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→ 14 May 2019
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CHRISTCHURCH, Sunday 2pm: “Denial”

Deborah Liptstadt

On Sunday in Christchurch we will be screening the movie “Denial”, the fascinating story of how a British court found David Irving guilty of being a fraudulent Holocaust denier after accusing historian Deborah Lipstadt of libel after she called him out.

Here’s an article by Lipstadt commenting on Anti-Semitism in the US today.  However, there are themes here that should resonate with New Zealand readers. 

The NZ government’s silence regarding the recent Gaza rocket attacks, and not calling out BDS actions in New Zealand as anti-Semitism show how conflicted our government’s attitudes are in relation to Israel.

The screening will be on Sunday, May 19, 2pm, Northwood Villa Clubrooms, Northwood Villa Crescent, Northwood, Christchurch 8051. Please bring a plate of finger food for afternoon tea.  We’d be grateful if you refrained from bringing any pork and/or seafood products.  

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→ 24 April 2019
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Anne Frank’s Diary translated into te reo Māori | Stuff

Boyd Klap has led the project to have Anne Frank's diary translated into te reo Māori. Te Rātaka a Tētahi Kōhine will be published in June 2019.
ROBERT KITCHIN/STUFF
Boyd Klap has led the project to have Anne Frank’s diary translated into te reo Māori. Te Rātaka a Tētahi Kōhine will be published in June 2019.

Parihaka felt like the right place to speak about discrimination.

That’s what Dutch businessman Boyd Klap reckoned.

His visit in 2017 to the settlement that symbolises peaceful resistance was to talk about Māori involvement in the Anne Frank travelling exhibition, to show the parallels between discrimination during the war and what Māori faced in colonisation.

At question time during that Parihaka visit after his talk at a marae there one woman asked if  Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl had ever been translated into te reo Māori.

The story of Anne and her family, who were hidden in an annexed apartment in Amsterdam by non-Jewish friends for three years during the Nazi occupation of Holland during World War II, has been translated into more than 70 languages and published in 60 countries.

But translated into te reo? He didn’t know.

So began his next project for the diary which has been the subject of two exhibitions, both accompanied by a focus on discrimination in the modern world.

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→ 23 April 2019
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The Frenchman who used games to save Jewish children | NZ Herald

Georges Loinger

Heartwarming….

It had all started as a game. During World War II, when hundreds of Jewish children were hidden at chateaus in the French countryside, kept out of sight from the nation’s Nazi occupiers and Vichy collaborators, Georges Loinger entertained them with calisthenics, football matches and ball games.

Tall and athletic, Loinger was a Jewish engineer turned physical-education teacher, whose blond hair and blue eyes helped him “pass” as a non-Jew while he travelled across France, secretly visiting the chateaus and other makeshift refugee centres to keep his young wards healthy with exercise.

But as anti-Semitic legislation gave way to mass deportations and murder, his exercise routines turned into a morbid form of training, preparation for the day in which Loinger would, if everything went smoothly, smuggle the children across the border into neutral Switzerland.

As a grim backup, it was also preparation in case the children were discovered and sent to a concentration camp.

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→ 19 April 2019
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Otago dealer to continue to sell Nazi memorabilia | NZ Herald

Barry White, Nazi Memorabilia Dealer

An Otago second-hand dealer is defending his range of Nazi memorabilia and says he has sold several swastika badges since the Christchurch attacks.

The New Zealand Jewish Council said while it recognises the legal right of people to profit from Nazi memorabilia, it hopes they appreciate the suffering seeing such items causes vulnerable communities.

Trash Converters owner and manager Barry White sells a wide range of Nazi memorabilia at his Palmerston store.

He said it was mostly imitation, including swastika badges and armbands, plus Waffen SS insignia.

He also offers military memorabilia from a host of other countries, including Allied forces, though toys are his biggest seller.

Among his most popular Nazi items were lapel badges bearing a swastika.

Three of the badges had been sold since the Christchurch terror attacks, he said.

In the same cabinet as the badges was a large red coffin sash, again bearing a swastika.

Also available for purchase was the Skull and Crossbones insignia of the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf, or the “Death’s Head” division.

It was responsible for several war crimes, including the mass execution of Jews in Poland, and the Le Paradis massacre, where they machine-gunned 97 British troops captured during a retreat.

Asked about the crimes of the Nazis, White remained unapologetic.
 
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→ 3 April 2019
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The Holocaust Memorial of 70,000 Stones | BBC


Stolpersteine, or ‘stumbling stones’, are commemorative plaques honouring victims of the Holocaust

At the end of a quiet, suburban cul-de-sac in north-eastern Berlin, Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer quickly ushers me into his garage. He casts a watchful glance down the road, as if to check I’ve come here alone.

“I’d ask you not to mention the precise location,” he said. “The neighbours all know what I do, but I don’t want any outside trouble.”

Inside, the garage smells of fresh cement, with lingering wafts of strong coffee and cigarettes. There’s a back door open onto a garden, letting in a wash of late-afternoon sun. A large-scale map of Germany is pinned to the far wall. In the corner, there’s a simple workbench, where Friedrichs-Friedländer has left a hammer, a set of metal stamps, and a sheet of paper bearing a series of names, dates and the word ‘Auschwitz’.

For the last 14 years, Friedrichs-Friedländer has hand-engraved individual Holocaust fates onto small commemorative plaques called Stolpersteine, or ‘stumbling stones’. Each plaque is a 10cm brass square affixed on top of a cuboid concrete block that’s installed into the pavement directly before a Holocaust victim’s last known, voluntary residence.

There are now more than 70,000 of these stones around the world, spanning 20 different languages. They can be found in 2,000-plus towns and cities across 24 countries, including Argentina, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, Slovenia and Ukraine. Together, they constitute the world’s largest decentralised memorial.

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→ 24 February 2019
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How I beat the Nazis and survived: 100-year-old tells her story | NZ Herald


Lena Goldstein hid under German uniforms and used her wits to survive the Holocaust in the Warsaw ghetto. Photo / Supplied, Sydney Jewish Museum

When the Nazi soldiers came to take her away to Treblinka camp and be gassed, Lena Goldstein managed to hide under a pile of German uniforms in a laundry.

It wasn’t the first or last time Lena had tricked the Nazis or watched them take someone she loved off to the extermination camps.

But the day remains seared in her mind, and as she tells her story, having just celebrated her 100th birthday in Sydney, it is with a freshness and an urgency to ensure the atrocities are not forgotten.

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→ 28 November 2018
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CNN poll reveals depth of anti-Semitism in Europe | CNN

Anti-Semitic stereotypes are alive and well in Europe, while the memory of the Holocaust is starting to fade, a sweeping new survey by CNN reveals. More than a quarter of Europeans polled believe Jews have too much influence in business and finance. Nearly one in four said Jews have too much influence in conflict and wars across the world.

One in five said they have too much influence in the media and the same number believe they have too much influence in politics.

Meanwhile, a third of Europeans in the poll said they knew just a little or nothing at all about the Holocaust, the mass murder of some six million Jews in lands controlled by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s.

Those are among the key findings of a survey carried out by pollster ComRes for CNN. The CNN/ComRes poll interviewed more than 7,000 people across Europe, with more than 1,000 respondents each in Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Poland and Sweden.

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→ 20 November 2018
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UNESCO launches Holocaust education website | NZ Herald

PARIS (AP) — The U.N. culture and education agency has teamed up with the World Jewish Congress to launch a website to counter Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.

UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay and WJC President Ronald Lauder unveiled the interactive “Facts about the Holocaust ” site at the cultural agency’s Paris headquarters on Monday.

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→ 8 October 2018
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My grandfather wasn’t a Nazi-fighting war hero — he was a brutal collaborator | Salon

Jonas Noreika

A deathbed promise led to me discovering his complicity in the Holocaust — and what it means beyond my family

Eighteen years ago, my dying mother asked me to continue working on a book about her father, Jonas Noreika, a famous Lithuanian World War II hero who fought the Communists. Once an opera singer, my mother had passionately devoted herself to this mission and had even gotten a PhD in literature to improve her literary skills. As a journalist, I agreed. I had no idea I was embarking on a project that would lead to a personal crisis, Holocaust denial and an official cover-up by the Lithuanian government.

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NZFOI: For our friend, Daniel Gold.

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→ 8 October 2018
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We are all Jews today | Aish.com

So moving…

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