Notes & News
NOTES & NEWS Nazi Treatment of the Deaf—Prologue to the Shoah One day Horst Biesold, professor of education for the disabled at the University of Bremen, West Germany, noticed that most of his...
...Born in Poland, she lost her hearing at age three as a result of illness...
...Pregnant deaf women also underwent forced abortions, most taking place beyond their fifth month of pregnancy...
...Her parents, who sent her to the Israelite School for the Deaf in Berlin, brought her back to Poland in 1933 to protect her from the Nazi legislation...
...When he asked one of them why, the friend confessed, embarassed and ashamed, that the Nazis had sterilized him...
...we are, for those moments, in the first days of our earth...
...Says Mayer, "Succinctly put, there has been a shift from feelings of outrage to strategies of outreach...
...Biesold found that in 1933 the Nazis passed a law to prevent "hereditarily diseased offspring...
...It Doesn't Matter If a Rabbi Performs the Ceremony If a rabbi agrees to perform the ceremony for a mixed marriage, is the non-Jewish spouse more likely to convert to Judaism...
...The two women escaped and hid for nine months in the basement of a country house, leaving Steinberg's young daughter with a French family...
...Henkin signs as he speaks...
...The study found no connection between rabbinic officiation and "subsequent Jewish expressions of the couple...
...Western governments failed to prevent these critical exports, despite the participation of these governments in the Missile Technology Control Regime, an accord proscribing the sale of missile-related equipment and technology, according to Friedman's report...
...Shocked, Biesold began to investigate the fate of deaf victims of the Nazis...
...But now she has added a second traditional prayer, the prayer upon seeing the wonders of creation . . . oseh ma'aseh bereshit...
...Approximately 25 to 30 percent of the non-Jews who marry Jews opt to convert...
...Intermarriage has, as is well-known, significantly increased in the United States since the 1970s and both public opinion and communal policy have changed...
...Steven Bayme, the national director of AJC's Jewish Communal Affairs Department, says the new data also indicate that rabbinic officiation at mixed marriages is more frequent now than in the past...
...An eerie coincidence...
...During the High Holidays, a silent choir signs in accompaniment to a cantor who sings and signs...
...See "Iraq—A Threatening New Superpower," and "We Are the People Who Let It Happen," December 1989...
...Biesold's research forms the core of a poignant exhibit of photographs, documents, art and narrative, ' 'In der Nacht: Visions of Deaf Survivors of Nazi Oppression," which is on permanent display at Gallaudet University, the country's only four-year liberal arts college for the deaf, in Washington, D.C...
...another 47 percent were turned in by public health officials...
...With the help of American relatives, she came to this country in 1947...
...This led to the sterilization of at least 17,000 deaf people—one-third of whom were under 18—without anesthetic...
...NOTES & NEWS Nazi Treatment of the Deaf—Prologue to the Shoah One day Horst Biesold, professor of education for the disabled at the University of Bremen, West Germany, noticed that most of his deaf friends were childless...
...he says the congregation is just like any other except that everything is signed...
...The verse number was the same as the Richter scale reading at 5:04 P.M...
...Almost all the congregation's families have at least one deaf member, although some hearing families have joined to show support for the deaf...
...Memorial to the dead...
...Western Nations Choose Exports Over Security How Western companies and governments cooperated in helping Iraq reach an advanced stage in the development of missiles and chemical weapons was described by journalist Alan Friedman in the Financial Times, an international daily published from London ("The Flight of the Condor," Nov...
...Using MOMENT as one of his sources,* Friedman tracks the development of the Condor 2 nuclear ballistic missile, an Iraqi joint venture with Egypt and Argentina...
...Western banks provided loans...
...Nearer the epicenter of the earthquake, at the Hillel House of the University of California at Santa Cruz, another sukkah was destroyed in the aftershock just after the end of Sukkot...
...The schools for the deaf turned in 37 percent of the deaf people to be sterilized by the Nazis...
...Neither her husband nor her father survived...
...In the days since the quake, Jo says that she continues to experience the feelings of wonder and deliverance that followed the quake...
...It is "uncomfortably clear," Friedman concludes, "that intelligence was available in Washington about Iraq's military procurement networks and its work on Condor...
...then they turned to murder of the Jews...
...U.S...
...But Western military experts say "Iraq has no need for the advanced machine tools sold by Matrix-Churchill except for military projects," according to Friedman...
...Like the American companies described in MOMENT, Britain's MatrixChurchill company violated no law when it sold equipment to Iraq...
...Reminder for the living...
...Once an apprentice porcelain designer at the State Academy of Applied Arts in Germany, Bloch escaped from Dachau and lived in Shanghai for nine years before coming to New York...
...Juxtaposed with the documents uncovered by Biesold is the dramatic story of Rose Steinberg, a founder of Temple Beth Solomon of the Deaf in Los Angeles, who shares her photo album and life story with the viewer...
...21, 1989...
...In 1935 Steinberg's family fled to Paris, where Steinberg married and had a daughter...
...Santa Cruz Rabbi Richard M. Litvak said: "It punctuated the message of Sukkot, that we live in temporary houses and our possessions are never the true source of our security or well-being" (see "As the Rabbi Said . . . ," p. 10...
...The sterilization program paved the way for the Nazi euthanasia program and, finally, the mass murders, which began in 1940...
...See "Rabbis Who Perform Intermarriage— Who They Are and Why They Do It," January/ February 1988...
...First the Nazis killed about 150,000 disabled people...
...In 1965, with the support of her second husband, Ted Rosman, Steinberg helped establish Temple Beth Solomon of the Deaf...
...Western manufacturers supplied the technology and parts...
...The answer is no, according to a new American Jewish Committee study conducted by Brooklyn College sociologist Egon Mayer...
...According to a recent MOMENT article, approximately 50 percent of Reform rabbis officiate at mixed marriages under varying conditions.* Orthodox and Conservative rabbis are forbidden by their movements from officiating at mixed marriages...
...She explains: When the earth shakes beneath your feet as the geological plates shift and grind, we experience ongoing creation...
...After a career as a lithographer and porcelain designer for the Johnson White House, he began producing woodcuts and oils of his visions of the Holocaust says the prayer of thanks...
...The Reform and Reconstructionist movements leave it up to the individual rabbi...
...The Gestapo forced Steinberg and her mother into slave labor...
...Friedman uses MOMENT'S articles to explain Washington's "tremendously strong pro-export bias...
...This Reform synagogue, which now has 175 families, was the first to serve the deaf community...
...And they did so despite a growing consensus among these nations that proliferation of nuclear missiles to Third World countries is now the most dangerous threat to global security...
...But the succah they had been sitting in minutes before still stood...
...According to the synagogue's rabbi, Alan Henkin, several other deaf Holocaust survivors are also members...
...Aftershock Fells Another When the earthquake struck San Francisco on October 17, 1989, a student in Jo Milgrom's class, ' 'The Roots and Art of Jewish Spirituality" at the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, California, was reading Numbers 6:9 from a Torah scroll...
...Today a plaque on the wall of the building that housed Berlin's Israelite School for the Deaf describes the fate that Steinberg evaded: "From this house 146 deaf Jewish citizens were dragged by Fascist bandits and murdered in 1942...
...when Jo Milgrom's pictures tilted on her walls, when stacked books fell off her shelves and when tragedy occurred nearby on the Oakland Freeway...
...One Succah Withstands California Earthquake...
...Rabbis who have justified their decision to officiate at mixed marriages on the assumption that they were helping 'save' the couple for Judaism may wish to reconsider," Mayer concluded...
...commercial interests pressed increased^ exports and the bureaucratic war between the Pentagon—concerned with security— and the departments of State and Commerce—promoting exports—prevented a unified government stand against militarily useful exports to Iraq...
...Before every class— now back in their classroom—she again "My Family History," a woodcut by deaf artist David Bloch, whose works are featured in "In der Nacht Visions of Deaf Survivors of Nazi Oppression" at Gallaudet University, a national university for the deaf, in Washington, D.C...
...After the quake passed, in the moments of stunned recognition of what had happened, Jo Milgrom said the traditional gomel prayer of thanks to God for bringing them safely through danger...
Vol. 15 • February 1990 • No. 1
