Holocaust

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.

In the latest front of Holocaust-related litigation, a federal class-action suit was filed Wednesday on behalf of survivors of Nazi death camps, alleging that Bayer AG, the giant German-owned chemical and pharmaceutical company, participated in cruel medical experiments by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele.

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.

Leopold Engleitner toiled in three Nazi concentration camps for refusing to renounce his faith as a Jehovah's Witness. In the decades after the war, he tried to tell his tale but rarely found an audience. Now, at 100, he finally is reaching listeners, thanks to the efforts of an Austrian filmmaker who was taken with his story of endurance. Engleitner has toured the United States since May 1, sharing his life story to encourage others to stick by their principles.

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.

For more than two years, Juozas Grabauskas has lived quietly in a 10th-floor, Soviet-style apartment here. His neighbors say he told them that he once lived in America. He never mentioned, however, that his U.S. citizenship was revoked because he lied about his Nazi past. Grabauskas kept quiet about a U.S. judge's finding that he was an officer with an infamous Lithuanian battalion that killed more than 10,000 Jews during World War II.

When Selene Bruk recently finished recounting her horrific tale of survival in several Nazi concentration camps about 60 years ago, her audience of Catholic school girls from East Los Angeles found one thing hard to believe. How, they asked, did she keep her faith in God after witnessing so many atrocities and losing so many fellow Jews and family members during the Holocaust? It was a question that Bruk, now a grandmother living in West Los Angeles, had asked herself many times in her life.

Eugene Zinn was about an hour into a PBS Holocaust documentary in January when he heard a familiar voice speaking his native Slovak tongue. Eighty years old with his eyesight nearly gone, Zinn pressed his face closer to the television screen in his West Hills den. There, clad in an argyle sweater and walking around the restored Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, was Otto Pressburger, a man for whom Zinn had been searching for much of his life. Zinn knew he needed to find Pressburger.

Sit down if you want a look," says Pippa Scott. Then the 64-year-old former actress matter-of-factly presents her index of hell. Click on the computer icon, enter "prison camps," "torture," "ethnic cleansing" or "rape," and Scott's database will tell you where, amid hundreds of hours of documentary videotape, to find the relevant footage.

Gilberto Bosques Saldivar has never been the subject of a major motion picture by Steven Spielberg. American history books seldom, if ever, mention his name, and he does not have his own Wikipedia page, in Spanish or English. But the former Mexican diplomat, stationed in France during World War II, helped save as many as 40,000 Jews and other refugees from Nazi persecution.

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.

Romania unveiled a memorial to some 300,000 Jews and Gypsies killed during the Holocaust in the nation, which at times denied that the genocide even happened. President Traian Basescu said it was Romania's duty to "recognize the genocide during World War II." Basescu was joined by Holocaust survivors and other leaders during the unveiling of the marble and concrete monument. Romania today has only 6,000 Jews. Its role in the Holocaust and the deportation of Jews was ignored by the Communists and minimized by subsequent governments.

"Heydrich/Hitler/Holocaust": A review of "Heydrich/Hitler/Holocaust" at the Met Theatre in the Sept. 11 Calendar section said that Adolf Hitler was one of the Nazi leaders who met at the 1942 Wannsee Conference to develop plans for exterminating Europe's Jewish population. Hitler did not attend the conference.

Iran's president said he is proud to stoke international outrage with his latest remarks questioning the Holocaust as he heads to the United Nations this week. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks Wednesday to the U.N. General Assembly. He appears intent on showing he has not been weakened by three months of turmoil at home, where his opponents have staged dramatic protests claiming Ahmadinejad's victory in the June presidential election was fraudulent. In a speech Friday, he questioned whether the Holocaust was "a real event" and called it a pretext used by Jews to trick the West into backing the creation of Israel.

Alfred Gottschalk, a leader of Reform Judaism who ordained the first American woman rabbi and headed Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion for three decades, died Saturday in Cincinnati. He was 79. A Hebrew Union official said Gottschalk died from complications following an automobile accident late last year Gottschalk, who escaped the Holocaust as a child in Germany, oversaw the expansion of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform seminary and graduate school with campuses in Los Angeles, New York, Cincinnati and Jerusalem, during 25 years as president.

A Hamas spiritual leader called teaching Palestinian children about the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews a "war crime," rejecting a suggestion that the United Nations might include study of the Holocaust in the Gaza Strip's school curriculum. A senior Israeli official said such statements should make the West think twice about ending its boycott of Hamas, in place since the group took control of Gaza in 2007. Israeli officials called the comments "obscene" and said they place Hamas in a pariah club of Holocaust deniers that includes the Iranian president.

Sketched on yellowing parchment, the 29 blueprints presented to Israel's prime minister Thursday lay out the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in chilling detail, with gas chambers, crematories, delousing facilities and watchtowers drawn to scale. "There are those who deny that the Holocaust happened," Benjamin Netanyahu said as he accepted the documents as a gift for Israel's Holocaust memorial, where they will go on display next year. "Let them come to Jerusalem and look at these plans, these plans for the factory of death."

A little more than a decade ago, researchers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum decided to create an encyclopedia of concentration camps. They assumed the finished work would be massive, featuring 5,000 to 7,000 camps and ghettos. They underestimated by about 15,000. Their ultimate count of more than 20,000 camps is far more than most scholars had known existed and could reshape public understanding of the scope of the Holocaust. "What's going to happen is that the mental universe of how scholars operate is going to change," said Steven Katz, director of Boston University's Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies.

An Australian who has denied the Holocaust occurred was sentenced to three months in prison for defying an order to stop publishing anti-Semitic material on his website. Fredrick Toben remained free after the judge gave him two weeks to lodge an appeal. Justice Bruce Lander of the Federal Court found Toben, 65, guilty on 24 counts of contempt of a 2002 court ruling that barred him from publishing anti-Semitic material on the website of his organization, the Adelaide Institute. The material found to be in breach of the order included suggestions the Holocaust did not happen, questioned whether there were gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp, and challenged the intelligence of Jews who questioned Holocaust deniers' beliefs.

Re "Holocaust, Gaza images stir furor" April 30 Because I am a Jew and the granddaughter of a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, I too sent out graphic images of Jews in the Holocaust and pictures of Palestinians caught up in Israel's recent Gaza offensive to friends, family and colleagues. I sent them because I was so disturbed by and ashamed of the Israeli assault on Gaza in the name of the Jewish people. I learned about the plight of the displaced Palestinian people from my survivor grandfather, Henri van Leeuwen, a deeply religious Orthodox Jew who was firmly committed in words and deeds to maintaining a distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.