A new exhibition called "The Power of Words" will launch at the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem featuring 40 inspiring statements by Holocaust survivors. 

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"The world is round. Do good and God will send good back to you. Always strive to give, to respect, to contribute and to add good to the world," Holocaust survivor Smadar Nicole Shaulof, who was born in 1938 in Tunis, said. 

"I am from the generation of Holocaust survivors. We founded the State from scratch and passed this most precious gift on to the younger generation. Guard it fiercely," Meir Reichardt, who was born in 1930 in Pruszków, Poland, said.

"Continue to be young and fun as you are now. Love everyone and everyone will love you back," said Dina Peled, born in 1942 in Murafa, Ukraine. 

The opening ceremony will be attended by founder Dr. Mike Evans and president Michael Evans Jr.

Each quote includes a photograph of the survivor and a QR code that gives access to his or her personal story. The 40 statements were chosen by the members of the Dolls and Dreams group for Holocaust survivors.

Michal Fundaminsky, a therapist who works with the group, said, "We founded the group about 12 years ago to aid Holocaust survivors living in the city. , despite the suffering and difficulties that life brought to them, with a lot of wisdom, life experience, respect, and values, they managed to discern what is really important, to see and learn to appreciate the good in everything. The purpose of the exhibition, as its name 'The Power of Words' reflects, is that words can cause people to stop for a moment and make a change, and precisely in the stormy days we are going through."

Daniel Voiczek, CEO of the museum, said, "We are happy and excited to host such a unique exhibition. We have all asked ourselves many times how it is possible to survive an impossible inferno and continue to grow and strengthen in life. In my opinion, the exhibition gives us the answer to this. The members of the group, each of whom has a difficult life story, are optimistic and special people who are passionate about life are giving us a gift and it is important to hear from them what guides them in life today. It is important to note that the Friends of Zion museum works a lot on behalf of Holocaust survivors in Israel and around the world, and the exhibition is another step in this activity."

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The number of Holocaust survivors living in Israel stands at nearly 150,000, according to statistics published on Sunday by the Holocaust Survivors' Rights Authority ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

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The 147,199 Holocaust survivors residing in the Jewish state include 521 new immigrants from war-torn Ukraine who last year were recognized as survivors of the Nazi genocide.

Holocaust Remembrance Day, an annual event in Israel commemorating the six million Jews murdered by the Germans and their collaborators, and those who fought back and partook in rescue efforts, takes place this year from Monday evening until the following evening. The somber day features a two-minute siren at 10 a.m. local time when the country comes to a standstill.

One of the central themes of this year's commemoration is Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, as the world marks 80 years since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

According to data, 1,161 of the 147,199 Holocaust survivors are over the age of 100. Around 31,000 are more than 90 years old. The average age of survivors is 85, with the oldest being 118 years of age and the youngest – 76.

Haifa is home to the largest population of Shoah survivors in Israel, followed by Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Some 63% of Holocaust survivors in Israel were born in Europe. Significant numbers of Holocaust survivors came from outside of Europe, including Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia and Iraq.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Israel will begin observing the Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday evening with a state ceremony at the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog are scheduled to speak at the event. In light of the weekly mass protests against the judicial reform, Yad Vashem is also preparing for the possibility of protesters disrupting the event. On Tuesday, the International March of the Living will take place in Poland, with thousands expected to attend and walk between the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps in memory of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.

The event is marking its 35th anniversary this year and will be held in full format for the first time in three years due to the coronavirus pandemic. Delegations from 25 countries are expected to attend as well as the grandchildren of the fighters of the Jewish Combat Organization.

The march will be led by 42 Holocaust survivors from Israel and elsewhere as well as senior Israeli politicians and officials. For the first time, a torch will also be lit in memory of North African Jews who were also persecuted by the Nazi regime.

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Two Polish historians are facing a libel trial for a scholarly examination of Polish behavior during World War II, a case whose outcome is expected to determine the fate of independent Holocaust research under Poland's nationalist government.

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A verdict is expected in Warsaw's district court on Feb. 9 in the case against Barbara Engelking, a historian with the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, and Jan Grabowski, a professor of history at the University of Ottawa.

It is the first closely watched Holocaust speech case since Poland sought to pass a law in 2018 that would have criminalized the act of blaming Poland for Germany's Holocaust crimes. Those criminal penalties were dropped in favor of civil penalties after the legislation sparked a major diplomatic dispute with Israel.

The current case is instead a civil libel case tried under a pre-existing law, yet many scholars believe it will set an important precedent for freedom of Holocaust research.

Since it won power in 2015, Poland's conservative ruling party, Law and Justice, has sought to discourage investigations into Polish wrongdoing during the wartime German occupation, preferring instead to almost exclusively stress Polish heroism and suffering. The aim is to promote national pride, but critics say the government has been whitewashing the fact that some Poles also collaborated in the murder of Jews.

The Yad Vashem Holocaust museum said the legal effort "constitutes a serious attack on free and open research."

A number of other historical institutions have condemned the case as the verdict nears, with the Paris-based Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah describing it Tuesday as a "witch hunt" and a "pernicious invasion into the very heart of research."

The case centers on a 1,600-page, two-volume historical work in Polish, "Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland," which was co-edited by Grabowski and Engelking. An abridged English version is due to be published in a few months.

Grabowski and Engelking say they see the case as an attempt to discredit them personally and to discourage other researchers from investigating the truth about the extermination of Jews in Poland.

"This is a case of the Polish state against freedom of research," Grabowski told The Associated Press on Monday.

Grabowski, a Polish-Canadian whose father was a Polish Holocaust survivor, has faced considerable anti-Semitic harassment by nationalists, both online and at lectures in Canada, France and elsewhere.

Polish officials, including the country's ambassador to Israel, Marek Magierowski, argue that it is only a civil case and that it represents no threat to freedom of speech. Magierowski, in a letter to the representative of Holocaust survivors in Israel, expressed his concern about the anti-Semitic slurs that have erupted in connection to the case.

The niece of a man in the village of Malinowo, whose wartime behavior is briefly mentioned, is suing Grabowski and Engelking, demanding 100,000 zlotys ($27,000) in damages and an apology in newspapers.

According to evidence presented in the book, Edward Malinowski, an elder in the village, allowed a Jewish woman to survive by helping her pass as a non-Jew. But the survivor's testimony is also quoted as saying that he was an accomplice in the deaths of several dozen Jews. Malinowski was acquitted of collaborating with the Germans in a postwar trial.

The niece, Filomena Leszczynska, 81, has been backed by the Polish League Against Defamation, a group which is close to the Polish government and has received grants in the past.

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That organization argued that the two scholars are guilty of "defiling the good name" of a Polish hero, whom they claim had no role in harming Jews, and by extension harming the dignity and pride of all Poles.

Mark Weitzman, director of government affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, called "Night Without End" a "meticulously researched and sourced book ... that details thousands of cases of complicity by Poles in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust."

"The proceedings against these two scholars of international repute are nothing more than an attempt to use the legal system to muzzle and intimidate scholarship on the Holocaust in Poland," Weitzman said.

Germany occupied Poland in 1939, annexing part of it to Germany and directly governing the rest, killing millions. Unlike other countries occupied by Germany, there was no collaborationist government in Poland. The pre-war Polish government and military fled into exile, except for an underground resistance army that fought the Nazis inside the country.

Yet some people in Poland collaborated with the Germans in hunting down and killing Jews, in many cases people who had fled ghettos and sought to hide in the countryside.

Grabowski said "Night Without End" is "multi-faceted, and it talks about Polish virtue just as much. It paints a truthful picture."

"The Holocaust is not here to help the Polish ego and morale, it's a drama involving the death of 6 million people, which seems to be forgotten by the nationalists," he said.

A deputy foreign minister, Pawel Jablonski, described the case as a private matter.

"It is everyone's legal right to seek such a remedy before [a] court if they feel that their rights have been infringed by [another] person or entity," Jablonski told the AP in an statement Monday. "The government is not involved in the proceedings, it is a private matter to be decided by the court."

Yet those who fear that the case could stifle independent research take a different view.

"The involvement in this trial of an organization heavily subsidized with public funds can be easily construed as a form of censorship and an attempt to frighten scholars away from publishing the results of their research out of fear of a lawsuit and the ensuing costly litigation," said Zygmunt Stepinski, director of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

Maciej Swirski, the head of the organization, said no public money was used to fund the legal case.

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