Israeli Musical Sings Praises of Italian Righteous Gentile

December 14, 2014 While Schindler's List brought fame to Oscar Schindler for saving more than 1,000 Jews during World War Two, the lesser known Giorgio Perlasca saved 5,000, inspiring an Israeli orchestra to sing his praises.

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Rivlin Visits Poland for Opening of New Jewish History Museum

October 31, 2014 Israeli President Reuven Rivlin flew to Poland this week for the opening of a Jewish museum in Warsaw, amid meetings with Polish heads of state to whom he stressed the need for a strong Polish-Israeli relationship. The museum is built on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto. It is the first museum to showcase the 1,000-year history of Polish Jews, who made an indelible impression on the identity of Europe.

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Forty Percent of Europe’s Jews Hide Identity

September 19, 2014 This week, the results of a recent European survey carried out by the Rabbinical Center of Europe (RCE) and the European Jewish Association (EJA) revealed that 40 percent of Jews living in Europe are afraid to be identified as Jews.

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Archaeologists Uncover Sobibor Gas Chambers

September 19, 2014 On Wednesday, Israel's official museum for the victims of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, and Poland’s Majdanek State Museum announced the discovery of the gas chambers at the Sobibor death camp, which was located in what was German-occupied East Poland. As many as 250,000 Jews were murdered at Sobibor from April, 1942 to October, 1943 when the 600 remaining prisoners revolted. They killed about a dozen German officers, allowing about 300 prisoners to escape, even past the 50-foot wide strip of landmines that surrounded the site.

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Knesset Meeting Warns of New Holocaust as Global Anti-Semitism Spreads

August 5, 2014 Israel's military action in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, has given rise to an anti-Semitic backlash in Europe with a great variety of threats against the Jewish People, including attacks, bomb threats, physical attacks on synagogues, and even “Hitler was right” banners in protest rallies. The backlash has led Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky to comment, according to Britain’s Sunday Times, “We are seeing the beginning of the end of Jewish history in Europe.”

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50 Righteous of the Nations are Honored in Poland

July 21, 2014 In Warsaw last Sunday, US Ambassador to Poland Stephen Mull honored 50 Righteous Among the Nations who had saved Jews during the Holocaust, calling them “a light in the darkness.” “You knew that the Hitlerites killed people—sometimes entire families—for aiding Jews during the German occupation of Poland, but at the same time you decided to help your Jewish brothers and sisters,” Mull said to the group, noting that they were "evidence of the human capacity for selfless love, compassion, and courage."

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Holocaust Whistleblower Jan Karski Honored

April 30, 2014 Jan Karski, a Polish resistance fighter who unsuccessfully appealed to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and later urged President Franklin Roosevelt to bomb the train tracks leading to the Auschwitz death camp, was honored last week by Georgetown University on April 24, the 100th anniversary of his birth. Karski, who died in 2000 at the age of 86, risked his life to bring his horrifying eye witness report of Jewish destruction to the Allies.

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70th Anniversary of the Destruction of Hungarian Jewry

April 23, 2014 This year marks a heart-breaking anniversary for Hungary: it is the 70th anniversary of the mass deportations, massacres, and death marches of 1944. By the beginning of March 1944, Adolf Hitler had set his sights on the destruction of the last body of Jewry still in existence within his evil empire. In April 1944, the Nazis and their corroborators began rounding up Hungarian Jews and the first deportations began on April 29, 1944. The first transport arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau on May 2, 1944 and the last transport arrived on July 11, 1944.

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Palestinians Denounce Students’ Visit to Auschwitz

April 23, 2014 Palestinian Professor Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi, the library director and a professor of American studies at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, recently took what is thought to be the first group of Palestinian students to Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in Poland. “It helped emphasize the human story of the Holocaust, to study the meaning of the historical narrative as related to our conflict, to heighten empathy, awareness, and sensitivity,” said the professor who was once a Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrilla.

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Art Stolen in Holocaust Finally Returned to Jewish Owners

April 9, 2014 While German law puts a 30-year statute of limitations on stolen property, the question of Nazi-looted artwork has seen recent gains for those seeking pieces stolen from Jewish owners in Nazi Europe. This moral question recently confronted 81-year-old Munich man Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a favorite art dealer of Adolf Hitler, who returned the first artwork in his collection proven to be stolen—Henry Matisse's "Seated Woman / Woman Sitting in an Armchair," which belonged to Jewish art collector Paul Rosenberg.

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