Holocaust

"WHAT ABOUT the Swedes?'' Lutherville's Paul Fenchak, leader of a variety of ethnic groups, asked last week. Perturbed by a Sun editorial opposing legislation requiring Maryland schools to teach about the Irish potato famine, he called to say it's about time certain ethnic groups got more attention. The typical high school library has little, if anything, about Swedish culture and history, he complained.His Slavic ancestors get short shrift as well: ''I challenge you to write an editorial calling for schools to teach about the massacre of Armenians in 1916.

How do you speak about the unspeakable? That was the creative challenge composer Aaron Jay Kernis faced in 1995 when he searched for the right musical language for Lament and Prayer, a piece marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust. It's one of two Kernis pieces the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, led by music director Marin Alsop, will perform this week. Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 is also on the program. Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Performs at 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall and at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Music Center at Strathmore.

JERUSALEM -- Trying to forestall a protest march by aged survivors of the Holocaust, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agreed yesterday to rethink a widely criticized plan to give them a monthly stipend of about $20 each. Olmert had announced the plan in response to concerns about poverty among some of the approximately 240,000 Holocaust survivors who live in Israel, but the size of the stipend was considered laughable by an organization of survivors. The organization announced that it would hold a protest march tomorrow, and some planned to wear striped concentration camp uniforms.

"The horrors of the material are such that I have to go slow or I shall go mad!" wrote artist Judy Chicago soon after beginning the research for the emotionally wrenching series of mixed-media artworks titled Holocaust Project: From Darkness Into Light, which she embarked on in the mid-1980s. By then, the Chicago native, who was born Judith Sylvia Cohen in 1939, had already won worldwide renown as a pioneering feminist artist and creator of The Dinner Party (1979), a monumental installation honoring great women throughout history that has since become an icon of the women's movement.

Jews have been too focused on the silence of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust, to the point that it is hindering the advance of Jewish-Catholic relations, a leader of the Conservative Jewish movement told a gathering of rabbis meeting in Baltimore yesterday."

Estelle Sapir, 72, a Holocaust survivor who sued a Swiss bank to recover her family's money, died Tuesday in New York of cardiac arrest. Miss Sapir was the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit involving thousands of other Holocaust survivors until Credit Suisse settled her case a year ago. The amount of the settlement was not disclosed, but estimates ranged from $300,000 to $500,000.Anthony Newley, 67, a British actor, playwright, composer, author, lyricist and singer known for the stage hit "Stop the World -- I Want To Get Off" and the 1967 film version of the children's classic "Doctor Doolittle," died of cancer Wednesday in Stuart, Fla. Mr. Newley was first diagnosed in 1985 with renal cell cancer and had a kidney removed.

People collect all kinds of stuff. Stamps. Rare coins. Fine art. Comic books. Baseball cards. Posters. Dolls. Political buttons.But memorabilia from Nazi concentration camps? Who would want to collect such ghastly material?As it happens, there is indeed a market for Holocaust memorabilia. In Philadelphia, a private collector recently paid $625 at auction for a lot of anti-Semitic broadsides and papier-mache masks of "ugly Jews." In Beverly Hills, in mid- November, Superior Galleries, an auction house, put up for bid an extensive collection of Holocaust and anti-Semitic artifacts whose owner, like many collectors, in- sisted on anonymity.

JERUSALEM -- After spending World War II in Soviet work camps in Siberia and Uzbekistan, Jack H. Pechter and his family returned to their native Poland to find that all his parents' siblings were among the millions of Jews killed under the Nazis.Pechter believes the power of hate can be diminished only through education. So, the 65-year-old Baltimorean, who is an East Coast real estate magnate, has become the largest private donor to the new Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies.

Felix Kestenberg, a survivor of the Maidanek, Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps, stood before members of Beth Israel Congregation in Owings Mills yesterday at the dedication of their Holocaust Memorial Garden and eloquently reminded them why they had gathered."

For 60 years, debate has raged about who or what might have deterred Adolf Hitler's rise to power and his Holocaust. Among world leaders during Hitler's era, few if any have ignited more intense controversy than Pope Pius XII. Before his ascension, he was known as Eugenio Pacelli, serving as a Vatican diplomat during the 1920s and 1930s. He was elevated to the papacy in 1939 and died in 1958, in the 59th year of his priesthood and his 82nd year on Earth.He is now within short reach -- perhaps a year -- of being declared a saint.

Food was scarce at the Nazi concentration camp, but the work was relentless. Morris Kornberg toiled day after day in a 1,500-foot-deep, pitch-black coal mine. His weight plummeted to 60 pounds, almost half what it is today. The starvation diet and hard labor stripped him of not just his girth, but also of his will to live. "When I was in Auschwitz, I gave up," he said. "I didn't want to live anymore. Whatever they were going to do to me, I just wanted it over." And yet today, even as he recalls watching hundreds of his fellow prisoners kill themselves by running into the electric fence around the camp, he can't explain why he didn't do the same.

The murder of a guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington last week was a tragedy. But it's also a reminder of anti-Semitism's return. The museum is a memorial to, and tells the story of, the greatest spasm of anti-Semitic violence ever. By murdering 6 million Jews in so ferociously focused a way, the Holocaust made plain the consequences of a hatred that has been widely felt, and frequently articulated, for some two millennia. That hatred had often erupted in the mass killings of Jews - by the Crusaders in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, by the pogromists in Eastern Europe, and in many other places at many other times.

A defiant hatred Here's what I strain to understand about people like James W. von Brunn, the man accused of shooting and killing a guard Wednesday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: How can such a person live among us, as a functioning member of an interdependent society? How does one who hates the "other" so thoroughly still somehow manage to navigate the modern world in all its complexity? Mr. von Brunn, a convicted felon who lived in Annapolis, was not quiet about his attitudes; he maintained a Web site chronicling his conspiracy theories and poisonous worldview.

James von Brunn, the 88-year-old Annapolis resident suspected of killing a security guard Wednesday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, was no stranger to groups that track the world of racially motivated hatred. The Anti-Defamation League labeled him "a longtime white supremacist and anti-Semite" who self-published a book espousing racist beliefs and posted to Web sites that deny the Holocaust occurred. "Time to FLUSH all 'Holocaust' Memorials," read one of his posts in 2004, according to the league.

Temple Isaiah, 12200 Scaggsville Road, Fulton, will commemorate Yom Hashoah, honoring the lives lost to the Holocaust, at 7:15 p.m. Monday. Steven Luckert, curator of the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will speak. There will be a Holocaust artifact display provided by Howard County survivors and their families. Those who attend are invited to inscribe their thoughts and feelings in the diaries in the Temple Isaiah lobby. The program is sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Howard County, Temple Isaiah, Shalom Aleichem, Oseh Shalom, Columbia Jewish Congregation, Calah Congregation, Beth Shalom, Bet Aviv and Ahavas Israel.

O's game means parking limits 2 Traffic modifications and stadium parking rules will be in effect Sunday as the Baltimore Orioles take on the Tampa Bay Rays at 1:35 p.m., the city Department of Transportation says. Spectators are encouraged to take public transportation or to pay for public parking lots because parking agents will be aggressively enforcing stadium-area restrictions in surrounding neighborhoods from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Changes to traffic patterns around the stadiums will begin at noon.

Geithner's tax troubles set the wrong example I am deeply involved in various education-related organizations, including the Maryland Business Roundtable for Education and Junior Achievement. As I sit in meetings, visit schools and speak before high school classes, ethics, dedication, conduct and honesty are topics of major discussions. So I am truly disappointed in our two senators, Benjamin L. Cardin and Barbara A. Mikulski, for voting to confirm Timothy Geithner as our nation's treasury secretary ("Obama reaches for Republican support," Jan. 27)

The recent news that another memoir - Angel at the Fence by Herman Rosenblat, who claimed that he met his wife at a concentration camp but recently admitted that they met in New York City after the war - was at least partially fabricated left me both angry and sad. Angry because such trickery in the story of a Holocaust victim violated the unwritten contract between author and reader. A memoir carries a premium because readers often form an emotional bond with the author. That reaction goes much deeper than appreciating a writing style or plot twist.

Alan M. Dershowitz, a Harvard Law professor and one of the nation's leading commentators on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, told about 1,800 people last night at a program commemorating the Holocaust and celebrating the 60th anniversary of Israel's independence that the world continues to be in denial about the intentions of Islamic fundamentalists, who he said have "opted for a culture of death rather than one of peace." Dershowitz, 69, spoke for about 45 minutes at the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation in front of an audience that included Gov. Martin O'Malley, Mayor Sheila Dixon, other state political leaders and dozens of Holocaust survivors.

Yossi Harel, 90 Ship commander Yossi Harel, the ship commander whose attempt to bring Holocaust survivors to Palestine aboard the Exodus 1947 built support for Israel's founding, has died. Mr. Harel's daughter Sharon said he died Saturday of cardiac arrest at his home in Tel Aviv. Mr. Harel commanded four expeditions that brought thousands of refugees to the shores of Palestine, his daughter said. But the best known was that of the Exodus 1947, a ship that left France in July 1947 carrying more than 4,500 people -- mostly Holocaust survivors and other displaced Jews -- in a secret effort to reach Palestine.