In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the role of American Jews and American Jewish organizations in rescue efforts during the Holocaust was the focus of a number of studies. (Full disclosure: This reporter was a member of the Goldberg Commission, which issued a report on the topic and was chaired by Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg.) One of those studies was by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein and resulted in his doctoral dissertation, "Were We Our Brothers' Keepers? The Public Response of American Jews to the Holocaust, 1938-1944" (Media Judaica), published in 1985, and available as an e-book on the Internet.
Fred Buff, inset, was a passenger on the SS St. Louis, here surrounded by smaller vessels in the port of Havana.
A "voyage of the damned" has gone down in history as one of the most despicable acts of political cruelty just before the second World War. One of the passengers on that journey was Fred Buff, who was 18 years old when he and 936 other passengers set sail on the SS St. Louis from Hamburg and headed for Havana on May 13, 1939. None of them knew they were about to become pawns in world politics and that their story would become a symbol of the greed, apathy, callousness, hatred, and xenophobia that so characterized the Holocaust.
From sea to shining sea and all points in between, including the Capitol in Washington and in communities around the world, the Holocaust will be remembered next week.
Perhaps it is a more poignant time than ever, as Holocaust survivors age and die and the last eyewitnesses rush to give their testimony in memoirs, on tape, in classrooms and at commemorations. How painful it is for them to hear and see what is in the news daily — threats against Israel by Holocaust deniers and Israel's being labeled the country of '1st-century Nazis — as they fight personal battles for their health and, in many cases, some form of restitution.
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, will speak in Tenafly about the famed Nazi-hunter.
From his tiny office in Vienna, the late Simon Wiesenthal, frail and small, set out to track down killers still at large of 6 million Jews, including those who murdered members of his own family. He inspired the Klarsfelds and others to do the same work, and a major American Jewish and Israeli organization was named for him while he was still alive—the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which teaches tolerance while pursuing those who committed genocide.
The director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, Brooklyn-born Dr. Efraim Zuroff, will speak in Tenafly next week about the man who inspired him.
Gaia Waisbrod of Tenafly helps clear away debris left by Hurricane Katrina. PHOTO courtesy of solomon schechter regional high school
TEANECK – Funeral services were held on Sunday and Monday for 1' victims of last week's bus crash in Chile. Robert Neil Rubin and Barbara Rubin, the parents of Larry Rubin of this township, were among them, and their funeral was held on Monday in Metuchen. (See page 60.)
The 1' victims, part of a 64-person B'nai B'rith group on a 14-day Celebrity Cruise Lines jaunt around South America, were returning to the ship after visiting Lauca National Park in Arica last Wednesday when their bus fell 300 feet down a mountainside. Two other American passengers, as well as the Chilean tour guide and driver, were injured.
Dr. William L.H. Roberts will be the featured speaker at Sunday's Interfaith Brotherhood-Sisterhood Committee's brunch.
Freedom to Believe" will be the theme when the Baha'i Community of Bergen County hosts the '0th annual Interfaith Brotherhood-Sisterhood Committee of Bergen County's brunch. William L.H. Roberts, treasurer of the U.S. National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is, will speak about the need for freedom to express and practice religious beliefs without fear or interference.
Simon Deng is walking from the United Nations to the U.S. Capitol to call for help against genocide in his native country. photo by jeanette friedman
In this blogger's era, marching on Washington seems like a quaint idea, but ex-slave Simon Deng's 300-mile Sudan Freedom Walk from U.N. headquarters to the U.S. Capitol, which began on March 15 and ends on April 5, is anything but.
In America, Deng says, marching can make a difference, and it is one of the reasons he came here to live. He has been calling attention to the genocide in Darfur and southern Sudan and discovered that simply talking doesn't work. So he and supporters who walk with him have taken this message to the streets and hopes Joe Average sees them, hears them, and acts.
A former musical prodigy who studied in Israel for two years, architect Daniel Libeskind never forgot his first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline. It happened in 1959 and left an indelible impression — one that has informed his work ever since, as he has gone on to design iconic buildings that mark the skylines of cities all over the world.
Libeskind, whose "Freedom Tower" design was initially chosen by New York Gov. George Pataki to replace the Twin Towers, started his architecture studies at New York's Cooper Union College in 1965, but it was in 1989 that he got his first break. Just as he and his childhood sweetheart, his wife Nina, were moving to California from Germany, he learned he had won the design competition for the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
Women saved Moses from certain death. Without Moses, there would have been no Exodus (no Exodus, no Sinai; no Sinai, no Judaism). Yet in the traditional Haggadah, these women are ignored.-
To rectify that omission, modern Jewish women will honor these heroines, and other outstanding Jewish women, at the annual JCC on the Palisades Women's Seder on March '0.
Gerd Stern's day job as a purveyor of kosher food is rather mundane, but don't let that fool you.-
Seventy-eight or so years into a fascinating and gypsy-like life that began with the death of his mom when he was 4 and fleeing the Nazis at 5, this resident of Cresskill and Poets Cove, Jamaica, has still got big plans.
He's writing articles for http://www.living-kosher.com, a Website about Jewish food and the holidays, and he's also working on an opera in New York City. He has an art show opening in Vienna in a month or so, and this Passover he's slated to be the poet-in-residence at a hotel in Florida.
