When Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, or Jewish Community Vienna, decided to sell a vacant building in the summer of 2000, two employees were sent to look for any archival material that might have been left behind.
Oxford Union faces boycott over invite to Holocaust denier
The Defence Secretary, Des Browne, is leading a group of politicians and public figures who are boycotting an increasingly divided Oxford Union over the decision by its president to host a talk involving the Holocaust-denying historian David Irving and the BNP leader, Nick Griffin. The event, entitled Free Speech Forum, which is planned for next Monday, has provoked uproar at the university and beyond. Some Oxford students say they have received death threats and fear they will be targeted by far-right groups. More than a thousand people have signed a petition on the Downing Street website calling on Gordon Brown to condemn the talk. A protest rally in Oxford against what many students see as a cynical publicity stunt by the union's current president, Luke Tryl, is planned for tomorrow.
A string of politicians and celebrities have now pulled out of events at the world's most famous debating society, the credibility of which appears to have been badly damaged by Mr Tryl, a former chairman of the Halifax branch of Conservative Future, the Tory party's youth wing, who sees himself as a future prime minister. Among those who have cancelled appearances are the television presenter June Sarpong, the Labour MPs Chris Bryant and Austen Mitchell, and Mr Browne. Sources close to Mr Browne said he did not wish to be "on the same programme as such people", and that "if he had known they had been invited he never would have agreed to speak in the first place". Mr Tryl is said to be increasingly isolated in the society. One union insider said: "He has sacrificed so many great guests, simply for the sake of a fascist and a Holocaust denier to speak."
Denis McShane, the former Europe minister, pulled out of a meeting at the union last Thursday night after writing to Mr Tryl to object to plans for "two notorious anti-Semites to be given a platform at the Oxford Union". Mr McShane said: "To put four-star Jew-haters on to a prestigious platform like the Oxford Union is to validate modern anti-Semitism. If the Oxford Union has a right-wing ex-Toryboy president, he is entitled to invite whoever he wants. But those who think there should not be a platform for Jew-baiters are entitled to their view, too." Asked about his position Mr Tryl, who describes himself as a "very liberal, modern person", said: "The BNP are in a minority, but they gain support when they say the liberals are silencing them." Pressed on BNP policies, however, Mr Tryl called them "abhorrent". Yair Sivan, of the Union of Jewish Students, said: "There is no place for racists and fascists at universities ... Democracy does include the right to free speech, but it also includes the right to tell extremists they are not welcome – that democratic right would be one far more fitting for the Oxford Union." The Oxford University newspaper, Cherwell, said students had received death threats from neo-Nazis. It is believed that BNP supporters are planning to "target" demonstrators at tomorrow's rally and at the event next Monday.
Holocaust museum opens at Belsen
Germany has inaugurated a museum at the site of the Nazi concentration camp where diarist Anne Frank died.
The new museum at Bergen-Belsen, in the north of Germany, highlights the fates of those who died at the camp during World War II.
Among the exhibits are the drawings and diaries of Jews imprisoned there, plus video statements by survivors.
Some 100 survivors were at the ceremony at the camp, where an estimated 50,000 Jews perished during the Holocaust.
Power of memory
The new exhibition is part of an effort to reconstruct the lives of those sent to Bergen-Belsen during the Nazi occupation of Europe.
It contains photographs, prisoners' records and objects donated by the survivors.
"Use of the new material makes it possible to faithfully recreate the history of the camp," said Christian Wulff, governor of the state of North-Rhine Westphalia.
"The genocide of Europe's Jews - a crime against humanity of unimaginable proportions - will now and forever keep its paramount place within the German memory," German Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said as he opened the museum.
Liberated by Allied troops in 1945 and later razed, Bergen-Belsen began life as a prisoner of war camp.
From 1943 until the end of the war it was a concentration camp for Jews, gypsies and homosexuals, with an estimated 125,000 people held there.
Holocaust-denier Irving expelled from Polish book fair
WARSAW (AFP-EJP)---Convicted British Holocaust-denier David Irving was Friday ordered to leave a book fair in Poland after turning up to publicise his controversial work, organisers said. Meanwhile a French professor previously sentenced by French courts for Holocaust denial, was prevented from holding a talk at an Italian university for fear of causing a public disturbance. "David Irving came to the stand (of the publisher Focal Point) to promote his books," said Grzegorz Guzowski, head of the company which runs the annual Warsaw International Book Fair. I asked him to leave immediately." Focal Point is a British-based company which publishes what it calls "real history" -- with a catalogue almost exclusively made up of books by Irving. Historian Irving, 69, is notorious for attempting to claim that Adolf Hitler was not party to the Nazis’ genocide of European Jews during World World II. He spent 13 months in jail in Austria following a conviction there for Holocaust denial before being expelled to Britain. Guzowski told AFP Irving had protested vigorously on being told to leave, accusing Poland of violating human rights. "But he finally gave in after we threatened to call the police," he said. Irving had not been invited by the fair, he added. In 2000, Irving lost a libel case in Britain’s High Court court over claims that he was a Holocaust-denier, with a judge ruling that Irving had deliberately misrepresented historical evidence and portrayed Hitler in an unwarranted, favourable light.
Meanwhile French Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson was prevented from holding a talk at the law faculty at Teramo University in central Italy. Faurisson had been invited by Claudio Moffa, a professor of Asian and African history and director of a master’s program in Middle East studies. Moffa cited academic freedom in defending the invitation. The university first ordered him to withdraw the invitation because Faurisson’s credentials were academically illegitimate. Robert Faurisson, a former university professor, said two months ago in Paris that Hitler's gas chambers and the Holocaust had been "one and the same historic lie.'' Later, as protests mounted over the planned speech, the rector decided to close the building for the day because of rising tensions over Faurisson’s presence. The decision to close the building was taken "following repeated warning signals... from students, teachers and national and international opinion concerning the lecture scheduled by Professor Robert Faurisson," said a statement by the rector, Mauro Mattioli. "The climate of tension could have presented a risk to the safety of students, teachers and administrative staff," it added. The university public relations office said Faurisson had attempted to hold a press conference in a hotel in town but this was cancelled and he addressed journalists in a public square. There had also been a brief altercation between him and a group from Rome saying they belonged to families killed in the Holocaust, it added. Faurisson, 77, a former university professor, said in March in Paris that Hitler’s gas chambers and the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis had been "one and the same historic lie." Faurisson, who has been condemned several times for revisionism, made the statement before a court where he is suing former French Justice Minister, Robert Badinter, for defamation for having said that he "falsified history".
BNP leader and Holocaust denier invited to Oxford Union
The Oxford Union debating society came under fire last night after its president said he had approached Holocaust denier David Irving, British National party chairman Nick Griffin and the Belarussian dictator, Alexander Lukoshenko, to speak at forthcoming events. Luke Tryl said he had asked Mr Irving and Mr Griffin to speak at the union's Free Speech Forum, due to take place at the end of November, adding that Mr Lukoshenko, the Belarussian president, accused of a string of human rights abuses, had been approached to address students later in the term.
"The Oxford Union is famous for is commitment to free speech and although I do think these people have awful and abhorrent views I do think Oxford students are intelligent enough to challenge and ridicule them," he told the Guardian, adding that no formal decision on who would be invited had been made. However, the move drew widespread criticism from student groups and anti-fascist campaigners. In a joint statement, Oxford Jewish Society presidents Daniel Bloch and Steven Altmann-Richer said: "It will be a disgrace if these discredited speakers are allowed a platform at a forum on free speech. They have an embarrassing history of disregard for legal restrictions on it. It will certainly go down as a black mark on the reputation of the Oxford Union." Duncan Money, a second-year student at the university who says he has suffered a series of threats from rightwing extremists, said: "It is disappointing that the Oxford Union has chosen to promote and legitimise fascism ... Doubtless the controversy will bring them feverish excitement but for those of us who confront hate-filled bigots and are on the receiving end of death threats because of it, the issue is a bit more serious."
The BNP said Mr Griffin would attend the event if it went ahead. However, the invitation to Mr Lukoshenko was blocked by the Foreign Office, which said he was subject to an EU travel ban. Mr Irving, who told the Guardian last month that he was launching a comeback speaking tour of the UK, denied that he had received any formal approach from the Oxford Union but added that he would like to speak to the students there. "I have had many invitations to speak there in the past but they normally get withdrawn after threats of violence and intimidation. It is a pity because I think there are a lot of students who would like to hear what I have to say." Last month the discredited historian told the Guardian that he believed the Jews were responsible for what happened to them during the second world war and that the "Jewish problem" was at the root of most of the wars of the last 100 years.
Iran Holocaust Show Sympathetic to Jews
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — It is Iran's version of "Schindler's List," a miniseries that tells the tale of an Iranian diplomat in Paris who helps Jews escape the Holocaust — and viewers across the country are riveted. That's surprising enough in a country where hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has questioned whether the Holocaust even took place. What's more surprising is that government media produced the series, and is airing it on state-run television. The Holocaust is rarely mentioned in state media in Iran, school textbooks don't discuss it and Iranians have little information about it. Yet the series titled "Zero Degree Turn" is clearly sympathetic to the Jews' plight during World War II. It shows men, women and children with yellow stars on their clothes being taken forcibly out of their homes and loaded into trucks by Nazi soldiers.
"Where are they taking them?" the horrified hero, a young Iranian diplomat who works at the Iranian Embassy in Paris, asks someone in a crowd of onlookers. "The Fascists are taking the Jews to the concentration camps," the man says. The hero, named Habib Parsa, then begins giving Iranian passports to Jews to allow them to flee occupied France to then-Palestine. Though the Habib character is fictional, it is based on a true story of diplomats in the Iranian Embassy in Paris in the 1940s who gave out about 500 Iranian passports for Jews to use to escape. The show's appearance now may reflect an attempt by Iran's leadership to moderate its image as anti-Semitic and to underline a distinction that Iranian officials often make — that their conflict is with Israel, not with the Jewish people. About 25,000 Jews live in Iran, the largest Jewish community in the Middle East after Israel. They have one representative in parliament, which is run mostly by Islamic clerics.
The series could not have aired without being condoned by Iran's clerical leadership. The state broadcaster is under the control of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khomenei, who has final say in all matters inside Iran. Moderate conservatives have been gaining ground in Iran, where there is increasing discontent with the ruling hardliners over rising tensions with the West, a worsening economy and price hikes in basic commodities. The government even allowed the series to break another taboo in Iran: For the first time, many actresses appear without the state-mandated Islamic dress code. The producers wanted to realistically portray 1940s Paris, and thus avoided the headscarves and head-to-foot robes that all women must normally wear on Iranian TV.
Ahmadinejad sparked widespread outrage in 2005 when he made comments casting doubt on the Holocaust and saying the state of Israel should be "wiped from the map." His government organized a conference of Holocaust deniers and skeptics from around the world in December. But the series has won support even from hardliners. Some argue that it links the Holocaust with Israel's creation, thus boosting an argument by Ahmadinejad that if the Nazi killing of Jews did take place, the Palestinians who then lived in Palestine should not have had to pay the price for it by the creation of Israel after the war. "The series differentiates between Jews and Zionism. The ground for forming Israel is prepared when Hitler's army puts pressure on activist Jews. In this sense, it considers Nazism parallel to Zionism," the hard-line newspaper Keyhan said.
Israeli anger over 'Nazi' group
Israelis have been shocked by the story of a group of young immigrants from the former Soviet Union who allegedly formed a neo-Nazi cell in the Jewish state - founded as a haven from the European anti-Semitism that led to the Nazi Holocaust in World War II.
The group, from the central town of Petah Tikva, are said to have filmed themselves carrying out hate crimes, wearing Nazi insignia and proclaiming their allegiance to Adolf Hitler.
Eight young men are being held over 15 assaults of Orthodox Jews, foreign workers and other minority groups. Police said a ninth youth had fled the country.
It is thought to be the first organised neo-Nazi cell to be uncovered in Israel, although alleged members and their families have denied any neo-Nazi activity.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert spoke of his outrage at the footage, viewed by ministers at a cabinet meeting, and said that Israeli society had failed to educate the youths.
About one million former Soviet Jews have immigrated to Israel since the 1990s, under the country's "law of return", which allows entry to anybody who is Jewish or has Jewish ancestry (defined as having at least one Jewish grandparent).
Some of the immigrants are thought to have only the most tenuous links to Judaism, and experts say a small minority have embraced Nazi beliefs.
'Widely ignored'
Marina Niznik, a lecturer at Tel Aviv University, says some young Russian-speaking Israelis are being influenced by a rise in fascism in their former homelands.
"Some of this generation are completely lost in society. They don't feel an affiliation with Israeli society, they feel like strangers," she says.
They are conscripted into the Israeli army but many experience a feeling of alienation from society, fed by lives spent in low-income areas and in broken families.
"It is as a sort of protest, a form of self-identification. The problem is that no-one wants to speak about this, it has been widely ignored until now," Ms Niznik said.
Zalman Gilichenski, of the Information Centre for Victims of Anti-Semitism, an NGO, says neo-Nazi behaviour among some immigrants is encouraged by links they maintain with racist groups in Russia.
"Many times the police and government ministries were told about this, but they were not interested," Mr Gilichenski told the BBC.
"There are other groups like these in almost every city in Israel," Mr Gilichenski said.
"In Russia, a day doesn't pass without a racist murder, and these youths are very connected to their friends in Russia (through the internet) and they learn from them; they even videotape their attacks."
'Deportation'
The discovery of a violent anti-Semitic cell among young people, whose immigration to Israel was based on their having Jewish roots, has caused particular outrage in the Israeli media and public, sparking calls for action.
"We obviously have to change immigration policies, not to take in everyone who wants to come," Mr Gilichenski said.
There have also been calls for the law to be changed to permit the revocation of Israeli citizenship and deportation for neo-Nazis.
At the moment, the Israeli statute outlaws denial of the Holocaust, but not neo-Nazi behaviour.
Michael Jankelowitz, of the Jewish Agency, which is responsible for immigration to Israel, warns against knee-jerk reactions, saying the Petah Tikva case arises from an internal Israeli problem with the education system.
"Immigrants from the former Soviet Union have changed the face of Israel," Mr Jankelowitz told the BBC.
"They have made an enormous contribution in the fields of medicine, hi-tech, science and the arts," he says.
Other experts say it would be against the state of Israel's strategic interests as Israel needs to encourage immigration because of the demographic challenge to the Jewish state from a growing Israeli Arab and Palestinian population.
Spain arrests fugitive Austrian Holocaust denier
MADRID – Spanish police said on Thursday they arrested Austrian Holocaust denier Gerd Honsik, 15 years after he fled his homeland to evade a prison sentence.
An Austrian court sentenced Honsik in 1992 to 18 months in prison after he published a book called 'Acquittal for Hitler'.
Honsik, 65, was convicted under an Austrian law banning people from re-engaging in activities in support of Adolf Hitler's Nazi party or its ideas, including publishing Nazi propaganda.
But Honsik fled to Spain during an appeal, the Austrian justice ministry said in a statement on Thursday. A spokeswoman for the Spanish national police said Honsik was arrested in the Malaga area, although declined to give further details.
Spain had already twice turned down an Austrian extradition request for Honsik. Spain's high court said that Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi propaganda were not illegal in the country.
But after a European-wide arrest warrant was issued, Honsik could be extradited for racist and xenophobic behaviour, the Austrian ministry said.
Spain has 90 days from the point when the arrest warrant was issued to decide whether to extradite Honsik.
In December, Austria deported British historian David Irving, who was arrested in 2005 and sentenced to three years in prison for denying the Holocaust. But he was granted an appeal to serve the remainder of his sentence on probation.
Denying the Holocaust in Austria, which provided a significant number of top Nazi leaders including Hitler, is a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Austria was part of Germany's Third Reich from 1938 to 1945.
Academic sacked over Holocaust
A prominent political scientist has been sacked from a top US university for criticizing the Zionist regime and questioning the Holocaust.
Norman Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry and a professor of political sciences in DePaul University in Chicago, is being denied tenure at one of the country's top 10 private universities, The Guardian reported.
Finkelstein has argued in his books that claims of Semitism are used to dampen criticism of policies of the Zionist regime towards the Palestinians and that the Holocaust is exploited by some Jewish institutions for their own gain.
Reacting to the decision, Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, said, "They can deny me tenure, deny me the right to teach. But they will never stop me from saying what I believe."
Intellectuals such as the prolific writer Noam Chomsky and the Oxford historian Avi Shlaim have spoken out in Finkelstein's favor.
MKH/BGH
Holocaust denier Irving asked to leave book fair
Organisers of a Polish book fair today asked British writer David Irving, who was jailed in Austria for denying the Holocaust, to leave the event. Irving had been scheduled to present his books at an event organised by British publisher Focal Point, said Grzegorz Guzowski, head of the Ars Polonia company, which organised the Warsaw International Book Fair. Guzowski said that, when organisers were alerted to the nature of Irving’s work, he told the writer to go. “I told him his message was in violation of Polish law and that I would not allow him to deliver it at the book fair premises, and I asked him to leave,” Guzowski said. “At first he refused and started shouting that there is no freedom of speech and that Poland is not a democratic country, but eventually he left,” he added.
Members of Italy's Jewish community have been protesting outside a lawyer's office in Rome where a former Nazi officer
has begun work.
Shouts of "Murderer!" greeted Erich Priebke, 93, as he arrived for his first day on the back of a scooter.
A court ruled last week that Priebke, who is serving a sentence for multiple murders, could work on day release.
Priebke was jailed for life in 1998 for his role in the massacre of 335 Italians in 1944.
He had been discovered working as a schoolteacher in Argentina, and was extradited to stand trial.
In 1999, he was given leave to serve the remainder of his sentence under house arrest in his lawyer's home, on the grounds
of his ill health.
But a military court ruled last week that he could go to work at his lawyer's office "every day, freely" and also to "go
out to satisfy, at nearby places and for the time strictly necessary, the indispensable necessities of life" - interpreted
as going out for lunch.
He will work as a translator, and will also spend time on his biography, which he began during his brief spell in jail.
'A disgrace'
The president of the Jewish community in Rome, Leone Passerman, questioned how it was possible that a Nazi war criminal,
allowed to complete a sentence at home on health grounds, was suddenly fit enough to go back to work.
"The first thought that I had was of the magistrate that made the provision, perhaps had remembered the lesson that was
on the gate at Auschwitz - 'Arbeit macht frei', 'work will set you free' - and perhaps he thought it was right to free Mr
Priebke to allow him to work," he said.
One Jewish protester, 80-year-old Leone Sonnino, said: "It's an absolute disgrace, people forget.
"People say 'It's enough now.' Enough for what? Nothing should be enough, there can never be enough grief."
'Re-education'
But Priebke's lawyer, Paolo Giachini, defended the decision.
"The law says that after a period in prison, inmates have the right to certain benefits, because detention here in Italy
isn't just punitive, it tries to re-educate those who have been condemned," he told Reuters news agency.
Priebke is serving a life sentence for the murder of 335 people at the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome.
The 1944 massacre was a reprisal ordered by Adolf Hitler after partisans killed a patrol of 33 German soldiers.
Priebke was one of several officers present during the killing of the men and boys, 75 of whom were Jewish, at the caves.
Italians picket ex-Nazi's office
FRANKFURT (EJP)---French-Israeli historian Saul Friedlaender, one of the best specialist
of the Holocaust, has been awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in Frankfurt. The prize, with a value of 25,000 euros, is Germany’s most prestigious literary award.
In 2005 it was awarded to Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk who received one year later the Nobel
Prize in literary. It is to be presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 14. He has taught at the universities of Geneva and Tel Aviv, and is currently a professor
of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. After a book on the “years of persecution” (1933-1939) which was published
in 1997, he came recently with the second volume on “the years of extermination” (1939-1945). In this book, he writes that at the time of Hitler, the Germans knew about the extermination
of Jews “even if they had not all the details.”
Jewish Holocaust historian gets top German
prize
The jury said Friedlaender
was an "epic storyteller of the history of the Shoah, the persecution and extermination of Jews in the time of Nazi dominance
in Europe."
Friedlaender had provided people burnt to ashes with a voice and a memorial, it said.
Friedlaender
was born in Prague in 1932 in a German Jewish family. He survived the Holocaust in France.
His two-volume work, "The Third Reich and the Jews”, is perhaps
his best known.
His two-volume work, “The Third Reich and the Jews”,
is perhaps his best known.
The Stermers were among an estimated 2.2 million Polish Jews targeted by Operation Reinhard, the secretive Nazi plan to
enslave, rob and slaughter the country's Jewish population. Operation Reinhard was part of what Nazi leaders termed the "final solution to the Jewish question." During the Second World War, Adolf Hitler at first sought to "cleanse" German territory of Jews through imprisonment and
expulsion. But Nazi policy toward Jews evolved murderously as the war progressed. In German-occupied Poland, Jews had their property confiscated and were concentrated in ghettos. Then, after the Nazis
invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, special killing squads, called Einsatzgruppen, moved into towns and cities on the
heels of a German advance. They would round up Jewish men, women and children, Roma families and Communist party leaders,
march them into forests or fields, rob them, strip them and shoot them. Some of the Einsatzgruppen's victims were gassed in
mobile units. It was the first systematic killing operation of the Holocaust. By October 1941, a policy of extermination of Jews under German control was being discussed among the highest ranks of
the Nazi regime, according to leading Holocaust scholar Christopher Browning, an historian at the University of North Carolina.
Although there's no document that pinpoints when the Nazis formalized their extermination policy, events suggest that mass
killing, not expulsion, became the new "operative vision" of the regime in late 1941, he said. "There was just too much happening at once for it to be coincidental," he said. In October 1941, the Nazis banned Jewish emigration from Europe, abandoning attempts to deport the continent's Jews to
the Soviet Union. That same month, the wheels were set in motion for what would come to be known as Operation Reinhard. German Schutzstaffel (SS) commander Heinrich Himmler ordered one of his generals to begin work on the "final solution"
in a part of occupied Poland known as the Government General, an area that included Warsaw, Krakow, Lvov and the Stermers'
hometown of Korolowka. SS General Odilo Globocnik directed the operation, which co-ordinated the construction of killing centres in Belzec, Sobibor
and Treblinka. The construction of Belzec began in November 1941 and was completed five months later. Like the other camps, Belzec was built next to a railroad to facilitate the transportation of Jews from ghettos across
southern Poland, including the Borszczow ghetto, near the Stermers' hometown. Many relatives, friends and neighbours of the Stermer family would perish in Belzec's six gas chambers. The killing began in Belzec in March 1942. Belzec, along with the other Operation Reinhard extermination centres, used
carbon monoxide gas, generated by truck engines, to murder Jews, Roma and Soviet prisoners of wars. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, cattle cars jammed with 4,000 to 5,000 people arrived at the Belzec railway station,
where German SS personnel announced they were at a transit camp and were to hand over all valuables in their possession. "The Jews were forced to undress and run through the 'tube,' which led directly into gas chambers deceptively labeled as
showers. Once the chamber doors were sealed, auxiliary police guards started an engine located outside the building housing
the gas chambers. Carbon monoxide was funneled into the gas chambers, killing all those inside. The process was then repeated
with deportees in the next 20 freight cars." The encyclopedia reports that an estimated 434,500 Jews died in Belzec, which was dismantled and plowed over in an attempt
to hide the atrocities that took place there.
Operation Reinhard first systematic killing operation of the Holocaust
DRESDEN, Germany (AP) _ Paintings and drawings by Holocaust victims will be put on display in an eastern German museum
in a first-of-its-kind collaboration with Israel's Yad Vashem, the director of Dresden's art collection said. The art created under conditions of extreme suffering _ often in the face of imminent death, in concentration camps, ghettos,
or during flight _ will be paired with older works from the Dresden State Art Collection, director Martin Roth said. ''It's about the dialogue between our collection of traditional art, mirroring European cultural and intellectual history,
and an art that was inspired by this tradition, and shaped by the reign of barbarism,'' Roth said. Many of the artists whose paintings and drawings will be displayed did not survive the Holocaust. Roth said he hoped the
exhibit would underline the significance of holding onto art in the face of death, terror and inhumanity. Roth said the idea for the exhibit came to him after visiting Yad Vashem, and the Israeli museum agreed to it. ''It will be the first time that Yad Vashem carries out such an exhibit in cooperation with a German museum,'' Roth said. Roth expressed hope the exhibit would help deepen understanding of the Nazi era, an especially important issue in the economically
depressed east, where Dresden is located, where the far-right party and another extremist party has representation in the
state parliament. ''I want to put the art center stage and to show with it how artists who were victims of the Nazi terror used art to endure
the nightmare in the death camps and to tolerate the intolerable.'' The exact location of the exhibition remains to be determined before the opening scheduled for 2009. AP
Dresden museum to display Holocaust victims' art
GVOZDAVKA-1, Ukraine: As children watched in the hot sunshine, a dozen rabbis scoured a Ukrainian village
meadow for bones — the fragmented remains of Jews systematically murdered here in the Holocaust. People who live in Gvozdavka-1 know that thousands of Jews were killed in the area during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine,
but the evidence didn't surface until April, when workers laying gas pipes happened on the burial ground. On Monday, the rabbis — including three Holocaust scholars from Israel and the United States — spent several
hours hunting for bones, which they immediately shoveled back into the ground. For 70 years, Gvozdavka-1's villagers planted vegetables and grazed cows on the meadow, and told their children horrific
stories about thousands of Jews executed in the village, 110 miles (180 kilometers) northwest of Odessa. "My grandmother frightened me with this story. What happened here is horrible," said Vika Bengul, 14, who often played
in the meadow. In November 1941, Romanian troops allied with the Nazis set up a concentration camp in Gvozdavka-1, where about 5,000 Jews
perished, according to regional Jewish leaders. Jews were brought here from several regions of Ukraine, as well as from what
is now Moldova, they said. Each day several cartloads of Jews arrived, villagers say. Some Jews were executed, while others died of starvation or
disease. "They extended their hands through the camp fence begging for food," said 78-year old Olha Tomachenko. "We threw potatoes
and bread to them." Tomachenko recalled how the inmates lived in the open, drenched by rain, freezing in the winter. "They gave birth to their
kids and died at the camp," she said. Yakov Ruza, rabbinical representative at the Israeli government's L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine, said there
are plans to fence off the site and put up a monument, but not to exhume the dead and try to identify them. "We want to cover the place," he said. "These holy Jews will stay where they are." The names of 93 of the Jews killed at the Gvozdavka-1 site have already been established, according to Ukraine's Jewish
community, while the identities of the others are probably documented at archives in Moscow and Israel. Villagers say the mass grave is only one of at least four in Gvozdavka-1. "They buried them everywhere. It was impossible to remember the places," said 80-year-old Olha Korsya. Parfeniy Bohopolsky, 85, remembered how Jews were tortured and killed, and their bodies then piled on carts for burial
at sites scattered through the village. Bohopolsky said when he was 18, he drove one of the carts. "Then I told my boss: 'You can kill me but I will never do it again,'" he said, his eyes filling with tears. Tomachenko said a Jewish girl who escaped from the camp spent one night at her family's home. But in the morning, Tomachenko's
grandmother told her to leave. "Go anywhere God sends you, or the Romanians will kill you and me," the grandmother said, according to Tomachenko. She doesn't know what became of her, but still keeps a small white towel the girl gave her. Vera Kryzhanivska said the village council she heads would be helpful and soon discuss a request to hand control of the
meadow to Jewish groups. Some Jewish community leaders said villagers could have shown more respect for the dead. "How could people just walk past the grave and do nothing?" said Ilia Levitas, the head of Ukraine's Jewish Council. "Where
is their Christian mercy?" Bones were discovered during earlier excavation work in 1974, according to some of the rabbis, but Ukraine was then part
of the Soviet Union, which kept silent about it. The destruction of Ukrainian Jewry is symbolized by Babi Yar, a ravine outside the capital, Kiev, where the Nazis killed
about 34,000 Jews during just two days in September 1941. Levitas said Ukraine has 726 Nazi-era mass graves. About 1.7 million Ukrainian Jews were killed, he said. But Yahad-In
Unum, a Paris-based group documenting Jewish mass graves in Ukraine, has covered one fifth of the country and has already
documented 600 mass graves. ___
Bones beneath a Ukraine meadow revive a chapter
of Holocaust horror
A Jewish Holocaust survivor made a plea for tolerance Tuesday at a conference in the world's most populous Muslim nation
that also brought together religious leaders and victims of attacks by Islamic extremists.
One of the goals of the meeting was to counter a December conference hosted by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that
tried to cast doubt on the killing of an estimated 6 million Jews during World War II.
''I hope people will learn from the past,'' said Sol Teichman, 79, who was a teenager living in Czechoslovakia when his
city was occupied first by the Hungarian army and then the Germans. ''We should try to improve life instead of destroying
it.''
The daylong gathering on Bali island was attended by high-profile moderate Indonesian Muslim leaders, including former
President Abdurraham Wahid, and Hindu spiritual head Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, as well as Buddhist teachers, a Jesuit priest and
rabbis — a rarity in a country that does not recognize Israel or the Jewish faith.
''All too often, hatred and violence replace peace as religion is manipulated for political purposes,'' the conference
wrote in a final statement.
It said religious leaders have a special obligation to reject such manipulation and to ''mobilize their communities to
not only respect, but also defend the rights of others to live and worship differently.''
Indonesia earlier this week refused to sign a U.N. Security Council agreement condemning Iran's president for making statements
that encouraged the destruction of Israel. But that did not stop Wahid, who was president from 1999 to 2001, from offering
his own objections to claims the Holocaust was a myth.
''Although I'm a good friend of Ahmadinejad, I have to say that he is wrong,'' he said. ''I visited Auschwitz's Museum
of Holocaust and I saw many shoes of dead people. Because of this, I believe the Holocaust happened.''
His daughter, Yenny Wahid, who is a prominent supporter of liberal Islam, said it was up to Muslims ''to bring religion
back to its original intention ... to underline the importance of finding shared values.''
''We have to find ways to promote tolerance and understanding for mankind,'' she said.
Also participating in the conference were victims of a terrorist attack in Israel and of suicide bombings by Muslim militants
on Bali in 2005. More than 220 people have died from two attacks in Bali.
''It has been difficult for me to excuse in my heart those who committed this act,'' said Tumini, a Balinese woman who
was severely burned when al-Qaida-linked militants targeted two nightclubs in 2002. She said she still has not recovered emotionally,
physically or financially.
Bali is a mostly Hindu enclave in Indonesia, which has some 190 million Muslims, more than any other nation in the world.
Its government is secular and most people are moderate, although a vocal militant fringe has grown louder in recent years.
The conference was sponsored by the Libforall Foundation, a U.S. based non-governmental organization that seeks to counter
Muslim extremism in the Islamic world by supporting religious moderates, and the Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance.
Teichman said he lost 70 family members to the Nazis, including his sister, brothers and grandparents, and was taken to
Auschwitz, Warsaw, Dachau, Kaufering and Landsberg concentration camps before allied forces liberated them in 1945.
He said Ahmadinejad's decision to host a conference in December questioning whether the Holocaust took place made him want
to ''push a little harder to meet Muslim leaders.''
Holocaust Survivor: Learn From Past
(AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati) :: Hindu spiritual leader and humanitarian Sri Sri Ravi Shankar,
left, former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, center, listen as Director of the Pardes Institute of Jewish studies
Rabbi Daniel Landes talks during a conference on religious tolerance in Bali, Indonesia, Tuesday, June, 12, 2007. A Jewish
Holocaust survivor made a plea for tolerance Tuesday at a conference in the world's most populous Muslim nation that also
brought together religious leaders and victims of attacks by Islamic extremists.
A Jewish peer has warned that anti-Semitism is at its worst level in Britain since he fled here from Germany
in 1936. Lord Moser said he was particularly concerned about anti-Jewish feeling in Britain's universities. Addressing a House of Lords debate on anti-Semitism on university campuses, the crossbench peer said: "It
is just over 70 years since I came to this country and I have to say that I've never been more concerned about the rising
tide of anti-Semitism throughout Europe, including this country. "This is evident in many ways and among my greatest worries is what is happening on university campuses where
there have been many examples of anti-Semitic outbursts and discrimination. "Leadership of the universities and the Government need to speak out in the strongest terms against such interference." During the Lords debate there was cross-party condemnation of a proposal by the Universities and Colleges
Union Congress to boycott Israeli universities. Baroness Morris of Bolton, for the Conservatives, attacked "a handful of lecturers who seem to have hijacked
their union". She said the proposed boycott "makes us look, unfairly, biased and petty-minded and it plays into the hands
of radical fanatics on campus. There is a time and a place for teenage gesture politics - this isn't it." Lord Patten, the former Conservative education secretary, described the idea of a boycott as "entirely abhorrent
- engagement is always better than exclusion". Baroness Walmsley, a Liberal Democrats, also opposed a boycott, saying: "I abhor the idea of limitations on
legitimate academic freedom within reasonable limits." Lord Adonis, the education Minister said: "The Government unequivocally deplores any proposed boycott. "A boycott is not only wrong in principle, undermining the integrity of relations between bona fide centres
of learning but in practice its only likely effect would be to weaken the progressive forces within both Israel and the Palestinian
occupied territories."
Anti-Semitism at 'worst level since 1936'
The Jewish Community Vienna said Monday it has routinely used documents found in the Austrian capital
to substantiate restitution and compensation claims by Holocaust victims and people whose families had property seized by
the Nazis.
In 2000, members of the group were preparing to turn a building over to new owners when they stumbled
across some 800 boxes and dozens of wooden cabinets filled with about half a million documents detailing the lives of Jews
during Nazi times. Part of the cache - which includes World War II-era deportation lists, emigration documents, letters and
photos - will be included in an exhibition that opens in the Austrian capital next month.
"From the moment we found the material and had it moved to our office, we widely used all available
information to substantiate both individual claims and claims regarding properties of disbanded Jewish organizations," said
Ingo Zechner, who heads the community's Holocaust Victims' Information and Support Center.
"The main task of our office is to support restitution and compensation claims, so of course we used
the information in the documents for this purpose," he said.
On Thursday, the Holocaust Survivors Foundation USA issued a statement demanding to know why the materials
apparently were not brought to the attention of groups trying to win compensation for Holocaust victims and their relatives.
"We do not understand how this valuable and pertinent documentation on Austrian Jewry was ignored,"
the Miami-based US foundation said, adding that the find might have changed the outcome of settlements with insurance companies
reached earlier this year.
Zechner said the complaints were based on misunderstandings.
He said the archival holdings of the Jewish Community Vienna, which also includes documents currently
stored at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem, do not contain any information on insurance policies of Jewish victims.
Rather, Zechner said, the documents contain information on other assets such as apartment leases, profession
bans, interruption of education and personal valuables.
Zechner, stressing that supporting Holocaust survivors and the families of Nazi persecution is the
main task of the Holocaust Victims' Information and Support Center, said staff members routinely check card indexes and files
- both included in the 2000 find - to support claimants.
In addition, Zechner said the center has provided access to the documents for the Austrian Historical
Commission investigating the expropriation of Jews by the Nazis, the Austrian Commission for Provenance Research that deals
with the restitution of artworks from publicly owned museums and collections, and to the Austrian National Fund and the Austrian
General Settlement Fund in charge of compensating property damages of people who persecuted.
"Restitution has been a major issue from the beginning regarding these archival materials," he said.
Since 2002, Vienna's Jewish community and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington have been working together to preserve the material on microfilm for a wider collection that will include
about 1.5 million Holocaust-era documents from Vienna currently stored in Jerusalem.
Vienna Jews: Holocaust archive used to resolve legal claims
CHICAGO, Ill. (STNG) -- Culminating a highly public battle, DePaul University
has denied controversial assistant political science Professor Norman Finkelstein tenure. Norman Finkelstein, whose work has sparked a long-running feud with Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz,
said he was disappointed by the decision. "They can deny me tenure, deny me the right to teach," the 53-year-old told the Chicago Sun-Times.
"But they will never stop me from saying what I believe." On his Web site Sunday, Finkelstein posted a letter from university president Dennis Holtschneider
explaining why a faculty panel voted 4-3 to deny him tenure at the Catholic university. The three-page note cites Finkelstein's "deliberately hurtful" scholarship along with his lack of involvement
with the school and his tendency for public clashes with other scholars. Finkelstein wrote in his 2000 book "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish
Suffering" that some Jews have used the Holocaust as an "extortion racket" to get compensation payments, and has referred
to Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel as the "resident clown" of the "Holocaust circus." His most recent book, "Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History," is
largely an attack on Dershowitz's "The Case for Israel." In it he argues that Israel uses the outcry over perceived anti-Semitism
as a bully weapon to stifle criticism. An e-mail message left Sunday for Finkelstein, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, was not returned. A
telephone recording said his Brooklyn phone had been temporarily disconnected. The debate over his tenure raised the ire of many in academic and religious circles. In a statement issued by the university, Holtschneider noted the heated debate surrounding Finkelstein's
tenure. "Over the past several months, there has been considerable outside interest and public debate concerning
this decision," he said. "This attention was unwelcome and inappropriate and had no impact on either the process or the outcome
of this case." DePaul's political science department and personnel committee both voted to support Finkelstein's tenure
application. But it was opposed by the dean of the school's liberal arts college as well as a university board charged with
granting tenure and promotions, which acknowledged Finkelstein's popularity with students and effectiveness in the classroom. The son of Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein earned his doctorate from Princeton in 1988. He published
five books and taught political theory at DePaul since 2001, school officials said. University spokeswoman Denise Mattson said Sunday that Finkelstein's teaching term expires next June,
but he can elect to leave his post immediately.
Controversial DePaul Professor Denied Tenure
His case drew widespread
interest because of the Jewish professor's blunt criticism of Jews and the state of Israel, and the attack on those views
by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz.
In a statement Friday, DePaul confirmed that while the political science
department and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences had recommended tenure for Finkelstein, the college's dean and the
University Board on Promotion and Tenure had recommended against it.
DePaul's president, the Rev. Dennis Holtschneider,
made the final decision.
In an interview Friday, Finkelstein said he was "disappointed," but that the decision would
not muzzle his views. "I met the standards of tenure required at DePaul, but it wasn't enough to overcome the political opposition
to my speaking out on the Israel-Palestine conflict," he said.
