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New Publikations from 2005


2001 - 2002 - 2003 - 2004 - 2005 - 2006


12.12.2005r

The government of Poland and the city of Warsaw have allocated $26 million and donated land in the former Warsaw ghetto for the construction of a new Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Jewish philanthropists have raised about $7 million for the exhibits and are trying to raise another $17 million.


12.12.2005r

MHPJ North American Council

Spotlight on Sigmund Rolat and The Exhibit of "The Jews of Czestochowa"

December 5 -9,Washington D.C.

Russell Senate Office Building Rotunda- located North of the main Capitol building at Delaware & Constitution Ave, N.E.
Please note: Photo ID required at door for admission  
Weekdays - 9.00am-4.30pm
Fridays - 9.00am-2.00pm

 

January 22 - April 2, South Orange, New Jersey

Seton Hall University

 

For the further details of the exhibit go to www.czestochowajews.org

 

About Sigmund Rolat 


12.12.2005r

16, Ha'neviim st.
Ramat Ha'Sharon 47279
ISRAEL

My holocaust is about memory. A memory of a child, thrown into a world that went mad. Memory that haunts me ever since.


12.12.2005r

19 November 2005
www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news

Auschwitz-Birkenau was among Hitler's mos torious death camps - and the museum which annually attracts millions of visitors from all over the world to this, the site of the most terrible mass murder in the history of humanity, undoubtedly plays a vital role in educating people about an era and a crime we should never forget. But should we encourage our children to visit such a place?


12.12.2005r

Sent: Thursday, November 24, 2005

By Lucyna Artymiuk

Poland has taken over a decade to rebuild relations with Israel, broken off under communism. Now it's hoped that the country is coming to be seen as Israel's gateway into the European Union.


12.12.2005r

Authorized by the Author

28 November 2005

Hi gang....

Tomorrow I leave Poland and head back to Melbourne. I can't believe that almost 5 weeks has gone by so quickly and that I'm going home already - so much done, yet so much still to do!


12.12.2005r

Ha'aretz
26/11/2005

New York City, U.S. - Sixty-one years ago, Joanna Zalucka hid a young Jewish girl in her bedroom for eight months, saving the child from the Nazi killing spree in their native Poland.


10.11.2005r

Sunday, November 6, 2005, 2 PM

at the Lodzer Centre Holocaust Congregation,
12 Heaton Street, Toronto near Bathurst and Sheppard, tel. 416-636-6665

Dear Members and Friends of the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation

The 25th Anniversary Holocaust Education Week in Toronto has already started.
We are proud to be part of it again.


10.11.2005r

Saturday, October 29, 2005

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

A renowned Canadian scholar of the Holocaust has pulled back the veils on one of the Second World War's most painful and inflamed controversies - the role Pope Pius XII played as Jewish leaders struggled to reclaim Jewish children from Roman Catholics to whom they had been entrusted for safekeeping from the Nazi death camps.


10.11.2005r

David Novak

Copyright (c) 1998 First Things 89 (January 1999): 20-25.

Something very significant has happened to Jewish-Christian relations, especially Jewish-Catholic relations. Last March, the Vatican issued the statement "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," which was prepared under the direction of Edward Idris Cardinal Cassidy, president of the Church's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, and introduced by Pope John Paul II himself (see FT, May 1998).


10.11.2005r

Ha'aretz

26-25 October 2005

Net-like sheets of fabric hang from the ceiling of the Radegast train station on the outskirts of Lodz in central Poland. The fabric depicts black-and-white pictures of Jews who were once residents of the city - random photographs of youths, couples, families, and people in the streets.


14.10.2005r

November 10, 2005 at 8:00pm

The concert will be dedicated to the millions of victims of the Second World War. Victims of Holocaust, genocide and mass murder in all occupied countries.

The University of Ottawa Orchestra will perform, supplemented by select members of The Ottawa Symphony especially invited for this important performance. The Orchestra will be under the direction of University of Ottawa Professor and Director of the Ottawa Symphony, David Currie. The vocal soloist will be Maria Knapik.


10.11.2005r.

Rzeczpospolita
Warsaw, 26th January 2004

Dear Sir,
Dear Colleague,

Acting as the Editor-in-Chief of the "Rzeczpospolita" daily, the most renowned opinion-forming Polish daily newspaper that has always focused on truth and the compliance with the ethical principles also in the sphere of journalism I have noticed with pain and grief that in many renowned newspapers all over the world a term "Polish concentration camps" appears time and again with the harm to the Poles.


05.10.2005r

His Excellency Ambassador of Israel to Poland

David Abraham Akiva Peleg

Accompanied by the diplomats and employees of the Embassy of Israel wish you a good, successful and peaceful year 5766.

The Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashana) begins on the 3rd of October in the evening.


05.10.2005r

Ottawa, 21st of September 2005

Mr. Giles Gherson
Editor in Chief
The Toronto Star

Dear Sir,

I am writing to you to express my concern and to protest against the expression used in the article published on the 21st September 2005 edition of "Toronto Star" on page A1 and A6 treating on the passing of Simon Wiesenthal entitled "Nazi-hunter sought 'justice, not revenge'". It is written in the aforementioned article that: "Wiesenthal was also instrumental in the arrest of Franz Stangl, commandant of the Polish death camps at Treblinka and Sobibor".


05.10.2005r

scriptwriter of The Pianist and now Oliver Twist,
tells Jasper Rees about his friendship with the remarkable

Roman Polanski

Telegraph.co.uk, 30 September 2005

A few years ago, Roman Polanski saw a play in Paris about the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler's relationship with the Third Reich. He had already acquired the rights to the memoir of Wladislaw Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish pianist who through resilience and luck managed to cheat the Nazis of one more victim.


05.10.2005r

September 26, 2005 Monday

taking part in the conference are outstanding experts and historians from Poland, Israel, Great Britain, Germany and the USA.


23.09.2005r

The Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation

presents

The Films of Agnieszka Holland

September 24-25 at the Bloor Cinema. Toronto

Oscar-nominated director Agnieszka Holland will speak about her life and work at the Polish Jewish Heritage Foundation's "Agnieszka Holland Film Festival".


23.09.2005r

By Adam Bernstein,
Washington Post

September 21, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Simon Wiesenthal, the controversial Nazi hunter who pursued hundreds of war criminals after World War II and who was ce l to preserving the memory of the Holocaust for more than half a century, yesterday at his home in Vienna, the city that was his base of operations. He had a kidney ailment and was 96.

Called the ''deputy for the dead" and ''avenging archangel" of the Holocaust, Mr. Wiesenthal after the war created a repository of concentration camp testimonials and dossiers on Nazis at his Jewish Documentation Center. The information was used to help lawyers prosecute those responsible for some of the 20th century's most abominable crimes.


23.09.2005r

By Eva Hoffman

Eva Hoffman (London) grew up in Krakow, Poland. After emigrating to Canada in her teens, she went on to study in the United States and received a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard University. Subsequently, she worked as senior editor and writer on several sections of the New York Times, serving for a while as one of its regular literary critics. She has also taught literature and creative writing at various universities in the US. and Britain. She is the author of 'Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language', 'Exit Into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe', 'Shtetl: The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World'. Her first novel, 'The Secret', was published in 2001.


23.09.2005r

September 16, 2005 - New York
President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland was honored last night by the American Jewish Committee with the organization's highest award, the American Liberties Medallion.


23.09.2005r

by Dan Pine
staff writer

Jewish News Weekly

August 26, 2005

PBS' "Hiding and Seeking"

Menachem Daum loves his sons, but when he saw them giving a wink to hatred, he decided to do something about it.


05.09.2005r.

By Rabbi Dow Marmur

Canadian Jewish News

Each time he returned to Israel, he was asked if anti-Semitism in Poland is still prevalent. "Yes," he'd reply, "just as in other European countries." He'd add: "Polish Jews are tied to their bad memories and refuse to free themselves from them. They don't want to see a different Poland. I've the impression that they don't put similar questions to those who return from visits to Germany or France."


05.09.2005r.

Personal ties spur philanthropist
to bring Poles, U.S. Jews together

By Carolyn Slutsky
JTA, August 17, 2005

RAKOW, Poland, Aug. 17 (JTA) - When Tad Taube decided to create the Polish Jewish Heritage Program, a branch of his Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, he did it for more than philanthropic reasons.


05.09.2005r.

Carolyn Slutsky
Special to the Jewish Times

AUGUST 18, 2005
Krakow, Poland

When Tad Taube decided to create the Polish Jewish Heritage Program, a branch of his Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, he did it for more than philanthropic reasons.
"I was born in Krakow," Taube said. "I have linkages that I feel positive about, and I wanted to make those linkages stronger."


05.09.2005r.

By MICHAEL BOYDEN

Jerusalem Post. August 23, 2005

Has anyone heard of Breslau? My grandparents lived there, and it was where my late father spent his childhood. Once it was the third largest city in Germany. It boasted an ancient university and a tradition of German scholarship that produced eight Nobel Prize winners. But then came World War II.


05.09.2005r.

Radio Free Europe (archives)
By Alix Landgrebe

Nationalism plays an important role in Polish society. The discourse in and about national paradigms is crucial even for many Polish intellectuals, and national questions are omnipresent in everyday Polish life. The period of Nazi occupation is often discussed in connection with national identity. Today, we are witnessing a revival of nationalist ideas from the 19th century that were long taboo under socialism. Although national ideas were strongly present during the socialist era as well, they were articulated differently. Nationalist thought involved an especially deformed memory of the past; many issues could not be openly discussed. By the end of the 1940s, Jewish history, and the Holocaust, or Shoah, in particular, became such a forbidden topic.


05.09.2005r.

David Rapp

Haaretz, 19 August 2005

The testimony given by Vera Alexander at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem focused on her memories of the women's camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Visual, subjective memories, of the sort that muted and faded over the years. Alexander, a native of Slovakia, took the witness stand on June 8, 1961. Gideon Hausner, prosecutor in the trial, presented the court and the witness with an album of drawings that depicted everyday life in Auschwitz.


01.08.2005r.

bbc news, August 1, 2005

The Polish Home Army has begun a battle to liberate Warsaw, the first European capital to fall to the Germans fifty one years ago.

At 1700 local time, the code signal "Tempest" was given and there was a wave of explosions and rifle fire throughout the city.


01.08.2005r.

Polemics between Rabbi David Lincoln who considers Poland as the victim of the Nazis and Fanya Gottesfeld Heller who claims that Poland was a victimizer. Below you have three texts from the New York Jewish Week:

The Rabbi's article, Fanya Gottesfeld Heller's opinion and the Rabbi's reply.

Jewish Week

New York, June 17, 2005

I was pleased to read recently in Haaretz that the Israeli government is considering changes in the March of the Living youth trips and concentration camp visits. Polish organizations have complained about the ignorance of youth leaders, with the result that young people (joining many Jewish adults in the United States) cannot distinguish between the German killers and Polish victims, and hold the Poles responsible for the fate of Polish Jews.


01.08.2005r.

Picking Up Passengers

When we began this project six years ago, we had no idea where life would take us. A man in our early audience told us, "you are on a journey, picking up passengers, to make a difference in the world." We continue on this journey and find more and more people wanting to make a difference. During the last of May and the first part of June we traveled to Poland for a total of nine days. So here are paragraphs on Irena, presentations, projects and the press.


01.08.2005r.

The Warsaw Voice No 27 (871)
July 3, 2005

Teacher Norman Conard and student Jessica Shelton from the Irena Sendler Project
Talk to Marcin Mierzejewski


01.08.2005r.

By Jeff Jacoby

In a country with no more than a wisp of Jewish life, where does such an appetite for things Jewish come from ?


29.07.2005r.

The Society of Friends of the First Social High School (the first independent school in Poland that was created in 1989) intends to open a new school in September, 2006. The curriculum of this school will include teaching the history, culture and traditions of Polish Jews and will also offer the study of Yiddish and Hebrew languages.


18.07.2005r.

NEW YORK- JUNE 30th

An international jury convened in Warsaw to announce that Finnish architects Ilmari Lahdelma and Rainer Mahlamaki have won the architectural competition for the building of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.


18.07.2005r.

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR29.6/paloff.html

8 On November 19, 1942, the great Polish author Bruno Schulz left his home in the Jewish ghetto of Drohobycz-according to the generally accepted version of the story, he had gone to fetch a ration of bread-and was shot to death by a German SS officer. The author of two critically acclaimed short-story collections and a graphic artist of growing renown, Schulz had survived the Nazi occupation as long as he did under the protection of Felix Landau, a vicious Gestapo officer who fancied himself a patron of the arts. Landau was fond of Schulz's drawings, which frequently depict dreamlike scenes of sexual humiliation, and he had ordered Schulz to decorate his son's playroom with images from fairy tales. During the last year of his life, Schulz received special permission to leave the ghetto to paint Landau’s frescoes.


18.07.2005r.

Mrs. Paula Sawicka, President of the Open Republic (Otwarta Rzeczpospolita) – an association to fight anti-Semitism and xenophobia created a couple of years ago in Warsaw - sent us a copy of the Theses presented by her to the OSCE conference in Cordoba. Two members of the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation’s Board, Wanda Muszynska and I, are also members of this organization. I believe that the activities of this organization may be of interest to our members and readers:

Cordoba, 8 & 9 June 2005


18.07.2005r.

Amiram Barket

Haaretz.com
May 5, 2005

More than 22,000 Israeli teenagers took part in Holocaust remembrance trips to Poland last year, an all-time record. Participation in delegations to Poland under the auspices of the Israel Defense Forces has also soared, from two delegations in 2001 to 15 this year. But alongside the standard visits to death camps, a growing number of Israelis, second- and third-generation Holocaust survivors, are involved in a more independent and profound manner with restoring Poland's Jewish past.


16.07.2005r.

Arieh O'Sullivan

THE JERUSALEM POST
May 16, 2005

Chaim Ben-Ya'akov, a lieutenant in the Polish Army who was stripped of his rank by Poland after the Six Day War because he was a Jew, was given back his officer's bars Monday by visiting Polish Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski.


16.07.2005r.

Ingrid Peritz

Globe and Mail
May 11, 2005

Father Romuald-Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel is a living embodiment of an apparent contradiction: He is a Catholic priest and, as he discovered as an adult, also a Jew.


23.06.2005r.


I hope one of the readers might identify the family in the photo that I received in the below e-mail from Viktor Lewin:

 

----- Original Message -----
From: viktor lewin
Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 4:47 AM
Subject: Losice Family.

 

Shalom Friends ,
Need help in identifying the family in this photo. There may be a Steinman connection , however I am not 100% positive. The reverse side of the photo is stamped -
Sz. Szpialter , Losice .
Thank you, Viktor.

-
Losice Mystery Photo


23.06.2005r.

From Radio Polonia
May 9, 2005

More than 150 former prisoners of the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz have signed a document founding the International Centre for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust.


23.06.2005r.

Michele Chabin - Israel Correspondent
Jewish Week. 13 May 2005

Jerusalem - Therese Collins never imagined she would major in Jewish studies in college.

"I came to Jewish studies by accident," said Collins, 20, a student at the City University of New York, explaining how a black Catholic woman from the Caribbean island of Antigua came to be standing outside the walls of the Old City, next to the Jaffa Gate.


23.06.2005r.

Etgar Lefkovits

www.Jerusalem Post.com

May. 4, 2005

"Help us die honorably. We want to follow in the footsteps of the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto. We are ready," reads the letter, smuggled out of a Nazi labor camp near the Polish city of Lublin in the months after the Warsaw Ghetto was demolished by the Nazis.


23.06.2005r.

By Michael Evans

Times, 6 June 2005
www.timesonline.co.uk

Information about the gas chambers was kept from Churchill because officials would not accept the evidence of witnesses

BRITAIN’s intelligence chiefs refused to accept witness reports of the German massacre of Polish Jews in the Second World War and discounted the existence of the Holocaust, according to an authorised account based on official archives.


17.06.2005r.

New York Times

11 June 2005

The last time the Rev. Andrzej Kurowski was at the Vatican, he met Pope John Paul II, who greeted him by asking where he was from. "Brooklyn," Kurowski said. The pontiff's eyes lit up. "Ah, Brooklyn," he replied.


17.06.2005r.

Dana David
The Canadian Jewish News
June 9, 2005

Before arriving in Poland as a university participant on the March of the Living, I had several expectations.

I expected to cry all day, every day, for a week. I expected to find the answers to my many questions. I expected to understand the atrocity that occurred only six decades ago. I expected to leave Poland feeling depressed. Prior to leaving Toronto, these expectations seemed realistic to me. While in Poland however, it occurred to me how idealistic they really were.


17.06.2005r.

Harriet J. Dobin
Jewish Ledger

Archives

DAY ONE: Mincha at Auschwitz

Twenty-nine men and women from Hartford got on a tour bus at Krakow Airport this morning, bound for a death camp in southern Poland. If it had been 60 years ago, perhaps only three of us would have made it out of that camp alive. Today, we smelled the air of Auschwitz, walked its muddy tracks and remembered the 1.1 million slaughtered Jews who never made it out of the Auschwitz gates of hell.


17.06.2005r.

David Lazarus
The Canadian Jewish News, May 26, 2005

JERUSALEM - March of the Living participants who landed in Israel last week after being in Poland could not kiss the tarmac as in the past because the gleaming new airport connects aircraft directly to the terminal.


17.06.2005r.

Reviewed by Arnold Aronson
The New York Times
May 25, 2005

Most of theater history belongs to actors and playwrights, but in the 20th century the stage became largely the domain of the director. From Meyerhold and Reinhardt through Chreau and Sellars, visionary and charismatic individuals have brought bold conceptions to theater and opera, reinterpreting classic plays, reinventing approaches to acting and investigating the relationship of the spectator to the stage. In the second half of the 20th century, no director has had more influence or recognition than Peter Brook.


17.06.2005r.

As March of the Living
By Carolyn Slutsky
Poles learn about what was lost

KRAKOW, Poland , May 3 (JTA) - About 20,000 people from around the world, Jews and non-Jews alike, are expected in Poland for the 15th March of the Living this week.

The annual trip, which began in 1988, takes Jewish high school students - and, increasingly, adults and non-Jews - to Poland, where they spend a week visiting Holocaust sites. Many groups then continue to Israel to see the homeland of the Jewish people.


18.05.2005r.

In mid April I had another car accident in which my leg was broken. I am still in hospital so will resume posting new publications in June once I am back home - IB


26.04.2005r.

August 1944, London

For my Mother in Poland or her most beloved shadow

I can hear the question immediately: 'Why US?' A question that is not baseless. Jews ask me, the ones whom I always told that I was a Pole, and now the question will be asked of me by the Poles, for the greatest part of whom I have been and will be a Jew. This is my answer for one and the other.