Joseph Patrick Kennedy (1888-1969) was the patriarch of one of America’s greatest political dynasties. Kennedy’s son, John, the first Roman Catholic president, was assassinated 50 years ago on Nov. 22. Robert, John’s attorney general and a U.S. senator, was gunned down in 1968. Edward, who died four years ago, enjoyed a stellar career in the […]
The Roman Catholic church in Nazi Germany supported the regime’s antisemitic policies, says an American scholar specializing in modern German history. Speaking in Toronto during Holocaust Education Week, Beth Griech-Polelle, a Bowling Green State University historian, said the German church accommodated itself to Adolf Hitler’s new order to protect its interests and parishioners. Fearing it […]
People in Nazi-occupied Holland generally greeted the maltreatment of Jews with indignation, but local authorities cooperated with the Germans in the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands, says a Dutch historian. Wichert ten Have, chair of the Academic Working Group at the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in Amsterdam, made these comments in a lecture in Toronto on Nov. […]
Philip (Fiszel) Bialowitz was one of the lucky few. He survived the hell of Sobibor — a Nazi extermination camp in Poland where about 250,000 Jews were murdered in less than two years– and better still, he managed to escape from this purgatory, in the largest prisoner revolt of the Holocaust. Now an American citizen, […]
[cycloneslider id=”polands-jewish-past”] As part of Holocaust Education Week in Toronto, Beth Tzedec Congregation’s Reuben and Helene Dennis Museum is hosting an exhibit by Canadian photographer David Kaufman called The Posthumous Landscape: Jewish Sites of Memory in Poland Today. Officially opened on Oct. 29, it runs until Feb. 2, 2014. Kaufman’s visually remarkable photographs, all in […]
Donato Manduzio, a disabled veteran of World War I, transformed himself into a messianic figure after returning to San Nicandro, his remote ancestral village in southern Italy. As he resumed his trade as a cobbler, he turned to faith healing, and after reading the Old Testament for the first time, he discovered the Hebrew scriptures. With […]
Seventy years ago this month, amid the terror of the Holocaust, the forces of decency prevailed in Nazi-occupied Denmark. At a time when millions of Jews throughout Europe were being systematically murdered in German extermination camps in Poland, the Jews of Denmark were being saved by their fellow citizens, in one of the […]
Matthew Halton, a celebrated Canadian foreign correspondent who worked for the Toronto Star and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, visited Nazi Germany about a dozen times between 1933 and 1939. These were pivotal years in Europe. In 1933, Adolf Hitler assumed power, and in 1939, World War II erupted. Based in London, Halton covered the most important […]
The toxic blood libel accusation, rooted in medieval Europe, emerged with a vengeance several times during the interwar period in the Soviet Union. This may come as a surprise to those who assume that such primitive manifestations of antisemitism would have been inconceivable in a supposedly progressive country like the Soviet Union. But a […]
To its credit, the Greek government has arrrested the leader of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, and a number of his senior associates on charges of having formed a criminal organization. Greece took this drastic decision, the first of its kind in decades, after police raided Golden Dawn’s offices in Athens and Greek […]