Newyorki Figyelő, 1999 (24. évfolyam, 3-10. szám)

1999-12-01 / 10. szám

10

NEWYORKI FIGYELŐ

1999. december 1.

World News

(Collected by World Jewish Congress)

Europe:

A French investigation has determined that one of the world’s mostwanted Nazi war criminals - former SS officer Alois Brunner - is hiding in Damascus, even though Syrian officials deny any knowledge of his existence.

Brunner, a top aide of Adolf Eichmann, the overseer of the Nazi death machine, is accused of helping organize the deportation and murder of at least

130,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, France, and Greece.

A new multi-media Jewish museum has been opened in the heart of the old Jewish ghetto in Bologna, Italy, the regional capital of Emilia Romagna - one of the richest sites of Jewish history in Italy, with evidence of a Jewish presence dating back to the 14th century.

The museum is of great importance since Bologna has almost no surviving records - the result of a 1943 bombing which destroyed the synagogue and the city’s Jewish archives.

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Two British Jewish schools have scored in the top ten is yearly national comprehensive exams.

Among the top scorers in the countiy were Hasmonean High School in Hendon and King David School in Liverpool.

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The Untied States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad is sponsoring the restoration of the Sephardic Jewish cemetery in Sarajevo, damaged during the Bosnian war of 1993- 95.

The site was a strategically important sniper post during the war; as such, it was extensively mined and sustained significant damage to its ornate prayer house, walls, and tombstones.

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Complaints about violence and i harassment by neo-Nazi groups in Sweden ; doubled from 1997 to 1998, according to Sweden’s security police.

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According to police, there are three main neo-Nazi groups in the country with an estimated 1,500 hardcore members and several thousand sympathizers; authorities view right-wing extremist violence as an increasing problem in a countiy where an immigrant community makes up about 12% of the population.

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The new president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, has visited the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz to demonstrate the importance of respecting human rights.

The first Nazi war crimes trial in the former Soviet Union effectively ended before it began, when judges indefinitely postponed the proceedings saying that the 92-year-old defendant, Aleksandras Lileikis, was too ill to stand trial.

Lileikis is charged with genocide - accused of sending scores of Jews to their deaths when he headed the Vilnius security police during the 1941-44 Nazi occupation.

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Police are investigating a suspected arson fire that completely destroyed the roof of a synagogue under restoration in Tokaj, Hungary, this past summer at the same time that a Jewish summer festival was taking place in Budapest.

The synagogue was last used for religious purposes before World War II, when thousands of Jews lived in Tokaj; it has been under construction for the past four years because local authorities were planning to use it for cultural events.

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Hungarian Jewish community leaders are accusing the Hungarian National Museum and the country’s Ministry of Culture of distorting the facts of Hungary’s World War II treatment of its Jews.

The Federation of* Jewish Communities in Hungary has released a statement saying that an exhibition prepared for the former Nazi concentration cap at Auschwitz has barely concealed anti-Semitic undertones, and wrongly places “all responsibility onto the Germans

for what happened during the 1930s and 1940s.”

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The Jewish Museum of Prague has taken over the restoration and maintenance of the city’s Fibichova Street Jewish cemetery in the district of Zizkov.

The cemetery was originally established in 1680 as a Jewish burial site for plague victims, but became a regular burial site after 1787 when burials were banned within the walled city. There are about 40,000 graves, including those of a number of eminent rabbis and scholars as well as leading representatives of the Jewish Enlightenment.

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Vandals have desecrated more than 100 gravestones in a Berlin Jewish cemetery.

The incident occurred in the Berlin- Weissensee district, in what is the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe.

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An amateur historian has won a prestigious prize awarded by Sandhurst Military College for his research into the Jewish contribution to Britain’s war record.

Martin Sugarman, assistant archivist at the Association for Jewish ex-Servicemen (AJEX) Military Museum in London, wrote an article - published in The Journal of Military History - tracing the exploits of the Special Interrogation Group (SIG), a secret corps of Germanspeaking Jewish commandos who operated behind enemy lines during World War II.

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During World War II, Sweden’s Wallenberg industrial family bought securities, which may have belonged to Jews, killed in the Holocaust, according to a commission investigating Jewish assets in Sweden.

Sweden’s reputation as a neutral nation during the war has recently been shaken by evidence that it helped the Nazi war effort by selling Germany iron or and by supplying German industry with ball bearings.

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The Americas:

The Consulate General of Poland in New York organized a September 4 graveside commemoration of the 100th birthday of the late Polish Jewish actress and director Ida Kaminska.

Kaminska, a member of a family of Yiddish actors in Warsaw that dated back to the 19th century, immigrated to the U S. in 1968 as a result of an anti-Semitic campaign in Poland; she died in New York and is buried in a Jewish cemetery in Flushing, Queens.

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Canadian Jewish community members have welcomed a ruling by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission that orders Saskatoon’s public school board to stop the practice of reciting the Lord’s Prayer in classrooms.

The decision came after witnesses testified that the prayer is discriminatory, and can be psychologically damaging to non-Christians.

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A 26-year-old Jewish baseball player has said that he would like to have a belated bar mitzvah celebration. Shawn Green, the outstanding outfielder for the Toronto Blue Jays says he has recently learned about Judaism.

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Argentina’s Jewish community has expressed opposition to the proposal that provincial police investigate the recent desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Buenos Aires.

Community representatives feel that some other body should conduct the investigation, due to the police force’s lack of success in finding the perpetrators of terrorist bombing attacks on the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish community headquarters, and because of charges of anti-Semitism against some members of the force.

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Ex-K.G.B. officer Vasili Mitrokhin, in his newly-published book The Mitrokhin Archive, describes a 1971 KGB plot to stir up racial hatred in the United States by bombing an African American target and blaming it on the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a militant Jewish group.

Mitrokhin writes that in another of the KGB’s bizarre attempts to smear Jews, Soviet agents fabricated anti-Black pamphlets purporting to come from the JDL and designed to exacerbate Black- Jewish tensions.

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Israel:

Artist Dale Chiluly put up a wall of 64 tons of Alaskan ice just outside the Old City of Jerusalem.

The artist believes that tensions in the Middle East will melt just like the ice sculpture in the desert sun.

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The Israeli Foreign Ministry is investigating reports that the ancient Jewish cemetery in Mashad, Iran has been leveled by local authorities, and that the city’s synagogue may also have been razed.

The reports come from Iranian Jews who have recently fled the country; Israeli officials are having trouble getting confirmation of the destruction, as the small Jewish community here will not speak to outsiders for fear of retribution from authorities.

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A massive Herodian-era staircase that ascends to the southern entrance of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem has been unveiled by Israel’s antiquities authority as part of a $30 million restoration project.

The now-restored Hulda ascent was used by Jewish pilgrims to the Temple in the First Century C.E.

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In a new $40,000 plan, the Israel Defense Forces has decided to electrify an existing fence along the Jordan River near Jericho to help ward off hundreds of wild pigs whose infiltration harass army patrols.

The current fence, which electronically detects movement, has posed a problem for border patrols, as the herds of pigs are often so active at night that soldiers are constantly summoned to the border fence in search of possible infiltrators.

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Women will serve as combat soldiers in the year 2000, according to a plan prepared by the Israel Defense Forces. Female units will serve as border guards along the Egyptian and Jordanian borders. These units will be highly selective and those chosen to serve in them will receive extensive training.

Additionally, pilot tests will place women in armored and artillery forces; they would “remain with their units even when based in Lebanon.”

The Navy has also decided to place women in its diving repair unit.

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There were a total of 63,500 new immigrants to Israel during the past 12 months, of whom 86% came from the former Soviet Union, including 37% from the Russian Federation.

Immigration accounted for 37% of the countiy’s growth over the past year, as compared with 34% during the previous year.

(Continued on the next page.)

KÉRJÜK OL VASÓINKA T, HOGY HIRDETŐINKET TÁMOGASSÁK! VÁSÁRLÁSAIK ALKALMÁVAL HÍVA TKOZZANAK LAPUNKRA!