Our conference was a great success, with over 400 survivors and families, including 2G’s and 3G’s.
We had many inspirational speakers, meaningful workshops, and engaging panels.
Please keep looking at our website for updates. More photos to come. To see larger photos, please click on the thumbnail pictures.
Our good friend, Dr. Robert Krell spoke to us once again, and inspired us with his insights about our common past. To view his speech, followed by a brief biography, please click on the following link:
We are pleased to publish the Spring 2012 edition of Mishpocha!, which features coverage of the successful Warsaw 2011 Conference.
The 2012 observance of the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust focussed on the theme, “Children and the Holocaust”.
The theme served to highlight the impact of mass violence on children.
United Nations’ annual observance of
the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust
Friday, 27 January 2012
11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
the General Assembly Hall, UN HQ, New York
The solemn ceremony on the theme “Children and the Holocaust” featured a video message remarks by UN Secretary-General, and statements by the President of the General Assembly and the Permanent Representatives of Israel and the Dominican Republic to the United Nations.
The UN Holocaust Programme’s new study guide for children was also launched.
Keynote remarks was made by Professor Robert Krell (Canada), a child survivor and a psychiatrist.
Polish public television TVP SA produced this documentary about the Warsaw 2011 conference. Click on the video below to watch. Polish and English with some Polish subtitles.
Children Of The Holocaust (Polish TV) Warsaw 2011 from WFJCSHD on Vimeo.
Polish TV documentary about the 2011 Warsaw meeting of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants.
Click on the “play” button below to watch the video. You can set it to full screen using the four arrow button the lower right.
Warsaw 2011 WFJCSH Conference Opening Program from WFJCSHD on Vimeo.
Warsaw 2011 WFJCSH Conference Opening Program, Friday Aut 19 2011.
On August 29th, the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants met in Warsaw Poland for an historic…
Professor Adam Rotfeld gave a speech about forgiveness and reconciliation.
To read the speech, click here: Professor Adam Rotfeld’s Speech “Memory of Nations. About the Right to Forgive and Reconciliation”
Opening night ceremony video: click here to go to video
Polish TV Documentary: click here to watch video
Please click here to view the Warsaw 2011 conference photo album: Warsaw 2011 Photo Presentation
Excellent quality photo gallery from Andrzej Chomczyk (click to visit):
From Stefanie Seltzer, President WFJCSHD:
One of the most moving events of our conference was the ceremony honoring the Righteous Among the Nations who had not yet been honored by Yad Vashem. This event was organized by the Israeli Embassy, to be celebrated at our conference. Seven Righteous were honored on the last day of our conference.The opening speech was by the Israeli Ambassador to Poland, but there was also the American Ambassador, as well as consuls of other countries, best known to us the Polish Consul to New York. It was very emotional for all of us, and particularly so for me, as one of the Righteous was from Radomsko, where my family had had a glass business and where I had been in the ghetto. I was excited to meet Sir Martin Gilbert; his family had also come from Radomsko and e exchanged information about some people we both know. The lady mayor of Radomsko was also there, and I was stunned to learn that both she and the son of the Righteous knew the exact address of my family’s business.
It was also a very special event for Ida Paluch-Kersz and her brother Adam, as her rescuer was one of the honorees.
Click here to read more about the ceremony, and to read the program booklet: Rightous Among The Nations Award Ceremony
Click here to see a Picasa photo album from the event:
MishpochaWhat an incredible conference in Warsaw. The 23rd International Conference of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Their Descendants was a powerful statement by the many who attended. Stefanie Seltzer, Rene Lichtman, Stephen Adler and the many others who worked so hard to make this a meaningful time deserve much credit.
As a non-survivor, but one who has been teaching Holocaust Education for many years, being a part of this conference was a once in a life-time experience. I was able to be on a panel with a dedicated group of educators and meet so many with inspiring stories.
My old friend, Rabbi Michael Schudrich, was a thrilling part of the conference. Elzbieta Ficowska and Renata Zajdman brought joy to my attendance, as we shared about the life of Irena Sendler, and my student’s project.
This conference was historic in every way, but more than historic, it made a statement about Tikkun Olam. Each dignitary who attended underscored the importance of this event. The final day was so inspiring and meaningful. I cherished my new friends from the conference and loved seeing my old friends. Thanks to the World Federation for your many hours of preparation and devotion to changing the world.
Norm Conard
Newspaper article: Child Holocaust survivors meet in Poland
Click on a photo below to see the full size version. Use the arrows to navigate forward/back.
Since 1963 a special commission of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, headed by the Israel’s Supreme Court, has been awarding Righteous Among the Nations medals and certificates of honour (Chasid umot ha-Olam). This decoration pays tribute to the Heroes who were putting their lives in danger in order to rescue their Jewish friends, neighbours, acquaintances, sometimes perfect strangers, all of them doomed to extermination.
Persons recognized as Righteous are awarded a specially minted medal bearing their name and a certificate of honour. The names and surnames of Righteous are also engraved on stone plates in the Garden of the Righteous in Jerusalem. The planting olive trees for the Heroes has ceased few years ago for there is no area left.
The Righteous Poles recognized at this ceremony were Janina Bereska, Adolf Brauner, Jadwig and Adam Chorazkiewicz, Maria Kazuczyk and Marianna Kazuczyk, Józefa and Wilhelm Maj, Katarzyna and Jan Swietlikowski, and Agnieszka Troszka.
To read the full program, please click her: Righteous Amont The Nations Program, Warsaw 2011
Adolph Brauner
Agnieszka Troszka
Katarzyna and Stanislaw Swietlikowski
Janina Bereska and Son
Josefa and Whilelm Maj
Marianna Kazuczyk with husband Jan and son Zygmunt
Jadwiga and Adam Chorazkiewicz
New important article by Professor Joanna Michlic titled:
This interpretive essay considers the representations of Jews and the Holocaust in postcommunist Poland from 2002, the year when the public debate about the Jedwabne massacre of 10 July 1941 ended, until the present. The almost constant preoccupation with all things Jewish and the Holocaust in the realm of national discourse about “who we are” and “who we wish to be,” makes Polish society stand out among the postcommunist countries. This situation has prompted some individuals in Poland involved in the memory work to claim that the country is a unique state in Europe with regard to the “recovery” and commemoration of the Jewish past; “Poland has been one of the few countries in Europe-perhaps the only one-to confront its own past systematically.”
To read the full article click here.
From Engage Online:
After many years as professor of Yiddish and Judaic Studies at Vilnius University, Lithuania, and research director of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Professor Dovid Katz felt he could not remain silent at the growing campaign in the Baltic region of what he calls “Holocaust Obfuscation”, the attempt to potentially write the Holocaust out of European history without necessarily denying a single death, but by rewriting twentieth century East European history as “two equal genocides” (Nazi and Soviet, or in its antisemitic versions, Soviet-Jewish). Things escalated in the Lithuanian capital in recent years when prosecutors and police began harassing aged Holocaust survivors who survived by joining the anti-Nazi resistance with “war crimes investigations”.
The website, which is openly partisan, seeks, in Dovid Katz’s own words, to introduce a Second Opinion into the debate and in time to chronicle the history of the Holocaust on a search-by-location basis in the Baltic States. The site opposes the 2008 Prague Declaration and associated resolutions, and also has a page dedicated to antisemitism in Lithuania in recent years. It also provides links to dozens of media items from recent times, including the explosive UK Tory EuroParliament alliance with various far-right parties in Eastern Europe.
Read the full post here: The new HOLOCAUST IN THE BALTICS website
By Yossi Melman
According to the Estonian president’s distorted logic, the Jewish victims who were murdered by the Estonians during the Holocaust, and the Estonian hangmen who annihilated the Jews, are “partners.”
It’s not a good idea to mention a noose in the home of a hanged man. But Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of Estonia who visited Israel this week, has the chutzpah to openly say explicit and distorted things, even at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem. The two nations, the Jews and the Estonians, so he said, “are partners to the same historical experience.”
According to the Estonian president’s distorted logic, the Jewish victims who were murdered by the Estonians during the Holocaust, and the Estonian hangmen who annihilated the Jews, are “partners.” In that same speech, the guest made no mention of the Holocaust, not even one word, nor of the fate of Estonia’s 4,500 Jews during World War II.
Source: Ha’aretz. Read the entire article here: The Holocaust distorter from Estonia
Who was worse, Hitler or Stalin?
In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people, tens of millions it was often claimed, in the endless wastes of the Gulag. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.
Source: New York Review of Books. To read the whole article, go here: Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?
By Toby Axelrod
Boris Burle of the Veterans Union of World War II Fighters Against Nazism examines an Estonian ultranationalist calendar at a Berlin conference on Holocaust revisionism in the former Soviet Union, Dec. 16, 2009. (Toby Axelrod)
BERLIN (JTA) — Was the Soviet Union a force for good or ill during the Nazi years?
That question is at the core of a controversy between and among some Jewish groups and former Soviet republics over the issue of Holocaust revisionism, and it erupted last week at a conference in Berlin organized by the World Congress of Russian-Speaking Jews on “The Legacy of World War II and the Holocaust.”
Some former Soviet republics view Stalin’s Soviet regime as evil and laud those who fought it as nationalist heroes. The problem, many Jewish groups say, is that some of those nationalists were Nazi collaborators and vicious anti-Semites.
Source: JTA. Read the entire article here: Controversy erupts over Holocaust revisionism in E. Europe
Clemens Heni, Ph.D., Berlin, scholar and author, former Post-Doc at Yale (09/2009-08/2009)
We are facing two big antisemitic movements today: first the Iranian threat against Israel and the Jews in particular, Muslim or Islamic antisemitism in general. Second we are facing a distortion of history, especially in Eastern Europe, Europe as a whole, and America and the Western world alike: trivialization or soft-core denial of the Holocaust.
Last year I spoke at the third International Conference on Antisemitism at the University of West Bohemia in the city of Plzen, Czech Republic, about secondary antisemitism and soft-core denial of the Holocaust. I would like to continue this analysis. One of my examples was German philosopher Martin Heidegger who in 1949 compared “gas chambers” with “motorized agriculture.“ I call this the universalization of the Holocaust and the denial of the unprecedented crimes of the Shoah, a “soft-core Holocaust denial” (in contrast to hard-core Neo-Nazi or Iranian, Muslim and Arab style Holocaust denial).[ii] Did anyone hear about the “Kaunas declaration of rewriting history by trivializing the Holocaust”? Probably not. Such a declaration does not exist. Lithuanian politicians, scholars and activists are a bit more tricky, or sophisticated. They convinced a number of people from around the world by hosting them during nice “remembrance” events in Lithuania, by organizing symposia, conferences, declarations, working groups etc. to join them in trivializing the Holocaust by framing this process as a study of totally “equal” totalitarian regimes, or, as it has been called for short by critics, “red equals brown.”[iii]
The most recent attempt to distort history and to trivialize the Holocaust is the Prague Declaration. Huge efforts, particularly by Lithuanian politicians, activists and scholars and their Western friends have been made to promote this form of “secondary antisemitism”, a rejection of remembrance of the Shoah AS unprecedented crimes against humanity.
Source: the blog of Clemens Heni. Read the whole article here: The Prague Declaration, Holocaust Obfuscation and Antisemitism
By YEHUDA BAUER
Despite the disproportionately large number of Jewish victims of Stalinism, neither can one talk of a genocide of the Jews at Soviet hands.
Tomorrow many countries will mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by the UN in 2005. Yet at the same time, there is a movement afoot to proclaim another day to commemorate the victims of the Nazis – but in this new movement to commemorate them along with the victims of Stalinism. There is ground for deep concern about repeated attempts to equate the Nazi regime’s genocidal policies, with the Holocaust at their center, with other murderous or oppressive actions, an equation that not only trivializes and relativizes the genocide of the Jews perpetrated by the Nazi regime, but is also a mendacious revision of recent world history.
Source: Jerusalem Post. Read the rest here: Remembering accurately on Int’l Holocaust Remembrance Day
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