Showing posts with label holocaust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label holocaust. Show all posts

Saturday, August 3, 2019

The Archbishop of Canterbury wades into Westminster Holocaust memorial debate

From The Telegraph-

The Archbishop of Canterbury has waded into the Westminster Holocaust memorial debate saying that it is right for the structure to be “right next to the home of our democracy”.

Plans for the project were announced in 2016 by former prime minister David Cameron, with the works being led by the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation.

The memorial has been proposed to be built on Victoria Tower Gardens on Millbank and would feature 23 large bronze fin structures and an underground learning centre dedicated to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis as well as millions of other victims.

However they have sparked mounting criticism. The Royal Parks charity, which manage the Grade-II listed park, saying that the plans - which have received cross-party support - would have a “significant harmful impact” on the area.

More here-

 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/08/02/archbishop-canterbury-wades-westminster-holocaust-memorial-debate/

Sunday, June 3, 2018

The Shameful Record of the Church and the Holocaust in Canada

From Canada-

As a reminder of that period, I reread the book None Is Too Many by Irving Abella and Harold Troper. First published in 1983, it documents efforts by the Canadian Civil Service to bar entry to European Jewish refugees trying to save themselves from the Holocaust.
The book’s title, a reply by an unnamed bureaucrat to the question of how many Jews should be admitted to Canada after World War II, is no exaggeration. Few Jewish refugees were admitted to Canada during the immediate post-war period (1945-1948) and only 500 were admitted from 1939-1945, when the search for sanctuary was most desperate.
Abella and Troper make it clear that the civil servants involved were complying with the wishes of the political establishment, from Prime Minister Mackenzie King on down. Due to widespread antisemitism, there were no votes on admitting Jewish refugees to Canada and the frantic efforts of the leaders of the 175,000 member Jewish community were useless, even in exceptional cases related to family reunification or when affluent applicants offered to transfer substantial assets to Canada.
 More here-

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

‘Why Was I Spared?’ Ivan Backer Reflects On Life After Escaping The Holocaust

From New England Public Radio-

In May of 1939, Jewish ten-year-old Ivan Backer boarded a train in Nazi-occupied Prague, headed for the United Kingdom. He was one of over 600 children taken to safety on “Kindertransport” trains, organized by a British stockbroker, Nicholas Winton.

Seventy-seven years later, he’s a former Episcopal minister and neighborhood activist living in Hartford. He tells the story of his life in his memoir, My Train To Freedom, which came out earlier this year.

I sat down with Ivan Backer and asked what he remembers of getting on that train.


More here-

http://nepr.net/news/2016/06/22/why-was-i-spared-author-ivan-backer-reflects-on-life-after-escaping-the-holocaust/

Friday, July 3, 2009

Franz Molnar’s Heirs Fight Over His Bank Account, And Their Identity


Interesting, if slightly off topic (as if we have one)-

Novelist and playwright Franz Molnar’s life was always high on drama. He wrote works that were turned into Hollywood movies and Broadway musicals, including the Rodgers and Hammerstein favorite “Carousel.” In his personal life, Molnar fled Hungary to escape the Nazis and lived the high life in New York City until his death in 1952.

Now, a new chapter in the Jewish émigré’s story is playing out long after his death. This drama involves Molnar’s Swiss bank accounts, an Episcopal priest, Jewish family mythology and an allegation of fraud.

The Swiss bank accounts causing all the trouble were left behind by Molnar and his wife when they fled Hungary before the Nazi onslaught. Like thousands of other Swiss bank accounts lost in the war years, Molnar’s were made public in the Holocaust restitution process a few years back, when a tribunal was set up to disburse the proceeds.

In 2007, Molnar’s great-grandson, Gabor Lukin, came forward to make a claim for the money from these accounts. For years, Lukin was among a few descendants of Molnar who had received royalties from the playwright’s estate, and Lukin assumed that his family also would receive the funds from Molnar’s bank accounts.

The problem was that another family of Molnars already had claimed the money. Elizabeth Rhodes, a corporate consultant from Ohio, had submitted a claim in 2001 for the bank accounts on behalf of her aunt and her father, an Episcopal priest named Peter Molnar. In claiming the funds, Rhodes noted that most of her family is not Jewish, but she pointed to family lore in arguing that her Jewish great-grandfather had been the brother of Franz Molnar.

Rhodes’s claim reached the tribunal first, and her family was awarded $226,000 in 2004. But since Molnar’s real heirs have come forward, the lawyer overseeing the tribunal, Michael Bradfield, has said the relation that Rhodes originally asserted was “completely undocumented, and entirely implausible.”

More here-

http://forward.com/articles/108795/

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Music That Saves?


Birkenau, known as the death camp of Auschwitz, was one of the few camps where music accompanied mass murder. For 54 women who knew how to play instruments, music was a life saver.

The Women’s Orchestra of Birkenau was the only such orchestra commissioned by the SS during World War II. The women played for the crowds newly transported to Birkenau, for the bleary-eyed and emaciated inmates forced to work each day and for the pleasure of their captors. In exchange, they were granted life. Given slightly better treatment than other inmates of Birkenau, they paid for it with their hard practice and with the emotional stress of playing while other prisoners were sent to their graves. Using only the instruments on hand, they played Chopin and Beethoven with mandolins, recorders and flutes. With the exception of their conductor, Alma Rose, all 53 women survived. Three are still alive today.

Now, the sounds of the orchestra can be heard once again, in performances commemorating the women who played for a year and a half at Birkenau. It’s their story of hardship and humanity that compelled contemporary conductor Barbara Pickhardt to create “Music in Desperate Times: Remembering the Women’s Orchestra of Birkenau,” which weaves orchestral music taken from the repertoire of the ensemble with spoken words from the memoirs of orchestra members and with songs of hope and resistance sung by an accompanying chorus.

The concert will be performed March 28 by Ars Choralis, a not-for-profit chorus from upstate New York. The group will perform in a church in Berlin and at the liberation ceremony at Ravensbruck, an all-female concentration camp, later in the year. The spring series, however, begins in New York City, at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. It’s a venue that many say suits the program perfectly. “The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine has got an amazing history of social justice, a commitment that goes beyond any particular religious belief,” program director Alice Radosh said. “It is also one of the most, maybe the most, beautiful venues in New York City.”

http://www.forward.com/articles/104183/