It took the directors of the new documentary Legacy nearly 10 years to complete the film, and by the time they had, many of the 200 aging Jewish gauchos interviewed had died.Perhaps that contributed to the emotional atmosphere permeating the theater here on the evening of Oct. 14, when the film had its commercial release. […]

The previously unknown diary of 18-year-old Helga Deen – who was murdered along with her family by the Nazis at the Sobibor death camp in 1943 – has been loaned to the Tilburg Regional Archive in the Netherlands. In her diary, Helga describes her experiences, feelings and surroundings at the Dutch Vught concentration camp in […]

Everybody likes a good party. And theres nothing like a nice round number to serve as an excuse for one. The number in question is 350. As in 350 years ago this month, 23 bedraggled Jewish refugees arrived in New Amsterdam and asked to stay. The Jews were thrown out of the settlement of Recife, […]

Gisela Blume is a convert to Judaism who has dedicated her life to the restoration and preservation of Fuerth’s historic Jewish cemetery. In her work as a genealogist, she has acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of Fuerth’s Jewish community from the sixteenth century to the founding of the first Jewish orphanage in Germany in 1762 by […]

ATHENS, Aug. 4 (JTA) Although the largest Jewish community in Greece resides in Athens, Jews from Salonika remnants of a once-thriving community are more active and cohesive. In Salonika, known in Greek as Thessaloniki, where 1,000 of the countrys 5,000 Jews live today, the synagogue has a regular minyan and younger Jews gather at the […]

On August 26, 1827, Tsar Nicholas I published the Recruitment Decree calling for conscription of Jewish boys between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. These boys were known as Cantonists, derived from the term canton, referring to the districts where they were sent and the barracks in which they were kept. Conscripts under the age […]

“Jews are commanded to surely obliterate the memory of Amalek from beneath the Heavens. I was given the privilege of erasing this descendant of Amalek in our generation, and I did,” said Shalom Nagar, 65, an Israeli of Yemenite origin who physically carried out the execution of the Nazi architect of the Final Solution, Adolf […]

(1860-1904) > In Basle I founded the Jewish state . . . Maybe in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will realize it. Theodor (Binyamin Zeev) Herzl, the visionary of Zionism, was born in Budapest in 1860. He was educated in the spirit of the German­Jewish Enlightenment of the period, learning to appreciate secular culture. […]

A late-night visit from a refugee rabbi during World War II convinced a Portuguese official to save Jews from Hitler. Rabbi Haim Kruger, a refugee in France, and Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Portugals consul general in Bordeaux, spoke all through the night about the problems of the war, Sebastiao de Sousa Mendes, the consuls son, […]

World War II to the Present: Lieutenant Frances Slanger: Jewish Nurse Killed In World War II On the morning of October 21, 1944, Lieutenant Frances Slanger of the U.S. Army Nurses Corps mailed a letter to STARS AND STRIPES telling the GIs how proud she was of them. That evening her unit was the target […]