Jewish History

AP rejects report that it cooperated with Nazis

NEW YORK (WJC) –The world’s leading press agency, the ‘Associated Press’ (AP), willingly collaborated with Germany from 1935 to 1941 to disseminate Nazi propaganda photos in the United States and agreed to provide pictures for Nazi publications, including anti-Semitic SS manuals, a researcher reports.  The Associated Press released a statement Wednesday rejecting the allegations. In an article for the German […]

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International, Jewish History

Anachnu: Rabbi Roberto D. Graetz

By Donald H. Harrison LAFAYETTE, California – It has been a quarter century since Rabbi Roberto D. Graetz came to this Northern California community after serving as a rabbi in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. But the soon-to-retire senior rabbi of Temple Isaiah has remained intimately involved in Latin America as a

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Donald H. Harrison, International, Jewish History, Jewish Religion

When God is silent, Jews find a proxy such as Esther

By Rabbi Ben Kamin OCEANSIDE, California — Purim, or “Lots,”—a woman’s heroic story based in historical facts—begins Wednesday evening, March 23. The Scroll will be merrily read, recounting the rescue of the Persian Jews in 357 BCE from genocide. It should be noted that God is neither mentioned nor quoted anywhere in the text. God

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Jewish History, Jewish Religion

Why the world should say ‘Judea’ and ‘Samaria’

By Steve Kramer ALFE MENASHE, Israel — The words we use are important, especially when explaining a situation or making an argument. Evidently, Israelis haven’t read Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass.” It was Humpty Dumpty who said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor

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Jewish History, Middle East, Steve Kramer

Poet Nathan C. Goldman reflects on Jewish themes

By Donald H. Harrison SAN DIEGO – In my mail came a book of poetry for review, unbidden, a gift from its author, a stranger to me.  Titled Above History, Behind Time, it contained the thoughts of Nathan Carliner Goldman, PhD, who is a professor of government at the College of the Mainland in Texas

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison, Jewish History, Jewish Religion

Germany puts judge who helped Survivors on trial

  JERUSALEM (WJC) — Colette Avital, chairwoman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, has launched a petition to Germany over the treatment of a German judge who has helped many survivors in Israel. Writing to Germany’s ambassador to Israel, Clemens von Goetze, Avital – a retired Israeli diplomat and former member

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International, Jewish History

‘The Dream of Zion’ focuses on the life of Herzl

The Dream of Zion: The Story of the First Zionist Congress by Lawrence J. Epstein, Rowman & Littlefield, New York;  ISBN 978-1-4422-5466-5 ©2016, $36.00, p. 137, plus chronology and references. By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.   WINCHESTER, California — Professor emeritus Lawrence Epstein in his newest book The Dream of Zion, argues that the nineteenth-century European Enlightenment’s

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Fred Reiss, EdD, International, Jewish History, Middle East

Jewish family became British through and through

  By Dorothea Shefer-Vanson MEVASSERET ZION, Israel — It’s one of the best-kept secrets of British journalism that the Life and Arts section of the Financial Times’ weekend edition contains some of the best-written and most stimulating articles and reviews. So as we were leaving the airport of our almost next-door neighbor of Cyprus for

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Dorothea Shefer-Vanson, International, Jewish History

A Righteous Gentile’s own story

In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer by Irene Gut Opdyke and Jennifer Armstrong; Penguin Random House/ Ember; (c) 1999, 2015; ISBN 978-0-679-99181-6; 278 pages including appendices, $10.99. By Donald H. Harrison SAN DIEGO — This publication has reviewed, and will continue to review, numerous memoirs by Holocaust survivors. What makes this memoir different

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Books, Poetry & Short Stories, Donald H. Harrison, Jewish History

Samuel Willenberg, last survivor of Treblinka

JERUSALEM (WJC) — Samuel Willenberg, the last survivor of the Treblinka death camp who died on Friday in Israel at the age of 93, beat the odds.. About 870,000 people, most of them Jews, died in the gas chambers at Treblinka. It was the second largest Nazi German death camp after Auschwitz-Birkenau. “Samuel Willenberg wa a hero

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International, Jewish History, Obituaries & memorials