When Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba escaped Auschwitz in 1944, they didn’t just save themselves. The two men, both Slovak Jews, used data secretly compiled during their time as sonderkommandos in Auschwitz to write the eponymous Wetzler-Vrba report, which provided one of the first eyewitness accounts of the death camp’s infamous gas chambers. Publicized by…
TRNAVA, Slovakia (JTA) — Growing up, Robert Sajtlava remembers playing near what used to be his native city’s Orthodox Synagogue. A rectangular structure with a deceptively unimpressive facade, its ornate ceiling and interior walls suffered extensive damage from the precipitation leaking through the roof and, occasionally, by trespassers who came through the rickety fence. “It…
In the results of Saturday’s national elections announced Sunday, the People’s Party-Our Slovakia garnered 8 percent of the vote, three times more than expected, which is equal to 14 seats. The country’s parliament, the National Council, has 150 members. Party chairman Marian Kotleba had led the neo-Nazi Slovak Togetherness-National Party, a banned party that organized…
Tomas Stern was born decades after World War II, decades after Nazi Slovak militia fired bullets into a pile of hay, narrowly missing his father — not yet 5 years old — who lay trembling beneath the straw. “They got some information that there are some Jews hiding there, so they ran into the stable,”…
The policies of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister are starting to bear an eerie resemblance to climate change: The critics all look like a bunch of whining scaremongers prophesying an implausibly apocalyptic ruination that’s sure to come in some fuzzily distant end-time. Even if it’s true, it’s too far away to worry about. That is, until…
1913 •100 years ago Jews of Kiev Evicted Reports from Russia reveal that the Jews of Kiev are under renewed attack. An official administrative order announced that 580 Jewish families must leave the city immediately. The order was issued in the wake of revelations that a large of number of Jewish families had obtained residence…
I was born in a city in eastern Slovakia, called Bardejov. When I was growing up, we Jews made up nearly a third of the city. We had synagogues, schools, a number of communal organizations, even a couple of Hebrew publishing houses. Then came the Holocaust. Only several hundred of us survived. Some of us…
European officials must act to reverse the momentum of neo-Nazi political parties, the head of the European Jewish Congress said following a victory in Slovakia by a neo-Nazi candidate. EJC President Moshe Kantor issued a statement Sunday in the wake of the victory by Marian Kotleba, the ex-chairman of the banned Togetherness National Party. Kotleba…
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