CANADA MILITARY NEWS- ISRAEL- THE JEWS- WWI-WWII-HOLOCAUST HEARTBREAK/ Evil European Red Cross/ Canada Jewish History... our shame and our good/THE FINAL SOLUTION LAID BARE-Jan27/15

THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST - WWI-WWII and what the European Red Cross did 2 destroy and continue 2 destroy the Jews today/

 League of Nations 1928 was disbanded on the ashes of the Holocaust that shamed the world-and many troops broken hearted never told about the vicious cruelty of global politicians- FORMED UNITED NATIONS- WHO PROMISED 2 PROTECT THE JEWS... AND HUMANITY AND THE WORLD’S POOREST OF THE POOR... today??Canada and our Jews- from shame 2 grace.

 WWII- Jews, Catholics, Gays, Lutherans, Gypsies, Disabled....BUTCHERED-  Uncle Harold said- if the troops knew this it would have broken their hearts and tore their souls, he never got over it.

  

The "Final Solution"
Synopsis
The Nazis, under cover of the war, developed the technology, bureaucracy, and psychology of hate to efficiently murder millions of Jews. The details of the "Final Solution" were worked out at the Wannsee Conference. All Jews in Germany and the occupied countries were deported to sealed ghettos as a holding area. Many were then shipped in cattle cars to labor camps where they lived under brutally inhuman conditions. Hundreds of thousands were sent directly to the gas chambers in death camps. As the Allies advanced on the camps, death marches further depleted the ranks of potential camp survivors.
INSTRUCTIONAL OBJECTIVES
Students will learn that:
1. An entire state bureaucracy was mobilized solely for the purpose of annihilating Jews.
2. German technological expertise was harnessed to make the mass murder as efficient and low-cost as possible.
3. Special camps were created solely for the purpose of killing Jews and other "undesirables."
4. The conditions in these death camps and other concentration camps were brutal, and designed purposely to make survival only temporary.
CHAPTER CONTENT
On October 23, 1941, S.S. head Heinrich Himmler issued an order down the Nazi chain of command which heralded a major change in Nazi policy with respect to the "Jewish problem." Until then, the Nazis worked vigorously to encourage Jews to emigrate. The Madagascar Plan (see below) was one example of strategies which were formulated to remove Jews from Germany and its occupied lands. As is described in more detail in Chapter 11, many countries refused to accept Jewish refugees. This shift in policy resulted in the deportation of Jews to camps and ghettos in the East. The policy to "resettle" Jews to these ghettos and camps was a significant step in what was to become the "Final Solution" the systematic murder of millions of Jews.
Madagascar Plan
Before the "Final Solution" was devised to murder all Jews in Nazi jurisdiction, the scheme the Nazis planned to rid their land of the Jews was forced emigration. In 1940, plans were devised by the Nazis to ship all Jews under Nazi control to Madagascar, an island in the Indian Ocean. It was not until 1941 that Nazi bureaucrats were referring to the "Final Solution" (Gesamtlosung) in the context of genocide rather than a "Territorial Final Solution" (territoriale Endlosung) in the context of forced emigration. Some historians believe that the Madagascar Plan was a smokescreen for Hitler's desire to murder European Jewry (see page 62 of Marrus' The Holocaust in History).
Deportation
In response to this new "resettlement" policy, the first death camps were designed. Chelmno was the site of the first gassing of Jews, which occurred on December 8, 1941. The Nazi war machine had limited resources, including slave labor, much of it Jewish. Even so, the Nazis made a decision that the annihilation of the Jews of Europe was a more important achievement than the value of their labor. Similarly, the Nazis made a decision not to let the need for transport for the war effort interfere with the need for trucks and rail cars to carry the Jews to concentration camps and death centers. It was Adolf Eichmann who masterminded the logistics of the deportation of Jews. (1)
Deportation was the first step in the "Final Solution." Typically, the Jews were informed that they were going to be resettled for work. Each was told to take some clothing, blankets, shoes, eating utensils (but no knife), a bowl, and some money. Rounded up, they were herded into trucks for the trip to the rail station, or were forced to walk. The rail cars were often strategically located at a distance from the passenger terminals, so that this scene would not arouse the ire of the local populace. Many who did see chose not to protest.
The deportees were forced into rail cars, most of which were windowless, unheated cattle cars, and squeezed in so tightly that most were forced to stand. The doors were then sealed shut from the outside. Neither drinking water nor sanitary facilities were available. Each car held more than 120 people, and many froze or suffocated to death or succumbed to disease during the trip to the camps. The dead were not removed from the cars during the journey because the Nazi bureaucracy insisted that each body entering a car be accounted for at the destination.
(1) Adolph Eichmann
Transporting enough Jews to feed the death camps was a major logistical undertaking. The Nazi officer in charge of this duty was Adolph Eichmann, who traveled from country to country that was under German occupation to systematically plan the deportation of the local Jewish population to the death camps.
Eichmann received various levels of cooperation from each of the various occupied governments. But in countries such as Holland, Belgium, Albania, Denmark, Finland and Bulgaria, some Jews were saved from their deaths by the action of the sympathetic populace and government officials. Denmark's government and populace were exemplary in their heroism in saving Jews. In other countries such as Poland, Greece, France, and Yugoslavia, the deportation of Jews to the death camps was facilitated by the cooperation of the government.
Ghettoization (December 1939 to March 1942)
Although the Nazis were successful in isolating Jews socially and economically, the actual physical isolation of the Eastern European population did not begin until December 1939. Jews had known the ghetto since the Middle Ages, although Jews were then permitted to leave the ghetto during the day and participate in the business of the general community. The purpose of the Nazi ghetto, however, was to create a total confinement for the Jewish population, turning entire neighborhoods into a prison unlike the ghettos of centuries past.
The Nazis hoped that the wretched ghetto conditions would deplete the Jewish population quickly and naturally through starvation, disease and cold. The ghetto also served as the holding area for eventual transport to the death camps for those who were able to survive.
Ghetto inhabitants in many areas were forced to become slaves for German industry. Factories were built alongside or within ghetto walls so that industries could take advantage of this free labor. The administration of Jewish life was the responsibility of the Jewish Councils, the Judenröte (see Chapter 11).
Life in the ghetto was abominable, and thousands died. There was no medicine. The food ration allowed was a quarter of that available for the Germans, barely enough to allow survival. The water supply was contaminated in many ghettos. Epidemics of tuberculosis, typhoid, and lice were common. Bodies of new victims piled up in the streets faster than they could be carted away. In the Warsaw ghetto, more than 70,000 died of exposure, disease, and starvation during the first two winters. Almost all of those who survived the Warsaw ghetto were either killed when the ghetto was razed in 1943 or died in the death camps.
Theresienstadt Ghetto
The Theresienstadt ghetto was established by the Nazis in an 18th century fortress in Czechoslovakia on November 24, 1941. More than 150,000 Jews passed through the ghetto during its four-year existence, which was used as a holding area for eventual murder in Auschwitz. By 1943, rumors began circulating in the international community that the Nazis were exterminating Jews in gas chambers, and that the conditions of the ghettos did not permit survival. The Nazis rebuilt parts of this ghetto to serve as a "showpiece" for propaganda purposes. Flower gardens were planted in the ghetto. Shops, schools, and a cafe were built. When an investigating commission of the International Red Cross came to visit, they did not see a typical ghetto. In July 1944 the Nazis made a documentary propaganda film about life in this ghetto. After the movie was completed, most of the Jewish "actors" were shipped to their death at Auschwitz.
Wannsee Conference
At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 in Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, the details of the "Final Solution" were worked out. The meeting was convened by Reinhard Heydrich, who was the head of the S.S. main office and S.S. Chief Heinrich Himmler's top aide. The purpose of the meeting was to coordinate the Nazi bureaucracy required to carry out the "Final Solution," which provided for:
Deportation of Jews to killing centers.
Immediate death for those who were unable to work or the very young, the old, and the weak.
Segregation by gender of the remaining Jews.
Decimation through forced labor with insufficient nourishment.
Eventual death for the remnant.
Concentration Camps
The Nazi concentration camps were established beginning in 1933 for the purpose of imprisoning political opponents. After the "Night of the Long Knives" (see Chapter 8, page 65), authority and management of the concentration camps was turned over to the S.S. The S.S. expanded the concentration camp system, and used these facilities to warehouse other "undesirables," including hundreds of thousands of Jews. Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen were among the first concentration camps built by the Nazis near Munich, Weimar, and Berlin respectively.
Upon arrival at a camp, the inmates were usually stripped of all their valuables and clothes. They were then shorn of body hair, disinfected, given a shower, and issued a striped prison uniform without regard to size. Each step of the process was designed to dehumanize the prisoners, both physically and emotionally. Each prisoner was given a number. At Auschwitz, for example, the number was tattooed on the arm, but some camps did not tattoo their inmates.
Life in the camps was a living hell. As described by Judah Pilch in "Years of the Holocaust: The Factual Story," which appears in The Jewish Catastrophe in Europe, a typical day in the life of a concentration camp inmate began at dawn, when they were roused from their barracks which housed 300-800 inmates each. Their "beds" were bunks of slatted wood two and three tiers high. Frequently three to four prisoners shared each bunk, not permitting space enough for them to stretch out for normal sleep. The inmates were organized into groups to go to the toilets, marched to a distribution center for a breakfast consisting of some bread and a liquid substitute for tea or coffee, and then sent out to work for 10-14 hours in mines, factories, and road or airfield building, often in sub-zero weather or the severe heat of summer. They were subjected to constant physical and emotional harassment and beating. The inmates' food rations did not permit survival for very long. Those who resisted orders of the guards were shot on the spot. Numerous roll calls were held to assure that no prisoners had escaped. If one did attempt an escape, all of the inmates suffered for it.
Death Camps
The German skill in adapting the 20th century techniques of mass production was applied in engineering the "Final Solution." In 1941, the engineers of the "Final Solution" utilized these same principles to cheaply and efficiently murder millions of Jews and other "undesirables." The plants established to carry out this mass murder were the death camps.
Unlike concentration camps, death camps had no barracks to house prisoners, other than those for workers at the camps. In order to process the murder of thousands of people, great pains were taken to deceive the victims concerning their fate. Jews deported from ghettos and concentration camps to the death camps were unaware of what they were facing. The Nazi planners of the operation told the victims that they were being resettled for labor, issued them work permits, told them to bring along their tools and to exchange their German marks for foreign currency. Food was also used to coax starving Jews onto the trains. Once the trains arrived at the death camps, trucks were available to transport those who were too weak to walk directly to the gas chambers. The others were told that they would have to be deloused and enter the baths. The victims were separated by sex and told to remove their clothes. The baths were in reality the gas chambers. The shower heads in the baths were actually the inlets for poison gas. At Auschwitz, the gas chambers held 2,000 people at a time. With the introduction of a cyanide-based gas called Zyklon B, all 2,000 occupants could be killed in five minutes. As a result of this technological "advancement," Auschwitz was able to "process" the death of 12,000 victims daily. Before the bodies were removed by workers with gas masks and burned in crematoria, the teeth of the victims were stripped for gold, which was melted down and shipped back to Germany. Innocent victims were exploited and desecrated to a degree unknown in human history.
Unlike the death camps of Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Belzec, which were built and operated solely to kill Jews, the two death camps of Maidanek and Auschwitz also had a work camp attached. Upon arrival at these two camps, a selection was made at the train station concerning which Jews (about 10 percent of the arrivals) would be permitted to live and escape immediate gassing in the gas chambers. These "lucky" survivors were permitted to live only to the extent that they endured the physical and emotional trauma inflicted upon them. They were given a food ration that permitted them to survive for only three months. As they died from exhaustion, beatings, and starvation, they were replaced with newly arrived victims. Auschwitz was also used as the site for medical experimentation. Many of these experiments had little scientific value but were only exercises to discover how much torture a victim could endure until death. By the end of 1944, an estimated two-and-a-half million Jews had died at Auschwitz. More than a quarter of a million Gypsies also died there.
Einsatzgruppen or "Special Action Squads"
Specially trained units of the S.S. followed the first wave of German army troops in the invasion of the Soviet Union (June 1941). Their orders were to execute on the spot all Communists, Jews, and Gypsies.
It is estimated that by the end of 1942, they had killed more than a million Soviet Jews. These victims were shot or loaded into enclosed trucks modified for the introduction of carbon monoxide to asphyxiate its victims. An additional 400,000 were killed by other S.S. units, anti-Semitic native civilians, police units, and the German army.
Babi Yar
The Jews of Kiev were rounded up by the Einsatzgruppen for "resettlement" in late September 1941. Thousands of Jews were brought to a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev and mowed down by machine guns. Many who were not wounded, including thousands of children, were thrown into the pit of bodies and were buried alive. According to an account in The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert, Ukrainian militia men joined in the slaughter. The records of the Einsatzgruppen unit which participated in the executions recorded 33,771 Jews killed at Babi Yar on September 29-30. In all, more than 100,000 persons, most of them Jews, were executed at Babi Yar between 1941-1943 by the Nazis. In the summer of 1943, the bodies were dug out by slave labor and burned to hide the evidence of the slaughter.
Nazi Murder of Non-Jews
While the focus of Nazi genocide was unquestionably targeted toward Jews, the Third Reich's policy of mass murder was not restricted to Jews but devastated the ranks of other non-Aryans.
Michael R. Marrus, in his book, The Holocaust in History, writes about the targets of Nazi murder:
"The Nazis murdered between five million and six million Jews during the Holocaust, two-thirds of European Jewry and about one-third of the entire Jewish people. But a staggering 55 million may have perished in all theaters during the Second World War including some 20 million Soviet citizens...five million Germans, and three million non-Jewish Poles...In all, some 18 million European civilians may have died as a result of famine, disease, persecution, and more conventional acts of war.
"Awesome as they are, therefore, numbers do not in themselves prescribe the singularity of the Holocaust. But they provide a clue. For the proportion of European Jews killed during the Second World War, with roughly one of every three civilian deaths in Europe being that of a Jew, was undoubtedly greater than that of any other people, because of the Nazis' policy toward them. Unlike the case with any other group, and unlike the massacres before or since, every single one of the millions of targeted Jews was to be murdered. Eradication was to be total. In principle, no Jew was to escape. In this important respect, the Nazis' assault upon Jewry differed from the campaigns against other peoples and groups; Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, Poles, Ukrainians, and so on. Assaults on these people could indeed be murderous; their victims number in the millions, and their ashes mingle with those of the Jews of Auschwitz and many other camps across Europe. But Nazi ideology did not require their total disappearance. In this respect, the fate of the Jews was unique."
Gypsies
Approximately a half million Gypsies (a dark-skinned, Caucasian ethnic group targeted by the Nazis) were murdered out of approximately 1.6 million who were living in Europe. The Gypsies in Germany and the occupied territories of the German War machine were subjected to many of the same persecutions as the Jews: restrictive, discriminatory laws, isolation and internment, and mass executions at their camp sites, in labor camps and death camps.
Polish Christians
Of the six million Poles murdered by the Nazis, half were Polish Christians. The Nazis considered the Poles and other Slavic peoples to be sub-human destined to serve as slaves to the Aryan "master race." The Polish intelligentsia and political leadership was sought out specifically for execution, and other Polish civilians were slaughtered indiscriminately. Among the dead were more than 2,600 Catholic priests.
Ukrainians
Almost four million Ukrainians fell victim to Nazi slaughter, through combat, starvation, and terror, particularly as a result of the efficient Einsatzgruppen. Of these, 900,000 were Jews, according to Bohdan Wytwychky's The Other Holocaust: Many Circles of Hell.
Other Victims of Nazi Genocide
The Germans rounded up thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals and sent them to the death camps for extermination. Homosexuals were forced to wear pink triangles on their clothing paralleling the yellow Star of David for Jews.
Death Marches
By the beginning of 1945, the Soviet troops were advancing through Poland. The retreating Germans forced all remaining Auschwitz prisoners to march toward Germany under indescribably cruel conditions. Approximately 20,000 of 58,000 prisoners died en route, from exhaustion, starvation, cold, beatings, and executions by guards.
In his bunker, in the Chancellory building in Berlin, knowing that the war was lost and that the "1,000 Year Reich" had lasted only a few years, Hitler committed suicide hours after marrying Eva Braun. Germany formally surrendered to the Allies on May 7, 1945. By the end of the war, more than 55 million had died and 35 million wounded. Only 17 million of the dead were soldiers.
Historical Events Listing
April 9, 1940 - Germany invaded and occupied Denmark.
April 27, 1940 - Himmler ordered the establishment of a concentration camp at Auschwitz.
April 30, 1940 - The ghetto at Lodz, Poland, was sealed off.
June 4, 1940 - Germany invaded Holland, Belgium, and France.
June 29, 1940 - Marshal Petain surrenders France to the Germans.
September 27, 1940 - The Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis was established.
September 27, 1940 - The Warsaw Ghetto was sealed off, making thousands of Jews inside virtual prisoners under house arrest.
June 22, 1941 - Germany invaded Greece and Yugoslavia.
June 22, 1941 - The Germans attacked and declared war on the Soviet Union.
July 8, 1941 - Wearing of the Jewish Star was decreed in the German-occupied Baltic states.
July 31, 1941 - S.S. Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich was appointed by Goering to carry out the "Final Solution", the murder of all the Jews in Europe.
September 1, 1941 - Wearing of the Jewish "Star of David" was decreed throughout the Greater Reich.
October 1, 1941 - All Jewish emigration was halted.
October 14, 1941 - Mass deportation to concentration camps of Jews from all over Nazi-controlled Europe began.
December 8, 1941 - 27,000 were massacred in Riga.
October 23, 1941 - 34,000 were massacred in Odessa.
October 28, 1941 - 34,000 were massacred in Kiev.
November 6, 1941 - 15,000 were massacred in Rovno.
December 7, 1941 - The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The United States entered the war.
December 8, 1941 - Chelmno death camp on the Ner River in Poland opened and the first gassing took place.
December 11, 1941 - Germany declared war on the United States.
October 17, 1942 - The Allied Nations pledged to punish the Germans for their policy of genocide.
Winter of 1943 - The tattered and frozen German army on the Eastern front surrendered to the Soviets at Stalingrad.
April 1943 - The Bermuda Conference on Refugees was convened. The agenda was to discuss action by the Allies to rescue refugees in Europe under Nazi control. No formal action was agreed to.
October 7, 1943 - Hitler ordered that all Jews of Denmark be deported to the death camps in Poland. Almost 95% of Danish Jews were whisked to Sweden, escaping the S.S.
March 18, 1944 - The Germans invaded and occupied Hungary. Deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz followed under the direction of Adolf Eichmann. Mostly all of the half-million Hungarian Jews were sent to the gas chambers.
June 1, 1944 - D-Day. The Allies invaded France at Normandy.
VOCABULARY
Auschwitz - The most infamous and largest of the Nazi death camps, located near Cracow in Southwestern Poland.
Babi Yar - An area in the Soviet Union near Kiev, where thousands of civilians, most of whom were Jews, were murdered by the Nazis.
crematorium - An oven where the bodies of newly murdered prisoners of camps, and those who died from other causes, were incinerated.
death camps - Centers established in mostly rural areas designed specifically for mass murder. Six death camps (Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Maidanek, Chelmno and Belzec) were established solely for the extermination of European Jewry.
death marches - Forced marches under brutal conditions required of death camp and concentration camp inmates by the Nazis to avoid liberation by advancing Allied forces.
Einsatzgruppen - "Special Action Squads" of the S.S. which had as their mission to seek out and murder Jews, Communists and Gypsies.
extermination - Mass murder, in the context of the killing of Jews in a manner which would be no less heinous than the killing of insects.
Final Solution - The term used by the Nazis to describe their program of mass murder of the Jewish people.
gas chamber - Rooms constructed to be air-tight so that poison gas introduced into the room would kill large numbers of people.
Gypsies - A dark-skinned, Caucasian ethnic group with origins in India who had, in many cases in Europe, a migratory way of life.
labor camp - A prison camp where the prisoners were used as slave labor for German industry and war machine.
tuberculosis - An infectious disease which can affect any organ, but particularly attacks the lungs.
typhus - Disease transmitted by lice or fleas which was epidemic in concentration camps.
zyklon B - A cyanide gas developed to kill Jews at Auschwitz in a manner which was more efficient than using carbon monoxide gas.
ACTIVITIES
Research the average daily calorie intake of people in the United States and the developing world, and compare this to the average intake of a concentration camp inmate.
Research why the Nazis kept detailed chronicles of all aspects of their genocide.
Research the story of "The Precious Legacy." What did the Nazis have in mind by creating this exhibit?
Define the following words using their dictionary definition, and construct another definition, using the Nazi context if appropriate:
murder massacre euthanasia mass-murder slaughter liquidation
deportation assassination pogrom decimation execution terrorism
killing extermination persecution genocide holocaust
What do these words have in common? Which words above are interchangeable?
Which are euphemisms? Which may be condoned (and under what circumstances) and which may not? Why is there sensitivity among scholars and survivors of the Holocaust on how these words are used?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Discuss what you would have taken into a ghetto had you been deported to one.
How did the Nazis succeed in carrying out the Final Solution? Why were the orders from the top obeyed all the way down the chain of command?
EVALUATION
1. Define the following:
zyklon B
crematorium
"special treatment"
labor camp
gas chamber
Final Solution
typhus
Gypsies
2. Describe life in the Nazi ghettos for the Jews and the major differences between these ghettos and those of the Middle Ages.
3. What was the mission of the Einsatzgruppen? Who were their targets? What methods did they use to accomplish their mission?
4. Who was Adolf Eichmann, and what was his job?
5. How was the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia different than any other ghetto?
6. Name three death camps, and briefly describe typical conditions in one.
7. What was the Wannsee Conference? Who convened it? What was its purpose?
8. What prompted the Nazis to order the "death marches" of 1945?
9. Why were experiments performed on inmates of the death camps?
TEACHING STRATEGIES
Show the class the book and filmstrip, I Never Saw Another Butterfly.
Recreate the discussions on human nature and values from previous chapters. Let the students describe if their views on human nature have changed as a result of learning about what occurred during the "Final Solution."
Have students view the film, The Wannsee Conference. Study guides on this film are available (contact the Holocaust Resource Center nearest you).
Read to the class poignant excerpts from Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.
http://remember.org/guide/Facts.root.final.html

I NEVER SAW ANOTHER BUTTERFLY
Studio East presents "I Never Saw Another Butterfly" October 5-13, directed by Lani Brockman and musically direct by Laura Shepherd. Book by Celeste Raspanti, Original Music by Susan Bardsley.

I Never Saw Another Butterfly is a story based on the lives and art of Jewish children held in Terezin during WWII and the Holocaust. Please be aware of the emotional nature of this show and the subject matter it faces.

Over 15,000 Jewish children passed through the Terezin concentration camp during WWII, and only about a hundred were alive when Terezin was liberated. Raja lived through it all, teaching the children when there was nothing to teach with, helping to give them hope when there was little reason for hope. This play is her story. It is history as much as any play can be history, showing the best and the worst of which the human heart is capable of. Recommended for ages 9 and up.

Special Thanks to Gwyneth for her cinematic help and those interviewed (Xana Waughman, Kaleena Jordan, Sienna Kitch, Sean Ben-Zvi, Caia Bornfreund, and Sarina Leon).

Songs featured: "I Never Saw Another Butterfly", "Go Away Alone"

CANADA MILITARY NEWS-Jan 27/15- ISRAEL-  THE JEWS- WWI-WWII and what the European Red Cross did 2 destroy and continue 2 destroy the Jews today/ League of Nations 1928 was disbanded on the ashes of the Holocaust that shamed the world-and many troops broken hearted never told about the vicious cruelty of global politicians- FORMED UNITED NATIONS- WHO PROMISED 2 PROTECT THE JEWS... AND HUMANITY AND THE WORLD’S POOREST OF THE POOR... today??Canada and our Jews- from shame 2 grace. WWII- Jews, Catholics, Gays, Lutherans, Gypsies, Disabled.... Uncle Harold said- if the troops knew this it would have broken their hearts and tore their souls, he never got over it.

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1.     [PDF] 

From Denmark to Canada in 1955: A Story of ... - UBC Library

ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/theseed/article/download/.../183742 - Cached - Similar

immigrants, my grandmother, a German of Jewish origin who came to Canada
from Denmark with her husband and three children in 1955. Käthe Therese ...

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Animation of Anne Frank, the graphic biography - YouTube
► 3:08	www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLSvdEUA2wI8 Jul 2010 - 3 min - Uploaded by Anne Frank House The biography tells the story of Anne Frank's life, and ends with the return of O... ... It makes me ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLSvdEUA2wI

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Anne Frank and Canada - Anne Frank Guide

www.annefrankguide.net/en-ca/bronnenbank.asp?oid=271642 - Cached - SimilarEven the story of Anne Frank has Canadian links. Canadian troops took part in
liberating the Netherlands (where Anne Frank lived for the longest period of her ...

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·  Alfred Hitchcock's Abandoned Holocaust Documentary Gets...

news.moviefone.com/2014/01/09/alfred-hitchcock-abandoned...   Cached

Jan 09, 2014 · A long-abandoned Holocaust documentary made by Alfred Hitchcock shortly after World War II concentration camps were ... These are the movies you’re ...

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 Every one -especially students globally should watch this documentary and learn about humanity...

An Alfred Hitchcock documentary on the Nazi Holocaust

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W88gA7O_tOM

BEST COMMENT:

I've got no time for people trying to justify or play down this horror. I don't care if you think its propaganda or if America, russian or the little green men from mars have done the same. The bottom line is its wrong. No human whether they support the left or right, white, black, brown or bright purple, we should never treat another person or living thing like this. I'm not a hippy or lefty just someone who gets so depressed by how greedy, nasty, abusive and manipulative the human race is. This kinda of thing happens all to often in the name of some non existent god or fear of someone they haven't taken the time to understand. Sick of self righteous conspiracy theorist who try to side step or give some sort of answer to this type of action. Its wrong pure and simple

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Alfred Hitchcock's Abandoned Holocaust Documentary Gets Release

Posted January 9th, 2014

by Katie Roberts

A long-abandoned Holocaust documentary made by Alfred Hitchcock shortly after World War II concentration camps were liberated in 1944 will finally see the light of day.

The Independent reports that the documentary, called "Memory of the Camps," will air later this year on British television, as well as screen at several film festivals and theaters, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Europe's liberation. It was shown once in on PBS in 1984, but was missing one of its six reels and in poor condition; the new version has been remastered and contains some recovered portions of the lost reel.

"Memory of the Camps" was commissioned in part to help drive home to the German people the atrocities committed by the Nazis, and force the country to take responsibility for those actions. Hitchcock was brought on as a director and was tasked with piecing together footage shot by the British Army Film Unit, including the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

But Hitchcock was so disturbed by what he saw that he had trouble finishing the film; he reportedly refused to return to Pinewood Studios for a week because of the horrifying footage. Work on the documentary was slow and tedious, and was soon scrapped all together, after its benefactors realized that its impact would be lessened by the rapidly-changing political climate. Five "Memory of the Camps" reels were left to the British Imperial War Museum, untouched until the early 1980s.

Toby Haggith, senior curator at the Imperial War Museum's Department of Research, said the documentary will be renamed before its public screenings later this year. Recent test screenings revealed that the footage was still "extremely disturbing" all these years later, he said.

"One of the common remarks was that it [the film] was both terrible and brilliant at the same time," Haggith said. " ... We can't stop the film being incredibly upsetting and disturbing, but we can help people understand why it is being presented in that way."

http://news.moviefone.com/2014/01/09/alfred-hitchcock-abandoned-holocaust-documentary

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Inside Alfred Hitchcock’s Lost Holocaust Documentary

In 1945, Britain’s army film unit commissioned a sprawling doc on the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, supervised by Hitchcock. A new film explores the forgotten masterpiece.

It is, perhaps, the greatest documentary never made.
Back in 1945, Sidney Bernstein, the chief of the Psychological Warfare Film Section of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, was commissioned to create the definitive documentary chronicling the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Bernstein’s aim was, in his words, to “prove one day that this had actually happened” and have it serve as “a lesson to all mankind as well as to the Germans.”
He eventually roped in his good pal, Alfred Hitchcock, to serve as the film’s supervising director. But the horrifying and heartbreaking footage of numerous concentration camps, shot by British, American, and Russian World War II soldiers as they were being liberated, became tangled up in a complicated web of politics and artistic rows. A magnificent new HBO documentary pulls back the veil on the making of German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey.
The eye-opening film-on-a-film, Night Will Fall, will premiere January 27 on HBO. It is narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, produced by Stephen Frears and Brett Ratner, and directed by Andre Singer, who serves as president of The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and executive produced the documentaries The Act of Killing and Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss. It was done in concert with London’s Imperial War Museum, and took 18 months of poring over thousands of feet of film to trace the making of the unmade epic.

“Neat and tidy orchards. Well-stocked farms lined the wayside. And the British soldier did not fail to admire the place, and its inhabitants—at least, until he began to feel a smell...”

“When I first saw material, it was shattering to see; a horrific experience,” Singer tells The Daily Beast. “I’ve been in the film world a long time and seen lots and lots of footage and you think you’ll get anesthetized to it, but that isn’t the case. This is something that is once seen, never forgotten.”
Singer’s documentary opens with footage from German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey of the British 11^th Armoured Division liberating the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Northern Germany on April 15, 1945. There, the Allied troops discovered a strange sight.
“Neat and tidy orchards. Well-stocked farms lined the wayside. And the British soldier did not fail to admire the place, and its inhabitants—at least, until he began to feel a smell,” says a narrator in voiceover.
The British soldiers found tens of thousands of emaciated prisoners inside the camp, many of which were on the brink of death by starvation. The camera lingers on piles of naked, skeletal corpses stacked several bodies high, as well as line after line of dead children. A total of 30,000 corpses were witnessed by Allied troops, according to the film. Singer managed to track down several British soldiers who were there, and some break down in tears recalling the horrors.
“It’s very difficult to describe,” recalls survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who was 19 when Bergen-Belsen was liberated. “You’ve spent years preparing yourself to die, and you’re still here. Every British soldier looked like a God to us.”

While Soviet intelligence had uncovered the existence of concentration camps in Poland as early as July 1944, because of the Soviet’s alleged record of falsifying atrocity reports, these warnings went largely ignored. However, once Bergen-Belsen was liberated, Bernstein decided to include footage of Russian troops liberating the Majdanek concentration camp in occupied Poland.
“We opened one warehouse. Women’s hair,” says Matvey Gershman, a member of the Soviet’s 8^th Guards Army at Majdanek. “We opened the second warehouse. Children’s shoes. The third warehouse, something else: Zyklon gas in barrels. And ashes, ashes. They stored people’s ashes the way they stored women’s hair.”
Footage from Bernstein’s documentary shows Russian soldiers opening stacks of large packages the size of duffle bags and removing piles of human hair, as the camera rests on a young girl’s ponytail amid the pile in close-up. You see crematoriums filled with ashes, still burning, and long rows of human bones.
Also included is footage of the Russian liberation of Auschwitz, including a fascinating sequence wherein Soviet soldiers are captured clad in white, camouflaged snowcoats crawling across the wintry tundra towards the Nazi death camp while clenching ski poles, with skis attached to their feet. Eva Mozes Kor, a survivor of the sadistic Mengele experiments, tears up watching footage of her younger self being freed from captivity.
American soldiers, meanwhile, captured the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau, and since American films began using 16mm color footage in January 1945, Bernstein’s film includes haunting color shots of heaps of withered corpses at Buchenwald, as well as shrunken Jewish heads inside jars. The American troops made local German citizens from the nearby city of Weimar visit the camp and witness the genocide firsthand. A German woman is seen fainting and being carried away, while other women casually turn their heads away in disgust.
“They had been aware of the camp and had been willing to make use of the cheap labor it provided—as long as they were beyond smelling range of it,” the narrator says.
While Bernstein’s opus was first commissioned in April 1945, it wasn’t until June that his pal, “The Master of Suspense” Alfred Hitchcock, came onboard after being released from his Hollywood duties. “I had felt that I needed at least to make some contribution,” Hitchcock says in an interview from 1962. “There wasn’t any question of military service—I was overage and overweight at that time—but nevertheless, I felt the urge.”
Since Bernstein was only given three months to complete the film, by the time June rolled around, he felt the need to recruit Hitch to help him piece it together. “Bernstein knew he needed some leverage,” says Singer. “He thought if they had a big name director it would help not just because it was better for the film, but it would give credibility to the film.”
So, Hitchcock served as a “director’s advisor,” supervising the way the footage was edited. He demanded that the documentary emphasized long shoots and frequent pans, so that people wouldn’t question its authenticity. He was also blown away by the stark contrast between the quotidian (the lives of Germans living near the camps) and the ghastly (the nightmare within), and requested that the film use maps to highlight their proximity, driving home the message that these German citizens knew exactly what was going on.
“Hitchcock himself is reputed to have been very nauseated by the footage,” says Singer. “He saw it in the cutting room and then didn’t want to watch it again.”
Bernstein’s time, however, soon ran out. According to a June 1945 memo from the Psychological Warfare Film department, Bernstein, lost in an artistic quagmire, was relieved of his duties. “Here he was trying to make a propaganda film, and he ended up making a great documentary,” says Singer. “And that’s not really what the government wanted.”
The Americans then installed acclaimed Double Indemnity filmmaker Billy Wilder as supervising director, and used some of Bernstein’s footage to create a short propaganda film entitled Death Mills. Whereas Bernstein’s film was artistic and captured the full breadth of suffering, Wilder’s version is described as a “hectoring short film” that “merely accused the Germans of committing these crimes.” Still, to the Americans’ credit, the film premiered in Germany.
“We must show it to as many Germans as possible,” Wilder says in a 1988 interview. “They will say: it’s a lie. These are extras with makeup. This is Hollywood… made by Jews. But where would we have got them from? They were just skin and bone!”
While Bernstein’s footage was eventually used as evidence against Nazi officials during the Nuremberg trials, his original, uncensored vision never saw the light of day. Singer’s film claims that the British government chose to kill Bernstein’s comprehensive documentary largely for two reasons. First, that Britain didn’t want to “further alienate the German people,” who were in a rebuilding phase and, with hints of the Cold War starting to appear, were seen as a potentially ally against the Soviets. And second, that the British were worried about the budding Zionist movement and weren’t interested in galvanizing support for a Jewish state.
“I don’t think that in government they were concerned about whether the German people were denying it ever happened,” Singer says of the film’s cancellation. “Morally and ethically it should be done, but in practical terms, it was just bad, bad timing. Churchill had just been kicked out of government and was more sympathetic, and there was a new foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, who was virulently anti-Zionist. I don’t think it was a conspiracy, or that any censorship was going on.”
As for his own documentary Night Will Fall, Singer feels it’s vital to inform audiences of what really happened at the Nazi concentration camps in order for the wounds of the past to heal, but not be forgotten.
“A lot of people are worried about whether we should be showing atrocity footage like this to people, is it meant to shock, and is there a pornography element to it,” says Singer. “I believe the opposite. Put in context, it’s incredibly important.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/17/inside-alfred-hitchcock-s-lost-holocaust-documentary.html

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Holocaust Denial Timeline

WHAT IS HOLOCAUST DENIAL?



The Holocaust is one of the best documented events in history. “Holocaust denial” describes attempts to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Common denial assertions are: that the murder of six million Jews during World War II never occurred; that the Nazis had no official policy or intention to exterminate the Jews; and that the poison gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp never existed.
A newer trend is the distortion of the facts of the Holocaust. Common distortions include, for example, assertions that: the figure of six million Jewish deaths is an exaggeration; deaths in the concentration camps were the results of disease or starvation but not policy; and that the diary of Anne Frank is a forgery.
Holocaust denial and distortion are generally motivated by hatred of Jews, and build on an accusation that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests. This view perpetuates long-standing antisemitic stereotypes by accusing Jews of conspiracy and world domination, hateful charges that were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Holocaust.
The United States Constitution ensures freedom of speech. Therefore, in the United States denying the Holocaust or engaging in antisemitic hate speech is not illegal, except when there is an imminent threat of violence. Many other countries, particularly in Europe where the Holocaust occurred, have laws criminalizing Holocaust denial and hate speech.
This timeline lists some key events in the evolution of Holocaust denial.
1942-1944: To conceal the evidence of their annihilation of Europe's Jews, Germans and their collaborators destroy evidence of mass graves at the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers, and at thousands of sites of mass shooting operations throughout German-occupied Poland, the German-occupied Soviet Union, and Serbia, including Babi Yar, in an operation code named Aktion 1005.
1943: In a speech to SS Generals at Poznan, Heinrich Himmler, Reich Leader (Reichsführer) of the SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons), remarks that the mass murder of the European Jews will be kept secret, never to be recorded.
1955: Willis Carto founds an influential, far right group based in Washington, DC, that eventually comes to be known as the Liberty Lobby. Led by Carto until its bankruptcy in 2001, the Liberty Lobby advocates a “racially pure” United States and blames Jews for problems facing the US and the world. The Liberty Lobby begins to publish Holocaust denial literature in 1969.
1959: American clergyman Gerald L. K. Smith's antisemitic publication, Cross and the Flag, claims that six million Jews were not killed during the Holocaust but immigrated to the United States during World War II.
1964: Paul Rassinier, a French Communist who had been interned by the Nazis, publishes The Drama of European Jewry, in which he claims that gas chambers were an invention of a “Zionist establishment.”
1966-67: American historian Harry Elmer Barnes publishes articles in the Libertarian periodical Rampart Journal claiming that the Allies overstated the extent of Nazi atrocities in order to justify a war of aggression against the Axis powers.
1969: Noontide Press, a subsidiary of the Liberty Lobby, publishes a book entitled The Myth of the Six Million.
1973: Austin J. App, professor of English literature at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, publishes a pamphlet: The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses. The pamphlet becomes a foundation for future claims by Holocaust deniers.
1976: Northwestern University engineering professor Arthur R. Butz publishes The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry. Butz was the first Holocaust denier to use the pretense of academic rigor to disguise his falsehoods. Northwestern responds by declaring Butz's statements an “embarrassment” to the university.
1977: Ernst Zündel, a German citizen living in Canada, establishes Samisdat Publishers, which issues neo-Nazi literature that includes Holocaust denial. In 1985 the Canadian government prosecuted Zündel with distributing information he knew to be false.
1977: David Irving publishes Hitler's War, arguing that Hitler neither ordered nor condoned the Nazi policy of the genocide of the European Jews. Irving distorts historical evidence and scholarly methods to lend legitimacy to his thesis.
1978: William David McCalden (also known as Lewis Brandon) and Willis Carto found the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) in California, which publishes material and sponsors conferences denying the Holocaust. The IHR masks its hateful, racist messages under the guise of valid academic inquiry.
1981: A French court convicts literature professor Robert Faurisson of inciting hatred and discrimination for calling the Holocaust a “historical lie.”
1984: In a landmark case, a Canadian court convicts public school teacher James Keegstra of “willfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group” for espousing Holocaust denial and other antisemitic views to his social studies students.
1986: On July 8, the Israeli parliament passes a law criminalizing denial of the Holocaust.
1987: California-based Bradley Smith founds the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. During the early 1990s, Smith's organization places full-page advertisements or editorial pieces in more than a dozen American college newspapers under the headline “The Holocaust Story: How Much is False? The Case for Open Debate.” Smith's campaign helps to blur the line between hate mongering and freedom of speech.
1987: Jean Marie Le Pen, leader of France's far right Nation Front party, suggests that gas chambers were merely a “detail” of World War II. Le Pen runs for president in France in 1988 and comes in fourth.
1987: Moroccan-Swedish writer Ahmed Rami begins broadcasting on Radio Islam, based in Sweden. The station describes the Holocaust as a Zionist/Jewish claim. Radio Islam later posts The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, and other antisemitic texts on its website.
1988: At the request of Ernst Zündel, Fred Leuchter (a self-proclaimed specialist in execution methods) travels to the site of the Auschwitz killing center. He later issues the Leuchter Report : An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland, which is cited by Holocaust deniers to cast doubt on the use of gas chambers for mass murder.
1989: David Duke, a white supremacist, wins a seat in the Louisiana State Legislature. Duke sells Holocaust denial literature from his legislative office.
1990: After Illinois becomes the first American state to mandate teaching about the Holocaust in public schools, parents Ingeborg and Safet Sarich publicly protest by pulling their 13-year-old daughter out of school. The Sariches also mail 6,000 letters to public officials, scholars, journalists, and Holocaust survivors attacking the historical record as “rumors and exaggerations.”
1990: The French government enacts the Gayssot Law which declares that questioning the scale or existence of crimes against humanity (as defined in the London Charter of 1945) is a criminal offense. This act marks the first European statute explicitly outlawing denial of the Holocaust.
1990: In the course of criminal proceedings brought against Fred Leuchter by the State of Massachusetts, it is revealed that Leuchter never actually earned an engineering degree or license. Leuchter admits that he has no training in biology, toxicology, or chemistry, all of which are crucial to the claims of the 1988 Leuchter Report, which is often cited to support claims made by Holocaust deniers.
1990: A Swedish court sentences Ahmed Rami to six months in jail for “hate speech” and revokes the broadcasting license of Radio Islam for one year.
1991: The American Historical Association, the oldest professional organization of historians, issues a statement: “No serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place.”
2000: A British court declares David Irving an “active Holocaust denier.” Irving had sued Emory University historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel following the publication of her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.
2005: In a speech broadcast on live television on December 14, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls the Holocaust a “myth.”
2006: Iran's government sponsors a meeting of Holocaust deniers in Tehran cloaked as an academic conference called “Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision.”
2007: On January 26, the United Nations adopts a resolution condemning denial of the Holocaust. The General Assembly declares that denial is “tantamount to approval of genocide in all its forms.”
2007: The European Union approves legislation that makes Holocaust denial a crime punishable by time in jail.
2009: English-born Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson denies the existence of gas chambers and minimizes the extent of killing during the Holocaust. The Vatican eventually calls on Williamson to retract his statements.
2010: Bradley Smith places his first online Holocaust denial advertisement, which appears on the website of the University of Wisconsin's Badger Herald in February. The Internet—because of its ease of access and dissemination, seeming anonymity, and perceived authority—is now the chief conduit of Holocaust denial.

Related Articles

• Combating Holocaust Denial: Origins of Holocaust Denial

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008003

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THAT'S MY KING-...  Catholic Christian Symbol

IRNI (LATIN: IESVS·NAZARENVS·REX·IVDAEORVM TRANSLATES-  Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews)

....YOU CAN'T OUTLIVE HIM.....AND YOU CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT HIM...... Oh Praise the Lord... Our Lord and Saviour...Jesus Christ

Dr. S.M. Lockeridge -That's My King: Do you know him?   -  1976 sermon in Detroit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZvghAZLDPA

The Purpose (Get Up Weary Soldier)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaRI0VSyjps

CANADA:  The Jewish kid in the Christmas pageant

By Bernie M. Farber, Ottawa December 23, 2012

As I gaze at the palm trees, green grass and lush vegetation outside my in-laws’ condo in Boca Raton, I still cannot reconcile a warm summer-like Christmas with my rich memories growing up in Ottawa, where Christmas meant mounds of snow and icy cold temperatures.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of being able to sit on the beach, take in the sun and read the latest Ken Follett novel, but nostalgia is a powerful seducer and memory itself a warm blanket.

I’m not sure what to think about climate change, but I do know that as a child growing up in Ottawa in the 1950s an ’60s, snow, wind and cold seemed as inseparable at this time of the year as potato latkes and Hannukah. And I am also drawn to the strong recollection of being one of only a small number of Jewish families in Ottawa inescapably caught in a Christmas spirit that enveloped us all.

While today arguments ensue about the proper “holiday greeting,” in Ottawa, in the latter half of the 20th century it seemed commonplace to wish everyone a “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.” To be sure, this had as much to do with the different patterns of immigration then and now, but it also had to do with what I could only describe as the spirit of the season as well.

My memories of the time are rich and deep of those few days just before the Christmas holidays as I walked beside my father, who often took me to school on his way to open our small family grocery store. Despite the bitter cold, I felt warm bundled up in my wool overcoat, scarf and that ugly cap with sheepskin flaps that covered my ears. I still recall warmly that crunch of the snow under our heels as we walked up the Somerset Street hill toward my elementary school.

Osgoode Street Public School, established in 1898, covered grades from kindergarten to Grade 6. It was an interesting hodgepodge of children from many immigrant families that had settled in the Sandy Hill area of Ottawa just after the war. They were mostly Eastern European whose first language ranged from Ukrainian to Italian with smatterings of German, Polish and, like mine, the odd Yiddish-speaking family. Including myself, my younger brother Stan and the Cohen twins, we were the only Jewish children at Osgoode Street Public School.

Christmas pageants were a regular and highly anticipated holiday assembly. We all got to play roles from shepherds wearing cotton beards to angels with paper wings. I still recall my parents’ sardonic smiles when I came home in early December 1960 to announce that I would be playing Joseph that year.

All the Jewish kids so much wanted simply to fit in. We felt so different and Christmas, though not our holiday, seemed a time where the usual anti-Semitic taunts we had to endure daily gave way to a cheery “Merry Christmas.” I loved the Christmas carols, the words of which are ingrained to this day in my mind. I can still sing a mean Joy To The World as well as Dreidel Dreidel, Dreidel. Indeed many years later as a social worker with the Children’s Aid Society it was the Jewish guy who led the group of foster children in carol-singing during the regular Christmas parties.

But my most vivid memory of the time was the Jewish-owned Freiman’s department store on downtown Rideau Street. Many decades later it was bought by the Bay Company but in 1960 it was Ottawa’s Christmas winter wonderland. With a miniature train that began inside the Freiman’s show window, we were all awed as it chugged its way through Toyland towards who else but Santa Clause himself.

I recall the great worry of that time I departed the train and decided I too would sit on Santa’s lap. As I approached the white bearded man, my Jewish heart pumping a mile a minute, I wondered if an electrical bolt would be sent down from the heavens.

Turns out Santa was none other than Moishe Gorinsky a Jewish friend of my father’s moonlighting that year as a department store Santa.

It was a sobering experience for a nine-year-old Jewish boy in 1960, to be sure.

Today the season is much different. Christmas is openly shared with the many other rich faith traditions that make up Canada in the 21st century. Kwanza, Diwali, my own Hannukah celebration, have been woven into this time of the year, making us all feel part of the season. And while I welcome and embrace the changes, from time to time I cannot help but bring to mind a simpler time long ago when a young Jewish boy sat on a the lap of a Jewish Santa while in the same year playing Joseph in his school Christmas pageant.

Bernie M. Farber, formerly the CEO of Canadian Jewish Congress, is a senior vice-president with Gemini Power Corporation. He writes often on human rights and the human condition.

Read more: http://www.canada.com/life/theholidayguide12/Jewish+Christmas+pageant/7738757/story.html#ixzz2G2zYronD

Israel takes in more Bnei Menashe 'lost tribe' members The Bnei Menashe tribe is believed to have descended from the ancient northern kingdom of Israel

25 December 2012 Last updated at 05:12 ET

Dozens of members of an Indian tribe said to be lost descendants of ancient Israelites have emigrated to Israel after the government lifted a visa ban.

Some 1,700 of the 7,200-strong Bnei Menashe already arrived nearly a decade ago after a chief rabbi recognised the community as a lost tribe in 2005.

Israel stopped issuing visas to the group two years later but recently reversed the policy.

Some critics have questioned the authenticity of the tribe's claims.

The community says it is one of the lost 10 tribes of Israel who were exiled when Assyrians invaded the northern kingdom of Israel in the 8th Century BC.

According to its oral tradition, the tribe travelled through Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet, China and on to India, where it eventually settled in the north-eastern states of Manipur and Mizoram.

'Never forgotten'

Around 50 people landed in the city of Tel Aviv on Monday.

Eyewitnesses said there were emotional scenes at Ben Gurion airport as the newcomers were greeted by relatives who had moved to Israel during the first wave of immigration.

Several hundred more Bnei Menashe members are due to arrive in the coming weeks, said Michael Freund, chairman of the Shavei Israel group which helped organise the journey for the Bnei Menashe members.

"The members of this tribe have never forgotten where they came from and we are excited to be able to help them come back," he told AFP news agency.

But some critics say the Bnei Menashe's link to Judaism are "historically untenable". They accuse the community of using their status to escape poverty India.

In March 2005, Israeli Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar officially backed Bnei Menashe's claims after an investigation lasting several years.

The announcement led to a wave of immigration to the "Promised Land", where members were formally converted to Orthodox Judaism.

The flow stopped in 2007, however, when the government rescinded visa rights to the Bnei Menashe.

Israel's decision to reverse the policy is expected to pave the way for all remaining members to migrate.

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The Romans in Israel

by Elizabeth McNamer

St. Luke, in his prelude to the birth of Jesus, tells us, "In those days Caesar Augustus published a decree ordering a census of the whole world. This first census took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria." All through the Gospels we are aware of a Roman presence in Israel. Just who were they, how did they get there and how did the Jews function under Roman rule?

It all began as a family quarrel sometime in the year 63 B.C. Two brothers from the Hasmonean dynasty, Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, vied for the throne in Jerusalem. They were descended from the great Maccabees, the family that had succeeded in ousting the abhorred Greeks from Israel some hundred years before. The Maccabees had established themselves as high priests and kings in Israel in no uncertain terms.

For a hundred years the mighty Romans had been advancing eastward. In 67 B.C. General Pompey reached Syria and established it as a province for Rome. Cities were built to assure Rome's eternal presence in the area and Pompey settled for a time at least before he would assert his rights in Rome. One day he received two messages for help from Hyrcanus and Aristobulus. Neither one was ready to relinquish power and called on Rome to intervene. Pompey was only too happy to come to their assistance.

What should have been settled over the weekend turned into a 500-year nightmare. Inviting the Romans in to solve the problem was engaging a lion to destroy a mouse. Like the man who came to dinner and never left, the Romans considered the invitation permanent. Mighty Rome was not to be trifled with. It took its duty seriously. When it came to the aid of a smaller state, it formed an alliance that was irrevocable and any attempt to negate it was regarded as a rebellion. Rome settled the dispute in favor of Hyrcanus, but he scarcely had time to thumb his nose at his brother when he realized that he had lost all power and that the noble Hasmonean Empire was at an end.

It was Rome's custom to place a friendly king on the throne of any country on their borders that they had no wish to govern. They called them client kings. Hyrcanus was allowed to rule a small territory, but he ruled only in name. The real power was in the hands of his minister Antipater, a man who had proved himself a friend to the Romans, and he would become the father of a man who would be an even greater friend: Herod the Great. The Romans had come to Palestine and they would remain there, looking down their long noses at the inhabitants until their Empire fell in the late fifth century A.D.

The Roman Empire

In the year 37 B.C., the young Octavian became Emperor of Rome with the title Augustus Caesar. He confirmed Herod, as he did client kings in many other places, as king of the Jews. Herod owed allegiance to Rome, but he could do anything he liked within his territory as long as foreign policy did not get out of line. Should he fail to please the Romans he would be immediately deposed.

Rome's empire encompassed the whole of the known world. They had an ingenious government. The Empire was divided into provinces and able men were sent there to govern. On arrival, a governor, accompanied by his engineers, architects, builders and army, set about constructing roads and cities to establish their permanent presence. Once can see the remains of these ancient cities all over the Middle East today.

During the time of Augustus the Pax Romana was in force. Rome was not engaged in war. But they were always prepared for it. Roman soldiers operated all over the Empire. Nine legions were concentrated in the East. A legion was composed of foot soldiers holding Roman citizenship. They were professionals who had signed up for 25 years. A legion consisted of ten cohorts divided into six "centuries" of 100 men each. Each century was commanded by a centurion. There were one hundred cavalry attached to each legion, so that there were somewhat over six thousand men in all. They were armed with heavy javelins and short thrusting swords as well as a small dagger. They wore helmets and mail shirts made of small iron rings and they carried large curved wooden shields.

In addition to the legions, auxiliary forces were drawn from the province. Those serving in these forces did not have Roman citizenship. They were organized into cohorts like the legions and could be called upon by the governors for help at any time. While a century of soldiers was present at Capernaum (Jesus cured the centurion's son), it is now thought that these were not Romans but were part of the army of Herod Antipas. Capernaum was on the border of his territory and taxes were collected here, particularly from the fishermen. At the time of Jesus Roman soldiers would have been found only around Caesarea Maratima where the Roman procurator lived. They would have been called into use when the great festivals were being celebrated in Jerusalem to prevent uprisings, or they would be needed in the execution of criminals by crucifixion.

Living under Roman rule had some advantages. Generally they allowed freedom of religion (unlike the Greeks had done) and did not interfere with the religious practices of the people they governed. The governors of provinces built temples to their own gods. where sacrifices were conducted daily. But it was the Roman method of taxation that most stung. Provinces had to pay taxes. An amount was estimated and the country split up into tax districts. As Rome had no civil service, taxes were collected by private syndicates who made a large profit by overcollecting. Taxes on goods were very high. Not surprisingly, tax collectors were despised.

Herod the Great

During the time of Herod the Great there were probably no Roman soldiers to be found in Israel. He had his own private army, and auxiliary units could always be called in if there was trouble. Like the Romans, Herod set out on a great building program. Among the towns he erected was Caesarea Maratima on the coast of the Mediterranean. This splendid town had a theater, an amphitheater, a stadium, a chariot-racing arena, public baths, a temple to Augustus, a splendid palace for himself and a false harbor so that he could import his marble and wine and all the commodities needed by a king. No expense was spared in the building of the city and he invited the emperor Augustus to the opening.

But Herod never lived there. He died in 4 B.C. before it was entirely completed and his territory was divided among his sons, who received the title tetrarch rather than king. Archelaus got Judea; Herod Antipas, Samaria and Galilee; Philip Herod, Trachonitis, Gaulanitis and Batanea.

Judea, which contained the holy city of Jerusalem, was going to be the most difficult to govern. At Passover the year after Herod died, thousands of pilgrims came pouring into the temple. Archelaus sent his troops (he had 3,000 of them) to control the crowd, but the crowd turned on the soldiers and stoned them to death. Some 3,000 people ended up being killed in the ensuing conflict. The governor of Syria took it upon himself to place a legion at Jerusalem to keep the peace. But at Pentecost more crowds came pouring in and climbed on the temple porticoes to pelt the Roman soldiers. The whole country was soon up in arms and the governor of Syria returned with more legions. Two thousand of the rebels were captured and crucified.

Enter the Procurators

Archelaus proved to be such an inept and cruel ruler that in A.D. 6 the people of Judea asked that a Roman procurator be appointed in his place under the watchful eye of the governor of Syria (Quirinius). The Syrian governor ordered a census of all property in order to estimate taxes and to sell off the estate of Archelaus. This was bitterly resented by the Jews.

Since the high priest had failed to convince the Jews that a census should be taken, he was replaced by a new high priest, Annas, who would keep the position until A.D. 15. Archelaus's troops were taken over by the Romans and turned into auxiliary units. The proconsul was given supreme power. He had total authority over the region. He could imprison, flog or execute as he saw fit. He set up his government at Caesarea Maratima and moved into Herod's palace.

The first three procurators governed for only a year each. The next, Valerian Gratus, did a 17-year stint. Then, in A.D. 26, Emperor Tiberius appointed as procurator of Judea a man called Pontius Pilate.

Pontius Pilate is described as greedy, vindictive and cruel by historians of the time. He had nothing but contempt for Jewish customs. He was deliberately provocative. The soldiers had been forbidden to carry their standards into Jerusalem because the images of the emperor would offend the Jews. Pilate ordered his soldiers to take in the standards under cover of night. A mob descended on Caesarea and besieged him for five days. He removed the standards. A new aqueduct was needed to bring water into Jerusalem. Pilate paid for the building of an aqueduct with Temple taxes. This again infuriated the Jews. Afraid of a riot, Pilate had some of his soldiers dress like Jews, mingle with the people and, at the first sign of trouble, kill the potential troublemakers.

It was customary for the proconsul to go to Jerusalem for the main feasts. Thus for Passover in the year 30, we find Pilate in Jerusalem.

The Zealots

Gamla is poised on a rocky ridge protected on each side by sweeping valleys in the Galilean hills. Here the Zealot movement had been founded by Judas the Galilean and a Pharisee named Zadduk in A.D. 6, at the time of the census by Quirinius.

They preached that God alone was the ruler of Israel and that no taxes should be paid. Judas' family paid a higher price in other ways. His sons Jacob and Simeon were crucified in 46. His grandson Menachem was murdered in Jerusalem in 66. Another grandson escaped to Masada and committed suicide in 73.

In A.D. 66 a revolt against Roman rule was started in Galilee. The Romans sent in their greatest general Vespasian to deal with the situation. He did it with ruthlessness and efficiency. Some 5,000 zealots committed suicide by jumping off the Gamla cliff as the Roman army approached.

Most of the towns that we associate with the ministry of Jesus were destroyed—Nazareth, Capernaum, Chorazim, Bethsaida.

Vespasian was so successful that his soldiers declared him emperor and he returned to Rome, leaving his son Titus in charge.

Titus destroyed Jerusalem. Whether he intended to destroy the Temple is often questioned. It was one of the most magnificent buildings in the world. Some say it caught fire by mistake. But destroyed it was.

Some of the Zealots escaped to Masada where they stayed for nine months before killing each other rather than fall prey to the Romans.

We know a great deal about this period because of the writings of Josephus. He was an Israelite general in the army that fought against Rome. He tells us that had he not been thrown from his horse and sprained his wrist during one of the battles and taken for medical attention to Capernaum, the history of the world would have been changed.

Be that as it may, in the long run he turned traitor and joined the Romans. It is said that he sat with Titus watching the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. He was taken by Titus to Rome, ensconced in an apartment and told to write a history of the Jewish wars. He also wrote a history of the Jews and his own life.

Elizabeth McNamer, one of the general editors of Scripture from Scratch and a frequent contributor, has a Ph.D. in adult education and religious studies from Montana State University and an M.A. in religious studies from Gonzaga University. She teaches at Rocky Mountain College.

Next: The Canticles in Luke's Gospel (by Daniel W. Casey)

-------------

Jesus

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jesus (pron.: /'d?i?z?s/; Greek: ??s??? Iesous; 7–2 BC/BCE to 30–36 AD/CE), also referred to as Jesus of Nazareth, is the central figure of Christianity, whom a majority of Christian denominations believe to be the Son of God.[11]

Virtually all scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed.[12][13][14][15][16][17] Most scholars agree that Jesus was a Jewish teacher from Galilee in Roman Judaea, was baptized by John the Baptist, and was crucified in Jerusalem on the orders of the Roman Prefect, Pontius Pilate.[8][18][15] However, the quest for the historical Jesus has produced little agreement on the historicity of gospel narratives and their theological assertions of his divinity.[19][20][21][22] Scholars have offered various portraits of Jesus, which at times share a number of overlapping attributes, such as the leader of an apocalyptic movement, Messiah, a charismatic healer, a sage and philosopher, or a social reformer who preached of the "Kingdom of God" as a means for personal and egalitarian social transformation.[23][24][25][26] Scholars have correlated the New Testament accounts with non-Christian historical records to arrive at an estimated chronology of Jesus' life.[3][5][27][28]

Christians hold Jesus to be the awaited Messiah of the Old Testament and refer to him as Jesus Christ or simply as Christ,[29][30] a name that is also used secularly. Most Christians believe that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of a virgin, performed miracles, founded the Church, died sacrificially by crucifixion to achieve atonement, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven, from which he will return.[31] The majority of Christians worship Jesus as the incarnation of God the Son, and the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.[32] A few Christian groups reject Trinitarianism, wholly or partly, as non-scriptural.[32][33]

In Islam, Jesus (commonly transliterated as Isa) is considered one of God's important prophets.[34][35] In Islam, Jesus is a bringer of scripture, and the product of a virgin birth, but not the victim of crucifixion. Judaism rejects the belief that Jesus was the awaited Messiah, arguing that he did not fulfill the Messianic prophecies in the Tanakh.[36] Bahá'í scripture almost never refers to Jesus as the Messiah, but calls him a Manifestation of God.[37]

--------------------------------

HISTORY

of

Israel & "Palestine"

  Israel today + Jordan today  =  "Pal estine"  Before 1923

    Take a close look at this PRESENT DAY MAP of the Middle East in which you can see that 22 Arab and/or Muslim [Iran is not considered Arab] nations completely engulf Israel. If someone can explain to me how "expansionist Israel" has "taken over" the Middle East, please email me! The Arab countries occupy 640 times the land mass as does Israel and outnumber the Jews of Israel by nearly fifty to one. So much for Arab propaganda!

   Now notice the TOTAL  area of  Israel and  Jordan.  This was referred to as  "Palestine" and mandated under British administration following World War I (see next map below). How convenient that today's Arab propagandists forget that land east of the Jordan River was also part of "Palestine" and is, in fact, the Arab-Palestinian State!

    From 1517-1917 Turkey's Ottoman Empire controlled a vast Arab empire, a portion of which is today Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine.  During World War I (1914-1918), Turkey supported Germany. When Germany was defeated, so were the Turks. In 1916 control of the southern portion of their Ottoman Empire was "mandated" to France and Britain under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided the Arab region into zones of influence. Lebanon and Syria were assigned (mandated) to France... and "Palestine" (today's Jordan, Israel and "West Bank") was mandated to Great Britain.  

    Because no other peoples had ever established a national homeland in "Palestine" since the Jews had done it 2,000 years before, the British "looked favorably" upon the creation of a Jewish National Homeland throughout ALL of Palestine. The Jews had already begun mass immigration into Palestine in the 1880's in an effort to rid the land of swamps and malaria and prepare for the rebirth of Israel. This Jewish effort to revitalize the land attracted an equally large immigration of Arabs from neighboring areas who were drawn by employment opportunities and healthier living conditions. There was never any attempt to "rid" the area of what few indigenous Arabs there were or those Arab masses that immigrated into this area along with the Jews!

In 1923, the British divided the "Palestine" portion of the Ottoman Empire into two administrative districts.  Jews would be permitted only west of the Jordan river.  In effect, the British had "chopped off" 75% of the originally proposed Jewish Palestinian homeland to form an Arab Palestinian nation called Trans-Jordan (meaning "across the Jordan River"). This territory east of the Jordan River was given to Emir Abdullah (from Hejaz, now Saudi Arabia) who was not even an Arab-"Palestinian!" This portion of Palestine was renamed Trans-Jordan. Trans-Jordan would again be renamed "Jordan" in 1946. In other words, the eastern 3/4 of Palestine would be renamed TWICE, in effect, erasing all connection to the name "Palestine!" However, the bottom line is that the Palestinian Arabs had THEIR "Arab Palestinian" homeland. The remaining 25% of Palestine (now WEST of the Jordan River) was to be the Jewish Palestinian homeland.  However, sharing was not part of the Arab psychological makeup then nor now.

    Encouraged and incited by growing Arab nationalism throughout the Middle East, the Arabs of that small remaining Palestinian territory west of the Jordan River launched never-ending murderous attacks upon the Jewish Palestinians in an effort to drive them out.  Most terrifying were the Hebron massacres of 1929 and later during the 1936-39 "Arab Revolt." The British at first tried to maintain order but soon (due to the large oil deposits being discovered throughout the Arab Middle East) turned a blind eye. It became painfully clear to the Palestinian Jews that they must fight the Arabs AND drive out the British.

 The Palestinian Jews were forced to form an organized defense against the Arabs Palestinians.... thus was formed the Hagana, the beginnings of the Israeli Defense Forces [IDF]. There was also a Jewish underground called the Irgun led by Menachem Begin (who later became Prime Minister of Israel). Besides fighting the Arabs, the Irgun was instrumental in driving out the pro-Arab British.  Finally in 1947 the British had enough and turned the Palestine matter over to the United Nations.

   The 1947 U.N. Resolution 181 partition plan was to divide the remaining 25% of Palestine into a Jewish Palestinian State and a SECOND Arab Palestinian State (Trans-Jordan being the first) based upon population concentrations.  The Jewish Palestinians accepted... the Arab Palestinians rejected. The Arabs still wanted ALL of Palestine... both east AND west of the Jordan River.

 Our Palestinian Cousins started the '48 war, and in so doing released the warlike appetites of a nation of survivors, a Jewish people with no place to run, who had repressed their rage for millennia, and had now earned full title to it!

    On May 14, 1948 the "Palestinian Jews" finally declared their own State of Israel and became "Israelis." On the next day, seven neighboring Arab armies... Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Yemen... invaded Israel. Most of the Arabs living within the boundaries of the newly declared "ISRAEL" were encouraged to leave by the invading Arab armies to facilitate the slaughter of the Jews and were promised to be given all Jewish property after the victorious Arab armies won the war. The truth is that 70% of the Arab Palestinians who left in 1948 – perhaps 300,000 to 400,000 of them – never saw an Israeli soldier! They did not flee because they feared Jewish thugs, but because of a rational and reasonable calculus: the Jews will be exterminated; we will get out of the way while that messy and dangerous business goes forward, and we will return afterwards to reclaim our homes, and to inherit those nice Jewish properties as well. They guessed wrong; and the Arab Palestinians are still tortured by the residual shame of their flight. Their shame is so great because in their eyes running from Jews was like running from women. So much for the blatant lie about Jews throwing out all the [Palestinian] Arabs! 

The remaining 30% either (1) saw for themselves that these Jews would fight and die for their new nation and decided to pack up and leave or (2) were driven off the land as a normal consequence of war.

When the 19 month war ended, Israel survived  despite a 1% loss of its entire population! Those Arabs who did not flee became today's Israeli-Arab citizens. Those who fled became the seeds of the first wave of "Palestinian Arab refugees."

The Arab propagandists and apologists almost never mentioned that in 1948, Arab armies launched a war against a one-day-old Israel. Instead he focused on the main consequence of that war: the creation of Arab refugees, stating that Israel "war of genocide" expelled 800,000 of them. This not only disagrees with UN estimates of a bit over 400,000 refugees but also ignores the fact that most of the Arabs/Palestinians were encouraged to leave by the Arab World itself!

The end result of the 1948-49 Israeli War of Independence was the creation of a Jewish State slightly larger than that which was proposed by the 1947 United Nations Resolution 181. What remained of that almost-created second  Arab Palestinian State was gobbled up by (1) Egypt (occupying the Gaza Strip) and by (2) Trans-Jordan (occupying Judea-Samaria (a.k.a. the "West Bank" of the Jordan River) and Jerusalem. In the next year (1950) Trans-Jordan formally merged this West Bank territory into itself and granted all those "Palestinian" Arabs living there Jordanian citizenship.  Since Trans-Jordan was then no longer confined to one side of the  Jordan River, it renamed itself simply "Jordan."  In the final analysis, the Arabs of Palestine ended up with nearly 85% of the original territory of Palestine... called Jordan but in reality their ARAB "Palestinian state! But that was still not 100% and thus the conflict between Arab and Jew for "Palestine" would continue through four more wars and continuous Arab terrorist  attacks upon the Israeli citizenry. It continues to this very day.

    From 1949-67 when all of Judea-Samaria [West Bank & Jerusalem] and Gaza ... were 100% under Arab [Jordanian & Egyptian] control, no effort was EVER made to create a second Palestinian State for the Arabs living there.  Surely you do not expect Israel to now provide these same Arabs with their own country when their fellow Arabs failed to do so!  And isn't it curious how Arafat and his PLO (formed in 1964)  discovered their "ancient" identity and a need for "self-determination" and "human dignity" on this very same West Bank ONLY AFTER Israel regained this territory (three years later in 1967) following Jordan's attempt attempt to destroy Israel!  Why was no request ever made upon King Hussein of Jordan by the Arabs living on the West Bank when he occupied it?  Is it logical that the PLO was formed in 1964 to regain the lands they would lose three years later in 1967?  This sort of logic makes sense only to those who who have not learned that the PLO was formed to DESTROY Israel. And that is STILL their goal! A cosmetic name change from PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) to PA (Palestinian Authority) does not change the stripes on THIS tiger!

 

  Throughout much of May 1967, the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian  armies mobilized along Israel's narrow and seemingly indefensible borders in preparation for a massive invasion to eliminate the State of Israel. The battle cry heard throughout the Arab world was then, as it continues to be... "Slaughter the Jews" and "Throw the Jews into the Sea!" But the Jews of Israel, remembering 2,000 years of being  butchered, gassed, burned and skinned (eg. The Crusades, The Spanish Inquisition, the Arab rampages of early Palestine and particularly the Holocaust),  planned and executed a perfect pre-emptive strike against Egypt. Within two hours the Egyptian Air Force did not exist... most of its planes destroyed while still on the runways!  Unaware that the Egyptians had no more air force, King Hussein of Jordan,  launched his attack from the his West Bank into Israel's belly while Syrian troops prepared to descend down the Golan Heights high ground into northern Israel. 

Now for some facts about "occupation." Firstly, the Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians lost Gaza, the West Bank and Golan Heights (respectively) by participating in a failed attempt at genocide against the Children of Israel. Had Israel lost this 1967 defensive war, the Arab-Palestinians and their Arab allies would have raped, butchered or driven out every Israeli they could get their hands on and gobbled up all of Israel. Now, 35+ years later and despite the fact that Israel won a war BROUGHT UPON THEM, the Israelis are still willing to allow the Arab-Palestinians to have a state on much of the West Bank and Gaza if only they will stop sending their suicide/homicide bombers into the heart of Israel! (Talk about misplaced compassion!)

From 1948 to 1967, Egypt ruled Gaza, Syria ruled the Golan Heights, while Jordan ruled the West Bank. They could have set up independent Arab-Palestinian states in any or all of those territories, but they didn't even consider it. Instead, in 1967 they used the Golan Heights, Gaza and the West bank to launch a war that was unambiguously aimed at destroying Israel, which is how Israel came into possession of those territories in the first place.

    After ONLY six days of air, sea and hand-to-hand ground warfare, Israel defeated all three Arab armies along three separate fronts, capturing the entire Sinai Desert from Egypt, the 37mile x 12mile Syrian Golan Heights and the so-called "West Bank" (including East Jerusalem and its Old City) from Jordan. The God of Israel was surely watching over His children!  Most importantly was the return to Israel of its holy 3,000 year old capital city of Jerusalem along the western edge of the West Bank... the same Jerusalem from which all Jews had been denied access for the 19 years (1948-1967) following Jordan's seizure and control over it following the first Arab-Israeli War of 1948-9.

    Unfortunately, the world saw things differently and considered Israel an "occupier" (rather than a "capturer") of this disputed "West Bank" and the Gaza Strip along with the 850,000 Palestinian Arabs living there. These Arabs would refer to themselves as "refugees" and joined the masses of refugees from the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948-9. Once again Israel was forced to fight a battle for survival and, sadly, once again Palestinian [in reality, largely Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian] Arabs becoming refugees by their own actions, the actions of their leaders and from the actions of fellow Arabs from neighboring states!

ISRAEL SCREWS UP TOO!

    Israel was responsible for bringing about some of its own problems. The Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were packed and ready to leave following their 1967 defeat.  Suddenly the victorious one-eyed IDF General Moshe Dayan persuaded them to stay. This singular act stunned no one more than the Arab enemy himself who could not believe such an incredible manifestation of Jewish madness!  After all, the Arabs knew what THEY would have done to the Jews if they had won!  Dayan's plan was to educate them, offer them modern medical treatment, provide them with employment both in the West Bank, Gaza AND inside Israel Proper itself ... living amongst each other in hopes of building bridges to the Arab world.  Israel is now paying dearly for this typically naive "Leftist" gesture.  That "bridge" led to two Intifadas and world-wide Arab-Palestinian terrorism.  From a frightened and defeated enemy, these "Palestinian" Arabs under Israel's jurisdiction turned into a confident, hateful and dangerous enemy now on their way toward forming a terrorist state determined to destroy Israel!  

Note: When people say Jordan (first called Trans-Jordan) is an Arab-"Palestinian" State, they are correct! Jordan accounts for 3/4 of Palestine's original land mass. Though they may call themselves "Jordanians," they are culturally, ethnically, historically and religiously no different than the Arab-"Palestinians" on the "West Bank." Even the flag of Jordan and the flag of the proposed 2nd Arab-Palestinian state on the West Bank / Gaza look almost identical. So, if the Arab-Palestinians and Jordanians think of themselves as one and the same, why should WE fall for the lie that the Arab Palestinians west of the Jordan River are any different from the Jordanian Arabs on its eastern shore?

Jordanian Flag

Proposed Palestinian Flag

  Usually when one side starts a war and loses both the war AND some territory, no one on the planet would expect the winner to give back anything! This not only sounds preposterous, it IS preposterous!  But the Jews (I hate to admit) had such an insane obsession of wanting the world to love them that they were willing to give back the entire Sinai Desert (oil fields, air bases and endless miles of security buffer) to Egypt for a piece of paper.  Thus, in 1982 Egypt regained their Sinai and Israel lost a massive buffer against any future Egyptian aggression!  Thus far, Egypt has not aggressed against Israel militarily; however, the basest, anti-Semitic bile to come out of Egypt is not unlike the worse of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda! This 1982 Camp David Peace Accord has to be the coldest peace deal in history!

    Israel still occupies Syria's Golan Heights which, prior to the 1967 war, had been by Syria used solely for terrorist incursions into and artillery bombardment upon Israel's northeastern settlements.  The Golan should never be given back to Israel's most vicious enemy!  And of course, Israel still "occupies" the West Bank with its  ONE MILLION TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND and Gaza with its EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND "Palestinian"  Arabs.  Had Israel done to these Arabs what the Arabs would have done to the Jews had THEY won, she would have expelled these  hostile Arabs and made it officially part of a Greater Israel!  But by remaining an "occupier," Israel set herself up for a campaign of vicious propaganda, the scope and intensity of which the world has never before seen!

More on "Palestinian Nationalism

and the

Real War Against Israel...

The Middle East war is not now and never was a conflict between Israelis/Jews on the one hand and Palestinians on the other. In fact, the Arab-"Palestinians", while currently the perpetrators of most of the anti-Jewish atrocities, were never a very important part of the conflict. In fact, before about 1970, virtually no one in the world considered the Middle East conflict to be one between Israelis and Palestinians.

The term "Palestinian" itself had referred to Israeli Jews back in the 1940s, and had been slowly deconstructed and redefined to refer to the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. The Middle East Conflict was always a war by Arabs against Jews, not a conflict between Israelis and "Palestinians." The war was repackaged as a conflict between Jews and Palestinians as a public relations gimmick by the Arab fascist regimes. These regimes had never had any interest in "Palestinians," in creating a "Palestinian" state, or in "Palestinian nationalism" before 1967. That is because Palestinian nationalism did not and DOES NOT exist. The Palestinians were a regional group of Arabs having virtually no cultural nor national distinctive traits separating them from Syrians, Lebanese, and Jordanians. They are all basically Arabs!.

The bulk of what are called "Palestinian Arabs" are members of families who migrated into the Land of Israel beginning in the late 19th century. Palestinian nationalism is a mislabeling of Arab nationalism. Arab nationalism exists, although it is closely bound up with Islamic nationalism and even Islamism. Palestinian nationalism, however, is a phantom. It is nothing more than genocidal hatred of Jews!

The Arab assaults and aggressions against Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1968, and 1973 had nothing to do with Palestinians. The Palestinian terror campaign would itself be easy to suppress today and eradicate if the Middle East conflict were really a Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Israel would simply obliterate the terrorists and expel their supporters to Syria and Lebanon. The Middle East war continues because it is really an Arab-Israeli war, not an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is also in large part a war between barbarism and civilization. In many ways an Islamic religious jihad against the Jews.

 http://www.masada2000.org/historical.html

---------

SWITZERLAND'S HATE OF JEWS...

The Red Cross should stick to helping people in need, not waste resources in bashing Israel

THE ICRC (SWISS... INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS).... AND THEIR WAR AGAINST ISRAEL...

For nearly four decades many in the international community have insisted that Jews are forbidden to live in Judea, Samaria and Gaza (Yesha), 'eastern Jerusalem,' and the Golan - areas conquered by Israel in 1967. Leading this fight was and is a private Swiss organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The ICRC was the first international organization to charge that "the presence of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories is contrary to the Geneva Convention," and therefore "unlawful."

"Any measure designed to expand or consolidate settlements is also illegal. Confiscation of land to build or expand settlements is similarly prohibited." (ICRC, 2009)

And the world listens, because the ICRC isn't just another NGO; it is the official recognized authority on the Fourth Geneva Convention (GC IV). Its decisions, therefore, were and are crucial in determining international law and vilifying Israel. Every judicial condemnation of Israel cites the GC and follows ICRC's interpretation.

This explains why the international community and courts have accepted ICRC's decisions that "Israeli (Jewish) settlements violate international law" without question.

Based on The Hague Convention, GC IV was drawn up after WWII to protect innocent civilians and restrict brutal occupations. Unilaterally, the ICRC turned it into a weapon to delegitimize and demonize Israel. Meeting secretly in the early 1970's in Geneva, the ICRC determined that Israel was in violation of the GC IV. That's been "the law" ever since.

And there's no appeal, because all decisions and protocols of the ICRC are closed, even the identities of the people involved are secret. Without transparency or due process, ICRC rulings became "international law." Their condemnations of Israel provide the sole basis for accusing Israel of "illegal occupation" of all territory conquered in 1967.

It's a legal fraud.

Article 49 of GC IV says: "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."

According to the ICRC, this forbids Jews from living in Judea, Samaria, Golan and eastern Jerusalem - areas conquered by Israel in 1967 - even though they moved there voluntarily, and prohibits any form of government assistance to them, including roads, utilities, schools and clinics.

The ICRC's position contradicts all written agreements which confirm the right of Jews to live in their ancestral homeland - League of Nations and British Mandate - including the Oslo Accords.

Article 49 obviously refers to the territory of another country, or sovereign power; Judea, Samaria and Gaza don't fit this definition. These areas were illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt between 1948 and 1967; the ICRC, of course, differs, but has never satisfactorily answered the question to which State this territory belongs.

Holding these territories in limbo for a future Palestinian state, which may never come to fruition, whose borders are undefined and whose intentions are openly hostile is absurd. Such ICRC antagonism to Israel, however, is pervasive.

During WW II the ICRC visited concentration camps and gave the Nazis a pass. After the war, they provided false passports to escaping Nazi war criminals.

Their website demonstrates their humanitarian efforts around the world, but when it comes to the Middle East, their story is one-sided. During two decades of constant terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, the ICRC said nothing. They have written several stories about the suffering of "Palestinians" in Gaza and Lebanon as a result of Israeli actions, without mentioning terrorist attacks that prompted a response.

The ICRC condemned IDF actions to stop terrorism in Jenin, Lebanon and Gaza as "massacres." They have consistently condemned Israel for 'violations of Palestinian civil and human rights,' and accused Israel of "war crimes." Sometimes, when these lies were exposed, the ICRC has recanted - but not often and never with full disclosure.

Because the ICRC lacks transparency, there's no way to find out how and why they made their decisions, or who made them. If they have nothing to hide, why the secrecy?

The Red Cross should stick to helping people in need, not waste resources in bashing Israel.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/14474

 http://www.icrc.org/

and heeeeeeeeeeeeeereeeeeeeeeeee's their website:

... OMG!!!!!

By the by... hasn't Switzerland been taken to task for their actions against the Jews... the war where over 6 MILLION JEWS WERE MURDERED... along with Catholics, Gypsies and persons because of race, colour, creed and sexual orientation.... that war? No more hiding.... let's " get r done!"

OH Bethlehem what have they done to you?

- David Rushton (Bio and Archives)  Monday, December 24, 2012

I have been privileged to visit Bethlehem more than 40 times out of more than 60 total visits to Israel. The first time was in 1964. Now it is sadly listed among the places, like London (my hometown) and Cairo that I never will visit again. In 1995 the birthplace of the Prince of Peace was turned over to the “Palestinian Authority” under the terms of the Oslo Peace Accord.

At the time of my first visit to Bethlehem it was under occupation by the Jordanian army as was most of Jerusalem. There was a “Berlin Wall” of barbed wire and sentry towers between what the United Nations defined as Israel and the part occupied by Jordan. One needed a passport and special visas to go from one side to the other.

Then came the Six Day War when Israel was attacked by Arab armies and fought back taking back much of the land of Judea and Samaria, including Bethlehem which had been deeded to it by God and recorded in the Bible.

Life was good in Israel after the Six Day War. During the ‘70s and ‘80s, I had many Jewish, Muslim, and Christian friends in Jerusalem. Most of my friends were Arabs. The Muslims were not militant in those days and on many evenings six or eight of us would pile into a car and drive the ten minutes to Bethlehem to eat in one of the cafes around manger square or drink coffee on the main street. There we were joined by other Muslim or Christian Arab friends for a night of friendly conversation.

One by one my Muslim friends disappeared under threats by militant Muslims that they must not consort with the enemy. Soon there were none of them left.

Most of my friends in Bethlehem were Christian Arab businessmen, including the Christian Mayor of the town. But after 1995 when the Israeli army pulled back to a place between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, my Christian Arab friends told of threats and boycotts by the Muslims. Each time I visited the town more Christian families had left to find new homes in the United States, Canada, Europe, and South America. When we visited in 2000 we had lunch in a small restaurant that was famous for its good Middle Eastern food. We arrived early and as we sat in the center of the room we noticed groups of men in olive green uniforms coming in and taking up tables around us. Each carried a rifle and laid it on the floor beside their table. A big screen television played film of Arafat and Fatah men in training accompanied by military music. A local man told us we were in the meeting place of Arafat’s army. The food was still good, but we finished quickly and left.

For 3,000 years Bethlehem has been a Jewish town and still is because God deeded it to His People Israel, and specifically to the tribe of Judah. There are no Jews and few Christians left in Bethlehem today because they have been forced out.

Over the centuries Bethlehem was invaded and ruled by Samaritans, Byzantines, Persians, Romans, Crusaders, Egyptians, Mamluks, Syrians, Turks and British. All of those great empires have fallen into the garbage dump of history.

Bethlehem is situated in the hills of Judea about 9 kilometers (6 miles) from Jerusalem. It is first mentioned in Genesis 35:16 as the place near where Jacob’s wife Rachel died.

“So Rachel died, and she was buried on the way to Ephrath, that is, Bethlehem, and Jacob set up a pillar upon her grave; it is the pillar of Rachel’s tomb, which is there to this day.” (Gen 35:19-20)

Bethlehem was the meeting place of Ruth and Boaz. David was born here and was anointed King of Israel here by the prophet Samuel in Bethlehem (1 Samuel 16:4-13). Could there ever be any doubt that this is part of the Land of Israel?

According to THE TIMES OF ISRAEL (timesofIsrael.com) Archeologist Eli Shukron, while digging in Jerusalem this year, recovered a pottery shard that was part of a seal mentioning the city of Bethlehem. As far as is known this is the oldest archeological proof that Bethlehem existed as a city of Israel approximately 2,700 years ago. This was at the time of the First Temple in Jerusalem. And this, of course, also proves, as if any more proof is needed, that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel more than 2,700 years ago. We know from the Bible that it was the capital and that Bethlehem existed as Jewish town even before that.

The very name of the city is Jewish. In Hebrew the name Bethlehem means “House of Bread” because of the wheat fields that surround it.

The Jewish town of Bethlehem is mentioned again in (Micah 5:2) where it is prophesied as the birthplace of the Messiah. 1st Samuel 17:12 calls it Bethlehem-Judah (or Bethlehem of the Tribe of Judah). And the New Testament calls Bethlehem “the city of David” (Luke 2:4).

Joseph and his wife travelled to Bethlehem while she was pregnant because the Roman authorities decreed that every family should travel to the land of the birth of the head of the household. Joseph then, as a descendant of King David, had to travel to Bethlehem, the City of David.

Bethlehem, city of David and part of the tribe of Judah, was the birthplace of the Messiah.

It is not mentioned in the Koran or other Muslim books because they know nothing about it.

CHRISTMAS CELEBRATIONS IN BETHLEHEM

There are three dates for Christmas in Bethlehem each year. The Roman Catholic and Protestant groups revere Dec. 25th as the day of Nativity. Greek, Coptic (Egyptian Orthodox) and Syrian Orthodox celebrate January 6th. Armenian Orthodox Christians celebrate on January 19th. Of course anyone who studies the Bible and History knows that Jesus was not born anywhere near December 25th or any time in January but more likely at the time of the Biblical Feast of Succot (Tabernacles). Certainly the Roman authorities would not have demanded that families travel to far away parts of the country in December or January when it is very cold and often accompanied by snow.

WHAT MUSLIMS BELIEVE ABOUT JESUS

Muslims say they believe in Jesus. Yes they do. They believe he was the last in a line of great prophets and was sent to usher in the final and most important prophet, Mohammed, who would bring the whole world to worship the moon god.

The town of Bethlehem may have been spoiled; God’s Holy Temple may have been destroyed and paved over as a foundation for the Mosque of Omar, but the Spirit and the Dream live on in the hearts of those who love and stand for the God of the Bible and His Messiah.

May the Spirit of Bethlehem live on in our hearts. Not only on December 25th, but all year long.

David Rushton was born in London where his parents were staunch conservatives. He immigrated to the United States in the sixties and formed a patriotic organization advocating conservative principles which include rallies and marches. He had his own radio talk show for many years and was also a guest on many radio and Television talk shows.

In the last few years David wrote several books about the dangers of radical Islam and spoke on this subject in some of the largest Conservative Churches in the United States.

He now resides with his wife Marcia in Costa Rica.

-----------------------------

Jewish Canadians- Canada Encyclopedia

Unlike most immigrants to Canada, Jews did not come from a place where they were the majority cultural group. Jews were internationally dispersed at the time of the ancient Roman Empire and after unsuccessful revolts against it lost their sovereignty in their ancient homeland.

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Unlike most immigrants to Canada, Jews did not come from a place where they were the majority cultural group. Jews were internationally dispersed at the time of the ancient Roman Empire and after unsuccessful revolts against it lost their sovereignty in their ancient homeland. Subsequently Jews lived, sometimes for many centuries, as minorities in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

Early Settlement

Jews in western Europe participated in the opening up of the Americas to European settlement, but were legally barred from residence in New France, where immigration was restricted to Catholics. Jews settled in the British colonies to the south and after the incorporation of New France into the British Empire began also to settle in Lower Canada. By 1768, the number of Jews in Montréal had grown to the point where they decided to establish Canada's first synagogue, Shearith Israel. By the late 18th century Jews had also settled in Québec City and other parts of Lower Canada. The Hart family were prominent in the area of Trois-Rivières; Ezekiel Hart was elected to the legislature of Lower Canada in 1807 but was denied his seat on the basis of his religion. Jews participated in the settlement of Upper Canada, establishing the first synagogue in Toronto (later Holy Blossom Temple) in 1856.

The 1871 census, the first after Confederation, counted 1115 Jews in Canada - 409 in Montréal, 157 in Toronto, 131 in Hamilton and smaller numbers in Québec City, Saint John, London, Kingston and Brantford. A community of over a hundred was also settled in British Columbia when it joined Confederation. British Columbia's first delegation to the House of Commons included Henry Nathan, the first Jewish Canadian MP.

Mass Migration

At the end of the 19th century, 80% of the world's 10 million Jews lived in the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German empires. The possibility of better conditions elsewhere, prejudice, legal discrimination, and violence encouraged emigration. Pogroms - violent mob attacks on Jewish neighbourhoods involving rape, injury, murder, looting and destruction - began in the Russian Empire in 1881. Jews fled eastern Europe to many places, including Canada, in the period from the 1880s to the beginning of WWI. Jews also moved north from the United States, part of the cross-border migration common in much of Canadian history.

By the time the outbreak of WWI curbed immigration, there were over 100 000 Jewish Canadians. Montréal and Toronto together accounted for about three-quarters of the Canadian Jewish population, but Jews could be found in every major city and in dozens of smaller places. Jews worked as retailers and wholesalers, many beginning as pedlars and working their way up to established businesses. Jews also provided much of the labour for the urban sweatshops of the new ready-to-wear clothing industry. Jewish merchants spread out to small towns, adding synagogues to the places of worship found in rural Canada. Eleven Jewish farm colonies were founded in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, assisted by the Jewish Colonization Society.

Organization and Identity

During their long period of international dispersion, Jews had developed an identity based on being a national minority with a distinctive religion and communal structure. When Jews settled in Canada, they founded organizations which expressed each of these dimensions of their identity.

In accordance with their religious traditions of thousands of years (see Judaism) places for worship were usually set up soon after the arrival in a new place of only a handful of families. Often the need to establish a Jewish cemetery was the source of the first Jewish organization. Synagogues and schools followed shortly after.

Turn of the century Jewish immigrants came almost entirely from the multinational empires of eastern Europe. Nationalist movements (see Nationalism) within these empires were organizing in pursuit of greater autonomy and eventual national independence. Modern nationalism encouraged the revival of Jewish national identity, which took two forms. Each had mass support in eastern Europe. The first was the movement for the reconstruction of modern Jewish life around guaranteed minority rights within modern nation-states, with separate social institutions controlled by the Jewish minority, and the recognition that the primary language of modern Jewish cultural life would be the everyday language of eastern European Jews - Yiddish. The second form of modern Jewish nationalism, Zionism, aimed at the re-establishment of an independent national state in the ancient Jewish homeland.

Jewish immigrants to Canada from eastern Europe were sympathetic to both of these movements. The Montreal Jewish Public Library - one of the major institutions of that community - Yiddish theatres, and Yiddish literary creativity had their social base in the attachment to Yiddish culture. The generation of Jews who were being transformed into urban factory workers were particularly strong supporters of secular Yiddish culture. The language of their unions and fraternal organizations was Yiddish; through it they shared and interpreted their experiences in the new land.

The mounting enthusiasm for Zionism in eastern Europe was paralleled in Canada. The Federation of Canadian Zionist Societies, founded in 1899 - two years after the first World Zionist Congress - became the first nation-wide Canadian Jewish organization. Zionism attracted wide support, including many affluent Jews, who followed the example of Clarence de Sola, the leader of the Federation of Canadian Zionist Societies, by joining the movement. The Zionist movement was an important setting where women's talents were encouraged; women's Zionist organizations took on distinct projects and produced their own cadre of leaders. By the first decades of the 20th century the Canadian Zionist movement, like Zionism world-wide, also contained organizations with competing philosophies. Mizrachi blended Zionism with religious Orthodoxy. Poalei Zion ("the Workers of Zion") had a strong following among the Jewish working class.

Jewish immigrants also brought a tradition of establishing a communal body, called a "kehillah," to look after their social welfare needs. The first Jewish social welfare body in Canada was the Young Men's Hebrew Benevolent Society, founded in Montréal in 1863 to assist Jewish immigrants (in recognition of financial support, the name was changed to the Baron de Hirsch Institute in 1900). Montréal and Toronto, with large populations, developed a wide range of communal organizations - hospitals, social work agencies, homes for the aged, libraries and more. There was a gradual movement towards the formation of organizations to co-ordinate fundraising in local communities. Immigrant Jews also founded landsmenschaften - literally, organizations of people from the same place. Landsmenschaften would sometimes sponsor synagogues, but they were primarily organizations in which immigrants helped each other and which could reply, as a group, to appeals for help from those left behind.

The movement to organize the Canadian Jewish Congress through countrywide elections spoke on behalf of the common interests of this diverse group of Jews, who thought of themselves in religious, cultural and communal terms. The Canadian Jewish Congress was organized in 1919 while the Treaty of Versailles ending WWI was being drafted. The treatment of national minorities under the new postwar arrangements was of great interest to Canadian Jews; very many had relatives who were to become citizens in the newly independent country of Poland. The Congress was also part of the groundswell of support for Zionism, which had been endorsed by the British government during WWI and was further endorsed by the new League of Nations. In anticipation of the renewal of Jewish immigration after the end of the war, the Congress established the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society, which continues as a national agency of Canadian Jewry.

The Great Depression and WWII

In 1930 the Canadian government responded to the unemployment caused by the beginning of the Depression by imposing severe restrictions on immigration. Although the cabinet could, and did, approve certain kinds of immigrants, permission for Jews to enter was almost never given. Religious intolerance was still a common feature of Canadian society. Anti-Semitism, which compounded religious intolerance with the new "science" of racism, was found among cultural and political leaders (see Prejudice and Discrimination).

In the face of strong opposition within the Cabinet and the upper levels of the civil service to admitting Jews, the Canadian Jewish Congress was reorganized under the leadership of Samuel Bronfman to work for a safe haven in Canada for some of the increasingly desperate Jews of Europe. Despite mass protests and continuous lobbying by political and communal leaders throughout the Depression and war years, pleas on behalf of the trapped Jews of Europe went unheeded. Canada took in proportionately fewer Jews than any western country. At the same time, 17 000 Jewish Canadians responded to the call to arms in WWII and served in the armed forces.

The hard economic times of the Depression led to a greater awareness of the need to co-ordinate the fundraising for communal organizations. The level of co-ordination increased in Toronto with the organization of the United Jewish Welfare Fund in 1937 and in Montréal with the formation of the Combined Jewish Appeal Campaign in 1941.

The Post-WWII Period

With a growing economy in need of workers, Canada opened its doors to immigrants soon after the end of WWII. About 40 000 survivors of the Holocaust came in the late 1940s, seeking a peaceful country, a place where they might have a chance at rebuilding their lives, or simply coming because they had relatives here. In the 1950s, Jews fleeing hostility in newly independent countries in North Africa immigrated to Canada, settling mostly in Montréal, where their French language was an asset.

During the postwar period, Jews became more fully integrated into Canadian life. Human rights legislation, which began to be introduced in Canada in the late 1940s, removed discriminatory practices which had been previously common. The introduction in 1971 of the federal policy of multiculturalism (latter supplemented with provincial policies and the incorporation of multiculturalism into the Canadian Constitution) highlighted the legitimacy of cultural pluralism within the Canadian mosaic.

Social patterns were also changing as 2nd- and 3rd-generation Jews born in Canada became a larger part of the community. Children of immigrant businessmen and labourers persevered through university, joining the professional ranks of doctors, dentists, accountants, lawyers and professors. The growth of Canadian cities in the postwar period was accompanied by the movement of Jews to new suburbs. Rather than dispersing, the 2nd and 3rd generation of Canadian Jews moved as a group. Synagogues, schools, community centres and other institutions relocated to these new neighbourhoods.

There was continuing internal Jewish migration in the postwar period. The Jewish populations of Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver increased during periods of economic growth. In contrast, the Jewish population of small towns and rural areas almost disappeared, with the exception of those small towns within commuting distance of large cities.

The Contemporary Community

Canada is now home to the 5th-largest Jewish community in the world - following the US, Israel, the former USSR and France. Based on 1991 census data the Canadian office of the Council of Jewish Federations estimated the Canadian Jewish population at approximately 356 000. This figure includes those who responded "Jewish" to the census question on religion plus those who responded "no religion" but indicated Jewish ethnic origin on the census. In the 2006 census, 351 705 people reported being Jewish. The largest number - about 141 700 - were in Toronto. Despite much talk of a Jewish "exodus," the Jewish population of Montréal had dropped only slightly, to about 68 500.

The most recent data available indicate that significant Jewish immigration continues. Data from the 1991 census indicated that about 30 000 Jews immigrated into Canada from 1981 to 1991. These immigrants account for over 8% of the Canadian Jewish population, which roughly corresponds to the percentage of 1981-1991 immigrants in the Canadian population as a whole. Jewish immigrants from 1981 to 1991 came mainly from the former USSR, Israel, South Africa and the United States. A continuing small stream of converts to Judaism also adds to the community. These sources of population increase may be offset by the disaffiliation of some of the growing number of Canadians who are of partial Jewish descent.

The generation of survivors of the Holocaust is now elderly, but the challenge of living with the history of being the victims of a campaign of mass extermination has not disappeared. The effort to bring to justice war criminals who had sought refuge in Canada became a major issue in the 1980s and continues. Remembrance of the Holocaust and the struggle with its implications are not only personal issues for children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, but also communal issues in Canadian Jewish life. Museums, lectures and other activities are resources for the younger generation of Jews and for other Canadians who are troubled about the threat of another genocide.

The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 marked the success of the Zionist movement and initiated a period of gradually closer ties between Israelis and Canadian Jews. Jewish federations have cultivated close relations with Israel, as have the organizations of each of the branches of Judaism. The Canada-Israel Committee was created to establish an organization that would speak about Israel on behalf of the Jews in Canada. Specialized organizations connect Canadian Jews with particular parts of Israeli society - universities, hospitals, social welfare projects. Visits to Israel have become much more frequent, often in the form of tours sponsored by organizations. Most adult Canadian Jews have visited Israel; many have visited more than once. The number of Canadian Jews who can speak in Hebrew is increasing.

Jewish federations have moved beyond meeting social welfare needs, developing co-operative relations with other community groups, and defending Jews against discrimination and anti-semitism into activities directly related to Jewish identity and continuity. In Montréal, a new inclusive body, the Allied Jewish Community Services, was established in 1965. The Toronto branch of the Canadian Jewish Congress merged into the United Jewish Welfare Fund in 1976; the new organization is now named the Jewish Federation of Greater Toronto. In the recent period of governmental cutbacks in social services, individuals and organizations have looked more for assistance to the social welfare services supported by Jewish federations. The 12 Jewish communities affiliated with the Canadian office of the Council of Jewish Federations share responsibility for the Canadian Jewish Congress, student services at Canadian universities, a Jewish continuity commission, the Canada-Israel Committee, the Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, a detailed analysis of census data on Jews and other activities. The Canadian office is recognized as a regional organization within the North American umbrella organization, the Council of Jewish Federations.

Jews have made significant contributions to Canadian culture (see for literature Jewish Writing, Leonard Cohen, A.M. Klein, Henry Kreisel, Irving Layton, Eli Mandel, Mordecai Richler, Adele Wiseman, Miriam Waddington, Joseph Rosenblatt, Naim Kattan, Stuart Rosenberg, W. Gunther Plaut; for music: Louis Applebaum, Milton Barnes, Alexander Brott, Harry Freedman, Srul Glick, Oskar Morawetz, John Weinzweig; in the performance arts: Lloyd Bochner, Pauline Donalda, Lorne Greene, John Hirsch, Wayne and Shuster; for journalism: Barbara Frum, Peter C. Newman), and have reached responsible positions in public affairs (see David Barrett, David Croll, Herb Gray, Bora Laskin, David Lewis, Stephen Lewis) and in economic life (see Bronfman Family, Reichmann Family, Sam Steinberg). The present generation of Canadian Jews includes leading writers, film-makers, musicians, journalists, businessmen, politicians, civil servants and scholars.

Current theories of ethnic identity describe ethnic groups as diasporas as well as assimilating minorities. Diasporas are culturally distinct groups scattered in distant countries who stay in touch with their homelands and with each other. This perspective is helpful in understanding Canadian ethnic diversity in general and Canadian Jews in particular. Jews were historical pioneers in the development of a long continuing Diaspora way of life. When modern societies developed in the direction of making ethnic or religious differences issues of private preference, many Jews chose to make their lives with friends and spouses outside of their community of origin. With the decreasing significance of national boundaries, cultural differences and international connections have again become more important. As well, some Jews, like other people at the end of the 20th century, have turned to what their tradition says about values in reaction to the cultural relativism of modern society. Like the members of other Canadian diasporas, Jews are faced with the challenge of developing strategies to live in a Canada which is moving towards ever more intimate involvement with a culturally plural, uncertain and interconnected world.

• ethnic group
• settlement
• Jewish Canadians
• Jews
• ethnicity
• Canada
• Judaism
• immigrants
• immigration

Suggested Reading

• Irving M. Abella, A Coat of Many Colours: Two Centuries of Jewish Life in Canada (1990); Irving M. Abella and Harold Troper, None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948 (3rd ed 1991); Howard Adelman and John Simpson, eds, Multiculturalism, Jews and Identities in Canada (1995); Ira Robinson, Pierre Anctil and Mervin Butovsky, eds., An Everyday Miracle, Yiddish Culture in Montreal (1991); Gerald Tulchinsky, Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community (1992).

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/jewish-canadians/

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PHOTO/PHOTO

David Ben-Gurion (born David Green), Israel’s first prime minister, trained with hundred of other members of the Jewish Legion at Fort Edward in the Annapolis Valley in preparation for the British Army’s plan to liberate Israel from Turkish rule during the First World War. At right, the 39th Battalion of the Jewish Legion at Fort Edward in Windsor. (ARMY MUSEUM, HALIFAX CITADEL)

Nova Scotia and the Jews of the First World War

KELLY SHIERS Staff Reporter

It’s a world away and more than a lifetime ago.

The wooden structure still overlooks the Avon River at Windsor, but nothing suggests the connection between Fort Edward and the modern-day State of Israel.

Nor is there any sign of a link between the small rural community at the edge of Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley and the man known as the father of that Jewish state.

But here, almost a century ago, a Zionist leader arrived with hundreds of other Jewish men to train for the newly formed Jewish

Legion, a fighting force of the British Army’s Royal Fusiliers created to liberate Palestine from Turkish rule during the First World War.

That man was David Ben-Gurion (born David Green), who would lead the struggle for an independent Jewish state and, in 1948, become Israel’s first prime minister. He would stay on in that role until 1953 and become prime minister again from 1961 to 1963.

“In Windsor, one of the great dreams of my life — to serve as a soldier in a Jewish Unit to fight for the liberation of the Land of Israel (as we always called Palestine) — became a reality,” Ben-Gurion wrote in a letter to Windsor’s mayor three years after he left the prime minister’s job.

“I will never forget Windsor where I received my first training as a soldier and where I became a corporal.”

It’s a chapter of world history lost to many.

“I doubt very much most Nova Scotians know about the Jewish Legion or the connection to Nova Scotia,” said Ken Hynes, curator of the Army Museum at the Halifax Citadel.

“It’s quite unique … to have someone (like) that to have been trained here in Nova Scotia, remember Nova Scotia and to have taken a very prominent place in world history.”

At the Army Museum, the story of Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Legion connection to Nova Scotia is prominently displayed in the First World War Centennial Exhibition, The Road to Vimy and Beyond.

“We wanted to tell the stories of some soldiers that have been forgotten. The story of the Jewish Legion is one that hasn’t received much attention, so we want to focus on that as much as we want to focus on the aboriginal soldiers’ story and the No. 2 Construction Battalion (mainly African-Canadians),” Hynes said.

An all-Jewish battalion of the British Army had long been talked about. But it wasn’t until 1917 that four Jewish battalions — the 38th, 39th, 40th and 42nd — became part of the Royal Fusiliers. Together, they were known as the Jewish Legion.

The 39th Battalion volunteers, mostly Americans, were sent to Fort Edward, starting in February 1918. The troops slept in tents on the hill in the summer and in makeshift barracks in winter.

The fort, initially used to train Canadian troops, became the training grounds for non-Canadians volunteering for the British Army after the Halifax Explosion damaged the Halifax Armouries.

From there, the troops would move on to England for more training before heading elsewhere in Europe or to the Middle East.

According to information provided by the Army Museum, Ben-Gurion arrived at Fort Edward in June 1918.

“I remember as a kid, somebody told me Ben-Gurion was here in Nova Scotia during World War 1, but I don’t think very many people knew that,” recalled Jon Goldberg, executive director of the Atlantic Jewish Council, a co-sponsor of the museum’s exhibit. “The guy who told me — I don’t even think he knew why he was here.”

But it’s important information that shouldn’t be lost to time, Goldberg said.

“It’s Canadian history. A story like this that happened during the war shows in the long term, over 100 years, there has been directly or indirectly a tie between Israel and Canada.”

http://thechronicleherald.ca/thegreatwar/1236057-nova-scotia-and-the-jews-of-the-first-world-war#.VKtkUXsYEsI

FIRST JEWISH IMMIGRATION TO CANADA

The first Jews immigrated to Canada in the 1750's. They too had to compromise their Jewish identity in order to gain entrance into the New World. Canada was under rule of the French colonizers. So Jews, and in fact all non-Catholics, were prohibited from settling. Some Jews side-stepped these restrictions by converting to Catholicism(4).
The Gradis family of New France was among the most notable of early Jewish settlers. Historians believe that this Jewish family played a pivotal role in sustaining the colony before it was conquered by the British. The Gradis family had a fleet of ships that went back and forth to France, providing food, supplies and munitions that kept the settlers armed and fed during their fight to defend the colony(5).
But Jewish political allegiances were as varied as anyone else's. While the Gradis family supported the French, a Jewish man by the name of Alexander Shomberg was a commander in the invading British navy. Of course, Schomberg's Jewishness would have been kept secret - only Christians were allowed to serve in the British navy. Schomberg's frigate, Diana, took part in the attack on Quebec that led the battle on the Plains of Abraham, where the French colony fell to British control(6).
The first significant wave of Jewish immigrants to make Canada their home arrived with General Jeffery Amherst in 1760. Most of these Jewish settlers emigrated from the United States and settled in urban centres, the majority in Montreal. The 1831 census recorded 197 Jewish residents in Upper and Lower Canada. By 1851 the number had increased to 451. Most were middle class and well educated; they were involved in trade and contributed to the economic growth of the country(7).
From 1850 to 1900 Jewish immigrants came mostly from Europe(8). During this period approximately 15,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Canada. The Shumiatcher family, when they came to Canada in 1909, were part of a wave of 120,000 Jews that came from Eastern Europe between 1900 and 1920. Those who came between 1920 and 1940 numbered 60,000 and from WWII to the 1980's, 135,000. The origin of Jewish immigrants at this time was predominantly the United States, North Africa and the Middle East(9).
According to 1991 Census, the Canadian Jewish population today is estimated at 356,000. The largest Jewish populations exist in Toronto, with 162,000, Montreal with 98,000, Vancouver, with 25,000. Jewish immigration to Canada continues: 30,000 Jews entered Canada from 1981 to 1991(10).

ENDNOTES:

4,5,6 - A Coat of Many Colours, Two Centuries of Jewish Life in Canada, by Irving Abella(Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys Limited, 1990).

7,8 - The Canadian Encyclopedia, James H. Marsh, ed.(Edmonton: Hertig Publishers, 1988)

9,10 - The 1998 Canadian & World Encyclopedia(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998).

http://www.whitepinepictures.com/seeds/i/1/history2.html

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1.     [PDF] 

Jewish immigration to Canada – A government's position Activity 4

www.mhmc.ca/media_library/files/50ca081151b8b.pdf - Cached - Similar

1930s when it represented about 1.5% of the total population of Canada. .... Hitler
has done is to clean out the Jews, that the Jews were possessing Germany ...

2.    Jewish Refugees - White Pine Pictures

whitepinepictures.com/seeds/iii/36/sidebar.html - Cached

In the 1930's, Canada closed its doors to all immigrants. ... in absorbing farmers,
thereby slamming the door on the vast majority of Austrian and German Jews.

3.    Canada turned away Jewish refugees | The Chronicle Herald

thechronicleherald.ca/.../1174272-canada-turned-away-jewish-refugees - Cached - Similar

15 Dec 2013 ... It was 1939 and 907 Jewish refugees aboard the German ... servants in Ottawa
and the widespread anti-Semitism in Canada during the 1930s.

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NEVER AGAIN...

The Night of Broken Glass

After the successful conclusion of the Munich Agreement, many international leaders harbored the hope that Hitler was a statesman with whom they could continue to negotiate. But on the night of November 9, 1938, an event occurred which revealed the true nature of Hitler's regime to the world and also marked the beginning of deadly radicalization of Nazi policy concerning the Jews.

For some months now, moderate anti-Semites within the Nazi hierarchy had been losing ground to those favoring extreme measures such as the immediate removal of Jews from Germany. The subsequent removal of the first big group of Jews in late October 1938 sparked a chain of events resulting in the Night of Broken Glass, a massive, coordinated attack on Jews throughout Greater Germany.

On October 27th, about 17,000 Jews of Polish origin, including over 2,000 children, were abruptly expelled from Germany on orders of Reinhard Heydrich, second-in-command of the SS. The Grynszpan family from the city of Hanover were among the Jews forcibly transported in railroad cars then dumped at the Polish border as unwanted persons. Polish border authorities at first denied them permission to enter. The Jews thus ended up in a kind of no-man's-land between the German and Polish borders.

The Grynszpan family had not taken along their 17-year-old son Herschel. He had gone to Paris for safekeeping at the age of 15 to stay with his uncle who worked there as a tailor. Young Herschel was a sensitive, somewhat sickly youth who stood just over five feet tall and weighed about 100 pounds. He was devoutly Orthodox, attended temple regularly, and strictly observed the various rules of his faith.

Proud of his Jewish heritage, Herschel had a keen interest in the plight of his family and the half-million Jews still living in Greater Germany. During his years in Paris he regularly read the Yiddish newspapers his uncle brought home which chronicled the downward spiral of "his people" under Nazi control in Germany, Austria and the newly acquired Sudetenland. The papers also reported the mass expulsion of the Polish Jews from Germany.

Just before that expulsion, Herschel suffered a major setback of his own. His request for permanent residency in France was rejected by local French officials, followed by a decree of expulsion to take effect on August 15, 1938. Herschel ignored the expulsion decree and remained in Paris illegally for the time being until he could figure out where to go.

Jews of Polish origin are abruptly expelled from Germany in late October 1938 - allowed to take a suitcase and little else - then taken by train and dumped at the Polish border with nowhere to go. Below: Portrait of Herschel Grynszpan in jail after his arrest.

Below: A crowd watches as a temple is allowed to burn while only the surrounding structures are hosed down by German firefighters. 

Below: A smashed plate-glass window and looted contents of a Jewish-owned shop in Berlin. 

Below: Jewish men at Baden-Baden in Germany are marched off under heavy guard to a concentration camp - marking the advent of Nazi mass roundups of Jews. 

He had become, like his family, a man without a country, unwanted anywhere because of his Jewish ancestry. Herschel sank into deep depression at this turn of events and even considered suicide. Making matters worse, he then received a letter from his family describing the ordeal of their expulsion from Germany.

His 22-year-old sister, Esther, wrote: "You undoubtedly heard of our great misfortune. I will describe to you what happened...On Thursday evening at 9 o'clock a Sipo [Nazi security policeman] came to us and informed us that we had to go to police headquarters and bring along our passports...We were not told what it was all about, but we saw that everything was finished for us. Each of us had an extradition order pressed into his hand, and one had to leave Germany before the 29th. They didn't permit us to return home anymore. I asked to be allowed to go home to get at least a few things. I went, accompanied by a Sipo, and packed the necessary clothes in a suitcase. And that is all I saved. We don't have a penny..."

His father had spent the past 28 years building up a modest tailoring business in Hanover.

Driven half-mad with sorrow and anger over all that was happening, Herschel decided to commit a radical act of violence to draw the world's attention to the plight of the Jews.

On Monday morning, November 7, he walked into a Paris gun shop and purchased a 6.35-caliber revolver along with a box of 25 bullets. When the shop owner asked why he wanted the gun, Herschel answered that he sometimes carried large amounts of money for his father and needed the protection.

After buying the gun, Herschel walked to a nearby café, entered the restroom there and loaded it, then put the gun in his left coat pocket. He took the Paris subway to the German embassy, arriving at 9:35 a.m. He entered the building and asked the first person he encountered, the wife of the concierge, if he could see an embassy official concerning some important papers he wanted to submit. He was pointed toward a flight of stairs and told to see a Herr Nagorka, the clerk-receptionist, up there.

Upstairs, Herschel told Nagorka he had an important document he wanted to hand-deliver to an embassy official. Nagorka offered to deliver the document for him, but Herschel insisted he had to deliver it himself because of its importance. This is how he wound up in the office of 29-year-old Secretary of Legation, Ernst vom Rath, who was the most junior embassy official on duty that morning.

Vom Rath seated Herschel, took his own seat nearby, then asked to see the document. Herschel responded to his request by shouting: "You're a filthy Kraut and in the name of the twelve-thousand persecuted Jews, here is the document!"

Herschel reached into his coat pocket, took out the gun, and blasted away at vom Rath, shooting five shots wildly, striking vom Rath twice as he stood up. The first bullet lodged in vom Rath's left shoulder and did little damage. The second bullet struck him in the lower left side, causing severe internal damage.

Herschel dropped the empty gun to the floor. The wounded vom Rath gave Herschel a quick smack with his fist, then dashed toward the door, clutching his abdomen and calling out for help. Herschel never left the office but just waited to be arrested. He was taken into custody by Nagorka and another embassy worker. At Herschel's request he was then handed over to the French police.

Vom Rath was rushed to the hospital where he underwent emergency surgery to remove his ruptured spleen, and to repair damage to his stomach and pancreas. Despite the surgery and massive blood transfusions, vom Rath suffered from a very high fever and gradually weakened until he expired at 4:25 p.m., Wednesday, November 9th.

While this was occurring, Adolf Hitler and most of the highest ranking Nazis were in Munich for the annual re-enactment of the Beer Hall Putsch. Every year on November 9, veterans of the 1923 Putsch gathered to retrace the same steps they had taken in their failed attempt to overthrow Germany's democratic government. The day was also a national holiday known as the Day of the Movement with Germans enjoying a day off from work and kids staying home from school.

Upon first hearing of the shooting incident, Hitler had sent his own personal physician to Paris to aid vom Rath. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, meanwhile, instantly recognized the shooting as a golden opportunity. Goebbels was by now the most powerful anti-Semite in the Nazi hierarchy, second only to Hitler. The little man with the club foot, who had been teased about his own so-called Jewish looks as a youth, harbored a life-long, deep-seated hatred for Jews. For five years now, Goebbels' propaganda machine had been spewing out a never-ending stream of messages portraying Jews as the mortal enemy of the German people. For Goebbels, the shooting in Paris was a chance to incite the German people to "rise in bloody vengeance against the Jews."

Goebbels, of course, wouldn't do anything without his Führer's approval. In the early evening hours of November 9, a messenger arrived bearing news of vom Rath's death just as Hitler and his old cronies were about to sit down to a festive dinner at Old City Hall in Munich, following a long day of self-congratulations, pomp and Nazi pageantry. Upon being told of vom Rath's demise, an angry looking Hitler took Goebbels aside and conferred privately for several minutes, finally telling Goebbels the SA storm troopers should have a "fling" at the expense of the Jews.

After dinner, Hitler left the hall without making a speech, leaving Goebbels to deliver the actual marching orders to the assembled Nazi leadership. Goebbels first announced vom Rath's death, then launched into an anti-Semitic diatribe, prompting the SA and Nazi Party leaders to incite a popular uprising against Jews throughout Greater Germany without making it look like the Nazi Party was the actual instigator.

When Goebbels finished his remarks, most of the assembled leaders headed for the nearest telephone to call their local SA and Party offices to deliver the appropriate instructions. However, the nuance of Goebbels message somehow got lost amid all of the telephone conversations. As a result, uniformed Brownshirts and Party activists carrying swastika banners took to the streets instead of nondescript civilians.

In fact, the popular uprising Hitler and Goebbels hoped to ignite never materialized. Most civilians either pulled down their window shades and stayed inside or stood silently on the sidewalk along with the regular German police and watched as storm troopers, SS men and Hitler Youth, accompanied by miscellaneous street punks, broke into Jewish homes, beat up and murdered Jewish men and terrorized Jewish women and children.

All over Germany and Austria that evening, Jewish shops and department stores had their windows smashed and contents wrecked. Synagogues were especially targeted for vandalism, including desecration of sacred Torah scrolls which were unraveled and tossed into a pile then burned.

Hundreds of synagogues went up in flames while fire fighters stood by watching or simply hosed down surrounding buildings to prevent the fire from spreading. Nearly all Jewish cemeteries near the synagogues were also desecrated.

About 25,000 Jewish men were hauled off to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps where they were brutalized by SS guards and in some cases randomly chosen to be beaten to death. In all, it is estimated that up to 2,500 Jews perished from beatings on the street, incarceration in the camps, and from the numerous suicides that occurred, including entire families.

The many thousands of broken plate-glass windows resulted in the term Kristallnacht or Night of Broken Glass to describe the events of November 9th lasting into the early morning hours of the 10th. Although the Nazis didn't get the popular uprising they had hoped for, they did notice that the overall population of some 60 million Germans showed remarkable indifference toward this first mass persecution of the Jews. Those who were shocked or outraged knew enough to keep their thoughts to themselves or risk being sent to a concentration camp.

Outside of Germany, however, the shock and outrage were not silenced. Radio commentators and newspaper writers in the United States declared that Germany had descended to a level of barbarism unseen since the pogroms of the Middle Ages.

The storm of negative worldwide publicity served to isolate Hitler's Germany from the civilized nations of the West and weakened any pro-Nazi sentiments in those countries. Before Kristallnacht, small pro-Hitler movements existed in both Britain and the U.S. After Kristallnacht, sympathy for the Hitler regime gradually evaporated. The United States also permanently recalled its ambassador from Germany.

However, radical anti-Semites within the Nazi hierarchy didn't care what the world thought. A few days after Kristallnacht, on November 12th, a dozen top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, and Hermann Göring, gathered to discuss what happened and to decide on further measures.

Heydrich reported 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed, 267 synagogues burned (with 177 totally destroyed) and 91 Jews murdered during Kristallnacht. Heydrich then requested new decrees forbidding Jews from having any social contact with Germans by excluding them from public transportation, schools, and hospitals, essentially forcing them into ghettos or out of the country. Goebbels said the Jews would be made to clean out the debris from burned-out synagogues which would then be demolished and turned into parking lots.

At this meeting there was a general agreement to eliminate Jews entirely from economic life in the Reich by transferring all Jewish property and enterprises to non-Jews, with minor compensation to be given to the Jews in the form of German bonds.

Regarding the economic damage from Kristallnacht and the resulting massive insurance claims, Göring declared the Jews themselves should be billed for the damage and that any insurance money payable to them should be confiscated by the Government.

"I shall close the meeting with these words," said Göring, "German Jewry shall, as punishment for their abominable crimes, et cetera, have to make a contribution for one billion marks. That will work. The swine won't commit another murder. Incidentally, I would like to say that I would not like to be a Jew in Germany."

As for Herschel Grynszpan, he was interrogated by the French police and declared: "It was not with hatred or for vengeance against any particular person that I acted, but because of love for my parents and for my people who were unjustly subjected to outrageous treatment. Nevertheless, this act was distasteful to me and I deeply regret it. However, I had no other means of demonstrating my feelings...It is not, after all, a crime to be Jewish. I am not a dog. I have the right to live. My people have a right to exist on this earth. And yet everywhere they are hunted down like animals."

Herschel eventually wound up in the clutches of the Gestapo and spent time in various Nazi prisons and concentration camps, and vanished without a trace.

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SWITZERLAND'S HATE OF JEWS...

The Red Cross should stick to helping people in need, not waste resources in bashing Israel

THE ICRC (SWISS... INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS).... AND THEIR WAR AGAINST ISRAEL...

For nearly four decades many in the international community have insisted that Jews are forbidden to live in Judea, Samaria and Gaza (Yesha), 'eastern Jerusalem,' and the Golan - areas conquered by Israel in 1967. Leading this fight was and is a private Swiss organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The ICRC was the first international organization to charge that "the presence of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories is contrary to the Geneva Convention," and therefore "unlawful."

"Any measure designed to expand or consolidate settlements is also illegal. Confiscation of land to build or expand settlements is similarly prohibited." (ICRC, 2009)

And the world listens, because the ICRC isn't just another NGO; it is the official recognized authority on the Fourth Geneva Convention (GC IV). Its decisions, therefore, were and are crucial in determining international law and vilifying Israel. Every judicial condemnation of Israel cites the GC and follows ICRC's interpretation.

This explains why the international community and courts have accepted ICRC's decisions that "Israeli (Jewish) settlements violate international law" without question.

Based on The Hague Convention, GC IV was drawn up after WWII to protect innocent civilians and restrict brutal occupations. Unilaterally, the ICRC turned it into a weapon to delegitimize and demonize Israel. Meeting secretly in the early 1970's in Geneva, the ICRC determined that Israel was in violation of the GC IV. That's been "the law" ever since.

And there's no appeal, because all decisions and protocols of the ICRC are closed, even the identities of the people involved are secret. Without transparency or due process, ICRC rulings became "international law." Their condemnations of Israel provide the sole basis for accusing Israel of "illegal occupation" of all territory conquered in 1967.

It's a legal fraud.

Article 49 of GC IV says: "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."

According to the ICRC, this forbids Jews from living in Judea, Samaria, Golan and eastern Jerusalem - areas conquered by Israel in 1967 - even though they moved there voluntarily, and prohibits any form of government assistance to them, including roads, utilities, schools and clinics.

The ICRC's position contradicts all written agreements which confirm the right of Jews to live in their ancestral homeland - League of Nations and British Mandate - including the Oslo Accords.

Article 49 obviously refers to the territory of another country, or sovereign power; Judea, Samaria and Gaza don't fit this definition. These areas were illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt between 1948 and 1967; the ICRC, of course, differs, but has never satisfactorily answered the question to which State this territory belongs.

Holding these territories in limbo for a future Palestinian state, which may never come to fruition, whose borders are undefined and whose intentions are openly hostile is absurd. Such ICRC antagonism to Israel, however, is pervasive.

During WW II the ICRC visited concentration camps and gave the Nazis a pass. After the war, they provided false passports to escaping Nazi war criminals.

Their website demonstrates their humanitarian efforts around the world, but when it comes to the Middle East, their story is one-sided. During two decades of constant terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, the ICRC said nothing. They have written several stories about the suffering of "Palestinians" in Gaza and Lebanon as a result of Israeli actions, without mentioning terrorist attacks that prompted a response.

The ICRC condemned IDF actions to stop terrorism in Jenin, Lebanon and Gaza as "massacres." They have consistently condemned Israel for 'violations of Palestinian civil and human rights,' and accused Israel of "war crimes." Sometimes, when these lies were exposed, the ICRC has recanted - but not often and never with full disclosure.

Because the ICRC lacks transparency, there's no way to find out how and why they made their decisions, or who made them. If they have nothing to hide, why the secrecy?

The Red Cross should stick to helping people in need, not waste resources in bashing Israel.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/14474

 http://www.icrc.org/

and heeeeeeeeeeeeeereeeeeeeeeeee's their website:

... OMG!!!!!

By the by... hasn't Switzerland been taken to task for their actions against the Jews... the war where over 6 MILLION JEWS WERE MURDERED... along with Catholics, Gypsies and persons because of race, colour, creed and sexual orientation.... that war? No more hiding.... let's " get r done!"

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Holocaust survivors: ‘Shameful’ that Pier 21 not displaying memorial to victims of ‘voyage of the damned’

Architech Daniel Libeskind shows former immigration minister Jason Kenney, right, his sculpture called the Wheel of Conscience, at Pier 21 in Halifax on Thursday, Jan. 20, 2011. The monument commemorates Canada's decision to turn away a steamship carrying Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939.Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

Stephen Maher

Published: November 13, 2014, 5:31 pm

A memorial to the Jewish refugees turned away from Halifax in 1939 should be on display at Pier 21, and not in storage, says the group that represents Canadian Holocaust survivors.
The Wheel of Conscience, a memorial to the victims of MS St. Louis, was installed at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in 2011 to commemorate the 254 passengers who were murdered by the Nazis after Canada turned them away.
Since this summer, when repairs were completed in Toronto, the memorial has been in storage, and the museum says it may eventually be placed elsewhere.
Sidney Zoltak, 83, the co-president of the Canadian Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Descendants, says the memorial should be be brought out of storage.

A file image showing the “Wheel of Conscience” monument by Daniel Libeskind Postmedia Wire/Link: http://www.daniel-libeskind.com/media/singleview/period/1295296569///article/353/libeskinds-1

“In my opinion it’s the wrong thing and it would be a shameful thing,” he said Thursday. “I don’t think, whether the museum likes it or not, the Canadian government shouldn’t allow them to sort of block the monument. We know what happened when the passengers of the St. Louis were blocked from disembarking on Canadian soil.”
There were 937 refugees seeking asylum from Nazi persecution on MS St. Louis when it was refused entry to Cuba, the United States and Canada, after Liberal Prime Minister Mackenzie King rejected humanitarian appeals to let them in.
In that era, antisemitic Canadian immigration officials strictly limited Jewish immigration, following the slogan “none is too many.”
The terrible ordeal of the refugees was chronciled in a 1976 movie, Voyage of the Damned.
Zoltak, who survived the Holocaust because a Polish family hid him in a barn, came through Pier 21 in 1948, when he immigrated to Canada. He says the memorial belongs there.
“I believe in symbolism,” he said. “I believe historic facts should be pointed out, should be pointed out in the proper place in the proper time. There is not a place in the country where that monument would make any kind of impact, or any kind of meaning.”
The Canadian government provided the Canadian Jewish Congress $500,000 for the memorial. The organization selected a design from world famous architect Daniel Libeskind, the child of holocaust survivors.
Zoltak was part of the group that selected Libeskind
The memorial features an electric mechanism that spins wheels marked Hatred, Racism, Xenophobia and Antisemitism, which has had maintenance problems. After it was sent to the manufacturer, Soheil Mosun, in Toronto for repairs, the museum told the company to hang onto it while they decide what to do with it.
That process is ongoing, said Cailin MacDonald, a spokeswoman for the museum on Thursday.
“We are continuing to work with representatives from the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs to determine next steps,” she said.
Zoltak, who praised former immigration minister Jason Kenney for his role in establishing the memorial, said the government should ask the federally funded museum to display the memorial.
Heritage Minister Shelly Glover’s office did not provide comment on Thursday.
smaher@postmedia.com
 http://o.canada.com/news/holocaust-survivors-shameful-that-pier-21-not-displaying-memorial-to-victims-of-voyage-of-the-damned