Warsaw march commemorates doctors, nurses who worked in ghetto
Some 700 people marched through the streets of Warsaw on July 22 to remember the doctors, nurses and other health care workers who gave aid to Jewish ghetto residents during the World War II era.
The march began at the monument at the Umschlagplatz, the square where Jews were gathered for deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp.
“This year we go there where the doctors and the medical service of the Warsaw Ghetto worked, the Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital,” said Pawel Spiewak, director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. “We’re walking there to show that we remember those sacrifices that were completely helpless, powerless in the face of what happened then in Warsaw.”
Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital was founded in 1878 and operated until 1942. Before World War I, Janusz Korczak, who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto for Jewish children during World War II and died with them, was a pediatrician there.
The hospital was located in the ghetto. Doctors tried to help the children, although they had limited options. Some could not come to terms with the fact that their patients would be murdered in Treblinka. Children were given morphine to die in their beds and avoid transport.
At the commemoration, Israel’s deputy ambassador to Poland, Ruth Cohen-Dar, said: “We are gathered here to remember the names of our sisters and brothers who were killed in the largest genocide of contemporary humanity.” — jta
Call grows for exhuming in Jedwabne
The mayor of a Polish town where locals killed and buried hundreds of Jews added his voice to a growing chorus of officials seeking to exhume the bodies from a mass grave to see if German soldiers were the killers.
Michael Chajewski, the mayor of the town in northeastern Poland, told a Warsaw-based newspaper that he supports the unusual move, even as Poland is in an uproar over its education minister saying that she did not know who killed the Jews of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941.
In fact, Poland’s state-owned Institute of National Remembrance determined several dozen locals killed at least 340 Jews at Jedwabne, some of whom they burned inside a barn. The incident, one of at least 20 pogroms against Jews by Poles during or immediately after the Holocaust, was largely unknown in Poland prior to the 2001 publication of a book by historian Jan Gross.
Revisionist historians say the bullets found at the site mean German troops were likely responsible for the mass killing because Poles were prohibited from carrying guns in July 1941. But dozens of testimonies by witnesses and survivors speak of the killing as done by willing locals.
“It’s not at all clear,” Chajewski told the Warsaw newspaper.
The historical record on Jedwabne is highly controversial because many Poles perceive their nation, where Nazis murdered 3 million non-Jewish Poles in addition to 3 million Jewish ones, as a victim of Nazi genocide. — jta
Portugal town opens Jewish heritage center
Portugal’s culture minister inaugurated a Jewish heritage center in memory of 80 former residents who were persecuted during the Portuguese Inquisition nearly 500 years ago.
Minister Luis Filipe de Castro Mendes and Israel’s ambassador to Portugal, Tzipora Rimon, attended the July 15 inauguration ceremony of the Interactive Center of Jewish Culture in the eastern city of Monsaraz.
“It aims to provide an in-depth view, with more content about a part of Monsaraz’s history and its Jewish community that previously had never been presented to the public in such a format,” Monsaraz Mayor José Calixto told a local broadcaster about the new center, which contains an exhibition on the city’s former Jewish residents and Sephardic culture.
The already substantial Jewish community grew in Portugal considerably after 1492, when tens of thousands of Jews came there from neighboring Spain as a result of the Spanish Inquisition, a campaign led by the Catholic Church and the Spanish royal house against the country’s Jews. In 1536, Portugal followed suit with its own inquisition.
In both countries, Jews were stripped of their possessions, forcibly converted to Christianity or forced to leave. Thousands were killed in pogroms and executions.
Over the past 20 years, Spain and Portugal have invested millions in preserving the heritage their 16th-century Jewish communities left behind. Since 2013, both countries have passed laws allowing Sephardic Jews to become citizens, in what was described by both governments as an act of atonement for the inquisition.
In Portugal, the government recently allocated approximately $6 million to the Portuguese Jewish Network-Sefarad Routes, a state-funded project for preservation and commemoration works at sites connected to the country’s Jewish past.
Separately, the municipality of Elvas near Monsaraz has allocated approximately $350,000 toward renovating its ancient synagogue, Mayor Nuno Mocinha last week told Radio Porto Alegre. It is scheduled to open next year. — jta