Tony Snow, Former White House Press Secretary and FOX News Anchor, Dies at 53

Righteous gentile, Irene Sendler, dies

This news item made me cry. May this righteous woman, Irene Sendler, rest in peace. May her memory be blessed forever. There are so few righteous people left, and sadly, there are so many Jew haters to take her place. This news is devastating because now I know that I will never meet her. I had told myself that I would try to meet the righteous ones, to thank them, to know them, to hear their travails, to shake their hand, to hug them - and now, at least with Irene Sendler, I won't be able to accomplish that. Via IreneSendler:

Irena Sendler — credited with saving some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, some of them in baskets — died Monday, her family said. She was 98.

Sendler, among the first to be honored by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as a Righteous Among Nations for her wartime heroism, died at a Warsaw hospital, daughter Janina Zgrzembska told The Associated Press.

President Lech Kaczynski expressed "great regret" over Sendler's death, calling her "extremely brave" and "an exceptional person." In recent years, Kaczynski had spearheaded a campaign to put Sendler's name forward as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city's welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw's Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto.

Seeking to save the ghetto's children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured inside the ghetto — and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.

Irene Sendler is a role model for all Jews and Christians. She has gone to her reward, to Heaven. Thank you, Irene Sendler, for sacrificing your peace of mind and quality of life while living under the auspices of tyranny simply to save a Jewish child. You were a role model, and you still are, unlike any American or European role model. May we all be able to live up to you, to your heightened elevation. I look forward to meeting you in Heaven. May you rest in peace and know the Right Hand of G-d. Amen.

Holocaust museum to honor Helena Bonham Carter's grandfather for saving Jews

Interesting side note. The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem will honor the grandfather of actress Helena Bonham Carter this week for his efforts that helped save thousands of Jews from Nazi persecution during World War II, The Observer reported on Sunday. Eduardo Propper de Callejon, Bonham Carter's maternal grandfather, will be named by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, according to the report. 'He was such a modest man and he was never acknowledged for whathe did,' Bonham Carer said, while in Surrey, England filming the new Harry Potter movie. 'I don't think I fully appreciated it myself until now.' Propper de Callejon helped thousands of refugees sneak into Spain while serving as Spanish First Secretary in Bordeaux during the war. Over 21,000 Righteous Gentiles have been recognized to date.

Iranian Jews Leave Their Silent Nightmare, Come Home to Israel

Jewish life in Iran. Via INN:

Ten Iranian Jewish families – 40 Iranian Jews in all -- began new lives Tuesday night when they came home to Israel. "How they were brought to Israel and information about who they are is classified information, " Jewish Agency spokesman Michael Jankelovitch said in an exclusive interview with Israel National News.

"This is a new initiative," said Jankelovitch, "a joint project of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews headed by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein and the Jewish Agency for Israel."

A total of 200 Iranian Jews made Aliyah (immigrated to Israel) this year, triple the number from just a year ago, when only 65 Jews made Aliyah to Israel from Iran. According to Jankelovitch, the majority of the Jews who left Iran permanently this year came to Israel.

One million dollars – fully half of the budget for this year's project, came from the Fellowship, said Jankelovitch, adding that the entire sum has been exhausted. "The organization is now embarking on a new campaign to raise funds to continue the work for 2008," he added.

Why Iranian Jews, and why now?

"Because their lives are at stake," answered Jankelovitz simply. "They are in a unique situation because of the regime. There are increased cases of discrimination. Learning the Hebrew language has been banned. Jewish day schools have been closed down – all of them. There are no more Jewish day schools in Iran," he said.

Jewish children have to go to school on Shabbat, and on all Jewish holidays including Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

"They come with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a small suitcase with almost no money at all," said Jankelovitch. "Their money is worthless because of the exchange rate. People live in a beautiful house which they sell and it is not even worth $10,000."

In order to balance that hardship, each new immigrant from Iran, including the children, receives a grant of $10,000. A family of five thus receives a total of $50,000 with which to begin their new lives in addition to the usual basket of new immigrant benefits received by everyone else who comes to make Israel their home.

Update: About 40 Jews who left Iran in secret arrived in Israel yesterday — one of the largest such defections — and got a Christmas present of $10,000 per person from U.S. evangelicals.

To whomever those Christians are, I want to personally thank you. May G-d Bless you and your families.

The power of minority politics

M. Zuhdi Jasser, an American Muslim, is a former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and is president and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. He is a physician in solo-practice specializing in internal medicine and nuclear cardiology. He was president of the Arizona Medical Association in June 2007, and chaired the bioethics committee of a large downtown Phoenix hospital. He graduated in 1992 on a full U.S. Navy medical scholarship and completed specialty training in internal medicine at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. in 1996. He served operational tours of duty on the USS El Paso as medical department head participating in Operation Restore Hope, and served a tour of duty as an internist at the Office of the Attending Physician for the U.S. Congress and Supreme Court Justices from 1997-1999. A native of Wisconsin and the son of Syrian immigrants, Jasser was raised to appreciate American freedom which guaranteed, as he says, "his right to life, liberty, and the practice of his personal faith of Islam, like in no so-called Muslim country."

Those are his words, not mine.

In an interview with National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez, Dr. Jasser talks about his military service, the duties of Muslims in America, how to destroy Islamofacism, and more. Click here to read the interview and dream. Dream about how wonderful everything would be, if Muslims with the character and integrity of Dr. Jasser, would be powerful enough to cloud the judgment of the barbaric masses.

There is great power in minority politics. It's called integrity.

Groups appeal for info on Bosnians who aided Jews in WWII

What is the Sarajevo Haggadah? Via JPost:

Leaders of Bosnia's Jewish community appealed Tuesday for help locating Bosnians who aided Jews during World War II and have not been recognized. The search is aimed at locating people who offered help and documenting their stories, said the Bosnian Jewish Community. The effort is part of a broader project to record the lives of Bosnia's Muslim and Jewish communities over the past centuries.

One of the best-known stories of Bosnian involvement inpreserving Jewish tradition during World War II involves efforts to safeguard a 600-year-old Jewish manuscript known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. In 1492, when Spain expelled the country's Jews, a refugee brought the book to Italy. A rabbi later brought the Haggadah from Italy to Bosnia and passed it down through his family until a descendant, Joseph Kohen, sold it to the National Museum in 1894.

The museum kept the treasure in a safe until World War II, when a Catholic museum director and his Muslim colleague saved the book from a Nazi officer who came to pick it up.The two men spirited the book through Nazi checkpoints and carried it to a village in the mountains above Sarajevo, where a Muslim cleric kept it hidden beneath the floor of a mosque until the war ended. It was then returned to the museum. During Bosnia's 1992-95 war, a Muslim museum director and a Serb policeman risked sniper fire to reach the museum, take the book and hide it in a National Bank safe, where it remained until the end of the war.

Bosnia regards the Haggadah as its most important national treasure.

Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi Address to the Founding Session of the New Jewish Congress

If only Israel's leaders were as passionate about Israel as the righteous Sheikh Palazzi.
~~~~~

copyright (c) 2007 by Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi

http://www.amislam.com/

Honorable Members of the Sanhedrin,
Distinguished Rabbis, Professors, leaders and activists of Jewish Organizations,
Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Shalom from Rome to all of you,

I regret being unable to personally participate in the founding session of the New Jewish Congress. I want to assure each one of you that my heart is with you during these tragic times in which the Jewish People now lives. I pray that this crisis will be resolved soon with the emergence of a new Jewish leadership, able to prove that the Zionist dream is still alive.

The hope of the Jewish People to live in peace and security in the Land of Israel was not extinguished in the past by mighty empires. Nor will it be extinguished today by the joint efforts of Arab dictators, U.S. politicians who are subservient to their diktat, and corrupt, collaborationist Israeli politicians bowing in surrender at Annapolis.

The nightmare which started with the Oslo agreement has not yet ended. Every decent human being who analyzes the reality in good faith will easily admit that the attempt to steal Jewish Land in order to create a "state" for P.L.O. gangsters caused tragic consequences, to the point that even Arabs in P.A.-occupied territories already realized what they had lost in terms of freedom since the day parts of Judea and Samaria were surrendered to Arafat.

The role played by a U.S. administration subservient to the interests of America's oil lobby is completely unmasked. George W. Bush claims to lead a "War on Terror", or a war against "Islamofascism" ["Saudi" Arabian Salafi/Wahhabism] . In the Middle East he is actually leading a war to damage America's only reliable ally and to reward terrorists and their "Islamofascist" ["Saudi" Arabian Salafi/Wahhabi] financiers.

Beyond propaganda, the reality of today's world is that the 9/11 terror attacks made their Saudi masterminds even more powerful than before. The Bush administration covers up the role that the princes who now rule "Saudi" Arabia had in financing [Salafi/Wahhabi] al-Qaeda from the very beginning.

The real boss behind Bin Laden, former "crown" "prince" Abdullah, now rules as "king" of "Saudi" Arabia and dictates to Bush what to do in order to avoid further attacks against America. This is one of the reasons why, while Western media speak of a "Road Map", Arab media call the Saudi plan being put into effect in Annapolis to cut Israel into pieces by its real name, "Abdullah's Plan".

The strategy of the Bush administration consists in "feeding the crocodile, hoping we will be the last ones to be eaten". The sacrificial bait the White House offers the Saudi masterminds of "Islamofascism" [Salafi/Wahhabism] is Israel.

Everyone knows that once a "Palestinian" state is created, [Salafi/Wahhabi] Hamas ["Palestinian" branch of the international Salafi/Wahhabi Muslim Brotherhood, sister organization of Salafi/Wahhabi al Qaeda] will immediately take control of it, just as happened in Gaza.

Once one gives Judea and Samaria to the "Palestinian" Authority, he will soon have [Salafi/Wahhabi] Hamas in control of Judea and Samaria. Once one gives Jerusalem to the "Palestinian" Authority, he will have [Salafi/Wahhabi] Hamas in control of Jerusalem, too. That would spell ruin for Israelis and Arabs alike. Gaza today is a chilling example of the barbarism that will prevail in parts of the Land of Israel stolen from the Jewish People tomorrow.

I am describing a reality which is easily understandable. One does not need to be an "expert" or politician to understand it. George Bush and Condoleeza Rice know it very well, surely better than I do, and so do Ehud Olmert and those members of the so-called Israeli "national camp" who do nothing to prevent this tragedy.

Bush, in particular, claims to read the Bible every day, but seems unable to understand that, according to that same Bible he reads, the Land of Israel was gifted by G-d to the Children of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob/Israel. The Land of Israel was not given to anyone else -- including the descendants of Ishmael -- who received plenty of territory to live elsewhere.

Consequently, whoever tries to steal its Divinely-appointed heritage from the Jewish People is not simply declaring war again one nation or another, but against G-d Himself and His Divine Decrees. The United States received abundant Divine blessings as long as it defended the rights of the Jewish People to its Land. The Soviet Union, which stood for the destruction of Israel, vanished from world maps.

Should the United States change its foreign policy to oppose God Himself, if it chooses to gift Judea, Samaria and even Jerusalem to those who burn U.S. flags, the flow of Divine blessings to America will also change. It is the moral duty of every U.S. citizen to prevent their country from being transformed, as it is now being transformed, into a Destroyer of Israel.

It is the moral duty of every Jew, in Israel or the Diaspora, to oppose self-proclaimed Jewish "leaders" who cooperate in stealing a Divine heritage from their own People.

As for those who today take upon themselves the task and responsibility to shape a new Jewish leadership, a leadership which is able to defend those areas of the Land of Israel which were liberated through enduring efforts and personal sacrifice, I pray G-d bless them in assuming the role of Light to the Nations, and in preparing the path of Redemption by saving the whole Land of Israel from repeated attempts at usurpation.

Shalom and Blessings from Rome,

Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi

eMail:islam.inst@alice. it
http://www.amislam.com/

Director,
CULTURAL INSTITUTE OF THE ITALIAN ISLAMIC COMMUNITY;
Secretary General,
ITALIAN MUSLIM ASSEMBLY
http://www.amislam.com/

Advisory Council Member,
JEWISH LEGAL HERITAGE SOCIETY
http://www.mishpativri.org.il/
(Professor Nahum Rakover, Founder and President, Jewish Legal Heritage Society;
Former Deputy Attorney General, State of Israel; Former Advisor to the Knesset on Jewish Law;
Professor of Law Emeritus, Bar-Ilan University)

Muslim Co-Founder and Co-Chairman
ISLAM-ISRAEL FELLOWSHIP
http://www.rb.org.il/Islam-Israel/Islam-IsraelContents.htm
Root & Branch Association, Ltd.
http://www.rb.org.il/

Now this is courage

Bleat, bleat, Osama, you hunted goat. You've been pwned and crushed like the grape that you are. h/t World Net Daily:

An American television evangelist has turned the tables on Muslim al-Qaida terrorist leader Osama bin Laden – sending him a video message warning him to repent of his sins and convert to Christianity.

"Osama, since you seem to be a fan of video messages, I thought this would be the best way to communicate with you," says Bill Keller, host of the Florida-based "Live Prayer" TV program as well as LivePrayer.com in a message being posted to YouTube and 20 other major video sites in the U.S. as well as some 50 in the Middle East.

"Look at you, look at your life," Keller says. "You live like a hunted goat in caves, totally dependent on a small group of people for your survival. At any moment, one of those you trust could betray you like Judas betrayed Jesus and your life would be over. The false prophet you follow, Mohammad, was poisoned to death by one of his wives."

Keller calls bin Laden a "coward" and a "tool of Satan."

"There are no virgins waiting for you in Paradise when you die, only Satan and the everlasting punishment of hell," said Keller. "The good news I have come to deliver to you is that you, yes, even you Osama, can escape God's wrath. He loves you so much, that He sent Jesus to die for your sins, all of them, every last one! Yes Osama, even you can be saved and enter into the Glory of Heaven. Not some fictitious place called "paradise" with women waiting to have sex with you, but the home of God where you can find eternal peace and rest when your life on this earth is over."

Righteous gentile: Adrian Van Kaam / Priest, Duquesne professor helped Jews in Holland

From The Post-Gazette:

The Rev. Adrian Van Kaam, a Catholic priest whose understanding of the dynamics of spirituality was formed as he smuggled food to Jews in hiding during the Nazi occupation of Holland, died Saturday at the nursing home of the Little Sisters of the Poor, North Side.

Father Van Kaam, 87, a Spiritan, founded the Institute of Formative Spirituality at Duquesne University. He emphasized how the soul is shaped and how faith is lived out in daily life. His reputation was worldwide.

Born in The Hague, he was in seminary when the Nazis invaded in 1940. He started a clandestine discussion group to help laity see what saints and scholars of the past had said about faith in dark times, said Susan Muto, his longtime colleague in Pittsburgh.

In the summer of 1944, believing that liberation was imminent, he went to a retreat in western Holland and was trapped behind Nazi lines after the disastrous Allied Operation Market Garden. There he endured the "hunger winter" of 1944-45, when Hollanders survived on turnips, potatoes and toxic tulip bulbs. The starvation diet permanently ruined his health, Dr. Muto said.

He hid in a barn, but rounded up food from farmers to take to Jews and others in hiding. That Christmas he wrote and produced a clandestine play, "Christmas Night in Ravaged Holland" which recast the nativity story in wartime Europe.

He believed that "there are no coincidences, only providences, " Dr. Muto said. "He believed it was providential, because of his future mission, that he was catapulted out of the ivory tower of seminary into the Dutch hunger winter."

He was always seeking ways to bring the spiritual riches of ages past to people who might never earn an advanced degree. To do so, in 1988 he co-founded the Epiphany Association with Dr. Muto. When Duquesne closed the Institute of Formative Spirituality in 1993, the pair continued at what is now Epiphany Academy in Beechview.

He died as the Little Sisters of the Poor sang Salve Regina, said Dr. Muto, who was present.

"We feel he just simply yielded himself completely into the arms of the mystery, which is the mystery of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit," she said.

He is survived by two sisters, Lia Schillkens Van Kaam and Bepp Van Gemert, both of the Netherlands. Donations may be made to the Epiphany Association, Duquesne University or the Little Sisters of the Poor.

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.

Who is Irena Sendler?

Via "The Woman Who Loved Children," Ladies' Home Journal Print Edition, December 2006.

Irena Sendler rescued 2,500 children from the Nazi death camps. Her story, writes Marti Attoun in Ladies' Home Journal, was rescued by three Kansas teens.

And her story is astounding, as awe-inspiring as that of Oskar Schindler, whose courageous acts of Nazi resistance became a book and an Academy Award-winning film. But unlike Schindler, who received international acclaim, Sendler had been a footnote in history for nearly 60 years.‚ That all changed in September 1999, when three teenagers in a small town in Kansas were looking for a topic for a history project and stumbled upon a short mention of Sendler in an article in a 5-year-old newsmagazine. As a Catholic social worker, the article said, Sendler had organized the rescue of 2,500 Jewish babies and children from the Nazi-controlled Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and 1943.

"We thought it was a typo," recalls Elizabeth Cambers, now 18 and a college freshman. "We thought it was supposed to say she rescued 250 children, not 2,500."

In September 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker employed by Warsaw's social-welfare department. An only child, she had been just 7 when her father, a Catholic doctor, contracted typhus and died after treating Jews during a 1917 typhus outbreak . But she never forgot his sacrifice. "I was taught that if a man is drowning, it is irrelevant what is his religion or nationality, " Sendler has said. "One must help him. It is a need of the heart."

In the fall of 1940, Sendler watched as the Nazis forced 350,000 Jews inside the Warsaw ghetto, a 16-square-block area that was walled off and guarded. With each passing month of the war, the torment of the people locked inside intensified. They were dying of starvation and disease while unknowingly waiting for the Nazis to herd them into freight cars that would ultimately take them to their deaths in the gas chambers.

Sendler joined Zegota, the code name for the Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland, an underground network founded in December 1942 by psychologist Adolf Berman and six other prominent scholars, religious leaders, and social activists. The secret organization, which forged thousands of birth certificates and other documents to give Jews safe Aryan identities, asked Sendler to head up their operation to smuggle Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto.

But first she had to get inside. Because the Nazis were on guard against the spread of infections, they allowed the delivery of medicine inside the Ghetto. A Zegota member working inside the Polish disease department forged a permit that allowed Sendler to work undercover as a nurse inside the ghetto. Her code name was Jolanta.With the help of 10 "messenger friends," as Sendler called her colleagues, and dozens of volunteers, she organized the effort to sneak the Children to orphanages, convents, and private homes in the Warsaw region.

Children who were old enough to talk were taught to rattle off Christian prayers and mimic other religious behavior (such as how to make the sign of the cross) so they could live safely without arousing suspicion of their Jewish heritage.

Sendler and Zegota devised several routes for smuggling children out of the ghetto. Kids escaped on foot or in the arms of volunteers through sewer pipes or basements with underground passageways. Many also escaped through the courthouse, which had entrances on both the ghetto side and Aryan side. Other methods were more inventive. For instance, a trolley driver and Zegota member, when crossing from the ghetto to the Aryan side, hid little ones in trunks, suitcases, or sacks under his back-seat, where the Nazi guards could not see. Another supporter, an ambulance driver, kept his dog beside him in the front seat and trained him to bark to camouflage any cries or noises from the babies hidden under stretchers in back. Sendler also arranged for babies and children to be sedated and smuggled out with merchants in potato sacks, under their loads of goods. Sometimes, she even sneaked sedated children out in body bags, telling the guards that they were dead.

Day after day, for about 16 months, Sendler persuaded parents and grandparents to hand over their babies and children, to give them a chance to live. "There were terrible scenes," Sendler says. "One mother & I wanted a child to leave the ghetto while the father did not. The grandma wanted, the husband did not. They asked what was the guarantee? What kind of guarantee could I give them?" She couldn't even guarantee that she could get past the guards. On slips of tissue paper, Sendler recorded the identity of every child she rescued. Whenever possible, she wrote down the child's Jewish name as well as the child's new Christian name and new address. Sendler buried these names in jars under an apple tree in a friend's garden. After the war, Sendler hoped, the children would be located and their Jewish identities revealed to them.

On Oct. 20, 1943, the Gestapo arrested Sendler. They had long suspected she was running a smuggling operation, and one of her messengers had been caught and tortured until she gave up Sendler's name and home address. The Gestapo interrogated Sendler, demanding information about the identities of the other rescuers and the children in hiding. But she refused to talk, even when she was beaten until her legs and feet were broken. "I was quiet as a mouse," Sendler has said. "I would have rather died than disclose anything about our operations." She was then taken to Pawiak prison, where she was sentenced to be executed.

At the last minute, however, the woman who had rescued so many others was herself rescued. On the day she was to be executed, Zegota paid ahefty bribe to a guard, who allowed Sendler to escape. The guard subsequently posted Sendler's name on public bulletin boards as one of the executed, essentially rendering her invisible to the Nazis. She then went into hiding in Poland, just like the children she'd saved.

When Poland was liberated a year and three months later, in January 1945, Sendler returned to the friend's garden and dug up the jars. She turned over the rescued children's names to Zegota's Berman, and he and other members of the group tried to locate the children's foster families.‚ Sadly, most of the children had no parents or grandparents to be found. Less than 1 percent of the Jews inside the ghetto survived the war, most having perished at the Treblinka death camp in northeast Poland. After the war, Sendler married, raised two children of her own, and continued her career as a social worker in Warsaw. The beatings she had suffered at the hands of the Gestapo left her permanently disabled and she has had trouble walking ever since. But she never talked openly about her rescue work. Poland was under a communist regime, and the postwar climate wasn't safe. For almost 60 years, her story was essentially lost to history.

Then, in March 2000, she received a letter from Elizabeth Cambers and two of her classmates at Uniontown High School in Uniontown, Kan. Encouraged by their social studies teacher, the girls had selected Sendler as the subject of their National History Day project, and though information about her was scarce, they had been able to write a 10-minute play, titled "Life in a Jar", that had already won first place at the state level of the national contest. "We explained who we were and what we were doing," says Sabrina Coons, now 20 and a student at Kansas State University. "We told her that we found her story amazing."

Sendler's response, handwritten in Polish, arrived in Kansas three weeks later. "I am very eager to receive and read your play,"Sendler wrote. In a series of letters, Sendler answered the students'questions, and slowly the details of her remarkable story unfolded; an international friendship was forged.

After an emotional performance of Life in a Jar at Uniontown High, the students were invited to perform the play for church groups, nursing homes, and civic organizations throughout southeast Kansas. Through their correspondence with Sendler, the teens learned that she lived quite meagerly. So at each performance, they set out a donation jar. Their first gift to Sendler was $3, which they told her to use for postage. "We found out later that she gave the $3 away to a children's home," says Coons. "That's just how she is."

Although the girls didn't win any awards when they traveled to Maryland in June 2000 to compete in the national contest, their play gained national and international attention, and the students have since given more than 100 performances of the play in eight different states. As a result, Sendler has received numerous awards for her courageous work. After learning she was to be given a $10,000 humanitarian award from the American Center of Polish Culture in Washington, she wrote to her girls "My emotion is being shadowed by the fact that no one from the circle of my faithful coworkers, who constantly risked their lives, could live long enough to enjoy all the honors that now are falling upon me.... I can't find the words to thank you, my dear girls.... Before the day you have written the play "Life in a Jar" -- nobody in my own country and in the whole world cared about my person and my work during the war ..." One member of a Kansas City audience was so profoundly moved by Sendler's story that he raised money to send the play's three authors to Poland to meet Sendler in May 2001.

"It wasn't real until I actually met Irena," says Megan Stewart. "We all ran up and hugged her. She wanted to just hold our hands and hear about our lives." Cambers told Sendler, "I love you. You are my hero." Sendler, a 4-foot-11-inch woman who now uses a wheelchair, deflected the girls' praise. "A hero is someone doing extraordinary things," she told them.. "What I did was not extraordinary. It was a normal thing to do.

"From "The Woman Who Loved Children," Ladies' Home Journal Print Edition, December 2006.

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.

Jews Remember Jeane Kirkpatrick as Friend of Israel, Moral Beacon

From Jews Remember Jeane Kirkpatrick as Friend of Israel, Moral Beacon:

Jeane Kirkpatrick, who died Friday at age 80, was an ardent defender of the State of Israel in one of the world's least hospitable environments. Kirkpatrick was a vocal supporter of Israel both at the UN - where she was America's first female envoy - and in other forums. "She was a great friend of Israel, of the Jewish people," said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Hoenlein noted that Kirkpatrick never ran for public office and her positions emerged not from calculations of political expediency, but "purely out of her deep conviction and belief."