General Interest News

Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev will step down after 27 years

Posted on June 25, 2020

The chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Museum told his staff that he will be leaving the position he has held for the past 27 years. Avner Shalev, 81, made the announcement Sunday in a letter to his museum employees. He said he will remain through the end of the calendar year.   Continue Reading »

Austria breaks ground for Holocaust memorial in Vienna

Posted on June 25, 2020

A new Holocaust memorial will be built in Vienna engraved with the names of 64,000 Austrian Jews killed by the Nazis. A groundbreaking ceremony was held Monday for the The Memorial to the Jewish Children, Women and Men of Austria who were Murdered in the Shoah, will sit in the central Ostarrichi Park, The Associated Continue Reading »

Portugal Honors a Diplomat Who Saved Jews From the Nazis

Posted on June 19, 2020

Aristides de Sousa Mendes provided Jews and others in Nazi-occupied France with visas allowing them to flee the country, actions that brought him severe reprisals during his lifetime. Eighty years after he helped save thousands of Jews from Nazi persecution by defying the orders of his own Portuguese government, a diplomat who provided them with Continue Reading »

Auschwitz memorial and museum will reopen to visitors on July 1

Posted on June 17, 2020

JTA) — The Auschwitz Memorial and the site of the former Nazi camp will reopen to visitors on July 1. The memorial and museum said it will open for guided tours and individual entry beginning on that date. Reservations must be made online  It closed to visitors in mid-March because of the coronavirus pandemic, including canceling the annual Continue Reading »

Nashville Holocaust Memorial vandalized with anti-Semitic messages

Posted on June 16, 2020

(JTA) — A white sheet spray-painted with messages described as anti-Semitic and white supremacist was hung on the walls of the Nashville Holocaust Memorial in Tennessee. The memorial is located on the grounds of the Gordon Jewish Community Center. The vandalism was discovered on Saturday, The Tennessean reported on Monday.

Dutch-Jewish WWII hero Betty Goudsmit-Oudkerk, who saved hundreds of children, dies at 96

Posted on June 16, 2020

AMSTERDAM (JTA) — Betty Goudsmit-Oudkerk, a Dutch-Jewish woman who saved hundreds of Jewish children from the Holocaust, has died at the age of 96. Goudsmit-Oudkerk, who died Sunday, was the last living member of the small team of rescuers who smuggled Jewish children to safety over several months from a Protestant religious seminary in Amsterdam, Continue Reading »

60 Minutes Presents: The Lost Music

Posted on June 12, 2020

More than 6 million people, most of them Jews, died in the Holocaust. The music they wrote as a temporary escape, however, did not, thanks in part to the efforts of an Italian composer and pianist.      

Evidence Emerges of ‘Second Japanese Schindler’ Who Rescued Jews From Nazi Persecution

Posted on June 12, 2020

Evidence has emerged of a second Japanese diplomat who provided visas to European Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, raising the prospect that further undiscovered heroes are waiting to be recognized. Saburo Nei — who served as Imperial Japan’s consul-general in the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok during World War II — issued transit visas for Continue Reading »

US government recommends that the Supreme Court hear German museums’ appeal on Guelph Treasure claim

Posted on June 7, 2020

The solicitor general’s recent filing suggests the Nazis’ looting of Jewish collections in Germany was a domestic rather than international crime The US Supreme Court may be inching towards granting an appeal by the German state museums in a claim over the master trove of German medieval church reliquaries known as the Guelph Treasure. Last Continue Reading »

Veterans Affairs department to reverse course and replace tombstones that have swastikas

Posted on June 3, 2020

(JTA) — The Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it will begin the process of replacing three gravestones bearing swastikas in cemeteries in Texas and Utah, less than a month after saying they would be preserved as “historic resources.” The VA told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last month that it would preserve the gravestones, which mark the burial Continue Reading »

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