Ordinary Israelis Can Read 2,100-Year-Old Hebrew Scroll

From Ordinary Israelis Can Read 2,100-Year-Old Hebrew Scroll:

Some Israelis have described being moved almost to tears by a rare viewing of the Great Isaiah Scroll, the best preserved and most complete Dead Sea biblical scroll, on special exhibit this summer at the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum for the first time in 40 years. Ordinary people are able to read, and at least partly understand, the ancient Hebrew text on the 2,100-year-old scroll.

"The Bible is first of all our connection to the land," said Ruvik Rosenthal, a popular Israeli language guru.

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.

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 were murdered during the Holocaust.

Israeli Museum Launches Looted Holocaust Art Database

From Israeli Museum Launches Looted Holocaust Art Database:

Israel's national museum has launched an Internet catalog of more than 1,000 pieces of art looted by the Nazis to allow Holocaust survivors and their heirs to identify and reclaim property. The pieces include drawings, Judaica items and paintings - several of them worth millions of dollars - that were plundered by German troops, recovered by the Allies in postwar Europe and later transferred to Israel.

Update: Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Activities in support of the Museum continue here in North America this summer. Last Wednesday evening, 60 young professionals attended a fundraising cocktail reception at Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History, here in New York City. The event was hosted by the North American Council in partnership with Chris Walenczak who, along with several of his friends, brought the crowd together to learn about the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, to view the photographic exhibit “And I Still See Their Faces”, and to enjoy a glass of Polish vodka. Special thanks to Consul General Krzysztof Kasprzyk for his inspiring opening remarks.

Another event is planned for Tuesday, August 28, also at the Center for Jewish History. The evening will celebrate the Museum Groundbreaking and will offer a final opportunity to view the photographic exhibit "And I Still See Their Faces: The Vanished World of Polish Jews" before it closes at the end of the month. Tickets for the event are still available and details can be found on our web site here.

Photos and highlights of the speeches from June's Groundbreaking Ceremony are now available here.

The Museum will also be taking part in the 92nd St. Y's street fair on September 16th. Please stop by and say hello!

In more somber news, a true friend of both Polish Jewry and the Museum recently passed away. Chris Schwarz, the founder of Krakow's Galicia Museum and host to MHPJ events during Krakow's annual Jewish Culture Festival, will be missed by us all. His obituary from the New York Times can be found here.

For more information about the Museum of the History of Polish Jews or NAC events, please respond to this email, check http://www.mhpjnac.org or call us at 212-584-3300.

Thank you for your continued support.

Museum of the History of Polish Jews
North American Council

Tales from the underground

From Tales from the underground:

With the green lawns of the Charles Clore Park on three sides and the azure waters of the Mediterranean on the fourth, the stone and black glass Etzel Museum building on the Tel Aviv shoreline is certainly impressive. A blue cloudless sky and attractive layered Jaffa skyline in the near distance are additional factors making the museum building stand out - while at the same time somehow blending in with its surroundings.

An enormous Israeli flag flaps high in the sea breeze above the museum, built over the ruins of a former Ottoman-period building. The museum is dedicated to the memory of operations officer Amihai (Gidi) Paglin and 41 fighters of the pre-state paramilitary Etzel (an acronym for Irgun Zvai Leumi, or National Military Organization) who fell in the campaign to conquer the nearby Arab town of Jaffa, and also documents other battles that Etzel members fought in during the 1947-8 War of Independence.

Active in Palestine from 1931 to 1948, the Jewish underground organization retaliated against attacks by Arabs on the Jewish population and rebelled against the British government's "White Paper" policy that imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine.

The integration of the Etzel fighters into the newly-formed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was brokered in an agreement signed between then-I.Z.L. Commander-in- Chief Menachem Begin and Israel Galili on behalf of the government of Israel. But even after the agreement was signed, there remained a great deal of bitterness between Begin and Ben-Gurion and their supporters, much of which centered around the June 1948 Altalena affair when Palmah soldiers attacked an arms-carrying Etzel ship close to the Tel Aviv shore.

The Etzel Museum on the Tel Aviv beachfront belongs to the Museums Unit of the Ministry of Defense, which explains the four girl soldier-guides manning the reception desk. The day Metro visited, the museum was empty, apart from the soldiers and a young security guard - which on the one hand was useful as nobody got in the way of photographs or obliterated the prolific texts alongside exhibits, but on the other was a little eerie.

On the beach immediately across the promenade from the museum a few dozen mostly young Israelis sunbathed or rode surfboards close to the shore. A foreign television crew was busy setting up equipment in the shade at the side of the building, as a municipal worker attempted to clean the pathway around them.

The first portion of the museum deals with the organizational structure of the Etzel. A map of Israel according to the UN partition resolution of November 29, 1947 is displayed on one wall, alongside another map with the boundaries of Israel following the armistice agreements of July 1949.

The map is accompanied by explanations and documents of the Etzel's response to the partition plan and the hostilities that broke out after the plan was announced.

A model of steel helmeted soldiers defending their post, surrounded by sandbags and barbed wire, greets the visitor on the first corner turned in the museum, set out in serpentine fashion. An electronic map serves as an introduction to the entire exhibit showing Etzel positions, attacks and raids and the capture of Arab villages during 1947 and 1948, including the infamous attack on the village of Deir Yassin in the Jerusalem corridor. Maps, documents and photographs are on display as well as a diorama presenting the heroism of two Etzel women fighters, who chose death over
surrender, in the battle for Yehudiya.

Up on the next floor one finds a description of the attack on Ramle. Fifty-one Etzel fighters died in the battle and many were wounded. On the same floor an area focuses on the fighters' training and purchase of arms, as well as somewhat tongue-in-cheek details of the "requisitions" of British ammunitions, which included 20,000 81mm mortar bombs swiped from a British train transporting ammunition to Arab fighters in Gaza.

Following the infiltration of a British army camp near Pardess Hanna, Etzel fighters also "requisitioned" weapons, ammunition and an armored vehicle from the British paratroopers stationed at what is today a large IDF training base known as Mahane 80 on the main Wadi Ara highway.

A large exhibition is dedicated to battles waged in the liberation of Jerusalem, and operations with the pre-state Haganah and Lehi militias. Two interesting dioramas deal with a stronghold of the British in the city, Zion Gate and in the background, the Old City of Jerusalem.

Another section concentrates on operations in the north such as the battle at Mishmar Hayarden, cooperation between forces of the Haganah and Etzel in the defense of Safed, and the taking of the Wadi Nisnas Arab neighborhood in Haifa - in present times the venue for an annual co-existence festival of art, music and culinary delights held during the month of the Hannuka, Christmas and Ramadan holidays.

The last section of the museum deals with the Altalena incident. The Etzel's armaments-carrying ship had embarked from the port of Marseilles. Upon arrival at the shore of the newly-founded State of Israel opposite Kfar Vitkin, Ben-Gurion's demands that the armaments be handed over to the unified Jewish forces were refused. An attack on the ship was ordered, and a massive explosion set off by a shell destroyed the ship and cargo.

The exhibit dealing with the Altalena is the last section of the museum. A large encased flag of Israel, flown on the deck of the Altalena, hangs on the wall. In the accompanying text one reads that the flag was saved minutes before the ship blew up, an Etzel fighter risking life and limb in an effort to rescue it.

Under a model of the ship, photographs and additional text, a large white lifebelt from the ship is propped up against the wall, the name ALTALENA silently shrieking of the tragic circumstances that brought Jews to battle Jews in the State of Israel -appropriately memorialized in a museum just meters from the sea.

Exhibit on Crypto-Jews Opens in Brazil

A vivid exhibition tracing the history andexperience of the Bnei Anousim (Jews who hid their identity for fear of persecution) over the past five centuries opened this week at the Jewish Museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the first of four stops it will be making as it tours the vast South American country. The exhibition, entitled "Crypto-Jews: The Flame that the Inquisition Could Not Extinguish," was designed and produced by Shavei Israel (http://www.shavei.org/), a Jerusalem-based group that reaches out and assists "lost Jews" seeking to return to the Jewish people.

Hitler's Forgotten Castle: Finishing School for Nazis to Become Museum

From Der Spiegel:

A forgotten monument to Hitler's ideology has emerged from a 70-year time warp -- a castle built in the 1930s to train a new Nazi elite. Vacated by the Belgian army last year, it sheds light on the systematic brainwashing that churned out a generation of fanatics. Now it's being spruced up to teach visitors about the perils of indoctrination.

Deep in the Eifel region of western Germany, a stone-clad reminder of Hitler's racist ideology towers above the surrounding wooded hills -- the remains of a training college for aspiring Nazi leaders that was built in the style of a medieval castle.

"NS-Ordensburg Vogelsang" (Vogelsang National Socialist Castle) is a dour arrangement of barracks, community halls and sports arenas hugging a steep slope down to a scenic reservoir. It was built between 1934 and 1936 to give selected Nazi party members aged between 25 and 30 a solid grounding in the superiority of the German race and its need for "Lebensraum" in the east.

Vogelsang, which means "Birdsong," was off limits to the public until last year when it was handed back to the German government by the Belgian army, which had used it as a barracks and training area for almost 50 years after World War II.

The handover has confronted the German government with the difficult question of how to handle a sprawling 50,000 square meter site filled with an embarrassing wealth of more or less intact Nazi symbols, murals and statues including a monstrous five-meter high Germanic "Torch Bearer."

The whole place is Nazi ideology hewn into stone. It shows how the Nazis stole from ancient Greek and Roman styles, Christian symbols and Germanic legends and mixed them up with modern functional designs. The result was an architectural mishmash that was as ludicrous as the pseudo-religious philosophy it was supposed to represent.

Click here to read the full article.

A new museum confronts an old mystery at Masada

Via Ha'aretz:

The exhibit at the end of the tour of the new museum at Masada consists of 11 tiny sherds bearing intriguing names.

Hundreds of inscriptions on sherds were found at Masada, including some on earthenware jugs. Some are only a single letters, others contain names and numbers from the days of the rebellion and the Roman siege. The archaeologists, in particular Yigael Yadin, were reasonably good at decipher the inscriptions on the various sherds, but the inscription on these 11 sherds was unusual.

They were all found in the same place, next to the network of internal gates that controlled the passage to the foodstores, and were not scattered over a wide area like the other sherds. They were all written in the same handwriting, and each sherd contained only one name.

Most important, the names were not regular names but rather nicknames, such as Ben Hanahatam (or Ben Hanahtum), Tzayda (or Hatzayad, "the hunter"), Ha'amaki (someone from a village in the Acre area). Among them was one well-known name - Ben-Yair, the name of the leader of the Masada rebellion, Elazar Ben-Yair.

When these sherds were found, Yigael Yadin came up with the theory that this was evidence of the terrible story of the mass suicide on the top of Masada.

Read the rest of this article here.

Museum Created for Germans Who Hid Jews

From Museum Created for Germans Who Hid Jews:

Barbara Preusch, 76, vividly remembers the day the Nazis searched her Berlin home for hidden Jews - and left without finding Rachela and Jenny Schipper, the mother and daughter her family sheltered from 1943 to 1945. Sixty-two years after the end of World War II, people like Preusch are being honored with a museum in Berlin. Israel has recognized non-Jews who helped Jews escape the Holocaust and honored 443 Germans at the Yad Vashem Memorial as "Righteous among the Nations." But similar honors have been long delayed at home. The "Silent Heroes" museum is to open in 2008 in an old tenement building in the center of Berlin. It will be based in Otto Weidt's former workshop for the blind, where several Jews survived in a secret room during the war. About 1,700 Jews survived in Berlin, and an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 non-Jewish Germans actively hid them, according to historian Johannes Tuchel, the head of the German Resistance Memorial Center which is in charge of the museum.

Eichmann capture exhibit inaugurated

Via Jerusalem Post:

Former Mossad and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) members who took part in the historic capture of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires nearly a half century ago got together Monday (January 12, 2007) at the Massuah Institute for the Study of the Holocaust to mark the inauguration of a new Eichmann exhibition.

The unique reunion, which was also attended by Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin, El Al Director General Eli Romano and members of the fateful 1960 El Al flight to and from Buenos Aires, included the disclosure of the Buenos Aires city map used by Israeli agents in the capture, the pen Eichmann used in which he signed a document agreeing to be tried in Israel, and a walking cane that an Israeli agent following Eichmann used as a cover.

The items will be on display at the Eichmann exhibit at the educational institute, which was founded at Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak in 1972.

In the beginning of his interrogation, Eichmann was asked the size of his shoes and of his hat, Shalom recalled, questions which gave him confidence that his captors did not really know his true identity.

Only after the interrogators were sure of his identity, Shalom said, did they ask him, towards the end of his interrogation, what was his Nazi Party member number, an answer which "sealed his doom."

When Eichmann's identity was revealed, the elated interrogators shook hands with each other, satisfied that their long work was finished. Former Mossad official Yaacov Medad, who like the other secret agents spent 10-days with Eichmann in the safe house, recalled that the mass murderer - whose face was blindfolded throughout the interrogation - sitting before his very eyes was a weakened man, depressed and broken.

"For us Holocaust survivors, Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem was a symbol that we could bring out memories of the inferno that were heretofore locked deep within our souls," Massuah vice-chairman Shraga Milstein said.

After a year-long trial, Eichmann was hanged in Israel in 1962, the last time capital punishment was carried out in the country.

Archaeology links

Links to sites of archaeological institutes in Israel and abroad, Museums, archaeological data bases, libraries etc, via Israel Antiquities Authority:

Archaeological Information Banks

The Biblical and Interpretations

FORVM ANTIQVVM

all.info

The Internet History Sourcebooks- The Internet History Sourcebooks Project [IHSP] is a world wide web project designed to provide easy access to primary sources and other teaching materials in a non-commercial environmen.The Internet Medieval Sourcebook, and other medieval components of the project, are located at the Fordham University History Department, New York

e Journals

Internet Archaeology- Internet Archaeology has been publishing on the web since 1996 and has been read by thousands of individuals from over 120 countries. Access to Internet Archaeology is only available to subscribers

Archaelogical Projects

The Bethsaida Excavations

Umm el Qanatir

Tel Rehov Project - The Tel Rehov project, a major excavation in northeastern Israel, is offering volunteers an opportunity to participate in this important dig in the 2005 season.

Hippos (Sussia)t - The site, situated on the top of a flat diamond shaped mountain, 350 m. above the Sea of Galilee

Institutes

Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies - Haifa university

Israel Exploration Society - In 1914 a group of Jewish intellectuals founded the Society for the Reclamation of Antiquities—today the Israel Exploration Society

The Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem - The Institute of Archaeology, established at the Hebrew University in 1926, is the oldest university department of archaeology in Israel

Museums

Hecht Museum

YU Museum exhibit 2/25 - 6/24: The Vanished World of Polish Jews

And I Still See Their Faces: The Vanished World of Polish Jews

Feb. 25 - June 24, 2007

This photographic exhibition documents the faces of Polish Jews and their everyday activities before the Holocaust. The photographs and albums, whose owners perished, were scattered throughout Poland during the war and saved from obscurity by the Shalom Foundation, which digitally enhanced and enlarged the photographs and devoted over two years to tracing the identities of the subjects and piecing together their stories. The photographs are accompanied by personal stories, which vividly evoke the vanished world of over three million Polish Jews for museum visitors.

Co-sponsored by the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews, North American Council, and Boston University Hillel House.

Yeshiva University Museum
at the Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street, NYC 10011
Tel. 212-294-8330