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Our Secret Auschwitz
The New York Times By Rachel Sopher When I started therapy, I found it hard to speak. Sessions filled up with silences, pregnant pauses, missing words. I couldn’t express myself for fear that any divulgence would hurt someone I loved. My childhood home had been like this, too. Our quiet house on a quiet block in a quiet city brimmed with silence — not a peaceful silence, but a heavy pall. Because so little was said, the running dialogue in my head took on particular importance, keeping me company, a steady reminder to myself: I’m real, I’m alive, I exist. My grandfather often sat in the living room of our house, impassive and impenetrable, coming to life only to yell at one or another of us who had interrupted his television program. His yells, though terrifying, also came as a relief, the riddle of silence solved, at least momentarily. Something was wrong, but it was better not to ask. If I was silent, I couldn’t hurt anybody. Survival rested on an understanding that dialogue took place in different registers. The unspoken messages were the urgent ones, the ones that needed to be decoded. “Go clean your room,” my mother instructed out loud, while her expression said: I’m sad. I need to be alone. My therapist turned out to be a silent type, too, the kind who mostly listens and doesn’t answer direct questions. I spent a lot of time on her couch sitting in silence, wishing that the unending dialogue in my mind could be communicated by osmosis, implanted directly into her brain without words. It seemed that I could not break the family taboo against speaking what felt really real inside. Then one day I told my therapist a story from a time when I was 12 years old. I had gone to a Holocaust exhibit with my class, and when I got home my mom asked me, “How was school?” “Fine,” I said. “We went on a field trip to see an exhibit on Auschwitz.” “You know Grandpa was there, right?” she asked. “At the museum?” “No,” she said. “At Auschwitz. He was in the concentration camp during the war.” “Oh,” I said. No one had ever told me this. Still, my face flushed with shame at not knowing. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and the conversation ended there. I absorbed the information as if just another fact, before returning to the safety of silence. When I told my therapist this story, I could sense her shifting in her chair. “What?” I asked her. “You know that the Holocaust was a huge trauma,” she said. “The kind that affects every life it touched.” “But it didn’t touch my life,” I protested. “That was my grandfather.” She didn’t respond to this, and we sat quietly until the session ended. But what she said stayed with me. In the next weeks, I attempted to have conversations with various family members about the impact of the Holocaust on our lives. But they were not interested in talking about it. The secret pact of silence was safer. Click HERE to read the full article.
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The Holocaust survivor who coached World Cup star Carli Lloyd
By Gabe Friedman July 7, 2015 12:01am JTA
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Looking Back at the Holocaust, Through a Child’s Eyes
New York Times by Isabel Kershner JERUSALEM — Jakov Goldstein survived the Holocaust as a child by hiding alone for two…
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At the Jewish Museum of Vienna, Enduring Images of Europe
By: Sarah Wildman, The New York Times Erich Lessing is one of the foremost chroniclers of 20th-century Europe, known equally well for photographing politicians like Charles de Gaulle, Eastern…
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Tracing Jewish Heritage Along the Danube
The New York Times By Lisa Schwarzbaum Like many who share my hair texture and fondness for rugelach, I am the descendant of Jewish forebears who boarded boats in the first half of the 20th century to escape bad times for our people in Central and Eastern Europe. These intrepid emigrants took to the water, settled in America and built a Jewish-American culture of creative assimilation. I owe them my life. Like about a third of the 120 or so fellow travelers with whom I spent seven nights on the Danube River last November, I boarded a boat called the AmaPrima in Budapest to float back to some of the same places so many of those same emigrants were — history has confirmed — lucky to leave behind. I was bound on a Jewish heritage tour, combining two growing travel trends: roots and rivers. In my case, the combination was a special-interest option laid over a popular Danube itinerary that AmaWaterways has been offering since the company entered the river-cruise market in 2002. On the water, we were all in the same boat as it powered from the Hungarian capital of Budapest to Bratislava, Slovakia; Vienna, Linz and Salzburg, all in Austria; and, finally, Regensburg and Nuremberg, in Bavaria, Germany. The AmaPrima cruise ship in Bratislava, Slovakia, top, one of the stops on the Jewish heritage tour along the Danube. Credit Akos Stiller for The New York Times. Each day, we shared the same abundant (nonkosher) meals and modest smartphone- and tablet-photography skills. Each night we repaired to our similar small, sweet, meticulously plumped cabins. (Our vessel could hold a maximum of 164 passengers.) And we all relaxed together each cocktail hour — mostly couples, mostly in their 50s to 70s, and mostly North Americans, along with some stray vacationers from England, Ireland, Australia and China — in the same pleasant lounge, with its big picture windows. Together, we admired the luxe bed linens, the Wi-Fi in every room, the bottomless free glasses of wine, the outdoor hot tub, the on-board gift shop, the minuscule hair salon and gym area, the all-inclusive pricing. But when we stepped onto dry land in a different city each day, with local guides and buses synchronized to meet us, each traveler could choose between a Jewish heritage tour or a more standard city tour. (Independent exploration was also an option.) And we who had booked our trips in honor of our roots would, for a few hours, explore paths haunted by ghosts. We would step into cemeteries with tumbled headstones. We would admire the very few synagogues that remain — so beautiful in Budapest, so stately in Vienna! — and listen to tales of the hundreds more destroyed. We would peer at old photographs and study rescued personal objects confiscated from the disappeared and today reverently displayed in glass cases. Each day we walked the streets of a Jewish heritage now effectively devoid of Jews, and we listened as guides described to us what used to be and is no more, along with tempered reports of precarious Jewish life as it exists today. Then, as darkness set in, we returned to the boat to reunite with fellow passengers who had spent the day on the cruise line’s default tour of gentile European culture. The Chatam Sofer Memorial, formerly the Old Jewish Cemetery, in Bratislava.Credit Akos Stiller for The New York Times. For a week, under the friendly efficiency of the cruise manager, Dragan Reljic, we clinked aperitif glasses of Hungarian, Austrian or German liqueur in friendly toasts to historic beauty, both original and rebuilt following war after war, century after century. Then we freshened up for another dinner banquet, warmed by the pleasurable, high-end comforts of our Danube holiday. This is the only way I can begin this story. The weight of your emotional baggage may vary. Budapest is an eminently logical place to start the search. Draped on both sides of the Danube, the city is home, still, to one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe, shrunken as it is. Not insignificantly, the river is also wide enough — and the docking availability commodious enough — to handle the current explosion in river-cruise tourism. Not for nothing has AmaWaterways increased its fleet to 19 vessels in 2015, while the industry leader, Viking River Cruises, will run 60 river ships with 25 itineraries this year. Along with a handful of others who would become my shipmates, I opted for an organized predeparture extension of two nights in Budapest before we embarked. That way, I could visit the imposing Moorish-style Dohany Street Synagogue, the largest active synagogue in Europe today. (It is, for that matter, the second largest in the world, after Temple Emanu-El in New York City.) As substantial as Dohany Street Synagogue is, though, it paled in emotional resonance compared with the effect of Shoes on the Danube Bank, a memorial by the sculptor Gyula Pauer and the filmmaker Can Togay. This simple, quietly heartbreaking permanent installation of 60 pairs of empty shoes, cast in iron on the Pest side of the Danube embankment, is a memorial to thousands of victims of Hungary’s own fascist Arrow Cross, in 1944-45. Men, women and children were relieved of their footwear, lined up and shot dead so that their bodies would fall into the Danube and wash away. Art puts our feet where they once stood. In the Stadttempel synagogue in Vienna, with the bar mitzvah of Nathan Baranow taking place in November. Credit Akos Stiller for The New York Times. Click HERE to read the full article.
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What ISIS Really Wants
The Atlantic By Graeme Wood What is the Islamic State? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors. The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing. Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world. The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million. We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it. The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain the group’s priorities and current leadership. Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.) We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medi religious nature. Peter Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohamed Atta’s last full day of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut. Click HERE to continue reading.
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The Last Trial: A Great-Grandmother, Auschwitz, and the Arc of Justice
The New Yorker Elizabeth Kolbert Oskar Gröning, who has become known as “the bookkeeper from Auschwitz,” was born on June 10, 1921, in Nienburg, a town about thirty miles south of…
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70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz
On January 27, 2015 we commemorated the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi German concentraction and extermination camp Auschwitz. On this day the whole world was listening to…
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