17 posts tagged with WWII and jewish.
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2020: The Year of Chiune Sugihara
In October 2019, the Lithuanian Parliament approved the initiative to name 2020 the Year of Chiune Sugihara (Delfi.en), to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Japanese diplomat’s noble work, and celebrate what would be his 120th birthday. The celebratory peak of the year is Sugihara Week (Visit Kaunas), the event which celebrates the actions of Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara (Sugihara Week). For 29 days, from July 31 to August 28, 1940, he issued more than 6,000 "Visas for Life" (Chiune-Sugihara.jp), saving thousands of Jewish refugees. [via Mltshp] [Previously] [more inside]
Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II
As WWII raged, Soviet ethnomusicologists began documenting Jews' lyrical reactions to their lives—Red Army soldiers, women working in factories on the home front, refugees in Siberia. Now a team of Yiddish scholars, performers, and composers has recorded 17 of the songs, long believed lost. [more inside]
I survived the Warsaw ghetto. Here are the lessons I’d like to pass on
I’m 93, and, as extremism sweeps across Europe, I fear we are doomed to repeat the mistakes which created the Holocaust by Stanisław Aronson
The Philosemitic / Antisemitic Tchotchke Market
Prior to WWII, there were over 3 million Jews in Poland. Today, estimates of the number of Jews living there range from 7,000 to 200,000. Many Poles have never met a Jewish person. But "lucky Jew" (Żyd na szczęście) figurines and oil paintings depicting stereotypical Jews (often wearing black hats, holding money and sporting long noses and sideburns) are becoming popular. [more inside]
"...thou shalt not be a bystander" ― Yehuda Bauer
"I asked him a very old Jewish question: Do you have a bag packed?"
conspiracy of kindness
A Japanese Holocaust rescuer, it is estimated that Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat who served as Vice-Consul for the Empire of Japan in Lithuania in WWII, facilitated the escape of more than 6,000 Jewish refugees to Japanese territory, risking his career and his family's lives. The profoundly moving story is now on YouTube: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6. [more inside]
X-Mensch
Beate Sirota Gordon, 1923-2012; "The Only Woman In The Room"
Beate Sirota Gordon, Long-Unsung Heroine of Japanese Women’s Rights, Dies at 89: a NYT obituary relates the fascinating story of a young woman who was just the right person in just the right place at just the right time and managed to strike a blow for gender equality. [more inside]
Lt. Brad Pitt and his Howling Commandos
Do you know these children?
Do you, or an older relative of yours, recognize any of these children? More than 70 children separated from their families during WWII, now all elderly men and women, are using the Internet to try to find some answers about their pasts, their families, and sometimes even their own names. They are soliciting help and suggestions in the comments sections on each story. [more inside]
Bacterial marketing: the other Oskar Schindler
Upon the Nazi invasion of Poland, pediatrician Eugeniusz Łazowski and his friend Stanisław Matulewicz fabricated a fake typhus epidemic to save Polish Jews from the Nazis. Knowing that typhus-infected Jews would be summarily executed, non-Jews were injected with the harmless Proteus OX19, which would generate false positives for typhus. [more inside]
From the Diary of Adam Czerniakow on the Eve of the Deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto, 1942
"They are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands"On October 4, 1939, a few days after Warsaw's surrender to the Nazis, Adam Czerniaków was made head of the 24 member Judenrat, the Jewish Council (write "Czerniakow" in the linked page's search box) responsible for implementing German orders in the Jewish community (interactive map of the Warsaw ghetto). On July 22, 1942 -- Tisha B'Av, the "saddest day in Jewish history" -- the Judenrat received instructions that all Warsaw Jews were to be deported to the East (exceptions were to be made for Jews working in German factories, Jewish hospital staff, members of the Judenrat and their families, and members of the Jewish police force and their families. Czerniaków tried to convince the Germans at least not to deport the Jewish orphans). Czerniaków kept a diary from September 6, 1939, until the day of his death. It was published in 1979 in the English language as the "The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom", edited by one of the most prominent Holocaust scholars, Raul Hilberg. More inside.
Herr Goering: Self-Hating Nazi?
Nazi's relative turns Israel lover. Matias Goering is a direct descendant of Hitler's right-hand man. He also keeps Shabbat, wears a kippa, and identifies with the Greater Israel vision of West Bank settlers. (via jewlicious)
The Return of Jerry Moses and the Jewish Migration to Shanghai
"Ala ZongGoNin! Ala YouTaNin!". Jerry Moses last walked on Gaoyang Road in 1947. It was called Chaoufoong Road then, and it was home to many of the 18,000 European Jewish refugees who had sought refuge from Nazi Germany in Shanghai's Hongkew District (today known as Hongkou) during the run-up to World War II. He casts his gaze at the lane, his brow loosens and he begins to nod. "This is it, this is it," he says softly. "I know this is it." One week into his first visit to Shanghai in almost 60 years, Moses has found his third home in an exile that lasted from 1941 to 1947. He strides into the space, his manner now much closer to that of the 12-year-old boy who had left than the 70-year-old man who has returned. More inside.
Andrzej Munk: Wry Smiles, Suspicious Glances
Eroica. Film director Andrzej Munk’s tragic death at age thirty-nine might have formed the plot for one of his own darkly sardonic works: a Polish Jew and an active resistance worker during the war, he was returning home from shooting his film Passenger at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1961 when an oncoming truck struck his car. He left behind only four feature films, but his influence was prodigious. As one of the key figures of the postwar “Polish School” of filmmaking, along with Wajda and Kawalerowicz, he helped to shape a vision that broke with the official social realist optimism of Eastern-bloc dogma and cast a skeptical eye on official notions of heroism, nationalism, and life in the Stalinist-occupied state. Mentor to Roman Polanski and Jerzy Skolimowski, his influence can be felt even in the films of a later generation of Polish filmmakers — directors like Zanussi and Kieslowski. More inside.
Boycott France?
Boycott France? An American Jewish Congress trade ad placed in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter compares anti-Semitic violence to that experienced during WWII. Some groups are also calling for a boycott of the Cannes Film Festival. Woody Allen doesn't agree. Can the actions of an idiotic minority really justify a boycott?
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