Raul Hilberg was not encouraged when he approached his professor, Franz Neumann, about writing his doctoral dissertation on the role of the German civil service in the Holocaust. Neumann assented, but warned: “It’s your funeral.”
Each year our congregation travels to a different corner of the Jewish world, and last Tisha B\’Av, the day commemorating persecutions and destructions that have befallen the Jewish people, we found ourselves in Berlin.
\”Rescued From The Reich: How One of Hitler\’s Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe,\” by Bryan Mark Rigg, Yale University Press, 2004.
When a German army officer trawled the streets of Warsaw in 1940 looking for Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, people either pleaded ignorance or ran away in fear.
The last time Trudy Spira was in Auschwitz, she was 12 years old. The day of liberation \”is my second birthday — I was reborn on that day,\” said Spira, who came from Venezuela with her son, Ernesto, 48, to show him the place that robbed her of her childhood.
Angress was one of \”The Ritchie Boys,\” a special Army unit made up mainly of young Jewish refugees from Germany, whose World War II exploits have been recorded for the first time in a documentary by German filmmaker Christian Bauer.\n\nThe German-Canadian co-production is one of 12 documentaries still in competition for Academy Award honors.
Simply named \”Einstein,\” the nearly nine-month-long exhibit, the largest ever mounted by the Skirball Cultural Center, opens Sept. 14 and closes May 29, 2005.
Von Trotta, one of Europe\’s preeminent filmmakers with a special gift for portraying strong women, has previously chronicled the story of 20th century Germany in such films as \”Rosa Luxemburg\” and \”The Pledge.\” It took her some 10 years to complete the cycle by documenting her country\’s \”darkest period\” in \”Rosenstrasse.\”\n\nWhile staying true to the basic facts, she has dramatized the story by telling it largely through the eyes of a young American Jewish woman, Hannah Weinstein (Maria Schrader).
When she was in her 30s, Hansi Goetter developed a mysterious illness. Although her doctors couldn\’t determine the cause, they told her she had only a few months to live.
This Rosh Hashanah, the dreadlocked Santa Monica resident will showcase his talents at B\’nai Horin, the Culver City shul he has been performing at since 1997. Alula Tzadik will play the kirar, a harp-like instrument dating back to King David\’s time.
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