(JTA) — An auction house in Germany canceled the sale of hundreds of items that belonged to Holocaust victims a day before it was set to take place.

The Felzmann auction house planned to offer 623 artifacts, including letters from concentration camps and documents detailing Nazi crimes, in the western German city of Neuss on Monday. After outcry from a Holocaust survivor group, the auction was canceled on Sunday and its listing disappeared from the house’s website by Sunday afternoon.

The auction was canceled shortly after being condemned by the International Auschwitz Committee, a group of survivors based in Berlin. The group’s executive vice president, Christoph Heubner, called the sale a “cynical and shameless undertaking” that left survivors “outraged and speechless.”

“Their history and the suffering of all those persecuted and murdered by the Nazis is being exploited for commercial gain,” Heubner said in a statement on Saturday. He demanded the auction house cancel its event, saying the contents “belong to the families of the victims” and “should be displayed in museums or memorial exhibitions.”

Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski said on Sunday he confirmed with his German counterpart, Johann Wadephul, that the “offensive” auction was aborted.

“Respect for victims requires the dignity of silence, not the din of commerce,” Sikorski said on X. He also appealed for artifacts to be handed to the Auschwitz Museum.

Days before cancelling without a statement, the auction house defended its planned sales to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, saying that private collectors used the items for “intensive research” and their activity contributed not to “the trade in suffering, but the preservation” of memory.

Titled “System of Terror, Vol. II,” the catalog showed items dating from 1933 to 1945. The first part of a privately collected trove of Holocaust letters was sold by the auction house six years ago, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Many items came from the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. A postcard from Auschwitz to Krakow in 1940 had a starting bid of $580, with a listing advertising the prisoner’s “very low inmate number” and their letter’s “very good condition.”

Other listings were expected to fetch much higher sums. A collection of 15 letters by a prisoner in the Ravensbrück camp started at $3,250. Another stash of letters between a Jewish family started at $14,000, described by the auction house as “rare” because “only a few Jews were alive” in 1943.

Beyond correspondence, the auction offered belongings such a yellow Star of David with “signs of wear,” three journal notebooks from an anonymous Polish Jew who survived the war, and identification documents of Jews who fled.

The catalog was also littered with Nazi documents. Among these was a 1937 medical report from the Dachau camp, which detailed the forced sterilization of a prisoner “by the camp doctor” with “the signature of an SS man.” Another listing showed a file by Auschwitz commandant Arthur Liebehenschel, with notes preparing for his post-war trial defense in Krakow in 1947, which the auction house said had not yet been published.

Other documents showed the records of companies forcefully sold to Nazis.

Previous auctions of artifacts linked to Nazi crimes have been canceled in the United States over recent years.

Two 17th-century paintings were taken out of an Ohio auction in September after a Holocaust art restitution organization determined they had been looted from a German Jew’s collection during World War II. In 2023, Christie’s called off the sale of 300 pieces from a jewelry collection belonging to Heidi Horten, whose husband Helmut Horten bought up Jewish businesses forcefully relinquished by their owners in the 1930s.

And in 2021, an auction house in Brooklyn suspended the sale of a 19th-century ledger claimed by a Jewish community in Romania.

The post German auction house calls off ‘shameless’ sale of concentration camp artifacts appeared first on The Forward.

The Israeli government has finally launched an investigation into the failures that led to the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023 — but not the independent state commission of inquiry that Israeli law, democratic norms, and public sentiment demand.

Instead, it is pursuing an internal investigation — a scheme central to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to escape political consequences for the catastrophe, and an evolution of his broader project to weaken Israel’s checks and balances.

To understand how we got here, we must recall the argument the government now uses against a state commission: that the public supposedly “does not trust” any effort involving the Supreme Court. This narrative is new, and also false. Until only a few years ago, polling consistently showed that the Supreme Court was one of the most trusted institutions in Israel.

But as soon as criminal indictments for corruption were filed against him in 2019, Netanyahu launched a sustained campaign portraying the court as a bastion of left-wing activism, suspect in its motives at every turn. His claims on this front have, from the start, been false. But a falsehood repeated often enough can shift public sentiment. That appears to be part of the plan.

When Netanyahu addressed the Knesset last week, he claimed that the “vast majority” of the Israeli public “does not believe” in establishing a state commission. This is a transparent lie. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, 74% of Israelis — including 75.5% of Jews and 68% of Arabs — support establishing a fully independent state commission. Among leftists and centrists, support is above 85%.

Families of Oct. 7 victims stood and turned their backs on him. But while the lies may sound obvious, they have had a measurable effect, particularly on the right. This intentional erosion of trust aims to weaken oversight, expand executive power, and delegitimize any institution capable of restraining the government.

Israel has an accepted mechanism for drawing lessons from national disasters, established by the State Commissions of Inquiry Law of 1968. Under that act, commissions are chaired by sitting or retired Supreme Court justices endowed with sweeping quasi-judicial powers and full independence from government control.

The Agranat Commission after the Yom Kippur War and the Bejski Commission after the early-1980s banking crisis are remembered as credible precisely because they were insulated from political manipulation. Their conclusions reshaped national understanding and restored institutional trust, although the Agranat Commission is criticized for largely clearing Golda Meir’s government of blame.

A Sunday decision by the government to instead establish its own probe will, by contrast, allows ministers to determine the mandate, membership, and powers of a “government commission.” In practice, that means those under scrutiny will choose their own investigators, and can limit the scope of the enterprise.

The need for a true reckoning — not this parody of corruption run amok — could not be more urgent. The Oct. 7 attack revealed systemic collapse across Israel’s entire security and political architecture.

Internal reviews since have made clear that longstanding assumptions about Hamas — particularly the belief that the group was deterred and more interested in governance than conflict — were catastrophically misguided. The military left the Gaza border with minimal protection, with much personnel diverted to the West Bank to try to contain provocations against the Palestinians by militant settlers backed by the government. The Defense Minister, Chief of Staff, head of Military Intelligence, head of the Shin Bet, and other senior officials from that period have all resigned or been removed.

These failures were not solely operational; they were strategic, doctrinal, and political. For years, Netanyahu’s Gaza policy — allowing Qatari cash into the Strip, sidelining the Palestinian Authority, insisting that Hamas could be “managed” and finding a benefit in having the Palestinians be politically divided — shaped Israel’s thinking.

Netanyahu, however, has refused to even hint at accepting any responsibility. During the Gaza war, he argued that any inquiry must await its conclusion. Critics howled that such a claim incentivized his prolonging of the war — but thus did Netanyahu buy two more years of time.

Now, with the war seemingly over, comes this latest machination.

Critics across Israeli society have already labeled the government’s decision a whitewash and a cover-up. The Movement for Quality Government decried “a transparent attempt to evade a real and independent investigation.” The October Council — representing bereaved families, survivors, and relatives of hostages — condemned the move as an attempt by those in power to “absolve themselves of punishment.”

The refusal to establish a state commission is not an isolated decision. It sits alongside ongoing efforts to dilute the Attorney General’s authority, undermine independent media, and reshape public understanding of Israel’s core institutions. Internationally, Netanyahu benefits from an American political climate less committed to defending liberal democratic norms. President Trump’s letter to his counterpart Isaac Herzog last week, urging him to pardon Netanyahu and end his bribery trial, underscored this new reality.

In this reality, the election coming up within a year is emerging as a referendum on the fundamental, existential question of whether Israel wants to remain a true democracy, or join the ranks or elected dictatorships, ranging from Viktor Orban’s Hungary all the way to the worst-case scenario of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

And if Israel votes to save itself from Netanyahu and his cabal, expect the new government to decommission the whitewash — and appoint a state inquiry commission.

The post A new scheme dishonoring victims of Oct. 7 — hatched by Israel’s own government appeared first on The Forward.

Hundreds attended the unveiling ceremony of the first monument in North America commemorating the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack at the Shalom Baruch cemetery in Humble, Texas. Photo: Shalom Baruch Cemetery

A Jewish cemetery in Texas recently unveiled the first permanent memorial in North America commemorating the deadly Hamas-led terrorist attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

The 12-foot tall Star of David sculpture at Shalom Baruch – located in the Houston-area city of Humble – honors the victims, survivors, and hostages of the Oct. 7 massacre. It was conceptualized and designed by an art committee that included Anat Ronen, Kirsten Coco, and Jonathan Dror.

“The Star of David emerging from the ground stands as a symbol of resilience, identity, and collective memory,” said Coco. “It honors those we lost, affirms the strength of Israel and reflects a commitment to rise above hate, together.”

A companion ribbon-shaped sculpture nearby, created by Israeli artist Yaron Bob, was made out of shrapnel recovered from missiles that were fired at Israel from Iran and intercepted by the Jewish state’s Iron Dome system.

The sculpture symbolizes transformation and hope, according to a description on the cemetery’s website. Bob is well known for creating a similar piece that US President Donald Trump gifted to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this summer and a menorah for President Barack Obama in 2014.

Yaron Bob’s sculpture made from shrapnel. Photo: Chuck Thompson

Shalom Baruch was founded in 2023 by Israeli-American Varda Fields in honor of her father. Guests who attended the memorial’s unveiling ceremony were encouraged to leave notes in the cemetery’s Western Wall replica and promised that their notes would be delivered to the real wall in Jerusalem when Fields travels to Israel next. Memorial stones, made by adult artists living with intellectual and developmental disabilities through Alexander Jewish Family Services’ Celebration Company program, were given to attendees to place at the memorial’s base, in line with the Jewish tradition of placing stones on the grave of a loved one.

The Oct. 7 memorial sculpture is available for viewing to the general public during the cemetery’s regular hours, Monday through Friday. It was unveiled earlier in November during an event attended by several local, state, and national elected officials, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and more than 200 community members, civic leaders, and faith representatives.

“Jewish Houstonians and our many allies showed up for us today,” said Fields. “I can only hope that they continue to speak up against antisemitism, support the Jewish people, and even encourage others around the country and the world to build their own memorials so that we never forget what happened on Oct. 7 and every day thereafter.”

“This monument … serves as a powerful symbol of resilience, identity, and the unbreakable spirit of the Jewish people,” US Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX), who attended the unveiling ceremony, said in a statement on social media. “It stands as a reminder that even in the face of unimaginable hate and terror, we rise, together with strength, faith, and a commitment to ensure the world never forgets. May this memorial inspire unity, remembrance, and a continued stand against antisemitism, here at home and across the globe.”

Speakers at the unveiling ceremony, co-sponsored by the Holocaust Museum Houston, included former Hamas hostage Omer Shem Tov, who was abducted from the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas-led terrorists and held captive in the Gaza Strip for 505 days. Shem Tov was released from captivity on Feb. 22 as part of a ceasefire deal. He spoke at the ceremony about the hostages and the soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces who were killed protecting Israel since the Oct. 7 attack. The Shalom Baruch cemetery honored him with its inaugural “The Lone Star of Israel Award,” which it will present annually.