Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Doing Her Part For Holocaust Education

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez certainly isn't the only one jumping at the chance to make absurd comparisons to the Holocaust:

But then again, this is not the first time Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has done this.

Are Jews Overreacting To Poland’s Holocaust Law? – An Exclusive Interview With Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi Of Poland

My interview with Rabbi Michael Shudrich originally appeared in the March 23rd print issue of The Jewish Press and on their online edition. It is posted here with permission.

Rabbi Michael Schudrich. Credit: Rabbi Michael Schudrich

Although several weeks have passed, indignation over Poland’s “Holocaust Law” still pervades the Jewish community. The law outlaws blaming Poland for crimes committed during the Holocaust, but it has been seen by many as an attempt to deny the Holocaust itself. In reaction, some have suggested boycotting Poland, including ending student trips to the country.

Rabbi Michael Schudrich, chief rabbi of Poland, sees matters in a very different light, arguing that much of the criticism of the new law is misplaced. He recently shared his perspective with The Jewish Press.

The Jewish Press: Before we address the new law, please provide a brief primer on the modern Jewish community of Poland?

Cartoon: The Extent of BDS on College Campuses

Chava Light, a cartoonist and illustrator, has illustrated for The Algemeiner the extent of the abuse of BDS on campuses with her cartoon of A College Miseducation:

Video: The Lady in Number 6 -- The New Movie on the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, World's Oldest Holocaust Survivor

Three years ago, I wrote about Holocaust Survivor Alice Herz Sommer, Age 106, And Her Music.

Now, 3 years later, there is a movie about Alice Herz-Sommer's life:

The Lady in Number 6 is one of the most inspirational and uplifting stories of the year. As the world’s oldest pianist and holocaust survivor, 109 year-old Alice Herz Sommer shares her views on how to live a long and happy life. She discusses music, laughter and how to remain optimistic come what may. The film features beautiful photographs and rare film footage that truly brings Alice’s extraordinary story to life.

PRESS RELEASE May 6, 2013  Contact: Lenny Ben-David NGO Monitor 054-216-8155 lenny.bendavid@ngo-monitor.org  Governments' Funding of Anti-Israel NGOs Abets Church of Scotland Attack on Judaism Jerusalem - The Church of Scotland's latest report, The Inheritance of Abraham? A Report on the "Promised Land," rejects the connection of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel and is strongly influenced by Sabeel, the radical Palestinian-Christian organization. Sabeel's funding comes partly from the governments of the Netherlands, Sweden and Canada via third party Christian aid groups, NGO Monitor said today. The Church of Scotland's report also erases Christian "guilt" over "centuries of anti-Semitism" and contests the usage of the Holocaust as a basis of support for Israel.

New Debate of Fate of The St. Louis During Holocaust and the Effort to Redeem Roosevelt's Image

According to the Amazon description of the book FDR and the Jews:

Nearly seventy-five years after World War II, a contentious debate lingers over whether Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned his back on the Jews of Hitler’s Europe. Defenders claim that FDR saved millions of potential victims by defeating Nazi Germany. Others revile him as morally indifferent and indict him for keeping America’s gates closed to Jewish refugees and failing to bomb Auschwitz’s gas chambers.

Video: The Silence of the Violin -- The Story Of A Violin From Auschwitz

The following is the story of a violin that survived Auschwitz and was silent for 65 years, till reborn,  and now plays around the world.

The following video was created by Kiriat Tivon Community TV in Israel

New Book "FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith" Exposes Roosevelt's Antisemitism

For Immediate Release February 25, 2013

BOOK SHEDS NEW LIGHT ON FDR'S OPINIONS ABOUT JEWS & HOLOCAUST Revered President Sought to "Limit Jews in Professions" and  "Spread Them Thin All Over the World" *** REVIEW GALLEYS AVAILABLE ON REQUEST *** WASHINGTON D.C. - President Franklin D. Roosevelt privately wanted to restrict the number of Jews entering some professions and universities, and believed Jews should be "spread thin all over the world," according to documents uncovered by a veteran Holocaust scholar and published in a new book being released on March 5, 2013. The book, FDR and The Holocaust: A Breach of Faith, by Dr. Rafael Medoff, will be published by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, based in Washington, D.C.  Dr. Medoff, the founding director of the Wyman Institute, is the author of 14 previous books on the Holocaust, Jewish history, and Zionism.

Video: Life In A Jar -- The Story of Irena Sendler, Who Rescued Children During The Holocaust

One of the Holocaust era's most inspiring and inspirational stories of courage and sacrifice was almost lost to history.

In the 1990s a group of Kansas high school history students stumbled on a short summary of a little-known episode that occurred during the dark days of the Warsaw Ghetto. Irena Sendler, a young Polish woman, had, at great personal risk, managed to save over 2500 Jewish children from certain death by smuggling them out of the ghetto. The students carefully researched the events and were able to piece together the story, both as a documentation and, later, as a production, to ensure that history will not forget the actions of this incredible woman.

Polish Funeral Home Wants To Build Crematorium Near Majdanek Concentration Camp

Is there an algorithm for suffering? One that calibrates how much empathy we should feel for the victims of genocide? What degree of concern is “rational”? What degree is excessive, “obsessed”? Should the degree to which we grieve about, analyze—and react to the threat of—mass murders be calculable objectively?
Ron Rosenbaum, A New Slur: Calling people "Holocaust-obsessed" is the new holocaust denial.

On the flip side of being "Holocaust-obsessed" is there a problem of "Holocaust-apathy" as well?

YourJewishNews.com reports about a new crematory being built near a former Nazi death camp:

The Middle East Media Sampler 8/30/2012: Is Iran Israel's Holocaust Obsession?

From DG:

1) Why Jeffrey Goldberg is so frustrating

I would prefer to ignore Jeffrey Goldberg. He, in many ways, is simply just another leftist writing about the Middle East. It took him a while before he took issue with J-Street. He believes that "settlers" represent the undoing of Israel. But every once in a while he writes an important column.

The focus of his latest is a Ron Rosenbaum essay, "Holocaust obsessed" It's the new Antisemitic slur. The central question of Rosenbaum's argument is:

Mideast Media Sampler 1/4/12: Who Will Speak Today? and Oh good, they're talking

From DG:

1)Who will speak up today? 

There's an impressive op-ed in the New York Times, The first killings of the Holocaust, which tells the story of a German prosecutor, Joseph Hartinger, who briefly put the Nazis on the defensive early in their history. Towards the end the author, Timothy Ryback, writes:

Clearly, no single man could have prevented the Holocaust, except Hitler himself, but had there been more Germans like Hartinger to hold individual Nazis personally accountable for their excesses, including President Paul von Hindenburg, who possessed the constitutional authority to dissolve the Nazi government at will and dismiss Hitler as chancellor, the course of history could have taken a very different turn.

Let's consider a number of recent news items from around the Middle East.

Conference: While Six Million Lived

CONFERENCE: "WHILE SIX MILLION LIVED"

"While Six Million Lived: America and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1939" is the title of the ninth national conference of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, to be held at Fordham University Law School, 140 West 62 St., New York City, on Sunday, September 18, 2011, from 10 am to 5 pm.

Scholars will unveil their new research on opportunities for rescue of European Jewry in the years leading up to the Holocaust: Prof. David Wyman on the 1930s search for havens; Dr. Rafael Medoff on FDR, racism, and immigration; Prof. Stephen Norwood on relations between American universities and the Nazis; Prof. Laurel Leff on the U.S. medical community and Jewish refugee doctors; and a panel of prominent cartoonists discussing political cartoons in the U.S. press in the 1930s. Plus a special tribute to the residents of the Virgin Islands for their offer of haven in 1939, with remarks by Virgin Islands Congresswoman Donna Christensen. Registration $25; $15 for students. Includes a kosher box lunch. To register, call 202-434-8994 or visit www.WymanInstitute.org and click on "Donate" on the home page.

See the flyer:

A FADING GENRE IN HOLOCAUST LITERATURE: Menachem Z. Rosensaft, chairman of the Editorial Board of the Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project and founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, writes:

The vast majority of the survivor’s autobiographical accounts of their horrendous experiences, however, have achieved only limited distribution, and most remain unpublished.

Sadly, it is a fading genre. As the ranks of survivors dwindle all too rapidly, their children, relatives and friends are left only with their heroic stories of strength, persistence and courage.

Rosensaft gives an annotated list of the memoirs that have been published.

Technorati Tag: Holocaust.

ISRAELI YOUTH ON THE HOLOCAUST: Arutz Sheva:

An ADL poll found that 37 percent of Israel’s youth believe another Holocaust is a possibility and six percent believe that there is a significant chance it will occur.

American Thinker:

It's sad that 37% of Israeli young people think another Holocaust is possible. But it's worse that 63% don't.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Holocaust.

THE MUSLIM WHO INSPIRED THE NAZIS: Historically, the Nazis influence Muslims--creation of the Ba'ath party, for example. But this hate was a two-way street. David Bedein has written an article about how Haj Amin Al-Husseini inspired Hitler with the concept of Jihad.

Among his points:

o Journalist Maurice Pearlman, who reviewed the records of Eichmann's meetings with the Mufti at the trials for Nazi leader in Nuremberg, wrote a book entitled The Mufti of Jerusalem, published in 1947. Pearlman noted that the Mufti instructed Eichmann as to the way in which the Nazis could best persecute the Jews - slowly and in stages, so as to catch them unaware of the next stage of persecution.

o The Mufti was assigned the task of organizing a Muslim contingent of the Nazi murder machine, which killed Jews throughout Yugoslavia.

o In Berlin, Husseini used the money confiscated from Jewish victims to finance pro-Nazi activities in the Middle East and to raise 20,000 Muslim troops in Bosnia. The Hanjar S.S. Waffen murdered tens of thousands of Serbs and Jews in the Balkans, and served as police auxiliary in Hungary. Heinrich Himmler, the administrator of the Nazi death machine, brought the Mufti on numerous tours of the death camps.

o Most recently, a book was written about the Zunderkommandos, whose task it was to remove the dead Jews from the crematoria. One of those Zunderkommandos remarked in an interview with a researcher that he witnessed a man with a turban whom the Nazi camp commandant brought to witness the gassing of the Jews and the removal of the bodies from the gas chambers, the stripping of their valuables and the burning of their remains. The Nazi told the Zunderkommando that this was the Mufti of Jerusalem.

According to Bedein, after Simon Wiesenthal's death a record was found of his pursuit of the Mufti during the late 1940's--which is now being made ready for publication.

Let's start a collection now to send Ahmadinejad a copy.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Haj Amin Al-Husseini and Mufti and Holocaust.

EUROPE DIED WITH AUSCHWITZ: The Anchoress quotes Spanish Journalist Sebastian Villar Rodriguez:

I was walking along Raval (Barcelona) when all of a sudden I understood that Europe died with Auschwitz.

We assassinated 6 million Jews in order to end up bringing in 20 million Muslims!

We burnt in Auschwitz the culture, intelligence and power to create. We burnt the people of the world, the one who is proclaimed the chosen people of God. Because it is the people who gave to humanity the symbolic figures who were capable of changing history (Christ, Marx, Einstein, Freud…) and who is the origin of progress and wellbeing.

We must admit that Europe, by relaxing its borders and giving in under the pretext of tolerance to the values of a fallacious cultural relativism, opened it’s doors to 20 million Muslims, often illiterates and fanatics that we could meet, at best, in places such as Raval, the poorest of the nations and of the ghettos, and who are preparing the worst, such as the 9/11 and the Madrid bombing and who are lodged in apartment blocs provided by the social welfare.

We also have exchanged culture with fanaticism, the capacity to create with the will to destroy, the wisdom with the superstition. We have exchanged the transcendental instinct of the Jews, who even under the worst possible conditions have always looked for a better peaceful world, for the suicide bomber. We have exchanged the pride of life for the fanatic obsession of death. Our death and that of our children.

What a grave mistake that we made!!!

This article was first published in Spanish in November 2004--now it is 2007 and Europe still has not learned.
[Hat tip: Larwyn]

Technorati Tag: Holocaust and Islamists.

A CONTEMPORARY LESSON FROM THE HOLOCAUST: Recalling the Holocaust and Adolph Hitler (Y'mach Shmo) drives home a point made by Sigmund, Carl and Alfred--the blog, not the psychiatrists:

An enemy is someone with whom we, as individuals and as a community, have fundamental differences. An enemy has values and beliefs, that are very different than out own. An enemy wants to deprive us of our beliefs and values, because that enemy finds our beliefs repulsive or threatening to their own. Enemies will fight to the death, should they choose to engage us or we choose to engage them.

There are people who believe that enemies are opponents- that is, they can reasoned with and rationalized with and common ground can be had. Believing that an enemy can be an opponent is what led much of Europe to appease Hitler, in the beginning. Herr Hitler, it was believed, was after all a European. Surely he could be reasoned with. Surely he would respond to the rational idea that war was catastrophic. [emphasis added]

It is a distinction that needs to be made and emphasized in the war on terror--
both the US and Israel's.
[Hat tip: Larwyn]

Technorati Tag: Holocaust and War On Terror and Islamists.

THE FORGOTTEN LIBERATORS OF THE HOLOCAUST: Author Dr. Alex Grobman writes about those who labored in obscurity to save the Jews who survived the Holocaust.

The Forgotten Liberators

By Dr. Alex Grobman

Many Holocaust commemorators honor American soldiers who participated in the liberation of a concentration or slave labor camp. They often overlook the American Jewish chaplains who played a critical role in helping the Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) in the American Zones of Germany and Austria at the end of WWII. Of the 311 Reform, Conservative and Orthodox chaplains selected to serve in the military, more than 90 had contact with the DPs from 1944-1948.

The DPs presented unique and difficult problems to the American military government who wanted to help, but failed to understand the specific dilemmas liberation posed for the Jews. The military government was responsible for re-establishing communication and transport behind frontlines, not administering and governing. They failed to recognize that the Jews, having been singled out for destruction, required psychological and spiritual assistance as well as material aid. Conditions in the camps were deplorable and the Jews lacked the freedom to choose their own destiny.

From the Army's perspective, the logical solution was to repatriate the DPs as soon as possible. Of the more than 200,000 European Jews who were in Germany and Austria at the end of the war, many were reluctant to go back to their "homelands," particularly the Jews from Poland and Lithuania, a large portion of the survivors. Some of them-the exact number is unknown-went back to search for family and friends. Then they returned to Germany.

Wherever they went in Eastern Europe, they were greeted with disdain and frequently harassed-false arrest, beatings and murder. On July 4, 1946, 47 Jews were murdered and more than 50 were wounded in Kielce, Poland. Many of them found themselves homeless; their homes confiscated by former friends and neighbors. Thus the majority of Jews from Eastern Europe understandably feared repatriation. Jews from Western Europe, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia were in a better position to reclaim their possessions and begin to rebuild their lives.

It fell to the relatively few American Jewish chaplains (approximately 30) who passed through Germany during the initial occupation period April-June 1945, right after liberation, to deal with the Jewish DPs problems. The chaplains were among the first Jews from the U.S. to meet survivors, so although their primary obligation was to American soldiers, some chose to help the DPs. They were not official representatives of the American rabbinate or any other organization. They made the people's needs known to the army and tried to influence the military's policies toward the survivors. If they failed, they took the initiative, which sometimes meant risking their own careers, by engaging in covert actions to ease some of the traumas and dilemmas confronting Jewish survivors in Germany.

Chaplains helped the survivors search for their families through illegal use of the military mail; they rescued children hidden in churches and on farms; and they inspired American Jews to ship tons of food, clothing and basic necessities. They served as escorts on trains that transported children and adults out of Eastern Europe, and on youth transports to Palestine. A number worked with Brichah, the illicit movement that smuggled Jews out of Europe and into Palestine. They also established schools, mikvehs, a summer camp, published educational material and functioned as rabbis of communities.

One of the most extraordinary men was Abraham Klausner. With the help of the survivors, Klausner, a Reform rabbi, compiled and published six volumes containing systematic and exhaustive lists of survivors in Bavaria and distributed them throughout the world. This, the first of the Shearith Hapletah volumes, was the first major attempt to communicate with Jews in the West.

With assistance from Max Braude, an Orthodox rabbi and Judah Nadich, a Conservative rabbi, Klausner was able to help the survivors establish Unzer Weg, the largest Yiddish weekly in Germany, which was viewed by many as their national newspaper.

When Klausner saw that Jews in Dachau dressed in their camp uniforms and still forced to live behind barbed wire and the Jews in other areas of Bavaria living in a horrible state after the liberation, he wrote an official looking, but unauthorized report, that created a quite a stir in the American Jewish community. He also played a key role in shaping the Harrison Report that established the position of adviser on Jewish affairs to the commander of the U.S. forces in Europe in August 1945 in response to the plight of the Jewish DPs.

Realizing the need for the Jews to be recognized as a separate nationality, he convinced the Americans to allow the DPs to establish an organization that would represent them with in negotiations with the military. The organization became known as the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria.

Klausner was instrumental in establishing three Jewish hospitals where DPs could be to be treated by Jewish physicians and Jewish "camps" to protect the survivors from frequent harassment and mistreatment they suffered at the hands of non-Jewish inmates.

Significantly, there were no differences in the extent of commitment and dedication between the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform rabbis. They stepped into the breach to help their fellow Jews until the Jewish relief agencies were operational. Even then they continued to assist the survivors. They tried to show the survivors that they were no longer alone, and that American Jews cared. We owe the chaplains a tremendous debt of gratitude. The very least we can do is to remember their names on Yom HaShoah.

Dr. Alex Grobman is the author of Rekindling the Flame: American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors of European Jewry, 1944-1948.

Technorati Tag: Holocaust and Dr. Alex Grobman.

THE HOLOCAUST: HOW THE JEWS WERE DIFFERENT: Author Dr. Alex Grobman goes beyond the numbers to explain how of all the groups persecuted--and murdered--by the Nazis, the Jews are different. [Hat tip: Larwyn]

Why Numbers Matter In Understanding The Shoah

Dr. Alex Grobman

One of the most common errors in describing the magnitude of the Shoah is the number of people who died. Figures range from 50 million to 11 million, a reflection of a fundamental misunderstanding of the uniqueness of this catastrophe. The use of 11 million is a particularly egregious historical distortion as it equates the destruction of the Jews of Europe with that of the others who were murdered.

We study the Shoah to understand what transpired, why it happened and what it tells us about the attitude of Western civilization toward Jews and other minorities living in the West. It is not a contest to see which group suffered the most or sustained the greatest numerical losses.

If we are to learn from history, we must be concerned about objective truth, with transmitting what actually ensued and not allowing those with their own particular agenda or ignorance to obscure our understanding of what occurred. Distinguishing between different historical events does not, and should not, lessen or demean the suffering of others.

When we refer to the Holocaust, we mean the systematic bureaucratically administered destruction by the Nazis and their collaborators of six million Jews during the Second World War. The Jews were found "guilty" only because they were viewed inaccurately as a race. The Nazi state orchestrated the attempted mass murder of every person with at least three Jewish grandparents.

Millions of civilians and soldiers were killed as a consequence of war. Communists, political and religious leaders were eliminated because they were viewed as a potential threat to the Nazis. When the Nazis murdered approximately 10,000 Polish intelligentsia, in 1939-1940, and Polish Catholic priesthood in western Poland, for example, they were trying to prevent these groups from becoming a political and spiritual force that could unite the country against them. Similarly, when the Nazis murdered more than two and one-half million Soviet prisoners of war, they were killing a military force that had fought them on the field of battle.

European Jews, on the other hand, were the only people marked for complete destruction. To the Nazi leadership, the Jews were a satanic force that controlled both the East and the West and, posed a physical threat to the German nation. There was no way to stop this alleged international Jewish conspiracy from gaining total control of the world, the Nazis reasoned, except to physically destroy every Jewish man, woman, and child. Failure to do so, Hitler believed, "would not lead to a Versailles treaty but the final destruction, indeed, to the annihilation of the German people."

When the executioners questioned their superiors about the need to kill every Jewish woman and child, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, claimed that he would not have been "justified in getting rid of the men-in having them put to death, in other words—only to allow their children to grow up to avenge themselves on our sons and grandsons. We have to make up our minds, hard though it may be, that this race must be wiped off the face of the earth."

For a number of reasons, we do not know the exact number of Jews who were killed. German historian Wolfgang Benz posits that there were 6,269,027, which is more than earlier studies by Jewish scholars. Six Million is the most accurate term and acceptable.

The Nazis also annihilated a minimum of 300,000 Sinti and Roma from Germany, the Baltic region, Ukraine, Croatia and Serbia, although the precise number cannot be determined. Many thousands of others were also killed: the physically and mentally disabled, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, socialists, communists, trade unionists, and political and religious dissidents.

None of these groups, however, were the primary target of the Nazis—not the mentally disabled, who were killed in the euthanasia centers in Germany (here it is to be noted that the Nazis did not export this program to the civilian populations outside the Reich); not the homosexuals, who were regarded as social deviants but for whom the Nazis did not have a consistent policy (homosexuals were persecuted only in the Reich and in areas annexed to it but not in countries the Germans occupied); not the Gypsies, who were partly seen as "asocial" aliens and Aryans within society and therefore did not have to be annihilated completely; and not the Jehovah's Witnesses, who had refused to swear allegiance to Hitler and who declined to serve in the German army, but who were not marked for extinction; in fact, only a small number were incarcerated in the camps, and most of them were German nationals. The Nazis also did not single out every socialist, communist, trade unionist, or dissident—just those they perceived as a threat to the Reich. The Jews alone were the primary target of the Nazis.

When we use 11 million or any other number than the Six Million to describe the Shoah, we are distorting the historical record. We trivialize the importance of this unprecedented event in modern history, minimize the experiences of all those who suffered and prevent a legitimate understanding of its causes and its universal implications for Western society.

The stakes are too high to misrepresent history for as Richard Rubenstein accurately noted, "Auschwitz has enlarged our conception of the state's capacity to do violence. A barrier has been overcome in what for millennia had been regarded as the permissible limits of political action." Our continued interest and fascination with the Nazi period should keep us vigilant Jacob Talmon observed for "it is entirely possible that this is the end that awaits many races and nations -- maybe all of them. And the Jews will then prove to have been the first victim of this new experiment."

A historian, Dr. Grobman's most recent book is "Battling for Souls: The Vaad Hatzala Rescue Committee in Post War Europe". He is also co-author of "Denying History: Who Says The Holocaust Never Happened?" His newest book is "Nations United: How the UN is Undermining Israel and the West".

Technorati Tag: Dr. Alex Grobman and Holocaust and Nazis.