Auschwitz memento thief is top Herzliya official

Motti Posloszny and his wife were fined and given two-year suspended sentences for stealing items from the former Nazi death camp. Gili Cohen reports in Haaretz. Hat tip to Meir Javedanfar for the following:

"He said he made a mistake," one official said. "I don't know what would come over a man to make him steal from Auschwitz. It's completely insane."

"It's very sad - for him, for his family and for the municipality," the official added. "This is the largest department in Herzliya; it has everything. This is inconceivable."

Posloszny returned to Israel on Sunday after having spent a night in a Polish jail. He and his wife were fined and given a two-year suspended sentence; the Polish prosecutor said the fine would be used to help preserve exhibits at the camp, which now serves as a museum. Posloszny could not be reached for comment yesterday.

According to Reuters, the couple stole nine items - including spoons, knives, scissors and porcelain bottle stoppers - from a warehouse where the personal effects seized from prisoners at the former Nazi camp are stored. They were arrested at the Krakow airport with the items in their possession.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/auschwitz-memento-thief-is-top-herzliya-official-1.369942

Holocaust survivor Epstein disses AIPAC

The unsinkable Hedy Epstein, pictured above on an aid flotilla to Gaza, is a survivor.

I fear AIPAC’s ability to move US policy in dangerous directions. AIPAC does a disservice to the Palestinians, the Israelis and the American people. It helps to keep the Middle East in a perpetual state of war and this year will be no different from last year as it keeps up a steady drumbeat calling for war against Iran, writes Hedy Epstein

AIPAC pretends to speak for all Jews, but it certainly does not speak for me or other members of the Jewish community in this country who are committed to equal rights for all and are aware that American interventionism is likely to bring further disaster and chaos to the Middle East.

Israel, of course, would not be able to carry out its war crimes against civilians in Lebanon and Gaza without the United States — and our $3 billion in military aid — permitting it to do so. At 86 years old, I use every ounce of my energy to educate the American public about the need to stop supporting the abuses committed by the Israeli government and military against the Palestinian people. Sometimes there are people who try to shout me down and scream that I am a self-hating Jew, but most of the time the audience is receptive to hear from someone who survived the Holocaust and now works to free the Palestinians from Israeli oppression.

The vicious discrimination brought to bear against Palestinians in the occupied territories deserves no applause from members of Congress attending the AIPAC conference. Instead, they should raise basic questions with Israeli officials about decades of inferior rights endured by Palestinians both inside Israel and the occupied territories.

Hedy Epstein is a Holocaust survivor, who writes and travels extensively to speak about social justice causes and Middle Eastern affairs. She will be participating in Move Over AIPAC, a gathering in Washington, DC from 21-24 May 2011, to expose AIPAC and build the vision for a new US foreign policy in the Middle East (www.MoveOverAIPAC.org).

Schindler's list rediscovered in Oz

Oskar Schindler's famous list has surfaced in Sydney, the BBC says. It is a handful of 13 yellowing pages, typewriiten on 18 April 1945, and contains the names and nationalities of 801 Jewish victims who managed to evade the holocaust through Schindler's interventions. The iconic list, compiled by the German industrialist, a registered Nazi with a twinge of conscience, was discovered in a Sydney library among the papers of the author Thomas Keneally, who wrote the novel Schindler's Ark, on which Steven Spielberg's film was based. The Beeb goes on:

Schindler ran a factory in Krakow, Poland, during the war, where he used Jewish labour.

Appalled by the conduct of the Nazis, he sought to persuade officials that his workers were vital to the war effort and should be spared from the death camps.

"It saved 801 men from the gas chambers... It's an incredibly moving piece of history," library co-curator Olwen Pryke said.

This Schindler's list was found sandwiched between research notes and German newspaper clippings gathered by Australian author Thomas Keneally.

Ms Pryke said neither the library nor the book dealer, from whom it bought the six boxes of material in 1996, realised the list was hidden among the documents.

Mr Keneally was handed the list almost 30 years ago in a shop in Los Angeles, by one of the people whom Schindler helped - Leopold Pfefferberg, Jewish worker 173 on the list.

Mr Pfefferberg wanted the novelist to write Schindler's story.

The tomb of Oskar Schindler lies in Jerusalem, and Izzy Bee is reminded of the hero everytime she steps into an elevator in an Israeli highrise. Inevitably, it's labelled "Schindler's Lift".

As Election Day draws nigh, Fringe Parties seek High Voter Turnout in Israel

It’s coming down to the wire in Israeli elections, to be held tomorrow. After all this Cast Lead bloodshed in Gaza, political energy inside Israel lurched to the right. Security is paramount and countering nuclear-armed Iran and justifying Israeli “defensive” overkill seems to be the constant drumbeat of politicians. Whatever happened to concern over economic freefall and official corruption?
Excuse me while I dodge this Qassam, maam.

Not many Israeli voters think cleanliness is next to godliness this time round. Tzipi Livni (aka Ms Clean) suddenly is scrambling, assuring would-be supporters that she is far more likely to charm cooperation from President Barack Obama than hard-ass rivals such as Bibi Netanyahu or Ehud Barak, the defence minister.

Funny thing is that , even this late in the campaign, at least 20 per cent of the voters have yet to make up their minds. And another 20 per cent—the Arab-Israelis—are unlikely to cast ballots at all.

Enter Avidgor Lieberman, the Soviet émigré and former nightclub bouncer who lives in a settlement. He appeals to youth and the intolerant by bashing Israeli Arabs and calling for their “transfer” out of the country. No loyalty, no citizenship, he mutters. And if this sounds like a mafia oath, more power to him, say his backers. When Lieberman underwent a police probe for a money laundering and bribery scam involving his daughter, his followers managed to put a positive spin on it. Surely, the ruling party Kadima, which is tainted with its own graft scandals, set up the man who dares to speak politically incorrect truths. What’s more, Lieberman makes Bibi look less hawkish and even more electable.

Lieberman’s message is gaining resonance.

"Israel is under a dual terrorist attack, from within and from without,"he says, "And terrorism from within is always more dangerous than terrorism from without."

It’s a slippery slope. Who next will have their loyalty questioned? The Ethiopian immigrants? Mizrahi Jews with Middle Eastern bloodlines?
Not everyone we know is resigned that the next leader of Israel will be Netanyahu, particularly if it’s a close-result and President Shimon Peres will have some discretion in naming the prime minister. Whoever wins will need to hammer together a coalition in order to rule.

The choice of potential political bedfellows is intriguing. Speaking of high office – get a whiff of the latest offshoot from the Green Leaf Party, now known as the Grown-Up Green Leaf. It’s a weird combo of cannabis users and death camp survivors, and emerged after the original Green Leaf party rolled out a controversial election advert featuring the party head, Gil Kopatch, toking up a spliff at the grave of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Some members disapproved and did not get the joke.
Of all the fringe parties on the ballot for Knesset, this new one, pushing pensioner rights along with penalty-free pot, has to be one of the quirkiest. Monster Raving Loony Party, it's not. They have a manifesto and some of the Pensioners were elected to Knesset seats in the last election.

This surreal alliance between Holocaust survivors and marijuana proponents undoubtedly is helped by medical marijuana , which has eased pain for some of the cancer-stricken elderly. But it doesn't necessarily cloud their judgment.

Yaakov Kfir, 74, who survived the Holocaust as a child in Yugoslavia, said he welcomed the party's embrace of Israel's estimated 350,000 survivors, who are often impoverished and side-lined in a society that extols military might. Kfir lost his parents at age 6 to the Final Solution. After emigrating to Israel, he became an air force officer and later an activist for the rights of survivors. Now the party is energized.

"They [survivors] know what it feels like to be persecuted for no reason. They can identify with us," party-head Shem-Tov said.

Here’s one of their campaign spots.

Another Holocaust Remembrance Day

Is this an anti-Semitic image or artistic irony? Well, timing is everything. As people around the world marked the 63rd anniversary of the liberation of the Death Camps, some Dutch sticker-sellers manipulated the iconic image of teenage Anne Frank and slipped a red-checked Palestinian keffiyeh around her neck.
The image has a certain repugnant resonance and compels passers-by to do a double-take. The same one has been spotted stenciled on New York City walls for the past couple of years. Seeing Anne Frank portrayed as a "keffiyeh kinderlach" or a lefty college student, using Arafat's ironic headcloth for street cred, emphasises her adolescence.

Even at the Jerusalem mall, the Zara store was stocking kaffiyehs last summer. A Zionist "Shemagh scarf" has evolved (see left) and is even popular amongst settler women. Israelity bites.

Accused neo-nazi teenager lets Holocaust survivor grandma speak out for him

The arrests of a rogue band of teenage skinheads who have plagued a city north of Tel Aviv triggered a wave of revulsion in the Knesset and across Israel. But now, the Holocaust-survivor Bubbe of one boy has risen to his defence, and blames his nasty friends for bullying her beloved grandson into attacks on Orthodox neighbors, immigrants and junkies. He's no Nazi, she swears. The octogenarian insists that the family "has been Jewish since Adam and Eve" and that, after this latest news broke, she's sorry that the fascists didn't kill her back when she was six. Dramatic stuff,
which verifies everything we ever thought about how strong the love of a Jewish grandmother is. The arrests, kept under wraps for a month, are apt to create a backlash against immigrants and Jewish converts inside Israel.

PETAH TIKVA, Israel (Reuters) - She escaped the Holocaust at age six by hiding from the Nazis under a pile of dead bodies in her Ukrainian village.

Now the Israeli pensioner's grandson stands accused of joining a neo-Nazi gang which allegedly attacked Orthodox Jews in Petah Tikva in metropolitan Tel Aviv and painted swastikas across the walls of the local synagogue.

Her 17-year-old grandson is one of eight young Israelis, all from the former Soviet Union, arrested in connection with neo-Nazi activity, in a case that has stunned the Jewish state. All denied involvement at a court hearing this week.

Some one million immigrants from the former Soviet Union have moved to Israel since the fall of Communism in 1990. Many, including some of the suspects, were not born to a Jewish mother -- the Orthodox definition of a Jew -- but qualified for Israeli citizenship because they had at least one Jewish grandparent.

The accused's grandmother said on Monday her family had been Jewish "since Adam and Eve".

It would be absurd, she said, to charge her grandson with neo-Nazi activities. Neither the accused, a minor, nor his relatives can be named for legal reasons.

"I went through a first disaster when I was six years old and now I'm going through a second disaster when I'm 72," she said in a telephone interview. "It was just chance the fascists didn't shoot me ... Now I'm very sorry they didn't kill me."

The accused's mother said her son was persuaded to join the gang after connecting with hardcore members on the Internet. She said he tried to leave when he found out about the attacks but was bullied into staying.

"He was always interested in history and the War," his mother told Reuters. "He made a mistake ... he thought they were just a bunch of history freaks."

"GOD WITH US"

The mother could not explain why her son tattooed "God with us" onto his arm in what she said was Yiddish. In German, which is close to Yiddish, the same motto -- "Gott mit uns" -- adorned the belt buckles of German soldiers in World War Two.

People in Petah Tikva -- many of whom sought refuge in Israel from anti-Semitism elsewhere -- expressed disbelief at the attacks on the local synagogue.

"This is incredible to see this here -- we didn't even see this kind of thing in Russia," said 32-year-old barber Mark Elazarov, who moved to Israel from the former Soviet Union 15 years ago and now attends the synagogue that was vandalized.

The case has revived calls for tougher immigration rules to ensure only bonafide Jews move to Israel.

While many Russian-speaking Jews have succeeded in Israel's booming hi-tech industry, others, including many not regarded as Jewish by religious authorities, have struggled to integrate.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the neo-Nazi case was an isolated incident and cautioned against tarnishing the entire community of Russian-speaking immigrants.

But many in Petah Tikva want tougher action.

"People who are not Jewish should be kept out of Israel," said Elazarov.

Shopkeeper David Ness, 58, said he "panicked in his heart" when he saw the swastikas emblazoned across the synagogue.

"This is a Jewish country and it's my home, For someone to do something like this, it hurts," he said. "The police should get them and throw them out."

Surviors' anguish - Israeli wounds

Somber salutes to the Holocaust victims will mark this Monday, April 16th, with special poignance because many of the quarter million ageing survivors here in Israel are nearing the ends of their natural lives. About one third live in poverty, according to government census records.

Scandalously, these holocaust survivors-- so distinctive with their wrist tattoos, woe-filled faces and obliterated families-- have not always been viewed as heroic inside Israel. This shocked me. Many gruff Israelis tend to view the first Zionist pioneers as far more admirable than European Holocaust victims, the ones who hid, ran away, or did not fight back. Few of these European survivors went into Israeli politics, perhaps because such a life story was a reminder of weakness and self-deception to voters, who tended to shun them. Before they can get Israeli state medical compensation these days, holocaust victims are forced to prove that their health problems were caused by Nazi maltreatment and are not the inevitable decrepitude of old age. Even inside Germany, the compensation for concentration camp survivors is more generous. This situation is deplorable and activists are working towards change.

Against this prevailing attitude, Yossi Zur is making sure that attention is paid to ordinary Israelis who are killed out of hatred. The bereaved father, whose teenage son, nicknamed Blondi, was killed by a suicide bomber on a Haifa bus four years ago, has pledged to remember all civilian victims in the country. He quotes Winston Churchill: "A nation that forgets its past has no future."

Zur has not purged the anger that festers inside the families of the fallen who stay inside contemporary Israel. But commemorating the sacrifice of lives-- whether at Kiryat Shmona, the successive Intifadas, or under Qassam rocket fire-- gives a focus to his grief. Ynet features his campaign to document all civilian memorials to terror victims and name each one. His work will also be showcased in an exhibit at the Castra Gallery in Haifa. The show is called simply "A People Remembers," and a website lovingly compiled by Assaf Zur's bereft father accompanies it.
The memorials to civilians come in myriad shapes and sizes, and Zur photographs them all.

Little Sara, a young Palestinian Christian acquaintance, has dubbed this website a Jewish Cyber-Shaheed. This is her way to comprehend the tears behind each random death. It's more of a cyber-Kaddish. Visitors can lay a pink, red, or white flower in cyber-space for each terror victim.