JERUSALEM (AP) _ Israel’s official Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem on Thursday rescinded an invitation to Lithuanian officials to attend a memorial service, as a protest against their country’s call to investigate a Holocaust survivor. The decision follows a Lithuanian accusation against a prominent survivor of slandering Lithuanians who collaborated with the Nazis, but are considered national heroes because they opposed … Read More
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Lydia Avidan, an elegant 79-year-old widow, walked into a Tel Aviv high school with tears streaking from beneath her tinted sunglasses. She was about to hand over to historians the only mementos she had left from relatives who perished in the Holocaust — a yellowed, cracked letter she had never read and a faded black-and-white … Read More
JERUSALEM (AP) —Ever since she became an orphaned 12-year-old in Russia, Liora Tamir thought she was alone in the world—having lost every single member of her family either in the Nazi Holocaust or Soviet prison camps. That changed because of a recent search of a database of names of Holocaust victims. She discovered that her murdered grandparents were commemorated there … Read More
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JERUSALEM (AP) —Fifty years after Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann was brought to justice, the men who captured, investigated and prosecuted the Holocaust mastermind held a rare reunion Thursday in the Jerusalem hall where his famous trial took place. The gathering, marking the U.N.’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, revisited the landmark trial that brought to light in vivid detail the horrors … Read More
KOCHAV YAIR, Israel (AP) — Alex Werber calmly strode toward a patch of black stones, pulled up his sleeves and opened a plastic bag to dump out its contents. “Goodbye, mom,” he said, scattering her ashes at the former site of the Treblinka death camp in Poland, where the Nazis murdered 875,000 Jews during World War II. It was Lucy Werber’s … Read More
BAT YAM, Israel — They are believed to be the last two survivors of the most chillingly efficient killing machine of the Nazi Holocaust: the Treblinka extermination camp in occupied Poland. Samuel Willenberg and Kalman Taigman, 87-year-old Israelis, are devoting their final years to trying to preserve the memory of the 875,000 people systematically murdered in a one-year killing spree … Read More
JERUSALEM (AP) – Growing up in the West Bank, Mujahid Sarsur knew next to nothing about the Holocaust and saw little ground to sympathize with a people he saw as his occupier. But thanks to an Israeli roommate overseas, the 21-year-old Palestinian student learned about the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews during World War II and discovered a new … Read More
JERUSALEM (AP) — As a 9-year-old girl, Shoshana Neuman was forced by Nazi collaborators to march across what is now Ukraine in a brutal six-week trek that her father and sister did not survive. The only image she has of her dead family is a painting she drew 40 years later of an exhausted, bearded man, his eyes closed, hoisting a … Read More
PARDES HANNA, Israel (AP) — Some patients refuse to shower because it reminds them of the gas chambers. Others hoard meat in pillow cases because they fear going hungry. At the Shaar Menashe Mental Health Center in northern Israel, it’s as though the Holocaust never ended. As Israel on Sunday night begins its annual 24 hours of remembrance of the … Read More
JERUSALEM (AP) — The neat lines and red rectangular sketches look like any typical architectural design. But the handwritten initials H.H. – belonging to the infamous Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler – indicate what the drawings represent: wooden barracks, gas chambers and crematoria. Just ahead of the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Israel’s Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem is … Read More
JERUSALEM (AP) – After surviving the Holocaust as a child, Israel Meir Lau — a former Israeli chief rabbi — spent decades searching for the man who saved his life. That journey ended with an Associated Press report about a recently discovered Nazi document confirming the identity of the teenager who shielded him from German gunfire when his concentration camp … Read More
JERUSALEM — As a slave laborer in Auschwitz, Meyer Hack was forced to sort through the tattered clothing stripped off inmates before they were sent to the gas chambers. He gathered valuable belongings hidden inside the clothes, stuffed them in a sock, hid them and later spirited them to freedom. On Monday, the 95-year-old survivor from Boston donated eight pieces … Read More
JERUSALEM (AP) — Hanita Leshem’s parents handed her over to a Christian family in Ukraine in 1941, when she was just a year old, to save her from the Nazi troops murdering the Jews there. Leshem, now a 69-year-old grandmother living in Jerusalem, never saw her mother and father again. On Tuesday, she stood among other child survivors as Israel … Read More
JERUSALEM—As terrified teenagers 65 years ago, Menachem Sholowicz and Anshel Sieradzki stood in line together in Auschwitz, having serial numbers tattooed on their arms. Sholowicz was B-14594; Sieradzki was B-14595. The two Polish Jews had never met, they never spoke and they were quickly separated. Each survived the Nazi death camp, moved to Israel, married, and became grandfathers. They didn’t … Read More