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Culture When Auschwitz Was a Jewish Town
Of all the things and places to give an endearing Jewish name, Auschwitz would seem the most unlikely. Oshpitzin — which comes from the Aramaic word for guest, ushpizin, and is the name of a traditional Sukkot prayer that welcomes guests — was how Jews once referred to Oswiecim, the Polish town that would become…
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Breaking News Polish MP Calls For End to Jewish World War II Property Restitution
Polish MP Slawomir Kopycinski called for the shuttering of the Regulatory Commission for Jewish Communities, a Polish body that restores property owned by Holocaust victims to its legal heirs. Kopycinski called the commission ”the fourth partition of Poland” in a Thursday press conference, alluding to previous partitions of the country in the 1700s and again…
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Culture Still Waiting for Godot
Killing the Second Dog By Marek Hlasko, translated from the Polish by Tomasz Mirkowicz New Vessel Press, 143 pages, $15.99 In the aftermath of World War II, while Europe was responding to the dissipation of the old empires and feudal orders by reconfiguring itself around capitalist and communist ideologies, its novelists took it upon themselves…
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The Schmooze ‘Ida’: Conversation with Director Pawel Pawlikowski
“Ida,” a fascinating and disquieting Polish language film written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, is a post-Soviet Polish rumination, a mystery with religious and political overtones. Pronounced as “Eeda,” Pawlikowski told me during our chat: “I needed a good name and remembered the Jewish Polish actress Ida Kaminska. It was a name I liked, but…
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News Poland’s Dueling Holocaust Monuments to ‘Righteous Gentiles’ Spark Painful Debate
In Poland, where 3 million Polish Jews died at Nazi hands, not one but two new monuments are being planned in Warsaw that will memorialize — and, some fear, distort the role of — the several thousand non-Jewish Poles who tried to save them. As Holocaust Remembrance Day approaches, both projects are generating heated criticism….
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Life Cecylja Klaften Educated Polish Girls
Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. Forward Association An unsung hero of Jewish girls education in inter-war Poland, Dr. Cecylja Klaften came to New York City in 1938 as part of a fundraising effort held at Mecca Temple…
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Breaking News Warsaw Marks Anniversary of Ghetto Uprising
Warsaw residents, including representatives of the Jewish community, marked the 71st anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Saturday’s ceremony featured prayers and the laying of wreaths at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in the Polish capital. The approximately 200 participants then marched to the Umschlagplatz square, the site where Jews in the early 1940s…
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Opinion What I Learned From Passover in Poland
A Passover Seder in prewar Europe. Every other spring, the Zionist-Socialist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair takes its bogrim, the group of usually 16-year-old leaders from around the world, on a weeklong trip to Poland. When it was my turn in 2006, the dates fell on Passover. The nine of us from Vienna boarded a night…
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Film & TV Bonhoeffer biopic tells of a pastor turned would-be Hitler assassin — but is the story true?
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News What Mike Huckabee’s ‘Kids Guide to Israel’ says about his views
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