Edwin Black, New York Times best-selling and international investigative author, will discuss his new book The Farhud: The Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust.
Thursday, October 7
Noon
Nolte Center for Continuing Education 140
(Pizza at noon; introduction at 12:10)
Monumental and Exhaustively Documented. Monumental in scope, Edwin Black's new book The Farhud sheds light on the under-researched, 14-century-long confrontation between the Caliphate and the Jewish communities, and offers new exhaustively documented details of exactly how the Pan Arabist and Jihadist movement of the Levant, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Husseini, partnered with the Nazis during the darkest days of the Holocaust.
-- Walid Phares, author of Future Jihad and Fox TV Terrorism Analyst
With a million books in print, Black's work focuses on genocide and hate, corporate criminality and corruption, governmental misconduct, academic fraud, philanthropic abuse, oil addiction, alternative energy and historical investigation. Editors have submitted Black's work ten times for Pulitzer Prize nomination, and in recent years he has been the recipient of a series of top editorial awards. He has also contributed to a number of anthologies worldwide.
For more information on Edwin Black visit http://www.edwinblack.com/.
Co-Sponsored by the University of Minnesota Program in Human Rights and Health and the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
Edwin Black Live Lecture and Film Screening
War Against the Weak, Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
Edwin Black, New York Times best-selling and international investigative author, will introduce his latest film, War Against the Weak, Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, based on his book of the same name.
In the first three decades of the 20th Century, American corporate philanthropy combined with prestigious academic fraud to create the pseudoscience eugenics that institutionalized race politics as national policy. The goal: create a superior, white, Nordic race and obliterate the viability of everyone else.
American corporate philanthropies launched a national campaign of ethnic cleansing in the United States, helped found and fund the Nazi eugenics of Hitler and Mengele--and then created the modern movement of "human genetics."
Discussion and book signing will follow film screening. Mr. Black will be introduced by Bruno Chaouat, director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Thursday, October 7 at 6:30 p.m.
Sabes JCC 4330 S. Cedar Lake Road, Minneapolis, MN, 55416.
For information, contact Peggy Mandel at pmandel@sabesjcc.org or 952.381.3466. For online tickets, visit www.sabesjcc.org.
This is event is presented by The Sabes Jewish Community Center and The Minneapolis Jewish Federation. Co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Center for Jewish Studies.
Edwin Black, New York Times best-selling and international investigative author, will introduce his latest film, War Against the Weak, Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, based on his book of the same name.
In the first three decades of the 20th Century, American corporate philanthropy combined with prestigious academic fraud to create the pseudoscience eugenics that institutionalized race politics as national policy. The goal: create a superior, white, Nordic race and obliterate the viability of everyone else.
American corporate philanthropies launched a national campaign of ethnic cleansing in the United States, helped found and fund the Nazi eugenics of Hitler and Mengele--and then created the modern movement of "human genetics."
Discussion and book signing will follow film screening. Mr. Black will be introduced by Bruno Chaouat, director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Thursday, October 7 at 6:30 p.m.
Sabes JCC 4330 S. Cedar Lake Road, Minneapolis, MN, 55416.
For information, contact Peggy Mandel at pmandel@sabesjcc.org or 952.381.3466. For online tickets, visit www.sabesjcc.org.
This is event is presented by The Sabes Jewish Community Center and The Minneapolis Jewish Federation. Co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Center for Jewish Studies.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Holocaust Victim Is Remembered With His Music
Holocaust Victim Is Remembered With His Music
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
September 12, 2010
New York Times
A day before its memorial concert on Saturday for victims and survivors of the Sept. 11 attacks, Bargemusic paid tribute to the victims of another atrocity -- Jewish composers killed during the Holocaust.
The pianist Rita Sloan spoke briefly about Gideon Klein, a composer from Czechoslovakia who died in 1945 at 26 under unknown circumstances -- probably in a labor camp or during a forced march. Klein wrote several scores during his internment in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where many prominent artists, scientists and scholars were held before being sent to Auschwitz. He encouraged musicians like Viktor Ullmann and Pavel Haas, who were interned with him, to continue composing.
The works that Klein wrote in Theresienstadt (which the Nazis used as a propaganda tool, showcasing its supposedly ideal living conditions) show the influence of Janacek, Berg and Schoenberg. Klein intended his Sonata for Piano to have four movements, but he completed only three.
Ms. Sloan offered an inelegant and unconvincing interpretation of the expressionistic sonata, whose declamatory first movement ("Allegro con Fuoco") is interspersed with more introspective interludes. A simmering tension underpins the ruminative Adagio. The concluding Allegro Vivace is driven by a bristling urgency, whose drama is intertwined with moments of wistful humor.
Klein's sonata was part of an all-Czech program that opened with a beautifully nuanced interpretation of Martinu's Madrigals for Violin and Viola. Martinu, who immigrated in 1941 to the United States, was inspired to write the work after listening to a performance of the Mozart violin-viola duos by Joseph and Lillian Fuchs, to whom he dedicated the Madrigals.
The violinist Renata Arado and the violist Espen Lilleslatten offered a lovely reading of this charming piece, vividly illuminating the counterpoint and homophonic textures of the rhythmically driven first movement and playing the elegiac trills in the second movement with finesse.
Ms. Arado and Mr. Lilleslatten were joined by the violinist Adele Anthony for a sweet-toned rendition of Dvorak's Terzetto in C, offering a deeply expressive interpretation of the soulful Larghetto. Dvorak's love of folk idioms is apparent in the rhythmically complex Scherzo. The work concludes with a sometimes dark-hued Theme and Variations.
The concert ended on a high-spirited note when Ms. Anthony, Ms. Arado, Ms. Sloan
and Mr. Lilleslatten were joined by the cellist Darrett Adkins for an energetic and insightful reading of Dvorak's popular Piano Quintet in A.
CHGS website has information about Theresienstadt as well as original documents from the ghetto. Be sure to look at the Ghetto Café document- if you look at the bottom you can see Klein is listed as a performer.
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
September 12, 2010
New York Times
A day before its memorial concert on Saturday for victims and survivors of the Sept. 11 attacks, Bargemusic paid tribute to the victims of another atrocity -- Jewish composers killed during the Holocaust.
The pianist Rita Sloan spoke briefly about Gideon Klein, a composer from Czechoslovakia who died in 1945 at 26 under unknown circumstances -- probably in a labor camp or during a forced march. Klein wrote several scores during his internment in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where many prominent artists, scientists and scholars were held before being sent to Auschwitz. He encouraged musicians like Viktor Ullmann and Pavel Haas, who were interned with him, to continue composing.
The works that Klein wrote in Theresienstadt (which the Nazis used as a propaganda tool, showcasing its supposedly ideal living conditions) show the influence of Janacek, Berg and Schoenberg. Klein intended his Sonata for Piano to have four movements, but he completed only three.
Ms. Sloan offered an inelegant and unconvincing interpretation of the expressionistic sonata, whose declamatory first movement ("Allegro con Fuoco") is interspersed with more introspective interludes. A simmering tension underpins the ruminative Adagio. The concluding Allegro Vivace is driven by a bristling urgency, whose drama is intertwined with moments of wistful humor.
Klein's sonata was part of an all-Czech program that opened with a beautifully nuanced interpretation of Martinu's Madrigals for Violin and Viola. Martinu, who immigrated in 1941 to the United States, was inspired to write the work after listening to a performance of the Mozart violin-viola duos by Joseph and Lillian Fuchs, to whom he dedicated the Madrigals.
The violinist Renata Arado and the violist Espen Lilleslatten offered a lovely reading of this charming piece, vividly illuminating the counterpoint and homophonic textures of the rhythmically driven first movement and playing the elegiac trills in the second movement with finesse.
Ms. Arado and Mr. Lilleslatten were joined by the violinist Adele Anthony for a sweet-toned rendition of Dvorak's Terzetto in C, offering a deeply expressive interpretation of the soulful Larghetto. Dvorak's love of folk idioms is apparent in the rhythmically complex Scherzo. The work concludes with a sometimes dark-hued Theme and Variations.
The concert ended on a high-spirited note when Ms. Anthony, Ms. Arado, Ms. Sloan
and Mr. Lilleslatten were joined by the cellist Darrett Adkins for an energetic and insightful reading of Dvorak's popular Piano Quintet in A.
CHGS website has information about Theresienstadt as well as original documents from the ghetto. Be sure to look at the Ghetto Café document- if you look at the bottom you can see Klein is listed as a performer.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Holocaust survivors reunited after 65 years
Holocaust survivors reunited after 65 years
Thursday, September 2, 2010
LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 2, 2010, 1:25 AM
BY HOWARD PROSNITZ
TEANECK SUBURBANITE
STAFF WRITER NorthJersey.com
TEANECK - In 1944 Jack Rosenfeld, then 15, entered the Mauthausen Concentration camp. At the time the Russian army was pressing from the East and the Germans were moving concentration camp inmates.
Before reaching Mauthausen, Rosenfeld was interred along the way in a smaller camp near the Austria Hungary border, having been marched there by the Nazis with hundreds of other Jews. With him were his brother and his boyhood friend from the Hungarian village where he grew up, Imri Meir.
By chance, Meir's father, a physician, was also an inmate at the camp. The day after their arrival, the father came and carried his son away.
That was the last time Rosenfeld saw Meir.
Until Monday, when the two boyhood friends, who attended school and played soccer together, and who last saw each other 65 years ago in a concentration camp, were reunited at Rosenfeld's South Forest Drive home.
The paths to the reunion were convoluted. Rosenfeld had often spoken to his family about his friend and had wondered what became of him. Rosenfeld's 15-year-old grandnephew, hearing the story, decided to do some computer research. Using records from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel, Michael Rosenfeld discovered that Mier, who had changed his first name from Imri and Amram, was alive and living in Toronto. The two old friends spoke on the phone and Meir realized that his son, who lives in Montclair, was a half hour from Rosenfeld's home. Meir promised that the next time he visited his son, he would stop in Teaneck.
About a dozen members of the Rosenfeld family gathered for the reunion.
Rosenfeld, who lived in the Bronx before moving to Teaneck 19 years ago, recalls the forced march, during which he and his brother saved Meir's life. "If you sat down or attempted to drink water from a puddle, they killed you. Most did not reach the concentration camp," Rosenfeld said. Meir could go no farther and attempted to rest. Together, Rosenfeld and his brother carried and pushed Meir for the rest of the march.
The interim camp was so crowded that Rosenfeld spent his first night in a 20- to 50-foot yard that was used as a communal latrine."It didn't matter to me. I was so tired that as soon as I closed my eyes, I fell asleep," he said.
The following day he found out that his family was in the camp.
"A woman from our village recognized me and told me that my mother was there. My mother took us into her tent and washed us. We had not taken a bath in weeks and the lice on us were almost an inch thick. She gave us some water with sugar cubes she had stored away and that revived me a little."
Rosenfeld's family survived the camps. After the war, they returned to Hungary. Then he and his brother made their way to the American zone in Germany. They had initially planned to go to Israel but were denied admission by the British. In 1947, they immigrated to the US. Rosenfeld became an American citizen in 1952 and married an American woman.
Memories of the war and the concentration camps do not bother him, he said.
"I don't think about it anymore. It is water under the bridge."
He even has some understanding of the feelings of people who deny that the Holocaust took place.
"For the ordinary person who lives his day to day life it is impossible to imagine that something like this really happened."
For Meir, the Holocaust remains a bitter memory. He has refused to visit Germany and resists buying German-made products.
After parting with Rosenfeld, his father carried him on another forced march from the small camp.
"We stayed together. When we were liberated, we were all sick, with typhus, with every possible disease. The US Army took us to a hospital in Linz."
Meir's mother and sisters returned to Hungary, but eventually the entire family immigrated, one by one, to Israel, where his father became a successful physician. Meir served in the Israeli army and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Hebrew University.
Michael Rosenfeld, the grandnephew who did the research that united the two old friends, noted that the entire family is listed as dead on Holocaust records.
"People doing the research had figured that all Jews in that Hungarian village had been killed, but that isn't true," he said. "It is a one in a million chance that we all came together and survived," Rosenfeld said.
E-mail: suburbanite@northjersey.com
Thursday, September 2, 2010
LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 2, 2010, 1:25 AM
BY HOWARD PROSNITZ
TEANECK SUBURBANITE
STAFF WRITER NorthJersey.com
TEANECK - In 1944 Jack Rosenfeld, then 15, entered the Mauthausen Concentration camp. At the time the Russian army was pressing from the East and the Germans were moving concentration camp inmates.
Before reaching Mauthausen, Rosenfeld was interred along the way in a smaller camp near the Austria Hungary border, having been marched there by the Nazis with hundreds of other Jews. With him were his brother and his boyhood friend from the Hungarian village where he grew up, Imri Meir.
By chance, Meir's father, a physician, was also an inmate at the camp. The day after their arrival, the father came and carried his son away.
That was the last time Rosenfeld saw Meir.
Until Monday, when the two boyhood friends, who attended school and played soccer together, and who last saw each other 65 years ago in a concentration camp, were reunited at Rosenfeld's South Forest Drive home.
The paths to the reunion were convoluted. Rosenfeld had often spoken to his family about his friend and had wondered what became of him. Rosenfeld's 15-year-old grandnephew, hearing the story, decided to do some computer research. Using records from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel, Michael Rosenfeld discovered that Mier, who had changed his first name from Imri and Amram, was alive and living in Toronto. The two old friends spoke on the phone and Meir realized that his son, who lives in Montclair, was a half hour from Rosenfeld's home. Meir promised that the next time he visited his son, he would stop in Teaneck.
About a dozen members of the Rosenfeld family gathered for the reunion.
Rosenfeld, who lived in the Bronx before moving to Teaneck 19 years ago, recalls the forced march, during which he and his brother saved Meir's life. "If you sat down or attempted to drink water from a puddle, they killed you. Most did not reach the concentration camp," Rosenfeld said. Meir could go no farther and attempted to rest. Together, Rosenfeld and his brother carried and pushed Meir for the rest of the march.
The interim camp was so crowded that Rosenfeld spent his first night in a 20- to 50-foot yard that was used as a communal latrine."It didn't matter to me. I was so tired that as soon as I closed my eyes, I fell asleep," he said.
The following day he found out that his family was in the camp.
"A woman from our village recognized me and told me that my mother was there. My mother took us into her tent and washed us. We had not taken a bath in weeks and the lice on us were almost an inch thick. She gave us some water with sugar cubes she had stored away and that revived me a little."
Rosenfeld's family survived the camps. After the war, they returned to Hungary. Then he and his brother made their way to the American zone in Germany. They had initially planned to go to Israel but were denied admission by the British. In 1947, they immigrated to the US. Rosenfeld became an American citizen in 1952 and married an American woman.
Memories of the war and the concentration camps do not bother him, he said.
"I don't think about it anymore. It is water under the bridge."
He even has some understanding of the feelings of people who deny that the Holocaust took place.
"For the ordinary person who lives his day to day life it is impossible to imagine that something like this really happened."
For Meir, the Holocaust remains a bitter memory. He has refused to visit Germany and resists buying German-made products.
After parting with Rosenfeld, his father carried him on another forced march from the small camp.
"We stayed together. When we were liberated, we were all sick, with typhus, with every possible disease. The US Army took us to a hospital in Linz."
Meir's mother and sisters returned to Hungary, but eventually the entire family immigrated, one by one, to Israel, where his father became a successful physician. Meir served in the Israeli army and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Hebrew University.
Michael Rosenfeld, the grandnephew who did the research that united the two old friends, noted that the entire family is listed as dead on Holocaust records.
"People doing the research had figured that all Jews in that Hungarian village had been killed, but that isn't true," he said. "It is a one in a million chance that we all came together and survived," Rosenfeld said.
E-mail: suburbanite@northjersey.com
Wiesenthal Worked for Israeli Spy Agency, Book Alleges
New York Times
September 2, 2010
Wiesenthal Worked for Israeli Spy Agency, Book Alleges
By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM -- Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who gained worldwide fame for decades as a one-man Nazi-hunting operation, was in fact frequently on the payroll of the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, a new biography asserts.
The assertion, based on numerous documents and interviews with three people said to be Mr. Wiesenthal's Mossad handlers, punctures not only a widely held belief about how he operated; it also suggests a need to re-evaluate the standard view that the Israeli government took no interest in tracking down Nazis until the 1960 capture in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, and little thereafter.
Mr. Wiesenthal died in 2005 at the age of 96 in his Vienna home.
"This requires us to adjust in some small way our view of history," said Tom Segev, the author of the new book "Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends," which is being published by Doubleday this week in the United States and simultaneously in six other countries.
Mr. Segev, who is Israeli and a columnist for the newspaper Haaretz here, is the author of half a dozen other books, mostly about Israeli history. In a telephone interview, he said he had been given unfettered access to Mr. Wiesenthal's papers -- some 300,000 of them, previously closed to the public -- by Mr. Wiesenthal's daughter, Paulinka Kreisberg.
While reading through Mr. Wiesenthal's correspondence, Mr. Segev came across names he did not recognize and discovered they were Mossad agents and handlers. He interviewed three of them and named two in the book.
Mr. Segev said that Mr. Wiesenthal was first employed by the political department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, a forerunner to the Mossad, and then by the agency itself. It financed his first office in Vienna in 1960, paid him a monthly salary and provided him with an Israeli passport, the biography says. Mr. Wiesenthal's codename was "Theocrat."
His main task was to help locate Nazi criminals, including Eichmann, one of the architects of the Final Solution, and especially to watch out for neo-Nazis and provide information on the activities of former Nazis in Arab countries, the book says.
It also says that Mr. Wiesenthal was part of a largely unknown earlier attempt to trap Eichmann in Austria in the last days of 1949. According to the book, an Israeli agent who was helping Mr. Wiesenthal probably caused the operation to fail when he regaled fellow New Year's drinkers in local bars with stories of Israel's recently concluded war of independence. Word spread that an Israeli was present and Eichmann's planned visit to his wife and child was abruptly called off, the book says.
The operation was initiated by Asher Ben Natan, later Israel's first ambassador to Germany, who spoke about it with Mr. Segev. The operational report, newly declassified, is also cited. Mr. Segev said he passed his manuscript through the Israeli military censor, which is required of any work published here on security-related issues.
Mr. Wiesenthal's role in the 1960 capture of Eichmann has been a matter of dispute. Isser Harel, the former Mossad head, now dead, claimed that the Nazi hunter deserved no credit.
But the book says that Mr. Wiesenthal, financed by the Israeli Embassy in Vienna, told the Mossad in 1953 that Eichmann was hiding in Argentina, leading ultimately to his capture by agency operatives. Eichmann's televised trial in Israel was a milestone in modern Holocaust awareness. He was found guilty and hanged by Israel in 1962.
Mr. Wiesenthal, a complex and often controversial figure, opposed the execution, Mr. Segev shows by examining previously unknown correspondence. It was not moral objection to the death penalty but the belief that Eichmann had not yet told everything he knew and that his future testimony could be useful.
The biography provides new details on Mr. Wiesenthal's often strained relations -- ultimately mended -- with Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is based in Los Angeles. The disputes, recorded in numerous letters from Mr. Wiesenthal, were mostly petty ones, regarding the center's alleged failure to inform or consult properly with him.
The book also shows that Mr. Wiesenthal came to the quiet and consistent aid of Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary general of the United Nations and president of Austria, when he was being accused by Jewish groups of having lied about his service in the German Army. The harshest suspicions of war crimes against Mr. Waldheim were never proved and Mr. Wiesenthal's role was largely as a behind-the-scene consultant to his fellow Austrian.
September 2, 2010
Wiesenthal Worked for Israeli Spy Agency, Book Alleges
By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM -- Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who gained worldwide fame for decades as a one-man Nazi-hunting operation, was in fact frequently on the payroll of the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, a new biography asserts.
The assertion, based on numerous documents and interviews with three people said to be Mr. Wiesenthal's Mossad handlers, punctures not only a widely held belief about how he operated; it also suggests a need to re-evaluate the standard view that the Israeli government took no interest in tracking down Nazis until the 1960 capture in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, and little thereafter.
Mr. Wiesenthal died in 2005 at the age of 96 in his Vienna home.
"This requires us to adjust in some small way our view of history," said Tom Segev, the author of the new book "Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends," which is being published by Doubleday this week in the United States and simultaneously in six other countries.
Mr. Segev, who is Israeli and a columnist for the newspaper Haaretz here, is the author of half a dozen other books, mostly about Israeli history. In a telephone interview, he said he had been given unfettered access to Mr. Wiesenthal's papers -- some 300,000 of them, previously closed to the public -- by Mr. Wiesenthal's daughter, Paulinka Kreisberg.
While reading through Mr. Wiesenthal's correspondence, Mr. Segev came across names he did not recognize and discovered they were Mossad agents and handlers. He interviewed three of them and named two in the book.
Mr. Segev said that Mr. Wiesenthal was first employed by the political department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, a forerunner to the Mossad, and then by the agency itself. It financed his first office in Vienna in 1960, paid him a monthly salary and provided him with an Israeli passport, the biography says. Mr. Wiesenthal's codename was "Theocrat."
His main task was to help locate Nazi criminals, including Eichmann, one of the architects of the Final Solution, and especially to watch out for neo-Nazis and provide information on the activities of former Nazis in Arab countries, the book says.
It also says that Mr. Wiesenthal was part of a largely unknown earlier attempt to trap Eichmann in Austria in the last days of 1949. According to the book, an Israeli agent who was helping Mr. Wiesenthal probably caused the operation to fail when he regaled fellow New Year's drinkers in local bars with stories of Israel's recently concluded war of independence. Word spread that an Israeli was present and Eichmann's planned visit to his wife and child was abruptly called off, the book says.
The operation was initiated by Asher Ben Natan, later Israel's first ambassador to Germany, who spoke about it with Mr. Segev. The operational report, newly declassified, is also cited. Mr. Segev said he passed his manuscript through the Israeli military censor, which is required of any work published here on security-related issues.
Mr. Wiesenthal's role in the 1960 capture of Eichmann has been a matter of dispute. Isser Harel, the former Mossad head, now dead, claimed that the Nazi hunter deserved no credit.
But the book says that Mr. Wiesenthal, financed by the Israeli Embassy in Vienna, told the Mossad in 1953 that Eichmann was hiding in Argentina, leading ultimately to his capture by agency operatives. Eichmann's televised trial in Israel was a milestone in modern Holocaust awareness. He was found guilty and hanged by Israel in 1962.
Mr. Wiesenthal, a complex and often controversial figure, opposed the execution, Mr. Segev shows by examining previously unknown correspondence. It was not moral objection to the death penalty but the belief that Eichmann had not yet told everything he knew and that his future testimony could be useful.
The biography provides new details on Mr. Wiesenthal's often strained relations -- ultimately mended -- with Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is based in Los Angeles. The disputes, recorded in numerous letters from Mr. Wiesenthal, were mostly petty ones, regarding the center's alleged failure to inform or consult properly with him.
The book also shows that Mr. Wiesenthal came to the quiet and consistent aid of Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary general of the United Nations and president of Austria, when he was being accused by Jewish groups of having lied about his service in the German Army. The harshest suspicions of war crimes against Mr. Waldheim were never proved and Mr. Wiesenthal's role was largely as a behind-the-scene consultant to his fellow Austrian.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Volunteers Needed to Assist Holocaust Survivors with Oral History
A group of local Holocaust survivors meet every month at the Jewish Community Center in St. Paul. The meetings are recorded to preserve the stories, experiences and the conversations that take place at the gathering. The group is looking for volunteers to type up transcripts of the recordings for historical posterity.
To volunteer, send an email to amram001@umn.edu. Please type "holocaust" in the subject line.
For more information about the group please click here to be linked to their page on the CHGS website.
To volunteer, send an email to amram001@umn.edu. Please type "holocaust" in the subject line.
For more information about the group please click here to be linked to their page on the CHGS website.
Jewish teacher suspended in France for teaching 'too much' about Holocaust
A high school history teacher is accused of 'brainwashing' her students, says French news agency AFP.
By Haaretz Service
A French history teacher in Nancy, France, has been suspended for breaching the principle of secularism and neutrality after the French education ministry concluded that she was teaching "too much" about the Holocaust and spending too much time organizing trips for her students to Nazi death camps in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Catherine Pederzoli, 58, was investigated by officials at the education ministry, who released a report about the matter in July. The report accused the teacher of "lacking distance, neutrality and secularism" in teaching the Holocaust, and of manipulating her charges through a process of "brain-washing," according to the French news agency AFP.
In December, when the French Minister of Education Luc Chatel was visiting Pederzoli's high school, several of her students staged a protest over the decision to cut in half the number of students traveling to Poland on an upcoming trip, meant to acquaint the students with Nazi camps in the region. Pederzoli was accused of inciting the protest.
The principle of secularism and neutrality in France is meant to protect the separation of church and state. The ministry's report cites that in meeting with investigators, the teacher used the word "Holocaust" 14 times while using the more neutral term "massacre" only twice.
Pederzoli's lawyer, Christine Tadic, said Tuesday that Pederzoli had been organizing trips to concentration camps for the past 15 years, but that a change in the school's administration in 2007 had led to a witch hunt against her.
Tadic claimed that "had the teacher been Christian, no one would have accused her of brainwashing." Furthermore, she asked whether Pederzoli is in fact being blamed for being Jewish.
Also on Tuesday, Tadic filed for an injunction over the teacher's suspension. According to AFP, the court has 15 days to rule on the matter.
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