Published: 9/28/08, 7:46 PM EDT
By SOPHIA TAREEN
CHICAGO (AP) – The faded papers hint at stark details in the lives of Nazi concentration camp inmates.

Letters secretly carried by children through the sewers of Warsaw, Poland, during the 1944 uprising. A 1933 card from a Dachau camp commander outlining strict rules for prisoner mail. A 1943 letter from a young man, who spent time in Auschwitz, to his parents.

The more than 250 World War II postal documents – cards, letters and stamps – have been acquired by an Illinois foundation from a private collector and will soon be on permanent display in a museum in suburban Chicago.

“These artifacts underscore the very personal dimension to this catastrophe,” said Richard Hirschhaut, the executive director of the Skokie-based Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, where the exhibit will be housed next year when the museum opens.

“It now will reach an exponentially larger audience and serve as a genuine tool for education and learning,” Hirschhaut said.

The Holocaust memorial exhibit belonged to longtime postal memorabilia collector and activist Ken Lawrence of Pennsylvania. It was called “The Nazi Scourge: Postal Evidence of the Holocaust and the Devastation of Europe.”

The Florence and Laurence Spungen Family Foundation, based in Northbrook, Ill., recently bought the collection and has added to it.

“The insured value of the collection is $1 million, but the educational value to future generations is incalculable,” said Daniel Spungen, a board member of the foundation, in a statement.

The exhibit also includes a handwritten Bible scroll in Hebrew that was used by a German soldier to mail a package. There are also documents sent to a Nazi doctor on trial for war crimes at Nuremberg.

Lawrence, the former vice president of the American Philatelic Society, meticulously collected the documents for more than three decades. His project was sparked by claims that the Holocaust never occurred.

He has since showcased the collection around the country, garnering awards.

The exhibit, which can also be viewed online, will travel to Billings, Mont., in December, followed by Santa Barbara, Calif., later in the winter.

U.S. lawmakers unanimously approved a resolution that urges lagging
European nations to press forward with Holocaust restitution.

The non-binding resolution passed by U.S. House of Representatives on
Tuesday “urges the countries in Central and Eastern Europe which have
not already done so to return looted and confiscated properties to their
rightful owners or, where restitution is not possible, pay equitable
compensation, in accordance with principles of justice and in an
expeditious manner that is just, transparent and fair.”

It also singles out Poland, calling on it “to immediately enact fair,
comprehensive, and just legislation” to enable those whose property was
seized by the Nazis or the Communist Polish government after the war to
receive restitution of their property or monetary compensation.
A similar resolution is under consideration in the U.S. Senate.

The Claims Conference, the umbrella body coordinating restitution
claims, lobbied for the resolutions, initiated in the House by U.S. Rep.
Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) and in the U.S. Senate by Sens. Bill Nelson
(D-Fla.) and Gordon Smith (R-Ore.)

“Eastern European property restitution is one of the major unresolved
issues and a current priority for us,” said Claims Conference
spokeswoman Hillary Kessler-Godin. “We welcome this strong support from
the Senate and House and hope that it prompts these governments to help
restore assets to rightful owners and heirs.”

WWW.JTA.ORG

By ETGAR LEFKOVITS

After a long public struggle, tens of thousands of elderly Holocaust survivors in Israel are starting to receive additional state stipends in keeping with the findings of a recent public commission of inquiry, the umbrella group of Holocaust survivors in Israel said Thursday.

The increased state assistance will affect 43,000 survivors who had not benefited from a recent landmark government agreement to boost the stipends of Holocaust survivors in Israel.

MORE.

SEE ALSO YEDIOT ACHARONOT HERE.

‘The lie is being perpetuated as the truth’
By Adi Schwartz
The executive chairman of the Claims Conference is furious. A documentary film alleges the organization has been denying Holocaust survivors money that is rightfully theirs. In a first interview after the film’s broadcast, Reuven Merhav says he had no choice but to sue for libel

For weeks, Reuven Merhav slept only fitfully. Distraught by the film made by Orly Vilnai-Federbush and Guy Meroz, “Musar hashilumim” (”The Morals of Restitution: The Struggle Continues”), he woke up at three o’clock every night and wandered about his home in a daze. The well-known words from the verdict in the trial of Rudolf Kastner – who in the 1950s was accused of having collaborated with the Nazis in Hungary – resonated in his mind. Judge Benjamin Halevi had declared that Kastner “sold his soul to the devil.”

Merhav wondered whether it would not be better to just wait for the storm to pass. In the end, he decided against restraint. As chairman of the executive committee of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany

more.

IN WAKE OF AHMADINEJAD’S ANTI-SEMITIC UN SPEECH, WIESENTHAL CENTER URGES UN
SECRETARY GENERAL BAN AND THE PERMANENT MEMBERS OF SECURITY COUNCIL TO
DENOUNCE THE NAZI-LIKE TIRADE AND REJECT TEHRAN’S SECURITY COUNCIL
MEMBERSHIP

On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, the Simon
Wiesenthal Center called on United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and
permanent members of the UN Security Council to openly denounce Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his hateful, anti-Semitic and
anti-American speech at the General Assembly on Tuesday.

“The United Nations was founded to defeat Nazism. Yet yesterday,
amidst an unprecedented world economic crisis, Iran’s President stood before
the nations of the world at the UN and invoked the very anti-Semitic canards
of Jewish manipulation and control used by Hitler and Goebbels to justify
the genocide of the Jewish people,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean
of the Wiesenthal Center. “And just as Hitler found allies for his
apocalyptic vision, Ahmadinejad basked in the applause of diplomats and
dignitaries,” he continued.

At a press conference held today at the Wiesenthal Center, Associate
Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper said that, “Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric represents a
serious escalation by the Iranian regime which, in a time of an
unprecedented global economic crisis, tries to lay blame for all the world’s
ills on the Jewish people. We usually expect such hateful rhetoric to
appear on the websites of the neo-Nazis and the KKK. But here it is spouted
by a man who is this close to having nuclear missiles. We should be
isolating such a man, not breaking bread with him.”

The Center, which has full NGO status at the United Nations, has
called on the five permanent member States on the Security Council: China,
France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, to bar Tehran’s
request for a seat on the Security Council. Mark Weitzman, Director of the
Wiesenthal Center’s Task Force Against Hate, will hand deliver that urgent
request tomorrow to the appropriate Ambassadors. The Center has also
launched an online petition campaign to Secretary General Ban urging action
against the Iranian regime (log onto www.wiesenthal.com).

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international
Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the
United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United
Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, and the Council of Europe.
For more information, please contact the Center’s Public Relations
Department, 310-553-9036.