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AMSTERDAM — The mayor of a Dutch town says a 96-year-old woman has confessed to killing a prominent citizen in 1946 after mistakenly believing he collaborated with the Nazis.

Here are two especially moving tributes to John Paul II, whose beatification ceremony Elizabeth is now winging her way to attend. The first comes from Dr. Michael Berenbaum of A Jewish Journal: Enter Pope John Paul II who as a young man in Poland witnessed the Shoah. Three million Jews of Poland were killed in the Holocaust. After the war, Polish cities, which were once the home of large and thriving Jewish communities, were bereft of Jews and the PopeÂ’s hometown was the site of a large ghetto whose Jewish population was deported to death camps. As a young university...

Project will make Holocaust photos and documents available on Internet; first batch already hits web; viewers can add their stories. Talkbacks (1) The world's largest collection of Holocaust documents is going digital. Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, is teaming up with Google to make its photographs and documents interactive and searchable on the Internet. The first 130,000 photos hit the web Wednesday. Although much of Yad Vashem's archive was already available through its formidable website, the new project enables users to search keywords and data just like a Google search. A social network-like component allows viewers to contribute to the...

On June 22, 1940, about one month after the German invasion, France signed an armistice with Germany. To establish a German order of control in the unoccupied area of France, a puppet government, the Vichy government named after its southern French town of establishment, was created. The Vichy government was defined as a neutral regime but, says Holocaust survivor and writer of Holocaust-themed literature, Alexander Kimel, "in order to gain favor with the Germans the Vichy government began instituting a number of anti-Semitic policies," none any kinder in nature than the strictly German policies. All Jewish individuals were labeled as...

Researchers Welcome Availability of Pius XII InformationVATICAN CITY, MARCH 25, 2010 (Zenit.org).- The Vatican announced today that official documents spanning more than 40 years are now available online. The entire collection of the of the Actae Sanctae Sedis (A.S.S.) and of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis (A.A.S.) -- i.e., the official Acts of the Holy See from 1865 to 2007 -- are now available in pdf format. Also available is a multi-volume collection of acts from World War II, (), published by order of Paul VI starting in 1965, and edited by a specialized group of four Jesuit historians. The project...

Of insult and mockery Dec. 22, 2009 EFRAIM ZUROFF , THE JERUSALEM POST Last month, I was invited to attend two important conferences convened to combat contemporary anti-Semitism. The larger and ostensibly more important one was the annual meeting of the Global Forum to Combat Anti-Semitism, which is sponsored by the Foreign Ministry and deals with the diverse forms of the problem all over the world. Its 500 participants include government officials, representatives of all the major Diaspora NGOs in the field and leading intellectuals and activists. From past experience, I know that it is a good venue to meet...

For 60 years Denis Avey remained too traumatised to talk about the horrors he had witnessed as a prisoner of war at Auschwitz. But when he finally felt able, he revealed an incredible tale of bravery and compassion.

Seven decades have passed since Irene Zisblatt survived the Auschwitz. Just a teenager then, Zisblatt endured daily the horrors of the Nazis. She was the only survivor in her family. She didn’t understand then why there was such brutality. She can’t tell you why she is here today. She can just tell you what happened to her. Zisblatt, a Hungarian Jew, has done that in her book, “The Fifth Diamond,” in Steven Spielberg’s documentary, “The Last Days,” and on the lecture circuit. Starting Feb. 23, Zisblatt will bring her story to the Tri-State in a weeklong series of lectures in...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Acknowledging and remembering the Holocaust is not only a matter of historical honesty; it is a religious obligation, especially for bishops, several Vatican officials said. When Pope Benedict XVI publicly distanced himself from the Holocaust-denying views of traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson and the Vatican Secretariat of State called on the bishop Feb. 4 to publicly disavow his views, they were not simply responding to a public uproar. "Denial of the Holocaust by a person who should know better is indistinguishable from an anti-Semitic prejudice," said Bishop Brian Farrell, vice president of the Pontifical Commission for Religious...

KRISTALLNACHT SEVENTY YEARS LATER"Was There No Space in the World for Us?"by Rabbi Marvin Hier, Simon Wiesenthal Center Founder and DeanSeventy years ago, while Jews in America gathered at the Algonquin Hotel and Waldorf Astoria at banquets in support of Jewish causes or in personal celebration of a Simcha, the most notorious pogrom was unleashed by Hitler’s Germany. On this day was born the Night of Broken Glass, Kristallnacht.The Nazis said it was in reaction to the killing of a German official in Paris, but as documents showed, it was a state organized pogrom involving the highest officials of Nazi...

Poland is not Shoah-land From Warsaw Business Journal A recent incident in which 35 Hasidic Jewish tourists forcibly entered the museum of the Majdanek concentration camp after the facility's closing time, removing gates from their hinges and breaking into one of the barracks, has highlighted the misunderstandings so prevalent in the hugely complicated relationship between modern Jews and modern Poland. To be fair, the tourists in this case spoke very little English and no Polish, and were not able to understand what the museum's security guard was telling them. Still, it seems hard to imagine that they didn't understand that...

According to a article in German that was published in the German magazine "Der Spiegel" the ruthless French nazi-collaborator Maurice Papon died in the age of 96 years on February 17, 2007. As secretary general of the prefecture Bordeaux Papon signed orders for the imprisonment and deportation or the jews in that area. Altogether there were 76.000 jews -among them 12.000 kids- arrested in France and displaced into the concentration camps of the nazis. Only 2.500 survived the Holocaust. Papon is definitly responsible for the deportation of 1,560 Jewish men, women and children. The majority were sent directly to detention...

40 institutes boycott Iran think tank over Holocaust conference By The Associated Press PARIS - Nearly 40 European and North American research institutes will suspend contacts with a leading Iranian think tank that helped organize last week's conference in Tehran of Holocaust deniers, a Paris-based researcher said Saturday. The institutes, from Warsaw to Washington and beyond, have agreed to suspend ongoing programs with the Iranian Institute for Political and International Studies, or IPIS, according to a statement issued by Francois Heisbourg, who organized the boycott. They have also refused participation in IPIS meetings or invite IPIS staff to their own...

BE HERE, OR BE NOWHERE!

ermany condemned a planned Iranian conference on the Holocaust and summoned Iran's charge d'affaires to the Foreign Ministry, saying Friday that attempts to question the Nazis' murder of Jews were "shocking and unacceptable." The conference, scheduled for Sunday and Monday, was organized by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called the systematic killing of some 6 million Jews a "myth" and "exaggerated." Some 67 foreign researchers from 30 countries are scheduled to attend the two-day meeting. "We condemn all past and future attempts of anyone who gives a platform to those who relativize or question the Holocaust," Foreign Ministry spokesman...

Holocaust survivor leads crusade to track down fugitive Nazis Elliot Welles, a Holocaust survivor who found the officer who ordered his mother's death and turned that personal triumph into a relentless crusade to track down fugitive Nazis, has died. He was 79. Welles died of an apparent heart attack at his Bronx home last Tuesday, his son, Mark Welles, of Roslyn, N.Y. said on Sunday. Welles retired in 2003 after more than 20 years as head of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League's Nazi-hunting operations. Finding ex-Nazis who had eluded post-World War II justice "was an overriding passion in his life,"...

An initiative to refurbish the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp has sparked a storm among Holocaust survivors in Israel. The initiative was announced last month by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum's new director, who claimed that the current exhibits were outdated and insufficiently attractive to visitors. A detailed refurbishing plan has yet to be drawn up, but participants at a recent meeting of Holocaust survivors' organizations warned against moves to "beautify" the site, as has been done with other Nazi concentration camps. "Dachau and Sachsenhausen have already become well-kept gardens; we won't allow the same to happen to Auschwitz," they said....

THE scale of the Holocaust has been "greatly exaggerated", Iran's foreign ministry spokesman said today, adding he had visited several former concentration camps in eastern Europe. “When I was ambassador I saw several of these camps in (the former) East Germany and Poland. In my opinion it has been greatly exaggerated. It is far from what is being publicised,” Hamid Reza Asefi said. His comments come ahead of a conference to be held on December 11 in Iran which the Islamic republic hopes will present “hidden aspects” of the slaughter of Jews under Nazi Germany. “Different opinions which affirm and...

Bialystok Jewish ghetto uprising anniversary 16.08.2006 Events marking the 63rd anniversary of the uprising in the Bialystok Jewish ghetto in eastern Poland are being held in the city today. It was the second biggest Jewish armed rising against Nazi Germans during World War II, after the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto Uprising. Over 40,000 people lived in the ghetto, which the Nazis began to liquidate in 1943. Some 800 people were killed on the spot and the rest started to be transported to death camps. The uprising lasted for almost a week. Some 300 to 400 insurgents had only 25 guns and...

On 13 July, the French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy inaugurated the first regional Shoah memorial in France in the Hauts-de-Seine subdivision. The memorial was placed in a glade of the prestigious park of Sceaux, located south of Paris. New memorials are to be built throughout France to increase awareness of the genocide. Paris consitoire chairman Joel Mergui said the aim was to commemorate the Shoah on a regional level in the places where the victims lived before they were deported to Nazi death camps. Sarkozy, who is also the head of the local council of Hauts-de-Seine, agreed two years ago...