This is an interesting monument in Warsaw, Poland, marking the boundary of the Warsaw Ghetto. For more info on the most famous event of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Ghetto uprising, go here (used to have pictures but those links seem defunct). This new info comes from the Jewish Heritage E-Report (November 13, 2008) Edited by Samuel D. Gruber (see also here.)

To my surprise, I came across a new monument on ulica Bielanska, not far from the site of the (destroyed) Great Synagogue that gave me a clue about the Wall. I had not heard of this monument and it is not yet included on any map or in any guide. As it happens it is but one small part of an ambitious new project by the City of Warsaw and the Ministry of Culture in cooperation with the Jewish Historical Institute (JHI) to bring back the memory of the wall. The work is still in progress, but will be officially inaugurated at the JHI next week, on November 19th.

The Mormon "church" has been in the news quite a lot lately, due to that organization's successful attack on the civil rights of LGBTQ Americans in California. However, coverage drives more coverage, and now, there's this.

Holocaust survivors to Mormons: Stop baptisms of dead Jews

Holocaust survivors said Monday they are through trying to negotiate with the Mormon church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps, saying the church has repeatedly violated a 13-year-old agreement barring the practice.

Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints say they are making changes to their massive genealogical database that will make it more difficult for names of Holocaust victims to be entered for posthumous baptism by proxy, a rite that has been a common Mormon practice for more than a century.

But Ernest Michel, honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, said that is not enough. At a news conference in New York City on Monday, he said the church also must "implement a mechanism to undo what you have done."

"Baptism of a Jewish Holocaust victim and then merely removing that name from the database is just not acceptable," said Michel, whose parents died at Auschwitz. He spoke on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi-incited riots against Jews.

"We ask you to respect us and our Judaism just as we respect your religion," Michel said in a statement released ahead of the news conference. "We ask you to leave our six million Jews, all victims of the Holocaust, alone, they suffered enough."

Is it even possible to do anything more offensive?

It is Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is the time we remember the 11 million people (including he 5 million non-Jews too often left out of our remembrance) who were killed by the Nazis in WW II.

Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freight Car

Here, in this freight car,
I, Eve,
with my son Abel.
If you see my older boy,
Cain, the son of Adam,
tell him that I…

--Dan Pagis, as quoted in Ariel Hirschfeld’s chapter in Cultures of the Jews, David Biale (ed.)

I read this poem, evoking the emotions of a woman crammed into a freight car on her way to the death camps during the Holocaust, right before I read Elie Wiesel's most recent edition of his book Night, describing his own experiences in the Holocaust. His book is, needless to say, chilling. But the additions in the latest edition make it even more so. If you read earlier editions, you might want to read the intro to the new one because he mentions things edited out of the original.

Grace Paley, 84, dies.. NY Times obit here She was a writer, poet, feminist Jewish radical who was idolized by many of us who grew up in Greenwich Village in the late 50's & early 60's. She had been in the War Resisters League and honored last year by the Jews For Racial & Economic Justice. For a recording of Paley reading her own work including the short story "Friends," click here. Katha Pollitt has a good reminis in the Nation together with a Paley poem you should read right now .

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomo Vanzetti, Italian anarchist-oriented union organizers were executed 80 years ago on August 23, 1927. They’ll be remembered at Union Square at 6PM Thursday Aug. 23, 2007.-+

Genocide Remembered. Do not omit reading this moving story by the LA Times’ Maria La Ganga about a nazi holocaust survivor who remembers concentration camp life at the end of hers (via The Columbia Journalism Review.)

Genocide Forgotten The Anti-Defamation League has very reluctantly left the camp of Armenian genocide deniers.