Stars of contemporary Yiddish culture turned out for an emotional gala memorial concert honoring Yiddish diva Adrienne Cooper, an influential performer, teacher and composer. Cooper died one year ago of cancer at the age of 65. A powerful stage presence, Cooper worked at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in the 1970s and 1980s, and…
A Netherlands church official apologized to a Jewish group for a memorial ceremony that commemorated Holocaust victims with soldiers who died fighting for Nazi Germany. Rob Mutsaerts, a bishop from Den Bosch in the southern Netherlands, in a letter last week expressed his regret to the small Jewish organization JFN. Mutsaerts apologized for a sermon…
A Holocaust memorial in Rhodes was defaced by unknown vandals. The Holocaust Memorial to the Jews of Rhodes was spray painted with swastikas on all six sides of the memorial. The initials AME also were spray painted on the monument, and may refer to an unknown organization, according to the Greek Helsinki Monitor. The attack…
Following protests, the Dutch town of Geffen will not display the names of German Wehrmacht soldiers along with Jewish Holocaust victims on a new monument. The monument, scheduled to be unveiled Saturday in the eastern Netherlands town, “was meant to promote reconciliation but instead caused controversy,” Mayor Roel Augusteijn said at a televised news conference…
A Dutch rabbi has demanded that the names of his relatives be removed from a monument which commemorates Jewish Holocaust victims along with German soldiers who died in World War II. “I don’t want my family members’ names to appear next to the names of German murderers,” Rabbi Wim van Dijk said in a filmed…
More than 1,000 people bid farewell on Tuesday to former U.S. Senator Arlen Specter at a service featuring tributes by family and dignitaries and concluding with Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” Specter died at his Philadelphia home on Sunday after battling non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was 82. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and former Pennsylvania Governor Ed…
September 5 was meant to be something of an annual holiday in Michal Shahar?s family. It was the date that she moved with her parents to Israel from Romania in 1963. Nine years later, they planned a double celebration: Her father, Kehat Shorr, was representing his new nation at the Olympics that day, coaching the…
Recently, I sat with my sons in our Tel Aviv apartment and watched a documentary about the massacre at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. Five days before the end of the games, eight Palestinian terrorists from the group Black September broke into the Olympic Village, killing two Israelis and taking nine others hostage. The…
