By Mary Sibierski – 5 hours ago

WARSAW (AFP) — The cornerstone of the long-awaited Museum of the History of Polish Jews, a major step towards reviving Poland’s Jewish heritage after the Holocaust, was laid in Warsaw on Tuesday, organisers said.

In the works for a decade, the long-awaited multi-million dollar, multi-media facility is expected to open its door in 2011.

“Prior to the Holocaust, the Shoah, Warsaw was one of the world’s main centres of Jewish life where politics, culture, publishing and Jewish theatre thrived — in fact it was the leading centre, surpassing other cities in the US and Europe,” project director Jerzy Halbersztadt told guests at the site.

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By Stefan Bos
Budapest
30 June 2009

The European Union and dozens of countries have pledged to speed up social support for Holocaust survivors and the search for art and other items that were stolen during World War II by the Nazis. At the meeting in Prague, they agreed to establish a special European institute to deal with these issues and education.

Czech Foreign Minister Jan Kohout delivers speech during Holocaust Era Assets Conference in Prague, 29 Jun 2009

As the number of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust rapidly declines, there was a sense of urgency among delegates that the world must provide them with adequate social assistance and compensation for stolen goods.

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Q&A with Eizenstat on Holocaust-era restitution

By Dinah Spritzer · June 29, 2009

PRAGUE (JTA) — Stuart Eizenstat, who led the U.S. government delegation to the June 26-29 Holocaust Era Assets Conference in Prague, sat down with JTA for an interview on the eve of the conference.

The conference, organized by the Czech government, which held the six-month rotating European Union presidency for the first half of 2009, brought together representatives of 49 countries for what participants said was likely to be the last major attempt to compensate Holocaust victims and their heirs for art and property confiscated or sold under duress during the Nazi era.

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By KAREL JANICEK – 2 hours ago

PRAGUE (AP) — Holocaust survivors, Jewish groups and experts gathered in Prague Friday to assess efforts to return property and possessions stolen by the Nazis to their rightful owners or heirs.

The five-day conference, which brings together delegates from 49 countries, is the first follow-up to a 1998 meeting in Washington that led to agreements on recovering art looted by the Nazis.

During the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler and his followers killed 6 million Jews and seized billions of dollars of gold, art and private and communal property across Europe.

But while countries such as Austria have stepped up restitution in recent years, critics claim some Central and Eastern European states still have a long way to go.

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From Dr. Steven Tenenbaum, a 2g in Newtown, Connecticut:

Poland – The creators of Poland’s future Museum of Polish Jews, Tuesday in Warsaw launched the Virtual Shtetl website, a portal they hope will build the museum’s collection even before its doors open in 2011.

“This portal has the potential to become the greatest source of information about Jewish life in Poland prior to the war,” project creator and coordinator Albert Stankowski told reporters in Warsaw Tuesday.

So far the site has information on 800 Polish cities and towns that were “shtetls” or Jewish settlements prior to the Holocaust, in which six million European Jews — three million of them from Poland — perished under Nazi German genocide.

The bilingual Polish-English website is built on Web 2.0 technology allowing users to contribute information and eyewitness testimony to the site.

Stankowski hopes the site will open channels of communication on an international scale and bring to light nearly a thousand years of Jewish life in Poland obliterated by the Holocaust.

The website is the virtual arm of the long-awaited Museum of the History of Polish Jews, expected to open its doors in 2011 after more than a decade of preparations.

http://www.sztetl.org.pl/?cid=15%E2%8C%A9%3Den_GB&lang=en_GB