September 2010 Archives

Edwin Black, New York Times best-selling and international investigative author, will discuss his new book The Farhud: The Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust.

Thursday, October 7
Noon
Nolte Center for Continuing Education 140
(Pizza at noon; introduction at 12:10)

Monumental and Exhaustively Documented. Monumental in scope, Edwin Black's new book The Farhud sheds light on the under-researched, 14-century-long confrontation between the Caliphate and the Jewish communities, and offers new exhaustively documented details of exactly how the Pan Arabist and Jihadist movement of the Levant, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Husseini, partnered with the Nazis during the darkest days of the Holocaust.

War Against the Weak, Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

Edwin Black, New York Times best-selling and international investigative author, will introduce his latest film, War Against the Weak, Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, based on his book of the same name.

Holocaust Victim Is Remembered With His Music
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
September 12, 2010
New York Times

A day before its memorial concert on Saturday for victims and survivors of the Sept. 11 attacks, Bargemusic paid tribute to the victims of another atrocity -- Jewish composers killed during the Holocaust.

The pianist Rita Sloan spoke briefly about Gideon Klein, a composer from Czechoslovakia who died in 1945 at 26 under unknown circumstances -- probably in a labor camp or during a forced march. Klein wrote several scores during his internment in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where many prominent artists, scientists and scholars were held before being sent to Auschwitz. He encouraged musicians like Viktor Ullmann and Pavel Haas, who were interned with him, to continue composing.

Holocaust survivors reunited after 65 years
Thursday, September 2, 2010
LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 2, 2010, 1:25 AM
BY HOWARD PROSNITZ
TEANECK SUBURBANITE
STAFF WRITER NorthJersey.com

TEANECK - In 1944 Jack Rosenfeld, then 15, entered the Mauthausen Concentration camp. At the time the Russian army was pressing from the East and the Germans were moving concentration camp inmates.

Before reaching Mauthausen, Rosenfeld was interred along the way in a smaller camp near the Austria Hungary border, having been marched there by the Nazis with hundreds of other Jews. With him were his brother and his boyhood friend from the Hungarian village where he grew up, Imri Meir.

By chance, Meir's father, a physician, was also an inmate at the camp. The day after their arrival, the father came and carried his son away.
That was the last time Rosenfeld saw Meir.

Until Monday, when the two boyhood friends, who attended school and played soccer together, and who last saw each other 65 years ago in a concentration camp, were reunited at Rosenfeld's South Forest Drive home.

New York Times
September 2, 2010
Wiesenthal Worked for Israeli Spy Agency, Book Alleges
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM -- Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who gained worldwide fame for decades as a one-man Nazi-hunting operation, was in fact frequently on the payroll of the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, a new biography asserts.

The assertion, based on numerous documents and interviews with three people said to be Mr. Wiesenthal's Mossad handlers, punctures not only a widely held belief about how he operated; it also suggests a need to re-evaluate the standard view that the Israeli government took no interest in tracking down Nazis until the 1960 capture in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, and little thereafter.

Mr. Wiesenthal died in 2005 at the age of 96 in his Vienna home.

A group of local Holocaust survivors meet every month at the Jewish Community Center in St. Paul. The meetings are recorded to preserve the stories, experiences and the conversations that take place at the gathering. The group is looking for volunteers to type up transcripts of the recordings for historical posterity.

To volunteer, send an email to amram001@umn.edu. Please type "holocaust" in the subject line.

For more information about the group please click here to be linked to their page on the CHGS website.

A high school history teacher is accused of 'brainwashing' her students, says French news agency AFP.

By Haaretz Service

A French history teacher in Nancy, France, has been suspended for breaching the principle of secularism and neutrality after the French education ministry concluded that she was teaching "too much" about the Holocaust and spending too much time organizing trips for her students to Nazi death camps in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Catherine Pederzoli, 58, was investigated by officials at the education ministry, who released a report about the matter in July. The report accused the teacher of "lacking distance, neutrality and secularism" in teaching the Holocaust, and of manipulating her charges through a process of "brain-washing," according to the French news agency AFP.