w^^jEWISH
Bulletin
SciThig Greater Vaiianiver since 19.i(f
$1.00 includes GST APRIL 30,1999/14 lYAR 5759
itoaiMl Winner
Reporter Kyle Bergerwins theWasserman/16
BrOiday Bash
Yom Ha'atzmaut celebrated at JCC Israeli-style/5
State Of Creation
Land issues hinder Palestinian statehood/19
Fun in the Sun: Fourty-one Richmond Jewish Day School Students participated In the April 24 Vancouver Sun Run to help raise money for local amateur athletics and the Vancouver Sun Children's Fund. For the full story, please see page 5.
Foundation honors educator Robert Krell
Poignant moments and quiet tears at Holocaust lecture where life's work is given special tribute.
PAT JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
Dr. Robert Krell jokes that it is becoming costly to be his friend. In recent years, several fund-raising events in his honor have brought together his friends, family and colleagues to celebrate the accomplishments of one of Canada's foremost Holocaust educators.
Sunday night was one of those events, but none of the approximately 500 people assembled at Schara Tzedeck synagogue was complaining. The guests gathered to celebrate the establishment of the Robert and Marilyn Krell Family Endovmient for Holocaust Education, a project of State of
Israel Bonds and the Holocaust Education Centre.
Krcll is a psychiatrist and UBC professor emeritus who is currently director of the general childpsycliiatry program at B.C. Children's Hospital. In his career, he has worked extensively with Holocaust survivors and others who have experienced severe trauma. At Sunday's event, he was honored for his life's commitment to helping, and specifically for his role in fUrtliering the education of later generations to the realities of the Shoah.
In 1980, he conceptualized a national program which taped
the testimony of more than 60 survivors across Canada, a compilation that would become the film Voices of Survival.
In 1985, Krell founded the' Vancouver Holocaust Centre Society for Education and Remembrance. A child survivor of the Holocaust himself, Krell formed child survivor groups in Los Angeles and Vancouver. He was also instrumental in the creation of a Holocaust memorial, wliich was unveiled in 1987 at Schara Tzedeck cemetery.
Just last year, Krell was awarded the Elie Wiesel Holocaust Remembrance Medal.
Speaking to an admiring audience Sunday, Krell deflected praise from himself and credited those around him for his successes. Most poignantly, he thanked his mother and his late father for having the courage to place the three-year-old Robert
Please see KRELL on page 4
Victoria man sues French government over loss of family
KYLE BERGER STAFF REPORTER
When Jean-Jacques Fraenkel was 10 years old, the government of France, under pressure from the Nazis, allowed his family and their possessions to be taken from him.
Fifty-eight years later, the retired international export consultant, who lives in Victoria, has decided to take the issue up in the French courts.
Fraenkel, who is Jewish, is suing his former homeland for the money and valuables he lost and for the dishonoring of his fathers name.
His father was a respected dental surgeon, professor of den-tristy and justice of the peace, and held the French military Legion of Honor.
During the Second World War, the French government issued statements declaring that his father was no longer officially recognized as any of those titles or as a citizen of the country.
Arrested from his home in 1941, his father died at the Auschwitz death camp in 1942. His mother, who joined the French resistance, was captured and killed at the same camp.
Fraenkel was separated from his sister and hidden by friends and relatives.
Approximately 76,000 Jews were deported from France during the war. Only 2,500 survived.
"Step by step the French administration destroyed every part of my family and after that they kept the money (that they stole]," Fraenkel said.
He told the Bulletin that he is suing the country because he
Please see FRAENKEL on page 4
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