the bergen record

Friday, September 28, 2007

By ALFRED P. DOBLIN
RECORD COLUMNIST

TWO YEARS AGO, some idiot or idiots carved a 15-foot swastika in the snow in a Clifton park. The people I talked with at the time, while concerned, viewed it as nothing more than a prank.

This month, anti-Semitic signs and fliers were posted in Passaic. Three men have been arrested. Two are from Clifton, one from Lincoln Park.

Further south in Mercer County, a football-field-sized swastika was cut into a cornfield. The timing around the Jewish Holy Days seems more than coincidental. more.

The Center for Holocaust Studies
at Brookdale Community College
and The Monmouth County Library
Present
Dr. Ann Kirschner
Sala’s Gift: My Mother’s Holocaust Story

“…[The letters] that Kirschner draws on to tell her mother’s story stand as evidence of humanity in the face of terrible conditions and of the religious faith and ritual that persisted despite the Nazi campaign to eliminate the Jews.”
– New York Times

September 30, 2007
at 2 PM
Monmouth County Library Headquarters, Manalapan

Few family secrets have the power both to transform lives and to fill in crucial gaps in world history. For nearly fifty years, Sala kept a secret: She had survived five years as a slave in seven different Nazi work camps. She held on to more than 350 letters, photographs, and a diary, without even mentioning them to her children. Only on the eve of heart surgery, did Sala present them to her daughter, Ann Kirschner, who has woven them into a moving account of her mother’s Holocaust experience.

Following the discussion, the author will be available to sign copies of Sala’s Gift: My Mother’s Holocaust Story.

For more information and reservations, please call the Center at (732) 224-2769
The Center for Holocaust Studies at Brookdale Community college is a
Registered Professional Development Provider with the NJ State Department of Education
Thanks to the Jewish Federation of Greater Monmouth County,
The Zobel Foundation and the members of the Center for Holocaust Studies
This program is presented free of charge

September 26, 2007

John K. Roth, the Robert and Carolyn Frederick Distinguished Visiting Professor of Ethics at DePauw University will lecture on the Holocaust at 8:00 p.m. tonight in Hays Hall, Room 104. The title of his lecture is “Forgiveness? Reflections on Ethics after the Holocaust.” His lecture is free and open to the public.

Aside from his one year visiting professorship at DePauw, Roth is the Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, where he is the founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights. He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than forty books, and the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees.

MORE.

Legacy of the Holocaust
Ben Barkow, the director of the Wiener Library, and his personal assistant, Margaret Daly
Rosalind Renshaw

It was not, said the cabbie as we drove towards the building that houses the world’s largest collection of Holocaust material, an address he knew. “Not part of The Knowledge,” was the explanation he offered.

Yet the Wiener Library, in Devonshire Street, Central London, should surely be on our radar. “It was started by Alfred Wiener, a German Jew, who as early as 1919 wrote a pamphlet warning of the dangers posed by the Nazis,” says the library’s director, Ben Barkow. “He began collecting everything he could. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Wiener fled to Amsterdam, where he set up the Jewish Cultural Information Office.”

The earlier collection was abandoned in Germany, but Wiener renewed his efforts in the Dutch city. In 1939 the archives were transferred to London and renamed. Today the library is bursting with oppressive and disturbing evidence of man’s inhumanity to man.
MORE

By NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: September 19, 2007

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 — Last December, Rebecca Erbelding, a young archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, opened a letter from a former United States Army intelligence officer who said he wanted to donate photographs of Auschwitz he had found more than 60 years ago in Germany.

Ms. Erbelding was intrigued: Although Auschwitz may be the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, there are only a small number of known photos of the place before its liberation in 1945. Some time the next month, the museum received a package containing 16 cardboard pages, with photos pasted on both sides, and their significance quickly became apparent.

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