Leo Geyer, a British musician and Oxford University doctoral candidate, has spent eight years studying the music written and played at Auschwitz. The orchestras, made up of inmates, were ordered to play marching tunes at camp events. Geyer’s discoveries comprise 210 fragments, some complete scores. Geyer came upon the forgotten manuscripts by chance in 2015 when he first visited Auschwitz while working on a commemorative piece of music to honor the late Sir Martin Gilbert, [...]

A full-scale replica of the secret annex where Anne Frank penned her famous diary opened in New York City on Jan. 27 as the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The exhibit at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan represents the first time the annex  has been completely recreated outside of Amsterdam, where the space is a central part of the Anne Frank House museum.          While the original annex has been intentionally left [...]

  Nearly 200 Columbia University faculty members sent a letter to the school’s interim president, urging stronger safety measures for Jewish students. (Columbia Spectator) Boston University rejected a proposal from Students for Justice in Palestine to divest from Israel. “The endowment is no longer the vehicle for political debate,” the school’s president said. (Algemeiner) A Massachusetts middle school student performed a Nazi salute in class, prompting the principal to assure parents that “appropriate action would [...]

When millions of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews perished in the Holocaust, their stories, culture, and way of life were wiped out. One survivor, the novelist Chaim Grade, made it his life’s mission to keep their memory alive. In scores of stories, poems and novels, Grade faithfully recreated the world he lost in pre-war Europe, vividly reimagining his formative years in Vilna and the yeshivas he attended. After his death, his wife Ina Hecker kept his [...]