First lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha visited the Holocaust memorial in Berlin amid tight security Wednesday morning under tight security.

They spent about a half-hour walking through the sea of 2,711 slabs that comprise the memorial, according to Uwe Neumaerker, its director. They were guarded by helicopters hovering over the area, which was cleared of visitors, so the memorial “was totally silent and they were alone,” Neumaerker told JTA by phone following the visit.

“They were impressed that we Germans have such a memorial in the center of our city,” Neumaerker said, adding that the first lady “really has an aura.”

American-Jewish architect Peter Eisenman designed the memorial, which was opened to the public in May 2005 on the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Also on the visit was Auma Obama, President Obama’s half-sister, about whose existence he reportedly learned of only after his father’s death in 1982. Auma Obama, 53, studied in Germany and lives in her native Kenya.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is right that “The World Ignored Our Annihilation,” but he doesn’t seem to understand that nothing has really changed.  And the lesson to learn from it is that we should remember that we can’t rely on anyone when in trouble.  We must have policies that don’t require being rescued or help by any other country.

“The leaders of the Allies knew about the Holocaust in real time. They understood exactly what was happening in the death camps. They were asked to act, they could have acted, and they did not. To we Jews the lesson is clear. We must not be complacent in the face of threats of annihilation. We must not bury our heads in the sand or allow others to do the work for us. From here, the place that attests to the desire to destroy us, I, the Prime Minister of Israel, the state of the Jewish People, say to all the nations of the world: The State of Israel will do whatever is necessary to prevent another holocaust.”

I’m just a lowly blogger; I’m not in any position to change or make policy, but Netanyahu is the Israeli Prime Minister and he can do a lot more than just tap letters on a keyboard.

The Holocaust teaches us that normal cultural and “moral” values are ignored when the victims are Jews.

Today we are victimizing ourselves by agreeing to empower Arab terrorists and given them sovereignty over our Land.  Claiming that it’s possible to make a “Palestinian state” that doesn’t endanger Israel is like claiming that 1 + 1 = 3.

The early Nazi laws which only “discriminated” against Jews in Germany were nothing compared to the laws against Jews in most Arab countries today and also in the “PA Authority.”  Yes, Jews were still safer then in Germany, than we are today in Jenin, Ramallah or Shechem.

Just like there was silence from international human rights organizations then when Jews were losing their jobs and being thrown out of schools, who is complaining about the Judenrein policies of Jordan, Dubai and the PA Authority, among others?

It’s time to learn our lesson and stop talking “peace.”  We have a country to build.  We shouldn’t expect any help from others.  Once we concentrate our energies on true sovereignty, we’ll be the “light to all nations,” strong and secure.

The U.S. government has recovered 400 pages of the dairy of Hitler’s Jewish confidante Alfred Rosenberg, according to Reuters, which reported that the diary has been long lost.

Rosenberg was hanged in 1946 for his party in the systematic murder of 6 million Jews.

Details of the diary have not been released, but it may contain details on his meetings with Hitler and on the plans for genocide against Jews.

Polish and Israeli archaeologists discovered traces of an underground tunnel that apparently was never used at the site of the former death camp in Sobibor.

The tunnel ran from a barracks to outside the camp fence and may have been dug by the prisoners of the Sonderkommando who worked in the camp burning the corpses of murdered Jews.

The archaeology work at Sobibor is directed by Wojciech Mazurek of Chelm, Poland, and Yoram Haimi of Israel.

Though the tunnel would have helped the prisoners to escape, Mazurek does not believe it was used.

“The Germans found the tunnel and therefore shot and then burned the entire crew of the Sonderkommando,” Mazurek told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper.

At the gas chambers in Sobibor, Nazis murdered about 250,000 Jews mostly from Poland, the Netherlands and Slovakia. The camp was closed following an uprising on Oct. 14, 1943; about half the remaining prisoners escaped during the uprising.

Afterwards, the Germans bulldozed the death camp and tried to disguise it by planting pine trees at the site, which now is home to the Sobibor Museum displaying a pyramid of ashes and crushed bones of the victims, collected from the cremation pits thereafter.

Before Jews were sent to the gas chambers, SS officer Oberscharführer Hermann Michel, wearing a white coat to give the impression he was a physician, told they would be sent to work after undressing and undergoing “disinfection.”

The SS then led them into the gas chambers, and Ukrainians closed the doors. After the gassing, Jewish workers removed the bodies and the SS led in the next group to meet their gruesome fate.

A Jewish underground movement at Sobibor succeeded in killing 11 SS officers and several camp guards. After the deaths were discovered, approximately 600 prisoners fled, half of them surviving the shots from Nazi fire and all but 50-70 of the others managing to escape re-capture or death on the mine fields surrounding Sobibor.

JTA contributed to this article.

An Israeli film maker who is admittedly “obsessed” with the Holocaust is finally putting to rest the myth that the urban myth that the Nazis used the remains of Jewish bodies to create bars of soap.

“Soaps,” a new film by director Eyal Ballas, 43, finds that the soap myth originated in World War I, when Germans were rumored to be turning bodies into the cleaning product. During World War II, SS guards would harass concentration camp members by threatening to kill them and turn them into soap.

Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt told The Jewish Week that “there is no proof that the Nazis made Jews into soap in a mass fashion … There were attempts, but it was never practical.”

Certain German soaps had the intitials “RIF” printed on them, which was thought to stand for “Reichs Juden Fett,” which translates to “State Jewish Fat.” The Holocaust museum in Bat Yam exhibits an RIF soap bar donated by a Holocaust survivor, but the inscription’s meaning is apparently not what we think.

Although this rumor is usually dispelled by historians, Yad Vashem’s website contains three photographs of soap burials, with one captioned, “In this grave is buried soap made from pure Jewish fat … A silent testimony to the Holocaust and the brutality of the Germans.”

According to a Haaretz article about the new film, a Yad Vashem spokesman says this is apparently a “technical and temporary manner.” Apparently the comments were an inaccuracy, and Yad Vashem has changed the picture captions for the exhibition at the museum. They are currently working to make the same changes on the website.

Celebrations for President Shimon Peres’s 90th birthday August 2 started two months early on Wednesday in his hometown of Vishneyeva, Belarus, where a plaque was revealed on the home that now sits on the lot where President Peres grew up.

The ceremonies were held in the presence of his eldest daughter Tzvia Walden, named after President Peres’ Grandfather Tzvi Meltzer, who was killed in Vishneyeva by the Nazis, and were part of the current three-day Limmud FSU Festival.

The plaque reads, “In this place, Shimon Peres, son of Yitzhak and Sarah Perski, the Nobel Laureate and 9th President of the State of Israel, was born on August 2, 1923.”

Earlier in the day, the town held an emotional memorial service near the Valley of Death monument to commemorate the 2,000 Jews of Vishneyeva who were murdered at the hands of the Nazis.

The Polish Academy of Sciences has dismissed historian Prof. Krzysztof Jasiewicz following an interview in which he partly blames Jews for the Holocaust.

Jasiewicz, 61, will lose his position as head of the Department of Analysis of Eastern Issues on June 1 but announced that he will appeal the decision.

In the interview, which was published in April in a special edition of Focus magazine on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Jasiewicz said that “generations of Jews worked for centuries to bring about the Holocaust,” that “without the active participation of the Jews, the Holocaust would have been impossible.

He also stated, “It is a waste of time to dialogue with the Jews.”

Director of the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Professor Eugeniusz Cezary Krol, said in a statement that Jasiewicz was fired for violating the elementary standards of scientific rigor.

Scholars and historians at the academy protested against what Jasiewicz said in the popular scientific magazine, saying his opinions were harmful.

Jasiewicz not only did not regret his remarks but also defended them. “The Jews accuse us [Poles] of the worst of everything; they are violent and arrogant against us. Our role in this dialogue is limited to apologizing,” he told Do Rzeczy magazine in an article about the controversy.

During his visit to China last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recalled that the city of Shanghai was “one of the few places that opened its gates” to Jews fleeing Hitler. Officials of the Chinese Communist government, standing nearby, beamed with pleasure at the expectation that people all over the world would read how their regime rescued Jews.

But is it true?

As the prime minister noted, the port city of Shanghai was a haven for many European Jewish refugees during the Hitler years, at a time when most other countries, including the United States, closed their doors to all but a fortunate few. It is important to note that much of China was under Japanese military occupation from 1931 until 1945, and immigration to Shanghai was controlled by the Japanese government, not the Chinese. The Japanese, hoping to improve their relations with the U.S. and the American Jewish community, permitted about 20,000 German and Austrian Jews to settle in Shanghai during the 1930s.

This immigration was made possible in part by false documents given to Jews by the Dutch consul in Lithuania, Jan Zwartendijk, and by transit visas to Japan provided, without official sanction, by Japan’s acting consul-general in Lithuania, Sugihara Chiune. Officially the visas were good for only eight to 12 days, but the Japanese authorities allowed the refugees to remain in Japan for up to eight months until they found other destinations. Many went to Shanghai, including 500 rabbis and students (and their families) from the famous Mir Yeshiva.

Beginning in 1943, most of the Jews in Shanghai were confined to a two-square-mile section of the city known as the Restricted Area. Conditions were harsh but certainly not comparable to what Jews suffered in Europe. These Jews were saved from the Holocaust because of Japan’s – not China’s – policies.

There were several individual Chinese citizens who came to the aid of the Jews during the Holocaust. But they were nationalists, not Communists; they were associated with the anti-Communist forces led by Chang Kai-Shek, who later lost the Chinese civil war and fled to Taiwan in 1949.

One was Dr. Li Yu Ying, a prominent scholar and president of Soochow University. While living in the United States in the 1940s, he served as one of the co-chairmen of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe (better known as the Bergson Group), an activist movement that held rallies, lobbied in Washington, and sponsored hundreds of full-page newspaper advertisements promoting rescue of Jews from the Nazis. Dr. Ying had previously served the Chang Kai-Shek government in several capacities, including as China’s representative to League of Nations meetings.

Two other Chinese citizens have been honored by Yad Vashem for assisting Jews during the Nazi era. One was Pan-Jun-Shun, who moved from China to Russia in 1916 (more than thirty years before the Communists took over in China). He was living in the city of Kharkov, in the Soviet Ukraine, when the Germans invaded in 1941. Pan saved a Jewish girl named Ludmilla Genrichovna from the Nazi round-ups by hiding her in his home.

The other Chinese rescuer was Dr. Feng Shan Ho, who served as China’s consul-general in Vienna from 1938 to 1940. He issued unauthorized visas to Jews trying to escape Nazi-controlled Austria, enabling them to reach the safety of Shanghai. Dr. Ho represented the Chang Kai-Shek government. And after the nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949, he served as Taiwan’s ambassador to Egypt, Mexico, and other countries.

When Dr. Ho was posthumously honored by Yad Vashem in 2001, the Communist Chinese ambassador attended the ceremony – and insisted that the ambassador from Taiwan be excluded. The Beijing government-controlled press gave prominent coverage to the honoring of Ho, whom it identified as “a Chinese diplomat,” erroneously implying that he was associated with the Beijing regime.

It is not hard to understand why Beijing’s rulers would falsely seek to take credit for what the Chinese nationalists and the Japanese did to help the Jews. Xu Kuangdi, an official of a government agency called the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, explained after visiting the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum last fall, “The spreading of this story plays an active role in promoting the understanding and friendship between the Chinese and people from all over the world.”