During the 1990s, the world was seized with stories of Nazi plunder and heirless property from the Holocaust era. Stolen bank accounts, looted artwork, confiscated real estate and payments for slave labor made front-page headlines, were the talk of congressional hearings and became the subject of international diplomacy. By the decade's end, billions of dollars had been returned to survivors...
The Fourth of July is a time for the American Jewish community to celebrate the unprecedented freedom that the United States has afforded all its citizens. While anti-Semitism has not disappeared, Jews in America enjoy religious liberties that few other such communities in history have experienced, have attained economic and educational success, and have risen to the highest echelons of...
Now that the earthly trial of Bernard Madoff has ended with a sentence of 150 years in prison, he will await his next trial -- the heavenly one. Although eschatology is not emphasized in Judaism, there is a recurring metaphor in rabbinic literature of a "heavenly tribunal," an accounting of one's actions on earth. For 2,000 years, rabbis have imagined...
Fifteen years after a car bomb struck the the hub of Jewish life in Argentina, more questions than answers remain. On July 18, 1994, a busy Monday morning, a white van approached the Argentine Israelite Mutual Aid Association Jewish community center in Buenos Aires and detonated its heavy cargo. The explosion completely destroyed the building. When it was over, 85...
The Holocaust Era Assets Conference concluded in Prague last month with a moving program at Terezin and a nonbinding declaration emphasizing that survivors' needs in these, their last years, should be treated with more urgency than real estate, art or other restitution issues. Elie Wiesel set the tone brilliantly by asking if the killers should become the victims' heirs --...
Sivan 9, 5773
