News, Info & Resources for the Cleveland Orthodox Jewish Community
(Cleveland Jewish News)
Mere weeks after a meeting of World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants in Berlin, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany established a $250 million fund for Jewish child survivors worldwide.
Rose Gelbart, who attended the child survivors and descendants conference, said that event spurred the claims conference decision.
A vast archive of photographs of pre-Holocaust Eastern European Jewish life is being made available to the public and researchers.
The International Center of Photography in New York and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday announced the joint creation of a digital database to facilitate access to photographer Roman Vishniac’s archive.
(Plain Dealer)
CLEVELAND, Ohio — It happens every time. The room filled with teenagers grows silent as soon as a survivor speaks.
Holocaust survivor Jacob Hennenberg used to tell students how he found hope in the camps in the tattoo the Nazis engraved on his arm. The numbers 64242 added up to 18, which in Hebrew stands for “life.” Jacob decided that meant he would live.
(Jerusalem Post)(A reader pointed out that this archive includes an interview that R’ Aisak Ausband Zt’l (via pseudonym) gave about his experience in the war in 1946.)
Website created by Hebrew University has interviews dating back from 1959.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks with Max Mannheimer, a Holocaust survivor, at Dachau. Imagine stumbling upon a three-decade-old interview of your grandmother’s Holocaust experiences on YouTube, and then listening to her retell her account of Jewish resistance against Nazis in Poland. Gal Nordlicht, who had never heard his grandmother’s story, before could only describe the experience as “incredible.”
(Cleveland Jewish News)
Holocaust survivors from Greater Cleveland have an opportunity to be reunited with family members they lost contact with before, during or after World War II.
That’s the goal of the DNA Shoah Project, which will come to the Cleveland area for the first time from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 29, at the Mandel Jewish Community Center in Beachwood.
(AP, The News Tribune)
A privately-funded Holocaust memorial is to be built on the grounds of the Ohio Statehouse despite concerns from the head of an oversight board that the project is “inappropriate” for public property and could ensnare Ohio in a separation-of-church-and-state dispute.
The $1.8 million memorial was approved Thursday by the state Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board, which oversees and maintains the Ohio Statehouse.
(VOA)
Germany will pay around 800 million euros ($1.03 billion) over a four-year period for homecare for the aging survivors of the Holocaust, a Jewish organization said on Wednesday.
The Jewish Claims Conference, which represents Jews in negotiations on compensation for Nazi victims and their descendants, said some 56,000 Holocaust victims worldwide, over a third of them living in Israel, would benefit from the aid.
Holocaust activist Robert (Mendy) Klein of Cleveland is the featured speaker and the theme is “Never Again : Heeding the Warning Signs” at the Governor’s 33rd Annual Holocaust Commemoration at the Ohio Statehouse on April 9, 2013. Rabbi Binyamin Blau offers the benediction. (Video below along with comments and listing of speakers. Mr Klein at 30:50.)
A child of Holocaust survivors, Robert Klein arrived in the United States in 1956 with his parents and two siblings. [Read more…]
(Cleveland Jewish News)
David Markovich, founding president of Hillel at John Carroll University, is proud of his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor who died six months ago.
That pride came through clearly during JCU’s first Holocaust Remembrance Day April 8 at the university’s Dolan Center of Science and Technology in University Heights. About 75 people attended.
Local UH resident, Alex Zelczer, a Holocaust Survivor has recently written a book entitled Eight Pieces of silk: What I could not tell my children. A very brief article about the book and what the author wrote it appears in the Cleveland Magazine.
Today, over sixty years later, Alex can still hear those imploring words reverberating in his head. “As soon as we get through with this, return to Vásárosnamény. Don’t go anywhere else. Let us wait for each other at home,” his distraught father had entreated. Well, … the SS had other plans. Eight Pieces of Silk is the touching memoir of Alex Zelczer, a keen observer and astute reporter of the daily savagery and mayhem of Nazi-controlled Hungary. From the wretched ghetto streets to the ghastly concentration camp barracks, the reader is swept along on a virtual journey to a man made Hell.
It’s most likely that Menachem Bodner last saw his identical twin in 1945, in Dr. Josef Mengele’s gruesome Auschwitz laboratory. He was 4 then and doesn’t remember his time in the notorious death camp. But in the 68 years that have followed, Bodner says he’s “always” been certain he was one of a pair. He just didn’t have any proof until this past year. Now, he’s searching for Jeno, a man who probably looks just like him, and who has a distinctive “A-7734” tattoo on his forearm. And 1 million Facebook users are helping him look.
Local UH resident, Alex Zelczer, a Holocaust Survivor has recently written a book entitled Eight Pieces of silk: What I could not tell my children. A very brief article about the book and what the author wrote it appears in the Cleveland Magazine.
Today, over sixty years later, Alex can still hear those imploring words reverberating in his head. “As soon as we get through with this, return to Vásárosnamény. Don’t go anywhere else. Let us wait for each other at home,” his distraught father had entreated. Well, … the SS had other plans. Eight Pieces of Silk is the touching memoir of Alex Zelczer, a keen observer and astute reporter of the daily savagery and mayhem of Nazi-controlled Hungary. From the wretched ghetto streets to the ghastly concentration camp barracks, the reader is swept along on a virtual journey to a man made Hell.
(NY Times)
THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.
What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.