The hatred of Jews is still strong more than 70 years after the Holocaust began, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres said at the national Yom Hashoah ceremony at Yad Vashem.
When people of reason and conscience look back on the subject of Shoah (otherwise known as the Holocaust) today, it is common to hear questions like: \”How could a nation of philosophers, composers of classical music, technology, poets, in this seat of the Enlightenment itself, suddenly give vent to savagery not seen since the Dark Ages? How could such dreadful, inhumane impulses seize every apparatus of a nation and cause it to commit such atrocities?\”
Sixty-eight years after being liberated from the horrors of the Holocaust, many aging survivors are living another nightmare — poverty without hope.
My daughter, Ilana, then a young college student, asked if she could go with me to the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, on April 22, 1993 (the date was tied to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’s 50th anniversary). I said: “I will be leaving very early.” She responded: “I’ll be up.”
When representatives of Israel, Germany and the newly created Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany met 60 years ago in Europe to hammer out a reparations agreement for the crimes of Nazi Germany, some Holocaust survivors were still living in Displaced Persons camps on the continent.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, in meetings with Israeli leaders, discussed Iran, Syria and the stalled peace talks with the Palestinians.
A British nun who saved dozens of Jews in Rome during the Holocaust has been advanced on the road to sainthood.
The lawyer for a man badly burned during an alleged arson attempt in a New York hasidic village is asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the incident as a hate crime. The May 22 attack in the village of New Square was \”evocative of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Germany,\” wrote lawyer Michael Sussman in a letter sent last week to Attorney General Eric Holder, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
My mother saw to it that we escaped from Nazi Germany intact, while a dozen family members, those who refused to leave, perished. That fact has impacted my life in various ways, both large and small.
Feb. 18 marks the 65th anniversary of the Gestapo arrest of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose in 1943. Then, on Feb. 22, their swift beheading after a show trial in Munich by Hitler\’s \”Hanging Judge,\” Roland Freisler, who reviled them for daring to call their countrymen to action in the face of Nazi Germany\’s suspension of all civil rights and its mass murder of Europe\’s Jews.
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