In the News

For Educators

 


The Significance of Stealing the "Arbeit Macht Frei" Sign
aish.com, January 1, 2010
A video presentation by Rabbi Yaakov Salomon.
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Perplexity After Auschwitz Sign Theft
New York Times, December 23, 2009
It was hard to know what was more shocking: the haplessness of the thieves who stole the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign looming over Auschwitz, or the laxness of the security protecting this emblem of the Holocaust’s perversity and horror.
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WWII Veteran had Hitler's Art Book on Bookshelf
Associated Press, December 9, 2009

After fighting his way across Europe during World War II, John Pistone was among the U.S. soldiers who entered Adolf Hitler's home nestled in the Bavarian Alps as the war came to a close.  Making his way through the Berghof, Hitler's home near Berchtesgaden, Germany, Pistone noticed a table with shelves underneath. Exhilarated by the certainty of victory over the Nazis, Pistone took an album filled with photographs of paintings as a souvenir.
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Holocaust: The Ignored Reality, by Timothy Snyder
The New York Review of Books, July 16, 2009
...Auschwitz, generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killing, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning with the past still to come.
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Schneider Named New Head of Claims Conference
JTA, July 15, 2009
The Claims Conference has elected Gregory Schneider as its next executive vice president.  Schneider has worked 14 years for the Claims Conference, mostly as its chief operating officer. He was elected unanimously Wednesday by the board of directors.
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Unspoken Memories of Holocaust Survivors Find Silent and Non-pathological Expression
Amir Gilat, Ph.D., University of Haifa, June 22, 2009

Aspects of knowing about a parent's or grandparent's Holocaust experiences and traumas are transmitted to other members of the family through unspoken and sometimes unintentional behaviors in the home.
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Buchenwald Trip Has Personal Meaning for Obama Aide
UPI.com, June 7, 2009
Josh Lipsky volunteered to help prepare for President Obama's visit to the concentration camp, where his grandfather had been a prisoner. There he makes a connection with the man he never knew.
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Why Holocaust Shocked Obama's Uncle
Jerusalem Post, June 5, 2009
President Barack Obama's planned visit to the former Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald on June 5 will have a special significance because his great uncle, Charlie Payne, was one of the American soldiers who liberated a sub-camp of Buchenwald sixty-four years ago.
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The German Overture
Reform Judaism, Summer 2009
The untold story of how in 1943 - a year before the Walkyrie Plot to assassinate Hitler - the German High Command offered to turn Wehrmacht forces against the Waffen-SS Nazi troops and help America win the war.
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Holocaust Toll Will Rise Even Higher, Says Priest on Trail of Nazi Mass-Killers
London Times, May 23, 2009
One bullet, one Jew. When Father Patrick Desbois heard that chilling Nazi maxim, he knew that he had to make a journey into one of the darkest corners of the Holocaust.
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Mystery of Message in a Bottle Found at Auschwitz Solved
AFP, May 9, 2009
Sixty-five years ago Waclaw Sobczak hid a message in a bottle between the bricks of a wall in a building of the Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, a last sign of life as he prepared to die.
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Remarks by the President at the Holocaust Days of Remembrance Ceremony
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, April 23, 2009
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Hearst and the Holocaust
Jerusalem Post, April 22, 2009
Three rare paintings once owned by media magnate William Randolph Hearst were last week returned to the family of the German Jews who were forced by the Nazis to sell them for a pittance. The return of the artwork was an act of justice made all the more fitting by the little-known fact that Hearst played an important role in promoting the rescue of Jews from the Holocaust.
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When the Last Survivor is Gone, A Yom HaShoah Essay, by Michael Berenbaum
April 15, 2009
Two years ago, an MBA student whom I mentored wrote her thesis on how major Holocaust organizations were planning to deal with the inevitable — the fact that soon, all too soon, there would be no survivors.
Her conclusion was sobering.

The leadership of every institution acknowledged the problem and dreaded that moment. What were they doing to plan for it?
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Australian Library Finds Copy of Schindler's List
Associated Press, April 6, 2009
Australian researchers sifting papers belonging to the author of "Schindler's List" discovered a yellowing roll of 801 men saved from the Holocaust by the German industrialist — the very copy the writer used to bring the story to the world's attention, a curator said Monday.
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U.S. Deports Former Nazi Guard to Austria
CNN.com, March 20, 2009
An Austrian man who participated in a Nazi massacre of Jews during World War II and later gained U.S. citizenship has been deported to Austria, U.S. officials said.
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Priest Uncovering Beginnings of Final Solution
Associated Press, February 1, 2009
The Holocaust has a landscape engraved in the mind's eye: barbed-wire fences, gas chambers, furnaces.  Less known is the "Holocaust by Bullets," in which over 2 million Jews were gunned down in towns and villages across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Their part in the Nazis' Final Solution has been under-researched, their bodies left unidentified in unmarked mass graves.
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Three Jewish Students Who Shook the World
The David S. Wyman Institute,
January 30, 2009
Sixty years ago this month, in February 1943, an extraordinary article appeared in a leading American Jewish magazine. The article was so unusual that the editors felt compelled to insert a note at the beginning, stating that the topic "merits public discussion" even if "there may be disagreement as to some of the methods" proposed by the authors. The topic was America's response to news of the Holocaust.
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Review of "Defiance"
Los Angeles Times, December 31, 2008
A Russian partisan commander looks dismissively at the Bielski brothers, eyeing tough Zus (Liev Schreiber) and tougher Tuvia (Daniel Craig) and proclaiming, "Jews don't fight."  "These Jews do," comes the prompt reply, and "Defiance," the new film by Edward Zwick is determined to prove that point.  Though one of the standard clichés of the Holocaust is that Europe's Jews were exterminated without offering any resistance, historians have gradually uncovered evidence to the contrary, with the Bielskis being the prime case in point. 
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False Memoir of Holocaust is Canceled
New York Times, December 28, 2008
A man whose memoir about his experience during the Holocaust was to have been published in February has admitted that his story was embellished, and on Saturday evening his publisher canceled the release of the book.
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BHEC Teacher Cadre to meet Thursday, January 14, 2010, 6:30 p.m.
Our guest will be Esperance Uwayirege Taylor, a survivor of the Rwandan Genocide.
More Information


New BHEC PowerPoint Now Available:
"Rescuers: A Model for a Caring Community"


Alexandra Zapruder, author of Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust, coming to Alabama for Teacher Workshops and Community Lectures in November.
Deadline for Workshop Registration: October 19, 2009.
More Information

Congratulations to Recipients of BHEC Scholarships!
The following teachers received scholarships from the BHEC to attend the Belfer Conference at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum this summer:  Kathleen Keelin/Our Lady of the Valley Catholic School, Sharon Wright/Fayetteville Middle School, Shannon Jones/Oneonta Elementary School, Angela Thompson/West Blocton Middle School, Jill Wallace/Spain Park High School.  In addition, Rachel LaMonte of Berry Middle School will represent the Alabama Holocaust Commission at JFR's Lerner Fellowship Program.  A reception for all alumni of the BHEC Scholarship Program will be held on Tuesday, July 28.  This program is made possible through the generosity of the Fred and Brenda Friedman Family Fund of the Birmingham Jewish Foundation.

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Opens New Website on Genocide
As part of our ongoing efforts to teach audiences that preventing and responding to genocide is one of the most compelling ways individuals can choose to act today, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened a new website:  "Preventing Genocide - Learn More and Take Action.  This website offers access to conflict backgrounds and current situation reports; galleries of photographs, videos, and first-hand testimonies from eyewitnesses to the Holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan; resources to help you take action; and a pledge wall where you can see how others have responded to the challenge and make your own commitment.  Best of all, each piece of content can be saved to a personal online account, as well as shared with students, friends, family, and colleagues.
Link to Website


Visiting a Mother's Grave, a Survivor Returns to Auschwitz
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, January 27, 2009
On a gray March day in 2007, I made a visit to what in all likelihood was the grave of my mother, my two younger brothers, Hershek and Moshek, and my infant sister, Itka. The boys were only 11 and 9 when they left the world; Itka was barely 6 months old.
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Teacher Scholarship Applications for Summer Holocaust Workshops Now Being Accepted
Birmingham area middle and high school teachers who are interested in furthering their knowledge about the Holocaust are invited to apply.
Deadline for applications is January 9, 2009.
More Information


ADL's Holocaust Education Program Recognized by Catholic Educational Association
ADL, October 13, 2008
The Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) nationally acclaimed Holocaust education program, Bearing Witness, was honored with the National Catholic Educational Association's 2008 President's Award, during an awards ceremony in Washington, D.C.
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Anne Frank Diary Resonates with Cambodians
The Jewish Journal, October 6, 2008
As a young girl in the early 1990s, Sayana Ser often spent the night cowering in fear with her family in an underground shelter her father had dug beneath their home on the outskirts of this capital city.
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New PowerPoint Now Online
 
A Brief Guide to Judaism includes 87 slides and audio pronunciation of all Hebrew terms.
Find it Here

8th Graders Make Holocaust Measure a Reality
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, August 2008
...Whittaker's St. Francis students pressed Kentucky legislators for the next three years, learning the art of compromise and coping with frustration along the way. Finally, success: House Joint Resolution 6—called the "Ernie Marx Resolution" after the Holocaust survivor who accompanied the students on numerous trips to this Museum—now requires the state to develop a Holocaust and genocide curriculum.
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Chattanooga:  Building a Community One Clip at a Time
Chattanooga Times Free Press, August 20, 2008
...
One Clip has developed a pilot curriculum that 16 local public and private schools will introduce this year, said Alison Lebovitz, the nonprofit’s president. Though they won’t actually be collecting paper clips as the Whitwell students did, she said, they will take their cues from that class.
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