Paris is back again at The Hub on Venice!

Saturday, June 8, 2013

Cafe opens at 6pm, music starts at 7:30pm

Please RSVP by calling 310-915-5200 or e-mail office@thehubonvenice.com.

Sophos is temporarily closed, but exciting new changes are in store for you. See you at our relaunch on June 8th with French Night!
Open every Thursday and Saturday from 6:00 pm till 10:00 pm, and every 4th Friday for Kabbalat Shabbat. Featuring a fabulous Mediterranean style menu in an intimate atmosphere.

Important Notice:
The Monday night class is on hiatus,
and will be not be meeting until further notice.
Monday night regulars are invited to join
Rabbi Finley’s Wednesday class at the American Jewish University.

Call the AJU office for details regarding payment.

AJU’s Continuing Education Office at (310) 440-1246
or visit www.ajula.edu.

Wednesdays beginning 

January 16, 12:30-1:30PM

Ohr HaTorah at THE HUB ON VENICE

$15 Members, $20 Non-Members

Drop-ins Welcome

“Spiritual Formation and Moral Psychology” , conducted by Rabbi Finley, has to do with the shaping of the inner life for spiritual, moral and emotional growth. In class, we learn to identify the processes of our thoughts, emotions, feelings, drives, impulses, and so forth that create our state of mind, and therefore our behaviors. We learn how to look at the ‘ego mind’, but not to identify with it. The focus on spiritual psychology helps us create a contemplative practice, where we can better understand our inner processes with an eye toward transformation and moral growth. Each month we focus on a few different themes.

For more information contact programs@ohrhatorah.org or 310-915-5200

Remember Shabbat at home in Israel? The sun is almost down. The Shabbat music from the teli
is piercing from the neighbors’ homes all around like surround sound, as if to remind us of a holy
unity. Shabbat has arrived…no more work, no more running.

On Friday June 28th we will recreate the Shabbat we all love, away from our home of Israel; of
zmirot and sharing a family meal; with ruach inspired by the greatest rituals of candle lighting,
Kiddush, Hamotsi and birkat hamazon; with live music, favorite melodies and the right food for
the mood (Oh, if you haven’t been to Sophos Café you’re in for a treat)!

You were forewarned. Yea-way…You, too will
say, Every Fourth Fri-Day!

Next Moscow Night: Coming Soon!

A bissele, or “a little” (for any non-Yiddish speakers out there)  Moscow Nights.  A bit of the old country.  But Russian, Yiddish, Scottish, no matter.  A fantastic night of food and music awaits!

You’ll hear a range of Russian music (and that aforementioned taste of Yiddish) that you’re unlikely to find anywhere, much less in a setting as warm and intimate as the Sophos Café.  From traditional Russian melodies to the beloved songs of Rozenbaum and Makarevich, to the original works of local “bards” Anatoly and Zena Postolov, come savor the rich musical stew of the Motherland.   And speaking of stew, Sophos’s delicious Middle Eastern menu will be supplemented by a number of choice Russian specialties.  A night of riches for the palate, the heart, and the soul, featuring Julia & Jacob Kantor, Endre Balogh, Jeff Lams, Anatoly and Zena Postolov, Alex Grager, and Eugene Alper.

Mark your calendars.  More importantly, call now to reserve a table.  Seating is very limited, and we expect a full house.  Due to capacity, we can only offer reservations until 6:30, by which point the tables must be claimed.  Join us.  Bring your friends, your ears, and your appetites!

On the next Blues Night let us do the singing for you!

The next blues night at the Sophos Café is coming soon.

Start with the fantastic cozy cafe atmosphere, add in a full menu of delicious Middle Eastern and Cajun food (special for the occasion), a packed crowd, and let the music take over!

Holding it down all night in spectacular style, Willie Aron & The Blue Mensches - featuring Willie Aron on guitar and vocals, Larry Klein on bass, Jeff Lams on keys, and Andy Kamman on drums. These guys really brought the house down. And they’re doing it again.

Guest appearances? You never know who might show up. Last time we had special performances by Rabbi Mordecai Finley doing a brilliantly original “Talmud-style” blues; the amazing Denise Kaufman on harmonica and also, in a rare treat, a performance by Ace of Cups, her seminal ’60s all-female blues-rock band; in addition, a couple of Yiddish blues numbers by Jacob & Julia (aka B.B. & Rivka Bloyzmen), and more.

Make your plans. Make your reservations. Make your way to the Sophos Café. See you there!

11827 Venice Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90066
310-915-5200

Cafe opens 6:00pm. Music starts at 7:30pm. Cover $10.

First Meeting – Coming Soon

8 sessions total

The first Nuremberg trial before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in 1945-46 and the Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961-62 are generally perceived as the great trials of the Holocaust.  Sixty years later, this view is both understandable and, at the same time, grossly distorted.  These two trials are not representative of the numerous Holocaust trials that took place after the war. In reality, a large number of other Nazi trials have taken place over the last half-century that the passage of time has seemingly pushed into oblivion.

The specific focus of the IMT trial was not on the murder of the Jews but on crimes against peace. This is so for two reasons.  First, the American prosecutors who were effectively in charge of the case felt, after the carnage of the Second World War, that the most important message to be derived from the Nazi period was the impermissibility of aggressive war.  Second, in the short time between the collapse of Germany in May 1945 and the beginning of the IMT trial in November 1945, there was not enough time for the prosecutors to fully grasp the enormity of the Holocaust and present it at the IMT trial. All the facts were simply not yet accessible to them.

While the Eichmann trial certainly encompassed a broad swath of Holocaust history, its understandable focus on Eichmann precluded illumination of a great deal of Holocaust facets. For example, the German administration of central Poland, including Warsaw, where millions of Jews perished, was under the aegis of Hans Frank. His diaries – almost forty volumes of detailed information on that administration – make no reference to Eichmann. Similarly, since Eichmann himself was a rare and reluctant visitor to the actual scene of the murders, his trial did not focus on the killing apparatus at an individual level.

This series will cover from four to eight separate trials, all of which have been overshadowed by the IMT and Eichmann proceedings. These trials, each to be discussed in a separate session, were chosen because they are representative of the various types of prosecutions of Nazi war criminals and collaborators under international law and domestic criminal law over the last half-century.

Below are the 10 trials covered in Professor Bazyler’s book, from which he will select in shaping this series.  Additionally, he may cover one never-forgotten trial of the Holocaust: the Eichmann trial, which took place 50 years ago, 1961-62, in Israel.

Trial Summaries

1: The Kharkov trial in the Soviet Union (1943)

Conducted in 1943 while the war was still raging, the Kharkov Trial in the Soviet Union was the first trial of Nazis and Nazi collaborators before any court.  The defendants consisted of Nazi personnel and a Russian collaborator who chauffeured the Kharkov Gestapo. In some ways, theKharkov trial was a trial-run of the IMT trial at Nuremberg since the prosecution at Nuremberg made  use of the forensic evidence first introduced at the Kharkov trial. In other ways, the Kharkov proceedings were typical of the usual Stalin-style show trials that the Soviets sought to recreate at Nuremberg before the IMT and that Winston Churchill first appeared to support. The Kharkov trial, therefore, reveals how the IMT proceedings would have been conducted if the Soviets had their way at Nuremberg.

2:  The trial of Pierre Laval in France (1945)

Pierre Laval was the collaborationist prime minister of Vichy France and known as the “evil genius of Marshal Pétain.” Laval was responsible for many of the anti-Jewish measures undertaken by the Vichy regime.  During his trial in 1945 under French domestic law, Laval mounted a vigorous defense claiming to have insured France’s survival after its military defeat by the Nazis in 1940. Found guilty and sentenced to death, Laval tried to commit suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule, but was unsuccessful since the cyanide had lost its full potency. He was taken to the gallows, half-conscious and vomiting, and hanged.

The Laval trial was one of the first to raise important issues regarding the nature of the collaboration by the French with the Nazi occupiers; these were quickly forgotten after the trial and then resurrected decades later during the subsequent and more well-known trials in France of Paul Touvier and Maurice Papon.

3:  The trial Amon Göth in Poland (1946)

Amon Göth was the commandant of the Płaszów concentration camp near Krakow. Göth’s role, and particularly his cruelty, was dramatized in the film Schindler’s List.  Forgotten is the fact that

Göth was captured by the British after the war and then turned over to the Poles, who put him on trial before the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland at Krakow, a special court created in Poland after the war to act as the Polish version of Nuremberg.

The trials illustrate the efforts of the immediate post-war government of Poland, which was not yet communist-dominated, to try high-ranking Nazis under Polish law for crimes committed on Polish territory, the site where the majority of six million European Jews were exterminated.

4: Dachau Trials in U.S.-occupied Germany (1945-48)

The Dachau Trials in the American zone of Germany were military trials in the Dachau concentration camp beginning in 1945 that tried 1,672 German-accused war criminals in 489 separate proceedings. The trials before the Dachau Military Tribunal demonstrate the use of the American military system of justice against captured Second World War enemy combatants. They also provide both a precedent and a counterpoint to the modern attempts by the Bush and Obama administrations to use military tribunals to try captured combatants in Guantánamo.

5: The Hamburg Ravensbrück Trials in British-occupied Germany (1947-48)

The Hamburg Ravensbrück Trials in the British zone of occupied Germany were a series of seven military trials of camp officials and kapos from the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Since Ravensbrück was the only German concentration camp to hold solely female prisoners and was staffed primarily by female guards, the trial highlighted the critical role of German women in the persecution and murder of the Jews.  Of the thirty-eight defendants tried, twenty-one were women.  The trials also provide a good contrast between how the British and the Americans tried captured Nazis under their respective military justice systems.

6: The Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg (1947-1948)

The Einsatzgruppen trial, the ninth of the twelve later Nuremberg trials in the American zone of occupation, was conducted in the same courtroom where the IMT was held. It put on trial the German commanders in charge of the special action murder squads (the “Einsatzgruppen”) that followed the regular German army eastward into newly conquered territory. Operating just behind the advancing German troops, these mobile killing squads would round up and transport Jews and other “undesirables” and “criminals,” often with assistance from the local populace, to a remote location. The victims were ordered to dig pits to serve as mass graves, forced to strip naked, and then shot at close-range. The murders were done one-by-one, bullet-by-bullet, town-by-town, and city-by-city. By such means, the Einsatzgruppen squads and their local collaborators managed to murder approximately 1.5 million Jews. The actions of the Einsatzgruppen squads conducted under orders from these defendants stand in stark contrast to the later industrialized killings conducted at the death camps, and so illustrate a different kind of command responsibility than demonstrated for the defendants at the IMT and the Göth trial.

Since the Einsatzgruppen generals also claimed to have followed orders from Berlin, this trial also illuminated the defense of following orders in far more depth than the IMT proceeding. This is because more information was available to the Einsatzgruppen prosecutors than was available in the cramped period between the end of the war and the inception of the IMT trial. Essentially, the prosecution in this case, with the active involvement of the American chief judge, showed that the claim that one had to follow orders to avoid serious consequences was a myth. The shattering conclusion of the trial was that no one killed innocent civilians because he had to; rather he killed because he wanted to.

The trial also illustrates the sad and largely forgotten fact that a significant proportion of the court judgments issued at Nuremberg were never fully carried out. As a result of the onset of the Cold War and pressure by various interest groups in West Germany, the Western allies within a few years of the proceedings commuted the sentences of those Einsatzgruppen defendants and other defendants at Nuremberg found guilty but who received prison terms or whose death sentences were not immediately carried out. By 1958, ten of the fourteen Einsatzgruppen defendants had been released from prison.

7:  The Kapo trials in Israel (1951-1964)

The Kapo proceedings in Israel put on trial Holocaust survivors who carried out the instructions of their immediate SS supervisors, and who were convicted in Israel for brutalities committed against their fellow Jewish prisoners. One common refrain often heard from Jewish survivors is that their fellow Jewish prisoners who acted as prison functionaries — the concentration camp slang term used was kapo — were often the most cruel.  

The kapos were tried under Israel’s Nazi and Nazi Collaborators Law, the same law under which Eichmann was tried. However, while the trial of  Eichmann fifty years ago has achieved worldwide notoriety, this maiden effort in the new State of Israel to prosecute perpetrators, but also fellow Jews,  has been forgotten.  The trials are not taught or discussed in Israel and, to this date, the records of the trials are to yet to be made public. Our discussion is based on the few available accounts of the trials and some limited scholarship by Israel historians who have examined this phenomena of  Jewish survivor-victims confronting their survivor-perpetrators after the war in the Jewish homeland.

The trials raise important issues regarding the legal defense of duress. They also present difficult moral questions of trying Jews who claimed that they acted at all times under compulsion, trying to save themselves from deportation and certain death by taking on the role of kapos in the camps.

8: The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in Germany (1963-65)

The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial was an elaborate and highly dedicated effort by the West German government in the 1960’s to prosecute under domestic criminal law Germans operating the Auschwitz death camp, the most notorious of the death camps in the occupied territories constructed for the industrialized murder of the Jews. At Auschwitz and other camps in the occupied territories, Jews and other persecuted groups were brought by trains from all over Europe. They were then either murdered immediately upon arrival in gas chambers (usually children and babies, the infirm and the elderly), or selected for work, from which they were expected to perish through the extermination-through-labor (Vernichtung durch Arbeit) program.

The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial reveals most clearly the practical limitations of using existing domestic criminal legislation to deal with genocide. Due to the nature of the German criminal code in effect during the Second World War, a code promulgated in 1871, those engaged in individual acts of sadistic murder at Auschwitz were sentenced more severely than those responsible for carrying out the industrialized killing process. These seemingly unjust results were not the product of lack of effort or commitment; rather, they were ordained by a legal system not structured to the nature of the crimes. The shoe simply didn’t fit. The Frankfurt trials provide a critical response to those who argue that it was a mistake at the IMT to prosecute Nazi war criminals under international criminal rules not fully codified at the time of the Holocaust.

9: United States v. Feodor Fedorenko (1976-1987)

The Fedorenko case was a denaturalization proceeding originating in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and brought by the United States Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) against a former guard at the Treblinka death camp. The trial and appellate proceedings against Fedorenko lasted close to a decade, including an appeal to the United States Supreme Court. They therefore afford a comprehensive understanding of application of American law to the perpetrators of the Holocaust found on U.S. soil. Because crimes against humanity are not part of the U.S. criminal code and because the crime of genocide, until 2008, could not be prosecuted for acts committed by aliens outside of U.S. territory, the only legal basis for prosecuting former perpetrators of the Holocaust within the United States was a denaturalization proceeding premised on false statements made by the defendant on entry documents to the United States. Thus, if a former concentration camp prison guard falsely stated many years earlier on his U.S.-entry certificate that he was a chef at an orphanage during the war, that now-naturalizedU.S. citizen can be denaturalized and then deported. In the last thirty years, the OSI has been able to denaturalize and then deport over one hundred such individuals (including two women) through such legal means. 

Of the various OSI prosecutions, the Fedorenko case will be featured for a variety of reasons. First, the trial concentrated on Treblinka, a concentration camp devoted exclusively to killing. Hence only a small handful of persons survived it and their testimony during this trial brought its horror to life in a United States courtroom. Second, the Fedorenko denaturalization case reached all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and so set the legal standard for denaturalization proceedings in the United States. (Fedorenko v. United States, 449 U.S. 490 (1981)). Finally, in 1984, Fedorenko became the first Nazi war criminal to be extradited from the U.S. to the Soviet Union. In 1986, the Soviets convicted him of participating in the deaths of all the 800,000 murdered inmates at Treblinka and he was executed in 1987.

Fedorenko’s fate provides an opportunity for discussion of the fairness of extraditing denaturalized Americans to states without an independent judiciary. It also provides an opportunity to discuss the still ongoing efforts of the Department of Justice to denaturalize quite elderly Nazi-era perpetrators — as well as what to do with them once they have been deported. The recently-concluded trial of John Demjanjuk in Germany is an example of this dilemma.  

10:  The Anthony Sawoniuk Trial in England (1999)

The Anthony Sawoniuk trial took place in the Central Criminal Court (the “Old Bailey”) in London in 1999. Sawoniuk, a Pole who immigrated to England shortly after the war, was found guilty by an English jury and given two life sentences for murdering Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. To date, Sawoniuk is the only person tried and convicted in the UK as a Nazi war criminal under Britain’s War Crimes Act 1991. He died in prison in 2005.

The Sawoniuk trial provides a good contrast between British and American legal efforts (discussed in the Fedorenko chapter) to bring to justice former perpetrators of the Holocaust discovered many years later to be living quiet lives in their adopted countries.

Michael J. Bazyler is Professor of Law and The “1939 Club” Law Scholar in Holocaust and Human Rights Studies at Chapman University School of Law in California. He is also a Fellow with the London- based Holocaust Educational Trust, the leading organization in the United Kingdom dealing with Holocaust issues.

In Fall 2006, Bazyler was the holder of the Baron Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim Chair for the Study of Racism, Antisemitism and the Holocaust at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and Research Authority in Jerusalem, Israel. Three years earlier, he held a fellowship at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

Bazyler is the author of over fifty articles and chapters in books on the legal aspects of the Holocaust, genocide and international human rights law, and the book Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts (New York University Press 2003; paperback edition 2005), cited by the U.S. Supreme Court. He is also co-editor (with Roger P. Alford) of Holocaust Restitution Perspectives on the Litigation And Its Aftermath (NYU Press 2006, paperback 2007).

His upcoming book, Holocaust, Genocide and the Law: The Quest for Justice in a Post-Holocaust World  – based upon a law school course he created — is set to be published by Oxford University Press in 2013.

His full bio is available at www.michaelbazyler.com

6 sessions total

Ethics in science range from issues of authorship to issues of life and death.  What was once common practice and commonly regarded as sound science is now recognized as profoundly unjust and even sometimes murderous!  In this course we will explore the gamut of ethical issues in science and debate the merits of each. From the chromosomal double helix to Tuskegee, we will explore the past challenges of scientific ethics, how the issues were viewed in the past and how they are currently regarded.

Pamela Anderson-Mahoney, Ph.D. is the founder and director of Epidemiology Resources.  She began her career working in industry at Lockheed’s “Skunkworks” program where she identified groups of workers at high risk for injury and illness using a state-of-the-art surveillance system. She used this data to design interventions to minimize risk and prevent injurious exposures.  She then served at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the world famous Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) often known as the Disease Detectives where she was stationed at the National Institutes for Occupational Safety and Health.  She also served as a Principal Investigator for a multisite study overseen by the CDC, and as the lead investigator in a Statewide occupational lead abatement study.  Dr. Anderson-Mahoney has a strong academic foundation in epidemiologic methods with an M.S. and Ph.D. in epidemiology from UCLA’s School of Public Health.