The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is making a collection of its historic records and photographs from the Holocaust period available online. The website enables the public to search a database of more than 500,000 names and to view and identify photos from 14 countries where the organization operated during and after the war. read more »
» US Holocaust museum to put records online - AAP, Australia
» Trove of historic records of Holocaust goes online - Associated Press, USA
The International Court of Justice in the Dutch city of The Hague has confirmed that Germany has legal immunity from being sued in foreign courts by victims of Nazi atrocities committed during World War II. read more »
World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder has called Germany's decision to give €10 million (US $13 million) to Israel's Holocaust memorial institution Yad Vashem over the next ten years "highly commendable". read more »
» OPINION - Moshe Kantor: Never again, for now - Wall Street Journal, USA
» Two million Holocaust-era property records of Jews now searchable online
The World Jewish Restitution Organization, of which the World Jewish Congress is a founding member, has conducted a briefing for members of the European Parliament in Brussels on the issue of Holocaust-era assets that have not been repaid. read more »
» UNESCO forum to discuss role of Holocaust education in fighting prejudice - China National News
» Leading German literary critic recalls horrors of Warsaw Ghetto in speech to lawmakers
» Holocaust Remembrance Day marked in Brussels and across Europe
In Berlin, lawmakers on Friday commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day with speeches from the speaker of the Bundestag and Warsaw Ghetto survivor Marcel Reich-Ranicki, 91. read more »
» Holocaust Memorial Day: "Kindertransport saved my life" - BBC News, UK
» OPINION - Dieter Graumann: A universal message for Holocaust Remembrance Day - JTA, USA
» A fifth of young Germans have never heard of Auschwitz, survey reveals - Daily Mail, UK
» Holocaust Remembrance Day marked in Brussels and across Europe
Dutch politicians are urging their government to apologize for what they call the "passive" response of the exiled Dutch government to the mass deportations of Jews by Nazi occupiers during World War II. read more »
The convicted Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk has failed in his bid to regain US citizenship. A judge in Ohio said Demjanjuk had lied about his whereabouts during World War II in order to gain entry into the US later. read more »
An agreement has been reached between Germany and the Claims Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany on liberalizing the criteria for pensions for Shoah survivors. The deal will pave the way for an estimated US$ 650 million in additional compensation going to survivors over the coming years. read more »
Polish authorities have reopened an investigation into crimes committed at Auschwitz and its satellite camps during World War II. One aim is to track down any Nazi war criminals still living. It is estimated that one million people - mostly Jews and non-Jewish Poles - were killed at the Nazi death camp. read more »
The International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists (IAJLJ) will host a conference on 'Holocaust Denial and Freedom of Speech in the Internet Era' in Berlin, Germany, from 15-19 November 2011. read more »
In a symbolic gesture, Greece has reinstated Greek citizenship for Jews born prior to 1945 who had to leave the country during World War II. Meanwhile, the Greek and Israeli governments signed an agreement to enhance security cooperation between the two countries. read more »
The protracted legal battle to extradite the 89-year-old Hungarian-born Charles Zentai, a resident of Perth, who is wanted in Hungary over the 1944 murder of a Jewish teenager, is to continue, with the case being referred back to Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Brendan O'Connor. read more »
Many if not most children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors live with ghosts. We are haunted much in the way a cemetery is haunted. We bear within us the shadows and echoes of an anguished dying we never experienced or witnessed. Today, the principal responsibility for transmitting the survivors’ legacy of remembrance into the future has shifted to their children and grandchildren. read more »
» Congresswomen urge federal funding for homecare of Shoah survivors in US
Russian authorities have not responded to requests for more information on the case of the late Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved many Hungarian Jews from the Nazi onslaught during World War II and later disappeared after being arrested by the Soviets. read more »
The popular social networking website Facebook has turned down a request by 21 Holocaust survivors to remove pages on which users can currently espouse Holocaust denial. read more »
Sandor Kepiro, 97, has been acquitted of charges that he took part in the killing of Jews in Novi Sad, Serbia, during World War II. Jewish groups called the court verdict "outrageous" and "an insult to the victims". read more »
A court in the German city of Regensburg has upheld a lower court’s conviction of Richard Williamson, 71, one of four bishops of the ultra-conservative Catholic breakaway group Society of St. Pius X, for denying the Holocaust in a 2008 interview with Swedish television. read more »
» Swedish TV interview in which Bishop Williamson denies the Holocaust 
Mietek Pemper, the man who typed up Oskar Schindler's famous list which helped save over 1,000 Jews from the Holocaust, has died in Augsburg, in southern Germany. read more »
The World Jewish Restitution Organization has appealed to US President Obama to raise the issue of the return of Jewish property during his visit to Warsaw this week. Poland is the only major country in the former Soviet bloc yet to solve the problem of returning private property confiscated during and after World War II. read more »
The Flemish Christian Democrat Stefaan De Clerck is facing calls to resign following his remarks during a TV debate in which he voiced support for a general pardon of all Belgians who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II. read more »
The World Jewish Congress has welcomed the conviction by a court in Munich of Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk for helping to murder at least 27,900 Jews while serving as a guard in the Nazi death camp Sobibor during World War II. Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years in prison but set free by the judge due to his old age. read more »
» OPINION - Menachem Rosensaft: The Demjanjuk verdict in historical context
In unusually strong terms, Poland’s President Bronislaw Komorowski has lambasted his country’s failure to enact a law allowing for the restitution of seized private properties confiscated by the Nazis and the Communists. read more »
The claim made by 92-year-old Briton Denis Avey in his new book that he swapped uniforms with a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz when being held at a PoW camp nearby have been questioned following the publication of an investigation by British journalists. The World Jewish Congress has called on Avey's publishers to check whether his story is true. read more »
Members of Norway’s Labor Party have called for the resignation of one of the movement’s lawmakers who denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and accused Holocaust survivors of exaggerating their stories. read more »
Several US Congressmen and senators have introduced legislation that would allow lawsuits against France's state-owned rail company SNCF over its role in deporting Jews to the Nazi death camps during World War II. read more »
» OPINION - Daniel Schatz: Poland must return Nazi-confiscated properties - JTA
» Ronald Lauder laments Polish decision to halt property restitution process
The head of the World Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Restitution Organization, Ronald S. Lauder, has expressed shock and dismay at the announcement by Poland to suspend legislation to provide compensation for former property owners whose assets were confiscated during the Communist period, among them many Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust. read more »
» Eizenstat urges Poland to reconsider suspension of restitution bill
The alleged Nazi collaborator John Demjanjuk is to go on a hunger strike unless the court allows him to present evidence that could exonerate him, his attorney has said. The verdict in the Demjanjuk trial is expected in March. read more »
» Rome plans to open Italy's first-ever Holocaust museum within ten years
» OPINION - Menachem Z. Rosensaft: 'The long road home' for Jews after the Holocaust
In Budapest, Sandor Kepiro has been formally charged by prosecutors for allegedly taking part in the murder of 1,200 civilians and partisan fighters in Serbia in January 1942. read more »
» Chicago appeals court upholds deportation order against suspected Nazi war criminal
A large delegation of Muslim leaders, Holocaust survivors and European statesmen has visited Auschwitz to pay tribute to the millions killed in the Holocaust. read more »
» OPINION - Ronald S. Lauder: In Auschwitz, German President Wulff sends the right signal
» Lauder accompanies German president for Holocaust remembrance in Auschwitz
» What is your view on the necessity of inter-faith dialogue? 
WJC President Ronald S. Lauder, Vice-President Charlotte Knobloch and the head of the German Jewish community, Dieter Graumann, were part of the official delegation of German President Christian Wulff on his visit to the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz. read more »
» OPINION - Ronald S. Lauder: In Auschwitz, German President Wulff sends the right signal
» World leaders remember the Holocaust, warn of rising anti-Semitism
» German news Television report, German President Wulff with WJC President Ronald Lauder
» Address by Ronald S. Lauder at Holocaust remembrance ceremony at European Parliament
At a commemoration at the European Parliament addressed by European Union politicians and Jewish leaders, World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder and European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor called for renewed efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and warned of rising anti-Semitism. read more »
» Turkey to officially commemorate Shoah for the first time
» Yad Vashem launches video channel on Holocaust for Iranians
» At memorial in NY synagogue, Ban Ki-moon calls Holocaust “darkest chapter in history”
» Address by Ronald S. Lauder at Holocaust remembrance ceremony at European Parliament
The German government is to pay € 60 million (US$ 80 million) over the coming months into a fund for the preservation of the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. read more »
» Winona Ryder accuses Mel Gibson of calling her an "oven dodger"
» Jewish groups criticize new Auschwitz video game by Israeli programmer
Germany has agreed to double to nearly 150 million dollars its annual funding for home care provided to Holocaust survivors. The change takes into account "the sharply increased need for home care" for elderly survivors. read more »
An episode of the popular Australian talent show ‘The X Factor’ featured the American pop singer Ke$ha performing her hit single ‘We R Who We R’ with a dance troupe wearing costumes and caps similar to those worn by Nazi SS fighters during World War II. read more »
German dictator Adolf Hitler's Nazi party “actively worked to destroy Europe's Jews financially,” and nearly a third of the German war effort was paid for with money stolen from Jews, according a new study about the role of the German Finance Ministry during the ‘Third Reich’. read more »
» Lithuania plans to have law on Holocaust-era restitution property restitution soon
» OPINION: Maram Stern on the role of German diplomats during the Nazi era
» German Foreign Office complicit in Nazi Holocaust, historians prove
Holocaust survivors have asked the European Commission to investigate claims that the Vatican’s financial arm laundered money stolen from Jews and others in the former Yugoslavia during World War II. read more »
» Shoah survivors sue Hungarian railway companies in US court for collaborating with Nazis
More than 20,000 artworks stolen by the Nazis from Jews in occupied Belgium and France during World War II can now be searched in an online catalog. read more »
» Michael Schneider, WJC Secretary General at the WJC Governing Board
Field Marshal Philippe Pétain, who presided the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, personally ordered to make anti-Jewish legislation harsher, French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld has said, citing a newly unveiled document. read more »
As three Greek human rights activists are to go on trial for speaking out against judges who acquitted the extreme-right politician Kostas Plevris, the World Jewish Congress has called on the European Parliament to send an official observer to watch the trial in Athens. read more »
Romania’s National Bank has been strongly criticized after minting a coin which depicts the late patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Miron Cristea, who as prime minister stripped many Jews of their citizenship in 1939. read more »
Prosecutors in Germany have filed charges against a 90-year-old man for allegedly helping to murder 430,000 Jews during World War II. read more »
The Leopold Museum in Vienna, Austria has agreed to pay US$ 19 million to the heirs of a former Jewish art dealer for being allowed to keep an Egon Schiele painting looted by the Nazis in 1939. read more »
» Eizenstat calls for US arbitration commission for Nazi-looted art disputes
Plans by filmmakers in India to make a film on Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler that will claim that the despot loved India and that he indirectly contributed to its independence have outraged members of the Jewish community. read more »
The Greek government has assured the local Jewish community that legal proceedings against Nazi war criminals such as Alois Brunner, who was responsible for the deportation of 50,000 Greek Jews during World War II, would soon be possible. read more »
» Demjanjuk’s ID card as Nazi camp guard authentic, expert witness says
In Germany, ceremonies were held on Sunday to mark the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen. read more »
» Interview with WJC President Ronald S. Lauder on Holocaust commemoration
Ivan (John) Demjanjuk, who is on trial in Germany for allegedly helping in the murder of 27,900 Jews at the Nazi camp Sobibor during World War II, has told the court that he was an “innocent victim" and has been falsely hunted for decades. read more »
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has decorated Britons who saved Jews and others from the Nazi onslaught during World War II with the new ‘Hero of the Holocaust’ medal. read more »
Hungary’s National Assembly has voted in favor of making the denial or belittling of the Holocaust a criminal offense, punishable by up to three years imprisonment. read more »
» Should the denial of the Holocaust be punishable under the law?
Russian PM Putin has told his Israeli counterpart Netanyahu that Russia would soon build a museum dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust. Netanyahu in response said Israel would erect a memorial dedicated to the efforts of the Soviet Red Army in liberating Europe during World War II. read more »
Stockholm police have arrested the former Swedish neo-Nazi leader Anders Högström, who is wanted in Poland over the theft of the ‘Arbeit macht frei" sign from Auschwitz. read more »
» Should the denial of the Holocaust be punishable under the law?
A court in Germany has summoned the Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson to attend a trial in April where he is to face charges of incitement for his belittling of the Holocaust, which is a crime in Germany. read more »
» Bishop Williamson refuses to pay fine for Holocaust denial
» German court fines Bishop Williamson for Holocaust denial
» Should the denial of the Holocaust be punishable under the law?
» Swedish TV interview in which Bishop Williamson denies the Holocaust
The Federal Social Court ruled that payments to former Jewish ghetto laborers would only be made retroactively to 2005 and not 1997, as demanded by the plaintiffs. read more »
Jewish and historical groups in Poland have called for a day to be devoted to Poles who helped Jews during the Holocaust. read more »
The International Court of Justice in the Dutch city of The Hague has confirmed that Germany has legal immunity from being sued in foreign courts by victims of Nazi atrocities committed during World War II. read more »
The Dutch government said today it will return two paintings that were looted more than 70 years ago by Hermann Göring for his country estate to the descendants of a Jewish antiques dealer in Paris. read more »
Rabbi Youlus has pleaded guilty to fraud, admitting to a scheme to steal money while claiming to be saving and restoring historic Torahs. One of those who was initially dubious was Menachem Z. Rosensaft, general counsel of the World Jewish Congress. read more »
World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder has called Germany's decision to give €10 million (US $13 million) to Israel's Holocaust memorial institution Yad Vashem over the next ten years "highly commendable". read more »
We need to learn and study evil as a discipline, as we would science, engineering or any other subject. Our civilization depends on the ability to recognize evil, not at commemoration ceremonies years or decades after it has wrought its destruction, but while it is in its infancy and the ominous signs are growing. read more »
Historians and researchers will gather in Paris for a United Nations forum designed to address the impact that Holocaust remembrance can have in stemming the tide of intolerance around the world. read more »
The Norwegian prime minister has apologized for the role his country played in deporting its own Jews as Europe marks Holocaust Remembrance Day. read more »
The World Jewish Restitution Organization, of which the World Jewish Congress is a founding member, has conducted a briefing for members of the European Parliament in Brussels on the issue of Holocaust-era assets that have not been repaid. read more »
In Berlin, lawmakers on Friday commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day with speeches from the speaker of the Bundestag and Warsaw Ghetto survivor Marcel Reich-Ranicki, 91. read more »
It has taken decades for the international community to deal with the Holocaust in a really serious way. Today, Holocaust commemorations have become an integral part of political culture, at least in Western democracies, writes the head of the German Jewish community. read more »
A survey carried out two days before Holocaust Memorial Day shows more than a fifth of young Germans do not know the name of Auschwitz or what happened there. read more »
The Russian Jewish Congress announced that it had sent a letter of protest to regional officials over the decision to replace a memorial plaque to Jews killed in the Holocaust with one that mentions only “peaceful citizens of Rostov-on-Don and Soviet prisoners of war.” read more »
Jewish groups in Germany and abroad are divided about a British publishing house's intentions to print excerpts of Adolf Hitler's infamous manifesto 'Mein Kampf'. read more »
A British forensic archaeologist has unearthed fresh evidence to prove the existence of mass graves at the Nazi death camp Treblinka, where 800,000 Jews were murdered - scuppering the claims of Holocaust deniers who claim Treblinka had merely been a transit camp. read more »
A British publisher’s plan to begin selling extracts from Adolf Hitler’s hatefilled autobiography 'Mein Kampf' at German newspaper kiosks and shops is set to be blocked. read more »
Eighty Holocaust and genocide scholars signed a petition calling on US President Barack Obama to condemn Libya's new government for hosting a visit by Sudanese President Omar Bashir. read more »
The Knesset has given its preliminary approval to a series of controversial bills that would outlaw the use of the term 'Nazi' as an epithet and the wearing of the Holocaust-era yellow star that the Nazis required Jews to wear. read more »
A Dubai fitness center has pulled an ad that featured train tracks to the Auschwitz death camp and the slogan "Kiss your calories goodbye". read more »
Dutch politicians are urging their government to apologize for what they call the "passive" response of the exiled Dutch government to the mass deportations of Jews by Nazi occupiers during World War II. read more »
The Swedish government has announced that it will designate 2012 as the official Raoul Wallenberg Year, and the honor is more than deserved. read more »
Saturday’s abhorrent rally in Jerusalem's Shabbat Square featuring haredim wearing yellow stars and simulated concentration camp uniforms brings to mind Walt Kelly’s observation in the classic 'Pogo' comic strip: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” read more »
Thomas T. Johnson, the judge who imposed a major setback on Shoah-deniers by ruling that the Holocaust was “a fact and not reasonably subject to dispute,” has died in California. read more »
Polish officials say France has pledged € 5m to help preserve the site of the former Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz, which badly needs repairs. read more »
The convicted Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk has failed in his bid to regain US citizenship. A judge in Ohio said Demjanjuk had lied about his whereabouts during World War II in order to gain entry into the US later. read more »
Thousands of Iranian Jews and their descendants owe their lives to a Muslim diplomat in wartime Paris, according to a new book which tells how Abdol-Hossein Sardari risked everything to help fellow Iranians escape the Nazis. read more »
An imam who caught flak last week over comments comparing the treatment of Canadian Muslims to Jews during the Holocaust said he was misinterpreted. read more »
A British government member has been sacked for attending a party where guests dressed up as Nazis and drank toasts to senior figures in the Nazi regime. read more »
On 11 December 1946, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 96 (I) which declared genocide, defined as “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups,” to be “a crime under international law". read more »
American casino and hotel magnate Sheldon Adelson has doubled his overall contribution to Yad Vashem in the past decade by announcing a US$ 25 million gift to the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. read more »
Austria’s parliament has authorized a donation of €6 million (US$ 8 million) toward helping to renovate a memorial to Holocaust victims who died at Auschwitz. read more »
An agreement has been reached between Germany and the Claims Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany on liberalizing the criteria for pensions for Shoah survivors. The deal will pave the way for an estimated US$ 650 million in additional compensation going to survivors over the coming years. read more »
Thousands of Holocaust survivors who lived in wartime ghettos or were otherwise in hiding during the war are now eligible for compensation from Germany, the non-profit organization negotiating on their behalf, has announced. read more »
The Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith has come under fire for using a reference to Auschwitz to criticize popular newspapers. read more »
Yad Vashem has honored the late German Adolf Otto as Righteous Among the Nations, in the presence of the Hedva Gil, whose life was saved in World War II. read more »
Alice Herz-Sommer, the oldest known survivor of the Holocaust, celebrated her 108th birthday. read more »
Some 155,000 Jews from Bohemia, Moravia and elsewhere in Europe gradually went through the wartime Jewish ghetto whose establishment started in Terezin (Theresienstadt) 70 years ago. read more »
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it would stop managing the center, which helps reunite families torn apart by the Holocaust, by the end of the year. read more »
Germany will return two paintings to the sole heir of a collector who was murdered by the Nazis. read more »
The House Foreign Affairs Committee has heard testimony on a bill that would make it easier for claimants to make their case against Holocaust-era insurers in US courts and to press insurance companies to release lists of policies from that time. read more »
While the generation of the Holocaust may be dying out, interest in Auschwitz is growing. read more »
Fifty-five Jewish partisans from across the United States were honored here at a synagogue reception and a gala dinner the next evening. read more »
A conference focusing on Romania's Holocaust-era war crimes in Ukraine and Moldova called on Romania to acknowledge and apologize for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. read more »
Today is the 73rd anniversary of Kristallnacht, and the first one I will mark without my father. read more »
Authorities in the United States have seized a nearly 500-year-old Italian painting that has been on display at a Florida museum, saying it was stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish family during World War II and should be returned to the family's heirs. read more »
The Quandt family, which owns lart parts of the German carmaker BMW, has pledged nearly 7 million dollars to a memorial institution in Berlin. read more »
Menachem Z. Rosensaft, the child of Holocaust survivors, teaches a class on the law of genocide at Columbia Law School. read more »
Menachem Z. Rosensaft, general counsel of the World Jewish Congress and the son of survivors of the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen death camps, will speak at New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn on the anniversary of the 1938 Nazi pogroms against Jews in Germany. read more »
Polish authorities have reopened an investigation into crimes committed at Auschwitz and its satellite camps during World War II. One aim is to track down any Nazi war criminals still living. It is estimated that one million people - mostly Jews and non-Jewish Poles - were killed at the Nazi death camp. read more »
A German casino on Tuesday will return a 300-year-old Dutch painting despoiled by the Nazis to German-Jewish art dealer Max Stern’s estate, one of his beneficiaries announced. read more »
Jerzy Bielecki, the Polish inmate who helped his Jewish girlfriend escape from Auschwitz in 1944, has died aged 90. read more »
The International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists (IAJLJ) will host a conference on 'Holocaust Denial and Freedom of Speech in the Internet Era' in Berlin, Germany, from 15-19 November 2011. read more »
A German auctioneer revised its plans for the sale of Hitler's reading glasses after Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, said the attempt to make money out of these “macabre heirlooms” was a sham and a stain on modern Germany. read more »
The money will be given in two transfers over the next two years to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation. read more »
Parliamentarians from Europe, Israel, Turkey and other nations gathered at the site of the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine. read more »
Finance Minister Maria Fekter apologized for comparing the criticism of bankers to the Nazis' persecution of Jews. read more »
The resources of a Nazi forced labor compensation fund were used to finance anti-Israel activities, some of which are anti-Semitic, the Israeli newspaper 'Yedioth Ahronoth' reports. read more »
Israel's Holocaust memorial institution has rescinded an invitation to Lithuanian officials to attend a memorial service in protest against Lithuanian calls to investigate a Holocaust survivor for alleged slander of nationalists. read more »
Memorial stones are to be erected at the sites of mass killings of Jews in the Ukraine during the Holocaust. The project has been organized by the Lo Tishkach Foundation, with help from the Association of Jewish Communities of Ukraine. read more »
It was supposed to be an evening of celebration and remembrance of the Jews of the Vilna Ghetto. But by hosting the Lithuanian foreign minister as “guest of honor” at a concert of Yiddish songs, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has instead angered some Holocaust survivors and their advocates. read more »
In a symbolic gesture, Greece has reinstated Greek citizenship for Jews born prior to 1945 who had to leave the country during World War II. Meanwhile, the Greek and Israeli governments signed an agreement to enhance security cooperation between the two countries. read more »
He survived the Holocaust carrying the solemn portraits he drew of concentration camp prisoners who labored alongside him in one of the largest counterfeiting operations in history. Now the collection of 43 drawings by Felix Cytrin of his fellow Jewish prisoners have been donated to Yad Vashem. read more »
A Jewish organization in Britain has called on Madame Tussauds to make its wax replica of Hitler look more defeated. read more »
He described himself as a risk-taking rabbi who had been “beaten up, thrown in jail and gone $175,000 into debt” on “expeditions” to Eastern Europe. But on Wednesday, Menachem Youlus was arrested in Manhattan on fraud charges. read more »
Protestant church officials in Austria and Germany lobbied the West German government to try to help Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organizers of the Holocaust, after his arrest by Israeli agents in 1960. One church leader described Eichmann as "fundamentally decent" and "kind-hearted." read more »
A couple whose grandparents survived the holocaust have made a complaint to Madame Tussauds after seeing tourists do the Nazi salute next to Adolf Hitler's waxwork. read more »
The Nazi chemicals giant IG Farben used forced labor and made poison gas. After the Nuremberg trials, companies like BASF and Bayer were formed from the splintered monolith. Now, IG Farben will cease to exist. read more »
A booming market for Nazi artifacts and Hitler-inspired baubles has sprung up in the United States, enabling shameless entrepreneurs to enrich themselves from the detritus of a regime that murdered millions. These profiteers ought to be shunned by polite society. read more »
new book about the life of Coco Chanel published in the United States on Tuesday aims to strengthen claims the French designer collaborated with the Nazis during World War II as a spy code-named 'Westminster.' read more »
The protracted legal battle to extradite the 89-year-old Hungarian-born Charles Zentai, a resident of Perth, who is wanted in Hungary over the 1944 murder of a Jewish teenager, is to continue, with the case being referred back to Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Brendan O'Connor. read more »
Lawyers for the US heir of a Jewish art dealer who lost many paintings while fleeing the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands say she has settled with The Hague municipality on a valuable work by Jan Steen. read more »
Noach Flug, the Polish-born Holocaust survivor and long-time president of the International Auschwitz Committee and the Center of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, died Thursday at the age of 86 at Shaare Zedek Hospital. World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder called him a “towering figure in the struggle for the rights of Holocaust survivors.” read more »
Sweden’s German-born Queen Silvia has said that her father had conducted a business deal with a prominent Jewish businessman whereby he took over his company in Berlin in 1939 and facilitated the man's emigration from Nazi Germany. read more »
Many if not most children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors live with ghosts. We are haunted much in the way a cemetery is haunted. We bear within us the shadows and echoes of an anguished dying we never experienced or witnessed. Today, the principal responsibility for transmitting the survivors’ legacy of remembrance into the future has shifted to their children and grandchildren. read more »
Holocaust survivors living in the United States would receive federal funds designed to help them age at home, rather than having to move to an institution, according to a new bill drafted by the Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her Republican counterpart Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. read more »
Russian authorities have not responded to requests for more information on the case of the late Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved many Hungarian Jews from the Nazi onslaught during World War II and later disappeared after being arrested by the Soviets. read more »
On behalf of the government in Montevideo, Foreign Minister Luis Almagro strongly condemned statements made by Iran’s ambassador to Uruguay, Hojatollah Soltani, who at a meeting had questioned the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews. read more »
The popular social networking website Facebook has turned down a request by 21 Holocaust survivors to remove pages on which users can currently espouse Holocaust denial. read more »
The 19th-century painting ‘Jewish woman selling oranges’ by the prominent Polish artist Aleksander Gierymski which was looted during World War II when the country was occupied by Nazi Germany has been returned to Poland after being withdrawn from an auction in Germany. read more »
An Israeli orchestra has played its way into history night by performing a piece by Richard Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer, at the renowned Bayreuth Festival read more »
In early July the words “Hitler was right” were painted on the memorial stone to the 72,000 Jews who were murdered at the Ponary Forest near Vilnius in Lithuania. On another monument close by, a vulgar reference was made to the compensation the Lithuanian government has made to the descendants of murdered Jews. No one seems to have noticed. read more »
A US auction house says it has sold the journals written by Nazi death camp doctor Josef Mengele. The sale is drawing criticism from Menachem Rosensaft, a leader of Holocaust survivors who says the business was profiting off the sale of one of the worst mass murderers in history. read more »
If you really want to despise someone, look no further than Stamford, Conn., where you can find Basil (Bill) Panagopulos, who runs Alexander Historical Auctions. The good Panagopulos also peddles Nazi memorabilia. read more »
The diaries of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, the so-called 'Angel of Death' who tortured prisoners at Auschwitz death camp, were bought by an Orthodox Jew for almost US$ 300,000. read more »
Sandor Kepiro, 97, has been acquitted of charges that he took part in the killing of Jews in Novi Sad, Serbia, during World War II. Jewish groups called the court verdict "outrageous" and "an insult to the victims". read more »
Jewish and Lithuanian dignitaries gathered in the town of Plunge for the dedication of a memorial wall for the more than 2,200 Jews from the town who were murdered by the Nazis in 1941. The monument, built in the nearby village of Kausenai from the bricks of the ruined Plunge synagogue, had been vandalized only last week. read more »
The convicted former death camp guard John Demjanjuk faces a new probe, a German newspaper reports. He was convicted in May by a German court for his role in killing Jews at the Nazi death camp Sobibor. read more »
Germany has agreed to expand the group of Nazi victims eligible for one-time payments of about US$ 2,660 to those who never left Eastern Europe, the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against German has announced. read more »
On Thursday, Israel’s Holocaust memorial institution Yad Vashem will posthumously pay tribute to the late Stefan and Maria Magenheim of Poland who were declared Righteous Among the Nations in 2009 for saving a Jewish boy from the Nazi onslaught. read more »
Having escaped the Holocaust as boys, two 80-year-old Jewish doctors from the United States have returned to Vienna to swim in the European Maccabi Games and have the last laugh at the Nazis who tormented their youth. read more »
An Jewish Italian survivor of the Nazi death camps, whose story inspired the Oscar-winning film 'Life is beautiful', has died at the age of 91 in Rome. read more »
A court in the German city of Regensburg has upheld a lower court’s conviction of Richard Williamson, 71, one of four bishops of the ultra-conservative Catholic breakaway group Society of St. Pius X, for denying the Holocaust in a 2008 interview with Swedish television. read more »
At a commemoration of the massacre in Jedwabne, Poland’s President Komorowski has asked Jews for forgiveness for the crimes inflicted on them by fellow Poles in 1941. read more »
A senior member of Egypt's liberal al-Wafd party has called the Holocaust a “lie,” the ‘Diary of Anne Frank’ a “fake” and the 9/11 terror attacks “made in the USA.” read more »
Richard Williamson has begun an appeal against a conviction in a German court of denying the Holocaust, claiming he was tricked into saying the comments by a TV interviewer. read more »
The Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial north of Berlin has come under fire for introducing a one-euro fee for visitors in commercial tour groups. Critics say the levy is unwarranted at the publicly funded site and runs counter to its duty to inform everyone about the Holocaust - free of charge. read more »
Romania has commemorated the 70th anniversary of one of the worst massacres of World War II in which an estimated 15,000 Jews were murdered. read more »
In Vilnius, the Seimas agreed to pay US$ 52 million over ten years to compensate for private property confiscated from Lithuanian Jews during the Nazi occupation. read more »
Mietek Pemper, the man who typed up Oskar Schindler's famous list which helped save over 1,000 Jews from the Holocaust, has died in Augsburg, in southern Germany. read more »
The internet company Red Bubble has withdrawn Hipster Hitler and other T-shirts that satirized the Nazi dictator and the Holocaust. read more »
Former US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who also served as chairman of the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, has died read more »
The museum at the former Nazi death camp Sobibor, in eastern Poland, has closed, at least temporarily, due to insufficient funding. read more »
The British government is to contribute US$ 3.4 million to help preserve the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site. read more »
The World Jewish Restitution Organization has appealed to US President Obama to raise the issue of the return of Jewish property during his visit to Warsaw this week. Poland is the only major country in the former Soviet bloc yet to solve the problem of returning private property confiscated during and after World War II. read more »
Spain's second-biggest poetry prize has been awarded this year to a volume honoring unsung heroines including the late Irena Sendler, who saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto. read more »
A list of thousands of personal effects taken from Jewish and other former concentration camp inmates – including wallets, photos and documents – has been posted online for claiming by survivors or their heirs. read more »
A company part-owned by the French railroad will have to detail the railway’s role in transporting Holocaust victims to Nazi death camps before it can compete again to operate Maryland commuter trains, according to legislation that Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley is scheduled to sign. read more »
Conservationists have welded together the ‘Arbeit macht frei’ [‘Work will set you free’] sign stolen from the gate of the former Nazi Auschwitz death camp in December 2009 and later recovered cut in pieces. read more »
The Flemish Christian Democrat Stefaan De Clerck is facing calls to resign following his remarks during a TV debate in which he voiced support for a general pardon of all Belgians who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II. read more »
Last week, a German court confirmed that while John Demjanjuk may not have been Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, he most certainly was Ivan the Very Bad of Sobibor. read more »
The World Jewish Congress has welcomed the conviction by a court in Munich of Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk for helping to murder at least 27,900 Jews while serving as a guard in the Nazi death camp Sobibor during World War II. Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years in prison but set free by the judge due to his old age. read more »
Sunday, 13 May 1945, five days after the end of World War II in Europe, was Mother’s Day in the United States. At Bergen-Belsen in Germany, however, there was nothing for my mother to celebrate on that day as she took part in the ongoing monumental medical and humanitarian effort to save as many of that Nazi concentration camp’s critically ill survivors as possible. read more »
The Foreign Affairs Committee of Lithuania’s parliament, the Seimas, has approved a bill allowing for financial compensation to Jewish communities for properties that were taken from them during and after World War II. read more »
One of the world's most-wanted Nazi war criminals, Sandor Kepiro, 97, is to go on trial in Hungary on charged with the murder of 36 people in Novi Sad, Serbia, in 1942. read more »
The main lawyer for Ivan [John] Demjanjuk, the 91-year-old currently standing trial in Munich for allegedly being an accessory to the murder of at least 27,900 Jews in a Nazi death camp, has demanded his client's acquittal, telling the court the case was unproved. read more »
S Holocaust museum has teamed up with internet genealogy site Ancestry.com to provide online information about those who were persecuted by the Nazis. read more »
A trove of papers and photographs documenting the lives of Holocaust victims and survivors includes notable names like Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel and former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. read more »
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is making a collection of its historic records and photographs from the Holocaust period available online. The website enables the public to search a database of more than 500,000 names and to view and identify photos from 14 countries where the organization operated during and after the war. read more »
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said that the "lessons of the Holocaust have not been learned," referring to spreading anti-Semitism in recent years. read more »
"Israel is the historical commemoration to the victims of the Holocaust," President Shimon Peres said at a Yad Vashem ceremony marking Yom HaShoah. read more »
David Baddiel, the comedian, has launched a campaign to stamp out use of the word 'yid' in football chants which mock Jewish and Tottenham supporters. High-profile backers have also condemned fans for hissing at Jewish spectators, to imitate the sound of gas chambers used in the Holocaust. read more »
The Berlin Central and Regional Library has handed back ten books and three journal volumes stolen by the Nazis to the local Jewish community. read more »
In unusually strong terms, Poland’s President Bronislaw Komorowski has lambasted his country’s failure to enact a law allowing for the restitution of seized private properties confiscated by the Nazis and the Communists. read more »
An FBI report kept secret for 25 years and obtained by the 'Associated Press' said the Soviet Union "quite likely fabricated" evidence central to the prosecution of John Demjanjuk - a revelation that could help the defense as closing arguments resume Wednesday in the retired Ohio auto worker's Nazi war crimes trial in Germany. read more »
President Barack Obama has announced the appointment of New York lawyer Herbert Block, executive vice-president of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, as a member of the US Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. read more »
The claim made by 92-year-old Briton Denis Avey in his new book that he swapped uniforms with a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz when being held at a PoW camp nearby have been questioned following the publication of an investigation by British journalists. The World Jewish Congress has called on Avey's publishers to check whether his story is true. read more »
Over the past two decades, Poland has distinguished itself as one of Israel's staunchest supporters in Europe. But in refusing to face the issue of property restitution and rejecting the idea of even a symbolic resolution, it is as if Poland's government has turned its back on all that is great and glorious in Polish tradition. read more »
An Austrian pastry maker has apologized after causing a stir for baking cakes with elaborate Nazi symbols such as the swastika. read more »
Representatives of the German and Israeli governments and of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany have agreed to substantially increase home care funding for Holocaust survivors by a total of US$ 564 million over the next three years. read more »
It has been reported by Polish media that the World Jewish Congress is advocating a boycott of Poland over the government's decision to halt private property restitution. This is untrue. At no point has the WJC proposed a boycott of Poland, nor have we considered or discussed any such measure. We continue to pursue diplomatic initiatives to resolve this important matter. read more »
The Pope has called the 1944 massacre of 335 Italian Jews and Catholics by Nazi soldiers at the Ardeatine Caves near Rome a "grave offense against God." read more »
After nearly 18 months, a court in Munich, Germany has closed the evidentiary phase in the trial of Ukrainian-born Ivan Demjanjuk, and closing arguments have begun. The prosecution has asked for the 90-year-old to be handed a six-year prison sentence. read more »
Members of Norway’s Labor Party have called for the resignation of one of the movement’s lawmakers who denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and accused Holocaust survivors of exaggerating their stories. read more »
The Polish government must revise its immoral and illegal decision and pass comprehensive legislation providing for the complete restitution of assets stolen by the Nazis and the Communist government. The advanced age of remaining Holocaust survivors makes the matter all the more urgent and the need to act all the more pressing. read more »
Several US Congressmen and senators have introduced legislation that would allow lawsuits against France's state-owned rail company SNCF over its role in deporting Jews to the Nazi death camps during World War II. read more »
The US government has expressed "disappointment" about Poland’s decision to suspend a planned law providing for the restitution and compensation for private property seized between 1939 and 1989. read more »
A Latvian court has allowed a march of ‘Waffen SS’ veterans and supporters in the country’s capital Riga. read more »
Jeff Atwater, Florida's chief financial officer, has called on his state's financial institutions to waive wire transfer fees charged to Holocaust survivors when receiving compensation or reparation payments. read more »
The head of the World Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Restitution Organization, Ronald S. Lauder, has expressed shock and dismay at the announcement by Poland to suspend legislation to provide compensation for former property owners whose assets were confiscated during the Communist period, among them many Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust. read more »
A bill that would give Holocaust survivors the right to sue European companies for unpaid life insurance claims has been introduced in the US Senate by a senator from Florida. read more »
The Islamist Hamas has said it would prevent the United Nations Relief and Works Agency from teaching Palestinian children in Gaza about the Holocaust. read more »
The Scottish Government is to pay US$ 350,000 a year to ensure Scottish children do not forget the lessons of the Holocaust. read more »
Project HEART, a new Holocaust era restitution project, has been launched. Its aim to identify the victims whose assets were confiscated by the Nazis. read more »
As is evident from Ben Shephard's masterful 'The Long Road Home - The Aftermath of the Second World War', the five years following the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and the end of World War II in the spring of 1945, when hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors languished in Displaced Persons camps, indeed constituted an era. read more »
The alleged Nazi collaborator John Demjanjuk is to go on a hunger strike unless the court allows him to present evidence that could exonerate him, his attorney has said. The verdict in the Demjanjuk trial is expected in March. read more »
A federal appeals court has confirmed the deportation order against Ukrainian-born Osyp Firishchak, who had concealed his membership in a Nazi-run police force when immigrating to the US in 1949. read more »
In Budapest, Sandor Kepiro has been formally charged by prosecutors for allegedly taking part in the murder of 1,200 civilians and partisan fighters in Serbia in January 1942. read more »
The former Swedish neo-Nazi leader Anders Högström, who organized the theft of the ‘Arbeit macht frei’ sign from Auschwitz, has been transferred to his home country to serve his three-year prison sentence. read more »
Maria Altmann, who escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna and returned to wage a triumphant fight to recover Gustav Klimt's iconic gold portrait of her remarkable aunt, has died. Ronald S. Lauder said: "She never stopped believing that the paintings would come out. I thank her for her resilience." read more »
Holocaust survivors are set to picket a golf tournament in South Florida sponsored by the international insurance company Allianz. read more »
Auschwitz is crumbling - the world's most powerful and important testament to Nazi Germany's crimes falling victim to age and mass tourism. Now guardians of the memorial site are waging an urgent effort to save what they can before it is too late. read more »
The Polish government has issued an official request asking museums at former Nazi death camps located on its territory to replace their Polish internet suffix ‘.pl.’ with more neutral suffixes in order to counter the false notion that the camps were run by Poland. read more »
A large delegation of Muslim leaders, Holocaust survivors and European statesmen has visited Auschwitz to pay tribute to the millions killed in the Holocaust. read more »
In cities across the globe, events were held to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 66 years after the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops. read more »
WJC President Ronald S. Lauder, Vice-President Charlotte Knobloch and the head of the German Jewish community, Dieter Graumann, were part of the official delegation of German President Christian Wulff on his visit to the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz. read more »
Turkey will commemorate the Nazi Holocaust for the first time on Thursday, which marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, at İstanbul’s largest synagogue. read more »
At a commemoration at the European Parliament addressed by European Union politicians and Jewish leaders, World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder and European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor called for renewed efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and warned of rising anti-Semitism. read more »
Israel’s Holocaust memorial institution Yad Vashem has begun broadcasting videos about the Shoah in Farsi, in order to educate Iranians about the mass slaughter of Jews during World War II. read more »
At a ceremony at New York’s Park East Synagogue, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said that the denial of the Shoah was intolerable. read more »
In Halifax, the Canadian Jewish Congress has unveiled a monument commemorating the Canadian authorities’ fateful decision in 1939 to turn away a steamship carrying Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. read more »
Sir Nicholas Winton, 101, of Britain attended the premiere of Slovak director Matej Minac's documentary Nicky's Family on how he saved the lives of 669 Jewish children from then Czechoslovakia just before World War Two broke out. read more »
A new drama-documentary on the story of Nicholas Winton, the British man who saved 669 children, most of them Jews, from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, is being premiered in Prague. read more »
Eradicating the scourge of genocide must be an American foreign policy priority. Indeed, it must be a priority of every civilized nation, of every civilized human being. read more »
The alleged Nazi war criminal Ivan (John) Demjanjuk has been indicted by the Spanish Supreme Court on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. He is currently on trial in Munich on separate charges, and a verdict is expected in March. read more »
Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal also known as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’ for his hideous treatment of Jews in Nazi-occupied France, was reportedly a paid agent of the German intelligence service BND during the 1960s. read more »
WJC President Ronald S. Lauder has called on courts and authorities in the United States to quickly pave the way for the extradition of the alleged Nazi war criminal Peter Egner, 88, to Serbia, where he is to stand trial on charges of genocide. read more »
An anti-Semitic writer who has been described by campaigners as a Holocaust denier is believed to be working as a distributor for the internet platform WikiLeaks in Russia. read more »
A video game in which Jewish concentration camp inmates kill Nazi guards has been called by Jewish organizations "horrific and inappropriate." read more »
The German government is to pay € 60 million (US$ 80 million) over the coming months into a fund for the preservation of the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. read more »
The Czech Republic’s Constitutional Court has rejected a restitution claim brought by the descendants of the Jewish owner of a button factory seized by the Nazis in 1939 and later nationalized. read more »
Germany has agreed to double to nearly 150 million dollars its annual funding for home care provided to Holocaust survivors. The change takes into account "the sharply increased need for home care" for elderly survivors. read more »
The US House of Representatives has unanimously approved a bipartisan resolution urging care for elderly survivors of the Shoah. read more »
A Swedish TV documentary accused the late father of German-born Queen Silvia of Sweden, Walter Sommerlath, of making a fortune from a factory seized from its Jewish owners by the Nazis. read more »
The Serbian government has requested the extradition of the US citizen Peter Egner, whom it accuses of committing genocide and other crimes as a Nazi officer in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia during World War II. read more »
Polish prosecutors have said the former Swedish neo-Nazi leader Anders Högström and two Polish nationals had confessed to the theft last year of the notorious ‘Arbeit macht frei’ sign, which the Nazis hung over the entrance gate of Auschwitz. read more »
By Carol Glatz, Catholic News Service read more »
Bishop Bernard Fellay, the head of the Society of Pius X (SSPX), has threatened to expel Bishop Richard Williamson after it emerged that Williamson retained a lawyer for his upcoming appeal trial who is closely connected to neo-Nazi groups in Germany. read more »
An episode of the popular Australian talent show ‘The X Factor’ featured the American pop singer Ke$ha performing her hit single ‘We R Who We R’ with a dance troupe wearing costumes and caps similar to those worn by Nazi SS fighters during World War II. read more »
The parliament of Austria has passed a bill to provide US$ 27 million in federal funds for restoring Jewish cemeteries over the next 20 years. read more »
The recent revelation that U.S. government officials gave aid and comfort to some Nazi war criminals and collaborators for several decades is as shocking as Claude Rain’s discovery in Casablanca that gambling was going on in Rick’s Café. read more »
A US$ 9.5 million project funded by the European Union to connect Shoah-related documents throughout Europe has been launched in Brussels. read more »
In the aftermath of the discovery of a $42.5 million fraud at the Claims Conference, a group of Holocaust survivors has called for the appointment of an ombudsman. read more »
A secret US Justice Department report written in 2006 accuses the post-war US government of knowingly making America a “safe haven” for several Nazi war criminals. read more »
Guillaume Pepy, the CEO of the state-owned French railway company SNCF, has issued statement apologizing for SNCF’s collaboration in sending some 76,000 French Jews to the Nazi death camps during World War II. read more »
German dictator Adolf Hitler's Nazi party “actively worked to destroy Europe's Jews financially,” and nearly a third of the German war effort was paid for with money stolen from Jews, according a new study about the role of the German Finance Ministry during the ‘Third Reich’. read more »
Lithuania’s parliament has debated and given initial backing for a plan to provide some compensation for communal property seized from Jewish communities by the Nazi and Soviet regimes during and after World War II. read more »
Justice officials in the United States have arrested, and brought charges against, 17 people who allegedly defrauded Holocaust compensation and pension funds administered by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. read more »
Jewish leaders in Italy have criticized a TV series that portrayed wartime Pope Pius XII as working forcefully to save Jews from the Nazi onslaught as "unacceptable revisionism.” read more »
It is bad enough that 60 years had to pass until it was decided, in 2005, to take a closer look at the role the German Foreign Office played in the Third Reich. The four historians who undertook this task have now concluded that the ministry was a "criminal organization“. read more »
Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust and families of the victims have filed a lawsuit against the Hungarian government and its two state-owned railway companies in a court in Washington, DC, accusing them of aiding to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps during World War II. read more »
Holocaust survivors have asked the European Commission to investigate claims that the Vatican’s financial arm laundered money stolen from Jews and others in the former Yugoslavia during World War II. read more »
A task force of historians commissioned in 2005 by then-Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has found that during the Nazi-era many German diplomats actively supported the genocide of Jews and later covered up their involvement in these crimes read more »
A new law passed by the authorities in the city of Porto Alegre in southern Brazil will require all public schools to include Holocaust education in their curriculum. read more »
More than 20,000 artworks stolen by the Nazis from Jews in occupied Belgium and France during World War II can now be searched in an online catalog. read more »
Holocaust survivors and fellow Republicans have rebuked Rich Iott, a congressional candidate for the Republican Party in Ohio, for dressing up like a Nazi during re-enactments of World War II history. read more »
Field Marshal Philippe Pétain, who presided the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, personally ordered to make anti-Jewish legislation harsher, French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld has said, citing a newly unveiled document. read more »
Menachem Z. Rosensaft is one of nine members of the US Holocaust Memorial Council that were appointed last week by US President Barack Obama. read more »
A human rights in Poland group is taking legal action against the British revisionist David Irving for “minimizing” the scale of Nazi atrocities, the ‘Jerusalem Post’ reports. read more »
The Holocaust denier David Irving is set to lead guided tours of former Nazi death camps, including Auschwitz and Treblinka, the newspaper ‘Daily Mail’ reports. read more »
The appeal of Bishop Richard Williamson against his conviction for Holocaust denial by a German court will be held at the end of November, and the cleric is set to appear in person. read more »
As three Greek human rights activists are to go on trial for speaking out against judges who acquitted the extreme-right politician Kostas Plevris, the World Jewish Congress has called on the European Parliament to send an official observer to watch the trial in Athens. read more »
"This is the best, most respectable answer to Nazism and anti-Semitism, which once removed us from here, and proof that the people of Israel live,” Israeli Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger said at the rededication of the Óbuda Synagogue in Budapest, Hungary. read more »
Jewish leaders have criticized Romanian authorities for persisting with the issue of a coin in honor of the late PM Miron Cristea, who stripped many Jews of their citizenship in 1939. read more »
The Canadian Jewish Congress has criticized posthumous honors for the first female mayor of Ottawa because of her opposition to taking in Jewish refugees during World War II. read more »
Eight Muslim American leaders, who visited the sites of former Nazi concentration camps and met with Holocaust survivors earlier this month, have signed a statement condemning Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. read more »
In Sofia, Israel’s President Shimon Peres has paid tribute to Bulgaria’s record with respect to the plight of its Jewish population during World War II. read more »
Romania’s National Bank has been strongly criticized after minting a coin which depicts the late patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Miron Cristea, who as prime minister stripped many Jews of their citizenship in 1939. read more »
A 93-year-old man living in southern Germany could be charged with participating in the murder of Jewish prisoners in the Nazi slave labor camp Treblinka during World War II. read more »
A monument to victims of World War II in Marmande was spray-painted with anti-Semitic graffiti. read more »
A federal judge in Washington, DC has issued a ruling against the Russian government for its refusal to return a library of historic books and documents to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. read more »
A tug-of-war in the United States over who owns a huge art trove seized by Hungary's Nazi henchmen is the most prominent example of disputed restitution policies in formerly communist eastern Europe - but by no means the only one. read more »
Heirs of the late Hungarian Jewish banker and art collector Baron Mor Lipot Herzog are suing the Hungarian government for the return of more than 40 paintings seized during World War II and estimated to be worth more than US$ 100 million. read more »
Prosecutors in Germany have filed charges against a 90-year-old man for allegedly helping to murder 430,000 Jews during World War II. read more »
The websites of two former Nazi concentration camps have been attacked by hackers, who replaced a ‘Book of the Dead’ on the Buchenwald pages with neo-Nazi slogans and completely erased the Mittelbau-Dora site. read more »
The nonprofit group Save a Torah has agreed it will only give provenances of its Torah scrolls “if there is documentation or an independent verifiable witness to such history,” according to an agreement with Maryland officials. read more »
American movie director Oliver Stone has alleged that Jewish control of the media was preventing an open debate about the Holocaust. He also alleged that the Jewish lobby in Washington was controlling US foreign policy. read more »
The Leopold Museum in Vienna, Austria has agreed to pay US$ 19 million to the heirs of a former Jewish art dealer for being allowed to keep an Egon Schiele painting looted by the Nazis in 1939. read more »
A huge poster of a Nazi swastika behind a naked pin-up model clad only in a Mickey Mouse-mask and stretched across a building has stirred controversy in Poland. read more »
The state-owned French railway company SNCF may disclose details about the role it played in transporting Jews to the Nazi death camps during World War II if California passes a bill requiring it to do so. read more »
The decision by a Riga court to give a march by sympathizers of Nazi Germany the go ahead has upset Latvia’s Prime Minister Dombrovskis and his Foreign Minister Ronis. read more »
Plans by filmmakers in India to make a film on Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler that will claim that the despot loved India and that he indirectly contributed to its independence have outraged members of the Jewish community. read more »
The British government has appointed a former ambassador as its first-ever envoy to deal with post-Holocaust issues. read more »
Kirsten Gillibrand, the US senator for New York, has asked the Obama administration to investigate reports of neglect and vandalism at Jewish graveyards in Europe. read more »
By Menachem Z. Rosensaft published in The Huffington Post read more »
John Demjanjuk, who is on trial in Germany for helping to murder 27,900 Jews at a Nazi death camp, was taken to hospital Tuesday after complaining of heart problems. read more »
More than six decades after its destruction in the ‘Kristallnacht’ pogrom of November 1938, the White Stork Synagogue in the Polish city of Wroclaw (formerly Breslau) has been re-dedicated following intensive renovation work. read more »
The Jewish Museum of Berlin is to get an extension to its current building which is to house one of the most important research and education centers on the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry. read more »
Marta Rosenberg, an heiress to the widow of Oskar Schindler, has filed a lawsuit against a New York art dealer in order to stop the US$ 2.2 million sale of a copy of ‘Schindler’s List’, which she alleges is a fake. read more »
At the site of the Nazis’ first concentration camp in Dachau, near Munich, survivors and officials commemorated the anniversary of the camp's liberation by US soldiers in 1945. read more »
The Greek government has assured the local Jewish community that legal proceedings against Nazi war criminals such as Alois Brunner, who was responsible for the deportation of 50,000 Greek Jews during World War II, would soon be possible. read more »
A court in the Netherlands has acquitted a Muslim organization of charges of inciting hate with a cartoon that questions the Holocaust. read more »
In an interview with 'Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung', World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder says memorials like in Bergen-Belsen need to be preserved for future generations. read more »
In Germany, ceremonies were held on Sunday to mark the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen. read more »
The bishop of the ultra-conservative Catholic group Society of St.Pius X, Richard Williamson, has been convicted by a German court to pay a fine for questioning the Holocaust. read more »
An ID card being used as a key piece of evidence in the trial against Ivan (John) Demjanjuk appears to be original, an expert witness has told the court in Munich, Germany. read more »
Richard Williamson, the bishop of the ultra-conservative Catholic Society of St. Pius X who denied the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps in a TV interview, will not be present at his trial in Regensburg, Germany, on Friday. read more »
Ivan (John) Demjanjuk, who is on trial in Germany for allegedly helping in the murder of 27,900 Jews at the Nazi camp Sobibor during World War II, has told the court that he was an “innocent victim" and has been falsely hunted for decades. read more »
In a ceremony on Sunday, survivors and German politicians marked the 65th anniversary of the liberation by American troops of the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald, where an estimated 56,000 people perished. read more »
The Swedish former neo-Nazi leader Anders Högström is to be extradited to Poland on Friday over the theft of the ‘Arbeit macht frei’ sign from the former Auschwitz death camp read more »
The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants has called on authorities in the US state of Maryland to launch an investigation into the sale of Holocaust-era Torah scrolls. read more »
One of the remaining five copies of ‘Schindler's List’, containing names of Jews saved from deportation to the Nazi death camps, has been put up for sale in New York. read more »
A court in Aachen, Germany has handed Heinrich Boere, a 88-year-old former member of the SS, a life sentence for the murder of three Dutch civilians in 1944. read more »
Food coupons and other documents related to leading Nazi officials at the Auschwitz death camp have been found in the attic of a nearby house, where they had lain unseen for decades. read more »
Around 2,000 Latvians who fought in the Nazi German ‘Waffen SS’ during World War II and their supporters have staged their annual march through the Latvian capital, Riga. read more »
Formula One chief executive Bernie Ecclestone, who last year praised Adolf Hitler for “being able to get things done”, has again made controversial statements on this subject. read more »
Anti-Semitic graffiti and slogans have been sprayed on monuments at the former Nazi concentration camp of Plaszow, in southern Poland. read more »
A Stockholm court ruled that Anders Högström can be extradited to Poland over his suspected involvement in the theft of the ‘Arbeit macht frei’ sign from the former Auschwitz death camp. read more »
Hungary’s President Laszlo Solyom has signed into law a bill that makes the denial of the Holocaust punishable by up to three years in jail. read more »
The German government is increasing its funding for home care services provided to old-age Holocaust survivors by US$ 37 million this year. read more »
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has decorated Britons who saved Jews and others from the Nazi onslaught during World War II with the new ‘Hero of the Holocaust’ medal. read more »
Some scams rise above the merely outrageous to the profane. Such is plainly the case with Rabbi Menachem Youlus, the DC-area Torah scribe who claims to have "rescued" more than 1,000 Holocaust-era Torah scrolls. read more »
Turkey's foreign minister, has warned of a breakdown in ties with Washington after a committee of the US House of Representatives approved a resolution labeling the World War I-era mass killings of Armenians a “genocide.” read more »
The prefect of the Vatican’s Secret Archives, has said it would likely take five years before the archives on the pontificate of war-time Pope Pius XII are cataloged and opened to historians. read more »
The Munich trial of alleged Nazi death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk will take months longer than had been anticipated, prosecutors said on Wednesday. read more »
The Polish government has ordered the municipality of Przemysl, in southeastern Poland, to return its ancient graveyard to the Jewish community. read more »
Hungary’s National Assembly has voted in favor of making the denial or belittling of the Holocaust a criminal offense, punishable by up to three years imprisonment. read more »
A delegation of the African Jewish Congress has visited the Jewish community in Nambia and also took part in commemorations of the massacres of Herero and San committed by German colonialists a century ago. read more »
Russian PM Putin has told his Israeli counterpart Netanyahu that Russia would soon build a museum dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust. Netanyahu in response said Israel would erect a memorial dedicated to the efforts of the Soviet Red Army in liberating Europe during World War II. read more »
The Vatican is planning to post selected documents from its World War II archives on the internet, according to the Catholic news agency ‘Zenit’. read more »
Stockholm police have arrested the former Swedish neo-Nazi leader Anders Högström, who is wanted in Poland over the theft of the ‘Arbeit macht frei" sign from Auschwitz. read more »
The French ‘Nazi hunter’ Serge Klarsfeld has urged Muslims and Jews to learn about their mutual suffering as a way to bring them closer, at a series of conferences on the Shoah held in several Arab countries and Israel. read more »
The trial in Munich, Germany of Ivan Demjanjuk, 89, was adjourned for a second day running on Thursday after doctors said the defendant was feeling unwell. read more »
A court in Germany has summoned the Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson to attend a trial in April where he is to face charges of incitement for his belittling of the Holocaust, which is a crime in Germany. read more »
World Jewish Congress criticizes Pope's decision to beatify controversial predecessor read more »
Ronald S. Lauder: Bernie Ecclestones Hitler eulogy frightening read more »
Ronald S. Lauder: "Duty to bring Nazi war criminals to justice" read more »
"German authorities must ensure that Nazi war criminals are brought to justice" read more »
Ronald S. Lauder hails President Fernández de Kirchner for her "courageous decision" read more »
"Holocaust denial is not an opinion, but a crime" read more »
From the Journal by the Israel Council on Foreign Relations download »
Efraim Zuroff's great-uncle was kidnapped in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 13, 1941, by a gang of Lithuanians "roaming the streets of the city looking for Jews with beards to arrest." read more »
More than sixty years after the end of the Holocaust, and nearly two decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Jewish communities in East Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union are still struggling with the question of how to reclaim the properties which were taken from them during the Nazi and Communist regimes. download »
Visitors entering the Terror Háza [House of Terror] in Budapest are immediately confronted with the political agenda of the public foundation that operates this popular museum - one of the most visited attractions in the Hungarian capital. download »
Vatican decree signed by Benedict XVI on the declaration of venerability 17 people, including Pius XII. The declaration of venerability starts the process of beatification of individuals. read more »
Reflections, from Bergen-Belsen to the White House by Menachem Z. Rosensaft read more »
Restitution
The WJC has led a number of restitution efforts over the past decades and was a founding member of the World Jewish Restitution Organisation (WJRO). However there are still some countries that have not yet adequately addressed the issue of property restitution.
Restitution and compensation are primarily about justice and not only about money. It is about honouring those who perished in the Shoah and helping those who survived unimaginable anguish in the Nazi death camps.
Negotiations should be conducted in the framework of the WJRO (which includes the Claims Conference and other international Jewish organizations) in coordination with the Israeli government and with the support of the US government and the European Union.
The distribution of any compensation monies should not be handled by the WJC. The
WJC does not seek any form of commission or gratification payments from Holocaust-era compensation or restitution agreements.
Funds destined for Holocaust survivors, or their heirs, should be transferred to them without delay.
Poland needs to urgently implement the law allowing for the return of confiscated properties, or alternatively for the payment of adequate compensation, to victims of the Holocaust or their heirs.
Bosnia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia should also engage in immediate negotiations to bring closure to this issue in the interests of all.
The German government and others need to ensure that poor survivors of the Shoah continue to have access to adequate medical and social services, and receive a decent pension.
Holocaust commemoration and education
Some countries do not adequately commemorate WWII- and Holocaust-related events. In many eastern European countries, Holocaust education is insufficient and/or inaccurate.
Initiatives by international organisations, governments, NGOs and private individuals to organise commemorative events on Holocaust related anniversaries are important and should be welcomed.
Political leaders and well-known personalities should be encouraged to participate in such events, as they serve as an important reminder for today’s generation.
Holocaust education should be included in every school curriculum, in all countries. Providing good education and information about the Holocaust becomes even more important as Shoah survivors will soon no longer be alive to tell their story.
Holocaust Denial
The denial or trivialization of the Holocaust is becoming increasingly fashionable.
Denial of the Holocaust is abhorrent. It denigrates the memory of those who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis.
Denial of the Holocaust has become a political weapon by anti-Semites, especially in Europe. EU wide legislation bringing a unified approach to legal action against Holocaust deniers is imperative.
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