Plundered Jewish Documents, Long Thought Lost, Surface in New York City

Last week, federal agents took possession of a cache of documents about to be auctioned in New York City, which they had determined had been seized from Jews either during or after the Holocaust. Tim Fitzsimons reports:

The Justice Department on Thursday announced the seizure of seventeen funeral scrolls, manuscripts, and community records that were looted from East European Jewish communities annihilated in the Holocaust. . . . One item, prosecutors wrote, was a manuscript containing ancestry records for a Jewish community in the city now known as Cluj-Napoca in Romania, [known as Kolozsvár to Hungarians and Kloyzenberg to Jews].

Contemporaneous records established that the manuscript existed in Romania in 1936, “shortly before the Holocaust had begun.” . . . The recovered scrolls and manuscripts, investigators said, included “prayers for the dead, memorial pages and/or the names of deceased members of the Jewish communities, operating rules of the society, society-member payments, obligations, society regulations, the identity of society religious leaders, and, in some cases, the names of the society members who were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz.”

Read more at NBC News

More about: East European Jewry, Holocaust, Jewish archives, Romania

 

A Catholic Reporter Attends Anti-Israel Protests and the Pro-Israel Rally

Mary Margaret Olohan has spent much of her career in journalism covering demonstrations of various kinds. Since October 7, she has attended numerous anti-Israel gatherings, an experience she discusses with Robert Nicholson and Dominique Hoffman. Olohan explains the ways protestors intimidate outsiders, the online instruction booklet for protests distributed by Students for Justice in Palestine, the systematic avoidance of any condemnation of Hamas, and much else. To this, she contrasts her experience at the joyous yet serious November 14 rally for Israel. Olohan also talks about how her own Christian faith has influenced her journalism. (Audio, 61 minutes.)

Read more at Deep Map

More about: American Jewry, Gaza War 2023, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict