Japan PM Abe honors 'Japanese Schindler' in Lithuania

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday honored a Japanese diplomat credited with saving an estimated 6,000 Jews from almost certain death in 1940 at a visit to the former Japanese consulate in Lithuania.

Chiune Suhigara was serving as Japanese consul in Kaunas, then capital of Lithuania, when he disobeyed his superiors and issued Japanese visas to Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland despite his country being a close ally of Nazi Germany.

Abe's visit to Lithuania, the first by a Japanese prime minister, comes as Japan seeks greater cooperation with countries such as China, a former adversary in World War Two, in the face of rising tensions over North Korea's nuclear and missile programs.

Japanese diplomat Chiune Suhigara is credited with saving 6,000 Jews during the Holocaust

 "The courageous and humanitarian action of Mr. Sugihara provides us with guidance as to how to we should survive in this world, where rule-of-law-based international order is being challenged in various forms," Abe told reporters on Saturday. "He worked far from Japan and in very difficult circumstances, but he had a strong belief as a Japanese diplomat and saved many Jewish people," Abe added on Sunday after he had toured the former consulate and sat at Sugihara's desk. "I am really proud of him as Japanese."

Japanese PM Abe sitting at Suhigara's desk in the Japanese consulate in Kaunas (Photo: AFP)

Japan had several of its former leaders convicted and executed by an Allied tribunal as war criminals after the end of World War Two. Sugihara was named as "Righteous among the Nations" by Israel's Yad Vashem museum among some 22,000 people honored for helping Jews avoid death in the Nazi Holocaust.

Lithuanian children greeting Abe with Japanese flags (Photo: AFP)

He issued thousands of Japanese transit visas to Jewish refugees in July and August 1940, opening a route for them to escape through Russia to Japan. His diplomatic career was cut short after the war and his actions remained largely unknown in Japan for decades after the conflict ended. Most of Lithuania's Jewish population—about 200,000 people—were shot dead in first few months after Nazi Germany occupied its territory in June 1941, ending centuries of the thriving culture.

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Brooklyn Holocaust museum focuses on faith, survival

Faith and survival, not the machinery of death, are the central themes at an atypical Holocaust museum in Brooklyn.

The three-year-old Amud Aish Memorial Museum, located far from the tourist crowds at near the very edge of the borough, focuses on the experiences of Orthodox Jews during and after the Holocaust.

Dovid Reidel holds a talit, or prayer shawl, part of the museum's collection, that belonged to Mendel Landau, in 1944, of Auschwitz, Poland (Photo: AP)

Its collection includes letters, diaries, photos and religious items, like a frayed prayer shawl worn secretly by a prisoner at Auschwitz. Many were donated by Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews who had stashed the artifacts in basements and attics would not have given them to another museum, Amud Aish staffers said. "Part of that is because their culture is different and they don't patronize museums for the most part," said Shoshana Greenwald, director of collections. "But here they felt this was a museum that would tell their story and understand where they are coming from." The collection includes the Warsaw Ghetto diary of Hillel Seidman, who wrote about Jews' daily struggle to survive and to practice their religion in the face of horrific persecution. "It's a well-known diary," said Dovid Reidel, the museum's director of research. "This is the original." The family of Seidman, who survived the Holocaust and died in 1995, gave the diary to Amud Aish because they "felt other museums will just focus on his general story," Reidel said. "They felt he wouldn't be appreciated from his religious dimension as well."

Shoshana Greenwald talks about the 1945 uniform of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp survivor Chaim Schmidt, in the museum's archive room (Photo: AP)

 Currently housed in a temporary space downstairs from a home health care company, far from city subway lines, the Amud Aish Memorial Museum has long planned on moving to a more prominent location. When it opened in the remote Mill Basin neighborhood, there were plans to build an $11 million permanent museum in the borough's Borough Park section, home to a huge and growing population of Orthodox Jews. Sholom Friedmann, the museum's director and CEO, said there's now no fixed date for a move. An exhibit that officially opens at the museum later this month tells the little-known story of thousands of Jews who found refuge in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, China. A group of teenage girls from a private Jewish school clustered around the vitrines during a recent visit and learned about the Walkin family, who fled Lithuania on the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1941, landing first in Kobe, Japan and then in Shanghai. Program coordinator Miryam Gordon pointed out sabbath candlesticks adorned with Chinese characters. "Daily life continued," she said. "Children were born. People got married." Reidel's own grandfather, Mike Tress, is featured in Amud Aish's collection for his work trying to secure passage for European Jews to the United States or another safe haven. There are typed minutes of an Oct. 14, 1944, White House meeting between first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Tress and other rescue activists. They met on a Saturday when religious Jews are not supposed to travel or conduct business, Reidel noted, adding, "When it came to rescuing lives, that supersedes the not traveling or not holding these work meetings on Shabbat."

Miryam Gordon (L) leads a tour of the museum's "Precious Gift: Rescue and Shanghai" exhibit with a group of students from Brooklyn's Nefesh Academy (Photo: AP)

Colleagues in Holocaust remembrance said there's a place for a museum that's devoted to the devout. "The more opportunities there are to engage with Holocaust education, the better," said Elizabeth Kubany, a spokeswoman for the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, located in lower Manhattan. Tova Rosenberg, the creator of the "Names, Not Numbers," a Holocaust oral history program, said Amud Aish shows the "spiritual resistance" of Jews who maintained their religion even in the concentration camps. "They were going to keep their religious commandments no matter what," Rosenberg said. "And that isn't portrayed so much in other museums." Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar who has served as a consultant to Amud Aish and other museums, said he hopes Amud Aish can reach its core community while also attracting a broader audience that may have little contact with the Orthodox beyond passing them on the street. "I would hope that lots of non-Jews, non-Orthodox Jews would come to see it in part as a bridge to understanding with these people they live adjacent to," he said.

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Key suspect in 1980 Paris synagogue bombing walks free

VANCOUVER - The man who was considered for 37 years by Israeli and French intelligence agencies to be the mastermind behind a deadly terror bombing of a Paris synagogue has been released from prison by French authorities.

 

 

Until 2008, Hassan Diab, a Beirut-born Canadian, managed to convince the Canadian government that he had nothing to do with the October 1980 bombing of the French Israeli Liberal Union Synagogue on Rue Copernic during the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah, which claimed the life of 42-year-old Israeli Aliza Shagrir, along with two French citizens, and wounded scores.

Diab, 64, who was a lecturer at the University of Ottawa, was eventually arrested in 2008 in Canada and extradited to France in November 2014 by the presiding judge, who expressed his concerns over the veracity of the evidence against Diab.

Hassan Diab (Photo: AFP)

It was, the judge said “convoluted, very confusing, with conclusions that are suspect.”

Since his extradition, Diab has been kept in a protected prison on the outskirts of Paris, and has consistently professed his innocence, claiming he was not even in the city at the time of the bombing, but was in the University of Beirut where he was studying.

Investigators believe the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was behind the attack. The French state prosecutor, meanwhile, said Diab’s passport was found in the hands of PFLP members arrested in Italy three days after the attack.

Following their arrests, and in light of evidence taken from the scene, both Israeli and French intelligence marked Diab as a prime suspect.

At the end of last week however, following a discussion attended by two investigative justices from the French Supreme Court, the court determined the evidence against Diab was too weak and too scant to justify his arraignment and continued incarceration.

Diab was subsequently released, and the decision was immediately appealed by the French state prosecutor.

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4 arrested in Tunisia synagogue firebomb attack

Tunisian authorities have arrested four men on suspicion of throwing Molotov cocktails at a synagogue on the island of Djerba three days ago, causing light damage to the structure.

 

The Tunisian Interior Ministry said the suspects were not religiously motivated, but rather trying to "create chaos" amid the anti-government protests in the country.

Two Molotov cocktails were hurled at a small synagogue in Djerba late Tuesday, setting fire to the building.

Damage caused to synagogue

The Molotov cocktails were thrown from the roof into the yard of the synagogue, which is located in al-Hara al-Kabira ("the Big Quarter"). The firebombs hit palm tree leaves—apparently leftovers from Sukkot—which caught on fire. A reporter at the scene told the AP the synagogue was empty and the fire was quickly extinguished. Some damage was caused to the structure but no one was hurt, the head of the local Jewish community, Perez Trabelsi, told Reuters on Wednesday. While the violent protests over price hikes that engulfed Tunisia did not reach Djerba, locals said the assailants had exploited the fact that there was a reduced security presence as police were busy combating anti-government protests elsewhere in the North African state. Mainly Muslim Tunisia has a Jewish minority of fewer than 1,100 people, many of them (300-500) in Djerba. Jews have lived in Tunisia for over 2,000 years and Djerba is home to Africa's oldest synagogue, El Ghriba, which was hit by al Qaeda-linked militants in 2002 in a truck bomb attack that killed 21 people including Western tourists.

AP, Reuters and Itamar Eichner contributed to this story.

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No Jews, no 9/11, says leading US neo-Nazi

The 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center would never have occurred had it not been for Jews, according to one of the leading figures of a United State’s neo-Nazi movement.

As the United States experiences a spike in anti-Semitic incidents, Israeli journalist and former politician Nitzan Horowitz paid a visit to the country where he conducted an interview with Matthew Heimbach, a far-right white nationalist who advocates a vehemently anti-Semitic agenda.

Leader of The Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP), Heimbach told Horowitz in the interview that Jews are responsible for just about all of America’s ills and shortcomings.

Jews, who he and his cronies say “should go home to Israel” and are not American, can be blamed for “working to enslave and displace all of our peoples” through their alleged domination of Wall Street, are “hostile” to American communities and family and are responsible for the US’s trillion-dollar financial deficit.

Matthew Heimbach

Moreover, Heimbach posits that the US’s backing of “Zionism” led to the deadliest attack on American soil on 9/11 and therefore the loss of thousands of American soldiers in ensuing wars.

Arabs would not hate the US, and no wars would occur with Middle Eastern countries, Heimbach continues in his vitriolic diatribe, if it were not for American support of Israel.

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Israeli soccer makes Holocaust memorial project next goal

The Israeli soccer world has agreed to pitch in to the World Jewish Congress's biggest ever Holocaust memorial initiative, with back-to-back reigning champions Hapoel Be'er Sheva, Maccabi Haifa and Hapoel Katamon of Jerusalem all joining the international project with their players photographed with the hashtag leading the project—#WeRemember. The project is intended to honor and commemorate the memory of the Holocaust, while sending the message of "Never again."

During the next few weeks and up until International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 millions of people will be joining the campaign as well, carrying signs with the aforementioned hashtag.

Hapoel Be'er Sheva owner Barkat (2nd from right) her players joined the WJC's Holocaust memorial project

The goal is raising awareness of anti-Semitism, hatred and genocide all over the world by flooding social networks with the photos. From January 24 and until International Holocaust Remembrance Day, selected photos will be screened onto the walls of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

Last year, the year of the campaign's inauguration, more than 250 million people around the world were exposed to it and more than a million people took part, including heads of state, religious leaders and opinion shapers from across the globe.

Maccabi Haifa's players

The campaign's materials will be translated to dozens of languages and disseminated throughout January in the World Jewish Congress and its many partners' different media channels. "Preserving the memory of the Holocaust is our duty as Jews and Israelis. Let's send a message of memory and education together so the Holocaust can never happen again," Hapoel Be'er Sheva owner Alona Barkat said.

Hapoel Katamon's players before a game

"Anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and xenophobia continue to rear their ugly heads today," said World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder. "We have to remember the Holocaust because the number of living survivors is ever decreasing, and in a few years' time they will all be gone. "We have to remember that 'Never again' happens again and again. Now, it's the younger generation's responsibility to educate their friends on the horrors of hatred, and spread the message that never again truly means never again."

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Germany's migrants may have to visit Nazi concentration camps

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Germany's Central Council of Jews supports proposal by Palestinian-German politician to introduce compulsory visits by migrants to concentration camps in bid to quash perceived rise in anti-Semitism. Germany's migrants may have to visit Nazi concentration camps : http://ift.tt/2AL5B3M