat into the sewers. Socha loved those who loved God as much as he did and he was excited by the challenge. Every Friday, Socha was paid by Ignacy and Paulina later lit her candles.
Socha spoke to the children. He played with them and tried to raise the spirits of all ‘his’ Jews. He took Krystyna to a place where she could see light drifting into the sewers as she sat upon his shoulders.
Mundek Margolies made daring forays into the destroyed ghetto to bring anything left behind that would make the lives of his friends more bearable. He had resolved to marry Klara after the war. They eventually learned that Klara’s sister, Mania, was sent to Janowska concentration camp. Klara blamed herself for abandoning her.
In the hellish world of concentration camps Janowska was particularly horrific. People were left overnight to see how quickly they could freeze to death in icing vats of water. Each morning nooses were prepared in the large square. Jews were “invited” to “volunteer” to be hanged. Tragically, there was no shortage of daily volunteers. Despite all this, Mundek determined to sneak himself into Janowska to rescue Mania and other Jews he could convince to follow him into the sewers.
It was insane. It was impossible. But angels can fly. Mundek changed identities with a Jewish slave he spied out from a work detail on one of his courageous flights outside the sewer. He smuggled himself into Janowska with the work detail at evening.
A little over a day later he located Mania behind a fence. Mania told him she simply could not live in a sewer and wrote a note to Klara, begging that she not blame herself. She blessed Klara with life.
Mundek met other Jews, urging them to leave. They thanked him and blessed him. But they were weak and terrified. The angel returned to the sewers, alone.
After several months the Chigers’ money ran out. They met with Socha and he told them such an enormous risk required compensation; that Wrobleski and Kowalow, his two Polish friends, could not be expected to assist him otherwise. They wished each other goodbye and good luck.
The following day a familiar shuffling of footsteps was heard. It was Socha! He became so committed to preserving their lives he saw no alternative but to use his own money. But he was concerned that his buddies, upon learning that the money was his, would back out of the rescue. So he asked Chiger to pretend he had found extra money and that is was really Jewish money being paid to Wrobleski and Kowalow.
One day Socha revealed to the Jews his motive for rescue. He had been a convicted felon, spent considerable time in jail before the war. This mission was his way to show that he was a changed man and return to God.
Protective wings sheltered the hidden Jews. They survived discovery by a Pole who opened up a manhole cover and shouted: “It’s true! There are Jews in the sewers!” (Socha moved them to a safer location.) They survived the planting of mines only days before the Germans fled Lvov, as the Russian army neared. Socha and Kowalow shouted with all the authority men in overalls could muster before well-dressed German soldiers. They warned that gas pipes lay directly below the ground they were digging for the mines. The Germans would blow up the whole street, themselves included.
It was a lie. And it saved the subterranean Jews.
They survived the melting snows and heavy spring rains in the winter of 1944. The water filled their small basin and rose above their necks. Krystyna screamed to Yaakov, the chassid, “Pray, Yaakov! Pray to God to save us!” Yaakov prayed and the water receded. Sixty years later she said, “It was a miracle.”
The long awaited day of liberation came. In July 1944, after 14 months underground, Socha lifted the manhole cover, telling the Jews they were free! Like creatures from another planet, hunched over from a hideout with low ceilings, ten ragged, thin and filthy survivors found themselves surrounded by Poles who gaped in wonder: “Jews really did live in the sewers!” After months of darkness, their eyes were blinded by the sunshine. Everything seemed red, “bathed in the color of blood.” Socha brought them indoors, to dark rooms where their eyes could adjust to light.
Months after liberation, Socha and his daughter were riding their bicycles in the street. A truck came careening in the direction of Socha’s little girl. He steered quickly to knock her out of the way. Once again he saved a life – his daughter’s – but Socha was killed, his blood dripping into the sewer. ‘His’ Jews, dispersed around Poland and Europe, returned to pay their last respects.
Krystyna still cannot cry. In the sewer she learned to suffer quietly. Her body swallows her tears. She dreads the sound of rushing water and moments of darkness. But she is a healer – a medical professional with an office in New York and has raised a Jewish family. Her brother Pavel served in the IDF and also raised a new generation. Ignacy and Paulina lived out their lives in Israel where Paulina continued bringing the light of Shabbat into her home.
Yaakov moved to Paris where he, too, raised a Jewish family and lived a full life. All those in the sewer, but for Krystyna, have since passed to a world with angels on high.
Mundek and Klara married shortly after the war. After moving to London from Poland, they established together a flourishing kosher catering business, still run by the family. He danced in the very center at every celebration he catered, grabbing his clients by the hand and beaming a broad smile, for his Jewish world was revived. Every Jewish simcha was his simcha. The world of darkness he once knew was now filled with light.
(Rabbi Shmuel Burstein is the author of “The War Against God and His People,” by Targum Press. He is a Holocaust Studies educator and lecturer, and interviewed members of the families for this story. The British Government paid tribute to Leopold Socha in their permanent exhibition on the Holocaust, located in London’’s ”Imperial War Museum.” There, the manhole cover from Lvov, used by Socha, can be seen. A fuller account of this story can be found in “In the Sewers of Lvov,” by Robert Marshall. Krystyna Chiger’’s memoir, “The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust’’s Shadow”)www.whyisrael.org/2009/11/03/angels-in-the-dark/Leopold Socha more www.gelsenzentrum.de/angels_dark_lvov.htm
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Post by pjotr on Jul 31, 2011 16:21:18 GMT 1
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Post by Bonobo on Mar 2, 2013 22:12:46 GMT 1
Hasidic Jews flock to pray at Rabbi's tomb 01.03.2013 15:37 Hasidic Jews from across the globe are descending on the town of Lezajsk in south east Poland today in a pilgrimage to the tomb of one of the founders of the Hasidic movement.
All in all, up to 3000 Jews are expected to reach Lezajsk this weekend, with pilgrims mainly drawn from Europe, Israel, America and Canada.
Pilgrims will pray at the tomb of eighteenth century rabbi Elimelech Weisblum (d.1787), who is regarded as one of the three fathers of Hasidism, the mystical branch of Orthodox Judaism that swept through Poland in reaction to the rigid academic traditions that had hitherto prevailed among Jews in the region.
Hasidic Jews believe that on the anniversary of his death tomorrow, Rabbi Elimelech Weisblum will descend from the heavens and answer the prayers of pilgrims.
These pleas are submitted in written form as kvitels – paper notes that are placed on the rabbi's grave, which in this case is located in a specially constructed building within the grounds of the town's old Jewish cemetery.
Prior to the Second World War, about 3000 Jews lived in Lezajsk. The vast majority did not survive the Holocaust. The graveyard itself, which was almost completely destroyed during the war, was reconstructed under the auspices of the Nissenbaum Foundation, together with other private donors. - See more at: www.thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/128765,Hasidic-Jews-flock-to-pray-at-Rabbis-tomb#sthash.F3N5PQSd.dpuf
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Post by tufta on Mar 24, 2013 10:24:02 GMT 1
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Post by pjotr on Mar 24, 2013 23:11:28 GMT 1
I hope that the museum will be as nice and good as the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam and the Jewish Museum in Berlin: This museum was designed by Daniel Libeskind (born May 12, 1946) an architect, artist, and set designer of Polish-Jewish descent.pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_LibeskindP.S.- The Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam (Het Joods Historisch Museum) is one of my favorite Dutch museums. Next to the general exhibition of Jewish religious and social-cultural artifacts the museum has very good art and photography exhibitions of Jewish artists. Dutch, American, German, Polish, Israeli, Russian and etc.
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Post by tufta on Mar 25, 2013 11:03:30 GMT 1
Pieter, most of the Warsaw museum will be very different. It has huge exhibition space, cultural centre, restaurant, conference hall, 17 century synagogue's roof replica (the reconstruction took 10 years!) and many other quite unique hallmarks. One of it is the location - in the heart of what used to be Warsaw Ghetto set up and run by the Germans. But the idea is not to form another European 'museum of annihilation', but 'museum of life' documenting extremely rich history. I hear that there're talks underway to enable displaying in Warsaw some of the objects from e.g. Amsterdam museum, rarely or never displayed.
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