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Friday April 22, 2005

Shorts: World

Israeli panel puts Holocaust losses

at $320 billion

berlin (jta) | European Jewry lost as much as $320 billion in the Holocaust, an Israeli government report found.

The precedent-setting study, issued this week, determined that in terms of confiscated properties and unpaid income for slave labor, Jews persecuted by the Nazis lost between $230 billion and $320 billion, adjusted for 1997 rates of inflation.

According to Ha’aretz, a panel under Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs, Natan Sharansky, concluded in the report that outstanding reparations must be demanded not only from Germany, but also from banks and insurance companies in the United States and Israel that have unclaimed accounts belonging to Holocaust victims.

U.S. rabbis begin

tolerance mission

krakow (jta) | Two American rabbis traveled to Poland to engage students in a series of conversations on religious tolerance.

Their trip is part of a pilot project developed by the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations to bring American rabbis to Poland to meet with church youth groups, high school students, Jewish cultural organizations and local Jews.

The program receives funding from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and from San Francisco’s Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, as well as from private donations.

Rabbi Ronald Brown, a Reform rabbi from Merrick, N.Y., and Rabbi Itzchak Cohen — an Orthodox rabbi who was born in Krakow, grew up in Jerusalem and now lives in Dallas — are the first participants in what Folwarczny hopes will be a series of trips by rabbis who will give Polish students an introduction to Judaism while learning about Polish Catholic culture and faith.

Tribal leader sorry

for comments

toronto (jta) | A Canadian aboriginal leader apologized for a controversial statement he released that many viewed as anti-Semitic.

B’nai Brith Canada called the apology by Chief Terrance Nelson inadequate and repeated its call for Nelson’s resignation. Nelson, chief of the Rouseau River Anishinabe First Nation in southern Manitoba, said he regretted the statement he released last week that said media coverage of former aboriginal leader David Ahenakew’s hate trial in Saskatchewan would increase aboriginals’ hatred of Jews and turn Ahenakew into a martyr.

Nelson also made critical comments about Jewish ownership of Canadian media organizations, naming the Asper family, which owns newspapers and a television network. “I realize now that my approach, tone and some of my comments were deeply hurtful and offensive to some members of the Jewish community,” Nelson said.

“Today I wish to apologize to the Jewish people of Manitoba and Canada for any offense, anger or hurt that I may have caused.” Ahenakew was on trial earlier this month for promoting hatred against Jews with statements in 2002 praising Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. The verdict in his trial is expected in early June.

Canada increases funding for museum

toronto (jta) | Canada’s government confirmed it has approved a total investment of up to $100 million to the Canadian Museum of Human Rights.

The investment in the museum, slated for Winnipeg, includes the $30 million allocated to the project in 2003.

The museum was the idea of the late Jewish media mogul Israel Asper. The Asper family owns CanWest Global Communications Corp., the parent company of several daily newspapers including the National Post as well as the Global Television Network.

Paris honors

Jewish children

paris (jta) | The Paris City Council renamed a city square to commemorate 44 Jewish children murdered by the Gestapo in 1944.

The children were hidden in the Izieu shelter in Ain, France, but the Nazis found them on April 6, 1944, and sent them to Auschwitz, where they were killed.

At a ceremony commemorating the square’s new name, the newly elected leader of the UMP Party, Gerard Leban, who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, remembered “the little faces that cried on the death trains, whose destiny was brutally interrupted because of the madness of men.”

French cemetery vandalized

paris (jta) | A Jewish cemetery in Avignon, France was vandalized last week.

The Star of David that hung on a pillar at the entrance to the cemetery was partially wrenched off, and racist slogans were scrawled on the window of the information desk, among other damage discovered by a rabbi.

Wiesenthal Center has leads on

suspected informants

warsaw (ap) | The Simon Wiesenthal Center said this week its recent hunt for Nazi collaborators in Poland had produced information on 20 suspects believed to have denounced or murdered Jews during World War II.

“Operation Last Chance” had produced about 50 calls to a hot line launched in Poland in June. Overall the program, which began in September 2003, has led to internal investigations into 19 Poles and one Jew, whose nationality was not given, the center’s Efraim Zuroff told a news conference.

Rights group finds rising anti-Semitism in Russia

moscow (ap) | Anti-Semitism and xenophobia are spreading fast in Russia, and the authorities have failed to adequately combat racial crimes, a rights group said in a report circulated last week.

The Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, which runs a European Union-funded program to monitor xenophobia and anti-Semitism in Russia, said that there were at least 30 murders on ethnic grounds last year and that their actual number could be higher because law enforcement agencies often ignore racial hatred as a factor in crimes.

An opinion survey conducted last year showed that more than 42 percent of Russians believed it necessary “to limit the influence of Jews in government bodies, politics, business, jurisdiction, educational system and show business,” the report said.

The group estimated that there are about 50,000 skinheads in Russia. Members of neo-Nazi groups have

frequently targeted synagogues with small-scale bombings, desecrated Jewish cemeteries and perpetrated racial attacks.

Poll: Russians know little about Holocaust

moscow (jta) | Four out of 10 Muscovites aren’t sure what the Holocaust was, according to a new public opinion survey.

Fifty-seven percent of respondents said they knew what the Holocaust was, 15 percent had heard the term but weren’t sure what exactly it meant and 28 percent did not know what the Holocaust was.

The survey of 300 Muscovites, conducted in late February by the polling firm Politech, was released this week. The study was commissioned by the Moscow Bureau on Human Rights and the Holocaust Foundation, a research and education group based in Moscow.

Of those with a college degree, 67 percent said they knew what the Holocaust was, compared to 35 percent of those with only a high school diploma.

No margin of error was reported. n

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