Holocaust

In his 89 years, Sol Berger has gone by many names. He started life in Poland as Salomon Berger, then became Jan Jerzowski. Then he was Ivan Marianowicz Jerzowski, then Shlomo Harari, then Sol. During World War II and its aftermath, the names kept him safe, protected him from the concentration camps and eventually allowed him to seek refuge in the United States.

Presenting, "Anne Frank, the Musical." Now, before you start humming "Springtime for Hitler," the producers of a new Anne Frank musical here want you to know that they are serious. They are offering a rendition of the popular, tragic story of a Jewish girl and her diary during the Holocaust that they say is respectful, inspirational and educational. And -- surprise! -- controversial. Even before the premiere last week, uneasy voices were raised about whether committing such a heart-wrenching tale to music was a good idea.

A far-right senator in Belgium has stepped down as his party's leader after a video of him singing a song poking fun at the Holocaust was broadcast on national television. The Senate called the actions by National Front Sen. Michel Delacroix "beyond the pale," and began an investigation. The video showed him singing an insulting song about a Jewish girl perishing at the Dachau concentration camp. The Brussels prosecutor's office also opened an investigation and will consider whether to strip Delacroix of parliamentary immunity.

Fifteen years ago, nearly 52,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses began sharing their stories with a group that would come to be known as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. The testimonies, averaging about two hours each, were documented on videotape, a format whose quality deteriorates over time.

Controversy has erupted at UC Santa Barbara over a professor's decision to send his students an e-mail in which he compared graphic images of Jews in the Holocaust to pictures of Palestinians caught up in Israel's recent Gaza offensive. The e-mail by tenured sociology professor William I. Robinson has triggered a campus investigation and drawn accusations of anti-Semitism from two national Jewish groups, even as many students and faculty members have voiced support for him.

William "Bill" Basch, a retired Los Angeles garment industry executive who was one of the Holocaust survivors whose stories were told in the Oscar-winning documentary "The Last Days," has died. He was 82. Basch died of age-related causes Monday at his home in Marina del Rey, said his grandson, Max Basch. A survivor of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps who had helped save Jews while working in the underground resistance movement in Budapest, Hungary, Basch arrived in the United States penniless in 1947 and launched a successful high-end women's apparel manufacturing business, Basch Fashions, in 1971.

The Vatican stood firm Tuesday on a decision to rehabilitate a Holocaust-denying bishop, even as Jewish leaders warned that the move will set back decades of Roman Catholic overtures to mend strained relations between the two faiths. The Vatican joined Jews and fellow Catholics in condemning the British bishop's assertions that no Jews died in Nazi gas chambers.

Eva Kor was stumped. She didn't know how to thank a Nazi doctor for writing a letter asking her and other Auschwitz survivors for forgiveness for his medical experiments at the camp. "I could not think of anything appropriate," Kor said Saturday as she spoke to about 100 people attending services of a Jewish congregation at an Encino community center.

The Hebrew word shoah, or holocaust, is not used casually in Israeli society. Occasionally, it is employed to denote a massive disaster. This weekend, though, Arab politicians and international pro-Palestinian activists, seizing on a comment by an Israeli minister, are calling the bloody Israeli incursion in the Gaza Strip a holocaust.

Sometimes serendipity makes history. In this case, it may have uncovered history. This year, Israeli writer Yaron Svoray came to Germany to research the underground operation that whisked Nazi officials to South America to escape justice after World War II. Svoray was chatting with a local about his project when the man mentioned that a nearby plot of land had served as a dump during the Third Reich.