When I was approached in the fall of 2009 to consider working on a Holocaust Museum in Macedonia, I could not have imagined its unique challenges – and opportunities. As a student of the Holocaust I had known of the distinct qualities of Bulgarian occupation. An ally of Germany, Bulgaria had received and occupied Thrace and Macedonia and had consented and implemented the deportation of its Jews to the death camp of Treblinka. None returned.

Bulgaria had also signed an order to deport its own Jews to Treblinka when segments of the population protested, parliamentarians and lawyers, Bishops and priests, writers and  artists and because of this pressure, the government was forced to retreat from the agreed upon deportations. These protesters had remained quite silent where “non-citizens” were sent to their death; they were even more silent earlier when citizens of the occupied territories were deliberately defined as “non-citizens” because they were Jews. But when it came to Bulgarian citizens, well that was a different matter entirely. The Bulgarians could discriminate against Jews, persecute Jews, send Jews to work camps, but deportation to death camps was where they drew the line.

Bulgaria was seeking to portray itself as pure as Denmark, which had rescued and protected its Jews under German-occupation, by emphasizing the non-consent to deportation of its own and developing a historical amnesia regarding the Jews in the territories it occupied as well as its own.

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The first call to the first of the Jewish Patriarchs, Abram was “go forth form your land, from the place of your birth, the house of your fathers to a land that I will show you.” The Hebrew of this Biblical verse is far more complex: Lech Lecha, go forth, actually means, “go onto yourself.” Every pilgrimage outward is also a journey inward.

In the early summer of 2009 some 100 Cantors of the Cantors Assembly from various cities and towns in the United States and Canada set forth on a journey to Poland to give a series of concerts: one of Jewish Music in the Main Opera House in Warsaw, the largest such performance hall in Europe; a July 4th concert in the Krakow Opera House of American Music by Polish born, American-Jewish composers to celebrate the migration of Polish talent to the American musical stage, perhaps also to remind the Poles of what they had lost; and another performance as participants in the Krakow Jewish Festivals, which culminates in a musical happening on the main square in Kazimierz, the former Jewish quarter on Krakow, which for one week a year is revived to celebrate Jewish art forms with lectures, concerts, exhibitions, films, and prayer making it more fun to be Jewish in Poland that one week than in the thousand years that Jewish dwelled in the land.

Between 15,000 and 20,000 Poles fill the open square on the final night, dancing, singing, celebrating and masking and perhaps confronting Poland’s Jewish problem: “the presence of absence and the absence of presence.”

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I join with Michael Kimmelman (NY Times February 19, 2010) in celebrating the decision of the Auschwitz Museum to revamp its exhibitions for the 21st century.

The visitation to Auschwitz is growing year by year. Its visitors are younger and younger and younger visitors inevitably have less first hand knowledge of the events of World War II.

Furthermore, the tools available to contemporary creators of Museum are dramatically different than the resources that were available a generation ago in the less Westernized Poland when the exhibitions at Auschwitz first took form.

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In the fabled fifties when New York was New York, there was one sure way to begin an argument and no way to end it. Just ask any member of the male species who the best center fielder in New York City was and you would hear tall stories of Willie, Mickey, and the Duke. Women (or girls as they were called in those days) were less likely to follow baseball then. The debate still arouses much more passion than logic.
Only a Brooklyn Dodger fan would defend what cannot be defended, attack what cannot be attacked, marshal evidence to contradict what is sacrosanct in baseball—statistics—hits, runs batted in, home runs, double, triples, stolen bases, strikeouts, ultimately pennants and World Series victories. But what Brooklyn boy ever backed away from a fight only because the chances of victory were slight?

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The Forward newspaper has done a service to the American Jewish community by publishing the salaries of major executives of American Jewish organizations. They are essentially Jewish communal civil servants, and, as do all civil servants, they sacrifice a measure of privacy — and what is more private in the United States than the amount of money one earns? — for two very important goals: transparency and accountability.

As first glance, these salaries may seem quite high for civil servants and higher than for comparable non-Jewish organizations. Many of the top-tier organizational heads earn significantly more than the president of the United States, whose job, even in the best of times, is far more arduous. And yet, they work for lay leaders who earn far more and who, quite frankly, do not understand how these men and women live on so little.

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Read the article here.

Poetry in Hell is a special work, dare one say a sacred work. The poems were written over a long period of time, but they were collected at a specific time, in a specific place, by a specific man and his colleagues, for a specific purpose.

A word about that time, that place, that man and that purpose.

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