'jews' - tagged features

No another reminder of the holocaust - this time in Warsaw where the cornerstone for the Museum of History of Polish Jews was laid in the polish capital. The people behind the project are emphasising that their ambition is not to build “just a Holocaust museum' but a centre of dialogue, culture and the long and rich history of Polish - Jewish coexistence. Joanna Najfeld from Polish Radio External Services reports 

We Head to the southern Polish city of Krakow, for a tour of the Kazimierz district, a Jewish quarter from late-medieval times... Most of the sixty thousand Jews who lived there before World War Two were murdered by the Nazis. Small wonder that the city’s Jewish past was in danger of being consigned to oblivion. 

“Never again”: how many times have we heard that, after genocides, wars and human rights violations…..yet these are still happening. Well let’s zoom in on an original project which is hoping to change this… "So that children know" is the title of an EU-funded project, in the Czech Republic. It’s goal is to teach fourteen and fifteen-year olds about human rights. The idea is not new - what makes it special is that it aims to break with the old practice of memorizing a text; instead it encourages pupils to talk about various aspects of human rights – and takes them to a World War II concentration camp. Radio Prague’s Daniela Lazarova reports. 

With between half a million and six hundred thousand Jews, France is home to Europe’s largest Jewish community. A majority live in Marseille in the South East of the country, in Strasbourg in the North East, and in Paris. For Network Europe, Radio France International’s Nick Champeaux went to several Jewish neighborhoods in the French capital, and filed this report. 

In Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Hercegovina, there is a small but active Jewish community.  Both its history, which dates back to the 16th century and the days of the exodus of the Ladino-speaking Spanish Jews, and its present situation in post-war Bosnia, sets it apart from the Jewish communities of other European capitals. 

The Nazi regime and the atrocities of World War II almost wiped out Jewish life in Germany. But, the number of Jews has been steadily increasing since the early 1990s, mainly a result of many Jews from the former Soviet Union moving to Germany. Comprehensive education for rabbis is once again available in Germany. This year, for the first time since the war, three Rabbis were ordained in Dresden. Germany's Jewish communities are awakening to new life. Kirsten Rulf visited one of them as he settled into his new job. 

The jewish community in Sweden dates back to several hundreds years ago and the Jewish migration has had several huge waves. Gaby Katz from Radio Sweden has visited the Jewish Museum in Stockholm and they special exhibitions portraying Jews. She investigated the place of the Jewish minority in Sweden. 

Romania belatedly acknowledged its role in the Holocaust. It was only in 2004, that a committee for the investigation of the Holocaust crimes published an official report according to which between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were exterminated by the Romanian army in the war zones of Bassarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria. These are the highest numbers in a country other than Germany. Before 2004, there was very little talk of the scale of Romania’s contribution to the Holocaust. But the last 3 years has seen a lot of campaigning aimed at making Romanians aware of those crimes. 

Berte is a Jewish holocaust survivor. In 1943, in Nazi occupied Holland, Berte was rounded up with her parents by the Nazis and sent to Camp Westerbok in the netherlands and then on to Bergen Belsen, the notorious concentration camp in Germany, where she spent the rest of the war. When she was freed by the Russian army in 1945 she was 7 years old. Last month she and 69 other Dutch survivors returned to the site of the camp to finally inaugurate a Dutch memorial. Radio Netherlands' Jonathan Groubert went with her...