RSS
As nationalism rises in Serbia, a Holocaust education seminar for teachers gets more popular
ŠABAC, Serbia (JTA) — On a recent morning in the Serbian town of Šabac, 69-year-old Borka Marinković sat around a table with half a dozen schoolteachers, none of them Jewish, and opened up about her complicated life as the daughter of Holocaust survivors.
Marinković’s mother was interned at a concentration camp on the Croatian island of Rab, but in 1943, partisans rescued her and she joined the resistance effort as a cryptographer. She then met Marinković’s father, a Yugoslavian partisan.
Three years later, after the war ended, they married and began a family, but they rarely spoke of the horrors they had endured. Only at the age of 15 did Marinković, née Salcberger — whose first name means “fighter” — even learn she was a Jew.
“In 1983, I married a Serb and gladly took his family name. Somehow it helped me assimilate into the new society,” said Marinković. “But the ethnic wars of the 1990s gave me flashbacks of the Holocaust, and at some point in my life I felt ashamed that I had kept my Jewish identity secret.”
Marinković, who told her story calmly but brought her entire audience to tears, eventually wrote a book about the tortured experiences of second-generation Holocaust survivors like herself.
“This is my first time speaking with teachers,” Marinković told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency through a translator after her story, which was followed by a breakaway session in which educators discussed how to use the narrative in a classroom setting. “I get emotional when I talk about my parents, but I think this message is very important for future generations.”
Marinković and two other second-generation survivors were participating in a seminar with 30 Serbian teachers at the Hotel Sloboda in Šabac (pronounced SHA-betz), a town on the banks of the Sava River whose small Jewish community was decimated during the war. The hotel is only two city blocks from a branch of the national bank where in August 1941 the Nazis hanged 10 prominent Šabac Jews from electricity poles.
The event was arranged by The Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights (TOLI) — a New York-based nonprofit that provides Holocaust education programs to teachers in the United States and Europe — in conjunction with local partner Terraforming, a Serbian civil society organization that teaches about the Holocaust and fights antisemitism and xenophobia.
Svetlana Maksimovic, 43, an English teacher at the seminar from the southern Serbian town of Prokulje, said “Serbs aren’t familiar with the Holocaust.”
“Even well-educated Serbs don’t know much about it,” said Maksimovic, a Serbian Orthodox woman who visited Israel last summer. “I think it’s a really big step for Serbia’s educational system that this topic is now being taught in schools.”
Serbian teachers attending the TOLI seminar on Holocaust education, along with three daughters of Holocaust survivors, gather in front of the recently restored synagogue in Šabac, Serbia. (Larry Luxner)
Oana Bajka, the associate director of TOLI International Programs, said the Aug. 21-24 event marked the 54th such seminar for TOLI and the third of its type in Serbia; the previous two, in 2021 and 2022, took place in Novi Sad, about an hour’s bus ride north of Šabac. TOLI now operates in 11 countries throughout Europe: Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain and Ukraine.
“In every country, the teachers gain an understanding about the responsibilities of their governments during the Holocaust,” said Bajka, who joined TOLI in 2019 and works from an office in Timasoara, Romania. “That’s one of our big challenges, because often governments have difficulty acknowledging their collaboration with Nazi Germany.”
Frequently, said Bajka, people tend to identify with their nation’s good deeds while overlooking the crimes. For example, she said, “in Bulgaria they talk a lot about saving Bulgarian Jews, and not so much Bulgaria’s role in deporting the Jews from Thrace and Macedonia.”
Under President Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia — like Poland, Hungary and most recently Slovakia — has veered politically to the far right in recent years. Local fascist and neo-Nazi groups are motivated by traditional antisemitism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Anger over the 2008 declaration of independence by predominantly Albanian-speaking Kosovo — which most Serbs consider an integral part of their country — has also fueled the rise of intense nationalism in this country of 7.1 million, which includes about 3,000 Jews.
Katarzyna Suszkiewicz, head of the education department at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, Poland, makes a point during an August 2023 TOLI Holocaust education seminar in Šabac, Serbia. (Larry Luxner)
Antisemitism and Holocaust discourse are issues elsewhere in the Balkans and in parts of Eastern Europe, too. Last year, Romania’s nationalist AUR party issued a statement calling Holocaust education — which had just been mandated in Romanian high schools — a “minor topic.” His comments were condemned by David Saranga, Israel’s then-ambassador to Romania. But on Aug. 28, Saranga’s successor, Reuven Azar, met with AUR’s president, George Simion, after the latter agreed that Romania is indeed responsible for the killing of Jews on territory it held during World War II.
Šabac resident Natalija Perišić decided to take action on the subject after reading the book “Sophie’s Choice.” Author William Styron based Sophie on Hungarian Holocaust survivor Olga Lengyel, whose 1946 book, “Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz,” was one of the first published accounts about the Nazi genocide.
Perišić says the murder of six million Jews has particular relevance in Serbia, which helped perpetrate the July 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica during the 1992-95 Bosnian War. In 2013, then-Serbian President Tomislav Nikolić apologized for the “crime” of Srebrenica but refused to call it a genocide.
“We think of ourselves as a nation of people against fascism, and we like to think of Serbian bravery,” said Perišić. “But I do not see that we’ve drawn any lessons from the 1990s.”
Belgrade educator Alexander Todosijevic, president of the Serbia History Teachers’ Association, said that this program was especially timely, given the pressure teachers now face about how they present history.
“It’s very important for Serbian teachers to know about the Holocaust and to be motivated to teach it,” he said, adding that the seminar, which provided pedagogical approaches, has become popular in Serbia. More than 150 teachers applied to take part this year alone.
RELATED: A Serbian city’s Jewish community barely survived the Holocaust. Now it might die out.
TOLI also takes its seminar participants to sites “connected to Jewish heritage and local history,” Bajka said. On the program this year was a scholarly presentation about the ill-fated Kladovo transport — a secret effort to help 1,051 Jewish refugees escape Nazi-occupied Europe via the Danube River and Black Sea to then-Palestine. The effort ended in failure when their chartered ship got stranded in Šabac, and the Nazis killed nearly everyone aboard or in the Sajmište concentration camp near Belgrade.
Teachers visited the burned-out remains of a mill that had temporarily housed about 500 refugees from the Kladovo transport, as well as a small synagogue where the Jews of Šabac used to pray.
Katarzyna Suszkiewicz, who heads the education department at Krakow’s Galicia Jewish Museum in Poland, said these teachers are “on the front lines.”
“They have direct contact with youth, and we must support them,” she said. “Local leaders or NGOs don’t have that kind of contact. And if teachers are incompetent or don’t know much, they’ll never risk interacting with students on such a difficult subject.”
Suzkiewicz, 38, isn’t Jewish, but she can relate to the Holocaust because her grandmother was a forced laborer in Germany. In Poland, where 90% of the country’s 3 million Jews were murdered in Nazi death camps, “historical facts put us in a spotlight, and this is something we will never escape,” she said.
“You cannot separate Jewish stories from Polish stories. At some point, I felt robbed because I wasn’t taught much about Jews at school, and so I wasn’t properly prepared for my visit to Auschwitz,” she said. “For many, the Holocaust is very distant. But atrocities are not that far away, and when the war in Ukraine broke out, they realized that Auschwitz can happen again.”
A memorial in the courtyard of the synagogue in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, lists the names of Jewish partisans killed while fighting the Nazis during World War II. (Larry Luxner)
TOLI’s local partner in Serbia, Terraforming, was founded in 2008 by Miško Stanišić. A non-Jew born and raised in Sarajevo, Stanišić fled in 1992 during intense fighting between ethnic Serbs and Bosnians, taking refuge in the Netherlands and later Sweden. He now lives in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city that was home to a once-sizable Jewish community.
“I believe that the majority population should be in charge of protecting the minority, and giving voice to those who are weak,” he said.
Terraforming has also produced a series of educational graphic novels about the Holocaust based on biographies, said Stanišić.
“They’re not just stories, but combined teaching materials that include primary sources, maps and historical photos. It’s all digital,” he said. “We’re targeting youth from 10 years old up to young adults. There are obviously not enough visual resources to tell these stories.”
Nor are there many eyewitnesses to the Holocaust left in Serbia. In fact, said Stanišić, “just a handful, maybe 10 survivors all in their late 90s. That is why we invite the second generation.”
Maksimovic, the English teacher from Prokulje, became fascinated with the Holocaust after reading “The Letters of Hilda Dajč.” The graphic novel by Aleksandr Zograf is based on the recollections of an Austrian-born Jewish nurse who volunteered to work at Croatia’s Nazi-run Sajmište concentration camp and was later gassed there — along with 6,000 other women, children and elderly men — in the spring of 1942.
“Her letters really moved me. I compare her to Anne Frank,” Maksimovic said. “We’ve also had wars here and we know what genocide means. It’s very important to introduce this topic from an early age, so that it never happens again. And there’s a way to teach this to children, without the horror, in a way they’ll understand.”
—
The post As nationalism rises in Serbia, a Holocaust education seminar for teachers gets more popular appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
Twitter AI’s Spree of Antisemitic Answers Provokes European Union Meeting as US Military Signs Deal With Company
European Union flags flutter outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, on June 17, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Yves Herman
Following an update earlier this month to xAI’s Grok chatbot which resulted in a wave of antisemitic and pro-Hitler responses to users on X/Twitter, the European Commission summoned representatives from billionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company to a Tuesday meeting to explain themselves.
The move comes after Italian parliament member Sandro Gozi urged for the Commission to begin a formal inquiry, as “the case raises serious concerns about compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as the governance of generative AI in the Union’s digital space.”
Poland’s Minister of Digital Affairs Krzysztof Gawkowski had also called for the Commission to take action and said that the Polish government would consider banning the app.
Due to the size of the X platform, the site falls under the European Union’s DSA which requires transparency about operations. Musk’s app already faces multiple investigations by the Commission.
On Wednesday, following the initial antisemitic statements from Grok, X’s Linda Yaccarino, the company’s CEO, announced her resignation.
On Monday, xAI announced a $200 million deal to provide Grok to the US military. The company stated that “under the umbrella of Grok For Government, we will be bringing all of our world-class AI tools to federal, local, state, and national security customers.” Customers in the plan could “use the Grok family of products to accelerate America – from making everyday government services faster and more efficient to using AI to address unsolved problems in fundamental science and technology.”
The Pentagon also announced on Monday other AI companies would receive contracts, including Anthropic, Google and OpenAI.
Douglas Matty, chief digital and AI officer at the Defense Department, said that “leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our Joint mission essential tasks in our warfighting domain as well as intelligence, business, and enterprise information systems.”
Also on Monday, Musk unveiled a new release to the AI capabilities on X. The Companions feature will allow users to interact with cartoon characters, including a mischievous fox and an anime-style goth girl named Ani.
On Tuesday, xAI put out a statement explaining that it had “spotted a couple of issues with Grok 4 recently that we immediately investigated & mitigated.” The company said it had “tweaked the prompts and have shared the details on GitHub for transparency. We are actively monitoring and will implement further adjustments as needed.”
The post Twitter AI’s Spree of Antisemitic Answers Provokes European Union Meeting as US Military Signs Deal With Company first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Jewish Synagogue, Holocaust Memorial Vandalized in Poland After Politician Denies Holocaust
An antisemitic slur spray-painted on the ruins of a former synagogue in Dukla, Poland. Photo: World Jewish Restitution Organization
Two Jewish sites in Dukla, Poland, were vandalized over the weekend mere days after Polish member of the European Parliament (MEP) Grzegorz Braun claimed gas chambers at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp were fake and repeated an antisemitic blood libel in a live radio interview.
Vandals spray-painted the word “F–k” followed by a Star of David on the ruins of a former synagogue that was destroyed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, and a memorial commemorating Holocaust victims located at the entrance of the Jewish cemetery in Dukla was defaced with a swastika and the word “Palestine,” according to the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO). The memorial honors Jews of Dukla and the surrounding areas who were murdered by Nazis during the Holocaust.
The two Jewish sites in Dukla are cared for by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODZ), which was established in 2002 by the Union of Jewish Communities in Poland and the WJRO to protect and commemorate Poland’s Jewish heritage sites.
“These hateful acts are not only antisemitic, but they are also attempts to erase Jewish history and desecrate memory,” said WJRO President Gideon Taylor in a released statement on Tuesday. “Polish authorities must take swift and serious action to identify the perpetrators and ensure the protection of Jewish heritage sites in Dukla and across the country.”
“The vandalism of Jewish sites in Dukla—with swastikas and anti-Israel slurs—is not an isolated act,” insisted Jack Simony, director general of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation (AJCF), in a statement to The Algemeiner. The nonprofit focuses on preserving the memory of the Jewish community in Oświęcim (Auschwitz) and maintains the Auschwitz Jewish Center, the last remaining synagogue in town.
“While we cannot say definitively that it [the vandalism] was sparked by Grzegorz Braun’s Holocaust denial, his rhetoric contributes to an atmosphere where hatred is emboldened and truth is under assault,” added Simony. “Braun’s lies are not harmless — they are dangerous. Holocaust denial fuels antisemitism and, too often, violence. This is why Holocaust education matters … because when we fail to confront lies, we invite their consequences. Memory must be defended, not only for the sake of the past, but for the safety of our future.”
On July 10, a ceremony was held commemorating the 84th anniversary of the 1941 Jedwabne massacre, when hundreds of Polish Jews were massacred – mostly by their neighbors – in the northeastern town in German-occupied Poland. The ceremony was attended by dignitaries and faith leaders including Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich and Israeli Deputy Ambassador Bosmat Baruch. Groups of anti-Israel and far-right activists — including MEP Braun and his supporters – tried to disrupt the event by holding banners with antisemitic slogans and blocking the vehicles of the attendees, according to Polish radio.
Hours later, during a live radio broadcast, Braun falsely claimed the Auschwitz gas chambers were “a lie” and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum was promoting “pseudo-history.” He also claimed that Jewish “ritual murder is a fact.” Polish prosecutors launched an investigation into Braun’s comments, they announced that same day. Under Article 55 of the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), Holocaust denial is a criminal offense in Poland.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum issued a swift condemnation of Braun’s remarks and said it intents to pursue legal action. The Institute of National Remembrance — which is the largest research, educational and archival institution in Poland – also denounced Braun’s remarks, saying there is “well-documented” evidence supporting the existence of gas chambers. His comments were also condemned by the Embassy of Israel in Poland, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski and the US Embassy in Warsaw, which said that his actions “distort history, desecrate memory, or spread antisemitism.” AJCF called on the European Parliament to consider disciplinary measures against Braun, including potential censure or expulsion.
Auschwitz Jewish Center Director Tomek Kuncewicz said Braun’s comments are “an act of violence against truth, against survivors, and against the legacy of our shared humanity.” AJCF Chairman Simon Bergson called the politician’s remarks “blatant and baseless lies,” while Simony described them as “a calculated act of antisemitic incitement” that “must be met with legal consequences and universal moral condemnation.”
The post Jewish Synagogue, Holocaust Memorial Vandalized in Poland After Politician Denies Holocaust first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Coalition of 400 Jewish Orgs and Synagogues Urge Teachers Union to Reverse Decision Cutting Ties with ADL
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt. Photo Credit: ADL.
Following a vote by the National Education Association (NEA) on July 6 to end its relationship with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 400 Jewish communal groups, education organizations, and religious institutions have come together to call for the influential teachers union to change course.
“We are writing to express our deep concerns about the growing level of antisemitic activity within teachers’ unions, particularly since the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023,” the letter to NEA President Becky Pringle stated. “Passage of New Business Item (NBI) 39 at the National Education Association (NEA) Representative Assembly this past weekend, which shockingly calls for the boycott of the Anti-Defamation League, is just the latest example of open hostility toward Jewish educators, students and families coming from national and local teachers’ unions and their members.”
In addition to the ADL, signatories of the letter included American Jewish Committee (AJC), Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Jewish Federations of North America, #EndJewHatred, American Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith International, CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting & Analysis), Combat Antisemitism Movement, Democratic Majority for Israel, StandWithUs, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Zioness Movement, and Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).
The group told Pringle that “we have heard directly from NEA members who have shared their experiences ranging from explicit and implicit antisemitism within the union to a broader pattern of insensitivity toward legitimate concerns of Jewish members – including at the recently concluded Representative Assembly. We are also deeply troubled by a broader pattern of union activity over the past 20 months that has targeted or alienated Jewish members and the wider Jewish community.”
The letter to Pringle included an addendum providing examples of objectionable rhetoric. These named such incidents as the Oakland Education Association (OEA) putting out a statement calling for “an end to the occupation of Palestine” and the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) accusing Israel of genocide.
The coalition of 400 organizations urged the NEA to “take immediate action” and suggested such steps as rejecting NBI 39, issuing a “strong condemnation” of antisemitism within the union, drafting a plan to counter ongoing antisemitism in affiliate chapters, and opposing “any effort to use an educator’s support for the existence of Israel as a means to attack their identity.”
ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt wrote on X that “Excluding @ADL’s educational resources from schools is not just an attack on our org, but on the entire Jewish community. We urge the @NEAToday Executive Committee to reverse this biased, fringe effort and reaffirm its commitment to supporting all Jewish students and educators.”
The post Coalition of 400 Jewish Orgs and Synagogues Urge Teachers Union to Reverse Decision Cutting Ties with ADL first appeared on Algemeiner.com.