The speaker of Canada's House of Commons resigned Tuesday for inviting a man who fought for a Nazi military unit during World War II to Parliament to attend a speech by the Ukrainian president.

Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

Just after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivered an address in the House of Commons on Friday, Canadian lawmakers gave 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka a standing ovation when Speaker Anthony Rota drew attention to him. Rota introduced Hunka as a war hero who fought for the First Ukrainian Division.

Observers over the weekend began to publicize the fact that the First Ukrainian Division also was known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, or the SS 14th Waffen Division, a voluntary unit that was under the command of the Nazis.

Video: Canadian House Speaker Anthony Rota resigns after publicly praising Nazi / Credit: Reuters

"No one in this House is above any of us. Therefore I must step down as your speaker," Rota said in Parliament. "I reiterate my profound regret for my error in recognizing an individual in the House during the joint address to Parliament of President Zelenskyy.

"That public recognition has caused pain to individuals and communities, including to the Jewish community in Canada and around the world in addition to Nazi survivors in Poland among other nations. I accept full responsibility for my actions," he added.

Rota stepped down after meeting with the House of Commons' party leaders. All main opposition parties had called for Rota to step down, and House government leader Karina Gould said that lawmakers had lost confidence in Rota. "This is something that has brought shame and embarrassment to all of Parliament and indeed all Canadians. The speaker did the honorable thing in resigning," Gould said.

Gould said that Rota invited and recognized Hunka without informing the government or the delegation from Ukraine, adding that the fact that Rota didn't inform anyone and didn't do due diligence broke trust with lawmakers.

Members of Parliament from all parties rose to applaud Hunka on Friday unaware of the details of who he was. "Never in my life would I have imagined that the speaker of the House would have asked us to stand and applaud someone who fought with the Nazis," Gould said.

"This is very emotional for me. My family are Jewish holocaust survivors. I would have never in a million of years stood and applauded someone who aided the Nazis." Gould said Rota found out about it over the weekend. "He probably should have resigned as soon as he learned about it," she said.

Canadian Health Minister Mark Holland had called the incident "incredibly embarrassing." The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies said in a statement that the incident "has left a stain on our country's venerable legislature with profound implications both in Canada and globally."

"This incident has compromised all 338 Members of Parliament and has also handed a propaganda victory to Russia, distracting from what was a momentously significant display of unity between Canada and Ukraine. It has also caused great pain to Canada's Jewish community, Holocaust survivors, veterans and other victims of the Nazi regime." In an earlier apology on Sunday, Rota said he alone was responsible for inviting and recognizing Hunka, who is from the district that Rota represents. The speaker's office said it was Hunka's son who contacted Rota's local office to see if it was possible if he could attend Zelenskyy's speech.

The prime minister's office said it was unaware that Hunka was invited until after the address. The speaker's office also confirmed it did not share its invite list with any other party or group. The vetting process for visitors to the gallery is for physical security threats, not reputational threats, the speaker's office said. In Moscow, a Kremlin spokesman said it was "outrageous" that Hunka received a standing ovation. Russian President Vladimir Putin has painted his enemies in Ukraine as "neo-Nazis," although Zelenskyy is Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust.

"It's highly unfortunate and the only winner here is the Putin regime, which is already spinning what happened on Friday to justify its ongoing military actions in Ukraine," said Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal. The opposition Conservatives in Canada have blamed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but Béland noted that the speaker's role in Canada is as an officer of Parliament who does not participate in partisan caucus meetings and is not a member of the Cabinet. "Canada's reputation is broken. This is by far the biggest hit Canada's diplomatic reputation has ever taken under in history and it happened under Justin Trudeau's watch," Opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said.

Poilievre said everyone in the House of Commons on Friday should have been vetted with Zelenskyy in attendance. Robert Bothwell, a historian and professor at the University of Toronto, called Rota clueless for waiting so long to step down. He said an apology from Trudeau is also justified. "He should not make it personal; there is nothing he personally did wrong, but the event embarrassed the country and as PM he takes responsibility," Bothwell said. "Trudeau doesn't have the strongest image and this will cause other leaders to see him as damaged goods."

Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!

The post Canada's House speaker resigns after honoring former SS fighter appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

Bruno Dey was convicted last month of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder in Hamburg state court – equal to the number of people believed to have been killed at Stutthof during his service there in 1944 and 1945.

 Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter

Dey was convicted under new legal reasoning that even though there was no evidence linking him to a specific crime, as a camp guard he was guilty of accessory to murders committed while he was there.

The post Appeals against conviction of Nazi camp guard dropped appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

Michael Karkoc, whose family maintained that he was never a Nazi or committed any war crimes, lived quietly in Minneapolis for decades until AP's review of US and Ukrainian records in 2013 uncovered his past and prompted investigations in Germany and Poland. Karkoc died Dec. 14, according to cemetery and public records. He was 100.

Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter

His son, Andriy Karkoc, hung up on an AP reporter without confirming his father's death. Officials at the Kozlak-Radulovich Funeral Chapel, which was listed on one website as having handled the funeral arrangements, declined to comment.

But records at Hillside Cemetery in Minneapolis show he was quietly buried there Dec. 19, next to his wife, Nadia Karkoc, who died in 2018. And Minnesota Department of Health records show that a Michael Karkoc with the correct birthday died Dec. 14. The family and funeral home did not publish a public obituary.

Karkoc's involvement in the war surfaced when a retiree who researched Nazi war crimes approached the AP after coming across Karkoc's name. The AP investigation relied upon a broad range of interviews and documents, including Nazi military payroll information and company rosters, US Army intelligence files, Ukrainian intelligence findings and Karkoc's self-published memoir.

The records established that Karkoc was a commander in the SS-led Ukrainian Self Defense Legion, which attacked a Polish village where dozens of women and children were killed in 1944, then lied to American authorities to get into the US after World War II.

His family denied he was ever at the scene of the attack, though a second AP report uncovered testimony from a former soldier in Karkoc's unit who said Karkoc ordered his men to attack the village, Chlaniow, in retaliation for the slaying of an SS major.

Andriy Karkoc has said his father was never a Nazi and denied he was involved in any war crimes. He has also questioned the validity of AP's sources and accused the AP of "defamatory and slanderous" allegations.

The AP stories prompted Germany and Poland to investigate. German prosecutors announced in July 2015 that they had shelved their case because the then-96-year-old Karkoc wasn't fit for trial. But Polish prosecutors announced in March 2017 that they would seek his arrest and extradition, saying his age was no obstacle in seeking to bring him to justice.

Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he was in no doubt that Karkoc should have been extradited and he called it unfortunate that Poland and the US didn't move more aggressively to do so.

"They seem to have handled this case with a lack of urgency," Zuroff said in a telephone interview from Israel.

"This is a typical case of a person who joined forces with Nazi Germany and was involved in crimes against innocent civilians, and he didn't deserve the privilege of living in a great democracy like the United States," he said.

A US Department of Justice spokeswoman declined to comment on Karkoc's case, referring a reporter to the Polish government.

An investigative file from the Ukrainian intelligence agency's archive revealed testimony from Pvt. Ivan Sharko, a Ukrainian soldier under Karkoc's command. Sharko testified in 1968 that the initial order to attack Chlaniow was given by another officer, but that Karkoc – who fought under the nom de guerre "Wolf" – told his unit to attack the village.

"The commander of our company, Wolf, also gave the command to cordon off the village and check all the houses, and to find and punish the partisans," Sharko told authorities in Ukraine in 1967 and 1968, for an investigation they were conducting against the Self Defense Legion.

Sharko, who died in the 1980s, also said the legionaries surrounded homes, set them on fire and shot anyone found inside homes or in the streets, according to the Russian-language investigative file.

"How many people were killed in all, I don't know. I personally saw three corpses of peaceful inhabitants who had been killed," Sharko was quoted as saying.

Stephen Paskey, who led Nazi investigations for nine years as a prosecutor at the US Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations, said Sharko's testimony is highly credible. He noted that Sharko didn't appear to be in custody or under investigation when questioned, and many of his statements were confirmed by historical documents.

Thomas Will, the deputy head of Germany's special prosecutors' office that investigates Nazi crimes, concluded in 2013 that there was sufficient evidence that Karkoc was present. In 2017, Polish prosecutor Robert Janicki of the National Remembrance Institute, which investigates Nazi and Communist-era crimes against Poles, said years of investigation confirmed "100%" that he was a commander of the unit.

Karkoc, an ethnic Ukrainian, was born in the city of Lutsk in 1919, according to details he provided to American officials. At the time, the area was being fought over by Ukraine, Poland and others; it ended up part of Poland until World War II. Several wartime Nazi documents note the same birth date, but say he was born in Horodok, a town in the same region.

Karkoc didn't tell US authorities about his military service when he entered the country in 1949. But in a Ukrainian-language memoir published in 1995, Karkoc said he helped found the Ukrainian Self Defense Legion in 1943, in collaboration with the Nazis' feared SS intelligence agency, to fight on the side of Germany.

He also wrote that he served as a company commander in the unit, which received orders directly from the SS, through the end of the war. The memoir is available at the US Library of Congress and the British Library, and the AP located it online in an electronic Ukrainian library. Karkoc became a US citizen in 1959. He lived for decades in a heavily Eastern European neighborhood of Minneapolis and was a longtime member of the St. Michael's and St. George's Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He worked as a carpenter, and was a member and a secretary in the local branch of the fraternal Ukrainian National Association.

Antin Semeniuk, a friend of Karkoc in Minneapolis, said after the AP's initial report that Karkoc told him he hadn't been a Nazi. Rather, Semeniuk said, Karkoc described himself as a Ukrainian patriot who wanted his country to be democratic and free of Nazi and Communist rule.

The post Minnesota man exposed as commander of Nazi-led unit dies appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

More than seven decades later, Dey is going on trial Thursday on 5,230 counts of accessory to murder in Hamburg state court. Prosecutors argue that by standing guard at the camp from August 1944 to April 1945, the 93-year-old helped Stutthof function and was thus "a small wheel in the machinery of murder."

Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter

"The accused was no ardent worshipper of Nazi ideology," prosecutors say in the indictment, reviewed by The Associated Press. "But there is also no doubt that he never actively challenged the persecutions of the Nazi regime."

Dey, a baker by training, told prosecutors he was deemed unfit for the front at age 17 in 1944 because of a heart problem, so instead was sent as a guard to Stutthof, and suggested that with or without him the killing would have taken place.

If he hadn't been there, "they would have just found someone else," he said.

Dey's attorney, Stefan Waterkamp, said his client stood by his statements to police and prosecutors. But he noted that the indictment did not link him to any specific killing and that it would be up to the court to decide whether standing guard in a watchtower alone is enough to convict him.

"Many people were killed in many ways at Stutthof," Waterkamp said. "Some were directly killed, some were killed by starvation, some were killed by typhus – the question is who is immediately responsible?"

In recent years, prosecutors have successfully convicted former death camp guards using the argument that by helping camps like Auschwitz and Sobibor function, they were accessories to the murders there even without evidence of involvement in a specific killing.

The 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening on such reasoning was upheld by a German federal court, solidifying the precedent.

In Dey's case, the reasoning is being applied to a concentration camp rather than a death camp. Still, prosecutors have expressed confidence it still pertains, since tens of thousands of people were killed in Stutthof even though – unlike at the death camps – the site's sole purpose wasn't murder.

Stutthof was established by Nazi Germany in 1939 east of Danzig, which is today the Polish city of Gdansk, and was initially used as the main collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from the city.

From about 1940, it 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. Others incarcerated there included criminals, political prisoners, homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

From mid-1944, when Dey was posted there, it was filled with tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos being cleared by the Nazis in the Baltics as well as from Auschwitz, and thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal suppression of the Warsaw uprising.

In the end, 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 clothes until they died of exposure, or put to death in a gas chamber.

Asked if he knew who was being killed, Dey told prosecutors his SS comrades talked of the "extermination of the Jews" and said he had "done people wrong" by serving there.

"I did not know why they were there," Dey told prosecutors. "I knew well that they were Jews who had committed no crime, that they were only there because they were Jews. And they have the same right to live and to work like any other person. But it was just that Hitler or his party were against that, who had something against the Jews."

The post Former Nazi SS guard, 93, going on trial in Hamburg appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

Shocked at what he had found, Haim ran up the basement stairs, his mind racing. "Could my mother have unknowingly married a Nazi?" "What else is he hiding from us?" "What crimes was he involved in?" Panting and out of breath, Haim entered the kitchen and yelled out, "Mommy, Daddy is a Nazi!" Haim's mother smiled. That was the moment when he learned his family's big secret.

Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter

Haim is my uncle. I have known about his stepfather for a few years now, and every year I am reminded of his past on Holocaust Remembrance Day. This year, though, I decided to look into the matter. Over the past few weeks, I have been collecting countless documents from personal archives and a few institutions in Israel and the US. Naturally, not everything was preserved in full. Some of the stories lack detail, while in other instances, there are discrepancies between the various documents and Haim's childhood memories. But nevertheless, what I have been able to learn makes for a fascinating and inspiring story.

This is the incredible story of William Zeev Brickman, a professor of education, an American spy and an emissary behind the Iron Curtain.

William Wolfgang Brickman was born in June 1913 in Manhattan, the son of Shalom-David, a German Jew, and Lahia-Sarah, a Jewish woman originally from the Polish town of Jedwabne, the infamous site where the Polish locals murdered their Jewish neighbors.

As a member of an Orthodox Jewish family, Brickman mostly spoke Yiddish at home, while he learned English and other languages out on the street. His father died when he was young, apparently the result of a self-inflicted umbilical hernia aimed at helping avoid the military draft back in Europe.

William was a towering, vibrant boy. When he registered for college, he decided to play it safe and major in something he knew he would be good at. With a background in German and Yiddish, he decided to register for the German and education programs at the City University of New York.

Agent 004

During the 1930s, Brickman got his doctorate in German, Latin, and education, managing to overcome the hostility and often anti-Semitism of some of the academic staff. His knowledge of Yiddish from home and knack for languages in general allowed him to develop great expertise in a number of languages, including full mastery of various local dialects. According to his academic resume, he could read 20 European languages, in addition to Latin and ancient Greek, three Asian and two African languages.

By the late 1930s, Brickman had a blossoming academic career, but World War II broke out and threw a wrench in his plans. In March 1943, one year after the US entered the war, he was drafted into the air force as a historian and German-language expert. In a letter of recommendation for an officers' course, Brickman's direct commander at his base in Fort Worth, Texas described him as "a scholar turned soldier, who proudly made the transition from civilian to military life."

Brickman had requested to be drafted as an officer in the air force's medical or chemical warfare units. All signs point to him having been convinced the war would serve as a sort of continuation of his academic career, but once again, fate would have other plans.

In late 1944, following the Allied invasion of northern France, it was clear the demise of the Third Reich was a matter of time. The US military was on the lookout for German speakers, when Brickman's name came up. He was summoned to interviews that were presented to him as ascertaining whether he would be a good fit for the occupation forces in Germany after the war. Brickman was supposed to serve in the occupation forces' postal service, where his knowledge of German would be considered an advantage, they said.  He scored high marks on the language exams, and of course, was accepted to the role. Though he did not know it at the time, his peaceful life was about to get a lot more interesting. A few weeks later, when he received his new draft order for his unit, it was clear to Brickman that the war was going to be an entirely different experience for him than he had expected.

According to the military documents, Brickman was to be stationed with the US Counter Intelligence Corps 970^th division, which operated in liberated territories in order to catch Nazi agents that had stayed behind. Between Jan. and Feb. of 1945, Brickman took an intelligence course at Fort Ritchie base in Maryland, in preparation for his being stationed in liberated Germany. According to his son Haim, at this stage, there was yet another change in plans and Brickman was drafted to the Office of Strategic Services, the US intelligence agency that would later become the CIA.

At first, Brickman was alarmed. Beyond the challenges of being stationed overseas, he did not want to leave his mother, who was alone and suffering from a serious illness, behind. As an Orthodox Jew, he also feared that on such a mission, he would not be able to maintain his religious way of life. Nevertheless, Brickman would soon be identified as Agent 004. Later on, his relatives would joke that Brickman had in fact preceded Agent 007, otherwise known as James Bond.

Setting the trap

Service in the OSS was particularly challenging, and Brickman's unit was to be stationed inside Germany, behind enemy lines, in the twilight of the Third Reich. Their objective: to capture senior SS officers that tried to escape and evade capture. The plan was to parachute into the border area between Germany and then-Czechoslovakia – an area known for being a center where Nazis would head in order to flee the country, in particular to Argentina, and pose as senior officers to catch those attempting to flee. For reasons that remain unclear, instead of parachuting in, the forces crossed the border by foot, setting up camp in Regensburg, Germany. This was made easier by the fact that the allied forces had already made significant progress, and the battle for Berlin was already in its advanced stages. The Germans began to destroy documents and archives, and the chaos that pervaded made it impossible to check the identities of agents posing as Nazi officers, thus allowing the agents to carry out their missions.

The official military documents I found while researching this article do not add any information or details about this period. All I know is what Brickman himself said about this time in conversations with his stepson. As Brickman told it, his unit offered Nazi officers a way out of the country, interrogated them and then foiled their escape plans. Their working assumption was that the only people in the area with the means and desire to leave Germany would be senior officers in the SS and the Wehrmacht.

Their method went something like this: Some of the agents in the unit would go out in public, mainly to the bars the Nazi officers were known to frequent. After having given the appearance they had been drinking, the agents would begin to brag about how they could help those who had the money flee the country for South America. When someone would turn to the agents and ask for their help, they would direct them to a specific cabin, where the agent would say they would find a Nazi officer with the connections and ability to get them out of the country. The Nazis would arrive at the cabin at night, where they would be greeted by a secretary who would ask them a few questions about where they served, their ranking and the like. The secretary would then call Brickman, who would be waiting in the office inside.

Brickman would be dressed in SS fatigues, on his shoulder the insignia of a military rank higher than that of his guest.

According to Haim, his stepfather "made sure not to take things too far. He wanted to remain credible, but he wanted to be more senior than the Nazi in order for him to obey him and treat him with respect."

In his conversation with the Nazi, Brickman would investigate the officer over his actions in the war and the places where he had served, before agreeing on a payment for his evacuation. Eventually, Brickman would send him a rendezvous point on the Czechoslovakian border and an agreed upon date when a group would prepare to leave for South America. When that date arrived, the Nazi officers would show up to the meeting point. But instead of finding their guides for the trip out of the country, they would find other OSS officers, who would take them hostage and transfer them to allied prisons. Other senior officers were taken to Nuremberg.

In one case, Brickman's unit had received information about the presence of very high-ranking SS officer in one of the villages in the area, and the agents set out to arrest him. Brickman entered the room, gave him two minutes to pack before leaving. The officer protested, saying he had many possessions and needed more time. Brickman made it clear that if he was not ready, he would be arrested and dragged through the streets naked. Two minutes later, the officer was ready.

Brickman was involved in a mission to catch Martin Bormann, one of the heads of the German Nazi regime. While the allies suspected he was hanging around the Czechoslovakian border, there were no pictures of him available, so he could not be identified. Brickman arrived at the village where Bormann was born and located the school he had attended as a boy. It was there he found a photograph of Bormann, which he distributed to his fellow agents. According to Haim's account, his father managed to get to the village where Bormann had apparently been hiding, although he did not ultimately succeed in catching him.

After the war, Brickman went back to working with the Counter Intelligence Services, where he was made responsible for Germany's Deggendorf district. At one point, he was stationed with the security unit tasked with securing the area where the Nuremberg trials were being held in 1945. In this role, a disguised Brickman would try to infiltrate the site in civilian clothes, with the aim of exposing weaknesses in the security system there. From time to time, when he would walk around among the Nazis' cells, he would run into a prisoner he had helped capture. He would take the opportunity to remove his military hat and reveal his kippah underneath. "He wanted to show them that fate had been reversed, and the victims had become the masters," Haim said.

In the months after the war, Haim would often serve as a witness at Jewish wedding ceremonies for concentration camp survivors conducted by a rabbi from the US military.

Brickman set himself a goal of collecting as many materials as possible from the Nazi era during his stay in postwar Germany, in order to preserve and document them for the sake of historical remembrance.

Among these documents, some of which are now at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem, others now housed in Brown University's archives, one can find a collection of files and pamphlets from the Nazi era. There is also a copy of the Nazi party's 1933 campaign platform, numerous Reichsmark bills, various limericks and everyday documents distributed by the regime. One of the more important findings that Brickman managed to take with him from Germany was an elegant album produced by the Gestapo that detailed the various torture methods used by the secret police. The album was donated to the Yad Vashem archives in 1960, along with uniforms, flags, pins, a collection of stamps and various other items from that period.

Postcards from behind the Iron Curtain

Upon his discharge from the army in April 1946, Brickman returned to the academic track. He studied with the well-known philosopher John Dewey, and during the 1950s, taught at New York University's Department of Education, where he headed the department's history program. In 1960, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he served as the head of the comparative education department.

Taking advantage of his knowledge of a variety of languages, Brickman's research focused on the comparison of different education systems around the world. He wrote dozens of books on education, published dozens of articles in periodicals and Jewish magazines and edited a journal in the field.

In 1958, Brickman married Sylvia Mann, the daughter of a Jerusalemite family that had immigrated to the US. Mann was divorced with two children, Haim and his sister Simcha. It was in the early 1960s, when Brickman became a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania that the family moved to that house in Philadelphia, taking with them William's large collection of books and various objects that would expose Haim to his past.

According to Haim, William didn't talk much about that time in his life. But Haim does recall how his stepfather would embarrass him whenever they would go see a James Bond movie together. "He would erupt in laughter in the middle of the movie. It really embarrassed me as a child," Haim said.

Haim also recalled how his stepfather had refused to hire an attorney when he was called into court for some matter or another. "I underwent interrogation training, and I can get along just fine on my own," William explained.

Just like at the outset of his military service, quite a few surprises were awaiting Brickman in his academic career. As an expert on comparative education fluent in world languages, the US State Department hired him to asses education systems around the world. It was the beginning of the aviation era and the status of the US was rising in the world, and America was contending with an influx of students coming to the country to get a higher education.

In order to assess their academic level and intellectual capability, there was a need to carry out in-depth surveys of education systems in their countries of origin and develop methods for comparing high-school graduates from different places. Brickman joined many such delegations, including to Israel, and compiled reports on the subject for the State Department as well as the Dept. of Education.

Of particular interest are his journeys to the Soviet Union, China, and countries in Eastern Europe. On these travels, Brickman would not suffice with meeting senior officials in the nation's capital and writing down the official version provided by the authorities but rather would try as much as possible to tour the schools themselves and gain a first-hand impression of what was happening out in the field.

A troubled Jewish heart

While we don't know whether Brickman was working for the intelligence service on these journeys, we do know for certain that he had developed an independent line of Jewish intelligence. After learning of the difficult situation the Jews in the Soviet Union faced, he began to bring religious articles and books with him on his trips and distribute them to members of the local community who were doing whatever they could, and at any price, to preserve their identity. Because the authorities would not check the contents of his suitcase upon entering the country, he could smuggle in large amounts of material. Upon departing, Brickman would take with him letters to the West, which he would conceal under a heavy pile of Soviet propaganda material so that during the security check at the airport, no one would get suspicious.

In one of his reports, Brickman describes how he was almost caught. In Jan. 1972, while at the airport, waiting to depart for Leningrad, the decision was made to carry out a thorough check of his items.

"That was the first time my belongings were examined. They found a few copies of the Pravda newspaper, some writing by ... Lenin, speeches by Brezhnev," he said. As the officials seemed suspicious, Brickman showed them his library card for the Lenin Library and that made the necessary impression. I was allowed to continue in the direction of the bus."

Brickman's frequent journeys to the Soviet Union led him to connect with Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who invested great efforts in preserving ties with the Jews in the Soviet Union at that time.

On one of his visits to Moscow, Brickman went to a synagogue on Friday night. Moscow's Chief Rabbi Yehuda Leib Levin, who knew of his guest's identity but feared the KGB agents planted in the crowd, gave a sermon in Russian in which he praised the authorities for supporting Jewish education, synagogues, religious institutions, and so on and forth. But in the middle of his speech, he looked directly at Brickman and under his breath, muttered the words of the kaddish, the mourner's prayer. That was all it took for Brickman to understood that Soviet Jewry was on its deathbed.

Within the framework of his activity in the Soviet Union, Brickman forged ties with the Israeli Embassy in Moscow. One of the Pentateuch's in William's possession contains a special dedication from Ambassador Yaacov Sharett, the son of Israel's second Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, dated the eve of Rosh Hashanah, 1960. The dedication reads: "To the dear, dedicated and brave Professor Brickman, in memory of many other Pentateuchs."

Brickman died in the US in 1986 and was buried in Jerusalem's Har Hamenuchot cemetery. He now has 25 great-grandchildren who reside in Israel. At his funeral, he was lauded for his contribution to Jewish education in the US and his efforts to obtain federal funding for Jewish day schools.

The post A Jew in SS uniform appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.