Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 26 - 39 of 39
BERLIN (JTA) - Nearly 80 years after the last train sent Jews to almost certain death from the main railway station in Wurzburg, a memorial to those who perished was dedicated in the German city. The memorial, designed by artist Matthias Braun, features a collection of suitcases, backpacks and assorted travel gear made of stone, ceramic and other materials. The luggage, its owners unseen, stands in front of the main station. Nearby are information steles with historical photos. In a modern...
(JTA)-Pianist Igor Levit says he has received death threats and is warning about an increase in hate crimes in Germany. The Russian-born musician, 32, whose family immigrated to Germany in 1995, said he received an email in mid-November threatening an assassination attempt against him at a concert in southern Germany. His spokeswoman told the German media that Levit informed the police and then played the concert under tight security. In an essay for the Sunday edition of the Tagesspiegel newspa...
(JTA)—A major German industry family will donate tens of millions of dollars to support Holocaust survivors and former forced laborers in the Nazi era. In addition to one-time donations to the Claims Conference and individual laborers, the Reimann family’s JAB firm has created a foundation designed to distribute 25 million euros ($27.8 million) annually to programs teaching about the Holocaust and democratic values. The announcement comes months after the Reimann family, which is worth at least 20 billion euros (about $22.27 billion), said his...
(JTA)-German-Jewish film producer Artur Brauner, whose award-winning films include "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" and "Europa Europa," has died at the age of 100. Brauner, who died Sunday in Berlin, was considered one of the most important producers in postwar Germany. Born in August 1918 in Lodz, Poland, Brauner fled to the Soviet Union in 1939 with his parents and four siblings, thus escaping the fate of other family members who were murdered in the massacres by German forces at Babi Yar...
BERLIN (JTA)-For Sigmount Koenigsberg, the most searing scene in the U.S.-made "Holocaust" miniseries broadcast here 40 years ago was when a German child throws photos of a Jewish family into a fireplace. The pictures curl up and melt in the flames. The moment "somehow burned into me," recalls Koenigsberg, 58, a Jew who lives in Berlin. In fact, the four-part series starring a young Meryl Streep and James Woods-first shown in the United States in 1978-burned itself into the consciences of many...
BERLIN (JTA)-In an unusual sight, the people lazing about or strolling down the paths in several parks here on a sun-drenched Sunday were wearing gleaming white kippahs. Seventy volunteers handed out some 6,000 of the satin yarmulkes in total at five parks in the German capital to counter a recent anti-Semitic incident targeting a man wearing the Jewish head covering. Three non-Jewish friends planned the event, dubbing it "Kopf Hoch"-literally "Keep your head high," or "Cheer Up." "It's always...
BERLIN (JTA)-In late 1943, the Germans were desperate to cover all traces of their death camp in Sobibor, Poland. They demolished buildings, bulldozed the evidence, planted trees. More than 70 years later, archaeologists led by Yoram Haimi of the Israel Antiquities Authority set about excavating the site, uncovering gas chambers, mass graves-and, late last year, a girl's silver pendant. It is engraved with a date, the place name "Frankfurt" and the Hebrew words "mazal tov." A cry from the...
(JTA)-Forty-five years after the murderous PLO attack on Israeli Olympic team members at the 1972 games, a memorial dedicated to the victims opened today in Munich. The memorial-largely realized through the persistent efforts of family members-features the biographies of the 11 Israeli athletes and coaches and a German police officer killed in the attack on panels with texts in German, Hebrew and English. "We wanted to give the victims their identity back in the eyes of the public," Bavarian Minister of Culture Ludwig Spaenle told the media on...
BERLIN (JTA)-It's a drizzly Saturday morning in May. Some 160 young Jews, mostly European and ranging from Orthodox to secular, have come to the Hotel Berlin to talk about everything under the sun. Well, almost. The upbeat, weekend-long event did not focus on anti-Semitism, the Holocaust or Israel, and thus the gathering reflected a shifting approach to Jewish continuity in Europe, 72 years after the end of World War II. Under the theme "Our World in Transition," participants in Junction...
BERLIN (JTA)-Even before the deadly attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, Jews in Germany were divided in their approach to the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Muslim countries since 2014. Citing a Jewish moral duty to aid the displaced, many Jewish organizations, synagogue groups and individuals have rallied to help the newcomers, including asylum seekers fleeing the civil war in Syria. But some Jews have warned that the influx of immigrants risks importing to Germany the...
BERLIN (JTA)-This month marks 50 years since Israel and West Germany established diplomatic ties. It has been an understandably complex relationship, launched two decades after the Holocaust ended and 14 years after West Germany committed to reparations "both moral and material" for the genocide committed by the Nazis. (The decision to accept German money and goods was contentious among Israelis, some of whom referred to the payouts as "blood money.") Normalized relations between Israel and...
KRAKOW, Poland (JTA)-What kept you alive? Did your non-Jewish friends reject you? Could you ever forgive? Those were some of the questions posed by Jewish young adults to Holocaust survivor Marcel Tuchman at the Galicia Jewish Museum here. "What kept me alive was having my father with me," said Tuchman, 93, a physician from New York who was born in Poland and survived several concentration camps, including Auschwitz. "And another thing was the hope I had that one day I will be able to tell the...
BERLIN (JTA)—The extraordinary disclosure that a trove of more than 1,400 vanished artworks were found in a Munich apartment has raised more questions than it has answered. What were these works, which were produced by masters such as Chagall, Matisse and Picasso? Who are their rightful owners? And where is Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a Holocaust-era art dealer in whose apartment they were found? Responding to growing international pressure, German authorities have begun to offer some preliminary answers. A few weeks ago, the state p...
BERLIN (JTA)—I was 23 when I first met my cousin Gilbert Michlin. He was sitting at a brasserie near his office in Paris wearing a dark suit with a folded handkerchief poking out of the breast pocket. His short, dark hair was perfectly combed. He said, in charmingly accented English, “There is one thing I must tell you: I was in Auschwitz.” Of course, I already knew. But I had never met a survivor before, let alone our French cousin, who had been a slave laborer for Siemens at the death camp....
