AJC Applauds U.S. Presidential Award to Jan Karski, Commitment to Prevent Genocide
AJC applauded President Obama’s announcement today that he will honor Jan Karski posthumously with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Karski was a renowned Polish diplomat who played an instrumental role in Poland’s anti-Nazi resistance movement during the Holocaust, and in seeking to focus world attention on the Nazi Final Solution against the Jews. Continue reading
Polish Jews: This Land Is Our Land
I returned last week from a Passover trip to Poland, my seventh trip there in the last two decades, and again I observed, and heard, what I have repeatedly in recent years. A Jewish community, while a shadow of its pre-Holocaust size or prominence, which is flourishing, which calls itself the fastest-growing Jewish community in the world (Germany, the beneficiary of a wave of émigrés from the former Soviet Union, also lays claim to this unofficial title), which shows no fear of publicly asserting itself. Continue reading
Fein: Passover remembrance
This year, at Pesach time, we mark the sixty-ninth anniversary of the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto. For more than half a century, we have spoken of the uprising at our seder table, recalling that it was on Pesach night in 1943 that the hateful enemy stormed the remnant of our people who had not yet perished. But our people rose up in hopeless courage and, in the days of their struggle, became immortal. It has become our custom to dedicate our second cup to their memory, to the memory of all those who perished in the Kingdom of Night and to seek to draw meaning from the darkness. Continue reading
Right and justice shine through the infernal prism of wartime Poland
One of my most treasured possessions is an old photograph. Taken in 1910, in Krakow, Poland, it shows five generations of my ancestors on my mother’s side, beginning with my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Pinkus Krengel, who was born in 1818.
Due to the unusual nature of the surname, Krengel, it isn’t hard to trace the history of my family. In fact, we know that they left Spain for Poland at the end of the 15th century, just when the interrogators of the Inquisition were polishing their twisted metal with Jewish blood. Continue reading
Jewish cemetery in Poland attacked by vandals
Vandals have desecrated a Jewish cemetery in Poland, spraying swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans on tombstones and memorial plaques, an official said Monday. Continue reading
Poland to issue coins honoring Poles who saved Jews
Poland is issuing commemorative coins to honor three Catholic-Polish families who were killed by the Nazis for having rescued Jews during the Holocaust. Continue reading
Researchers make new discovery of Jews murdered by Poland villagers during Holocaust
Recent research has discovered the murders of Jews in three Polish villages during the Holocaust that were carried out by locals. Continue reading
Poland reopens probe into 1941 massacre of Jewish women
Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance is reopening an investigation into the 1941 rape and murder of 20 Jewish women in the Polish village of Bzury. Continue reading
Poland seeks return of death camp barracks
Polish and U.S. officials are engaged in intense talks to determine the fate of a sensitive object: a barracks that once housed doomed prisoners at the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp and is now on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Continue reading
Reporter-activist relishes Poland’s Jewish revival
Poland’s Jewish community today — at 8,000, tiny compared to the 3.4 million before the Holocaust — is on the upswing, though it wasn’t easy to revive Jewish life. Most of Poland’s Holocaust survivors immigrated to Israel or elsewhere. Thousands more were banished in communist purges. Those who remained were, Gebert said, “the least Jewish.” Continue reading
