This is the Forward’s coverage of the Holocaust (also called the Shoah), the genocide of Europe’s Jews committed by the Nazis during World War II.
Holocaust
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News For Bar Mitzvah Boy and Survivor, Love of Chess Bridges 76-Year Age Gap
Thirteen-year-old Zachary Targoff was feeling cornered. His options were running out. Across the table, 90-year-old Herman Bomze sat impassively, waiting. “I made a bad move there,” Zachary said. A minute passed in tense silence. Then Zachary accepted his demise. “I’m going to go ahead and resign,” he said. Thus ended the latest of the improbable…
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The Schmooze Eric Clapton Headlines Auschwitz Music Festival
Eric Clapton headlined the fifth annual Life Festival in Oswiecim, Poland late this month. Yes, you read that right. Eric Clapton just played Auschwitz. Well, kind of. The Oswiecim Life Festival started in 2010, and was created by Darek Maciborek, a radio DJ, who wanted to change the negative associations brought up by his hometown….
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Fast Forward Athens Holocaust Memorial Vandalized With Threats Against Jews
Vandals have defaced the Holocaust Memorial in Athens, writing threats against the Jewish community on it. The incident occurred Friday and police were immediately called to the scene, where they took fingerprints and opened an investigation, said Victor Eliezer, the secretary general of the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece. The graffiti included a…
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Culture A Holocaust Romance Tied to a Necklace, Filled With Clichés
Love and Treasure By Ayelet Waldman Knopf, 352 pages, $26.95 A historical novel, the Hungarian literary critic Georg Lukács argued, should reach only as far backwards as the era of the author’s grandparents. That is because novelists build not balanced panoramas, but rather individual portraits. Real human beings are unrealistic, because they are improbably idiosyncratic….
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Fast Forward Grave Robbers Target Ukraine Holocaust Victims
Grave robbers in Ukraine raided the final resting place of Jews executed en masse during the Holocaust, a Kiev-based watchdog on anti-Semitism reported. The raid occurred on June 20 near Volodymyr-Volynsky, a western city located just north of Lviv, according to Jewish Kiev group which monitors anti-Semitic attacks in Ukraine. Nazis and local collaborators were…
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News Leo Melamed Retraces Path of Escape From Nazis to Japanese Port
To this day, Leo Melamed recalls vividly the first thing his mother did when his family walked off the boat at the small Japanese port city of Tsuruga. “She told me that she can now let go of my hand,” Melamed recalled. “She held my hand for two years straight.” It was the first safe…
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News More Than Half of NYC Holocaust Survivors Living in Poverty Despite Reparations
Ninety-year-old Sonia Anger survived the Nazis by fleeing Romania after the Germans invaded in 1941 and taking refuge in the Ural Mountains. Today, the brown-haired, 5-foot-6-inch widow struggles to survive in New York City on a monthly Social Security check of $1,130, or $14,000 a year. “I’m sweeping the floor, and have little to eat,…
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Culture What’s the Difference Between Mass Killing and Genocide?
Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about “neo-Nazi” as a term for anti-Arab hooligans among Israel’s settler population, explaining why I thought it inappropriate. Because the Nazis, I said, have rightly come to represent the ultimate in monstrously hateful human conduct, it has become common to invoke them in condemning all forms of violent…
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