JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Kristallnacht unearthed

By Lisa Hostein · October 28, 2008

My mother-in-law is one of the thousands of German-born Jews who still can recall with horror Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, the pogrom 70 years ago that marked the beginning of the end. The memory of watching her Jewish school burn as a 9-year-old child is seared into her brain. Her story and others’ have been told time and time again. But there hasn’t been much physical evidence of that fateful day – until an Israeli researcher stumbled on a garbage dump. The New York Times gives a full report.

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The Jets and Giants and Nazi collaborators

By Uriel Heilman · September 10, 2008

Will a company with a Nazi past and a history of cooperating with Hitler win the naming rights for the new NFL stadium for the Giants and Jets?

More than six decades ago, Allianz, a Munich-based insurer and financial services company, insured facilities and personnel at concentration camps like Auschwitz and Dachau, had a chief executive who wore an SS uniform and served as Hitler’s economics minister, and refused to pay the life insurance policies of Jews, instead sending Jewish beneficiaries’ cash to Nazis.

Now Allianz wants its name atop the football stadium representing the hometown teams of the most Jewish city in America, and the world.

So far, no decision has been made, according to a report on the subject in Wednesday’s New York Times. The Giants and Jets have hired a crisis management firm to deal with possible problems arising from the sale of the stadium’s naming rights, which reportedly will go for $20 million to $30 million per year. Here’s what Richard Sandomir writes in the Times:

A deal with Allianz would not be easy to sell publicly, like Citigroup’s with the Mets. The possibility of an Allianz Stadium will make some people cringe, especially in a market that is home to many Jewish people, and in which the Tisch family, which owns half of the Giants, has supported many Jewish causes.

“There must be sensitivity to the psychological impact this would have,” said Elan Steinberg, a vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. “Survivors are still alive. It would not be appropriate to affix the Allianz name to a stadium name in an area where a lot of survivors still living.”

...Even the best arguments in Allianz’s favor are imperfect. The teams can say that Allianz has done much to atone for its role before and during the war, but no amount of apologies or restitution to victims and survivors can make full amends for its past.

The teams can say Allianz participated in two major efforts that began in the 1990s to compensate slave and forced laborers as well as insurance policy holders — but only after pressure from the American government, state insurance regulators and Jewish groups, and class-action suits filed in federal court.

The teams refused to speak about Allianz, which has United States subsidiaries like Fireman’s Fund Insurance and Oppenheimer Capital, because a deal is not done. And Allianz refused to discuss the naming-rights negotiations.

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Holbrooke’s Karadzic memories

By Ami Eden · July 24, 2008

Richard Holbrooke, the former diplomat who spearheaded U.S. efforts to end the war in the Balkans, wrote a piece in the Washington Post recalling his one meeting with Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader captured on Monday:

The capture of Karadzic on Monday took me back to a long night of confrontation, drama and negotiations almost 13 years ago – the only time I ever met him. It was 5 p.m. on Sept. 13, 1995, the height of the war in Bosnia. Finally, after years of weak Western and U.N. response to Serb aggression and ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats in Bosnia, U.S.-led NATO bombing had put the Serbs on the defensive. Our small diplomatic negotiating team – which included then-Lt. Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Christopher Hill (now the senior U.S. envoy to North Korea) – was in Belgrade for the fifth time, trying to end a war that had already taken the lives of nearly 300,000 people.

These three men – Milosevic, Mladic and Karadzic – were the primary reason for that war. Mladic and Karadzic had already been indicted as war criminals by the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. (Milosevic was not to be indicted until 1999.) As leaders of the breakaway Bosnian Serb movement, they had met with many Western luminaries, including Jimmy Carter. ...

Karadzic was silent at first. He had a large face with heavy jowls, a soft chin and surprisingly gentle eyes. Then, when he heard our demand that the siege of Sarajevo be lifted immediately, he exploded. Rising from the table, the American-educated Karadzic raged in passable English about the “humiliations” his people were suffering. I reminded Milosevic that he had promised that this sort of harangue would not occur. Karadzic responded emotionally that he would call former president Carter, with whom he said he was in touch, and started to leave the table. For the only time that long night, I addressed Karadzic directly, telling him that we worked only for President Bill Clinton and that he could call President Carter if he wished but that we would leave and that the bombing would intensify. Milosevic said something to Karadzic in Serbian; he sat down again, and the meeting got down to business.

Holbrooke concluded by explaining the significance of Karadzic’s arrest:

His capture is all the more important because it was accomplished by Serbian authorities. Serbian President Boris Tadic deserves great credit for this action, especially since his good friend Zoran Djindjic, then prime minister of Serbia, was assassinated in 2003 as a direct result of his courage in arresting Milosevic and sending him to The Hague in 2001. Karadzic’s arrest is no mere historical footnote; it removes from the scene a man who was still undermining peace and progress in the Balkans and whose enthusiastic advocacy of ethnic cleansing merits a special place in history. It also moves Serbia closer to European Union membership.

Karadzic’s capture is another reminder of the value of war crimes tribunals. Even though 12 years-plus is an inexcusably long time, the war crimes indictment kept Karadzic on the run and prevented him from resurfacing. In far-away Khartoum, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was indicted last week by the International Criminal Court, should be paying close attention.

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