Poland gives survivor key post
Poland’s new prime minister picked Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, an 85-year-old Auschwitz survivor and former foreign minister, as a foreign policy adviser last week.
Bartoszewski’s nomination was meant to raise the country’s profile on the international stage, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said.
“He is a patron of a new chapter in Polish history,” said Tusk, whose pro-business and European Union-friendly government took office this month. — ap
Ukraine delays handover of scrolls
Ukrainian officials say they are not prepared to transfer Torah scrolls held in state archives to the Jewish community in spite of President Viktor Yuschenko’s Oct. 24 decree to do so.
More than 1,000 historic Torah scrolls are sitting in state-run museums and archives in Ukraine.
The scrolls originally had belonged to synagogues and private Jewish households in Ukraine, and were either confiscated by Communist Party authorities during anti-religion campaigns during the Soviet era or seized by Nazi forces during the World War II occupation of Ukraine. — jta
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California