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For the next few months I will stop publishing texts -  Irena Bellert 


15.05.2008r.

June 30 2008

www.independent.co.uk/

Independent.co.uk

Eva Hoffman: 'The first impulse was to write about music'

Eva Hoffman was a budding pianist before her family had to leave Poland for Canada. Fifty years on, she tells Matthew J Reisz how recitals and romance fill her new book


15.05.2008r.

By Dinah A. Spritzer
June 25, 2006

PRAGUE, June 25 (JTA) - Anyone who thinks the planned $58 million Museum of the History of Polish Jews doesn't have the support of general Polish society might have to reconsider.


14.05.2008r.

Trial of Jewish Heritage opened in Poland

thenews.pl
20.06.2008

The Trial of Jewish Heritage Places connected with the history of Polish Jews from the north-western city of Bialystok has been opened today.


14.05.2008r.

From Lucyna Artymiuk

June 30 2008

I am just finishing reading a most interesting book -

Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR 1939-46 ed  Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky

published in 1991
series of articles by various academics


14.05.2008r.

Ha'aretz, May 23, 2008

Whoever controls the past

By Laurence Weinbaum

It was Orwell who observed that whoever controls the past controls the future, and whoever controls the present controls the past. That is why contemporary politics in Poland, a great repository of Jewish history, are of such interest and importance to Jewish historians. In recent months, a heated debate among Polish intellectuals and politicians was triggered by the publication of the Polish edition of Jan Gross' provocative best-seller, "Fear."


24.05.2008r.

FROM THE WEB EDITOR:
On behalf of the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation

May 13th 2008

Irena Sendler, a person admired by all of us, passed away on the 12th of May 2008 in Warsaw Poland at the age of 98.
Her heroic efforts to smuggle out and safely place in hiding 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto led to her arrest.
She was tortured and condemned to death by the Nazis.
Members of the Zegota underground managed to secure her release.
Despite her brush with death her courage allowed her to continue helping those in need. Yad Vashem recognised Irena Sendler as Righteous Among Nations  in 1965.  She received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's  highest civilian decoration.
For her selfless courage, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. May her shining example continue to inspire us.


24.05.2008r.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUKL1511954920080515?sp=true

May she rest in peace.

May 15, 2008

WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland's World War Two resistance heroine Irena Sendler, who saved thousands of Jewish children from the Nazi gas chambers, was buried on Thursday to the accompaniment of Roman Catholic and Jewish prayers.
Sendler, who died on Monday aged 98, was once nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her wartime achievement of smuggling an estimated 2,500 children out of the Warsaw Ghetto.


24.05.2008r.

Dear Bellert Irena,
  
Irena Sendler passed away this week. Sendler, who lived until the age of 98, was a unique and heroic person.
Sendler rescued hundreds of children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Using her position as a social worker, she regularly entered the ghetto, smuggled the children and then placed them with Polish families and institutions.
In 1943 Sendler, who led the children' section of the Zegota organization which helped Jews during the war, was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. She only escaped execution when Zegota managed to bribe some Gestapo officials, and she was released after withstanding severe interrogations, but she did not betray the names of her rescue confidants.


24.05.2008r.

May She Rest in Peace.

From Life in a Jar "News Week".
May 15, 2008.
In memory of Irena Sendler.

She was buried today at St. Boromeusz Church at Powazki Cemetery. Her funeral was at noon, Warsaw time.

Comments from the funeral:
"Professor Michael Glowinski (a child saved by Irena) made a fantastic speech at the cemetery, and Rabbi Schudrich sang a psalm, so it was really something beautiful, and somehow comforting. I don't have any more tears to cry."
"Michael said it ALL." He spoke such special words."


24.05.2008r.

Irena Sendler, Lifeline to Young Jews, Is Dead at 98

By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: May 13, 2008

Irena Sendler, a Roman Catholic who created a network of rescuers in Poland, who smuggled about 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto in World War II, some of them in coffins, died Monday in Warsaw. She was 98.


29.04.2008r.

By GREER FAY CASHMAN
WARSAW, Poland
April 19, 2008

The throngs of Jews and non-Jews from Poland, Israel and as far away as Australia who gathered in and around Poland's Warsaw Ghetto Square on Tuesday proved that time has not diminished respect for heroism and the refusal to bow to a bestial enemy.


28.04.2008r.

Interview with Polish Director Andrzej Wajda: An Elegy for Poland's Painful Past

April 11, 2008

by Vera von Kreutzbruck
- Germany -

Andrzej Wajda was 13 years old when World War II broke out. Together with his mother he lived most of his life in the vain hope that his father might have survived the war: his father's name had never appeared on any official list of Polish soldiers killed in combat. The truth, discovered years later, was that Captain Wajda had been shot cold-bloodedly by the Soviet secret police in a prison in the western Soviet Union. Andrzej and around 22,000 other people had waited for their loved ones in vain.


28.04.2008r.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7347856.stm

Israel's President Shimon Peres and President Lech Kaczynski of Poland, 14
April 2008

The Polish and Israeli presidents visited Treblinka on Monday

Poland is holding events to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.


28.04.2008r.

March 17, 2008

http://www.jpost.com/

The good news is that observant Jews who go to Poland on business, as tourists or to trace their family roots no longer have to fill their suitcases with cans of tuna and packets of powdered soup.

The bad news is that while Jewish life has resurrected itself in Poland and one can walk through the streets in Hassidic garb without attracting undue attention, anti-Semitism still exists.


28.04.2008r.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/975283.html

WARSAW - The powerful, muscle-bound figures on the monument designed by Nathan Rappaport in memory of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters emphasized the emptiness of the square that was once a lively Jewish area, and later a killing ground. None of its inhabitants resembled the strong people on the sculpture. They were heroes of a different ilk.


28.04.2008r.

http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/108003.html

Published: 04/10/2008

Israel and Poland are upgrading ties.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hosted his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, this week for talks on improving bilateral relations.


28.04.2008r.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3269147,00.html

The commemorative ceremonies started at the former Nazi death camp Treblinka

Poles, Israelis and survivors commemorated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the Polish capital on Tuesday, April 15. The insurrection against German occupiers was "a victory over human bestiality," Israel's president said.


21.03.2008r.

By MATTHEW WAGNER

March 15, 2008

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite

Beginning this week, Jews who left Poland for Israel in the wake of the March 1968 "anti-Zionist" disturbances will be allowed to reclaim their Polish citizenship.

Polish Minister of Internal Affairs and Administration Grzegorz Schetyna announced Monday that all Poles who were forced to leave Poland after 1968 would have their citizenship recognized automatically.


21.03.2008r.

Books: Wartime memoir a lesson in finding family treasures

http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=19016

Michael Berenbaum

"Every Day Lasts A Year: A Jewish Family's Correspondence From Poland," edited by Christopher R. Browing, Richard S. Hollander and Nechama Tec (Cambridge University Press, $28).

Over the past several years, a new genre of original Jewish documentation has emerged in closets and attics of Holocaust survivors. The documentation has all the authority of the diaries and notes that were written in situ, within the ghettos, within hiding, even within concentration camps and elsewhere during the Holocaust.


21.03.2008r.

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i27/27b02101.htm

March 15, 2008

Katyn, a name that haunts Poland, may gain greater familiarity in the West. A new book from Yale University Press and a new, Oscar- nominated film from director Andrzej Wajda offer different takes on the Stalinist mass murder of Polish prisoners of war in the spring of 1940 and its 50-year cover-up.


21.03.2008r.

From Warsaw Business Journal
by Adam Zdrodowski

http://www.wbj.pl/?command=article&id=40342&type=wbj

President Lech Kaczyński has honored participants of the March 1968 demonstrations. Commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the so-called "March 1968" events officially started in Poland last week. On March 6, President Lech Kaczyński recognized 45 participants of student and intellectual protests against Poland's communist government.


21.03.2008r.

Warsaw Ghetto borders to be marked in red

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3514753,00.html

 

Sixty-five years after half a million Jews suffered in ghetto, every visitor to Polish capital to be reminded of their fate
Itamar Eichner

Sixty-five years ago it was a place of sorrow and suffering, where hundreds of thousands of Jews lost their lives. But residents or tourists walking in the heart of Warsaw's business district cannot imagine that at the same place, so many years back, 400,000 people were sentenced to death.


21.03.2008r.

Radio Online  -  Radio Polonia
Polish-Jewish relations

Report by Michal Kubicki
March 12, 2006

During a recent visit to the United States, Polish president Lech Kaczynski met with representatives of the American Jewish Committee. Since the fall of communism in Poland in 1989, Polish authorities have made efforts towards improving ties with Jewish communities in Israel and the rest of the world.


29.02.2008r.

The article originally appeared in German in the Frankfurter Rundschau on January 18, 2008.

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1642.html

21 January 2008

Jan Tomasz Gross has taken on the difficult task of removing blind spots in Polish history. His new book "Fear" has sparked an emotional debate in the country of his birth, where anti-Semitism is not a popular subject. By Jakub Kloc-Konkolowicz


29.02.2008r.

Israel's chief rabbi in Poland to revive first post-Holocaust rabbinical group

22/Feb/2008

WARSAW (AFP-EJP)---Israel's chief Ashkenazi rabbi Yona Metzger has arrived in Poland to formally revive the rabbinical association in the country, a highly symbolic step in what before the Holocaust was Europe's Jewish heartland.


29.02.2008r.

Apology for the mistake concerning Krakow !
Dr. Paulsson:

I am writing you in reference to your very well-conceived letters concerning the piece we ran in the February issue of Town & Country by Susan Crandell.We have received numerous letters echoing your complaints about our misstatement of fact, and we deeply regret the error. We do fact-check all of our stories, but unfortunately, the point about the residents of Krakow collaborating with the Nazis was not confirmed with an independent source, and we simply got our facts wrong. As a woman of Polish descent, I am even more remorseful for having made this error.


29.02.2008r.

Emanuel Ringelblum, The Warsaw Ghetto, And The Oyneg Shabes Archive

By:  Shmuel Ben Eliezer
http://www.jewishpress.com

Over the past 12 years that I have been writing this column I discussed the Ringelblum Archives numerous times. The first article was when I saw the archives and the efforts to preserve them. I also wrote about them when a portion went on exhibit in New York, as well as when there was a renewed search for the remaining missing parts on the grounds of the Chinese Embassy in Warsaw.


29.02.2008r.

By: Shmuel Ben Eliezer

In order to emphasize the magnitude of the Holocaust and genocide, Director of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology: Polish Academy of Sciences, Professor Henryk Domanski, created the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, on July 2 2003.


29.02.2008r.

American Jewish Congress

Praises Polish Foreign Minister
for Clear Stance on Anti-Semitism

February 5, 2008

New York - The American Jewish Committee praised the newly-appointed Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski for instructing Polish diplomats around the world to avoid any contact with Jan Kobylanski, leader of the South American Polonia organization, USOPAL.


15.02.2008r.

Dreaded Book on Deaths of Polish Jews Enters Second Print Run in Poland

http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=303

February 4, 2008

Bookstores in Poland are restocking copies of a book on Polish anti-Semitism after World War II as a prosecutor investigates whether it violates a law prohibiting ``slander against the nation.''
The book, ``Fear. Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz'' by Princeton University professor Jan Tomasz Gross, sold out days after the first 25,000 volumes were published. A second print run of 20,000 is being sent to bookstores from today.


15.02.2008r.

http://www.jewishpress.com/print.do/29764/Secular Organizations_In_Poland.html

by ": Shmuel Ben Eliezer
February 6, 2008

I am often asked what Jewish life in Poland is really like. Because I am a practicing religious Jew, I have been told that my writing is often biased towards the religious community and that I ignore the secular Jews who today are the majority in Poland.


15.02.2008r.

In denial

From Economist.com

Russia revives a vicious lie

Feb 7th 2008


30.01.2008r.

SIEC INFO

Jan Tomasz Gross interview, PolAm Dems, John Guzlowski on NPR, The Defense

Shield 1/21/08

Waldemar Piasecki interview with Jan Tomasz Gross, the author of Fear An Appeal by Polish American democratic leaders. Ambassador Nicholas Rey and Marilyn Piurek co-chair of DNC ethnic committee

Therapy with "Fear" [from Tygodnik Przegląd]

Waldemar Piasecki

Associate me with thinking of Jan Karski, whose truths also aroused pseudo-patriotic fury among many know-it-alls about Poland, observes Jan Tomasz Gross in an interview with Waldemar Piasecki.    


30.01.2008r.

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service

Amazon site
Friday, January 18, 2008; A14

WARSAW -- Polish prosecutors are considering taking the unusual step of filing criminal charges against an Ivy League professor for allegedly "slandering the Polish nation" in a book that describes how Poles victimized Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in the aftermath of World War II.


30.01.2008r.

The Economist
Jan 24th 2008

A CRIME and a lie are the twin strands in the shameful tragedy of Katyn: the massacre of 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet secret police, and the cover-up that followed. Now Andrzej Wajda, Poland's leading film maker, has made his last film (he is 81) about what he calls the "unhealed wound" in his country's history.


30.01.2008r.

By Anne Applebaum

Katyn
a film directed by Andrzej Wajda, written by Andrzej Mularczyk and Andrzej Wajda


12.2007r.

FROM THE EDITOR:

My best wishes for the Chanukah, X-mass and a very happy New Year 2008!

I will be in Miami until February. Then I will start again republishing recent articles of interest to members and friends of Polish-Jewish-Heritage Foundation.


19.12.2007r.

JEWS AND BUFFALOES
Victims of Nazi Pseudo-science
FRANK   FOX
Zwoje  Copyright C 1997-2007

Nazi plunder of Warsaw Zoo
It was September 1939. Screams of dying and wounded animals mingled with whistling projectiles and explosions as Warsaw's Zoological Garden, located near the capital's air defences, came under heavy German bombardment. Polar bears ran loose, their white furs streaked with blood. Kasia the elephant died struck by a shell, while her two-year old daughter Tuzinka (only the twelfth known elephant to have been born in a zoo up to that time) trumpeted her distress.


19.12.2007r.

The Associated Press
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=8801369

WARSAW, Poland: In the chilling final scene of "Katyn," the new film from Oscar-winning director Andrzej Wajda, Soviet secret police execute one Polish army officer after another in a dank cellar, washing away the blood with buckets of water.


17.12.2007r.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2960568,00.html
Nov 21, 2007

Poland has announced that former Polish Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski will be a foreign policy advisor for Warsaw's complex relations with Germany, Russia and Israel, which have all come under strain recently.


17.12.2007r.

-
The Associated Press
Published: November 21, 2007
-
http://www.iht.com/articles/

WARSAW, Poland: Poland's new prime minister picked an 85-year-old Auschwitz survivor and former foreign minister as a foreign policy adviser Wednesday.


17.12.2007r.

Wartime Truths

by Andrea Crawford

http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=614

In 1945, Jerzy Andrzejewski's novel of the Warsaw ghetto enraged Poles and Jews alike. How will it read to audiences today?


17.12.2007r.

http://canadianpress.google.com/article/

15 hours ago

WARSAW, Poland - A new documentary film that recounts the heroic efforts and violent deaths of Poles who helped Jews during the Holocaust premiered Wednesday, amid efforts by Poland to alter a lingering reputation for anti-Semitism.


17.12.2007r.

Keeping alive the memory of Krakow's "golden era" of Jewish life

http://www.radio.cz/en/article/98191
[30-11-2007]
 By John Beauchamp

In pre-war Poland - Jews were one of the largest minorities. And in the
southern city of Kraków they played a prominent role in everyday life with a thriving and dynamic culture. Eighty years after this golden era, the International Cultural Centre is hosting an exhibition that serves as a reminder of what everyday life in Jewish Kraków was really like
In pre-war Poland - Jews were one of the largest minorities.


17.12.2007r.

Holocaust survivor meets savior after 62 years

By Robert MacMillan
Nov 23, 2007

http://www.reuters.com/article/

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Golda Bushkanietz is not religious but when Irena Walulewicz helped save her from death at the hands of the Nazis, she thought an angel saved her.


17.12.2007r.

An enduring myth: "The Poles were worse than the Nazis."

http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html

Friday, October 26, 2007

Last week I was in Poland. While there I kept stressing to the people with whom I was traveling that it is wrong to depict Poland as a place of unending anti-Semitism or to fall prey to the absurd but, nonetheless, oft-heard comment made by Jews who visit the place, "The Poles were worse than the Nazis."


17.12.2007r.

A hero brought to stage

Mary Vallis, National Post  Published:

Monday, December 03, 2007
http://www.nationalpost.com/todayspaper/story.html?id=139968

Eight years ago, deep in the heart of the American Midwest, inside a Kansas classroom, four students needed a National History Day project and told their teacher they wanted to learn more about the Holocaust.


24.11.2007r.

The Polish Witch-Hunt

By Adam Michnik,

Translated from the Polish

 by Olga Amsterdamska, Irena Grudzinska Gross

The New York Review of Books

Volume 54, Number 11 . June 28, 2007

Recently, the Polish government attempted to strip Bronisław Geremek of his seat in the European Parliament, to which he had been elected in 2004. The Parliament immediately voted to condemn the Polish government's action. One of Poland's most distinguished public figures, Geremek was a leader of Solidarity and a former political prisoner of the Communist regime. As foreign minister from 1997 to 2000, he was responsible for Poland's accession to NATO. The Polish government tried to have him dismissed because Geremek had refused to sign a declaration that he had not been a secret police agent during the Communist years.


24.11.2007r.

[The New York Times]
Seeking witnesses of Holocaust

October 19, 2007
Father Desbois' subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter.


22.11.2007r.

Together Down The Rabbit Hole Of War

In an Austrian labor camp, Rachel Mitzmacher and righteous gentile Wladyslaw Misiuna forged a lifetime friendship.

by Carolyn Slutsky
Staff Writer

It was in a warehouse used for breeding rabbits in Nazi-occupied Poland that the creation story of the Mitzmacher-Misiuna family friendship began.


22.11.2007r.

The jumble of political parties in Poland and other nations just fosters volatility.

By Timothy Garton Ash The Los Angeles Times

October 25, 2007

Every so often, just when you're getting tired of it, you are reminded what a wonderful thing democracy is. Last Sunday, young Poles queued up patiently, not just in Warsaw and Wroclaw but in Dublin and London, to vote for a Poland in which they would have a future.


22.11.2007r.

Michael Freund
THE JEDRUSALEM POST
October 30, 2007
http://www.jpost.com/

Slowly but energetically, the circle of worshipers made its way around the interior of Krakow's Kupa synagogue, their voices rising ever more forcefully in song and prayer.


22.11.2007r.

By Beverly Beckham,  November 4, 2007

http://www.boston.com/

I thought that Auschwitz might explain it. That's why I went. To learn. To know.


22.11.2007r.

Out of the Attic, Family Memoirs With a Nazi Past

Berliner Katrin Himmler
Was Shocked at SS Ties;
Grandmother's Connections

By LAURA SANTINI
November 7, 2007; Page A1

BERLIN -- As a young girl, Katrin Himmler asked her grandmother about the man in a black suit in a photograph hanging on her living-room wall. Her grandmother didn't say much, but she cried.
The man in the picture was Ms. Himmler's grandfather Ernst, a brother of Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler. The little that Katrin's family did tell her about her grandfather, who disappeared during fierce fighting in Berlin in 1945, was that he was apolitical.


29.09.2007r.

By Brandon Griggs

The Salt Lake Tribune
09/08/2007

In Nazi-occupied Warsaw during World War II, two resourceful keepers of the city's bombed-out zoo rescued Jews by smuggling them into empty animal enclosures. At a time when handing a thirsty Jew a cup of water was punishable by death, this brave Polish couple outwitted the surrounding Germans and spared the lives of some 300 people.


29.09.2007r.

http://www.thejewishpress.com/

By:  Shmuel Ben Eliezer

Date Posted: September 11, 2007

For many, Polish Jewry is a misnomer; they (even those that come to visit) think that there is no longer any Jewish life, that it was all killed in the Holocaust. In the past year, I have been privileged to see just how much life there is in Poland.


29.09.2007r.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iAKMjctZbV4wXxF3-Hk4RTArypFA

Poland's acclaimed director Andrzej Wajda trained the bright light of cinema on Wednesday on one of his country's darkest episodes: that of the Soviet massacre of 22,500 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940.


29.09.2007r.

Note on Place Names
Note on Transliteration

Part I Polish - Jewish Relations in North America


29.09.2007r.

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20070912/78405407.htm

September 12, 2007

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Maxim Krans) - When Russia was recognized as the de facto successor to the U.S.S.R. it inherited not only its property, nuclear arsenal and a huge foreign debt, but also the heavy, often unbearable, burden of historic responsibility for the policies and actions of former regimes.


29.09.2007r.

Polish leader honours massacred officers on Russia visit 9/17/07 http://www.russiatoday.ru/features/news/14259/video

MOSCOW (AFP) - Poland's Lech Kaczynski on Monday made his first visit as president to Russia for highly charged commemorations for 22,500 Polish servicemen massacred by Soviet secret police in World War II.


07.09.2007r.

http://www.polskieradio.pl/zagranica/dokument.aspx?iid=58175

Singer's Warsaw
06.09.2007

The 4th festival of Jewish Culture is in full swing in the Polish capital. It is yet another festival presenting the Jewish culture and tradition in Poland after the Krakow Jewish Festival held in summer. The Warsaw event is entitled- Singer's Warsaw.


07.09.2007r.

Po-Lin

September 06 , 2007
Day Of Remembrance In Lodz
By:  Shmuel Ben Eliezer
http://www.thejewishpress.com/

Date Posted: September 5, 2007

A Day of Remembrance for the Jews of the Lodz Ghetto was recently held in the city. The mayor of Lodz, the Israel Ambassador to Poland and the Chief Rabbi of Poland led the march, of nearly 1,000, from the Jewish cemetery to the site of the Radegast Train Station where the Jews had been gathered before being sent to their deaths in Auschwitz.


07.09.2007r.

http://www.thenews.pl/archives/1128-Polands-Cardinal-Dziwisz-wants-Radio-Maryja-put-under-scrutiny.html

Poland's Cardinal Dziwisz wants Radio Maryja put under scrutiny

Created: Tuesday, September 4. 2007

Catholic weekly "Tygodnik Powszechny" has published a speech by Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz - a former assistant to John Paul II - in which he appeals to Polish bishops to take the controversial Catholic media Radio Maryja and Trwam TV under close scrutiny.


07.09.2007r.

'We can call this conference anti-Israeli,'
Polish MEP* says
Yaakov Lappin

http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3438591,00.html

A conference of UN NGOs (non-governmental organizations) on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to be hosted at the European Parliament this month, will be boycotted by Polish Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from across the political spectrum, who say that the conference is biased against Israel.


07.09.2007r.

From: Aragorn
To: czestochowajews-yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2007 8:21 AM
Subject: [czestochowajews] Cemetery Update
RECEIVED FROM Lucyna

...

This morning,  Halina Wasilewicz (Chair of the Czewa TSKZ) and Prof Jerzy Mizgalski  and I (on behalf of our World Society) composed a letter to the City President of Czestochowa, Dr Tadeusz Wrona, expressing our shock at the desecration of graves in our cemetery and the fear that one act of stupidity and vandalism such as this, could undo all the efforts of not only Sigmund Rolat and our World Society, but also that of Dr Wrona and the City of Czestochowa over the last decade - efforts, not only to protect the Jewish heritage of this city, but also the promotion of dialogue and understanding that has been built up over that decade between Jews and Catholics in this city.


07.09.2007r.

The Jewish Press
By: Shmuel Ben Eliezer    

Wednesday, August 15, 2007
http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/23265/Po-Lin.html

Vandals Desecrate Cemetery

Last week, Mr. Sigmund Rolat visited his birthplace in Poland, the city of Czestochowa. As he does on every trip, he took time out to pay his respects to the local Jewish cemetery. On this last trip, he made the horrible discovery that approximately 100 matzevot (gravestones) had been marked with anti-Semitic phrases and Nazi symbols. The markings included the letters SS, swastikas and the slogan "Jude Raus" ("Jews Out" written in German).


07.09.2007r.

3 August 2007

http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=26&story_id=42569

WARSAW (AFP) - Russian and Polish authorities on Thursday published a hefty volume of documents, many of them never declassified before, which shed new light on the ill-fated 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis.


17.07.2007r.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/11533/Auschwitz+horror+camp+is+renamed

AUSCHWITZ HORROR CAMP IS RENAMED

Thursday June 28,2007

THE notorious Auschwitz concentration camp is to be renamed, after a campaign to make it clear that the death centre was established and run by Germans, not by Poles.
The Polish government an­nounced yesterday that Unesco " the UN's cultural arm " has accepted its request for a change of name.


17.07.2007r.

Not just for Jews: Companies show
support for Polish Jewish museum

By Dinah A. Spritzer
June 25, 2006

PRAGUE, June 25 (JTA) - Anyone who thinks the planned $58 million Museum of the History of Polish Jews doesn't have the support of general Polish society might have to reconsider.


17.07.2007r.

7 Tammuz 5767, 23 June 07 04:48
by Hillel Fendel

(IsraelNN.com) Plans are underway to eternalize the history and contributions of Jewry in both Poland and Alaska. Half the world's Jews trace their ancestry to Poland; somewhat fewer hail from Alaska.


17.07.2007r.

JTA Wire Service
Dinah A. Spritzer
JUNE 23, 2007
Prague

http://www.jewishtimes.com/News/6688.stm

The June 26 groundbreaking at the site in Warsaw where the Museum of the History of Polish Jews is scheduled to open in 2009 will feature a speech by newly elected Israeli President Shimon Peres. Peres, a native of Poland, was one of the early supporters of the $65 million museum, where visitors in eight galleries will be able to explore the 1,000-year history of Polish Jewry.


17.07.2007r.

By Adam Michnik, Translated from the Polish by Irena Grudzinska Gross

http://www.nybooks.com/artics/20331

Recently, the Polish government attempted to strip Bronisław Geremek of his seat in the European Parliament, to which he had been elected in 2004. The Parliament immediately voted to condemn the Polish government's action. One of Poland's most distinguished public figures, Geremek was a leader of Solidarity and a former political prisoner of the Communist regime. As foreign minister from 1997 to 2000, he was responsible for Poland's accession to NATO. The Polish government tried to have him dismissed because Geremek had refused to sign a declaration that he had not been a secret police agent during the Communist years.


17.07.2007r.

Po-Lin

By: Shmuel Ben Eliezer
Wednesday, June 13, 2007

http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/21838/Po-Lin.html

Summer Travel to Poland (Part II)

When traveling, it is best to do a little homework first ; the more you know and prepare for a trip the more you will get out of it.


17.07.2007r.

Tickets Please

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3406901,00.html

09:45 , 05.31.07

Concentration camps may charge for entry ticket

Some of most notorious Nazi death camps, now run as museums, could soon demand entrance fee from visitors to help to finance educational facilities, The Times reports. 'These are graveyards; you do not pay to mourn the dead,' says spokesman for Central Board of Jews in Germany
Ynet


17.07.2007r.

"On what Poles and Jews don't like to remember"

http://www.dialog.org/dialog_pl/michn01.html

Author: Adam Michnik (editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza daily, former leader of anti-communist opposition, human rights activist,)
Source: dialog.org. (Lecture given in July 1995 in Krakow, on a conference entitled "Polish remembrance - Jewish remembrance", first published in Tygodnik Powszechny of 16th July 1995)
Translation: MoPoPressReview (beta version)

The problem of Jewish remembrance of Poland is anti-Semitism. But the problem of Polish remembrance, is that Poles often encounter hostility from Jews.
My roots


10.06.2007r.

The tolerance must be mutual

By Wladyslaw Bartoszewski
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/

June 1 2007

I am a Polish Catholic from Warsaw, now visiting Israel for the 15th time. I belong to an older generation of Poles, but have continued to write, engage in historical research, and take an active part in public and political life. In Israel, this generation includes personalities like Prof. Israel Gutman, of Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem, and Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres, highly respected in Poland since winning the Nobel Peace Prize.


10.06.2007r.

Groundbreaking for Museum of Jewish History of Polish Jews
By: Shmuel Ben Eliezer
Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Po-Lin
tp://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/21517/Po-Lin.html     

It has been more than 10 years since its conception, but finally the long-awaited groundbreaking ceremony for the Museum of Jewish History of Polish Jews has been set for June 26, 2007.


10.06.2007r.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/wn_report/2007/06/05/2007-06- 05 moving diary of polish anne frank unveil.html
BY ARON HELLER
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Tuesday, June 5th 2007

Stanislawa Sapinska of Poland, center, is accompanied through the Hall of Names at Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial during a ceremony marking the diary's publication.


10.06.2007r.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/866556.html

By Israel Gutman

Several days ago, on May 25, Haaretz published an article by Yitzhak Laor entitled "The east is ours." In the piece, Laor discussed the frescoes of writer and artist Bruno Schulz, which were brought to Yad Vashem, in Israel. Laor complains, "The truth is that Hebrew readers knew nothing about Schulz until 1979," the year when "Cinnamon Shops," a book of his stories, was published in Hebrew.


10.06.2007r.

By JANICE ARNOLD
Staff Reporter
http://www.cjnews.com/viewarticle.asp?id=11767

Renata Zajdman of Montreal, a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto shares Irena Sendler's story with high shool students from Uniontown Kansas


10.06.2007r.

A letter from Norman Conard
After the trip to Montreal
25 May 2007

Montreal, you were wonderful.  We just returned from a powerful set of presentations in Montreal, Canada.  We salute Herman Gruenwald and the Eva and Herman Gruenwald Holocaust Education Fund for bringing us to Canada.  Also, we thank Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom for making this trip possible.

We presented at the Polish Consulate in Montreal, to the Polish Jewish Heritage Foundation.  Thanks to the foundation president, Ilona Gruda for her kindness and the dinner.  Also, thanks to the Polish Ambassador to Canada and the other embassy and consulate officials who visited our presentations.


10.06.2007r.

The Family Who Died for Sheltering Jews
Zenit News Agency

March 23, 2007
 

ROME, MARCH 23, 2007 (Zenit.org).- For harboring Jews, the nine members of the Ulma family were executed by firing squad in 1944 in their German-occupied Polish village.


10.06.2007r.

North American Council
Update
June 8 2007

Dear Friends,

As you already know, the much anticipated groundbreaking ceremony for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews will take place in Warsaw on June 26. For this MHPJ North American Council update, we'd like to share with you some of the events surrounding this historic occasion.


02.06.2007r.

Life in a Jar in Montreal
A letter from Norman Conard
After the trip to Montreal
25 May 2007

Montreal, you were wonderful.  We just returned from a powerful set of presentations in Montreal, Canada.  We salute Herman Gruenwald and the Eva and Herman Gruenwald Holocaust Education Fund for bringing us to Canada.  Also, we thank Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom for making this trip possible.


31.05.2007r.


02.05.2007r.

American Leads a New Generation of Polish Jews
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/25/AR2007032501007.html

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 26, 2007; A01

WARSAW -- The anti-Semitic hooligan picked on the wrong guy when he yelled a slur, hurled a punch and fired pepper spray at a Jew walking near a synagogue here last May.


02.05.2007r.

Po-Lin

Sigmund Rolat And Wayne Zuckerman Honored At YU Museum
http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/21196/Po-Lin.html
 By: Shmuel Ben Eliezer

Monday, April 2, 2007

Sigmund Rolat And Wayne Zuckerman Honored At YU Museum

The exhibit "And I Still See Their Faces," at the Yeshiva University Museum in the Jewish History Center in N.Y., was the site of a gala reception honoring two of Polish Jewry's greatest friends, Mr. Sigmund Rolat and Wayne Zuckerman.


02.05.2007r.

'Faces' are traces of a decimated culture

Friday, March 23, 2007

PHOTOGRAPHY
And I Still See Their Faces: The Vanished World of Polish Jews

Where: Yeshiva University Museum, 15 W. 16th St., New York When: 11 a.m.- 5 p.m. Sundays and Tuesdays-Thursdays through June 24 How much: $8; $6 seniors, students and children ages 5-17. Price includes admission to other exhibits in the Center for Jewish History, where the museum is located. Call (212) 294-8330 or go to www.yumuseum.org. For the exhibit catalog, go to www.shalom.org.pl.


02.05.2007r.

An Archive With Tales To Tell

By Anne Applebaum

Tuesday, March 6, 2007; A19 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/05/AR2007030501186.html

Anyone who has ever had the good luck to work in old archives knows how surprising they can be. A thick and unappetizing file might, with patience, yield a wealth of interesting detail; a pile of yellowed papers can contain the solution to an old riddle. Recently, an amateur archivist stumbled across the letters of Otto Frank, Anne Frank's father, in a collection of documents that had been gathering dust in the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for 30 years -- proving that there was still more to learn, even about the most famous of all Holocaust victims, even in the middle of New York City.


02.05.2007r.

For these students, restoring Jewish cemeteries in Poland means history is alive

By Tamar Rotem
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/839602.html

Twelfth grader Eliana Kessler has gotten used to the surprised reactions she gets when she tells people that her pre-army service trip will be a visit to Jewish cemeteries in Poland. It will be the second time that Kessler will be restoring old gravestones, and the names of the Polish towns she has already visited roll off her tongue.


02.05.2007r.

We Will Never Forget Their Faces

Carolyn Slutsky - Staff Writer

The Jewish Week
22 March 200
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=13806

Haunting photo exhibit brings together 450 images - and other artifacts - of Jewish life in prewar Poland


17.04.2007r.

SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH FORMER POLISH FOREIGN MINISTER WLADYSLAW BARTOSZEWSKI

"A Family Clan Is in Power"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,466540,00.html
20.02.2007

Former Polish Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, an Auschwitz survivor and a veteran of the Warsaw Uprising, talks to SPIEGEL about the center-right regime of the Kaczynski twins, dissatisfaction in Poland and soured relations with Germany.


17.04.2007r.

Poles Asking Questions

Ryszard Bankowicz

Reprinted with permission from European Jewish Press

March 20,  2007

Jews lived in Poland for 900 years before World War Two, and about half the Jewish victims of the Nazis came from Poland. Today, Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka is a senior government representative of President Lech Kaczynski, charged with Polish-Jewish relations


17.04.2007r.

VIEW POINT

An Overlooked Renaissance
Shana Penn

On one of my recent trips to Poland, a young Jewish man studying at Warsaw University asked me: "Why do you American Jews send your children on death camp tours of Poland? Why choose only death when you could show life?

Shana Penn / photo Bernard Osser


17.04.2007r.

Polish radio broadcasts in Hebrew

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6495145.stm

Jewish culture is undergoing a revival in Poland

Poland's public radio station has begun broadcasting a daily programme in Hebrew for Israelis, many of whom have roots in Poland.


17.04.2007r.

March of the Memory in Krakow

http://www.ejpress.org/article/15308

By Mike Urbaniak, 22 March 2007 

KRAKOW, Poland (EJP)--- Hundreds of people, including a large group of Israeli youths, marched through the streets of Krakow on March 11 in an annual commemoration of the thousands of Krakow Jews killed by the Nazis during WWII.


19.03.2007r.

Museum to Tackle Poland's Complexities

March 08, 2007 - Bryan Schwartzman, Staff Writer

http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/12374/

The idea of a museum dedicated to retelling the history of Polish Jewry -- a state-of-the-art institution erected on Polish soil -- is moving closer to reality after more than a decade of planning, fundraising and, at times, heated debate over what exactly it should convey.


16.03.2007r.

By Yossi Lempkowicz
http://www.ejpress.org/article/news/14535
27/Feb/2007

BRUSSELS (EJP) --- The President of the European Parliament is likely to seize the parliament's bureau this week on eventual sanctions against a Polish MEP whose anti-Semitic booklet has sparked outrage among European Union officials, Jewish organisations and in Poland.


16.03.2007r.

http://www.polskieradio.pl/zagranica/dokument.aspx?iid=48740
23.02.2007

President  Lech Kaczynski is deeply shocked by the views expressed by Polish MEP Maciej Giertych in his publication 'Civilisations at War in Europe'.


16.03.2007r.

THE LOST