Poroshenko shakes hands with Knesset chairman Yuli Edelstein while Israeli president Reuven Rivlin claps during special session held December 23, 2015. Photo courtesy of Hadas Parush/Flash 90

“Russia supplied systems to Syria that can change the balance of power in the region,” Poroshenko warns in speech to Knesset

Israel should take a side in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko said in his address to the Israeli parliament the Knesset Wednesday.

“When evil wins in one place, it will try to continue to another,” Poroshenko warned. “We need to act in coöperation and Israeli politicians should make their stance towards Ukraine very clear.”

Poroshenko said that over the last 21 months, 9,000 Ukrainians were victims of “Russian-funded terror,” and warned that the 17,000 Jews on the Crimean Peninsula may find themselves in danger.

“The occupiers have started encouraging anti-Semitism,” he said.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the World Jewish Restitution Organization have both issued statements hailing a decision by the EU to exempt Holocaust materials from a draft regulation on data protection called the General Data Protection Regulation.

IHRA reports that although the law won’t be considered until next year, “after two years of research and analysis, IHRA had determined definitively that researchers and research organizations were already being denied access to Holocaust-related materials on the premise that the GDPR would not permit the use of these materials.”

Name-recognition of Lithuania’s second city Kaunas is growing like mushrooms after a heavy spring rain in far-off Japan. The Japanese premiere of the new film about the Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, “Persona non Grata: The Chiune Sugihara Story,” took place in early December and has achieved huge success.

Lithuanian ambassador to Japan Egidijus Meilūnas said the film is currently being shown at over 300 theaters in Japan and is second only to the new James Bond film in terms of popularity. Brochures about Kaunas are also being provided to the public at the movie theaters and other public spaces. Japan seems to be buzzing about the film, with many television programs discussing it and broadcasting images of Lithuania and Kaunas.

“Kaunas is being advertised very heavily right now,” ambassador Meilūnas said.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

Film trailer here.

Official film site page in Japanese on Sugihara, Kaunas and Lithuania here.

An SS guard who was on duty when Anne Frank was brought to Auschwitz in 1944 has been found sufficiently healthy to stand trial for mass murder, the Daily Mail reports.

Hubert Zafke, 95, was examined by psychiatric doctors this week appointed by a court in Rostock and judged mentally sound to go on trial for his part in the murders of 3,681 people.

Full story here.

Francine Klagsbrun
Special To The Jewish Week

Watching “Antique Roadshow” on PBS the other night, I was intrigued by one of the items on display. It was a doll someone had inherited, which the show’s expert evaluated at several thousand dollars in today’s market. It had been manufactured, he said, in the early 1900s by Kammer & Reinhardt, a well-known German doll-making company, in business from 1886 to 1932. It was the cutoff date that caught my attention—could this have been a Jewish company that closed down as the Nazis rose to power? The company’s logo on the doll’s back confirmed my suspicion. It showed the initials K and R separated by a Star of David. That star set my mind racing. Did the company’s owners end up wearing the proud symbol of their firm as the oppressive yellow star that marked Europe’s Jews during their darkest days?

This week we commemorated Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, when, between November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi thugs smashed thousands of windows in Jewish storefronts and houses all over Germany and Austria. It struck me as I contemplated, yet again, the horror of those days, how instant had been my reaction to the 1932 closing date of the German doll company, immediately assuming because of that date that the company was Jewish-owned. Those of us who were alive during the Holocaust years, even as children, will always make such associations, always filter 20th-century events through the lens of that century’s Jewish catastrophe.

And what of our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren? It’s been said many times that as Holocaust survivors pass on, we have a greater responsibility than ever to keep their stories alive. But as the 21st century unfolds with its own stories of atrocities and desperate refugees, we also have to make sure that, while deeply sympathetic to suffering everywhere, succeeding generations of Jews understand the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its impact on all of Jewish life.

The Lithuanian version of the Economist IQ publication has published an interview with Nobuki Sugihara, the son of the famous war-time Japanese diplomat who rescued Jews from the Holocaust in Kaunas against instructions from his ministry. The youngest Sugihara son was in Lithuania partly to attend the premiere of a new film about his father called Persona Non Grata: The Chiune Sugihara Story.

Ieva Rekštytė asked him “What impression did you come away with after the premiere at the movie theater?”

Nobuki Sugihara responded: “The film was beautiful visually, the actors were good, but in no way are all the historical facts in it true. You have to realize that this is entertainment, after all, and not a film intended to expand knowledge. For example, my father wasn’t so soft and sentimental as he’s made out to have been. Further, his supposed lover Irinia plays a major part in his life in the film, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of her. The impression is the film was created in a hurry, not even as a cinematic production, but as a television serial. I think the Japanese audience (to whom, most likely, the film is oriented) will like it, but it’s unlikely the international viewer will take an interest.

Full interview in Lithuanian here.

Lithuanian Jewish young people held a small protest against the commemoration of Jonas Noreika/General Vėtra on the wall of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences building. THey hung banners with images from the ghetto where Litvak Lithuanian citizens were sent by order of Noreika.

The organizers of the protest said they are trying to bring attention to how commemoration of Noreika is shameful to the European city of Vilnius.

“I and other young people are not trying to anger or offend anyone with our initiative, we simply want to inform people, passers-by, of the controversial memorial plaque to Noreika which has been much discussed lately. I believe history must be presented objectively so that our generation and future generations who haven’t and hopefully will not experience personally what war means will understand the mistakes of the past and learn from them, European Jewish Student Union board member Amit Belaitė said.

VILNIUS, November 9, BNS–Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky has called an assessment of actions by Lithuanian officer Jonas Noreika during World War II released by the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of the Residents of Lithuania “contradictory.”

At the end of October the center announced Noreika hadn’t taken part in the mass murder of Jews in Lithuania during World War II, but that the Nazi occupational regime had involved him in the ordering of affairs connected with the isolation of Jews.

“It appears to us, the Lithuanian Jewish Community, that this assessment of the actions of Jonas Noreika is very contradictory,” the statement Faina Kukliansky issued said. She said: “the imprisoning Jews in ghettos, or any other kind of ‘isolation,’ or ‘ordering of affairs connected with the isolation of the Jews,’ is nothing other than the extermination of Jews.”