A Page in History

Weekly News Roundup: May 14, 2012

Julia — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:08:29 +0000

A roundup of last week’s noteworthy articles pertaining to the history and documentation of the Shoah as well as current issues facing survivors.

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New information on ghettos during WWII has been uncovered.

New details have emerged about ghettos in WWII, writes Associated Press. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., published the second volume in a seven-volume series about war-time persecution. “Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II,” edited by Martin Dean, describes “excruciating details” of 1100 ghettos, including 200 more than were previously known. The first volume was published in 2009 by researchers at Yad Vashem. Both USHMM and YV receive support from the Claims Conference. We fund the scholarship necessary to document the atrocities of the Shoah to ensure the victims are never forgotten.

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This past Sunday, the Jerusalem Post reported that a defibrillator was used by an emergency medical team in Jerusalem to save the life of a man who had a heart attack. That defibrillator was partially funded by the Claims Conference. Because the Israeli government has yet to install defibrillators in public areas despite legislation requiring it, emergency medical volunteers rely solely on donations for this lifesaving equipment.

In 2005, the Claims Conference allocated $60,000 to United Hatzalah, a volunteer emergency medical organization, toward the purchase of 100 emergency kits including 10 with defibrillators. In 2011, the Claims Conference allocated an additional $65,000 to the organization toward 60 emergency kits, all of which include defibrillators.

These allocations were made in response to United Hatzalah’s Holocaust Survivor Initiative. Hatzalah estimates that 30 percent of the people benefiting from these defibrillators are Holocaust victims, thus explaining why the Claims Conference contributed toward their purchase. The man who was saved this week was not a survivor, but he is the father of a Hatzalah volunteer, and the Claims Conference is proud to have helped save his life.

כל המקיים נפש אחת מישראל, מעלים עליו כאילו קיים עולם מלא
Whoever saves one life, it is as if he has saved the world entire.

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Mr. Berkovich holds a photo of his parents.

Mozus Berkovich, 92, has been fighting the Latvian government for 20 years to reclaim his family’s real estate, the Boston Globe reports. Almost all the Jews in Mr. Berkovich’s village of Akniste were killed in 1941 while he was in Riga at dental school. The Latvian government, free from Communist rule since 1991, has repeatedly denied his claim to his family’s property in Akinste for various reasons: lack of documentary proof of ownership; the claim filing deadline passed in 1996; the 1946 declaration that lists Mr. Berkovich’s father as owner does not list the address of the building or mention the land itself. The land is now owned by Latvia Mail. In signing the Terezin Declaration established at the 2009 Prague Conference on Holocaust Era Assets, the Latvian government committed to working towards “just and fair solutions regarding cultural property.” We call on the government of Latvia to take seriously Mr. Berkovich’s claim and return the land that is rightfully his.

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Weekly News Roundup – May 4, 2012

Julia — Fri, 04 May 2012 18:58:15 +0000

A roundup of this week’s noteworthy articles pertaining to the history and documentation of the Shoah as well as current issues facing survivors.

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The Bad Arolsen, Germany-based International Tracing Service says it will preserve its archive of records on over 300,000 prisoners from Dachau that are at risk of deterioration, reported Agence France Presse. Most of the files, which are often used to prove persecution or for other archival research, are already digitized. The Claims Conference advocated for the opening of the Arolsen files to researchers and restitution organizations. The archive opened in 2008.

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The Los Angeles Times had a big article on the ongoing suit between Marei Von Saher and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadenaregarding the almost 500-year-old diptych of Adam and Eve before the fall by Lucas Cranach the Elder. If the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the Norton Simon does not need to return the painting to Von Saher, the article contends that recovery and restitution of other Nazi-looted art could be undermined. The painting was expropriated from the collection of von Saher’s father-in-law Jacques Goudstikker by Herman Goering himself after the family was forced to flee Holland in 1940.

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Klepetář with an 18th-century marble and mahogany clock from the Poppers' collection.

A Czech man sued the Czech Republic in U.S. court on April 19 for the return of art that belonged to his realtives who perished in the Lodz ghetto in 1941 or 1942. The Prague Post explains that Michal Klepetář and his brother Jan, the grand-nephews and only surviving heirs of Czech Jews Richard and Regina Poppers, have been fighting since 1992 for the restitution of real property and the Poppers’ vast collection of 125 Old Masters works valued at more than $50 million. The brothers did win the return of the property, but were denied the art on the grounds of a Czech law. Eight paintings in the Czech National Gallery have been definitively identified as coming from the Poppers collection, but the family’s lawyer says that there may be others.

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"How We Survived: 52 Personal Stories by Child Survivors of the Holocaust" was just published by Child Survivors of the Holocaust Inc.

“The Great Silence is over” for at least 52 child survivors, wrote Jonathan Kirsch in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles about a new book by child survivors of the Holocaust detailing their wartime experiences. How We Survived is a collection of 52 memoirs by child survivors, recounting survival in Terezin, on the streets of Belgium, or by being hidden by Righteous Gentiles. After the war, psychologists did not expect child survivors to remember the brutality they experienced at the hands of the Nazis, and as a result, many have suppressed memories, knowledge, and emotions. But as Marie Kaufman, a child survivor and the chair of the editorial committee that produced the book, explains, “Even the very youngest, who may not have had the intellectual memory, do have the sensory memory — the smells, the colors, the sounds, the terror and the anxiety due to uncertainty from one day to the next.”

Weekly News Roundup: April 27, 2012

Julia — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:40:23 +0000

A roundup of last week’s noteworthy articles pertaining to the history and documentation of the Shoah as well as current issues facing survivors.

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Moving story by Petula Dvorak at The Washington Post about a group of survivors living in the Charles E. Smith Life Communities in Rockville, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. Dvorak explains that many survivors don’t want to talk about their wartime experiences, but through living in this supportive community they are able to share their unique histories–of labor camps, Auschwitz selection, being hidden in a Dutch farmouse–and process their survival. The article is accompanied by an incredible slideshow of survivors now and their own photographs from wartime and before.

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"Portrait of Wally" is screening at the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC

Fascinating recap of the restitution of Egon Schiele’s “Portrait of Wally” in The Art Magazine from April 24. Judith H. Dobrzynski explains how “Portrait of Wally” was a watershed in art restitution from the day it was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York in 1997 until a deal was reached between the painting’s heir, the US government, and the Leopold Museum in Vienna in 2010. The US government was instrumental in securing the painting for the heirs of the Lea Bondi Jaray estate, first with a subpoena from the Manhattan District Attorney, which failed, and then by US Customs seizure as stolen property that had been imported in violation of federal law. (Read Dobrzynski’s 2010 coverage of the “Portrait of Wally” resitution, also from The Art Magazine.) Now a documentary, also called “Portrait of Wally,” has been made about the process and screened during the Tribeca Film Festival here in New York City over the weekend.

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Two interconnected articles from Ha’aretz from April 27. Ofer Aderet reports that Swiss banks allegedly destroyed records of millions bank accounts opened during World War II. Next week, two Israelis are set to file suit in US Court against the Union Bank of Switzerland, Credit Suisse, and the Swiss government, one for $185 million and one for $130 millon.

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ABC regional South Florida channel WSVN continues their reporting on the Greater Miami Jewish Federation’s trip to Israel. “You are marching for the living from the day you are born,” says Hannah Schear, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, who is part of the delegation and visited Yad Vashem this week.

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“America’s Soul in the Balance,” by Gregory J. Wallance

Julia — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:50:51 +0000

I wanted to share with you a new book that might be of interest, America’s Soul in the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department, and the Moral Disgrace of An American Aristocracy by Gregory J. Wallance, a partner at the law firm of Kaye Scholer in New York City; a former federal prosecutor; and the author of Two Men Before the Storm and Papa’s Game. Gregory was a producer of the HBO movie “Sakharov,” which was an outgrowth of a 1979 human rights mission to the Soviet Union in which he participated to represent families of refuseniks – Jews punished for attempting to emigrate to Israel – and personally presented legal petitions on their behalf to Soviet authorities.

Why was America’s soul in the balance?

As we all know, the greatest genocidal crime in human history was the Nazi government’s murder of six million Jews during World War II. At the height of the war, highly educated, patrician diplomats in the State Department tried to cover up the Nazi extermination scheme and block efforts to rescue Jews in the few places where rescue was possible. Had they ultimately succeeded, it would have made the United States an accomplice to the Nazi genocide.

Why on earth did the State Department do that?

Anti-Semitism played a role. Many in the State Department bureaucracy were virulently anti-Semitic; some actually put Nazi collaborators into positions of power in newly liberated countries. Just to give you a flavor: the head of the Division of European Affairs in 1942 was a diplomat named Ray Atherton, who arranged for an anti-Semitic, French Nazi collaborationist to become a governor-general in liberated North Africa (where he maintained Nazi laws that discriminated against Jews). Atherton and his colleagues then blocked the reports from Europe of the exterminations. Loy Henderson, who worked in the State Department on East European and Soviet issues in the 1940s, blamed “international Jewry” for support of the Soviet Union and, after a visit to New York City, commented of the inhabitants jostling him in the street that “They seemed to have little in common with me.” William Phillips, an undersecretary of state, in the 1930s, described Atlantic City as “infested with Jews.” William Bullitt, an ambassador to the Soviet Union during FDR’s first term, and later Ambassador to France at the war’s outbreak, called an official in the Soviet Foreign Ministry a “wretched little kike.” Breckinridge Long, a wartime assistant secretary of state, who played a decisive role in blocking Jews from reaching the United States, regarded Mein Kampf as “eloquent in opposition to Jewry and Jews as exponents of Communism and chaos.”

Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long in the 1930s

But it would be a mistake to regard anti-Semitism as the only factor. The response of the State Department’s diplomats can be traced to a unique cultural and social context. These wartime diplomats were part of a now all-but-vanished American aristocracy that existed outside the experience or even awareness of most of their fellow Americans. Sheltered from mainstream America in a hermetically sealed aristocratic archipelago, they went from elite Northeast boarding schools to Ivy League educations to diplomatic postings. Imbued with a sense of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism and convinced that America needed them more than they needed America, they developed a heartless indifference to the sufferings of human beings from different ancestries, religions or economic backgrounds. For example, in 1940, the head of the Division of European Affairs was Jay Pierrepont Moffat. As a young diplomat in Warsaw shortly after the end of World War I, Moffat had watched desperate refugees flee oncoming Soviet armies: “They sounded like so many cackling geese and generally behaved in a manner that made us pray like the pharisee, ‘Lord, I thank Thee that I am not as other men’.” It was as though whatever nerves that transmit ordinary human compassion and empathy had been amputated.

At one point in your book, you describe an incident involving water boarding.

A number of important State Department officials graduated from Groton, a boarding school in Massachusetts, which educated the sons of the wealthiest men in America. The school was founded to promote “manly, Christian character,” but it also put a high value on conformity. For example, if a student failed to cheer at a football game, or wore the wrong clothes, or was just cheeky, and didn’t change his behavior, he was water boarded by other students (except they called it “water pumping”). It was a combination of the Spanish Inquisition and Lord of the Flies. With the approval of the school’s headmaster, Endicott Peabody, the bigger students forced the errant student under a faucet, held his mouth open, and turned on the spigot long enough to partly drown him. That “don’t rock the boat mentality” also accounts for the State Department’s behavior.

Why did the State Department think it could cover up the murder of millions of people?

Most of Europe, of course, was occupied by Nazi Germany, which cut off the flow of information, but not Switzerland, where the United States had a legation. Jewish groups in Switzerland were able to use the legation to transmit the initial reports of the mass murders to the State Department in Washington, where Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who was one of the few department officials sympathetic to the plight of the Jews, gave the reports to Jewish American groups.

Sumner Welles, Undersecretary of State

These groups then mounted publicity campaigns to pressure the Roosevelt administration to take measures to stop the massacres and mount rescue efforts. To stop the pressure, the Division of European Affairs sent a cable to the legation in Switzerland instructing the mission to cease sending reports of the exterminations. And then Welles, the only high level official sympathetic to the plight of European Jewry, was forced to resign.

Because he was sympathetic to the Jews?

Actually – no. In one of the most remarkable twists in the story Welles got himself into a sex scandal – and his enemies, which included Secretary of State Cordell Hull, used the scandal to destroy him.

Where was FDR in all of this?

He was managing a world war fought on six continents. That said, he lost control of his State Department. And he was inconsistent – on the one hand, he approved one of the biggest Jewish rescue missions of the war. On the other hand, he never used his great powers of communication to personally condemn the Nazi extermination plan to the world. He missed the opportunity to save lives and establish a great moral legacy.

How was the State Department’s conduct discovered?

In early 1943, an opportunity arose to rescue 70,000 Romanian Jews who had been deported to the nightmarish place known as Transnistria where they were expected to die from the cold, disease or starvation – and this was the rescue effort that Roosevelt approved. But, the rescue effort required, in effect, paying bribes to the Romanian government. Financial transactions like that required a Treasury Department license – which young Christian Treasury lawyers from middle class backgrounds instantly granted. And then – nothing happened for months because the State Department refused to transmit the license to Jewish groups in Switzerland involved in the rescue. The Treasury lawyers, at first baffled and then angry, began an investigation. Using, in effect, a “mole” in the State Department, they got their hands on the cable sent by Atherton to shut off the Swiss mission as a conduit for reports (it was the World War II equivalent of Wikileaks). They told Henry Morgenthau Jr., the Secretary of the Treasury, that he had to persuade FDR to take refugee and rescue away from the State Department. Morgenthau was Jewish and somewhat fearful that if he confronted the State Department on a Jewish issue, he and FDR would be attacked. But in the end, he persuaded Roosevelt to act.

Roosevelt and Morgenthau in 1933

Did this save lives?

Not as many as could or should have been saved. But, FDR did take refugee and rescue away from the State Department and established the War Refugee Board, which is credited with rescuing 200,000 Jews.

What lessons does the book have for today?

Well, I think there are two. The first is the hazards posed by powerful elite groups cut off from society’s mainstream. The second is the one from the Talmud, “To save one life is as if you have saved the world.” And, while the United States cannot prevent every act of genocidal madness, we should never forget that saying – or the behavior of the wartime State Department that not only disgraced itself but came close to blackening the good name of the United States of America for all time.

Why did you decide to write this book?

A few years ago, I read about the discovery of letters written by Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, in an effort to get visas for his family to emigrate to the United States. Those efforts were unsuccessful – and we all know what happened to that family – but one of the reasons was the bureaucratic obstacles erected by the State Department to Jewish refugees. I then read the literature on the American response, and concluded that the role of the State Department hadn’t been sufficiently examined. It’s not so much that the State Department’s conduct has been ignored, but rather, it has been submerged in the American collective guilt approach that underpins many historical assessments. Consider the State Department’s treatment in the arguably most influential book of the past twenty-five years, The Abandonment of the Jews, by David Wyman, an exhaustive scholarly study of the American response. The 29-page summation chapter titled “Responsibility” (“America’s response to the Holocaust was the result of action and inaction on the part of many people”) devotes less than a page to the State Department, while three full pages are spent on the wartime rivalries of American Jewish groups. The book also contends that “direct proof of anti-Semitism in the department is limited” and that “plain bureaucratic inefficiency” was one explanation for the State Department’s behavior. America’s Soul in the Balance has a different perspective.

What is your view of the State Deptartment’s efforts today to address the rights of Holocaust survivors?

In light of the State Department’s conduct during the Holocaust, I think they have a special obligation to the Holocaust survivors. I am not in the best position to judge whether they are fulfilling that obligation, but it certainly is one way for the State Department to atone for what happened during the Holocaust.

In your research for the book, did you interview survivors who now live in the U.S.? What are their feelings on this chapter of American history?

An important figure in my book is Ruth Glasberg Gold, who at age 11 watched her family die in Transnistria and then somehow managed to survive a brutal environment.

Ruth’s own book, Ruth’s Journey: A Survivor’s Memoir, is one of the best personal accounts of the Romanian Holocaust. She gave me a great deal of help while I was writing my book, even though it required her to resurrect searingly painful memories. But, I don’t think the account of what was going on in the State Department while she was trying to stay alive as a child was as disturbing to her, perhaps, as much as it might be to others. After all, for those who have experienced the Holocaust firsthand, I am not certain that anything about human behavior would be surprising.

Yom HaShoah April 19, 2012 / 27 Nisan 5772

Julia — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:47:46 +0000

Today is Yom HaShoah, a day for remembering the victims of the Holocaust. In Israel and around the world, ceremonies are being held to memorialize the six million who perished.

Our work at the Claims Conference focuses on those whose lives were destroyed by the Shoah, both those who were murdered and those who survived. We document, commemorate, and educate about the events but nothing compares to working with individuals. Among our obligations is to ensure that even decades later, each and every person who emerged from the Shoah is recognized and cared for. Along with our support for memorializing those who perished, our tribute to the victims is in the work we do for those who survived.

Karl, 78, now lives in Queens, NY, and holds a picture of his Polish rescuer Paulina Kisielewska

One of those who survived is Karl Schapiro of Poland, now living in New York. Karl, a small child during the war, is alive today because of the brave actions of a non-Jewish family who helped hide him and his parents. We are forever indebted to these brave people whose moral courage stands out among the inaction or collaboration of so many others.

In 1963, the Claims Conference established the Hassidei Umot Haolam program, becoming the first Jewish organization to recognize the collective Jewish obligation to non-Jewish rescuers and provide them with financial support. Today, Claims Conference support for Righteous Gentiles is provided through the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. Since 1963, the Claims Conference has paid approximately $8 million to assist rescuers.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has designated “Choosing to Act: Stories of Rescue” as this year’s theme for the national Days of Remembrance, which were established by Congress. In keeping with this theme, I would like to share with you the story of one rescuer who began receiving financial support from the Claims Conference in 1990.

Paulina as a young woman

Paulina Plaksej was 16 when Germany occupied her hometown of Kalusz, Poland (now Ukraine) in 1941. Before the war, her parents Bronislawa and Zacharias Plaksej had regularly visited a haberdashery in town owned by Solomon Schapiro. After the Nazi invasion, Solomon, his wife Sarah, and 6-year-old son Karl were forced into a ghetto with the rest of the town’s Jews.

After 15 months, the Schapiro family escaped the ghetto and sought out the Plaksejs, who sent them to a farmer outside of town where they joined other Jews already hiding in a crawl space beneath the barn.

Because Kalusz was a small town the Plaksejs could not hide Jews themselves, but they gave money to the farmer and Paulina would sometimes visit the hidden Jews, bringing newspapers and food. For a year and a half, 17 Jews hid beneath the farmer’s barn, living on small amounts of bread and soup brought to them at night.

In 1944, Miriam, another inhabitant of the ghetto, learned that the Germans planned to liquidate the ghetto. Miriam asked Zacharias Plaksej to save her two-year-old daughter, Maja. Zacharias contacted Miriam’s former maid, who brought a horse and cart, and the Jewish police helped smuggle the little girl out.

Miriam was in one of the last groups of Jews to be deported to Auschwitz. As her group was marched to the train, Miriam quickly took off her armband and joined the crowds in the street. She went straight to the Plaksej house asking for help. They hid her in their wardrobe for a number of months. Zacharias obtained forged papers for her and took her to another village where she would not be recognized as a Jew. There she was picked up as a Pole and sent to a German farm as a forced laborer. After the war, she returned to the maid’s house, picked up her daughter, and reunited with her husband. Due to the efforts of Paulina and her family, all of the Jews they helped survived the war.

In 1948, Solomon, Sarah, Karl, and 1-year-old Mina Schapiro – born after the war in a displaced persons camp – immigrated to New York City. Karl recalls today that his father used to categorize the family budget: food, rent, and Plaksej. Though poor and struggling to make a living, Solomon would regularly send care packages of cigarettes, chocolate, eyeglasses – anything that could be traded on the Polish black market – to the Plaskej family, until he passed away in 1968. Solomon would never put his name anywhere on the packages out of fear that the Plaksejs could be targeted by anti-Semites.

Paulina Plaksej is now Paulina Kisielewska, an 87-year-old widow living in Krakow. She finds comfort by speaking with youth groups and educating them about those horrible times, she says. Paulina meets with visiting groups from the Israel Defense Forces and March of the Living and their responses are usually the same: They listen, they cry, they hug her. There is an emotional connection, Paulina says, because she is a living example and testimony to what happened.

Paulina helped her family rescue 17 Jews in Poland during the Shoah.

In 1987, Yad Vashem recognized Paulina as a Righteous Among the Nations and a plaque at the Jerusalem museum bears her name. But Paulina does not consider herself a hero. What she and her parents did, she believes, was a natural response.

Now 78 and living in Queens, New York, Karl has not seen Paulina since those days in Poland long ago. But he has not forgotten her or what her family did. Karl’s sister, Mina, now lives in Israel and a few years ago, through other survivors from Kalusz, she discovered Paulina. Karl now sends Paulina money every few months and she sends back pictures and letters. While Karl wants nothing to do with Poland, he believes that helping the widow who saved his family’s lives is “a Jewish gesture.”

On this day of commemoration, we remember those who perished, those who survived, and those who stood up to tyranny.

Slovakia Marks 70th Anniversary of Auschwitz Transport

Julia — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:44:04 +0000

Slovakia recently commemorated the first transport of its country’s Jews from Poprad to Auschwitz 70 years ago. One thousand Jewish women were deported to the concentration camp on March 25, 1942. On Friday, outgoing Prime Minister Iveta Radicova and Holocaust survivor Edita Grosmanova took a commemorative train ride from Poprad, in northern Slovakia, to Oswiecim, Poland, the JTA reports. “If I were talking for 24 hours, it would not be even a percentage of the things that I have experienced,” Grosmanova said. The Slovak Spectator covered the Slovakian Cabinet’s commemoration of the transport anniversary with a statement against “extremism, racism and xenophobia.”

Slovak Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz, number 1474

Yad Vashem records indicate that the woman above arrived in Auschwitz from Poprad on March 26, 1942, meaning she was part of the first transport. Slovakia deported 60,000 to 70,000 Slovak Jews to concentration camps during WWII, paying 500 Reichsmarks to the German government for each deportee.

Currently, about 10,000 of Slovakia’s population of 5.5 million are Jews, and 1,000 to 1,500 of them are Nazi victims. In 2011 alone, the Claims Conference directly paid survivors $2.5 million through the Central and Eastern European Fund pension and the Holocaust Victim Compensation Fund one-time payment, and allocated another $500,000 to social service agencies improving Nazi victims’ quality of life. With an average age of 79, Slovakia’s Nazi victims are experiencing increasing health problems while the costs of health care, energy, nursing, and other services are rising. Nearly 700 Slovak Nazi victims are served by the Central Union of Jewish Religious Communities in the Slovak Republic (UZZNO) through Or Chaim, the principal project of UZZNO’s Slovak Centre for Health and Social Care. Or Chaim’s mission is to provide health and social services to Holocaust survivors in Slovakia.

Since its establishment in 2000, the Centre has provided an array of services for vulnerable Nazi victims and collaborates with social service departments within Jewish communities throughout Slovakia to ensure that necessary assistance reaches all who need it. The Claims Conference also funds the socialization programs of The Hidden Child Slovakia (THC), an organization run by Nazi victims. Monthly meetings of social clubs in Bratislava and Kosice help break the isolation experienced by over 120 Nazi victims as they grow older.

On the 70th anniversary of the first transport of Slovak Jews to Auschwitz, we remember the atrocities of the Shoah and continue to fight for a measure of justice for Nazi victims everywhere.

One French Family’s Struggle for Art Restitution Continues

Julia — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 13:45:48 +0000

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a front-page story on a Jewish French family’s battle to recover a painting by Monet that the Nazis looted from their vault during WWII. According to the Times, Ginette Heilbronn Moulin, 85, has recovered some of the other art looted from her family’s vault, but Monet’s 1889 “Torrent de la Creuse,” a riveting Impressionistic painting lively with the convergence of the Petite Creuse and the Creuse Rivers, has never been recovered by the family.

Torrent de la Creuse

The original Nazi record of the looting of this painting, including a photo of it, appears in the Claims Conference’s searchable database of art looted from French and Belgian Jews, more than half of which is still missing. We urge museums, dealers, and auction houses the world over to use this database when researching provenance of works that changed hands in Europe between 1933 and 1945. Recently, we launched the Provenance Research Training Program for art scholars and conservators to gain understanding and facility in the field of provenance research and cultural plunder.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York holds an almost identical painting, bequeathed in 1967 by Adelaide Milton de Groot. The Times reports the provenance of that piece, called “Torrent of the Petite Creuse at Fresselines,” ends in 1958 with its acquisition from a private collector by Daniel Wildenstein, a prominent Jewish French art critic and the author of Monet’s definitive catalogues raisonnés. The catalogues authored by Mr. Wildenstein, who died in 2001, include the “Torrent de la Creuse.” The Wildensteins’ personal art collection has included other works looted by the Nazis.

Rapids on the Petite Creuse at Fresselines

The Claims Conference is committed to the restitution of all looted art to Nazi victims around the world. Though the number of survivors among us grows fewer, the search for art and cultural objects stolen from victims can and does continue.

Rabbi Helga Newmark; Albert Abramson

Merry — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:32:00 +0000

A female Czechoslovakian concentration camp survivor who was ordained as a rabbi at the age of 67, and an American developer who was instrumental in building the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., both died last week.

Rabbi Helga Newmark survived the Thereisenstadt concentration camp to become the first woman Holocaust survivor ordained as a rabbi. Rabbi Newmark worked at two northern New Jersey synagogues, as an assistant rabbi at Barnert Temple in Franklin Lakes, N.J., and as an educator at Temple Shalom in River Edge, N.J. Rabbi Newmark, who lived in Hackensack, N.J., died March 6 at the age of 79. More about her life can be found at The Record (of Bergen County, N.J.).

Growing up, Rabbi Newmark lived on the same street in Amsterdam as Anne Frank. A remembrance of Rabbi Newmark, which includes her memories of Anne, can be found at Tablet magazine.

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As chairman of the development committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Albert Abramson of Maryland helped raise money for the creation of the museum, and worked on the museum’s planning and construction starting in the mid-1980s.

Mr. Abramson was named to the museum’s council by President Ronald Reagan, and reappointed by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He was an Air Force veteran of World War II.

Mr. Abramson died March 6. He was 94. More on Mr. Abramson’s life can be found at The New York Times.

We mourn the loss of two great people from a generation that went through so much pain and sorrow and yet found the strength to teach the world about tolerance and courage.

At 92, Long-Awaited Recognition

Hillary — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:59:18 +0000

At age 92, Yvette Anavi of Plovdiv, Bulgaria is still quite active and talkative, writing a book on Jewish women to add to the several she has already published. And at age 92, she has finally received acknowledgement of her persecution during WWII in the form of a payment from the Holocaust Victim Compensation Fund (HVCF), a Claims Conference program established in 2011 following negotiations with Germany.

Born in Plovdiv, Yvette’s early years passed happily in an economically comfortable family of intellectuals. After graduating high school in 1938, Yvette was able to begin studying at the University of Strasbourg. Back in Bulgaria for a visit when war broke out, she arranged to continue her studies at Sofia University.

Yvette Anavi of Bulgaria is grateful for her HVCF payment

With anti-Jewish legislation beginning in 1941 in Bulgaria, Yvette had to wear a yellow star on her clothing. She endured insults such as, “Dogs and Jews don’t need education” when seeking the mandatory police permission to travel to Sofia. The fascist authorities forced Yvette to change the spelling of her family name from Calev to Caleff in order that this name not be misinterpreted as a Bulgarian one.

Yvette and Leon Anavi were married in June 1944, shortly after he had received notice that he was to be sent to a labor camp.

After the war, Yvette and Leon raised two sons and she worked as a librarian at one of Bulgaria’s largest libraries. After the fall of Communism, Yvette published several books on Jewish topics and taught a course on Ladino, the language of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, including by those who made their way to Bulgaria.

Now a widow with four grandchildren, Yvette is gratified to have finally received a payment that acknowledges her persecution and suffering during the Shoah. Nazi victims like Yvette, who have waited for so long for the recognition of a compensation payment, are the reason that we continue to advocate, negotiate, and work on their behalf.

: Yvette in 1942

“Although many years have passed, someone has recognized the pain, anxiety, privations, and lack of freedom we endured,” Yvette says. “It is not the amount of money that warms me but that you have understood the truth. Thank you!”

In 2011, the Claims Conference launched the HVCF for Nazi victims living in the 10 former Soviet bloc countries that belong to the European Union. However, Nazi victims living today in the other former Soviet bloc countries still remain ineligible for comparable payments. Ironically, those who live, for example, in Ukraine, Russia, or Belarus who need it the most are the very ones to whom payment and recognition are denied. As we are flooded with stories like Yvette’s — people for whom the acknowledgment has been far too long in coming but for whom it is of paramount importance — we are strengthened in our resolve to secure a measure of justice for those Holocaust victims who are still unrecognized.

“Coming of Age in the Holocaust”: Connecting students to history

Hillary — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:33:54 +0000

On May 21, 1942, the eve of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, the sudden sound of gunshots woke the Kransnostawski family just before dawn. Soldiers broke into Meir’s house and forced everyone out onto the street and marched them, along with many neighbors, to a nearby gathering point.

While everyone waited in the courtyard, the Nazis slowly removed the young people and the elderly people from the crowd. Meir watched the Nazis take his mother, grandmother, and siblings. He feared that they would soon be murdered. Finally, with all his relatives gone except his father, Meir wondered whether it was worth trying to stay alive.

This is the story of 13-year-old Meir Kransnostawski, a child survivor profiled in “Coming of Age in the Holocaust, Coming of Age Now,” an educational website to help middle- and high-school students create personal connections to history through the experiences of people their own age. The website was developed by New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in partnership with Israel’s Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum. The website was supported by a Claims Conference grant.

The website includes stories of 12 Holocaust survivors and one about growing up in pre-state Palestine during the same period. Each story reflects unique, individual experiences, and as a group, they provide a library of resources for learning about the Holocaust through personal narratives.

All of those profiled were between 9 and 13 years old when the Nazis invaded.

“By connecting them to stories of people their own age who faced terrible challenges, students not only learn the history but start to reflect on their own identities and responsibilities to their families and communities and consider their own coming of age as they look at these terrible challenges faced by people during the Holocaust,” said Liz Edelstein, the museum’s director of education.

“Coming of Age” has existed as a printed curriculum for several years, but the website offers teachers and students advantages such as interactive timelines and videos, which help students connect to the survivors in ways that reading their stories would not. “It allows for more images, related artifacts, and links to related sites,” Liz said.

More than 160 teachers from the U.S., Canada, Israel, Hungary, Germany, and England have registered so far. “The rate at which teachers are signing up and the broad diversity of schools and geographic areas indicates to me that there is a hunger for this type of material using first-person narratives and first-person stories for what is a very difficult subject for students to learn,” Liz said.

Seventh-grade students at North End Middle School in Waterbury, Connecticut, recently finished reading the story of Pawel Hodys, who was 9 years old when the Nazis invaded his hometown of Lodz, Poland, and sent his family to the Lodz Ghetto. In August 1944, the family was told they were being moved to escape the Allied bombings, but found themselves on a train bound for Auschwitz.

A timeline of Pawel’s experiences intertwined with a general timeline of the Holocaust accompanies his story. The website asks students to think about issues such as the stated reasons for persecution of Jews, conditions in the Lodz Ghetto, how ghetto residents tried to maintain their humanity, and the moral dilemmas faced by the ghetto’s Jewish council.

The students also said they were engaged by the site’s interactivity and videos, and learning how people responded to the Holocaust.

The site recently won the Bronze MUSE Award for Education and Outreach from the American Association of Museums’ Media & Technology Committee. The award is given to projects that include educational content for children or adults, resources for educators, “distance learning” courses, pedagogical training tools, and community outreach. “It moved me to tears,” said one judge, who added that the website creates an amazing learning environment for students.