The Mordechai Anielewicz Creative Arts Competition

You can read a news story about this Holocaust arts competition at: http://www.dailylocal.com/article/DL/20170802/NEWS/170809961

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WEST CHESTER >> Eagerness and persistence paid off for Stetson Middle School student Grace McCabe. McCabe, who will enter ninth grade at Rustin High School this year, recently won first place in her age group in the Mordechai Anielewicz Creative Arts Competition, sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia’s Jewish Community Relations Council.

The competition is an annual event designed to encourage all Philadelphia-area middle school and high school students to learn about and reflect upon the history of the Holocaust. According to the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, students are invited to submit Holocaust themes and lessons through essays, poems, short works of fiction, two-and three-dimensional as well as multimedia works of art, original songs, musical compositions, and dance. The contest is named in memory of the young leader of the Jewish revolt against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Memorial stone in Warsaw ghetto

Names of victims carved on back side of stone in Warsaw ghetto

The former location of the Warsaw ghetto is now a memorial site

McCabe’s story entitled, “Lebensborn Redemption” fell under the theme of Experiences of Children and won first place in the seventh/eighth-grade prose writing category. In 1935, faced with a declining birthrate in Germany, Heinrich Himmler, a leading member of the Nazi Party, created the Lebensborn program to further the Aryan race by whatever means possible.

Young children with Aryan features were kidnapped from families living in German-occupied areas. After they were “Germanized,” the children were placed with pre-approved German couples who would raise them as their own. The program also provided the opportunity for German women deemed “racially pure” to meet and have children with SS officers to create a “super-race.”

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Forgive the Nazis and make some money doing it

Eva Kor is a Holocaust survivor who has made a career out of forgiving the Nazis.

You can read about it in this news article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/should-holocaust-survivors-forgive-the-nazis_us_59861cbbe4b00833d1de2888

Why does Eva Kor advocate forgiving the Nazis? She’s alive, isn’t she? She could have been killed by the bombs that were dropped during World War II.  The camps were relatively safe from bombing.

The following quote is from the news article:

Begin quote from article written by Eva Kor

Many of the people who survived the Holocaust have the “victim mentality,” which is to me a poor me mentality with too much focus on what was done to me. They have extreme difficulty in getting rid of that feeling, that I was used as a human guinea pig, or I was used in slave labor, or I was not treated like a human being. It is understandable, of course. I was a good victim for many years. There is a lot of anger that comes with that. The question is, what does the anger do to you? Does it help you? Who are you hurting when you are angry? You are not hurting the perpetrator – you are HELPING the perpetrator by remaining the victim. You are only hurting yourself.

In my experience, anger is a seed for war. Healthy, happy people do not start wars. Some people take out their anger on their children, or on themselves. But if you look at people who forgive, they are at peace with themselves. Therefore, forgiveness is a seed for peace. When I forgave Mengele, and then all the Nazis, and then anyone who had ever hurt me, I felt a tremendous burden lifted from my shoulders. I realized that although I was liberated in 1945, I was not free until I forgave in 1995.

I have spent a lot of time and effort promoting the idea of forgiveness because it helped me to heal. I am willing to do anything I humanly can to convince survivors to at least try it. I joke about it, but it’s a fact: forgiveness is free. Therefore everybody can afford it. It has no side effects. It works. If people do not like how it feels to be free, they can always take their pain back and remain victims. But I have not found a larger platform where I can advocate it. If some organization would adopt the idea and help me advocate it on the world scene, I think it would help some survivors. But maybe it is too late. They have lived like victims for 70 years. What are the chances they will try something new?

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The White House as a crime scene?

This is the headline of the top news story today:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/05/robert-mueller-donald-trump-russia

White House as crime scene: how Robert Mueller is closing in on Trump

The news article begins with this quote:

The legal net around Donald Trump’s beleaguered presidency tightened dramatically this week with news that a grand jury has been established a few hundred yards from the White House, to pursue evidence of collusion with the Kremlin.

It is a troubling development for the president, for several reasons. In the US legal system, a grand jury has broad powers to issue subpoenas, and ultimately indictments, at the request of prosecutors.

What is a grand jury and how serious is it for Donald Trump?

The special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US election, former FBI chief Robert Mueller, had been using a sitting grand jury in Virginia to authorise his team’s demands for documents and witnesses. The convening of a separate grand jury in Washington suggests the Mueller team – working in a suite of offices a few blocks’ walk from where the 20-odd jurors sit – is going to be making extensive use of it. It will not be hospitable terrain for the president. Trump won only 4% of the vote in the District of Columbia.

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