Arrest warrant issued for suspected Nazi camp guard
German prosecutors said last week they have charged 88-year-old retired Ohio auto worker John Demjanjuk with more than 29,000 counts of accessory to murder for his time as a guard at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp, and will seek his extradition from the United States.
Demjanjuk is accused of participating in the murders while he was a guard at the Nazi camp in occupied Poland between March and September 1943.
Demjanjuk, who lives in a Cleveland suburb, denies involvement, and his son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in an e-mailed statement to the Associated Press in Cleveland that his father is suffering from a blood disorder and acute kidney failure, and is not fit for international travel.
A native of Ukraine, Demjanjuk immigrated to the United States in 1952 and gained citizenship in 1958. He was extradited to Israel in 1986, when the U.S. Justice Department believed he was the sadistic Nazi guard known as Ivan the Terrible from the Treblinka death camp. He spent seven years in custody before the Israeli high court freed him after receiving evidence that another Ukrainian was that Nazi guard, and his U.S. citizenship was restored in 1998. — ap
New Durban II draft drops Israel criticism
Specific criticism of Israel has been dropped from a draft resolution prepared for Durban II, a United Nations–sponsored anti-racism conference scheduled for next month in Geneva.
The new draft resolution does not single out Israel for criticism but still speaks of concern about negative stereotyping of religions. It also does not include a provision backed by Muslim countries that criticizes “defamation of religion.”
The new draft came amid recent threats from the European Union, Germany and Australia to boycott the Durban Review Conference. Israel and Canada already have said they will not attend; the United States and Italy say they will not attend unless the resolution is more balanced.
The original resolution singled out Israel as having racist policies and called it an occupying power. The draft also included five paragraphs devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The new draft meets some of the Obama administration’s conditions for participation in the conference laid out in late Feburary; however, the new text reaffirms the concluding document of the first Durban conference, which singled out the “plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation.” — jta
Israeli rabbi edgy about pope’s visit
The Vatican officially announced last week that Pope Benedict XVI will visit Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority from May 8 to 15. He will visit Jerusalem and the Western Wall, Bethlehem and Nazareth, the announcement said. It will be the first papal trip to the Holy Land since Pope John Paul II’s pilgrimage in 2000.
This week, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, the rabbi in charge of the Western Wall, told the Jerusalem Post that it is not appropriate for the pope to wear a cross there. “My position is that it is not fitting to enter the Western Wall area with religious symbols, including a cross,” Rabinovitch was quoted as saying. “I feel the same way about a Jew putting on a tallit and phylacteries and going into a church.”
The rabbi has barred other Catholic leaders from visiting the site after they refused to remove or hide their crosses. In 2000, Pope John Paul II visited the site with his cross visible. — jta
Financial crisis slams Russia’s billionaires
Russia’s Jewish billionaires lost more than two-thirds of their wealth in 2008, according to figures released by Forbes magazine.
At the same time, wealthy Jewish philanthropists with ties to the former Soviet Union also saw their fortunes drastically reduced in the latest sign that it will be difficult for the Russian-speaking Jewish community to depend on the largesse of local donors. Funding already has seen significant cuts.
In Russia, Jewish billionaires collectively saw the value of their assets and holdings drop from $99.4 to $32.1 billion. Most notably, Roman Abramovich and Mikhail Fridman, who have lent significant financial support to philanthropic efforts in recent years, saw their fortunes plummet in 2008. — jta
New strategy in hunt for Nazi
The Simon Wiesenthal Center filed a lawsuit March 18 asking Berlin prosecutors to open an investigation to try and determine if the family or attorneys of the world’s most-wanted Nazi war criminal, SS doctor Aribert Heim, have been lying about whether he was dead or alive.
The suit comes after Heim’s son, Ruediger Heim, claimed in a February television interview that his father had died in 1992 in Cairo, where he had been living under an alias.
Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said Heim’s attorney recently claimed in an ongoing tax case in a Berlin court that there was still regular contact with the doctor, who would be 94 if still alive. — ap