Comments (0)Construction Set for Polish Jewry Museum
June 25, 2009Rome
JTA Wire Service
Construction on the long-planned Museum of the History of Polish Jews is set to begin in Warsaw.
Poland’s culture minister, Warsaw’s mayor and other officials signed a contract Wednesday authorizing Poland’s largest construction engineering company, Polimex-Mostostal, to begin work on the multimillion-dollar project on June 30.
Polimex-Mostostal chairman Konrad Jasko said the building, a glass-walled structure designed by Finnish architect Rainer Mahlamaki, would be completed in 33 months.
The museum will be located in the heart of what was the World War II Warsaw Ghetto, facing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument that was erected there in 1948.
In a statement released Thursday, the museum said that a gala ceremony will mark the start of construction. A group of 100 American cantors on a concert tour of Poland are scheduled to perform.
Meanwhile, the future museum launched a Virtual Shtetl Web site Tuesday to help build the museum’s collection, the French news agency AFP reported.
The site contains information about 800 Polish cities and towns that were home to Jewish shtetls before the Holocaust. Users can add information and eyewitness testimony to the site.
British Lawmakers Elect first Jewish Speaker
Britain’s Parliament for the first time elected a Jewish speaker of the House of Commons.
John Bercow, 46, a Conservative lawmaker, was elected Monday in a secret ballot.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown in congratulating Bercow noted that he was the Parliament’s first Jewish speaker.
Historians to Research Wagner’s Nazi Past
Descendants of German composer Richard Wagner announced plans to have independent historians research the family archives.
Katharina Wagner, a great-granddaughter of Hitler’s beloved composer, and now head of the annual Bayreuth Wagner Festival together with her older sister, Eva, told the Welt Online newspaper on June 18 that it was important to lay bare the family’s Nazi past.
Included in the family archives are nearly 300 letters from Hitler.
“An independent and complete documentation of the history of Bayreuth will be prepared without any influence from us,” Katharina Wagner told the Welt Online edition.
The research will focus on the private archive of the festival and of her father, Wolfgang Wagner, born in 1919, who retired last year as director.
“I don’t know the extent to which other family members will get involved in this project,” Wagner, 31, said in the interview. “But I want to emphasize that Eva and I will make everything available that we possibly can.”
Rumors of a romantic involvement between Hitler and Katharina Wagner’s grandmother, Winifred Marjorie Williams, fueled in part by a 2008 novel by A.N. Wilson titled “Winnie and Wolf,” have never quite died.
Katharina Wagner said she did not know if there would be any surprises in the archives.
“The subject has been handled before but not thoroughly,” she said, “otherwise there wouldn’t be questions hanging in the air anymore.”
An informal ban on the public performance of Wagner’s music in Israel has been in place since the founding of the Jewish state.
Hungarians Rally Against Memorial’s Desecration
Thousands of Hungarians have paid their respects to Holocaust victims whose memorial was desecrated with pigs’ feet.
In the largest rally, thousands came Thursday to the banks of the Danube River to show that the forces of democracy will not be intimidated by the rise of neo-Nazism.
Leaders of all the parliamentary political parties joined many prominent writers and artists at the rally, which took place two days after the desecration. A government spokesman said Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai was outraged but could not attend because of a mandatory heads of government meeting in Brussels, but earlier he placed a flower at the memorial.
Fidesz, the dominant parliamentary opposition, formally condemned the attack.
The memorial for thousands of Jews executed and thrown into the Danube during World War II is made up of 60 pairs of abandoned shoes fashioned of steel. The vandals put pigs’ feet into some of the shoes.
Several human rights organizations called mass meetings at the memorial Thursday. The largest was organized by a Socialist parliamentary deputy and supported by the Association of Hungarian Jewish Religious Communities, which used the opportunity to gather support for draft legislation by the government to outlaw Holocaust denial and public incitement to racial hatred.
This story reprinted courtesy of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.