For the first time since they published their book "And Then There Were Four," Ellen Stein, Marcelle Robinson, and Lisa Klein sat before a roomful of youngsters to describe their wartime experiences. The three women — speaking at the Midland School in Rochelle Park — told how their families had fled for their lives in the face of the Nazi juggernaut that enveloped Germany in the 1930s. The fourth author of the book, Daisy Roessler, lives in Israel.

Since they have generally spoken only with adults during their book promotion tour, the authors said they were at first apprehensive about addressing some of the issues raised in the book. Nevertheless, they added, they were also excited.

If Jews around the world do not want Holocaust history distorted, then perhaps we should examine how we create our own myths — and lay those distorting myths to rest, once and for all. One such myth is particularly egregious, since it deals with Israel and the Holocaust.

A day after the United Nations Holocaust Commemoration on Jan. 28, an e-blitz from Barbara Wind, the director of the Holocaust center at United Jewish Communities of MetroWest, contained the following statement:

"Amb. Dan Gillerman spoke eloquently, saying that if Israel had existed[,] the Holocaust would have been averted. (This will be the theme of our "One School Remembers" exhibit that will be on view Apr. 6-May 3.)"

David Kranzler, who died last Friday at the age of 77, was immersed in the historical role of the Orthodox Jewish community during the Holocaust. While the countries of the world closed their hearts and minds to the destruction of European Jewish life, David, whose family fled Germany in the late ‘30s, discovered during his extensive research that one group, the Orthodox community, was actively engaged in rescue. It would be an illuminating revelation that would direct his research for the rest of his life.

In "Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust," the catalogue that accompanies the exhibit of the same name, the director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York puts into print the question on everyone’s lips when the survivors were liberated.

"Context is everything," David Marwell writes. "In trying to understand the study of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, this dictum becomes especially critical. If the reader has any doubts, he or she need only think about the oft-repeated question, ‘Why did the Jews go like sheep to the slaughter?’"

and David Gold

In the 1950s, Israeli Holocaust survivors signed over their restitution monies to the Israeli government, which, in return, promised to care for them in their old age. The logic was that the state needed the money to establish itself and protect its citizens.

At the same time, when the state was created, the British handed Israel all the assets and bank accounts that belonged to Holocaust victims and their heirs. But the Israelis have never returned the assets in their custody, and continued to thwart the attempt to return them. Bank Leumi, which had custody of these assets, had no right to transfer those assets to the state. In 2004, a committee chaired by MK Collette Avital, a daughter of survivors, was established to look into the matter and located 2,500 Leumi accounts. The committee established that the bank owed the survivors in excess of 300 million shekels (about $68 million).

Last month the Jewish Agency, speaking for a coalition of the Israeli government, Yad Vashem, and the Holocaust survivors’ organizations in Israel, demanded that the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) cede control of negotiations and allocations of Holocaust survivors’ assets to the Israeli government and move its headquarters to Israel because it’s the central address for Jews worldwide. While the centrality of Jerusalem and the allure of its sacred soil are not in dispute, this proposal is a pure power play that ignores survivors and their needs.

Behind the nobility of sentiments, what is at stake and in dispute is money — lots of it. In addition to the annual allocations, there is an estimated $1.7 billion in the Claims Conference kitty, a reserve established to care for Holocaust survivors in their old age.

Paterson Hebrew Free Loan Association comes to Bergen

For hundreds of years the issue of chained women, agunot, women whose husbands refuse to grant them divorces (gets), has simmered on the back burner, an awful secret often linked to domestic violence and worse. Thousands are affected by this issue, and suffer the indignity of never being able to marry again — as long as their "ex"-husbands hold them hostage to untenable conditions — like demanding total custody and all marital assets, no alimony, plus payment of thousands (in some cases millions) of dollars. And if a wife or her family can’t meet the recalcitrant husband’s conditions, she remains an agunah, and he, with a technical leniency called "heter meah rabbanim," permission from a hundred rabbis, can marry someone else.

That’s extortion. It is astonishing that such an abhorrently unfair and medieval system can exist in Western civilization in the 21st century.

The battle against it has been going on for at least 40 years. I know. I was an agunah for six years and was sent by Rabbi Moishe Feinstein to civil court for a divorce. When my decree was overturned because the court held my ex in contempt, Rabbi Feinstein helped create the Silver Get Law.

It’s not the usual Sunday night program at a suburban temple, but then Barnert Temple in Franklin Lakes — the direct descendant of the old Barnert Temple in Paterson — has always understood Holocaust survivors. Congregants were holding doing Holocaust commemorations long before they became common — more than 30 years ago.

On Sunday night they took the commemoration of Kristallnacht — an anti-Jewish riot in German on Nov. 9-10, 1938 — to the next level. Lynn Kaston, of the Advisory Board, read an article in The Jewish Standard in March 2005 about an extraordinary duo. These complete opposites were making the rounds of schools to teach kids not to hate each other and that genocide is unconscionable. They had both survived genocide. Everything else was as different as can be. So Kaston brought them to speak to the students at her local public school in Kinnelon. They made such a deep impression on the school community, she then brought pair to the attention of Sara Losch, the temple’s director of Jewish life and educational director. Kaston and Losch felt that these two people would make this year’s annual Kristallnacht commemoration an unforgettable one.

Countless Holocaust survivors and their descendants, as well as World War II veterans, have the ghosts of the past tucked away in the darkened nooks and crannies of their homes. Photographs, documents, passes, Stars of David and armbands, camp uniforms, diaries — masses of them — are scattered across the nation and across the globe, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is trying to track them all down, collect them, and give them a home.

Museum officials have embarked on a campaign that will help survivors and others decide what to do with this valuable but decomposing legacy. Left as they are, these heirlooms will disintegrate if they aren’t properly cared for.