Holocaust

The United States' blind eye toward the Holocaust never became an election issue, even at the height of World War II. But reports of Serbian concentration camps, a chilling reminder of Nazi atrocities, puts American response to the ugly war in the former Yugoslavia squarely into the presidential campaign. Democratic nominee Bill Clinton, expressing outrage over reports of detention camp killings, yesterday called on the United States to seek an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council.

The Nazi persecution of the Jews entered a chapter of brutality 50 years ago this Wednesday with a night of terror that left 7,500 Jewish businesses and 177 synagogues demolished. Later known as Kristallnacht, or night of the broken glass, the violence touched virtually city and village in Germany. Rabbi emeritus Fred Susman of Beth Israel Synagogue at Fifth and Harmony Streets in Coatesville will speak about Kristallnacht and the Holocaust on Friday night at 8 p.m. during the regular Sabbath services.

For Robert Kovacs and John Pesda, the Holocaust is a lesson that must continue to be taught, to ensure that it never happens again. For that reason, the two professors at Camden County College in Blackwood are establishing a program to educate teachers how to teach about the Holocaust. "In studying about these things, we can hopefully prevent them from happening again," said Pesda, a professor of history and the coordinator of the Holocaust program. "A people that fails to study its own history is doomed to repeat it. " The Holocaust refers to the Nazi extermination of an estimated 6 million Jews and 5 million others - including Catholics, homosexuals, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and intellectuals - during World War II in Europe.

One reason Michael Elkin wrote Date of Death was to show that the Holocaust was not of interest to Jews alone. "It affects everybody. It was a universal event with universal damage," he says. Elkin's play will be presented tonight by the Y Arts Council as part of Yom Hashoa, an annual commemoration of the Holocaust, and the ecumenical message of the play will be carried forward in the production; neither of the two actors, Ted Piperno and Greg Wood, is Jewish. Acting, of course, means playing something you are not. Still, says Piperno, the fact "that neither Greg nor I am Jewish brings a different dimension to the play.

TO STU Bykofsky: Thanks for the wonderful and enlightening column about the Rev. Hermann Scheipers. As a history buff, I find that I must often remind people that the Holocaust encompassed many groups of people including - but not limited to - Jews. I also want to thank you for bringing to light the fact that the Soviet state was no better than the Third Reich. People often see the U.S.S.R. through rose-colored glasses - especially because of the World War II era, when we were allies.

For those whose fathers fought the Nazis and for those who actually remember The War, learning of the Holocaust made the triumph even more profound, the sacrifice even more noble: The Liberators saved the world from monstrous evil. Which is why it's so distrubing that a recent poll shows that more than a third of Americans believe the Holocaust may not really have happened. Disturbing, but not surprising. Those times were marked by a completely different way of thinking, which, in today's world, is hard to reproduce, thank God. And so it must seem unreal to those who weren't around then.

To Mend the World takes its title from a passage in the Book of Psalms and its inspiration from Emil Fackenheim's book on the art of the Holocaust - art created by concentration camp survivors. An emotionally charged documentary by Harry Rasky, who explored the artistic process in the Oscar-nominated Homage to Chagall (1977), the film alternates between panning shots of artworks and interviews with the artists and fellow survivors of Auschwitz, Treblinka and other Nazi death camps.

In Train of Life, Jews stand by the railroad tracks, clutching suitcases and other possessions and waiting to board the cattle-cars while their vigilant German guards look on. It is an image that movies like Shoah, Sophie's Choice and Schindler's List have used to define the Holocaust and turn a simple means of transportation into something sinister and evil. But there's something wrong with this picture in Train of Life. The Jews are cheerful and clamber willingly into the cars, and they seem to be on oddly familiar and friendly terms with their guards.

The great irony is that people discover race hate the way lovers discover love. It always seems utterly new and fresh to the hater, who like the lover feels that he has invented the emotion. And like love, race hate always expresses itself in the same cliches uttered as if the hater had discovered the principles of the universe. "They take our jobs. " "They're everywhere. " "They're just too damn different. " Racism is as human as love. In defining ourselves, the tribe we belong to, its mores, we are tempted to believe in the inferiority of the culture and mores of other groups.

Jerome Brentar, dumped by Vice President George Bush from an ethnic campaign committee last week over allegations of anti-Semitism, insisted last night he was still part of the campaign and had not resigned. Brentar, a Croatian-American, also refused to concede that Nazis had deliberately gassed Jews during World War II and insisted on the innocence of John Demjanjuk, convicted in Israel this year of running the gas chamber at Treblinka death camp. In a confrontation with Rep. Stephen Solarz, D-N.Y.

For University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann, bringing more than 50,000 personal Holocaust testimonials to campus is a personal milestone. The video testimonials were compiled by the University of Southern California's Shoah Foundation Institute, founded by the director Steven Spielberg in 1994 to collect and preserve the testimony of survivors. Gutmann's father fled Nazi Germany in 1934 and eventually settled in the United States, where she was born. She first talked to Spielberg about the possibility of bringing the collection to Penn about a year ago. "I have spent some hours listening to them, and for me, personally it's just incredibly moving and important," Gutmann said in an interview.

  "Today we commemorate our mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters who perished at the hands of the Nazis. " As Batame Hertzbach spoke those words Sunday in Philadelphia, the first of six candles was lighted on a candelabra - one for every one million Jews who died in the Holocaust. Hertzbach's speech was part of Philadelphia's annual Memorial Ceremony for the Six Million Jewish Martyrs, which attracted hundreds Sunday despite the pouring rain. Hertzbach is chairwoman of the Jewish Community Relations Council.

"Today we commemorate our mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters who perished at the hands of the Nazis. " As Batame Hertzbach spoke those words Sunday in Philadelphia, the first of six candles was lit on a candelabra - one for every one million Jews who died in the Holocaust. Hertzbach's speech was part of Philadelphia's Annual Memorial Ceremony for the Six Million Jewish Martyrs, which attracted hundreds Sunday despite the pouring rain. Hertzbach is chairwoman of the Jewish Community Relations Council.

The last time Torah No. 586 was read during services probably was a few days before the Jews from a small town in Czechoslovakia were rounded up and sent to a Nazi concentration camp. The sacred scroll was one of 1,564 left in Czech synagogues when the people who used them were taken away to die. But Thursday, the 130-year-old Torah from the town of Lipník nad Becvou will be rededicated at the Martins Run senior living community in Marple Township while a survivor who read from it during his bar mitzvah watches via Skype from the Czech Republic.

Alfred Weisskopf, age 16, died in Auschwitz in 1944. So did Eva Bulova, age 15. And Zuzana Winterova, who was just 11. But Dotan Yarden, Haley Weiss, and Dana Handleman are very much alive. Along with 23 other young actors in the play I Never Saw Another Butterfly, which will be performed Thursday at the National Museum of American Jewish History, they are capturing the voices of children who lived in the Terezin concentration camp during the Holocaust. Between 1941 and 1945, 15,000 children were transported to Terezin, created by the Nazis as a "model ghetto.

"EUROPA, Europa" director Agneska Holland returns to the Holocaust with the Oscar-nominated "In Darkness," a grueling but rewarding story of survival. It's a fictionalized account (taken from the book In The Sewers of Lvov ) of Polish Jews who lived through the Nazi occupation hiding in sewers beneath a ransacked Jewish ghetto, making for a drama every bit as grim as it sounds. One might say it is partly an account of a righteous Gentile, but the Catholic sewer worker (Robert Wieckiewicz)

WARSAW, Poland - Polish and U.S. officials are engaged in intense talks to determine the fate of a sensitive object: a barrack that once housed doomed prisoners at the Nazis' Auschwitz death camp and is now on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Poland is demanding the return of the artifact, which has been on loan to the Washington museum for more than 20 years and is an important object in its permanent exhibition. But the U.S. museum says the valuable object shouldn't be moved, partly because it is too fragile.

Thomas T. Johnson, 88, a retired Los Angeles County Superior Court judge who in 1981 ruled that the Holocaust was "a fact and not reasonably subject to dispute," died of congestive heart failure Wednesday at home in Los Angeles. Judge Johnson made the unusual pronouncement in a case brought by Long Beach, Calif., businessman Mel Mermelstein against the Institute for Historical Review, a Torrance, Calif., organization that claimed the planned extermination of Jews by the Nazis was a myth.

NEW YORK - After a year of tough negotiations, Germany has agreed to pay pensions to about 16,000 additional Holocaust victims worldwide - mostly survivors who were once starving children in Nazi ghettos, or were forced to live in hiding for fear of death. The agreement announced Monday between the New York-based Claims Conference and the German government is "not about money - it's about Germany's acknowledgment of these people's suffering," said Greg Schneider, the conference's executive vice president.

On her 15th Yom Kippur, Anneliese Nossbaum watched in deepening dread as the sun crossed the September sky. When dusk fell on the Nazi camp-ghetto of Terezin, Czechoslovakia, 67 years ago, "it was the end of my family," she said. The next day, her father was forced on a train to Auschwitz. "I never saw him again," she told a dozen teenagers last week at the Klein Jewish Community Center in Northeast Philadelphia. Someday soon, the last Holocaust survivors will fall silent, joining in death the millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, handicapped, and religious minorities who perished in Germany's concentration camps during World War II. When that time comes, Holocaust educators say, future generations will never again sit at the feet of people like Nossbaum.