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Comments (0)In the wake of California legislation requiring companies to disclose their activities during the Holocaust, the head of France’s national railroad said lawmakers were welcome to review its archives.
France’s national railroad, known by the acronym SNCF, carried French Jews to Nazi concentration camps.
Railroad chief Guillaume Pepe on Sunday told Radio France Internationale that the archives, which have been open for 20 years, are available to U.S. lawmakers, UPI reported.
The California Legislature last week passed The Holocaust Survivor Responsibility Act, which would require bidders to disclose their involvement in transporting victims to concentration camps during World War II. The measure requires the California High-Speed Rail Authority to consider that fact in its deliberation of contract awards.
The legislation is awaiting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signature.
SNCF is seeking part of a $43 billion project to build a high-speed rail line between Sacramento and San Diego.
“We should not forget one thing: The SNCF, the railway workers, were under the yoke of the Nazi occupiers, threatened with death,” Pepe told French radio. “And 2,000 railway workers were executed by the Nazis.”
A Japanese firm that used American POWs for slave labor during WWII, leading to the deaths of more than 1,000 American POWs, also is vying for a piece of the project.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center applauded the passage of the California legislation.
German Yeshiva to Ordain Soviet Emigres as Rabbis
Two rabbinical students reflecting the demographics of Germany’s burgeoning Jewish community are set to be ordained at a German seminary.
In what some are calling more proof of the revival of Jewish life in Germany, Shlomo Afanasev and Moshe Baumel of the Rabbinical Seminary of Berlin will be ordained in ceremonies Monday at the historic synagogue of Leipzig.
They are the second batch of rabbis trained at the school, a program of the U.S.-based Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. The first ordination was held in June 2009 in Munich.
Asanev was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he studied financial management and accounting. He will be working for the Jewish communities in the state of Brandenburg, Germany.
Baumel’s family immigrated to Germany from Lithuania in 1991. He will be rabbi and director of Jewish studies at the Zwi-Peres-Chajes School of the Jewish Community of Vienna, Austria. In addition to pursuing ordination, Baumel has studied art history and antiquities.
Germany’s Jewish community consists of about 80 percent immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Some 200,000 Jews live in Germany today, about half of whom are affiliated with Jewish communities. Only 20 years ago, the Jewish population was about 30,000.
“The ordination is the apotheosis of all the concerns about whether the Russian immigration to Germany would produce Jewish life,” Rabbi Joshua Spinner, the Rabbinical Seminary’s director, told JTA.
The influx of Jews “is not only producing the communities who want the rabbis, it is also producing the rabbis themselves,” said Spinner, 40, who last year was appointed chief executive officer and executive vice president of the Lauder Foundation.
The seminary describes itself as a successor to the institution founded by Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer in 1873 in Berlin and shut down by the Nazis in 1938.
In addition to local Jewish leaders, guests at the ordination are set to include World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder; Yeshiva University President Richard Joel; and Rabbi Chanoch Ehrentreu of London, supervisor of the seminary.
The seminary is associated with the Conference of European Rabbis and the Orthodox Rabbinical Conference of Germany.
School Apologizes Over Prize for Hitler Costume
A Catholic primary school in Australia apologized to parents after a student dressed as Hitler won a dress-up competition.
Students aged 9 and 10 at the school in Perth, in western Australia, had been asked to dress as famous people. Teachers awarded first prize to the child dressed as Hitler, spurring an outcry from parents.
The principal of the school, which has not been identified, issued a letter of apology last week reassuring parents that future dress-up activities would be restricted to famous people “appropriate for primary school-aged students.”
But in an interview with the West Australian newspaper, the principal said people had made a “mountain out of a molehill” and described the dress-up activity as a “one-off thing.”
“Hitler was a fairly famous person,” the newspaper reported him as saying.
The principal added that children who reportedly responded with chants of “Hitler! Hitler!” were simply cheering for the person they thought should win the contest.