MTV has produced two Holocaust awareness ads as part of its “Think” initiative.

THE FAMILY ROOM

THE SUBWAY

The Times of London examines challenge of tastefully examining and displaying Hitler’s vision of Berlin as a city full of bloated marble architecture, capital of the Nazi-run world:

For decades his plans were regarded as so crazed that they were confined to specialist books and institutes.

Yesterday the taboo was broken. Peer Steinbrück, the German Finance Minister, unveiled a scale model of Germania, the Führer’s supersized city. Centrepiece of the display was the domed Great Hall, planned by Albert Speer, Hitler’s master architect, to accommodate a crowd of 150,000. …

The positioning of the exhibition, in a pavilion next to the Holocaust Memorial and two minutes’ walk from Hitler’s bunker, has made it easier to open it to the public without seeming to glorify the Nazi’s aesthetic vision. …

There’s been plenty of Jewish news the past few days over at the New York Times (and that’s before you even get to the Israel coverage) … (more…)

Reuters reports that a photograph of the boy with the “beautiful brown eyes” who Anne Frank described as her “one true love” is set to go on display in Amsterdam.

The photo of Peter Schiff was donated to the Anne Frank museum by his former childhood friend Ernst Michaelis who realized after rereading Anne’s diary recently there were no known pictures of Schiff, a museum spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

In her famous diary, Frank wrote: “I forgot that I haven’t yet told you the story of my one true love.”

“Peter was the ideal boy: tall, slim and good-looking, with a serious, quiet and intelligent face,” Anne wrote of the 13-year-old she had fallen for in 1940 when she was just 11.

To see the photo, click here.

Anshel Pfeffer has a story in Ha’aretz about Pinchads Zlotosvsky, 32, a Polish skinhead who became a fervently Orthodox Jew after learning of his Jewish roots.

The transition in Zlotosvsky’s life occurred after his mother told him she comes from a Jewish family. Her parents, she said, sent her to a monastery when she was a small child so that she would survive the Holocaust.

All her relatives were murdered, as far as Pinchas Zlotosvsky knows.

“I realized I was Jewish according to Judaism. I couldn’t look myself in the mirror for a whole week after I found out,” he recalls. After he recovered from the shock, he spent the past few years rediscovering his Jewish roots. He has also become very active with the Jewish community.

Ha’aretz caught up with Zlotosvsky at an annual conference for hidden Jews in Lodz. The newspaper reports that official figures put the number of Jews living in Poland at 4,000 — but the number of people who are Jewish according to Halacha.

The discrepancy stems from the fact that thousands of Jews who survived the war preferred not to reveal their Jewish identity for fear of anti-Semitic persecution by the local population. … Another significant portion of the hidden Jewish population consists of people like Pinchas Zlotosvsky’s mother, whose parents sent them to monasteries to be raised as Christians. Despite efforts by international Jewish organizations to locate these people, not all have been found, and many are assumed to have remained Christian.

Okay, it’s true that I haven’t seen any of this year’s nominees for best foreign-language film. Maybe “The Counterfeiters” was the best of the bunch.

Still, on principle, it bugs me: Israel finally has a great chance to win its first Oscar (for “Beaufort”) — and loses to an Austrian picture about the Holocaust!?! To add insult to injury, it was written and directed by director-writer Stefan Ruzowitzky, a descendant of Nazis and/or Nazi sympathizers.

Yes, Ruzowitzky, was quite gracious in victory, paying homage to the Jewish directors who were exiled from his native land prior to World War II. But the bottom line is there should be a rule against Israeli films losing to Holocaust-themed movies made in countries that sided with the Nazis.

And don’t get me started on Leni Riefenstahl.

Courtesy of cracked.com…

Democratic presidential hopeful U.S. Senator Chris Dodd recently wrote an op-ed for JTA pegged to the release of his new book, “Letter From Nuremberg,” a collection of correspondence from the time his father, Thomas, played a lead role in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals.

In his JTA op-ed, Dodd argues that his father’s letters underscore that the Bush administration has much to learn from the triumph of principal over power at the Nuremberg trials.

Wonder what the senior Dodd would make of Jewish organizations taking a lead role in pushing for a hard line against Iran. Check out this passage from a Sept. 25, 1945, letter:

“You know how I have despised anti-Semitism. You know how strongly I feel toward those who preach intolerance of any kind. With that knowledge — you will understand when I tell you that this staff is about seventy-five percent Jewish. Now my point is that the Jews should stay away from this trial — for their own sake. For — mark this well — the charge ‘a war for the Jews’ is still being made and in the post-war years it will be made again and again. The too large percentage of Jewish men and women here will be cited as proof of this charge. Sometimes it seems that the Jews will never learn about these things. They seem intent on bringing new difficulties down on their own heads. I do not like to write about this matter —it is distasteful to me — but I am disturbed about it. They are pushing and crowding and competing with each other and with everyone else.”

In an interview with Providence Journal columnist M. Charles Bakst, Dodd the son said that when he reads this letter, “I first of all cringe a little bit because I wonder what he’s driving at.”

Bakst added:

As provocative as the passages may seem, [Dodd] suggests it’s also important to note that his father specifically said he deplored anti-Semitism and, in fact, had close Jewish friends. So, the senator says, “I tried to understand it in the context, knowing who he was, knowing what he cared about, what his own history was. And there were those, the [Charles] Lindberghs and others, that made the case that…Roosevelt got us into this war because of Jewish issues.”