In 2009, a group of school children in the Czech town of Velký Beranov was doing research for a project called “Neighbors Who Disappeared” — an effort to get kids to understand all those who are missing from their towns, their cities, their world. Together the kids discovered the strange, melancholy story of Helena Böhmová:…
A Canadian lawmaker has proposed a motion in the country’s Parliament calling for formal government recognition of some 850,000 Jews forcibly displaced from Arab lands since Israel’s creation in 1948. In his Nov. 8 motion, Liberal Parly lawmaker Irwin Cotler, a former Canadian justice minister, noted that by rejecting the United Nation’s Partition Resolution of…
Naim Reuven was only 8 when he left Baghdad more than 50 years ago, but he still remembers going with his father to catch fish in the Tigris River. His dad worked in a laundromat, a middle-class father of six and one of Iraq’s more than 100,000 Jews. Baghdad’s Jewish community suffered a pogrom in…
Yitzhak Teutsch, director of the American Joint Distribution Committee’s archives in Jerusalem, is trying to document more than 2,000 babies born to Jewish refugees interned in Cypriot camps between 1946 and 1949. The infants’ parents had been on their way to Israel after World War II when the British seized their ships and sent them…
In a rare show of pre-election bipartisanship, lawmakers from both parties are sponsoring a bill that would link the plight of Palestinian refugees with that of Jews from Arab countries. The legislation would require the administration to include mention of the need to resolve the issue of Jews who were expelled from their homes in…
The Paralympics, the quadrennial competition for athletes with disabilities that follows the Olympics, will draw some 4,200 participants to London in late August to vie for medals before 1.5 million ticket-holders, 5,600 journalists, countless television viewers — and, for the first time, a bronze bust of the bespectacled physician and refugee from Nazi Germany who…
In this week’s podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis talks with Washington correspondent Nathan Guttman about how Jewish organizations are reacting to Israel’s deportation of Sudanese refugees. Then, Forward editor Jane Eisner stops by to discuss if it is Americans’ responsibility to financially support ultra-Orthodox Jews who choose to study rather than work. Then, staff writer Ezra…
Palestinian refugees, longtime pawns in regional and international struggles, have recently become a factor in American politics, as well. An attempt by the U.S. Senate to define who exactly can be counted as a Palestinian refugee has pitted congressional Republicans and some Israel advocates against the Obama administration. The measure, an amendment to the defense…
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