Jewish Russian Telegraph

Man Who Killed Rudolf Kastner: I Regret It

JRT: Depending on who you ask, Rudolf Kastner was either a saint or a villain. Responsible for making a deal with the Nazis that saved the lives of some 1,600 Jews, he was later accused of withholding information that could have saved hundreds of thousands of Hungary's Jews, who were the last to perish in Europe when they were sent to Auschwitz in 1944. The Kastner case roiled Israel when it went public in 1954, with the fledgling state seeing one of its heroes accused of the one crime anyone could be sentenced to death for in the new country: collaborating with the Nazis. 

Kastner was shot dead in 1957, and in this Ynet interview his murderer, Ze'ev Eckstein, expresses remorse for what he did almost sixty years ago.

From Ynet:

In the early hours of March 4, 1957, Ze'ev Eckstein stood hidden outside 6 Emanuel HaRomi Street in Tel Aviv. With a cocked and loaded pistol tucked into his belt, he waited quietly to spark one of the biggest storms in the history of the State of Israel. Shortly after midnight, the headlights of an approaching car appeared out of the darkness. Eckstein came out of hiding and called out: "Israel Kastner!" And when he heard a voice reply in the affirmative, he raised his arm and pulled the trigger. The first round was a blank, but then Eckstein fired three more shots.

The death of Dr. Israel (Rudolph) Kastner did indeed mark the end of an intricate and fascinating affair in the small newborn state, but it was also the first time the subject of the Holocaust and the ties between Zionist leaders and high-ranking Nazi officials rose to the fore. Today, at 81, and with the publication of his book, Quilt Blanket, Eckstein takes stock of his life for the last time and says: "I wouldn't do it today. I wouldn't shoot. There's no doubt about it."

The affair began in 1952, after a Jerusalem hotelier by the name of Malchiel Gruenwald launched an attack on members of the pre-state leadership and their silence during the Holocaust. Kastner, who was a member of the Aid and Rescue Committee in Budapest during the Holocaust and was serving in 1952 as then-trade and industry minister Dr. Dov Yosef's spokesman in David Ben-Gurion's government, was singled out in particular.

 Gruenwald accused Kastner of collaborating with the Nazis during the war, concealing the death camps from the Jews of Hungary, and testifying at the Nuremberg Trials on behalf of Kurt Becher, a senior Nazi officer and head of the General Department of the SS.

 Following a police investigation, the attorney general at the time, Haim Cohen, decided that the state should sue Gruenwald for libel. No one imagined, however, that the lawsuit would create even more of a stir, and that Kastner, who had forged ties with the Nazis in an effort to implement a rescue plan for the Jews of Hungary, would find himself an accuser-turned-accused, charged with collaborating with the Nazi enemy.

 "My genetic connection is not the Holocaust," Eckstein now says of the background to his murder of Kastner. "I was a Security Service (today's Shin Bet) agent and was instructed to get close to and socialize in right-wing circles. But when I was among them, my eyes slowly started seeing a different side of the same Zionist ideology – the fighting side, the rebellious side."

 Eckstein switched sides and went from being an agent in the service of the Mapai party to an ardent supporter of the right – and that's where the turning point came.

Read more at Ynet

posted by: jrtelegraph

JRT Endorses Charlie Baker and Karyn Polito for Governor and Lt. Governor

PHOTO: SUZANNE KREITER/BOSTON GLOBE 

JRT: There is an old Soviet joke that goes like this: Why do we have only one party in the country? Because we can't feed another one.

This joke rings especially true in Massachusetts, where the Democratic party has had a complete and unrestrained control over the state for far too long. Nothing is left of the system of checks and balances, not even the appearance of one. Working people and small businesses are overburdened by mandates, demands and the never ending social experiments of the dysfunctional ruling class. The people of Massachusetts are voting for change and have been for quite some time. Unfortunately they are mostly voting with their feet. In 2010 Commonwealth lost a congressional seat due to demographic changes.

This should not be the case. Massachusetts is a great place to live and work, if only we could lighten the burden of one-party rule even just a little. 

Fortunately, in this year's election we have a real choice and we can vote at the ballot box and not only with our feet. They say that politics make strange bedfellows, and on this note the Jewish Russian Telegraph joins the Boston Globe in endorsing Charlie Baker for Governor and Karyn Polito for Lieutenant Governor.   

(Just think about how dysfunctional one party-rule had to become to get our colleagues at Morrisey Boulevard to make this choice. It took them a while to get to their senses, but we are happy to support their choice nevertheless.)

Charlie Baker has extensive experience in both the public and private sectors and Karyn Polito has, aside from her notable career on Beacon Hill, worked in the real world as well. So, on Tuesday, November 4th, we ask all of our Massachusetts readers to pull the lever for Charlie Baker and Karyn Polito. 

One-party rule simply does not work.

posted by: jrtelegraph

Mosaic Magazine: What Does the Future Hold for Ukraine's Jews?

Jewish refugees from Donetsk in their makeshift apartment in Kiev, Ukraine.

Dovid Margolin writing in Mosaic Magazine:

The light-haired customs official in Kiev inspected my American passport. As I quickly presented myself as a Russian-speaker, he looked up and asked where my Russian came from.

“My parents are from Moscow,” I replied, realizing as I said it that my father’s birthplace was now the capital of Ukraine’s enemy.

“Why are you speaking Russian here?” the agent retorted. “This is Ukraine.”

My father was born in Moscow and my mother in Leningrad, but my grandparents are mostly from Ukraine; my grandfather was born and raised in Uman, western Ukraine. As war rages in eastern Ukraine, creating the greatest Jewish refugee crisis since the end of World War II, and as the Ukrainian economy continues to falter, drying up desperately needed sources of income for Jewish communities that have thrived since the breakup of the Soviet Union, I wanted to see for myself how its Jews were faring.

For the last months I’ve been covering Ukrainian Jewry for Chabad.org, the website of the worldwide hasidic movement. Since the fall of Communism, Chabad-Lubavitch has devoted substantial resources to bringing its message to the Jews of the former Soviet Union and establishing Jewish institutions there. Unlike in the U.S., where Chabad operates alongside mainstream denominations, in Ukraine it frequently occupies the center of organized Jewish life. Often a Chabad emissary is a city’s only rabbi. Thus, many Jews active in communal life have some affiliation with Chabad, even if they themselves are not members of the movement.

Since February, when 100 protesters were killed at Maidan, Kiev’s Independence Square, Russia has invaded and annexed Crimea, violence has rocked major Ukrainian cities like Kharkiv and Odessa, and Russian-backed separatists have taken control of a large swath of eastern Ukraine, leading to war. Meanwhile, pro-Russian separatists—or Russian soldiers—used a surface-to-air missile to shoot down an airliner, killing 300.

In short, instead of getting better, as everyone had expected, the situation in Ukraine has gotten worse. My task as a journalist went from writing about the Jewish community during a time of general unrest to reporting on the deaths of a young Jewish woman and her mother in Luhansk, felled by a mortar round as they went out to buy some groceries, leaving behind a four-year-old boy.

 

Back in April, I had spoken with Rabbi Pinhas Vishedski, the Chabad emissary in embattled Donetsk, just after masked men handed out fliers in the synagogue demanding that Jews register at a central office. At the time, he was optimistic, denouncing the pamphlets and stating that the Jewish community would remain until the situation calmed down. (It turned out that the fliers were the work of an anti-Russian group aiming to make the separatists look bad.) But when I arrived in mid-September, his outlook had changed. The Vishedskis and their community were now refugees in Kiev, planning a Rosh Hashanah-in-exile with the help of 40 pounds of gefilte fish that I’d brought at the request of the rabbi’s wife.

According to the UN, the war in eastern Ukraine has displaced at least one million people, with Ukraine absorbing about 300,000, of whom 18,000 are thought to be Jews. (Overall Ukrainian Jewish population figures are difficult to pin down, with estimates ranging from 70,000 to more than a quarter-million.) These numbers do not include the untold thousands who have not registered as internally displaced persons. Refugees from Donetsk and Luhansk with whom I spoke told me they saw little purpose in registering.

“I can go fill out government forms that we’re refugees, but what’s that going to help?” asked Galia from Donetsk, thirty-four, as we sat together with her older sister Marina in their tiny apartment on Kiev’s left bank. Eight people live in the apartment’s two rooms, and children ran in and out of the sun-filled kitchen. “It’s a lot of effort for basically nothing in return.”

Galia’s son attends a Jewish school, but otherwise she and her sister receive no support from government or civic organizations. In fact, none of the refugees I met with has received any government help. With landlords suspicious of penniless exiles from the east, many try to hide their status. When refugees flooded the southern port city of Mariupol, rents tripled overnight.

I met Shaul Melamed, thirty-six, in the small basement café of Kiev’s Brodsky synagogue. A programmer from Donetsk who works for an American company, Melamed led his family out of Donetsk in mid-June, thinking, like many of his neighbors, that they would return before summer was over. Now he plans to stay in Kiev indefinitely, but he still hopes he won’t have to abandon his home—an apartment he had just purchased in the center of Donetsk—for good.

“If a government of bandits stays, then we won’t return,” Melamed told me, referring to the self-proclaimed, pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). “I need to work, and I need to live in a place with a normal government and working banks, I can’t live behind an iron curtain. I never gave assistance to Ukrainian forces, but I didn’t hide my views in support of Ukraine, either. If I returned they could easily arrest me.”

Melamed does not fear Ukrainian anti-Semitism, despite the presence of far-right political parties in the central government. Instead, he told me stories of anti-Semitism among the leaders of today’s DPR. In 2004, when they first appeared on the scene as opponents of the Orange Revolution, “they had all sorts of anti-Semitic slogans. When this is done, I’m sure they’ll all come back.”

Read the rest here.

posted by: jrtelegraph