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| Nazis hurried to murder more Jews as armies arrived to liberate camps. |
Today is Yom HaShoah, Israel's Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day.
Most southern Californians will not give a thought today to the slaughter of six million Jews during World War II in Nazi Germany.
Yet the Holocaust lives on among us.
One skirmish in the ongoing war against Jews occurred last Saturday when a 60-year-old woman in Poway CA was killed for being in a synagogue on the last day of Passover. Poway is a community along Interstate 15 just north of San Diego and south of Escondido.
Another drama unfolded in a Los Angeles federal courtroom when Judge John F. Walter ruled that the painting of Paris owned by Lilly Cassirer in Berlin in the 1940s now rightfully belongs to a museum in Spain. The Nazi government of Germany took the painting from Lilly "in exchange for an exit visa out of Berlin," explains an editorial in the Los Angeles Times today.
That exchange saved Lilly from deportation and murder in a gas chamber. She survived, and her granddaughter lives in La Mesa, a little closer to San Diego than Poway. The Cassirer family has been fighting for twenty years to reclaim the painting worth $30 or more.
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| Sunset at Yad VaShem, January 15, 2019 |
Judge Walter wrote that the museum should return the painting but that he could not require it to "comply with its moral commitments." If not Judge Walter, who?
"The museum could offer to pay the family in order to keep the painting," the editorial concludes. "But refusing to recognize any obligation to Cassirer’s heirs is shameful."
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| Israel's Holocaust Museum |
Thus the atrocities of the Nazis continue in southern California today, along with surfing and traffic jams and millions of people just living their lives.
The right to life is stolen from Jews, and a painting once stolen is not returned.
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