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A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

The Holocaust

The Weber Siblings at the New York Harbor, May 20th, 1946; Front Left to Right: Renee, Judith, Bela Back Left to Right: Gertrude, Alfons, Senta, and Ruth.

How seven siblings survived the Holocaust — and how the next generation is telling their story

By Olivia Haynie, The ForwardPublished February 18, 2025

Alfons Weber recorded every detail of how he and his six siblings survived the Holocaust, and distributed copies of the typed memoir at a family reunion in 1996. His niece, actress Beth Lane, couldn’t bring herself to read it for years. “Every...

Deportation of Jews in Bielefeld, Germany, on Dec. 13, 1941.

Newly discovered photos of Nazi deportations show Jewish victims as they were last seen alive

Wolf Gruner, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and SciencesPublished February 17, 2025

The Holocaust was the first mass atrocity to be heavily photographed. The mass production and distribution of cameras in the 1930s and 1940s enabled Nazi officials and ordinary people to widely document Germany’s persecution of Jews and other...

Ari Richter depicts his visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in his graphic memoir "Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz." (Fantagraphics Books, Inc.)

A gift shop at Auschwitz? New films and a graphic memoir explore the contradictions of ‘dark tourism’

Andrew Silow-Carroll, JTAPublished January 26, 2025

In a fraught moment in the film “A Real Pain,” Kieran Culkin, playing the more volatile of a pair of Jewish cousins who go on a roots tour of Poland, berates his fellow travellers for riding in a first-class train car in a country where so many Jews...

What reading the names of Holocaust victims means to me

What reading the names of Holocaust victims means to me

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished January 24, 2025

For the past several years, I’ve sat at a table in a conference room of the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum and read the names of Holocaust victims aloud for 15 minutes. It’s only 15 minutes—a fleeting moment compared to the immeasurable...

Elon Musk's gesture during an Inauguration Day rally ignited debate over whether he intended to deliver what looked like a Nazi salute, Jan. 20, 2025. (Screenshot)

Elon Musk’s straight-armed gesture at inauguration event ignites comparisons to Nazi salute

Philissa Cramer, JTAPublished January 20, 2025

When Elon Musk gave his own victory speech following Donald Trump’s inauguration, it was something he did — rather than something he said — which ignited the biggest reaction. The billionaire, who was Trump’s top donor during the 2024 election,...

Abba Kovner and the Vilna resistance in Lithuania Courtesy of Ghetto Fighters Museum

Buried secrets uncovered: How a hidden tunnel revealed untold stories of Jewish resistance

By Olivia HayniePublished January 20, 2025

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward's free email newsletters delivered to your inbox. For biblical archeologist Richard A. Freund, who excavated dozens of Holocaust sites, it was critical to not disturb victims’...

Until Jan. 1, 2025, public access to the Central Archives of the Special Administration of Justice (CABR) was limited. (Wikimedia)

Netherlands not shy about exposing suspected Nazi collaborators

JTA StaffPublished January 2, 2025

A massive trove of documents about suspected Nazi collaborators in the Netherlands is now open to the public for the first time. For the past seven decades, only researchers and relatives of those accused of collaborating with the Nazis could access...

Polish and German police officers inspect the papers of a Jewish pedestrian, Warsaw, 1941.

Polish police murdered Jews during the Holocaust with gusto and even without Nazi orders, new book claims

Zev Stub, JTAPublished December 10, 2024

Writing a comprehensive history of Polish citizens during the Holocaust is challenging, especially under Poland’s controversial 2018 law criminalizing references to Polish complicity in Nazi crimes. Despite this, acclaimed Holocaust historian Jan Grabowski...

Shalom Nagar

The guard who hanged Adolf Eichmann, passes away at 88

By Andrew Silow-Carroll, JTAPublished December 4, 2024

Israel has carried out the death penalty just once, when Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was sentenced in 1962 to death by hanging. “We placed the rope on his head. I pressed [a handle] and he fell downward,” Shalom Nagar, the guard who carried...

Holocaust survivor Marion Blumenthal Lazan holding a yellow star identification badge that Jewish people were forced to wear by the Nazis

Holocaust survivor shares her story and a message of hope with St. Louis audience

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished November 11, 2024

Trapped in Nazi Germany, Marion Blumenthal Lazan and her family sought refuge in Holland, only to be captured and sent to the Westerbork transit camp and later the infamous Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Her 1996 memoir, “Four Perfect Pebbles,”...

The Bornplatz Synagogue in Hamburg, Germany, once held 1,200 congregants before it was destroyed in the  Kristallnacht pogroms, Nov. 9-10, 1938. (Wikimedia Commons)

When the Nazis attacked synagogues on Kristallnacht, they were targeting Judaism’s heart and soul

Michael Berenbaum, JTAPublished November 7, 2024

(JTA) — Eighty-six years ago this week, a series of pogroms took place in Germany and Austria. More than 1,000 synagogues were burned, their pews destroyed; sacred Torah scrolls and holy books were set aflame. More than 7,000 Jewish businesses were...

St. Louis Holocaust Museum launches study to gauge visitor impact

St. Louis Holocaust Museum launches study to gauge visitor impact

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished October 24, 2024

Have you visited the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum recently? If so, the museum wants to learn more about your experience. In partnership with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Skokie Museum, the St. Louis museum is conducting...

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