Jewish & World News

Amsterdam council has vowed to probe revelations that it forced Jews returning from World War II concentration camps to pay rent arrears, even if their homes had been destroyed or occupied by Nazis. The scandal, involving an unknown number of Jews and non-Jews living in city-owned properties, was uncovered by a young art history student in Amsterdam's archives.

A leading American prosecutor who works to bring Nazis war criminals to court on Thursday criticized nations for not doing all they could to aid in such cases. “Without doubt it is still possible to secure a measure of justice in the Nazi cases,” declared Eli Rosenbaum, the US Justice Department’s director of human rights enforcement, strategy and policy, at a ceremony commemorating the Holocaust. “In many countries, however, the political will to do so is not being mustered.”

Poland's Jewish community does not want a planned monument to righteous gentiles to be erected near the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The museum, which is due to open this month, is located on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto.

In marking Holocaust Remembrance Day Monday, US President Barack Obama stressed the responsibility of remembrance and continuing to confront anti-Semitism. “We must accept the full responsibility of remembrance, as nations and as individuals,” he said, “not simply to pledge ‘never again,’ but to commit ourselves to the understanding, empathy and compassion that is the foundation of peace and human dignity.”

Yad Vashem hopes to have collected the names of the overwhelming majority of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust within the next three years, Yad Vashem chief archivist Dr. Haim Gertner told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. He cited a wealth of documentation that has become available since archives in former Soviet bloc nations began to grant access to Israeli researchers.

Officials from the Jewish Museum of Vienna said that hundreds of objects in the museum’s possession were looted from Jewish families during the Holocaust. A review of the artifacts found 490 objects and more than 980 books that may have been stolen from Jewish owners, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

France launched a search for the Jewish owners of about 2,000 pieces of Nazi-plundered art, from Monets and Rubens to Renoirs, that hang in museums such as the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Almost 70 years after World War II, France is making one of its biggest efforts to trace the Jewish owners of artworks stolen by the Nazis, recovered by the Allies and sent to the country after the war. President Francois Hollande’s government is setting up a group of historians, regulators, archivists and curators to actively track down families, instead of waiting for claimants to come forward. The group starts working in March.

Three defendants pleaded guilty in federal court Wednesday to conspiring to defraud a Holocaust reparations organization out of $57.3 million, according to court documents. Genrikh Kolontyrskiy, Moysey Kucher and Dora Kucher, all of Brooklyn, helped produce and process some of the thousands of fraudulent applications for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany that are under investigation.

A box of documents covered with dust, which belonged to the Israeli Embassy in Prague and was discovered accidentally 46 years later, contains a historical memory which may allow the State of Israel to honor Czech citizens who saved Jews during the Holocaust and have yet to be officially recognized. Shahar Shelef, the deputy Israeli ambassador to the Czech Republic, received a phone call from a diplomat serving at the Swedish Embassy in Prague several weeks ago.

British MP David ward has been summoned by his party chiefs over controversial comments he made recently, associating Israel's actions with the Holocaust, that drew the ire of England's Jewish community. British newspaper The Independent reported Friday that the Liberal Democrats said "further decisions" would be taken after Jewish leaders demanded action.

Harry Grenville and his sister Hannah didn't know what had happened to their parents during World War II for nearly 70 years. That uncertainty came to an end last month following an initiative of a Polish citizen who visited the Auschwitz concentration camp museum. According to a report in London's Times newspaper, the Polish visitor photographed a vast pile of suitcases left by victims murdered in the Holocaust, each of which had a name and serial number painted in white letters on the front.

A sign on the overpass of an automotive plant in Detroit reads in German "Work will make you Free," evoking images of the sign on the gate of Auschwitz. The red letters on white pieces of paper in the windows of the overpass at the Packard Automotive Plant reads "Arbeit Macht Frei," the Detroit Free Press reported Monday.

Some 100 imams will commemorate the Holocaust at a memorial monument near Paris. Monday's event is planned for Drancy, a suburb of the French capital where tens of thousands of Jews were confined in 1942 before being transported to extermination camps during the German Nazi occupation, according to a report in the French daily Le Figaro. The paper called the event unprecedented.

The Holocaust was a U.S. intelligence hoax and the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis actually moved to the United States, an Egyptian state news official said. "The myth of the Holocaust is an industry that America invented," said Fathi Shihab-Eddim, a senior figure close to Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi responsible for appointing the editors of all state-run newspapers.

The Swiss government knew about the Nazi program to wipe out Jews in 1942 -- earlier than previously known -- documents publicized by a Swiss television station suggest. A report aired by the German-language station SRF on Sunday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, said the government was aware of German leader Adolf Hitler’s extermination plan and the existence of German concentration camps as early as 1942, the year that Germany decided on its so-called “final solution” for the Jews.

A ceremony marking the 68th year since the liberation of Auschwitz was held at the site of the former Nazi camp. The ceremony held Sunday, on International Holocaust Memorial Day, at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum was attended by ex-prisoners and liberators of Auschwitz. The honorary patron of the ceremony was Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski.

During the inauguration of a Holocaust memorial in Milan, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Benito Mussolini's fascist regime had carried out some positive policies. “The fact of the racial laws was the worst fault of a leader, Mussolini, who in many other ways did well,” Berlusconi said in informal remarks to the media at the ceremony on Sunday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The memorial dedicated at Milan’s train station is located at Track 21, from which 700 Milan Jews were deported to Nazi camps.

One in four of Israel's 200,000 Holocaust survivors suffers from economic distress which is expected to worsen due to the austerity measures that are said to take place in 2013, a new report reveals. Marking the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel (FBHV) published data which revealed that 87% of survivors who asked for financial aid in 2012 – about 20,000 people – were subsisting on less than NIS 5,000 (roughly $1,350)  a month.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center ranks Germany, Italy and the U.S. as the most successful at investigating and prosecuting Nazi war crimes over the past year. In its annual report covering April 1, 2011 to March 31, 2012, released Thursday, the center said there was a fivefold increase in convictions from its previous report, from two to 10. Nine of those convictions were in Italy and one was in Germany.