Warsaw Ghetto memorial reflects a changing Poland

The Museum of the History of the Polish Jews, set to open its permanent exhibition next year, celebrates Jewish life in Poland before the Holocaust and confronts Poles with its own dark chapters of anti-Semitism.

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somewhereno-oneknows:

Sir Nicholas Winton.

Here’s the video.

Go watch! 

(take tissues!!)

Polish rescuers of Jews celebrated as heroes

The rescuers themselves deny that they are exceptional. With each other, they discuss other things, often their failing health, avoiding memories of executions and other brutality that they witnessed and which still bring them to tears.

“We did what we had to do,” said Halina Szaszkiewicz, 89. “There was nothing heroic about it.”

But the Jewish officials honoring them see it differently.

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Artists, scientists and musicians from Israel, the United States and the former Soviet republics will attend the four-day conference, which began Thursday in this country of 4.1 million with a population of 20,000 Jews

The conference is organized by Limmud FSU, a group that supports and reinforces Jewish education and identity.

A Bronx Tale: After the congregants of an Orthodox synagogue could no longer afford their rent, they found help in the local mosque.

Near the corner of Westchester Avenue and Pugsley Street in Parkchester, just off the elevated tracks of the No. 6 train, Yaakov Wayne Baumann stood outside a graffiti-covered storefront on a chilly Saturday morning. Suited up in a black overcoat with a matching wide-brimmed black fedora, the thickly bearded 42-year-old chatted with elderly congregants as they entered the building for Shabbat service.

The only unusual detail: This synagogue is a mosque.

Or rather, it’s housed inside a mosque. That’s right: Members of the Chabad of East Bronx, an ultra-Orthodox synagogue, worship in the Islamic Cultural Center of North America, which is home to the Al-Iman mosque.

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Poland Has Largest Gathering Of Rabbis Since WWII

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PICTURED ABOVE: Workers inspect the most challenging part of the building that is to house the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, a partition that symbolizes the waves of the Red Sea that opened to allow Jews a safe escape from Egypt.

An ambitious museum devoted to the 1,000-year history of Poland’s Jews will open on the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, officials said Monday.

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Berlin Offers Kosher Lifestyle For Jews

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