Bearing Witness in Second Life

Denver's Chanel 9 News reported about Fanny Starr, a Holocaust survivor who regularly speaks in Second Life about her experiences (2Life reported several times about events with her). Here the video.

Chai/Vida

Mexican Filmmaker Ariel Zylberstein created this beautiful short film that is now making the rounds in the Internet. Thanks to the web, this film gets the exposure it deserves.

Living Memory

She might not be the oldest Second Life user, but with 87 years, Colorado resident Fanny Starr is one of the oldest (the oldest is, by the way, 97 years old, as reported in the New World Notes). In January, she spoke about her experiences during the Holocaust to an audience of avatars. The New World Notes reported here about it. The YouTube video above gives a little of the atmosphere during the event. Let's hope that this event can be repeated some time in the near future.

The other 9th of November

Newspapers worldwide feature today the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Another event that happened as well on November 9th seems today forgotten: Kristallnacht.

Zeek magazine features today photographs by Julian Voloj of the Muensterland, a small geographic area in the north west of Germany. Voloj was born in Muenster, the capitol of this region, and for this project, the New York based photographer re-visited his hometown and the surrounding area, documenting the last traces of the once vibrant Jewish culture in this area. None of the villages he photographed has a Jewish community today, but other areas witness a renaissance of Jewish life. Around 200,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union turned Germany's sleeping Jewish community of around 25,000 into the third largest of Europe with around 220,000 (only around half of them are recognized by the official Jewish community due to Halachic definition).

Voloj's photographs are traces of the past, taken nearly 70 years after Kristallnacht. Today, 71 years later, they are a silent reminder.

(To visit the slide show, click here.)

Virtual Shtetl

When you think about Jews and Poland, you probably think about death camps and ghettos. The Holocaust is definitely very much associated with these two words, but Poland's Jewish history dates back 1,000 years.

Four months ago, Albert Stankowski launched the Virtual Shtetl Web site as a homage to Jewish history in Poland, a country that once offered the community religious refuge in medieval times and later became home to the world's biggest Jewish community.

Stankowski, the son of a Holocaust survivor and a Roman Catholic Pole, likes to call the site a museum without walls—a multimedia precursor to the 2012 completion of Warsaw's long-anticipated Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

The website is more treasure trove than institutional preview. Its key feature: wiki technology enabling registered users to contribute memories, documents, and photos to the bilingual (English and Polish) site. Stankowski is also integrating the Virtual Shtetl with sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. According to Stankowski, about 2,000 to 3,000 visit Virtual Shtetl daily. He expects that number to keep growing.

Auschwitz on Facebook

The BBC reported that the Polish authorities in charge of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz have launched an official site on the social networking website Facebook.

A spokesman said the move was aimed at reaching the younger generation and educating them about the Holocaust.

It follows the launch by Auschwitz - now a state museum - of a YouTube channel earlier this year.

"We're always trying for new ways of reaching people, and in today's world one of the most popular tools is the internet, and on the internet millions of people use Facebook," said Auschwitz Museum official Pawel Sawicki.

Still, a strange idea. Do you be-friend Auschwitz on Facebook? How do you feel about this?