When was Menachem Z. Rosensaft born?
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Menachem Z. Rosensaft (born 1948 in Bergen-Belsen, Germany) an attorney in New York and the Founding Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Survivors, is a leader of the Second Generation movement of children of survivors, and has been described on the front page of the "New York Times" as one of the most prominent of the survivors' sons and daughters. He also served as National President of the Labor Zionist Alliance, and was active in the early stages of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. As psychologist Eva Fogelman has written: "Menachem Rosensaft's moral voice has gone beyond the responsibility he felt as a child of survivors to remember and educate. He felt the need to promote peace and a tolerant State of Israel as well. He wanted to bring to justice Nazi war criminals, to fight racism and bigotry, and to work toward the continuity of the Jewish people".
Menachem Z. Rosensaft
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In March 2009, Menachem Rosensaft was appointed as general counsel of the World Jewish Congress, the umbrella organization of Jewish communities around the world based in New York. Since 2008, Menachem Rosensaft has been Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, and he was also Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Syracuse University College of Law. In 2011 he was appointed lecturer in law at Columbia University Law School where he teaches a course in the law of genocide. He is the editor of "God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors", published by Jewish Lights Publishing.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft
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The son of two survivors of the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, he was born on May 1, 1948 in the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany. From 1945 until 1950, his father, the late Josef Rosensaft, was chairman of the Jewish Committee of the Bergen-Belsen DP camp and of the Central Jewish Committee in the British Zone of Germany. His mother, the late Dr. Hadassah Bimko Rosensaft, was a member of President Carter's Commission on the Holocaust, and a founding member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft
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In March 2010, Rosensaft sparked a formal investigation by the Maryland authorities into the activities of Menachem Youlus, a rabbi and scribe based in a Washington, DC, suburb who had falsely claimed to have "rescued" Torah scrolls that had survived the Holocaust, which he sold to synagogues and Jewish centers through his "Save a Torah" charitable organization. "Any exploitation of the Holocaust for crass commercial purposes is appalling," Rosensaft wrote in the New York Post on March 7, 2010. "Creating false Holocaust histories for Torah schools is despicable."
Menachem Z. Rosensaft
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"In late March," reported James Barron of The New York Times on July 26, 2010, Rosensaft wrote to the Maryland attorney general, Douglas F. Gansler, alleging "possible fraud and/or misrepresentation" by Save a Torah. He asked for an investigation into whether Save a Torah had been 'soliciting funds under false pretenses.' Mr. Rosensaft, who is also an adjunct professor at Cornell Law School and teaches a course on World War II war crimes trials, took issue with Rabbi Youlus's description of [a Torah scroll that had allegedly been saved by a priest at Auschwitz who in turn supposedly had given it to Youlus]. 'There is no record of anyone even remotely fitting the description of the priest' Rabbi Youlus said had saved it, Mr. Rosensaft said in the letter. He also took issue with a Torah that Rabbi Youlus said had been at Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp where Anne Frank died in 1945. Mr. Rosensaft's parents met at Bergen-Belsen. Mr. Rosensaft said that Rabbi Youlus's description of finding a Torah beneath a wooden floor in a barracks was not possible. The original buildings at Bergen-Belsen, he said, were burned to stop a typhus epidemic and the survivors were moved to a former German military installation nearby in May 1945. Mr. Rosensaft said that he was born in that installation in 1948 and returned many times to visit.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft
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In the spring of 1985, Rosensaft was an outspoken critic of President Ronald Reagan's decision to pay homage to fallen German World War II soldiers, including members of Hitler's Waffen SS, at the military cemetery at Bitburg during a state visit to Germany. Addressing some 5,000 Holocaust survivors and their families in Philadelphia on April 21, 1985, Rosensaft said, "For heaven's sake, let him find another cemetery. There must be at least one in all of Germany that does not contain SS men." On May 5, 1985, Rosensaft organized and led a demonstration of survivors and children of survivors at Bergen-Belsen in protest against the visits that day by President Reagan and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to the mass-graves of Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel wrote in his memoirs that Rosensaft was "one of the very few to strongly oppose President Reagan in the Bitburg affair."
Menachem Z. Rosensaft
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Menachem Rosensaft received his B.A. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1971, together with an M.A. degree in creative writing from the university's Writing Seminars. From 1972 until 1975, he was an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Jewish Studies at the City College of the City University of New York and assisted Professor Elie Wiesel in his courses on Holocaust literature and Hasidism. He received a second M.A. degree in modern European history from Columbia University in 1975, and in 1979, he received his J.D. degree from the Columbia University School of Law, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and Book Review Editor of the "Columbia Journal of Transnational Law".
Menachem Z. Rosensaft
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Rosensaft has also struggled with the theological implications of the Holocaust. "Where was God when the fires of Auschwitz failed to ignite the universe," he asked at a 1995 commemoration at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. As reported in the New York Times, he "posed the question of how God could be praised if he did not stop the killing. Then he suggested an answer: 'What if God was not with the killers, with the forces that inflicted Auschwitz on humanity?'" He explained that, "To me, the incredible element of the Holocaust is not the behavior of the murderers, because that is pure evil. It is the behavior of the victims and how they remained human and in many ways behaved in a superhuman manner. ... So the God I choose to pray to was at Auschwitz, but it was not in the manner of the victims' deaths, it was in the way in which they lived." Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York City, Rosensaft elaborated on his belief that evil is perpetrated by human beings, not by God:
Menachem Z. Rosensaft
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Twenty-one years later, on April 17, 2005, he reiterated these views in a speech at Bergen-Belsen on the 60th anniversary of its liberation. The children and grandchildren of the survivors, he declared:
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In December 1988, he was one of five American Jews who met in Stockholm, Sweden, with Yasir Arafat and other senior leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization, resulting in the PLO's first public recognition of Israel. Writing in Newsweek, he explained that despite an initial reluctance to participate in such a meeting, he concluded that since he had urged others to negotiate with the PLO, "I really had no choice. Since I wanted others to talk to the enemy, I had to be willing to do so as well – not going would be a betrayal of my principles both as a Jew and as a Zionist." For Rosensaft, the very beginning of dialogue was a major accomplishment. "There are miles to go," he said. "But for God's sake, let's start talking. When you talk, you de-demonize the enemy."
Menachem Z. Rosensaft