Why is this night different from all other nights? Ironically, SS General Juergen Stroup pondered that dilemma outside the walled and wircd ghetto of Warsaw. He had unleased his Waffen-SS,SS police, Lithuanian militia and Webrmacht for an aktion the SS had a great deal of experience with. Things didn’t go as planned. On that 19.43 […]

He worked day and night to save millions of Jews. His activities forced Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board that saved 100,000 Jews in Europe. Here’s a Mitzva you can do in the spirit of Peseach that will make an old man very happy. Every once in a while I visit an elderly man […]

A new series of stamps dedicated to the Aleph-Bet (the Hebrew alphabet) were issued in February. As Prof. Yosef Naveh of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem explained, “In the second millenium BCE, the Babylonians and Assyrians wrote in Cuneiform, and the Egyptians in hieroglyphs. These forms of writing included hundreds of signs, and only scribes […]

Cairo, with its close to 18 million inhabitants, has a total Jewish population of 52 families. Most of them live in and around the city of Old Cairo, a neighborhood surrounded by 29 mosques and 20 churches. The Great Synagogue, where occasional religious services are held, is situated in this area. The second Jewish home […]

An Israeli committee has begun hearing testimony about some 2,000 Jews abducted during Argentina’s infamous military dictatorship of the 1970s. This year is the 25th anniversary of the coup that led to a seven-year-long dictatorship led by a military junta. During this period, approxiraately 30,000 Argentines were abducted, imprisoned or murdered. Earlier this month, the […]

Do Poles, along with Germans, bear guilt for the Holocaust? It is hard to imagine a more absurd claim. Not a single Polish family was spared by Hitler and Stalin. The two totalitarian dictatorships obliterated three million Poles and three million Polish citizens classified as Jews by the Nazis. Poland was the first country to […]

PARIS-Alois Brunner, the Nazi officer who sent 170,000 Jews to concentration camps and is credited with designing mobile gas wagons to kill Jews before the creation of concentration camps, is probably still living well in Damascus, Syria. ButonMarch2, he was tried in absentia in Paris and found guilty of crimes against humanity. I There were […]

1600s BCE – Jews migrate from Canaan to Egypt 1200s BCE – Exodus from Egypt 1250 BCE – Jewish conquest of Canaan 1025-1006 BCE – Kingdom of Saul 990-968 BCE – Kingdom of David 968-928 BCE – Kingdom of Solomon 940 BCE – First Temple is built 928 BCE – Division of Jewish kingdom into […]

In Our Hearts We Were Giants By Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev Carroll & Graf, 305 pages, $25. Imagine the terror of a having a vicious German Shepherd bark at you on the train platform at Auschwitz. Now imagine that the dog is barking at you as your tiny body is lifted from a cattle […]