|
|
|
Israel Alert Newsletter
|
|
27 Nissan 5773
|
April 7, 2013
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel
Sunday evening marks Yom Hashoah or Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel. Yom Hashoah was established in Israel in 1953 by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, as a day to commemorate the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. According to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, the American Jewish Yearbook placed the total Jewish population of Europe at about 9.5 million in 1933.
This number represented more than 60 percent of the world’s Jewish population, which was estimated at 15.3 million. Most European Jews resided in eastern Europe, with about 5 1/2 million Jews living in Poland and the Soviet Union. Before the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, Europe had a dynamic and highly developed Jewish culture.
|
|
|
Click here to read
more>>
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust
Hannah Szenes, a young Jewish soldier in the British Army who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe with the goal of assisting her fellow Jews, wrote right before crossing the border into Hungary, “Blessed is the match, consumed in kindling flame. Blessed is the flame that burns in the heart’s secret places. Blessed is the heart that knows, for honors sake, to stop its beating. Blessed is the match, consumed in kindling flame.” While Szenes successfully fought with Tito’s forces for three months, she would be captured upon crossing into Hungary, tortured cruelly by the Nazis and yet despite the knowledge that her own mother was at risk, she refused to give the Nazis any sort of information that could assist their war effort.
|
|
|
Click here to read
more>>
|
|
|
|
|
A Brief History of the Holocaust
Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who has dedicated his life to documenting Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, once wrote, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. […] Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.
|
|
|
Click here to read
more>>
|
|
|
|
The Terrors of the Holocaust…in North Africa?!
To the contrary of common perceptions, the Holocaust was not a strictly European tragedy; the Jews living under colonial rule in North Africa were also victims of the Nazis.
When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Vichy rule was consolidated in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, thus posing an existential threat to the well-being of the Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews who were part of those ancient Jewish communities dating back to antiquity. In addition, Fascist Italian control of Libya posed a danger to the Jews who lived there.
|
|
|
Click here to
read more>>
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
