Yom HaShoah

Yom HaShoah: The Gift of Food

James Besser — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 17:35:11 +0000

When a Manhattan survivor takes to the kitchen, her dishes nourish far more than herself alone

Deborah Blumenthal

Special to the Jewish Week

Thursday, April 15, 2010

The elevator door opens on the 12th floor and I inhale the heady scent of sautéed onions. I don’t have to wonder where the smell is coming from, I know: Eva is cooking.

From the first day that my husband and I moved into our East Side Manhattan apartment, we were greeted with the intoxicating food scents wafting through the door of my neighbor Eva’s apartment, just down the hall.

I ran into her in the corridor one day and told her how enchanted I was by the smell of her cooking.

Yom HaShoah 2010: The Cello, The Dress And The Autograph Book

James Besser — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:55:45 +0000

Three new books explore the Holocaust through the prism of everyday objects

Sandee Brawarsky

Jewish Week Book Critic

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Mundane objects can be the containers of powerful stories. Those objects take on a degree of holiness when they are infused with memory and loss, and are the only tangible connection to lives and times that are no more.

Three new books related to the dark history of the Holocaust, are connected to objects that have become priceless and symbolic: a cello, a child’s dress and an autograph book.

Yom HaShoah: Remembering the Wrong Thing

James Besser — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:47:17 +0000

The new obsession with Jewish vengeance, and what it suggests.

Thane Rosenbaum

Special to the Jewish Week

Thursday, April 15, 2010

In the topsy-turvy post-Holocaust world, genocide never ended and the Holocaust itself became a brand name. Yom HaShoah competed with Yom Kippur for mourners. A museum in Washington, D.C., doubled as a Jewish Mount Rushmore. And Anne Frank was adopted by every culture on earth as a metaphor for adolescence interrupted. Elie Wiesel, a precocious, sensitive boy from a remote region of Transylvania, ended up as a Nobel laureate, a worldwide celebrity, and an honored guest on “Oprah.”

Who would have imagined all that when the death camps were liberated in 1945?

Yom HaShoah 2010: For Survivors Here, Waning Years Are Trying

James Besser — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:30:23 +0000

Many are living in poverty, largely hidden from public view; new German payments for homecare seen helping

Steve Lipman

Staff Writer

Thursday, April 15, 2010

On the streets of Jerusalem, their plight is well chronicled, and even debated in the corridors of power in the Knesset. It is a well-told story across Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union, too, where a frayed social safety net affords little protection.