Those Who Harm Israel Will Pay the Full Price

From Those Who Harm Israel Will Pay the Full Price:

Predictions regarding Israel's possible demise are becoming increasingly fashionable among some elements worldwide. Israel is the only country in the world that sees other countries calling for wiping it off the map. On Holocaust Memorial Day, we are permitted to - and in fact, obligated to - make it clear to others that there will be no situation whereby the State of Israel will be harmed without those who perpetrate this, including their collaborators, paying the full price for it. The decree "Never Again" does not only mean that no longer will we be defenseless, but also that those who harm us will not be spared.

Survivors of Exodus 1947 Preserve Stories

From Survivors of Exodus 1947 Preserve Stories:

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), in conjunction with several groups in Israel, is working on a project to find surviving passengers and crew members of the Exodus 1947. There never was an official passenger manifest, and so much time has passed that this is not an easy task, says Genya Markon, the museum's curator of collections. The museum has the names of about 2,300 people who were on the ship and has made contact with 270 passengers and four crew members. Most of the known survivors live in the United States or Israel.

Rafael Medoff, director of the Washington-based David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, says lessons of the Exodus 1947 still ring true today. "The important role of American volunteers on the Exodus is a reminder that the struggle to establish Israel was supported by a broad coalition of Americans of all faiths - and that support for Jewish statehood continues among Americans to this day," he says. "It is no surprise that many Americans sympathized with the Jewish immigration struggle, given its strong parallels to American history. Refugees from persecution were trying to build a country based on liberty and equality, only to be blocked."

For more information on the voyage, you can go to www.exodus1947.com to purchase a DVD documentary, "Exodus 1947," narrated by Morley Safer and broadcast on PBS.

Nazi archive will help save lost names

To rescue a name is to rescue a life from oblivion. Via Yahoo News:

When Bill Connelly heard that the heirs of a collector of Jewish memorial books were cleaning out his library, he rushed to New York and fished dozens of the Yiddish-language volumes out of a municipal trash bin. With their lists of residents from long vanished European communities — sometimes recorded street by street — the books often are all that's left of entire villages or neighborhoods consumed in the Nazi genocide of World War II.

To rescue a name is to rescue a life from oblivion, Holocaust survivors believe.

The yizkor books, from the Hebrew word for "remember," are now on the shelves, alongside hundreds of other volumes, at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum where Connelly works.

"It's a gesture to the centuries: It says, this is who we are, and we will not disappear," said Connelly, referring to the books he salvaged 10 years ago that formed the foundation of the museum's library.

Now, the museum is gaining access to millions more names, the largest registry of Holocaust victims existing anywhere. For more than 60 years, they were locked in a secretive archive in Germany that houses records scooped up by Allied troops from concentration camps, Nazi SS offices and postwar displaced-persons compounds.

In August, the International Tracing Service of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which administers the archive, began transferring digital copies of its documents to the museum in Washington, to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, and to the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, Poland.

Romanian named 'righteous gentile'

An heartfelt thank you to the Criveanu family. From Jpost:

Yad Vashem on Wednesday posthumously honored a Romanian reserves officer who blocked the deportation of Romanian Jews to Nazi death camps.

Theodor Criveanu was inducted into Yad Vashem's "Righteous Among the Nations" group of non-Jews who rescued Jews from the Nazis. His son, Willie Criveanu, accepted the award on his behalf.

The 20,000 Jews of Czernowitz, Romania, were interned during the war and slated for deportation to death camps.

As a reserves officer in the Romanian army, Criveanu was assigned the task of presenting authorities a list of Jews who were required to work in the ghetto, and were thus spared deportation. According to testimonies given to Yad Vashem, Criveanu risked his own life by handing out permits beyond the allowed limit, including to Jews who were not essential to the workforce. Yad Vashem said it could not estimate how many Jews he saved.

Criveanu married the daughter of one of the Jews he saved. He died in Romania in 1988.

"My father's life was based on justness, correctness. He was a great humanitarian, that was his nature," his son said at the ceremony. "He was a gift from God for my mother's family and to so many more."

More than 21,000 non-Jews have been honored by Yad Vashem, including Oskar Schindler, whose efforts to save more than 1,000 Jews was documented in the Oscar-award- winning film Schindler's List. Fifty-three Romanians have been honored.

65th anniversary of Sebastopol massacre marked in Ukraine

Received by email.

65th anniversary of Sebastopol massacre marked in Ukraine

18 July 2007

In the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Sebastopol, the 65th anniversary of the Nazi massacre of Jews during World War II has been commemorated. Holocaust survivors, local officials and Jews from Crimea marked the anniversary on Sunday in a ceremony near the city’s Holocaust memorial. More than 4,200 citizens of Sebastopol, mainly Jews, were killed in the 1942 massacre by the Nazis. At the ceremony, Jewish leaders noted with concern that the memorial had been vandalized several times over the last two years. Police detained a suspect in one of the incidents, but he was prosecuted for hooliganism, not a hate crime, to the dismay of local Jews.

http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/

Yom HaShoah - 5767

The Survivors of the Holocaust Are Dwindling – Will the Memories Last Beyond Them?

Bulgarians mark rescue of Jews

From JTA:

Bulgarians paid tribute to the 64th anniversary of the rescue ofthe country's Jewish population from the Nazis. Bulgarians laid flowers Thursday at the memorial plaques near Saint Sofia Cathedral in honor of those who supported the Jews. Parliamentary Chief Georgi Pirinski laid flowers at a plaque near the National Assembly in Sofia, recalling the valor of parliamentarians during World War II who stood up for Jews. Although aligned with Germany during World War II, Bulgaria refused the Nazi order to deport any of its 50,000 Jews to death camps thanks to the efforts of the government, the Orthodox Church and especially King Boris III. The government's final decision to reject the Nazi demand was made March 10, 1943. The current government set March 10 as the Day of Holocaust Victims.The Jewish organization in Bulgaria Shalom, Etnopalitra Foundation and the Association for Friendship and Collaboration between Bulgaria and Israel also organized ceremonies in Sofia.

Holocaust Memorials defiled by neo-Nazis

From Times Online:

The German authorities were preparing for criticism from the Jewish community after it was revealed that a Holocaust memorial in Berlin was being used as a public lavatory by tourists and by neo-Nazi sympathisers.

The disclosure, in a Berlin newspaper, will trigger a new debate about how the Holocaust should be remembered in Germany. One argument against building the monument -- that consists of 2,700 concrete slabs resembling Jewish gravestones -- was that it would become a target of anti-Semitic vandals. The managers of the memorial, which attracts 3.5 million visitors a year, have tried to play down the scandal. 'This just belongs to the teething problems of any new monument", Uwe Neumaerker, of the Memorial Foundation, said.

The German Government has been aware of the problem since the monument was completed in May 2005 but has tried to maintain a silence for fear of encouraging more vandalism. The defacing of Jewish memorial areas in Germany by followers of the far Right has become a widespread problem that is acknowledged rarely. On the eve of Holocaust Day at the weekend a group of youths set fire to a restored railway carriage -- symbolising the deportation of the Jews -- in Lower Saxony.

In the eastern German port of Stralsund, concrete was poured over a memorial for a Jewish family, the Keibel-Cohns. A court in Frankfurt an der Oder, on the Polish border, sentenced three youths to between nine and 14 months jail this month for urinating on a Jewish memorial.