Honoured to be Australian

THE words of our national anthem urge us to “rejoice” as a nation, and Australia Day seems the ideal opportunity to do just that. As Australians generally – and as Jewish Australians particularly – we have much to rejoice about; living in a free and, as world standards go, an inordinately decent society that offers levels of tolerance, a celebration of cultural harmony, and an abiding sense of stability and peace perhaps unparalleled on the planet.

For a Jewish community, of which a great proportion descends from the post-Holocaust generation that arrived on what writer Serge Liberman aptly described as Australia’s “firmer shores”, this remote, somewhat barren continent provided a sense of salvation.

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Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Photo: AJN file

OSWIECIM, Poland — Israel is prepared to fight a new Amalek 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said at the former death camp.

At a ceremony on January 27 marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Netanyahu said Auschwitz is a reminder that one must warn the world of dangers while defending oneself.

“We will always remember what the Nazi Amalek did to us, and we won’t forget to be prepared for the new Amalek, who is making an appearance on the stage of history and once again threatening to destroy the Jews,” he said.

“We will not take this lightly and believe that these are empty statements. We will not be calm as if threats and denial of the Holocaust were just blank words. We will never forget and always remember to stand guard.”

The nation of Amalek has been Israel’s nemesis since the Exodus from Egypt. Nations that have tried to destroy Israel often are referred to as descendants of Amalek.
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Pope Benedict at the Western Wall in May 2009. Photo: AJN file

ROME — An Italian Jewish community leader told Pope Benedict that his wartime predecessor Pius XII should have spoken out more forcefully against the Holocaust to show solidarity with Jews being led to the “ovens of Auschwitz”.

The comments, from the president of Rome’s Jewish community Riccardo Pacifici, were made during the Pope’s first visit to Rome’s synagogue on January 17 and were some of the bluntest ever spoken by a Jewish leader in public to a Pope.

“The silence of Pius XII before the Shoah, still hurts because something should have been done,” Pacifici told the Pope, using the Hebrew word for the Holocaust.

“Maybe it would not have stopped the death trains, but it would have sent a signal, a word of extreme comfort, of human solidarity, towards those brothers of ours transported to the ovens of Auschwitz,” he said.

The visit, Benedict’s third trip to a synagogue since becoming Pope in 2005, has deeply split Italy’s Jewish community after he advanced Pius XII on the path towards sainthood last month. Many Jews say Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, did not do enough to help Jews facing persecution by Nazi Germany.
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Melbourne Holocaust survivor Frank Vajda sits in the reflective space at St Kilda Town Hall dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg. Photo: Peter Haskin

PETER KOHN

THE heroism of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved up to 100,000 Jews during the Holocaust, will be honoured on the weekend.

Melbourne survivors will gather at a ceremony at St Kilda Town Hall on Sunday January 17 at 11am to pay tribute to Wallenberg, who disappeared 65 years ago.

The annual event has the backing of B’nai B’rith’s Raoul Wallenberg Unit and the City of Port Philip, with Mayor Frank O’Connor due to address Sunday’s gathering.

Susan Ginesy, who was born in Budapest, was saved from deportation to the death camps when she was placed in one of the protected houses set up by Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat. She has written about her experiences in her memoirs, When I Was There … And Now.

Avraham Zeleznikow, who is a member of Raoul Wallenberg Unit and the elderly citizens committee at the City of Port Philip, said that while “most people are familiar with the story”, Wallenberg’s heroism needs to be commemorated, particularly in St Kilda and surrounding suburbs, where many Holocaust survivors live.
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Yad Vashem. Photo: AJN file

DALIA SABLE

SCHOOL and university teachers from across Australia are setting off for Israel to take part in an intensive course designed to broaden their knowledge of the Shoah.

The members of the 20-strong delegation are participants in the inaugural Gandel Holocaust Studies Program for Australian Educators.

Conducted by the Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies in Jerusalem, the initiative is a long-term course to educate and mentor the group, beginning with an intensive training seminar in Israel, followed by a year-long program back home.

“This is an extremely important initiative and we are delighted to be involved,” John Gandel said upon announcing the successful scholarship recipients.

“The participants will come home to intensify and broaden their study of the Holocaust in their work and to raise awareness of the Holocaust within their communities. We believe their visit to Israel and attendance at the Yad Vashem course will be a highlight of their professional careers and their life in general.”
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Holocaust survivor and author George Sternfeld at the Sydney Holocaust Museum, where he volunteers as a guide.

CHANTAL ABITBOL

IT took child Holocaust survivor George Sternfeld more than five decades to experience what had been denied to him -– his bar mitzvah.

“This opportunity sort of spontaneously came up, and after contemplating for about a minute or so, I said, ‘Why not?’” recalls the 70-year-old retired researcher from Randwick, who grew up in Communist Poland and chronicles the event in the first chapter of his newly-released memoir, Chocolate to Anzac Biscuits, published by the Sydney Jewish Museum.

His decision to have his bar mitzvah came after an emotional return to Poland and the home where he grew up -– the first time back since leaving more than 45 years ago -– during the 2005 March of the Living program.

“When I walked into the dining area, I could almost visualise my mother,” he recalls. “It was an amazing feeling to realise that I had left and moved on, and nothing had changed. I discovered that Poland is not my country anymore.”
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Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben. Photo: AJN file

PETER KOHN

FREDRICK Toben has been released from jail after serving a three-month sentence for contempt of court charges stemming from his denial of the Holocaust.

Toben walked free from South Australia’s Yatala prison early on November 12.

The Adelaide-based Holocaust denier, who spoke at a 2005 Holocaust denial conference in Iran, can now add Australia to the list of countries including Germany, Austria and the UK, where he has served prison time.

His Adelaide Institute reported on its website that Toben was “unbroken and unrepentant, and appears very refreshed and relaxed after his little holiday”.

The website also stated he was “welcomed home by his friends and supporters who held a celebratory dinner for him on November 12. During his speech on the night, he vowed to continue his work in demolishing the Holocaust lies.”
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Holocaust survivor Fred Stein remembers Kristallnacht.

AJN STAFF

MORE than 400 people turned out to mark the 71th anniversary of the Nazi’s Kristallnacht anti-Semitic pogrom at Emanuel School recently.

Among the guest speakers were Holocaust survivor Fred Stein and Kevin Russell, the great grandson of William Cooper, an Aboriginal man who protested outside the German Consulate against the persecution of German Jews in 1939.

Cooper’s demonstration came just weeks after Kristallnacht, when about 1400 synagogues were set ablaze and hundreds of Jews killed.

NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president Robin Margo said:  “It takes one’s breath away that people who had suffered, were suffering, so much themselves, who were not yet even counted as people in the Australian census, found it in their hearts to express such solidarity and compassion for another people, our people, subject to persecution in a country thousands of miles from Australia.”
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How did they get it so wrong?

SANITY eventually reigned this week, when Cambridge University Press agreed to withdraw its controversial religious studies textbook from bookshelves.

When alerted to the book’s content earlier this week, we could not believe what we were seeing and did some investigation to ensure it was no hoax.
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Sarah Fife at the entrance to the old city of Munich

SARAH AND TIM FIFE

WE headed to Munich. Dachau Concentration Camp, the reason for our visit to Munich, on the other hand proved to be an entirely different story.

The first concentration camp to be built by the Nazis, Dachau was, and continues to be, synonymous with the terror and horror of the Holocaust. The very name causes many people to shutter and, having stood in the enormous empty roll-call square where up to 30,000 prisoners once stood to be counted, I can see why.

We spent our first hours at Dachau making our way through yet another information-heavy (though, this time, interesting) exhibition, which gave a history of Dachau in addition to commentary on the war in general.
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