April 29, 2007

By Teri Greene
Montgomery Advertiser

Throughout his nearly eight decades, when asked about his early childhood memories, Henry Stern hasn’t known if those memories were really his or belonged to someone else.

Then, nearly a decade ago, he took his wife and kids to the place he called home in Westheim, Westfalen, Germany.

“And as I was going up the steps to go to the sitting room, I had a flashback,” he said. “And that again goes back to the question: Is this something you’ve heard all your life, or do you really remember it?”

He didn’t know the answer.

That sense of not knowing, of a past washed away, made him want to find those members of his family lost to the Holocaust.

more.

A comic novelist takes on the Holocaust
By Victoria A. Brownworth
Special to The Sun
Originally published April 29, 2007

Kalooki Nights By Howard Jacobson
Simon & Schuster / 464 pages / $26

The war in Iraq has made many of us painfully aware of the power religion has to wound as well as heal. The internecine religious civil war in Iraq exemplifies just how awry religion can go from its true purpose. The very beliefs that are meant to make us more humane can often have the opposite effect, spurring people to rage, violence, murder.

British writer Howard Jacobson journeys into this complex terrain of religious identity in his latest novel, Kalooki Nights. His protagonist, Max Glickman, is a secular Jew growing up in Manchester, England, in the 1950s when World War II and the Holocaust were fresh wounds in the Jewish community. Max’s best friends are Manny, an Orthodox Jew, and Errol, an adolescent hedonist right out of a Philip Roth novel.

more.

Sunday, April 29, 2007
BY DON BURKE
Star-Ledger Staff

WASHINGTON — It takes a lot to make an impression on most major league baseball players, wrapped as they are in their own me-first, where’s-my-room-service, February-through-October cocoons.

But visits this weekend to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and to Walter Reed Army Medical Center here by a handful of Mets players, executives, coaches and support personnel, stopped them in their tracks.

MORE.

ROCKBRIDGE WEEKLY

Washington and Lee University’s Hillel presents Holocaust Remembrance Activities from May 2 – May 4. The activities that have been planned range from films to a talk by a Holocaust survivor to a Jewish service.

The Holocaust Remembrance Week activities are open to the public without charge.

“The Last Days,” a film that won an Academy Award in 1999 for Best Documentary, will be shown on Thursday, May 3, at 9:30 p.m. in the Stackhouse Theater in the University Commons. “The Last Days” is the first feature documentary from Stephen Speilberg’s Shoah Foundation. It is a concise, devastating history of the Nazis’ decimation of Hungary’s Jewish population during the final days of World War II.

The film’s most searing images, shown sparingly near the end of the movie, include scenes of concentration camp inmates liberated from Auschwitz by Allied troops. These pictures are matched in impact by the interwoven testaments of five Holocaust survivors, one of whom, Irene Zisblatt, will speak at W&L on Thursday, May 3, at 5 p.m. in the Stackhouse Theater.

One of the most vivid and compelling stories is Zisblatt’s account of her deportation to Auschwitz. Before leaving, her mother had sewn a few diamonds into the hem of her dress. Arriving at Auschwitz she was strip-searched and hid the gems in her mouth and eventually had to swallow them. By swallowing them repeatedly and then retrieving them when she went to the bathroom, she was able to hold on to the diamonds for the duration of her stay. They have since been incorporated into a menorah that has become a family heirloom.

The activities at W&L during the final three days of the Holocaust Remembrance Week are:

• Wednesday, May 2, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the University Commons: Commons Atrium Scroll Signing: Sign a scroll for a victim of the Holocaust and receive a photo of the person and a remembrance paper clip. 7 p.m., film: “The Pianist” in Stackhouse Theater, Commons.

• Thursday, May 3, 5 p.m. in the Stackhouse Theater in the University Commons: Talk by Irene Zisblatt, Holocaust survivor. 9:30 p.m., film: “The Last Days” in the Stackhouse Theater, Commons.

• Friday, May 4, 5 p.m. in the University Commons, room 345: Yom Ha Shoah Service, led by Rabbi Treseder of Lynchburg. Dinner will follow in room 214 of the Commons. 10 p.m., film: “The Pianist” in the Stackhouse Theater, Commons.

By SAMANTHA GROSS (Associated Press Writer)
Associated Press
04/26/2007

NEW YORK – Khaled Abdul-Wahab was shy about his past, but the Tunisian would have been proud to be the first Arab nominated to receive an honor reserved for those who saved Jews during the Holocaust, his daughter said.

“He wouldn’t have looked for it,” Faiza Abdul-Wahab said of her father. But, she said, “he would have been very proud.”

Faiza Abdul-Wahab appeared Wednesday at Manhattan’s Yeshiva University with the grown daughter of one of the girls her father rescued in the early 1940s, when he hid more than 20 Jews during the Nazi occupation of Tunisia. The New York event followed her father’s posthumous nomination in January for recognition as “Righteous Among the Nations” in Israel.

Without Khaled Abdul-Wahab, Nadia Bijaoui said, her mother likely would not have survived World War II.

“That’s what your father did, Faiza,” Bijaoui said to her counterpart. “He loved his neighbor like he loved himself.”

The women met for the first time last week, united in part by the work of Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who researched the families’ stories and nominated Khaled Abdul-Wahab for the Israeli high honor.

MORE.