By JTA
Russia will contribute up to $1 million to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation for the conservation and maintenance of the site of the former Nazi concentration camp, the Polskie Radio website reported. A statement issued by the Russian Embassy in Warsaw stated that support for the project is “a common moral duty as it serves the mission […]
Thirty-eight Sejm members representing Tusk’s ruling Civic Platform party joined with the opposition in voting to outlaw ritual slaughter.
Add Poland to Hezbollah’s terrorist network, which smuggled from Poland parts of the bomb that killed five Israelis last summer, a Polish daily reported. Hezbollah paid $100,000 for the attack.
By JTA
Poland’s chief rabbi said he will resign if a definitive ban on kosher slaughter is imposed in the country. “I cannot imagine serving as chief rabbi in a country in which the rights of the Jewish religion are curtailed, as I would not be able then to serve properly my coreligionists,” Rabbi Michael Schudrich wrote […]
By JTA
Campaigning against ritual slaughter on the grounds of “animal rights’ is a popular tactic to make lives difficult for Jews and Muslims. Take Poland, for example.
By JTA
A Bialystok court has asked the Polish Constitutional Tribunal to rule on whether the country’s ban on ritual slaughter is compliant with the constitutional freedom of religion. The case is connected to the ritual slaughter of one cow which took place in March in Tykocin. Poland on January 1 banned slaughter without stunning, a requirement […]
The same day Michelle Obama visited a Holocaust memorial in Berlin, vandals in Poland remembered the Holocaust and Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by defacing a memorial.
By Batya Medad
The Holocaust teaches us that normal cultural and "moral" values are ignored when the victims are Jews.
More evidence that Jews tried to change their fate at the hands of the Nazis: Archaeologists discovered that Jews at the Sobibor death camp built an escape tunnel but apparently didn’t live to use it.
By JTA
The Polish Academy of Sciences has dismissed historian Prof. Krzysztof Jasiewicz following an interview in which he partly blames Jews for the Holocaust. Jasiewicz, 61, will lose his position as head of the Department of Analysis of Eastern Issues on June 1 but announced that he will appeal the decision. In the interview, which was […]
Are we to believe that these Jews who were devout and pious were being punished?
By JTA
The opening of a music club and disco in a 19th century Jewish learning center in Krakow is sparking controversy. The club, called Mezcal, which is also a Mexican alcoholic beverage, opened Saturday night in the former Chewra Thilim Beit Midrash in the heart of Krakow’s Jewish district, Kazimierz. The rundown building, built in 1896, […]
By JTA
German police arrested on Monday one of the 10 most wanted Nazis, 93-year-old Hans Lipschis, who is facing charges of complicity in murder as a former guard at the Auschwitz extermination camp. State prosecutors in Stuttgart are preparing an indictment against Lipschis, a native of Lithuania who was a guard at Auschwitz from the autumn […]
By JTA
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will receive a top award from Europe's mainstream Orthodox rabbinic body, the Conference of European Rabbis. It announced Monday that Merkel will be awarded the 2013 Lord Jakobovits Prize for European Jewry for her dedication to the German Jewish community and "outspoken denunciation of anti-Semitism throughout Europe." The award will be […]
By JTA
Poland's Jewish community does not want a planned monument to righteous gentiles to be erected near the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is due to open this month on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto. "The community of Polish Jews will never forget the heroism of people who, despite the threat of […]
By Batya Medad
Considering all of the Holocaust history which is part of Israeli culture, are we immune from another massive slaughter of Jews?
Irena Sendler smuggled 2,500 children out of the ghetto.
By JTA
The Auschwitz Jewish Center launched a fundraising campaign to rescue the house of the last Jewish resident of Oswiecim, the Polish town where the Auschwitz concentration camp was built. The center plans to transform the home of Szymon Kluger into a cafe that also will serve as a meeting place for local residents and visitors. […]
By JTA
Poland's Jewish community has about a one month supply of kosher meat left, following a ban on ritual slaughter that went into effect at the beginning of the year, Piotr Kadlcik, president of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, told the JTA on Monday from Warsaw. The status of ritual slaughter in Poland […]
Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, who was a Nazi Germany army lieutenant volunteered to blew himself up along with Hitler, died at his Munich home as the age of 90. The suicide bomb plot never was carried out, but von Kleist later was part of a group that unsuccessfully tried to kill Hitler in July 1944. He […]
By JTA
The city of Warsaw agreed to hand over ownership of an ancient cemetery to Poland’s Jewish community. The Brodno Cemetery, on the eastern banks of the Vistula River, will be handed over to the Jewish community in the coming weeks and undergo a major restoration operation this year, according to a report last week on […]
Hope is a vital part of visiting the death camps in Europe.
How can anyone calling himself a Rabbi have the chutzpah to ever justify the death of innocents?
By JTA
The court killed a Polish government allowance for Jewish and Muslim slaghtering.
In 1648 and 1649 Bogdan Chmelnitzky and his hordes of Cossack warriors perpetrated an annihilation campaign against the Jews of Poland and the Ukraine. Almost 100,000 Jews and 300 communities perished at the hands of these murderous mobs. All of the Jews, including infants, were targeted for murder; the general populaces nearly always joined in […]
25 young Polish Jews, many of whom have only recently discovered their Jewish roots, arrived in Israel on Monday for a special seminar organized by Shavei Israel, an organization that aims to strengthen the connection between descendants of Jews and the State of Israel & the Jewish people. The participants, between the ages of 18-35, most of whom were raised Catholic, came from cities like Krakow, Katowice, Warsaw, Przemysl and Gdansk. For many it marks their first time visiting Israel.
German marcher Bäerbel Pfeiffer asked for forgiveness for her grandfather, an electrician who installed the electrified barbed wire fence at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
More than 40 ‘Hidden Jews’ from Poland will participate in an unprecedented seminar organized by Shavei Israel on July 30 through August 2 in Lublin, Poland, dedicated entirely to the study of Talmud.
By JTA
An adviser to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas visited Auschwitz on Friday. Ziad al-Bandak, a Christian who advises Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Christian affairs, visited prisoner blocs, gas chambers and a crematorium in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in Poland, The Associated Press reported. He visited at the invitation of a private Polish foundation that promotes […]
We Jews say that all prayers are answered - every single one. Just sometimes, the answer is "no."
By JTA
The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is set to open next year, will receive a $7 million grant from two Jewish philanthropic foundations. The gift from the Koret and Taub Foundations will finance eight galleries that will take visitors through 1,000 years of Jewish history in Poland. The exhibits will include a […]
By JTA
Poland's attorney general has asked the country's Constitutional Court to investigate the constitutionality of ritual slaughter. Andrzej Seremet said that he believes the minister of agriculture, who allowed an exemption to Polish law to accommodate ritual slaughter, violated the constitution. Under Polish law, animals must be stunned before slaughter; the only exception is ritual slaughter. […]
Picture a family full of smiles, and joy. See all the moments they spend together and support each other, through blessed times and difficult ones. Picture the holidays filled with warmth and laughter, and the Shabbat... But then something destroys the serenity.
By JTA
Polish officials called on President Obama to apologize for using the term "Polish death camps." While Holocaust historians say the record of Polish behavior during the Holocaust is vexed and contradictory.
The players on England's Euro 2012 soccer squad will visit the Auschwitz death camp when they travel to Poland for the European Championship. The final tournament of the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship, or Euro 2012, will be hosted by Poland and the Ukraine between June 8 and July 1, 2012. England's players will go […]
By Tzippy Klein
A week- seven days. That’s how long I spent in the dustbin of Jewish History that is Poland. I went there to learn about, and to see first hand, the country that housed the absolute horrors of the Holocaust, but I also went to see the places that had once housed such rich Jewish life. As such the trip focused, in my opinion, on three aspects of Jewish life in Poland: pre-war, the Holocaust years and then post-war.
European Turkey in its present form consists of the small region around Istanbul, Adrianopolis, Kirkilisse, and Rodosto. For the history of the Jews, the cities Adrianopolis – today’s Edirne, and the capital from 1361 – 1453 – and Constantinople – today’s Istanbul, capital since 1453 – come into consideration. Both cities once had thriving Jewish communities, but show signs of going under today.
The virus of antisemitism persists in haunting Europe. In recent months, antisemitism has been exhibited all too often in European countries, not just in theory but in practice.
By Jewish Press Staff Reporter
A delegation of some 60 IDF commanders arrived in Poland on Monday, April 16, as part of the Witnesses in Uniform program. Guided by educators from the Yad VaShem Holocaust Memorial Museum, the officers started a four day study of pre-war Poland, the Holocaust, and contemporary Jewish Polish life.
In 1648 and 1649 Bogdan Chmelnitzky and his hordes of Cossack warriors perpetrated an annihilation campaign against the Jews of Poland and the Ukraine. Almost 100,000 Jews and 300 communities perished at the hands of these murderous mobs. All of the Jews, including infants, were targeted for murder; the general populaces nearly always joined in the attacks, and the torture and degradation of Jews was an integral aspect of the murderer’s procedures.
Libya lies in North Africa between Egypt and Tunisia and consists of Cyrenica and Tripoli. Even in the 3rd century before the Common Era, Cyrenica was a destination for Jewish emigration. Over the next century the Jewish population grew in numbers but was strongly Hellenized.
The popularity of the rise of chassidus did not go unnoticed by those who did not share the same allegiance. As long as the movement was limited to the commoner and isolated in a few pockets of Poland no one perceived it as a threat. But all of this had changed by 1772.
The AP reports that last Sunday vandals desecrated a Jewish cemetery in Wysokie Mazowieckie, eastern Poland, spraying swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans on tombstones and memorial plaques. according to the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland, the vandals also wrote "This is Poland, not Israel" on one sign at the Jewish cemetery. Police […]
The stories in this column are translations by Mr. Nollet from Die Juden In Der Welt (The Jews in the World) by Mark Wischnitzer, a long out-of-print book published more than seven decades ago in Germany. The book examines Jewish communities, one country at a time, as they existed in 1935.
By Tibbi Singer
Warsaw is moving the discussion over the transfer of possession to original owners to the courts.