The Seifter Menorah: Fingerprints From a Vanished World
As is often the case with material culture, the Seifter menorah tells a complex story.
16
Dec
10
Feb
Pew Survey Reveals Americans’ Limited Holocaust Knowledge
Less than half of Americans can answer basic questions about the Holocaust, according to a new Pew Research Center report.
The report, released just before the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, examines the results of a survey testing Americans’ religious knowledge, which included five basic questions about the Holocaust. The results revealed that most Americans associate the Holocaust with the attempted annihilation of Jewish people: They know approximately when the Holocaust happened and what Nazi-created ghettos were, but less than half know how many people were killed during the Holocaust or how Hitler came to power.
Four of the questions were also included in a separate Pew survey of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17. Like adults, teens know more about the general timeline of the Holocaust than the specific death toll. Becka Alper, primary...
27
Jan
A Third-Generation Remembrance of Holocaust’s Horrors
Today, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the horrors of the Holocaust loom large in the world’s collective memory. But for those who were personally affected, those horrors have never left. Born in the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen, the son of two survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, law professor Menachem Rosensaft has devoted his life to the keeping the legacy of Holocaust survivors and their descendants alive.
Rosensaft has been curating these voices since 1965, when he edited a magazine of essays, poems and short stories by the children of Holocaust survivors known as the Bergen-Belsen Youth Magazine. Today, he teaches classes on the law of genocide at the law schools of Columbia and Cornell Universities. His newest project is the just-published book God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and...
08
May
Prof. Dajani Opens Up to Moment
On May 8, Moment Magazine Editor-in-Chief Nadine Epstein and Senior Editor Dina Gold sat down with Mohammed S. Dajani, the political science professor who made waves by taking the first-ever field trip to Auschwitz with a group of Palestinian students last month.
Prof. Dajani told them a story that hasn't been in the press. For years, he has run workshops with the theme "Big Dream/Small Hope," he said. In the workshops, he asks Israelis and Palestinians for their “big dream” and “small hope.” Israelis’ big dream is they will wake up and there will be no Palestinians in the West Bank, while Palestinians’ big dream is to wake up in the morning to find no Jewish-Israelis. Neither dream can ever come true. So he asks them for their “small hope.” Both say: two states for two people...
02
May
Auschwitz, in 2011
by Kayla Green
Today marks Yom HaShoah, the day we commemorate those killed during the Holocaust. Across the world, people share stories of those who survived and those who didn’t, of yellow stars and barbed wire, of a terrifying life lived in ghettos and camps. Among the camps, Auschwitz is often pointed to as the pinnacle of the Nazis’ brutal science. The horror that occurred at the three death camps that comprise Auschwitz should be memorialized as, in the words of a plaque at the camp, “a cry of despair and a warning to humanity.” However, to some people, Auschwitz, or rather, Oświęcim (the Polish pronunciation of the word, which was used before Nazi occupation) is more than the site of the world’s most terrible genocide: To this day, Oświęcim still exists as a town.
More specifically,...
22
Dec
A Declaration of War
By Symi Rom-Rymer
Well, the mystery is solved…sort of. The infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign stolen from Auschwitz on December 18 has been recovered on the other side of the country from where it was taken. At this point, the Polish police are refusing to comment on the circumstances surrounding the theft or on its motivation, although five men have been detained. But what has been most striking throughout this whole incident is the wild rhetoric that erupted in its wake. The comment that really got my attention, was one made by Avner Shalev, director of Yad Vashem (Israel’s memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust) the day the sign was reported missing. According to reports by the BBC, he called the theft “a true declaration of war.”
To which I say: Mr. Shalev, please explain...