Jeanette Friedman

By Jeanette Friedman

Sometimes serious matters cannot be reduced to mere sound bites or black and white. Complicated issues should be examined carefully before an action is taken. One of those things is HR1746, a bill now before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services. This bill, the Holocaust Insurance Accountability Act, will allow survivors to sue insurance companies that are withholding payments on policies dating back to the Holocaust Era. If passed, Congress will essentially disavow the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC) agreement.

Established in 1998, ICHEIC was created as the outcome of an international agreement signed by officials from the United States Department of State, the German government, other European countries, Israel and Jewish organizations. It also involved U.S. state insurance regulators, European insurance companies, and the European Economic Commission. It was chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, whose leadership was sought precisely because of his well-earned ethical standing.

ICHEIC worked with 75 European insurance companies and “partner entities” on a voluntary basis and resolved more than 90,000 claims. As a result of its efforts, $306 million went to 48,000+ Holocaust survivors, their heirs and families of victims, often with little or no documentation to prove their cases. More than $169 million in additional funds was also secured to benefit needy Holocaust survivors worldwide. And when ICHEIC concluded operations in 2007, individual Holocaust survivors who were dissatisfied with the process clearly could pursue legal action against insurance companies.

HR 1746 seeks to abrogate all that ICHEIC accomplished. True, ICHIEC was flawed—as internal conflicts between survivors, diplomats and industry executives persisted throughout the commission’s existence. Nevertheless, ICHEIC did what it could to get funds, and quickly, to as many survivors as possible. (See www.icheic.org for details of the process.)

The key word is quickly. Those who signed the agreement tried to put money into the hands of those who passed agreed upon criteria, into the hands of poor survivors, and to the agencies serving them around the world—from the Americas to Australia, from Israel to the FSU. The idea was to avoid lawsuits—which can take insufferable lengths of time, are prohibitively expensive, and promise little in return. While lawsuits slowly wended their way through the courts, survivors were dying at alarming rates. Impoverished survivors were dying even more quickly than that. In Israel, the former Soviet Union, Florida and New York, there were hundreds of thousands of aging survivors who needed help immediately, not years in the future. ICHEIC got the money to them for the promise of legal peace.

Klaus Scharioth, the German ambassador to the United States, wrote to the late Congressman Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor and chair of the House International Relations committee: “At ICHEIC’s final session on 20 March 2007 there was overall agreement that German insurers have fulfilled all obligations under the ICHEIC trilat¬eral agreement and have therefore deserved permanent and all-embracing legal peace.”

He noted that the German Government acknowledges without qualification Germany’s historical responsibility for the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors. He pointed out there are “signifi¬cant legal hurdles posed by the federal rules [in the U.S. and Germany] of evidence for claims brought in court.” The hurdles didn’t apply to the ICHEIC process, since many claimants did not have to produce documents and other evidence to get claims processed. Scharioth added that in court actions against insurance companies, one could not guarantee success and that voluntary agreements, such as ICHEIC, helped Holocaust survivors whose claims would not stand up in court.

The letter reiterated that “Claimants with sufficient documentation can still file their claims with the insurance companies concerned, as insurers promised to continue processing these claims—and apply ICHEIC standards in their decisions—even after the ICHEIC process has been con¬cluded.”

But HR 1746 demands that insurance companies seeking to do business in the United States reveal all their records from 1933 through 1945. It exacts penalties and damages for those companies failing to comply. The bill mandates the creation of a Holocaust Insurance Registry to be maintained by the federal Archivist. (The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost of creating and maintaining the registry would be tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.)

HR 1746 will hurt Holocaust survivors around the world, as Scharioth explained to Lantos.

“Even if the legislation currently under discussion should clear the way for a few sur¬vivors to win large sums in court, it would certainly jeopardize the possibility of com¬pensating large numbers of Holocaust survivors through voluntary contributions, for example, by industry. Indeed, turning away from the principle of legal peace after voluntary compensation has been paid, would make it much harder to convince indus¬try not only in Germany, but anywhere in the world [to cooperate]…. HR 1746, in our opinion, is contrary to good faith…Negotiation can help Holocaust survi¬vors in a better and more timely manner than litigation ever could. Should HR 1746…become law, it would likely be impossible to enlist the support of any Ger¬man company for similar projects in the future….Hence, HR 1746 would do nothing to improve the lot of the majority of Holocaust survivors, but would at the same time jeopardize future agreements that would really serve to benefit Holocaust survivors in dire need of help….”

Secretary of State Eagleburger, former Deputy Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat and signatories of the trilateral agreements agree. They are concerned that no one will come to the table to negotiate the expansion of categories under which Holocaust survivors receive funding. In short, by reneging on the ICHEIC agreements, by creating a federal agency to become part of the litigious process against agencies that have so far, admittedly begrudgingly, opened their coffers to afford some survivor relief, all the participants in the agreements will no longer be viable partners for any future negotiations.

Considering the history of survivor litigation, the scandals concerning the handling of survivor funds, the news of some attorneys involved in such litigation being convicted of malfeasance, the last thing the U.S. and the Jewish community need is to further such a state of affairs at Holocaust survivors’ expense. Lawsuits, especially class-action suits, can take years to resolve, and then no one sees much money except the lawyers. Do the survivors really have the time?

Survivors in need have to have their needs fulfilled now. If Congress wants to initiate legislation that will cost millions of taxpayer dollars to enforce, why not expend those millions on behalf of Holocaust survivors now? Why not guarantee health care and economic sustenance instead of law suits?

The proponents of this bill say that if you are against this bill, you are against the Holocaust survivors. They paint a picture in black and white. Perhaps the many shades of gray involved here might warrant a closer look.

Paul Shapiro: Mission Impossible, Accomplished
By working to make the ITS files at Bad Arolsen public, Paul Shapiro is midwife to history.

By Jeanette Friedman

Holocaust survivors and their descendants went to Washington in October 2007 to learn about the International Tracing Service (ITS), a long-closed archive housed in Bad Arolsen, Germany, that is finally being made available to Holocaust survivors, their families and researchers. Since 1945, Holocaust documentation has been gathered from around the world and stored at ITS, which is overseen today by an 11-nation governing board—the ITS International Commission. Placed under the aegis of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1955, the files include Nazi war records and displaced persons camp records that contain information on the fates of at least 17 million people victimized or displaced by the Nazis. The records have been tapped to implement postwar restitution and forced labor compensation settlements between survivors and the governments of perpetrator states, but the full extent of the archives was never made public.

For decades, survivors and their descendants requested information from the ITS in order to determine what happened to family members during the war. They often waited years for a response and when they did receive something, in many instances the information was incorrect or incomplete. Survivors were left wondering if they had been told the whole story, and had no way to find out. The backlog of inquiries grew until by 2001/2002 there were over 400,000 of them. All attempts to gain direct access to the files were rebuffed. Protests grew, and with restitution and reparation application deadlines running out, with survivors dying in ever increasing numbers, access to the files became critical.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, joined later by the U.S. Department of State, began a campaign to secure agreement from the 11 countries on the ITS governing board—the ITS International Commission—to make the files public. The final steps in what became a complicated and heated diplomatic process were completed in November 2007. As part of the agreement, digital copies of the entire archive are being delivered to the museum in Washington and to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The first installment of 17.8 million digital document images was received in August 2007. A 50-million-card name file followed in November. The remainder will come through a series of shipments over the next three years, and by 2010, with well over 100 million digital pages in hand, the museum will have a complete copy of the archive. The museum’s mission now is to transform tens of millions of digital images (.tif and .jpg files) into searchable files (.txt, .doc or .pdf files), so that people can easily find the information they want. It’s a complicated process, it may take years, it involves new developing technologies, but it is happening at last.

The man who was a prime mover in getting those digitized files to Holocaust repositories was Paul Shapiro, a quiet fellow, who never really imagined himself in the role of Holocaust activist. But history has a way of shaping people and imbuing them with passion.

**Shapiro was born in Framingham, Mass, the town that put cholesterol testing on the map. Local schools were so overcrowded with baby boomers, that when his parents offered him the chance to attend Phillips Exeter Academy he grabbed it—and built a Jewish congregation there for Jewish students, who until then were required to attend church services as part of their academic training. Shapiro eventually earned Jewish students the right to attend synagogue off campus during Jewish holidays—the result of a public and sometimes vehement confrontation with school authorities.

Exeter led to Harvard.

There, Shapiro studied government and international affairs, particularly the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. They were the main international focus of the day, as America’s opponents in the Cold War. His graduate work was in Eastern Europe history. What he learned above all else is that we need to understand the history of the countries we deal with or we won’t ever understand them diplomatically. There was also a side-effect.

As Shapiro put it: “Once you delve into Eastern Europe, you have to delve into Jewish history, life and culture. It is inescapable. And that brings you to the Holocaust.” And once you confront the Holocaust, as a Jew in America at that time, you had to confront the critical issue of civil rights in America. In 1964, at age 18, he gave a commencement address in the aftermath of the murder of Medgar Evers. Evers, the NAACP’s field representative in Jackson, Mississippi, was shot dead in his driveway in June 1963. “I spoke about the Holocaust and how Jews were murdered with few hands raised to help them. I described the catastrophic consequences. Then I told the Medgar Evers story and asked students to consider what their responsibility is when such actions take place in our country and the response is silence,” Shapiro recalled.

There was dead silence in the auditorium—from parents and students. That was followed by a huge struggle between the headmaster and the board of trustees, about whether or not to publish his remarks. “That told me that there was something powerful and necessary about telling the story of the Holocaust, and that it was essential for people to understand the importance of acting when they witness discrimination, no matter if it is based on religion, race, creed or other prejudice. If we are true to our tradition as Jews, and if we are true to our traditions as Americans, we have an obligation to teach Holocaust history so people can learn from it and gain some enlightenment in the way we treat people—especially people who are different—today. What you learn is that silence empowers those perpetrating the injustice. You can extrapolate this from that: if you stand by when something has to be done, that is simply not good enough.”

When he was finished at Harvard, Columbia University sent him to Romania as a Fulbright scholar—and when his schooling was done, he went to work for the U.S. government as a researcher at United States Information Agency journal, Problems of Communism, the most important publication of its kind in its day.

There he was also asked to do some research for the Department of Justice, to bring evidence in the first successful case brought against a fascist who lied to American immigration authorities to gain entry into the United States. The man in question had unleashed a pogrom in Bucharest, Romania, in 1941. In America he had risen to become the Romanian Orthodox Archbishop of the United States, chairman of the National Council of Churches, and had even opened a session of Congress.

This took place at the time Elizabeth Holtzman, a congresswoman from Flatbush Brooklyn, was arguing for the creation of the Office of Special Investigations, now headed by Eli Rosenbaum. The case against the Romanian cleric was handled in a tiny office at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, however, because some politicians, including in the White House, were reluctant to address the issue.

Having gained experience working in classified Romanian Holocaust archives for the Trifa case, Shapiro began to do research for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—as a volunteer and a part-time researcher on assignment from USIA—in 1989, a few years before the museum opened its doors. It soon became clear to him that this was his passion and that he had found his true métier. In 1997, USIA loaned him to the museum for two years to help develop its Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. When the two years were up, the Museum asked him to stay. He did. The rest is history. Literally.

**Shapiro was appointed director of the Center and designed a program around a large number of research fellowships, programs for faculty who teach the Holocaust at college and universities, publications, research workshops and symposia on difficult subjects in Holocaust studies. One of the most important aspects of the Center’s work was to collect archival material relating to the Holocaust—the basis of all Holocaust research.

“In the roughly 20 years that the museum has been involved in archival collection, we’ve assembled about 40 millions pages of documents from 40 countries, forming the basis of a new generation of Holocaust research and teaching,” he told Lifestyles.

Imagine his reaction when he learned that there were more than 50 million original documents, and 50 million index cards relating to victims of Nazism at Bad Arolsen in Germany and that none of it was available for research.

“As a research scholar, that absolutely grabbed me. There’s no question. But as a human being I was overwhelmed by the tragic fact that much of the Holocaust survivor generation has passed away without knowing what happened to the loved ones they lost and fearing that once they are all gone no one will remember their names, or the names of the loved ones they lost, or the fate they suffered. I felt a moral obligation to bring into the open this massive documentation that tells the stories of millions of people who were lost, degraded or displaced. Success could offer closure to survivors who were there, and for those of us who were not, and all who come after us, the documentation would be a powerful insurance policy against forgetting. Everyone warned me that this would be a fruitless effort. But succeed or fail, I knew that I could not simply walk away from the issue.”

The ITS archives contain millions of pages of documentation covering four huge areas:

1. The concentration camp system, deportations, transports, Gestapo arrests and other forms of incarceration.
2. The forced/slave labor of millions of people, both Jews and non-Jews, who were treated not as human beings, but as assets to be used until they dropped—Arbeit macht frei —literally worked to death.
3. The fate of Holocaust survivors and other displaced persons, and how they were treated by the Nazis and the post-war victors.
4. The manner in which, since the end of the Holocaust, people who needed the information in the documents at Bad Arolsen were served by the 11 governments on the ITS International Commission and ITS’s ICRC administrators.

These ITS archives will literally double the amount of archival material at the museum, and some of the information in those 17 miles of documents will provide answers to questions we have only wondered about up to now: What did the forced and slave labor system look like at the ground level? What factors could affect the decisions made regarding concentration camp prisoners that determined their death or survival? How differentiated was the treatment of DPs by Allied authorities? How did perpetrators and war criminals obtain DP status, allowing them to avoid punishment and come to the United States? Moreover, because the documents were created at the same time and relate to all categories of victims, Jewish and not, the collection offers a powerful opportunity to make comparisons among all the persecuted groups and to learn from that.

The bottom line, says Paul, “is that the documents have multiple levels of importance. They perform a huge memorial function—to know the names and fates of those who disappeared. A memorial function that is so central in Judaism, to remember and speak the names of the departed, can then be fulfilled. But it is just as important for the families of non-Jewish victims to know what happened to those they lost.”

Shapiro also points to the moral obligation that we have to people perceived to be powerless, and that the survivors of genocide are perceived as powerless. That obligation is to tell their story, reassure them it will not be forgotten, and provide them with the information they need to come to some form of closure. Like other scholars, he sees the material as tremendously important from a scholarly research and teaching perspective as well.

Shapiro relates the archive to major problems of our own day as well. “With Holocaust denial on the rise, we have had the blessing of survivors to attest to the reality of the Holocaust. In the future, the original documents, of which there are millions at ITS, will be the truest testimonial and the most authentic witnesses. This collection also demonstrates in the most dramatic way the danger of anti-Semitism, not only for Jews, but for everyone. It is a warning of the need to confront resurgent antisemitism in our own times.”

About 25 percent of the documentation in the Bad Arolsen archives relates to Jews; the rest, to non-Jewish victims of the racial and religious hatred that is unleashed when antisemitism is allowed to become the operating principle of a society. They suffered and died as a result of antisemitism, too. The museum is committed to telling the story of all of the groups victimized by the Nazis and their collaborators. This collection will be of interest and of service to many ethnic communities in the United States that have an interest in this history, including Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, French, Belgians, and all the countries affected by World War II.

**Shapiro first became aware of the Bad Arolsen files when he went to work at the Museum. The leadership of ITS wouldn’t talk to the museum about making the resources available to scholars or anyone else. That intrigued him, and in 2001 he attended the annual meeting of the 11 governments that oversee the ITS.

Despite his plea on behalf of the dwindling survivor population, it became clear to him that neither the governments nor the ICRC had any intention to act seriously on opening the archives. Though survivors and scholars had asked for access to the files, they were repeatedly rebuffed. When the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors wrote them in 2000 and again in 2004, they didn’t bother to respond. Benjamin Meed, President of the American Gathering, threatened to rally 10,000 survivors to protest, but they ignored him and anyone else attempting to change their policies or even obtain information about the holdings. Meed, who passed away last year, never received a response to his letters.

Shapiro traveled to ITS and made repeated requests for lists of its archival holdings, all of which were rejected. But he believed that if he could show people what was in the archives, he could win them over. It had become clear that the systematic withholding of information was part of a strategy to make it impossible for the governments on the ITS board to act. ITS’s on-site leadership, the ICRC, and some members of the board itself maintained a stranglehold on the situation.

Working at the museum gave Shapiro the ability to do things others might not be able to do. Among them was assigning researchers from the museum staff to gather all the information they could possibly find about what was actually in the Bad Arolsen files—by checking the archives in the participating countries that had inventoried what they had sent, and locating in the National Archives an untouched crumbling list of the collections that had been turned over to the Red Cross by the Allied High Command in Germany in 1955. Through the great work done by the museum scholars, they also assembled information on two-thirds of the thousands of collections that had been deposited in Bad Arolsen after 1955.

Shapiro knew that making this information public and describing the situation at ITS to a community of individuals and organizations dedicated to working on the Holocaust would have a dramatic impact. He prepared a “white paper” for the International Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research when it met in Rome in June 2004. The Task Force is an organization of government and non-governmental organizations from 24 countries, all with a Holocaust focus.

The effect was immediate. The Task Force passed three successive unanimous resolutions over a 12-month period—the first such public resolutions in its history—demanding the immediate opening of the files. The resolutions and associated press releases impacted the governments on the ITS board. All were associated with the Task Force, and Shapiro challenged them publicly to explain a situation in one forum they were calling for the immediate opening of the files, while in another they were keeping them locked up tight.

When media attention focused on the story and diplomatic tempers began to rise, the U.S. State Department finally joined the museum’s effort to force action to open the files. Over the following 24 months, the museum was able, in partnership with the State Department, to convince all 11 governments and the ICRC to sign agreements not only to open the archives, but at the museum’s initiative, to allow each country on the ITS board to have a complete digital copy. Agreement came in 2006, and by November 2007 every country had ratified it. The transfer of digital actually began in advance of ratification, in August 2007!

**What is being transferred? Years ago, worried that the paper files that fill six buildings in Bad Arolsen might go up in smoke, ITS began scanning the documents into computer images. The resulting files are not “searchable” for key words or names because they are essentially photographs of the documents, and cannot be “read” by the computer when it is looking for specific words. Normally, software programs called optical character recognition programs can read these photographs of words, and turn them into text files automatically, but only if they have a certain uniformity of language and are clearly typed, not handwritten. Even then, even with the best software, the system isn’t foolproof. Much of the Bad Arolsen documentation is handwritten, in multiple languages, on pieces of paper of dramatically different format, quality, size and color. Many of the words even on typed documents are obscured by stamps, stains and other interference. That means that every .jpg and .tif file will have to be individually looked at, typed in and verified before it can become a searchable file. When you are dealing with tens of millions of documents, that transformation can take years.

Says Shapiro, “Time is of the essence, and survivors have already waited too long. Because software development and digitization will take time, we are reassigning staff members and bringing in new staff and volunteers to help survivors seek out the documents that relate to their families.” The museum hopes to begin responding to survivor requests for information in early January. Initially, searching the archive will require specially trained archivists using custom software to get clues about where to look for information in the actual documents. The museum will send survivors and their families copies of the documents they find. Under new leadership, ITS also is now committed to providing improved service and has agreed to provide copies of documents when it responds to inquiries.

“Finally!” Shapiro concludes. Summing up the museum’s plans, he explains, “This is a two track process. The moral drive to take care of the survivors and their families—which is an immediate need—is track one, and the train is already moving pretty fast. But we are working on improved access tools at the same time, recognizing that they will take time to develop. Over the long term, the research, teaching and memorial uses of the Bad Arolsen archives will contribute to the fulfillment of the mission of the museum, which owes so much—its very existence in fact—to the inspiration and dedication of the survivors themselves.”

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT (#2)
by Robin Morgan
February 2, 2008
New York City

“Goodbye To All That” was my (in)famous 1970 essay breaking free from a politics of accommodation especially affecting women. During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women’s movements, I’ve avoided writing another specific “Goodbye . . .”. But not since the suffrage struggle have two communities — the joint conscience-keepers of this country — been so set in competition, as the contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO) unfurls. So.
Goodbye to the double standard . . .
–Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who’s emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.
–She’s “ambitious” but he shows “fire in the belly.” (Ever had labor pains? )
–When a sexist idiot screamed “Iron my shirt!” at HRC, it was
considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted “Shine my shoes!” at BO, it would’ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint
analyzing our national dishonor.
–Young political Kennedys–Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr.–all
endorsed Hillary. Sen. Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed, pundits would snort “See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him.” (Personally, I’m unimpressed with Caroline’s longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)

Goodbye to the toxic viciousness . . .

- Carl Bernstein’s disgust at Hillary’s “thick ankles.”

- Nixon-trickster Roger Stone’s new Hillary-hating 527 group, “Citizens United Not Timid” (check the capital letters).

- John McCain answering “How do we beat the bitch?” with “Excellent question!” Would he have dared reply similarly to “How do we beat the black bastard?” For shame.
- Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged-and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.

- Goodbye to the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history, > including one with the murderous slogan “If Only Hillary had married > O.J. Instead!” Shame.
- Goodbye to Comedy Central’s “Southpark” featuring a storyline in which terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC’s vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain down into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison.

For shame.
Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny. This is not “Clinton hating,” not “Hillary hating.” This is sociopathic woman-hating. If it were about Jews, we would recognize it instantly as anti-Semitic propaganda; if about race, as KKK poison. Hell, PETA would go ballistic if such vomitous spew were directed at
animals. Where is our sense of outrage-as citizens, voters, Americans?

Goodbye to the news-coverage target-practice . . . The women’s movement and Media Matters wrung an apology from MSNBC’s
Chris Matthews for relentless misogynistic comments
(http://www.womensmediacenter.com/).

But what about NBC’s Tim Russert’s continual sexist asides and his all-white-male panels pontificating on race and gender?
Or CNN’s Tony Harris chuckling at “the chromosome thing” while interviewing a woman from The White House Project? And that’s not even mentioning Fox News.

Goodbye to pretending the black community is entirely male and all women are white . . .

Surprise! Women exist in all opinions, pigmentations, ethnicities,
abilities, sexual preferences, and ages–not only African American and European American but Latina and Native American, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Arab American and-hey, every group, because a group wouldn’t be alive if we hadn’t given birth to it. A few non-racist countries may exist — but sexism is everywhere. No matter how many ways a woman breaks free from other oppressions, she remains a female human being in a world still so patriarchal that it’s the “norm.”

So why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the centuries, even millennia, of struggle that got us this far, as black Americans, women and men, are justly proud of their struggles?

Goodbye to a campaign where he has to pass as white (which whites-especially wealthy ones–adore), while she has to pass as male (which both men and women demanded of her, and then found > unforgivable). If she were black or he were female we wouldn’t be having such problems, and I for one would be in heaven. But at present such a candidate wouldn’t stand a chance-even if she shared Condi Rice’s Bush-defending politics.

I was celebrating the pivotal power at last focused on African
American women deciding on which of two candidates to bestow their vote–until a number of Hillary-supporting black feminists told me they’re being called “race traitors.”

So goodbye to conversations about this nation’s deepest
scar-slavery-which fail to acknowledge that labor -and sexual-slavery exist today in the US and elsewhere on this planet, and the majority of those enslaved are women.

Women have endured sex/race/ethnic/religious hatred, rape and battery, invasion of spirit and flesh, forced pregnancy; being the majority of the poor, the illiterate, the disabled, of refugees, caregivers, the HIV/AIDS afflicted, the powerless. We have survived invisibility, ridicule, religious fundamentalisms, polygamy, teargas, forced feedings, jails, asylums, sati, purdah, female genital mutilation, witch burnings, stonings, and attempted gynocides. We have tried reason, persuasion, reassurances, and being extra-qualified, only to learn it never was about qualifications after all. We know that at this historical moment women experience the world differently from men — though not all the same as one another — and can govern differently, from Elizabeth Tudor to Michele Bachelet and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

We remember when Shirley Chisholm and Patricia Schroeder ran for this high office and barely got past the gate-they showed too much passion, raised too little cash, were joke fodder. Goodbye to all that. (And goodbye to some feminists so famished for a female president they were even willing to abandon women’s rights in backing Elizabeth Dole.)

Goodbye, goodbye to . . .
–blaming anything Bill Clinton does on Hillary (even including his
womanizing like the Kennedy guys–though unlike them, he got reported on). Let’s get real. If he hadn’t campaigned strongly for her everyone would cluck over what that meant. Enough of Bill and Teddy Kennedy locking their alpha male horns while Hillary pays for it.
–an era when parts of the populace feel so disaffected by politics
that a comparative lack of knowledge, experience, and skill is
actually seen as attractive, when celebrity-culture mania now infects our elections so that it’s “cooler” to glow with marquee charisma than to understand the vast global complexities of power on a nuclear, wounded planet.
–the notion that it’s fun to elect a handsome, cocky president who feels he can learn on the job, goodbye to George W. Bush and the destruction brought by his inexperience, ignorance, and arrogance.

Goodbye to the accusation that HRC acts “entitled” when she’s worked intensely at everything she’s done-including being a
nose-to-the-grindstone, first-rate senator from my state.

Goodbye to her being exploited as a Rorschach test by women who reduce her to a blank screen on which they project their own fears, failures, fantasies.

Goodbye to the phrase “polarizing figure” to describe someone who embodies the transitions women have made in the last century and are poised to make in this one. It was the women’s movement that quipped, “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” She heard us, and she has.

Goodbye to some women letting history pass by while wringing their hands, because Hillary isn’t as “likeable” as they’ve been warned they must be, or because she didn’t leave him, couldn’t “control” him, kept her family together and raised a smart, sane daughter. (Think of the blame if Chelsea had ever acted in the alcoholic, neurotic manner of the Bush twins!)

Goodbye to some women pouting because she didn’t bake cookies or she did, sniping because she learned the rules and then bent or broke them.

Grow the hell up. She is not running for Ms.-perfect-pure-queen-icon of the feminist movement. She is running to be President of the United States.

Goodbye to the shocking American ignorance of our own and other countries’ history. Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir rose through party ranks and war, positioning themselves as proto-male leaders. Almost all other female heads of government so far have been related to men of power-granddaughters, daughters, sisters, wives, widows: Gandhi, Bandaranike, Bhutto, Aquino, Chamorro, Wazed, Macapagal-Arroyo, Johnson Sirleaf, Bachelet, Kirchner, and more.

Even in our “land of opportunity,” it’s mostly the first pathway “in” permitted to women: Reps. Doris Matsui and Mary Bono and Sala Burton; Sen. Jean Carnahan . . . far too many to list here.

Goodbye to a misrepresented generational divide . . .

Goodbye to the so-called spontaneous “Obama Girl” flaunting her bikini-clad ass online-then confessing Oh yeah it wasn’t her idea
after all, some guys got her to do it and dictated the clothes, which she said “made me feel like a dork.”

Goodbye to some young women eager to win male approval by showing they’re not feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten the status quo), who can’t identify with a woman candidate because she is unafraid of eeueweeeu yucky power, who fear their boyfriends might look at them funny if they say something good about her. Goodbye to women of any age again feeling unworthy, sulking “what if she’s not electable?” or “maybe it’s post-feminism and whoooosh we’re already
free.”

Let a statement by the magnificent Harriet Tubman stand as
reply. When asked how she managed to save hundreds of enslaved African Americans via the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, she replied bitterly, “I could have saved thousands — if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.”

I’d rather say a joyful Hello to all the glorious young women who do identify with Hillary, and all the brave, smart men-of all ethnicities and any age–who get that it’s in their self-interest, too. She’s better qualified. (D’uh.) She’s a high-profile candidate with an enormous grasp of foreign- and domestic-policy nuance, dedication to detail, ability to absorb staggering insult and personal pain while retaining dignity, resolve, even humor, and keep on keeping on. (Also, yes, dammit, let’s hear it for her connections and funding and party-building background, too. Obama was awfully glad about those when she raised dough and campaigned for him to get to the Senate in the first place.)

I’d rather look forward to what a good president he might make in eight years, when his vision and spirit are seasoned by practical know-how–and he’ll be all of 54. Meanwhile, goodbye to turning him into a shining knight when actually he’s an astute, smooth pol with speechwriters who’ve worked with the Kennedys’ own speechwriter-courtier Ted Sorenson. If it’s only about ringing rhetoric, let speechwriters run. But isn’t it about getting the policies we want enacted?

And goodbye to the ageism . . . How dare anyone unilaterally decide when to turn the page on history, papering over real inequities and suffering constituencies in the promise of a feel-good campaign? How dare anyone claim to unify while dividing, or think that to rouse US youth from torpor it’s useful to triage the single largest demographic in this country’s history: the
boomer generation–the majority of which is female?

Older woman are the one group that doesn’t grow more conservative with age-and we are the generation of radicals who said “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”

Goodbye to going gently into any goodnight any man prescribes for us. We are the women who changed the reality of the United States. And though we never went away, brace yourselves: we’re back!

We are the women who brought this country equal credit, better pay, affirmative action, the concept of a family-focused workplace; the women who established rape-crisis centers and battery shelters, marital-rape and date-rape laws; the women who defended lesbian custody rights, who fought for prison reform, founded the peace and environmental movements; who insisted that medical research include female anatomy, who inspired men to become more nurturing parents, who created women’s studies and Title IX so we all could cheer the WNBA stars and Mia Hamm.

We are the women who reclaimed sexuality from violent pornography, who put child care on the national agenda, who
transformed demographics, artistic expression, language itself. We are the women who forged a worldwide movement. We are the proud successors of women who, though it took more than 50 years, won us the vote.

We are the women who now comprise the majority of US voters.
Hillary said she found her own voice in New Hampshire. There’s not a woman alive who, if she’s honest, doesn’t recognize what she means.

Then HRC got drowned out by campaign experts, Bill, and media’s obsession with All Things Bill.

So listen to her voice:

“For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words. “It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of human rights when woman and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small. It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide along women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own
families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.

“Women’s rights are human rights. Among those rights are the right to speak freely–and the right to be heard.”

That was Hillary Rodham Clinton defying the US State Department and the Chinese Government at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing (the full, stunning speech:

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/hillaryclintonbeijingspeech.htm

And this voice, age 22, in “Commencement Remarks of Hillary D.
Rodham, President of Wellesley College Government Association, Class > of 1969″ (full speech:
http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/Commencement/1969/053169hillary.html

“We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands. . . .
searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living. . . . [for the] integrity, the courage to be whole, living in
relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. . . . Fear is always with us, but we just don’t have time for it.”

She ended with the commitment “to practice, with all the skill of our being: the art of making possible.”

And for decades, she’s been learning how.

So goodbye to Hillary’s second-guessing herself. The real question is deeper than her re-finding her voice. Can we women find ours? Can we do this for ourselves? “Our President, Ourselves!”

Time is short and the contest tightening. We need to rise in furious energy–as we did when courageous Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the US Senate, as we did when desperate Rosie Jiminez was butchered by an illegal abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for trying to break through. We need to win, this time.

Goodbye to supporting HRC tepidly, with ambivalent caveats and
apologetic smiles. Time to volunteer, make phone calls, send emails, donate money, argue, rally, march, shout, vote.

Me? I support Hillary Rodham because she’s the best qualified of all candidates running in both parties. I support her because her progressive politics are as strong as her proven ability to withstand what will be a massive right-wing assault in the general election. I support her because she’s refreshingly thoughtful, and I’m bloodied from eight years of a jolly “uniter” with ejaculatory politics. I needn’t agree with her on every point. I agree with the 97 percent of her positions that are identical with Obama’s-and the few where hers are both more practical and to the left of his (like health care). I support her because she’s already smashed the first-lady stereotype and made history as a fine senator, and because I believe she will continue to make history not only as the first US woman president, but as a great US president.

As for the “woman thing”?

Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman — but because I am.

Robin Morgan
February 2, 2008
New York City

By Jeanette Friedman

If Jews around the world do not want Holocaust history distorted, then perhaps we should examine how we create our own myths—and lay those distorting myths to rest, once and for all. One such myth is particularly egregious, since it deals with Israel and the Holocaust.

A day after the UN Holocaust Commemoration on January 28, 2008, an e-blitz from Barbara Wind, director of the Holocaust Center of the UJCNJ (the Metro-West Federation) contained the following statement:

“ Amb. Dan Gillerman spoke eloquently, saying that if Israel had existed[,] the Holocaust would have been averted. (This will be the theme of our “One School Remembers” exhibit that will be on view Apr 6-May 3.)”

The Israeli diplomatic corps has been promulgating this myth for years—a luxury they can afford with 20-20 hindsight. Shimon Peres made a similar statement when he became the President of Israel a few months ago. These statements fly in the face of reality and don’t help Israeli credibility one iota.

Who can compare the Yishuv with today’s Israel? Eighty years ago, there were approximately 350,000 Jews, many of them refugees from Europe, living in Mandate Palestine, surrounded by millions of hostile Arabs. The Jews bought the land they lived on—until the British stopped them. Many of those Jews, who came in the first wave of pioneers, returned to Europe between the wars because they had nothing to eat. For those who remained, the economy was a disaster, and there were virtually no guns, no army and certainly no planes or tanks to use for self-defense.

There were 17,000,000 Jews in the world when World War II began, most of them in Central and Eastern Europe, and many in Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Egypt. In that war, the Nazis and their collaborators (including the Italians under Mussolini) caused the deaths of almost 60,000,000 people, including our own 6,000,000 Jews.

Could little Israel have stopped the Holocaust? Could she have absorbed 17,000,000 refugees or even 6,000,000? Today’s Israel has capacity, reach and scope that she didn’t have then—and couldn’t imagine having during the days of her birth.

The State of Israel wasn’t even an idea until the late 19th century—so how could its 350,000 Jews have managed to defend themselves against the Axis assault on Mandate Palestine? They couldn’t. Even the British Empire was at serious risk when confronted with the German war machine, and all of Europe practically collapsed like a house of cards within months of the Nazi onslaught. Poland fell in less than a month, Denmark, France, Belgium, Holland and other countries far more powerful than Palestine fell even more swiftly.

When Ben Gurion proposed that the British recruit thousands of Jews in special units in the war against the Nazis, the British rejected the request. Only after the situation deteriorated, and the Germans gained ground, did the British agree to establish the Jewish Brigade [5,000 troops]. And even then, many Zionists refused to fight the Nazis and their collaborators because it meant helping the British.

When France fell in 1940 and the Italians aligned with the Germans, Syria and Lebanon came under the control of Vichy France. The 30,000 Jews in Syria became victims of the same Nazi laws promulgated in Europe. Businesses were Aryanized and Jews were interned in camps. Henri Dentz, the Syrian high commissioner, planned to open concentration camps. Thankfully, in 1941, the British and Free French forces seized control before he could do so. Members of the Palmach—Moshe Dayan [who lost an eye in the campaign], Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon among them, participated in the Allied invasion against Vichy Syria, thus preventing the deportation of the Syrian Jews. (But success still did not allow Jewish entry to Palestine.)

In 1940, Italian planes were stationed in Rhodes. On July 15, they bombed Haifa. Nine days later, another bombing left 50 dead. In September, the Italians invaded Egypt and also bombed Tel Aviv, leaving more than 100 dead and many wounded, with extensive property damage. The Yishuv was already a German target. As an official Jewish state, “Israel” would have attracted a much larger invasion. (For the record, the Jews of Rhodes were deported in 1944.)

In April 1941, the Germans invaded Libya, causing British fear of an impending invasion of Palestine. By the end of May, German General Erwin Rommel reached the Egyptian border and the mighty British Empire retreated. During that same week, the Balkans, Yugoslavia and Greece fell to the Germans. Among the POWS were 1500 British soldiers from the Yishuv. That same month, a Palmach sabotage mission to Vichy Lebanon failed.

On June 10-12, 1941, the Italians returned and bombed Haifa and Tel Aviv. A year later, Rommel crossed Egypt to El Alamein, 60 miles from Alexandria. People were terrified the British would abandon Palestine, leaving it to the Germans—who had already made their deals with the Mufti of Jerusalem to deport the Jews.
When the Germans invaded Russia and headed for the Caucasus, there were fears of an invasion from the north. A state of emergency was declared and plans were made to fortify the Carmel, just in case. Palmach units were sent south toward the border with Egypt and to the sea, to prevent Axis attacks—the equivalent of sending a little Dutch boy to stick his finger in a dyke to stop a flood.

It wasn’t until October 1943, when British General Bernard Montgomery attacked Rommel’s army, that the German threat to Egypt and Palestine ended. That month, the Russian victory at Stalingrad marked the beginning of the fall of Nazi Germany. And that, and only that, stopped the German juggernaut.

So even if there would have been an official state of Israel (which would have been even tinier than it was in 1948, since Trans-Jordan was not an option if the West wanted Arab oil) how would it have possibly absorbed millions upon millions of impoverished Jews who would have flooded the area? With no infrastructure or space or even enough potable water, who would have been able to care for those millions of displaced Jews?

And when all the established countries of Europe, including Russia, couldn’t stop Germany until it self-destructed, do we really believe tiny Israel would have saved six million Jews and prevented the slavery of millions more?

NOT.

Jeanette Friedman is a freelance journalist and editor who founded Second Generation North Jersey in 1979.

David Kranzler, who passed away last week, was a religiously observant Jew who was immersed in the historical role of the Orthodox Jewish community during the Holocaust. While the countries of the world closed their hearts and minds to the destruction of European Jewish life, David was a flee case, a child survivor, who discovered during his extensive research that one group, the Orthodox community, was actively engaged in rescue. It would be an illuminating revelation that would direct his research for the rest of his life.

I first met David when I sought to learn more about the Kastner Transport, the train that transported 1,684 passengers—most of them were held hostage in Bergen-Belsen and released to freedom in Switzerland in December 1944. My mother, a Polish woman, was on that Hungarian train, and so was David’s wife, Judy. Agudath Israel archivist, Rabbi Moishe Kolodny, introduced us, and David and I worked together on some projects, notably The Goldberg Commission Report that reported on the inactivity of the American Jewish community during the Holocaust era. He became a trusted friend, a reliable source and someone who appreciated a good, solid, knock-down, drag-out intellectual battle.

Although David was a diligent and exact researcher, he was nevertheless stubborn, cantankerous and exacting. His long-winded writing style often got in the way of the incredible facts he managed to dig up from archives and interviews, driving a humble editor to distraction and despair. But he admitted when you were right—usually after yelling himself hoarse. On the day of his funeral his wife told me: “There were days he wanted to kill you.” The feeling was entirely mutual—and then she reminded me of his gentle, generous side, like the day he helped me cross Lexington and 68th right after my knee operation, and invited my daughter to his home for Shabbat. David was a special soul.

David’s seminal work was Japanese, Nazis and Jews, a massive work about the refugee community in Shanghai from 1938-1945 and the rescue efforts of Jan Zwartendyk and Chiune Sugihara. Published in 1978 by Yeshiva Univerity Press, it was one of many books that he wrote about the Holocaust that focused on the actions of the Orthodox.

In the early ’80s, as a member of the “Goldberg Commission to Examine the Role of American Jews During the Holocaust,” I read the rough draft of a document he submitted called “Orthodox Ends, UnOrthodox Means.” In painstaking detail, it described the rescue efforts of Rabbi Michael Ber Wiessmandl and Gisi Flieschmann in Slovakia and the Sternbuchs and others in Switzerland, as well as many other attempts to save Jewish lives during the war—along with the constant attempts of the American and Zionist Jewish establishment to thwart those efforts. Like Japanese, Nazis and Jews, the document was a tough read, but buried in the text were nuggets of pure historical gold—

and an indisputable damnation of the American Jewish establishment.

As an editor, I couldn’t help but pull out my blue pencil and start cleaning it up, so I called him and asked him if I could officially work on the document. That’s how we began working together. I contacted a personal friend, Tim Noble, one of the finest editors I have ever known and then the op-ed page editor of The Record in Bergen County, New Jersey, who agreed to do the final vetting. It was tumultuous and noisy work, but we were determined to make this document air-tight, with little wiggle-room.

One reason for this was that David’s degree was in library science, not history, so many mainstream historians treated him with contempt while they “borrowed” his material without giving him due credit. This naturally put him on the defensive and sometimes made things tough. But when the editing of “Orthodox Ends” was done, David gave me a copy of Henry Feingold’s Midrash on American Jewish History. He inscribed it in his own illuminated way and I had it with me when I ran into Feingold at a meeting.

I also had the final draft of “Orthodox Ends” and asked Feingold to read it. He said Kranzler couldn’t write. I said Kranzler could dig and that this document was edited, so he did me a favor and read it. When he was done reading, I handed him Midrash to autograph and under Kranzler’s dedication to me he wrote, “Litvaks never succumb,” and then admitted, though not in writing, that “Orthodox Ends” may well be one of the best documents in the report.

David, you will be missed. You were, indeed, one of the best.

OP-ED

By Jeanette Friedman Published: 11/13/2007

NEW YORK (JTA) — In “Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust,” the catalog that accompanies the exhibit of the same name, the director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust here puts into print the question on everyone’s lips when the survivors were liberated.

“Context is everything,” David Marwell writes. “In trying to understand the study of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, this dictum becomes especially critical. If the reader has any doubts, he or she need only think about the oft-repeated question, ‘Why did the Jews go like sheep to the slaughter?’ ”

Even now, 69 years after Kristallnacht and the beginning of the Holocaust, survivors are still putting to rest the accusations that they went like sheep to their fates. Some children, prompted by the attitudes of non-survivors in their milieu, even asked their survivor parents that question.

As Tom Segev’s “Seventh Million” made clear years ago, and a recent demonstration in the streets of Jerusalem underlined, to those without context Holocaust survivors are dismissed as bars of soap, “sabon.” Worse, many American Jews snidely wondered about the survivors, and some still do, “What did they do in order to survive?”

In the catalog’s final essay, psychologist Eva Fogelman notes that everyone blames the victim. It goes way back to Job: “Who ever perished, being innocent?” But Job’s friends didn’t understand him, and those who don’t understand the variations of Jewish defiance in the Holocaust simply don’t get it. To remain human, to maintain a shred of dignity in the midst of torturous mayhem, was to defy everything for which the Nazis stood.

The definition of resistance wasn’t helped by scholars and pundits who counted only armed resistance and measured success by counting the number of dead Germans killed by Jews.

Earlier this month, to honor the achievements of the distinguished Holocaust scholar Israel Gutman, four stellar academics — Yehuda Bauer, Judy Baumel-Schwartz, Robert Shapiro and David Engel — stood before an audience of about 200 and put Jewish resistance in the Holocaust into context.

Bauer was especially passionate. Amazingly, it was an Israeli who understood that what survivors and the Second Generation years ago called “spiritual resistance” was as important as armed resistance — and often much harder to maintain. The scholars broke it down to talk about women resisters, and religious, political and cultural resistance.

Bauer insisted that these stories of defiance be told and taught, otherwise future generations wouldn’t know how to resist those who try to dehumanize them and those who manipulate them politically.

He is absolutely right. More interesting is that those who grew up in survivor communities were surrounded by heroes who didn’t look or act like heroes at home. Some were short and dumpy, some could never master English or modern Hebrew, and few would talk about their experiences. But walk through the exhibit and you may find your neighbors on the walls and in the videos, or read about them in the catalog.

You realize that you know other heroes who deserve to be up on those walls and in those pages, but there just isn’t enough room. They did everything from observing Judaism, blowing up ammunition trains, producing Yiddish theater and concerts, and surviving under impossible circumstances.

When the museum first opened, the curator at the time, Yitzchak Mais, gave me, the daughter of survivors, a preview.

“Do you know about spiritual resistance?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

I described a tiny piece of cardboard with Hebrew letters shown to me by a survivor in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn years before. The survivor had used it in hiding to teach her little brother the Hebrew alphabet.

“It’s in the showcase on the second floor,” Mais said.

That piece of cardboard is a solid reminder of how tough the survivors still must be. It’s 62 years since the war ended and they still have to defy the powers that be to maintain their dignity as they face disease and death.

Unfortunately, those who owe the survivors the most are those who stole from them, treated them with contempt and appropriated their stories. But the survivors never give up. Our survivors, those who came from “there,” have lots to teach us. They are role models of whom we should be proud. They are not statistics that drain the economy. They are not sabon.

The Jews made their voices heard long ago, in hiding, in the camps, ghettos and forests. They made their voices heard when deniers began crawling out of the woodwork in the 1970s, and they make their voices heard now in their declining years. They demand that we remember. They demand the right to medical care, food and shelter so they can live and die with dignity. It’s a battle they have already fought.

As Marwell so eloquently says, “Just because Jews were powerless does not mean they were passive.”

Not even when they get old.

Jeanette Friedman, a freelance writer and editor, is a founder of the Second Generation movement.

This quote came from a blogger in Israel who is popular with the right-wing. Sometimes we agree, especially on issues of domestic violence, sometime we don’t. When she added this quote to her criticism of a friend who is founding a Jewish/Chrisitian political party, she got me going.

>>>There were a handful of us, students in Great Neck North, who went to the Free Soviet Jewry demonstrations of SSSJ, rather than demonstrating for “negro” civil rights, the Biaferans or against the Vietnam War. The war that ignited us was the Six Days War and the liberation of our Jewish Historical Lands.<<<

These are not mutually exclusive protests, and I took part in SSSJ AND protesting the Vietnam War AND supporting the Biafrans AND being a Zionist–and other causes, too. Including civil rights and Women’s Liberation.

Was my husband–a son of Holocaust Survivors and a draftee in Vietnam–not worth a protest to save his life and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who were there to fight a war that was created to prop up the dollar against the pound sterling?

Are Biafrans less than human? And were the “Negroes” supposed to remain slaves forever without civil rights?

What are the lessons we pull out of what the Nazis and their collaborators did to the Jews? That only Jews count? Did you know that a huge number of those that survived the Holocaust survived because a non-Jew, somewhere along the line, helped them, even if infinitesmally?

Where did you learn that only Jews matter and that human decency doesn’t go beyond the Jews?

At least you admit publicly that you have no moral compass. So let me bring this to a different level.

How many Holocaust survivors did YOU allow your government to murder this week with their neglect?

Did you know the Israeli government, from 1948 on, stole the victims’ money and land? Did you know the majority of Israelis have a culture that denigrates Holocaust survivors and sees them as a black mark on Jewish history? Did you know the consensus is that they need to die as quickly as possible and not be a drain on the Israeli economy? Did you know that your compatriots still call the survivors Sabon and Sabonit (cakes of soap)? That the surviving orphans were slaves in the Kibbutzim and cannon fodder as soon as they got off the boats that brought them to the Holy Land? That many girls were raped, that many orphans were robbed and killed?

Thanks to the new disclosures, and the current government’s behavior (too little too late) and the apathy of the Israelis for the people who are responsible for creating a State of Israel in the first place, I find it hard to be a Zionist, but not a Jew.

Without Holocaust money, Israel would still be nothing but a pile of sand and swamps. But then, aren’t solopsistic Israelis following in the footsteps of history? Isn’t patently clear to those who choose not to twist the words in the Torah. …where mothers kill sons and husbands, husbands kill mothers and sons and daughters, there’s child sacrifice and incest, murder for sex, we have it all–that our ancestors set a bad example? But they also knew repentance.

We Jews do good things too, but why don’t other people matter? What happens to the “little people?” There is only lip service for Akiva’s dictum: Love your neighbor for s/he is like you.

Are we all children of Adam and Eve? Do we share the same DNA or not?

Why do many Israelis silently agree to the killing of a few survivors each week? Why is the government permitted to withold their meds, starve them and let them boil or freeze? Why does the Israeli government keep what they stole from the survivors’ parents?

Then, if Holocaust survivors count for nothing in Israel, what happens to innocent Palestinians who are caught in the middle of a war they really didn’t want? Why does the Israeli government cater to extremists? The moderate innocent and the Arab Christians are now caught between Hamas, Fatah, Israel, Sunnis, Shiites, extremists of all sorts. They are treated like the garbage of the universe. Are they by your lights, as expendable as the Holocaust survivors? Less? More? How much can each group be exploited? Why stop the exploitation of those who are politically expendable?

If you think black people are expendable, that Asians in dire straits are expendable, that the boys who died in Vietnam were expendable, and that everyone who is dying in Mess-o-Potamia (Iraq) is expendable, and that Holocaust survivors are a drain on the Israeli economy, why shouldn’t your friend hook up with folks who think Jews are expendable?

What makes you think Jews are the only people who need to survive?

Thanks to comments like yours, we Jews are especially expendable.

On the first day God created the Heaven and Earth, and it was evening and it was morning and it was the first day. On the first day, we came out of the darkness and chaos, into the light, and the order of the Universe. On that day, all idolatry, all the worship of other gods was exposed as meaningless because only the one God could create the heaven and earth, and all those things people thought were gods, weren’t gods at all. Among many things, Genesis is about the negation of idolatry, and the Creation is the proof of the One God.

And when the one God was done creating the Universe, God created Adam and Eve. Man and woman he created them, as a single unit. He didn’t create Eve from Adam’s feet or his head. He created Eve from Adam’s side that they would be partners …and soon after that, the saga, which still hasn’t ended, began in the Garden of Eden.

Adam and Eve in the Garden were innocent, free of sin, free of guilt…they were, in a sense, ignorant and naïve. They didn’t know anything about life or death. How could they? They had no experience. They didn’t know about the lives we lead, filled with trials and tribulations. They certainly didn’t know anything about death. What they did know was that they could do as they pleased, as long as they stayed away from the Tree of Knowledge in the center of the Garden, and didn’t eat its fruit.

But one morning, the snake came along and tempted Eve, by implying the eating of the fruit would empower her to be god-like with God knowledge. She told the snake that if she so much as touched the tree, she would die. The snake told her that wouldn’t be the case, so she decided to eat the forbidden fruit, took a bite and offered it to Adam, who took a bite as well.

And then what happened? THEIR EYES WERE OPENED. And they were indeed infused with the power of God knowledge. They became self-aware. They became self-conscious. What does that mean? Some commentators say they became sexually aware, but that is not the answer. They became different from the animals. They suddenly understood actions have consequences and that people have to think about how they act and what the results of those acts will be.

They lost their innocence. They felt the guilt of doing something they were forbidden to do. They knew they would be punished, but did God kill them? No. He sent them out into the world to live, to make decisions, to raise families, to make peace or make war. The quality of their lives depended on their choices—whether they would be responsible choices or choices that would hurt others.

How did the Creation and negation of idolatry immediately lead into the story of the expulsion from the Garden? What does idolatry have to do with a lesson about responsibility and accountability?

Idolatry is not about worshipping statues and making child sacrifices and having wild bacchanals. Idolatry is anything that makes you feel good for the wrong reasons. It’s anything that enslaves you, like a drug habit or an obsession about something or someone that you cannot let go. It is pride and greed and the abuse of power. It is anything that prevents you from seeing another person as a person, and instead you use them as a means to an end.

But that’s not why God created the world. He created the FAMILY of man, and with that comes the need to act ethically and responsibly, in order to pursue peace, which is what the Torah asks us to do above all else.

As children of Adam and Eve, we all share the same DNA, and we must not destroy each other. That lesson comes hard on the heels of the expulsion, when Cain learned about being accountable, the hard way. Is he his brother’s keeper? Yes, he is, and so are we all our brothers’ keepers. We know, because the entire Torah is directed at teaching us to treat each other decently and to make peace.

There are two classic distillations of the Torah, one from Akiba, and one from Hillel, who existed in turbulent times, when the way the Torah was read and understood was going through a transformation.

Akiba said, “Love your neighbor for he is like you,” reinforcing the notion of the family of man. Hillel’s classic comment was made to the gentile who wanted to learn the Torah as he stood on one leg.

“Don’t do anything to anyone that you don’t want them to do to you. The rest is commentary, now go and study.”

When he said go and study, he didn’t mean to study the texts until you couldn’t make a living. He meant go out and study the world, make it a better place, care about your fellow man, and pursue peace.

On the first day, God created everything, and said to us, be my partners in Creation, be the Eve to my Adam. And as the Talmud says, while we may not be the ones who start the work, or finish the work, it is incumbent upon us to make sure we do our share.

—
And on Simchat Torah, God created me, as a twin to a boy, in an Orthodox family. And today, on my bat mitzvah, in a post-denominational chavurah, I can say, Today I am a Woman.

It has been a long journey for a person with short legs like mine, to be able to, on my 60th Simchat Torah, say a blessing on the Torah. It is something I have wanted to do since I was kicked out of the men’s section of the Agudath Israel of Crown Heights, when I was 9 years old—because I was a girl.

I loved the men’s shul, and hated the stairs and smell of old chulent, beef and bean stew, in the women’s shul upstairs. I loved the smell of snuff used by old Rabbi Kreiger, the famous writer of gets, who sat next to my father. I loved being under the tallis when the priests came out on the holidays to bless the congregation, and the smell of the parchment of the Torah scrolls whenever I kissed them.

On Simchat Torah, during the Musaf (afternoon service) I had helped tie the shoelaces of the person leading the prayers during the Amida, a prayer during which you are not permitted to move your feet. Then the older guys would wrap him in his tallis and take him out to the street, along with the pulpit, to finish. The fellows at the Mizrachi synagogue down the block went even further. They would stuff their leader into a cab and send it to Coney Island (as long as the cabbie did the driving, it must have been ok.) All this merriment followed a night of shul hopping from synagogue to synagogue to see the boys dancing with the Torah. The wildest dances took place on the corner of Eastern Parkway and Kingston Avenues, at 770, Lubavitch headquarters.

My 12th birthday was spent in a darkened sukkah with some friends and a birthday cake (no candles—not permitted to blow them out). I wasn’t standing in front of a Torah scroll to make a blessing. I could stand behind the curtain upstairs in the smelly women’s shul and peek, watching others, including my twin brother, do that as “Chasan Bereishis” The Groom of Genesis. Masculine, the male who gets to make the first blessing on the new year’s first reading, the beginning of the Torah, Bereishis. In the beginning. Why, I wondered, couldn’t there be a “Kallah Bereishit?” The Bride of Genesis.

I was a Beis Yakkov girl, a student at the ultra Orthodox girls only school where they taught us the Pentateuch and Prophets and only the halacha we needed to know about running a household and being a good wife.

But we had TV at home and I had a high school teacher, Shirley Jacobson, who taught us civics, and about political action and talked to us about going to college. She inspired me to convince my parents to let me to go to Brooklyn College, as long as it didn’t cost them anything except the bare minimum.

I lived in a society where talking to boys was out of the question—but I did it. Riding a bicycle was not permitted—but I did it. And when I was sent to the Beis Yakkov teacher’s seminary and told not to go to college—I went anyway. But I was still a good girl. When it came time to marry me off at the ripe old age of 18, I played by the rules and was hooked up via a shadchan, a matchmaker. The rest, as they say, is history. Legal history. Literally.

Brooklyn College saved my life. It’s where in the middle of my battle for freedom, during my escape from the ghetto, in September 1970, I met my husband Philip, a Vietnam vet, and we’ve stuck together through thick and thin, even thin air, for 37 years.

Brooklyn College taught me two trades—art and journalism, and how to be a Jew and a citizen of the world without suffocating ritual. There I learned to work the system when you have to and how use my Judaic values to make the world a better place for other people, and how to make the world a better place for me—from marching against the war in Vietnam in 1965 to marching in the Women’s Lib parade in 1970.

When I joined the school newspaper, I met a group of people who gave me courage to move out and up. They were the first to appreciate my writing ability, and taught me a trade that still pays the bills. They taught me how to look for an apartment and drive a car. They taught me how to dig for information and to use the power of the pen.

Whenever I was in conflict with myself or my ethics, the first person I would turn to for advice was Sol Amato, a kid from the Lower East Side, who used to wait tables in the Borscht Belt. He was the dean of the special baccalaureate degree program, and is a very gentle man. I remember Sol’s office, and the bottom drawer of the lateral filing cabinet, filled with his papers about the great philosophers and minds of the world. He always asked the right questions, gave the thoughtful answers and led me in the right direction.

And then there was the late Dolly Lowther Robinson, the sharecropper’s daughter who went to law school and became Secretary of Labor for the State of NY and a Model Cities Commissioner under Abe Beame. I cannot honor her enough, and only Sol and Philip realize how much I miss her. Without Sol and Dolly, above all others, the road I was on would not have led to Jack Bemporad, Chavura Beth Shalom and this ceremony in Alpine, New Jersey

When Phil and I moved to Teaneck, we had four kids, aged 1, 2, and 3 and 9. We had been in town about two years, when in 1979, someone painted swastikas on the synagogue where my kids were going to nursery school—and I started down a road with my fellow sons and daughters of survivors that led to meeting amazing people, including world leaders, and traveling around the world.

This road, through convoluted circumstances, led to Rabbi Jack, whose has taught me much in the last two years. Perhaps I frustrate the hell out of him because he has to uncross all the ultra-Orthodox hardwiring in my brain. But because of Jack I have looked into the Talmud, and I now know why the Ultra-O’s kept women away—there are things in there we don’t want our sons to even THINK about! He now has taken over the role that Sol Amato and Dolly Robinson played in my early shaping.

Sol and Jack are both 19th century men. Their frames of reference and methods of learning bear no resemblance to our world today. And I, deeply planted in the 21 century, am learning to translate what Jack teaches me into this realm. Rabbi Jack is helping me with my new beginning at the beginning of the Torah cycle, on my 60th Birthday, the reading of the Creation and the First Day.

Give the money to those who need it; it’s theirs, anyway
by Jeanette Friedman and David Gold

In the 1950s, Israeli Holocaust survivors signed over their restitution monies to the Israeli government, which, in return, promised to care for them in their old age. The logic was that the state needed the money to establish itself and protect its citizens.

At the same time, when the state was created, the British handed Israel all the assets and bank accounts that belonged to Holocaust victims and their heirs. But the Israelis have never returned the assets in their custody, and continued to thwart the attempt to return them. Bank Leumi, which had custody of these assets, had no right to transfer those assets to the state. In 2004, a committee chaired by MK Collette Avital, a daughter of survivors, was established to look into the matter and located 2,500 Leumi accounts. The committee established that the bank owed the survivors in excess of 300 million shekels (about $68 million).

The bank recently offered a paltry 20 million shekels (approximately $4.5 million) to the Holocaust Survivors Fund run by Zev Factor and Noah Flug, the umbrella organization for survivors in Israel. When the bank applied pressure to the Avital committee, the committee rewrote the repayment formula so that the bank would owe the survivors only a small percentage of the real total, because something is better than nothing. If heirs are not found, a process that could take years, Bank Leumi will pay the remaining survivors NIS 35 million at most, and keep the rest.

More than 80,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel are living below the poverty line with very few services offered to them. They need basic medical care, money for glasses and false teeth. After last summer’s war, the psychological problems of the survivors and their condition became more public. But no funds were advanced for treatment, and even the Claims Conference refused to come forward and finance emergency medical care. The conference released a mere $100,000 for use by Israeli survivors. As Roman Kent, the Claims Conference treasurer, said, “It was too little, and came way too late.” Flug and Factor calculated that caring for each Holocaust survivor under fire in the north cost $5,000, and that 5,000 survivors desperately needed help.

You do the math ($20 per survivor).

This happened soon after Flug and Factor said they had to close the Holocaust Fund because they had no money. Finally, the Claims Conference and the government gave them an infusion of cash, but the government is at war with itself when it comes to releasing funds to care for survivors.

Social Affairs Minister Isaac Herzog accuses the Finance Ministry of not implementing the plan to support Holocaust survivors. The Finance Ministry refuses to accept any proposal from the Social Affairs Ministry, even after the budget was cut. Until recently, the Finance Ministry was headed by Abraham Hirchson, who resigned in disgrace after a series of scandals that included allegations that he took funds from the Claims Conference and March of the Living. Some of this money was allegedly used to fund the Likud Party.

In his treatment of Holocaust survivors, Hirchson followed in his predecessors’ footprints. When Benjamin Netanyahu was finance minister, he threatened to destroy the Claims Conference unless he was given complete control of the allocations and negotiations. His bullying failed, but the survivors in Israel continue to suffer, because his legacy remains.

Avital’s committee forced the creation of something called Hashava.org.il, The Company for Locating and Restitution of Holocaust Victims’ Assets. Hashava was established in Israel by virtue of the Holocaust Victims Property Law (5766-2006). It has published the first list of 6,000 properties and assets owned by Jews in Europe prior to World War II. The list can be viewed on the organization’s website http://www.hashava.org.il in Hebrew or in English on www.americangathering.com.

Applications in English are available at americangathering.com and will be published as the centerfold in its next issue. In the next few months, another 54,000 assets and accounts will be listed. But it will take years for people to prove who they are. The list was checked against the lists of victims at Yad Vashem to make sure that those on the list actually died in the Holocaust. No one who had an account and is still alive is listed, and those not on the list can call or write Hashava to find out if they have any unclaimed assets.

It is a waiting game — the longer it takes to determine which survivors get money, more survivors die, and the organizations get to keep a larger piece of the leftovers.

In the meantime, everyone wants to jump on the money bandwagon. Survivors’ descendants in Israel have filed suit against the German government for $10 million over a three-year period, to pay 12,000 to 20,000 for psychotherapy. They blame the Germans for their parents’ bad parenting and their own neurosis.

Studies show that, as a rule, these people are better adjusted, more successful, and have a better grasp of reality than most of their peers in any ethnic group. Are Israeli children of survivors sicker than most because of the war pressure cooker they live in? If that’s the case, it is the Israeli government’s responsibility to care for them. Why sue the Germans?

Israeli society should stop looking for handouts from American Jews and everyone else under the sun, and take responsibility for its own citizens. They should never allow 80,000 survivors to starve.

Why should the Claims Conference fund major Israeli hospitals, even on a pro-rata basis, when those hospitals have millions upon millions of dollars in their budgets?

What is really at issue in Israel, and also in the United States, is the way the Jewish community treats its Holocaust survivors. In the end, it is not the responsibility of a third party to take care of them. When money is short, the Jewish community should provide it, not just to their favorite causes, but also to impoverished survivors and their distressed sons and daughters. Each community should take of its own people, whether they are survivors or not.

Take responsibility. Don’t wait for governments. Take care of your poor Holocaust survivors wherever they are, and stop waiting for someone else’s money to pay for it. As New Jersey’s Sen. Frank Lautenberg once said, when members of the Jewish community complained that they didn’t have enough money for certain Jewish projects: “Dig a little deeper.”

It’s a disgrace when the most fragile of the Jewish community, the elderly Holocaust survivors, are dismissed as a drain on budgets, but their life experience, namely the fact that they lived through the Holocaust, is the basis for political, financial, and emotional exploitation. Anyone who wants to raise funds for their favorite cause — whether it’s fighting anti-Semitism in Europe, interfaith conversation, Jewish continuity, or other matters that engage Jews — uses the Holocaust as a bludgeon. Enough.

Jeanette Friedman, founding president of Second Generation of North Jersey, and David Gold, member of the National Council of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, are working on a forthcoming book, “The Snake Made Me Do It: Ten Lessons from The Holocaust.”

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Ali Shahata-author of “Demystifying Islam”, Jeanette Friedman & Chuck Dicaro