Britain’s Prince Charles To Visit Yad Vashem In January
Britain’s Prince Charles has accepted an invitation by Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to take part in the fifth World Holocaust Forum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, scheduled for Jan. 23. The event, titled “Remembering the Holocaust, fighting Anti-Semitism,” is a joint project by the world Holocaust Forum Foundation and Yad Vashem. It will commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
The United Kingdom also revealed that the Prince’s itinerary will include a visit to the occupied Palestinian territories, where he will be a guest of the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.
Prince Charles last visited Jerusalem in 2016 to attend the funeral of Shimon Peres on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II. He also represented the queen at the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin.
Two Shooters Attack Kosher Grocery in Jersey City
On Martin Luther King Drive, JC Kosher Supermarket in Jersey City, NJ, had become the center of a small but growing Hasidic community. All that changed on Dec. 10, when David Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 50, stormed the store with rifles, beginning an hours long standoff with police that ended in both of their deaths along with three other people in the store.
Authorities believe Anderson and Graham intentionally targeted the store, and say the pair is believed to be responsible for the death of Jersey City Police Detective Joseph Seals, who was killed shortly before the pair attacked the store. Anderson was a one-time member of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, and his social media pages pushed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The Black Hebrew Israelite movement has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The victims in the store were identified as Mindy Ferencz, 32, who ran the store with her husband; Miguel Douglas, 49, who worked at the store; and Moshe Deutsch, 24, pictured at his funeral with Orthodox men carrying his casket. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihen)
Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop called the attack a hate crime, saying that based on surveillance evidence, the Jewish community in his city was targeted.
Westhoffen, France
Members of the Jewish community walk amid vandalized tombs in the Jewish cemetery of Westhoffen, France. Authorities said that vandals have scrawled anti-Semitic inscriptions, including swastikas spray-painted in black, on 107 tombs. AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias
Chancellor Angela Merkel Visits Auschwitz, Pledges $66M
Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, met German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp, in southern Poland, and thanked her for announcing Germany’s commitment of $60 million to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation for support and preservation of the memorial site
Her visit is the first in her 14-year tenure as Chancellor of Germany, the first time a German chancellor has visited the site since 1977, and only the third time a German chancellor/head of government has visited since WWII. The chancellor has gone to other concentration camps, including Buchenwald and Dachau, which are in Germany, but she had not visited Auschwitz. The visit comes in advance of the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on Jan. 27, 2020, and amid rising levels of anti-Semitism in Europe and around the world.
Chancellor Merkel entered through the camp’s notorious gate marked “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Sets You Free), and lit a candle in memory of the more than 1.1 million people killed there. She visited the museum’s Conservation Laboratories, which preserve suitcases, human hair and every shoe, every document, and every building that remains at the site. She also visited the Central Sauna building at the former Birkenau camp, where prisoners were subjected to “disinfection” before being forced into slave labor.
On the eve of her visit, the chancellor said that Germany would contribute $66 million to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, in addition to the $80.5 million it has given over the past decade. The United States has contributed $15 million to the endowment.
[Pictured with chancellor Angela Merkel are Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland, second from right, flanked by Holocaust survivors. Getty Images/Janek Skarzynski
Reimann Family Atones; Gives Millions To Holocaust Survivors
The family behind Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Panera Bread, Peet’s Coffee, Einstein Bros. Bagels, Keurig, Coty, and other brands is donating 5 million euros, or $5.5 million, to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which seeks reparations for Holocaust survivors and funds social services. That donation and $11.3 million made last spring to institutions that help former forced laborers and their families is being made by the JAB Holding Company of Luxembourg, which supported the Nazi regime and once used forced labor from prisoners of war and others taken from their homes in Nazi-occupied territories. The JAB Holding Company is solely owned by the Reimann family, who have been publicly reckoning with the family’s history.
Reunion Of Survivors With Their Saviors At Yad Vashem
A 92-year-old Greek woman was reunited in Jerusalem with members of the Jewish family she helped save during the Holocaust, in what organizers said could be the last meeting of is kind.
More than 75 years ago, Melpomeni Dina and her two older sisters risked their own safety to offer shelter to the Mordechai family, a Jewish group of seven from Veria, Greece. The Mordechais lived in Dina’s home during the occupation.
At the end of WWII, the Jewish family resettled in Israel. The two surviving siblings brought their children and grandchildren to meet Dina on Nov. 3 — about 40 members in total.
Rescuers have become increasingly rare as the generation that lived through WWII ages. Many have died or have become too frail to travel.
In 1994 the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial recognized Dina, whose maiden name was Gianopoulou, as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.” The title has been awarded to more than 27,000 non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jewish people during the Holocaust.
Nazi Germany’s occupation of Greece ended in 1944. Up to 70,000 Greek Jews died during the Holocaust — about 81% of the country’s Jewish population, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Melpomeni Dina, center, is reunited with Holocaust survivors Yossi Mor, right, and his sister Sarah Yanai at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on Nov. 3, 2019.
Getty Images/Emmanuel Dunand
Hebrew Bible Back In Galicia, Where It Originated 500+ Years Ago
On a summer’s day in 1476, a scribe called Moses Ibn Zabarah put the finishing touches to an enormous and magnificently illustrated Hebrew Bible, commissioned by the son of a wealthy Jewish family from Galicia in northwestern Spain. The Bible, whose pages teem with dragons, monkeys, peacocks, intricate geometric patterns, and an alarmed Jonah entering the whale’s mouth, took 10 months to complete.
Sixteen years later, Spain’s Jews were ordered to leave the country by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The expulsion cast the family and their precious Bible into exile. From Spain, the book was taken to Portugal, North Africa, Gibraltar and Scotland before finally ending up in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
And now, after more than 500 years, the book is finally coming home…for a visit. The Kennicott Bible, named after Benjamin Kennicott, the scholar and librarian on whose advice the work was bought by Oxford University, has been loaned to the regional government of Galicia, and will be on display in Santiago de Compostela until April 2020.
Despite the Kennicott’s Galician heritage and global renown, the region has no plans to ask for its permanent return, said Roman Rodriguez, minister for culture and tourism in the regional government. “It’s Galician, no matter where it is,” he said.
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