Today in Jewish History - Adar 14

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In 355 BCE, the Jews celebrated their successful defeat of Haman's anti-Semitic mobs, an event we commemorate today with the Purim holiday.We read the Megillah (Scroll of Esther), dress up in costumes, and celebrate how the Jews of Persia narrowly escaped annihilation, thanks to the bravery of Esther and Mordechai. In Shushan, the Persian capital, however, the battle lasted one additional day and Purim was not celebrated until the 15th of Adar. Thus today in Jerusalem, Purim is celebrated one day later than the rest of the world.

Adar 14 is also the day in 1912 that Henrietta Szold founded Hadassah, the women's Zionist organization. In 1892, even before Herzl's activities, Szold and her father formed the first Zionist society in Baltimore, and Hadassah was her idea to mobilize American Jewish women in support of Israel. In 1920, Szold made aliyah, wher she supervised the opening of Hadassah medical units, playgrounds and public health programs. At age 73, Szold, as head of the Youth Aliyah Department, traveled to Germany where she worked to save Jewish youth destined for Hitler's ovens. Szold is buried in Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives. Today Hadassah operates the largest hospital in Jerusalem, and its 300,000 members make it one of the largest women's organizations in the world.

Also on this day, in 1942, in the town of Zdunska Wola in Nazi-occupied Poland, 10 Jews were hanged by Hitler's SS, in a sadistic parody of events in the Book of Esther. To add to this debacle, the Gestapo ordered all Jews out of their homes in order to witness the hangings. On Purim day the following year, 1943, there was another 'Purim massacre' in the Polish town of Piotrkow, where 10 Jews were executed. Hitler harbored a venomous hatred for the holiday of Purim: When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, he banned the reading of the Book of Esther, an ordered that all synagogues be closed and barred on Purim day. "Unless Germany is victorious," he proclaimed, "Jewry could then celebrate the destruction of Europe by a second triumphant Purim Festival." Incredibly, when Nazi officer Julius Streicher ascended the gallows to be hanged at Nuremberg, he shouted, "Purimfest 1946."

Vandals defile ancient Jewish cemetery in S. Czech Republic

A Jewish cemetery has been desecrated in a southern Czech town, police said Friday. Spokeswoman Hana Moltasova said in a statement that 23 tombstones were overturned at the cemetery in Pisek, 100 kilometers south of Prague. Five of the tombstones were broken, she said. The cemetery, dating back to the 19th century, is no longer used for burials, and was opened to the public in 1993 after renovations. Two weeks ago, vandals defiled a Holocaust memorial at a Berlin train station, where tens of thousands of Jews were once shipped to Nazi concentration camps.

Net closing in on top Nazi criminal Aribert Heim

Investigators are closing in on one of the last living top Nazi war criminals, Germany's Der Spiegel magazine reported on Saturday. Spiegel magazine said investigators were focusing on Spain and Austria in their hunt for 93-year-old Aribert Heim, known as "Dr Death" at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Germany has for decades been searching for Heim, an SS doctoraccused of having killed hundreds of concentration camp inmateswith heart injections.Earlier this month, Austria said it was offering a 50,000 euro(e68,260) reward for information leading to the arrest of Heimand Alois Brunner, an aide to Adolf Eichmann who helped organisethe deportation of Jews to death camps. The 93-year-old is presumed to be living in Spain or LatinAmerica, according to the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

Even at the age of 93, the nazi bastard is too cowardly to show his face. Why he got to live to age 93, while millions of Jewish children under the age of 6 were slaughtered by German nazi rubbish, is one question I will have to ask HaShem when I get to heaven, please G-d.

Kurt Waldheim dies at 88; ex-UN chief hid Nazi past

Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary general and president of Austria whose hidden complicity in Nazi war crimes was exposed late in his career, died Thursday in Vienna, Austrian media reported. He was 88. He died of heart failure, the state broadcaster ORF reported.

Although it was never proved that Waldheim himself committed atrocities during World War II, he was a lieutenant in army intelligence, attached to brutal German military units that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps from 1942 to 1944. Waldheim lied about his wartime service in the Balkans, maintaining that his military career ended in 1942 after he was wounded in a battle on the Russian front.

But more than four decades later, his assertions were disputed by witnesses, photographs, medals and commendations given to Waldheim, and by his own signature on documents linked to massacres and deportations.

Folks, Waldheim's service with a World War II German army unit guilty of war crimes in the Balkans resulted in his being barred from entering the United States after his election as President of Austria.

Rot in hell, nazi bastard.

Today in Jewish History - Sivan 24

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In 1977, a neo-Nazi group planned to march in Skokie, Illinois, in a largely Jewish neighborhood that was home to many Holocaust survivors. It was believed that the march would be disruptive, and the city refused to allow it. The American Civil Liberties Union came to the Nazis' support, and in 1978 a high court upheld the Nazis' right to march, on the grounds that the public display of the Nazi flag is a constitutionally protected free expression. After winning the court battle, the Nazis decided to march in Chicago's Marquette Park instead. In 1987, a Holocaust Monument and Museum was opened in Skokie. On the night of its dedication, the monument was desecrated with swastikas.

Today in Jewish History - Iyar 27

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In 1945, the Theresienstadt concentration camp was liberated. Theresienstadt was not a death camp by the usual definition. It was the center of a Nazi PR ploy -- a mythic, idyllic city that was supposedly built to protect Jews from the vagaries and stresses of the war. The Red Cross was once allowed to visit Theresienstadt, which was spruced up for the occasion; inmates were dressed up and baked goods suddenly filled the shelves. (The Red Cross concluded that the Jews were being well-treated.) In reality, starvation and disease proved rampant. Of the 200,000 people (mostly Czech Jews) who passed through its gates, thousands died of malnutrition and exposure, and others were sent to Auschwitz.

Today in Jewish History - Nissan 3

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In 1944, the Nazis perpetrated the Children's Action in the Kovno Ghetto. That day and the next, German soldiers conducted house-to-house searches to round up all children under age 12 (and adults over 55) -- and sent them to their deaths at Fort IX. Eventually, the Germans blew up every house with grenades and dynamite, on suspicion that Jews might be in hiding in underground bunkers. They then poured gasoline over much of the former ghetto and incinerated it. Of the 37,000 Jews in Kovno before the Holocaust, less than 10 percent survived. One of the survivors was Rabbi Ephraim Oshri, who later published a stirring collection of rabbinical responsa, detailing his life-and-death decisions during the Holocaust. Also on this date, in 1937, American Jews held a massive anti-Nazi rally in New York City's Madison Square Garden.

Mock Nazi camp in Debica, Poland

The authorities of the Debica region in southern Poland have decided to construct a replica of a Nazi concentration camp. The copy of the camp would be situated in the locality of Pustkow , where a Nazi concentration camp operated during WWII. Some 3 thousand Poles, 7 thousand Jews and 5 thousand Soviet POW were murdered there. The replica of the camp with the main entrance gate, barracks for prisoners surrounded by barbed wire is to stand near the Mountain of Death a memorial to the victims of the Pustkow camp. The initiative would be financed by EU funds and as the authorities of the region says will have an educational and commemorative aim.

Today in Jewish History - Adar 14

Sponsored by Aish.com:

In 355 BC, the Jews celebrated their successful defeat of Haman's anti-Semitic mobs, an event we commemorate today with the Purim holiday. We read the Megillah (Scroll of Esther), dress up in costumes, and celebrate how the Jews of Persia narrowly escaped annihilation, thanks to the bravery of Esther and Mordechai. In Shushan, the Persian capital, however, the battle lasted one additional day and Purim was not celebrated until the 15th of Adar. Thus today in Jerusalem, Purim is celebrated one day later than the rest of the world.

Adar 14 is also the day in 1912 that Henrietta Szold founded Hadassah, the women's Zionist organization. In 1892, even before Herzl's activities, Szold and her father formed the first Zionist society in Baltimore, and Hadassah was her idea to mobilize American Jewish women in support of Israel. In 1920, Szold made aliyah, wher she supervised the opening of Hadassah medical units, playgrounds and public health programs. At age 73, Szold, as head of the Youth Aliyah Department, traveled to Germany where she worked to save Jewish youth destined for Hitler's ovens. Szold is buried in Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives. Today Hadassah operates the largest hospital in Jerusalem, and its 300,000 members make it one of the largest women's organizations in the world.

Also on this day, in 1942, in the town of Zdunska Wola in Nazi-occupied Poland, 10 Jews were hanged by Hitler's SS, in a sadistic parody of events in the Book of Esther. To add to this debacle, the Gestapo ordered all Jews out of their homes in order to witness the hangings. On Purim day the following year, 1943, there was another 'Purim massacre' in the Polish town of Piotrkow, where 10 Jews were executed. Hitler harbored a venomous hatred for the holiday of Purim: When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, he banned the reading of the Book of Esther, an ordered that all synagogues be closed and barred on Purim day. "Unless Germany is victorious," he proclaimed, "Jewry could then celebrate the destruction of Europe by a second triumphant Purim Festival." Incredibly, when Nazi officer Julius Streicher ascended the gallows to be hanged at Nuremberg, he shouted, "Purimfest 1946."

Want to deny the Holocaust?

At the Nuremberg trials, a witness reported Adolf Eichmann's defiant boast: "I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have 5,000,000 human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction."

Even Eichmann did not deny the Holocaust, nor did he deny the enormous number of 5,000,000, recalling the Jews he helped kill, as chief of the Gestapo's Jewish Section, where he drew up the lists of names, marshaled the freight cars that carried the victims to the camps, perfected the methods of slaughter—finally settling on "Zyklon B" as the gas that was fastest and cheapest.

The Beast in Chains

Who is Adolf Eichmann? A detailed article from Time Magazine, dated Monday, June 06, 1960, on the historic arrest of Nazi war criminal and Jew-exterminator, Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible together with the Nazi leaders for what was called the 'final solution' of the Jewish question— the extermination of 6,000,000 Jews of Europe. An excerpt:

The Israelis found Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. He arrived in this country in 1952 from Spain. He was traveling with an Italian Red Cross document obtained through the Vatican's D.P.-relief department, which qualified him as a displaced person. The document was in the name of Krumey, one of Eichmann's assistant exterminators who was rearrested in West Germany following Ben-Gurion's announcement [of the arrest of Adolf Eichmann].

Eichmann at first worked as a surveyor for a German-American engineering firm called Capri. For the next several years he turned up under various aliases in Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia. By 1956 he was back in Argentina with a job as mechanic in the capital's outskirts, worked later on as an overseer on a farm in the interior. In 1958 he returned to Buenos Aires, became an office employee in an automobile plant and lived near the airport with his German wife and four children (the last was born after his family joined him).Eichmann, now 54, bore no resemblance to the jaunty SS officer of the past. He had gone almost completely bald, hollow-cheeked, with big, flopping ears and a long, drooping nose. Yet early last month Israeli secret agents identified their quarry. From then on, they stalked him day and night. A five-man commando squad headed by one Yehudah Shimoni was sent from Israel to Buenos Aires. At the same time. El Al (Israeli Airlines) New York Station Manager Joseph Klein, who himself bears a tattooed number from one of Eichmann's concentration camps on his arm, flew down to make arrangements for a special El Al flight. It was to carry an Israeli delegation headed by Minister of State Abba Eban to attend the isoth anniversary of Argentine independence.

On May 13 Eichmann walked along General Paz Avenue on his way home from work. An automobile swerved out of the heavy traffic, screeched to a halt. Before the startled Eichmann could struggle or cry out, he was grabbed and flung into the car. That night a message was flashed to Ben-Gurion. Decoded, it read: "The beast is in chains." Eichmann's family spent the night telephoning friends and checking hospitals and morgues. Next morning, they disappeared into hiding.

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.