Colombian President Ivan Duque Marquez issued an apology Friday after cadets at the Simon Bolivar Police Academy in Tulua wore Nazi uniforms during a cultural exchange event with representatives from Germany.

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Cadets wore Wehrmacht and SS uniforms, with some even sporting Adolf Hitler-style mustaches. Decorations included swastikas, the Luftwaffe aerial warfare branch and other symbols of the Nazi regime.

Photographs of the event were shared on an official police Twitter account, with the caption, "With these cultural exchanges, we strengthen the knowledge of our students."

Marquez said, "any acceptance or expression of Nazism is completely unacceptable. I condemn all use of the symbols of the regime that is responsible for the murder of six million people."

The Israeli and German embassies in Bogota issued a joint statement expressing "total rejection of any form of recognition and demonstration of Nazism."

The Colombian Defense Ministry, which oversees the police, also issued a statement, apologizing and condemning the "unacceptable" conduct.

In the aftermath of the scandal, the head of the Simon Boliver Police Academy was dismissed.

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For Israeli Philosophy Professor Shalom Rosengerb, the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who had the privilege to meet Monsieur Chouchani and those who did not. 

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An enigmatic scholar, Chouchani taught many distinguished students in Europe, Israel, and South America after World War II. Besides Rosenberg, his disciples were French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, and more. 

Although not much is known about Chouchani, including his real name, recent documents obtained by the National Library of Israel shed light on his genius.

Fifty notebooks handwritten by Chouchani were donated to the library by Rosenberg, who met the scholar in South America. The papers were studied, deciphered and organized by the National Library and are available to the public. 

According to archivists, the notebooks are full of ideas on Jewish thought, memory exercises, and mathematical formulas that were incredibly difficult to decipher. 

"Chouchani's notebooks are a gold mine," said Yoel Finkelman, curator at the National Libary. "His works are exceptionally challenging to decipher because he did not write orderly paragraphs. He put down parts of sentences, mathematical equations, and acronyms in which he encrypted his ideas.

"Moreover, he had his own kind of vocabulary, and only through tracking down a word as it appears throughout the rest of the text can one begin to understand its meaning."

According to Finkelman, the library worked on deciphering Choucani's works in order to "understand what he knew, how he thought and how he formulated his religious and educational views." He aso said the library considered it "of paramount importance to bring to the public's attention the story of one of the most mysterious and influential figures in twentieth-century Jewish thought."

David Lang, an archivist at the National Library, said another aspect that made the process of deciphering Chouchani's notebooks complex was how diverse his areas of expertise were. 

"The notebooks cover all subjects in Judaism – Torah, Talmud, Jewish law, Rabbinic literature, philosophy, Kabbalah, ethics, and Hassidism," he said. "He also spent a great deal of time on mathematics and physics, and Choucani's interest in the history of science is also evident."

According to Lang, Chouchani had an extraordinary photographic memory and was able to recall and cite the entire Bible, Talmud, and various Jewish texts from memory and even mastered several languages. 

Wiesel, who greatly admired his teacher, wrote that Chouchani "mastered some 30 ancient and modern languages, including Hindi and Hungarian. His French was pure, his English perfect, and his Yiddish harmonized with the accent of whatever person he was speaking with. The Vedas [Hindu religious texts] and the Zohar he could recite by heart. A wandering Jew, he felt at home in every culture."

For Rosenberg, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1935 and moved to Israel in 1963, meeting Chouchani was a dream. 

"Shalom spoke about Chouchani all the time, and so in 1967, I surprised him with a gift – a trip to Montevideo, Uruguay, to meet him," his wife, Rina said. Despite the limited amount of time they spent together, Chouchani left a tremendous impression on Rosenberg, as well as the rest of this students. 

Chouchani arrived in Uruguay after spending several years in Israel, Algeria, and France. While in Israel, he studied with renowned Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who was the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine. 

Kook called Chouchani "one of the most excellent young people… sharp, knowledgeable, complete and multi-minded."

Chouchani's comprehensive knowledge even helped him escape the horrors of the Holocaust. When arrested by Nazi officers in Paris, he claimed he was a Muslim. Doubting whether that was true, officials summoned the chief mufti of France at the time, who, after a three-hour conversation with Chouchani, declared he was "a holy Muslim." 

The Jewish scholar eventually made his way to Uruguay, where he died unexpectedly in 1968. 

"He felt that Uruguay was so far away, the war would never spread there," Rina Rosenberg said. In 1968, she and her husband participated in a Jewish teachers' seminar in the South American country, which Chouchani also attended. 

"He used to always sit in his room and teach," she said. "He never came to the dining hall, but only ate in his room. He was charismatic and impressive. Shalom told me Chouchani told him he preferred to teach women because he said their heads have not been tainted by yeshivas."

Choucani passed away during that same seminar. 

"One Saturday night he suddenly fell ill," Rosenberg recalled. "Shalom and a few others took him to a local hospital, where he died. Shalom was devastated. He thought Chouchani could have been saved, but the hospital didn't even have oxygen to give him."

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Rosenberg, who is the former chair of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has spent many years deciphering Choucani's work. He asserts that Chouchani's real name was most likely Hillel Perlman and he was born in the Belarusian town of Brisk. 

A few years ago, he was joined by his student Hodaya Har-Shefi, who wrote a thesis on Chouchani and is now writing a doctorate. 

By studying Chouchani's work, she learned that "he gave a lot of attention to the teacher-student relationship. It is also interesting to see his attitude towards the sages, how he criticized their work, but at the same time, deeply respected them."

According to the National Library, Chouchani challenged his students with difficult questions and encouraged them to improve and progress, and especially to think in unexpected ways.

"Chouchani did not want his works to be published in his lifetime," Har-Shefi continued."He also did not like students taking notes and summarizing his lessons. He had tremendous respect and caution for the written word.

"He wanted people to teach and learn the right way, and he tried to pass on these tools to his students to make sure Jewish tradition continues."

Professor Hanoch Ben-Pazi, who walked Har-Shefi through her thesis work, says Chouchani's personal experience mirrored that of European Jewswho moved to the West in the first half of the 20th century. 

"Chouchani belongs to the same group of young people from Eastern Europe who came to the West and admired the Enlightenment and the vast knowledge that was now available to them," he said. "The same thing happened to Rabbi [Joseph] Soloveitchik, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe [Menachem Mendel Schneerson.]"

Soloveitchik, Heschel, and Schneerson were all born in Eastern Europe, but immigrated to the United States in their youth and went on to become the greatest Jewish leaders of the 20th century. 

"They all tried to preserve the Torah world, but still wanted to be part of the enlightened world," Ben-Pazi continued. "This is a complicated task. In the end, each of them had their own journey." 

Ben-Pazi has also spent a great deal of time deciphering Chouchani's works. 

"It is clear that from a historical and biographical point of view that Chochani's is a classic Jewish story," he said. "On the other hand, seeing how his teachings affected his students and where it led them, we see that his influence on Western thought, albeit indirect, is much greater than one would assume."

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A 190-year old Torah scroll that found its home in Israel in 2017 is in need of restoration. It was brought to the Jewish state by Asher and Sandy Berlinger, who made aliyah to Israel with the help of Nefesh B'Nefesh. The couple, both in their 80s, moved to Jerusalem from Paramus, New Jersey. 

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The Torah scroll was written in 1833 and was passed down from generation to generation in Asher's family, who is a descendant of a German rabbinical family. 

Berlinger inherited the item from his grandfather, Naphtali Berlinger, who was the rabbi of the Bodenhausen Jewish community during the Nazi period. 

When Asher was three years old, his family fled to the United States. His father, Menachem Berlinger, was arrested on Kristallnacht and event sent to prison, but, thankfully, was released because he, and the rest of the family, had visas. The family settled in New York, and the Torah school was used at a synagogue in Brooklyn. 

The grandfather, Naphtali, decided to stay behind to support his congregants. In a letter he sent to loved ones, he wrote: "Do not worry about me. God is with me." He died in the Theresienstadt ghetto. 

The Torah scroll is currently located in the Berliner home in Jerusalem. Almost 200 years of challenges and hardships did not leave it unscathed: part of it has been torn and some of the writing has faded, making it ineligible for use in religious worship. 

"If the Torah school can be restored, I will do so, in order for it to be used in a synagogue again," Berlinger told Israel Hayom. "I open it from time to time with my family, and we have also celebrated with it on Simchat Torah. It makes me happy to use the scroll for festivities, after everything it has been through over the years."

Founder and CEO of Nefesh B'Nefesh Rabbi Yehoshua Fass said: "Every year we come across new testimonies by Holocaust survivors, and are amazed to discover more stories of heroism, in this case through a valuable object that illustrates the Jewish's people's victory and prosperous future."

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The state of Arizona could be laying the groundwork for executing death row inmates in gas chambers, The Guardian reported Friday. The state's  Corrections Department purchased the ingredients to make hydrogen cyanide, the same deadly gas that was used by Nazis for the mass murder of Jews and other groups during the Holocaust. 

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The British paper revealed that the department spent more than $2,000 in procuring the ingredients to make the gas and sodium hydroxide pellets and sulfuric acid to generate it.

The gas chamber, housed in the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence, was built in 1949 but has not been used for 22 years. According to documents obtained by The Guardian, it has recently been "refurbished." 

The state, the report said, was looking for alternatives to restart its "deeply flawed" execution system, which was suspended in 2014 following the "botched" execution of convicted murderer Joseph Wood who had to be injected 15 times. A process that should have taken 10 minutes dragged on for two whole hours. 

Officials also reportedly conducted a series of tests last August to appraise its "operability," and in December, it was declared "operationally ready," the Guardian reported.

Arizona death row inmates would be given a choice to decide which way to die – by lethal injection or in a gas chamber. The former is a method widely used in death penalty states and was considered a more humane alternative to gas, electric chair, or firing squad. That is, until Wood's botched execution. 

Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said: "You have to wonder what Arizona was thinking in believing that in 2021 it is acceptable to execute people in a gas chamber with cyanide gas. Did they have anybody study the history of the Holocaust?"

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Alarmed by a rise in online antisemitism during the pandemic, coupled with studies indicating younger generations lack even basic knowledge of the Nazi genocide, Holocaust survivors are taking to social media to share their experiences of how hate speech paved the way for mass murder.

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With short video messages recounting their stories, participants in the #ItStartedWithWords campaign hope to educate people about how the Nazis embarked on an insidious campaign to dehumanize and marginalize Jews – years before death camps were established to carry out murder on an industrial scale.

Six individual videos and a compilation were released Thursday on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, followed by one video per week. The posts include a link to a webpage with more testimonies and teaching materials.

"There aren't too many of us going out and speaking anymore, we're few in numbers, but our voices are heard," Sidney Zoltak, an 89-year-old survivor from Poland, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Montreal.

"We are not there to tell them stories that we read or that we heard – we are telling facts, we are telling what happened to us and to our neighbors and to our communities. And I think that this is the strongest possible way."

Once the Nazi party came to power in Germany in 1933, its leaders immediately set about making good on their pledges to "Aryanize" the country, segregating and marginalizing the Jewish population.

The Nazi government encouraged the boycott of Jewish businesses, which were daubed with the Star of David or the word "Jude" – Jew. Propaganda posters and films suggested Jews were "vermin," comparing them to rats and insects, while new laws were passed to restrict all aspects of Jews' lives.

Charlotte Knobloch, who was born in Munich in 1932, recalls in her video message how her neighbors suddenly forbade their children from playing with her or other Jews.

"I was four years old," Knobloch remembered. "I didn't even know what Jews were."

The campaign, launched to coincide with Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day, was organized by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which negotiates compensation for victims. It is backed by many organizations, including the United Nations.

It comes as a study released this week by Israeli researchers found that coronavirus lockdowns last year shifted some antisemitic hatred online, where conspiracy theories blaming Jews for the pandemic's medical and economic devastation abounded.

Although the annual report by Tel Aviv University's researchers on antisemitism showed that the social isolation of the pandemic resulted in fewer acts of violence against Jews across 40 countries, Jewish leaders expressed concern that online vitriol could lead to physical attacks when the lockdowns end.

Supporting the new online campaign, the International Auschwitz Committee noted that one of the men who stormed the US Capitol in January wore a sweatshirt with the slogan "Camp Auschwitz: Work Brings Freedom."

"The survivors of Auschwitz experienced first-hand what it is like when words become deeds," the organization wrote. "Their message to us: do not be indifferent!"

Recent surveys by the Claims Conference in several countries have also revealed a lack of knowledge about the Holocaust among young people, which the organization hopes the campaign will help address.

In a 50-state study of Millennials and Generation Z-age people in the US last year, researchers found that 63% of respondents did not know that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and 48% could not name a single death camp or concentration camp.

Claims Conference President Gideon Taylor told the AP that the surveys highlighted that "messages and concepts and ideas that were common and understood 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago" are not anymore.

After the success of a social media campaign last year using the messages of survivors to pressure Facebook to ban posts that deny or distort the Holocaust, Taylor said it made sense to seek social media help again.

"The Holocaust didn't come out of nowhere," he said. "Before Jews were driven out of their schools, their jobs, their homes, before the synagogues, shops and businesses were destroyed. And before there were ghettos and camps and cattle cars, words were used to stoke the fires of hate."

"And who can draw that line from dangerous words to horrific acts better than those who lived through the depths of human depravity?"

For Zoltak, the escalation from words to deeds came rapidly after the invading Nazi army occupied his town east of Warsaw in mid-1941. The Nazis rapidly implemented antisemitic laws that they had already instituted in the western part of Poland they occupied two years earlier and forced Zoltak's parents into slave labor, he said.

A year later, the Germans forced all of the town's Jews – about half the population of 15,000 – into a ghetto segregated from the rest of the town, subject to strict regulations and kept on restricted food rations.

Three months later, the Nazis liquidated the ghetto, transporting its residents to the Treblinka death camp or killing them along the way.

Zoltak was one of the few lucky ones, managing to escape with his parents into a nearby forest. They hid around the area until the following spring when they were taken in by a Catholic family on a nearby farm and sheltered for the duration of the war.

After the war, he returned to his town and learned that all but 70 of its 7,000 Jews had been killed, including all of his classmates and his father's entire family.

"It's sometimes hard to understand," he said. "We're not actually dealing with numbers, they were humans who had a name, who had families."

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When one hears the words "Nazi occupation," one's mind does not immediately think of Africa. However, the fascist regime did reach the north of the continent and severely impacted Tunisia and particularly its Jewish community.

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During the six months of Nazi occupation, thousands of Tunisian Jews were sent to labor camps and lost their lives due to disease or from allied forces bombings while forced to work for the Germans. 

"No other country in North Africa was as significantly affected by the German occupation [as Tunisia,] which was occupied between November 1942 and May 1943," Professor Haim Saadoun, a senior faculty member at the Open University, told Israel Hayom. 

Saadoun is also the director of the Documentation Center of North African Jews During World War II, which was established at the Ben Zvi Institute to chronicle Holocaust events in the Maghreb. 

As part of his work at the documentation center, Saadoun aims to raise awareness for Nazi atrocities in Tunisia. His father survived the Holocaust in Sfax, a city southeast of Tunis, and shared his survival story with his son after many years of silence.

After Nazi Germany occupied Tunisia, they conducted themselves the same way they did in Europe. The Muslim Tunisian government and the French one remained, but the Germans had a significant influence on local policy. 

"The occupation of Tunisia during the war stemmed from German military considerations regarding the development of World War II in North Africa," Saadoun explained. 

"First, they lost a battle in November 1942 in the area of El-Alamein in Egypt, and second, American forces landed [in Africa] as part of a large-scale operation, called Operation Torch, waged in Algeria and Morocco.

"Occupying Tunisia was a response to these two military events. The goal was to place a buffer between the British forces that moved from Libya towards Tunisia and the US forces that were also moving there, but from Algeria."

The SS men that arrived in the North African country together with the German army were in charge of dealing with the local Jewish population, as usually happened. SS Commander Walter Rauff, who specialized in the extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe in mobile gas chambers, was in charge. 

Rauff and his men implemented a policy somewhat similar to that in Europe and established a Jewish community council through which they controlled the Jews. 

"The Jewish community had to provide the Germans with at least 5,000 young men between the ages of 17-50, who were used for labor in the German army," Saadoun said. 

"The Germans needed the workforce for various reasons, and some Jews were being held in labor camps. Some of these camps were situated at the front line of the war, and Jews there lived in tough conditions and had to do hard manual labor. 

"There were 24 camps. We do not know how many Jews were there, but it was thousands. The Germans did not apply an exterminating policy in Tunisia. There were isolated cases of Jews being killed, but it was not systematic. Many did, however, die in the labor camps," Saadoun explained.

"The 18-year-old Jews were sent to labor camps at airports that had been hit by American bombs," Saadoun's father, Yakov, wrote in his journal. 

Jews were also sent to work at "the port and the train station. They had to do manual labor and wear a yellow badge to stand out against the French and other nationalities, like Italians, Greeks, and Maltese, etc. Many workers died as a result of their work, for they were bombed by the Americans or the Brits," he wrote. 

"The Germans caught my father, a blond 14-year-old boy with blue eyes, [characteristics] that saved him because they thought he was not Jewish based on how he looked," Saadoun said. 

"My father wrote many letters that I keep, but he did not talk about the wartime a lot. I originally did not understand why it took him so long [to share his experience during the war,] but it turns out that it was very difficult for him to speak of that time. It was a kind of post-trauma."

"In some cities in Tunisia, Jews would walk around with yellow badges, for example, in Sfax. Their property would get confiscated by the Germans, so were Jewish buildings and valuable personal belongings, and more. That was the first time Tunisian Jews had to face such great difficulties. They never experienced anything like that before. They did not know how long it would last. It was a horrible time for them," Saadoun explained. 

"Many Jews in North Africa kept journals and memoirs about their situation during World War II. Leaders of the Jewish community published some of those stories immediately after the war. A lot of information was published, and we have come across more of it throughout the years. 

A few years ago, we published a journal of one Tunisian Jew, who "described every day his and his family's experiences – how the Germans confiscated their home, how they were forced to cram together in a single room with another family in the neighborhood in which they lived," Saadoun said. 

A lot was written by Tunisian Jews at the time, and "we are calling on people to tell their story because it is important to know what happened to this community. These stories are beyond priceless."

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German prosecutors have charged the elderly secretary of the former SS commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp with 10,000 counts of accessory to murder, arguing that she was part of the apparatus that helped the camp function.

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The 95-year-old also faces an unspecified number of counts of accessory to attempted murder for her service at the camp between June 1943 and April 1945, Peter Mueller-Rakow, spokesman for prosecutors in the northern town of Itzehoe, said Friday.

Despite her advanced age, the suspect will be tried in juvenile court as she was under 21 at the time of the alleged crimes, Mueller-Rakow said.

The suspect, whom Mueller-Rakow would not identify in line with German privacy laws, is believed to be in good enough health to stand trial.

She has previously been partially identified as Irmgard F. by Germany's NDR public broadcaster, which interviewed her at the retirement home where she now lives in a small community north of Hamburg.

She confirmed to NDR that she had worked as the secretary to SS officer Paul Werner Hoppe in Stutthof, but said she never set foot in the camp itself and did not know of murders taking place there.

Hoppe was himself tried and convicted of being an accessory to murder and sentenced to nine years in prison in 1957. He died in 1974.

NDR cited a 1954 statement Irmgard F. had made when interviewed as a witness ahead of the trial, in which she told authorities all Hoppe's correspondence with higher SS administration had gone past her desk and that the commandant had dictated her letters daily.

She also said she did not know of prisoners being gassed, but told authorities at the time she was aware Hoppe had ordered executions, which she presumed were as punishment for infractions, NDR reported.

The case against her will rely on new German legal precedent established in cases over the last decade that anyone who helped Nazi death camps and concentration camps function can be prosecuted as an accessory to the murders committed there, even without evidence of participation in a specific crime.

"In the trial we will focus on the suspect who was in the camp as a secretary, and her concrete responsibility for the functioning of the camp," Mueller-Rakow said.

Initially a collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from Danzig – now the Polish city of Gdansk – Stutthof from about 1940 was used as a so-called "work education camp" where forced laborers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died.

From mid-1944, tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos in the Baltics and from Auschwitz filled the camp along with thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal Nazi suppression of the Warsaw uprising.
Others incarcerated there included political prisoners, accused criminals, people suspected of homosexual activity, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

More than 60,000 people were killed there by being given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, shot or starved. Others were forced outside in winter without clothing until they died of exposure, or were put to death in a gas chamber.

Last year, a former SS private, Bruno Dey, was convicted at age 93 of more than 5,000 counts of accessory to murder for serving at Stutthof as a guard and given a two-year suspended sentence.

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Lutheran Bishop Ilse Junkermann unveiled the memorial Monday in the eastern German town of Eisenach in conjunction with several members of state Lutheran churches from across Germany whose predecessor organizations founded the institute in 1939.

The institute had aimed to delete all positive references about Jews in the bible and to push out Jewish converts from the church.

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In an interview with the Polish news magazine Wprost, Piotr Glinski described how members of his ruling Law and Justice party has been treated when they were still in the political opposition before 2015, as well as the attitude toward them today.

His mention of the Nazi propaganda minister was not coincidental. In the Nazi era, Goebbels peddled anti-Semitic racial theories to sway public opinion in favor of the persecution of Jews and ultimately their systematic murder. According to Glinski, his party was "excluded and treated like lepers" when serving in the opposition, and now "we are compared to fascists, dictatorships."

He said the language often used to describe the party is deliberately meant "to dehumanize," just as Goebbels dehumanized the Jews.

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Khanna, a Democrat from California, is one of two congressmen leading a bipartisan effort urging the U.S. State Department to pressure Poland and Ukraine to combat state-sponsored anti-Semitism.

"Our government should be concerned with the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Ukraine and Poland," Khanna wrote Wednesday. "Both countries recently passed laws glorifying Nazi collaborators and denying the Holocaust."

Khanna was referring to the recently passed Polish law that makes it a crime to blame Poland for the crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The law has sparked criticism in the United States, and even more so in Israel, where some fear it aims to quash any debate about Polish anti-Semitic violence during the German occupation in World War II. However, even critics have not tried to argue that the law glorifies Nazism.

On Thursday, Andrzej Pawluszek, an adviser to Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, said Khanna's words were "irresponsible and shocking."

Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Bartosz Cichocki retorted Wednesday on Twitter: "Sir, I would appreciate if you indicated a single law passed in my homeland Poland (recently or not), which glorifies Nazi collaborators and/or denies the Holocaust."

In a separate post, he added, "Equally, I would love to learn what exactly your government did to combat [the] Holocaust after being requested to do so by the Polish government-in-exile."

During Germany's occupation of Poland, the Polish government-in-exile struggled to warn the world of the mass killing of Jews – a message that was largely ignored.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum also weighed in, saying, "There is no law in Poland that would glorify collaborators of the German Nazis or that would deny the Holocaust."

Attempts by phone and email to obtain a comment from Khanna received no response.

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