Rae Kushner
On December 13, 2016, ’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, attended a meeting in a building not far from Trump Tower, in the Madison Avenue offices of Colony Capital. One month after Trump’s surprise win in the Presidential election, Kushner met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, or VEB, a Russian state-owned development bank. Kushner, in later congressional testimony, said that his goals in the meeting were purely diplomatic. The Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Had told him that Gorkov had a “direct line to the Russian President who could give insight into how Putin was viewing the new Administration and best ways to work together.”That month, arranged an “ ‘all-hands’ oligarch meeting”—as one of the oligarchs in attendance, Petr Aven, described it to the special counsel ’s investigators—to discuss U.S.-Russia relations. At least three of Russia’s most prominent oligarchs subsequently tried to solidify ties with a man who seemed their perfect counterpart: a young American oligarch whose family had grown wealthy with a healthy assist from government programs—the President-elect’s son-in-law,.Through the Russian Ambassador’s persistence, Gorkov got the meeting.
According to Kushner, the two discussed U.S.-Russia relations—business was not on the agenda. But a VEB spokesperson told the Washington Post something altogether different. As described by the Post, “The bank maintained. In the nineteen-thirties, a few years before half of the family was murdered, the Kushners, as they usually did, took a summer vacation in the tiny town of Novoyel’nya, then part of Poland. Amid the sharp scents of pine and spruce and fresh lake water, the Kushner children played in the forest. On Friday evenings, as the late-setting sun angled through the woods, the family gathered for Shabbat dinner. Parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, cousins sat in front of tall white candles to eat chicken soup, sweet kugel, the ever-present braided challah bread.
“Summer camp” was how the surviving Kushners would later describe these trips. “Camping” and “going to camp” were among their fondest memories.There’s a photograph that endures from one of these summers. The lower left corner is burnt, or chemically degraded, but the image in the center is clear: four children arrayed on a hammock around their father, tall trees standing like sentries in the background. There’s Esther, in her late teens, on the far left, wearing a short-sleeved, close-fitting white button-down shirt, parted sharply by a dark tie. On the right, with a hand draped behind her brother Chanon’s back and resting on her father’s shoulder, is the teen-age Reichal (Rae) Kushner. Her thick black hair is cut in a bob, and she is smiling. Her face, like everyone else’s in the family, is unworried, unlined.
Her dark-brown eyes gaze forthrightly into the camera, yet to witness horrors.Half a decade after the photograph was taken, three of six members of the Kushner family would be dead. Of hundreds of cousins, grandparents, sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts, only a handful, including Lisa, Rae, and their father, Naum, made it through: through the destruction of their home and the confiscation of their business; through family separations and multiple mass executions; through starvation, lice, beatings, forced labor, German dogs, and Nazi bullets; through barbed wire and months of hiding in the forest during the Polish winter, a trek across international borders, and years in a displaced-persons camp. The Kushners lost everything. The photo survived.After years in the ghetto and that winter in the forest—during which they lived in ziemiankas, holes in the ground covered by trees—some twelve hundred Jewish partisans made their way back home to Novogrudok after the Germans retreated from the town.
“You cannot imagine—I fainted twice,” Rae said, in later testimony, of the first time she witnessed the wasteland her home town had become. “We all wanted to run away from our town. We wanted to run any place—but, like, Russia took us in. We were afraid to move. We couldn’t move.
You needed a passport. You needed papers. It’s not so easy.” They asked themselves, “Where should we run? Nobody wants to take us in.”Under postwar Soviet rule, a Jewish underground emerged in the area, which helped survivors plot their escape. About nine months after their return to Novogrudok, Rae, her sister, and her father told Russian soldiers that they were Greeks and boarded a train to Czechoslovakia, and then made their way to Hungary, where she met up with Yossel.
In a synagogue in Budapest, alongside some twenty other couples, Rae and Yossel were married by a rabbi. There is a record of this moment, a ketubah, or Jewish wedding contract.
Normally a ketubah is a carefully prepared document, but this one was scrawled out hastily, on yellow paper with different pens, just before the couple fled again. According to “The Miracle of Life,” a book compiled by Rae’s children for her seventy-fifth birthday, the couple then “illegally crossed the Alps and several borders by foot, train and any other available mode of transportation.” They ended up in a displaced-persons camp near Rome. For the next four years, they were stuck in Italy, refugees waiting for a nation to welcome them.“We would go anywhere where we could live in freedom, but nobody wanted us,” Rae later recalled. “Nobody opened their doors to us. Nobody wanted to take us in.” A picture from those years shows Rae, her lipsticked mouth a perfect bow, her shoulder-length hair still lush and brown, brushed up and back, and her once forthright gaze marred with worry and pain.
To make money while they were living in the refugee camp, Yossel sold tobacco and other goods on the black market. At one point, he was arrested and sent to jail; Rae, nine months pregnant with their daughter Linda, bribed a guard to get him out.It was not long afterward that the Kushners lied on immigration paperwork and Yossel Berkowitz took his wife’s last name, becoming Joseph Kushner, or Josef Kushnier, as his name was spelled then. “The Miracle of Life” explains, “Because sons and fathers were given priority to get visas, Yossel assumed his wife’s maiden name being that he travelled with his father in law.” The newly renamed Kushner family was helped by an American nonprofit group that fully embraced immigration and helped tens of thousands of Jews escape from Europe—the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, or HIAS.
The organization booked their passage on the S.S. Sobieski and helped them with immigration forms. HIAS accumulated a twenty-three-page case file on the Kushners, containing a list of family members, interview notes, and a record of their progress from Italy to New York.
The file was buried in HIAS records for seventy years and hasn’t previously been reported.One form prepared for the Kushner family by aid workers listed “Naum, 51,” as the family patriarch, with “Josef, 26,” as his son. “Raja,” also twenty-six, was listed as Naum’s daughter-in-law. Raja’s—Rae’s—“maiden name” was given as “Sloninski,” a version of Joseph’s maternal grandfather’s surname. Their country of origin was recorded as “Germany,” a more favorable country of origin for immigration purposes than their real home country, Poland.The Kushners had listed a sponsor in the U.S., but, before they landed, the sponsor disavowed any knowledge of them, according to a note made by an aid worker in the HIAS case file. They had two dollars to their name when they arrived in New York, in March, 1949. For three months, HIAS sheltered them and gave them a food allowance, with extra for Passover, which was just weeks after their arrival.
The group even helped the family find jobs.Joe began work as a carpenter, in New Jersey. Carpenters were in high demand in the postwar years; in New Jersey, a thousand homes were built a week, for a thousand straight weeks. Soldiers returning from the war, and their newly growing families, needed homes, and builders received a huge boost from U.S. Government programs. Bill provided low down payments and long loan terms. The mortgage income-tax deduction helped middle-class families buy homes and build wealth, with government backing. The Federal-Aid Highway Act, a twenty-five-billion-dollar program, passed in 1956, stimulated home construction in the suburbs by making commutes to factories and offices faster.
This act, which established the biggest federal infrastructure program in U.S. History, fuelled the economy and made builders such as Joe Kushner rich.
At the time of his death, in 1985, Joe had built four thousand homes—all of them above ground, unlike the pit he inhabited in Poland during the war—and he had accumulated tens of millions of dollars. Four of those homes were mansions for his children, which he built in the New Jersey suburbs of West Orange and Livingston—areas that were newly opening to Jews.By the time Joe built homes for his sons Murray and Charlie, Livingston had become a town of conspicuous consumption. “Everybody was trying to impress everyone else with what they had.
They had to have the best,” one former town official told me. The median income was well above the national average, and housing prices were increasing at more than two times the rate of inflation. Joe built Charlie a large house on a large lot.
Down the hill, in a small home on a small lot, lived the captain of the high-school baseball team, who, even then, was getting involved in politics:.In 1985, Charlie set up Kushner Companies, with the idea of going into business with his father. But Joe died soon after, and Charlie, bereft and left to lead the company alone, expanded his father’s business model from primarily focussing on development to dealing with acquisition, management, and debt as well. The Kushners were part of a wealthy, aggressive, and fiercely private coterie of developers in New Jersey known as the “Holocaust builders.”Charlie, though, was a public guy. He was written about in the press. He made attention-getting donations to philanthropic causes and to politicians, most of them Democrats. President Bill Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore, and the New York City Mayor came to his offices, in Florham Park. Hillary Clinton visited the Kushners’ beach home, in Long Branch, for a Shabbat dinner, during her Senate campaign in 2000.
But Charles Kushner’s biggest donations by far were to support a candidate for governor in New Jersey. Kushner and his associates gave one and a half million dollars to Jim McGreevey, part of more than three million in donations that he made to Democrats, making him the biggest Democratic donor in the state by the end of the last century.During that time, Charlie became known for his generous gestures—showing up at shivas, sending flowers and letters, appearing at hospital bedsides when associates’ children became ill.
Seryl Kushner
He lived in an expansive house, on Fawn Drive, in Livingston, with a large atrium and a floor-to-ceiling fireplace, and his home became the family gathering spot. Charlie was the fun one, athletic and outgoing.
At these conclaves, the boys played basketball and baseball in the backyard. The girls played in the basement. On Shabbat, Charlie’s home was the hub. Rae brought over matzo-ball soup; she had a special recipe, with tomato in it.Every year, for Passover, Rae took the whole family to the Fontainebleau hotel, in Miami Beach—a high-rise arc of white concrete surrounded by myriad pools and decks and palm trees. Rae would pay for the whole family.
She would rent a row of adjacent rooms. The cousins—Rae had more than a dozen grandchildren—would run from room to room, bouncing on beds and hanging out on balconies, clutching the twenty-dollar bills that Rae gave each of them for the arcade.Joe had been a strict parent, and Charlie was more so. His family’s behavior was circumscribed; his children weren’t even allowed to wear jeans—dungarees, he called them. Joe’s grandchildren attended a yeshiva that Charlie and his brother Murray had endowed: the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy.
Their sports jerseys said “Kushner” on the front and “Kushner” on the back. Charlie’s eldest son, Jared, was universally described as a polite boy, particularly deferential to his parents.
In one family photo, all the cousins are wearing sweaters—except for Jared, who is dressed in a button-down shirt and a tie.By the time of Jared’s bar mitzvah, both he and Charlie had become increasingly focussed on the bright lights of Manhattan. The bar mitzvah was a black-tie event, held at a midtown hotel. Hundreds of people attended, including members of the New York Giants football team. A central part of the bar-mitzvah ceremony is the reading of a story from the Torah. Jared read Beshalach, the part of the Exodus story in which God parts the Red Sea for the Israelites and then allows the waters to flood the pursuing Egyptian army. “Jared is my favorite grandchild,” Rae said. A week later, Charlie’s sister held a bar mitzvah for her son Jacob, also black-tie, but in New Jersey and without N.F.L.
Players in attendance. “Jacob is my favorite grandchild,” Rae said.
In the late nineteen-nineties, Charlie Kushner started pushing limits. He began drinking more, and, when he did, he could become verbally abusive, including at the family gatherings. He began making political donations in the names of his family members and business partners, without their knowledge, in violation of campaign-finance law. He used corporate funds for personal expenses: landscaping, “holiday alcohol,” New Jersey Nets tickets, paying a consulting firm to assess the comeback prospects of, then between stints as the Prime Minister of Israel. In 2002, Charlie’s brother Murray—who had his own business but whose ties to his brother’s business were cemented by a series of interlocking trusts that Joe had created to minimize taxes—sued Charlie for misusing corporate funds.In legal filings, Charlie’s attorneys argued that he’d done nothing wrong and that his donations enhanced the prestige and power of the family real-estate business. “Charles Kushner’s activity, both charitable and political, has raised his name and reputation in the broader real estate community as a prominent real estate developer and an individual who dedicates his success to the well-being of his community,” the lawyers wrote in a filing with the Federal Election Commission. “Thus, Charles Kushner’s and the charitable and political contributions made by the various Partnerships have been beneficial to each of the partnerships.”His brother Murray’s civil lawsuit caught the attention of the new, politically ambitious United States Attorney for New Jersey, Chris Christie, who had been appointed by President George W.
Bush, in 2001.Christie’s investigators began the arduous task of tracing interlocking limited-liability companies—L.L.C.s—through corporate ledgers. Charlie fought back, hiring the kind of white-collar lawyers who can frequently make cases like this go away. They could not. So Charlie took things into his own hands. He had become convinced, erroneously, that his brother Murray and his sister Esther—named for Rae’s older sister, who was murdered by the Nazis—had secretly been working with Christie, from the beginning, to bring him down.Charlie called Jimmy O’Toole, an East Orange police captain on the verge of retirement, who was also Charlie’s running buddy, and offered him a lucrative gig. Sitting at his desk, in his vast office, Charlie passed O’Toole an accordion file stuffed with twenty thousand dollars in cash and asked him to hire a prostitute to seduce and entrap Esther’s husband, Billy Schulder.
For months, the scheme stalled. O’Toole, raised as an altar boy, was consumed by guilt. One day, O’Toole took the file of cash back to Charlie’s office, but Charlie wouldn’t take no for an answer. He handed O’Toole a phone number. “I want you to call this number and say you’re a friend of John’s,” Charlie told him.
It was a phone number for a Manhattan prostitute named Susanna, “a high-priced, European-born call girl on Manhattan’s Upper East Side,” as Christie described her in his book “.” Finally, O’Toole called Susanna.On a snowy day in December, 2003, O’Toole’s brother Tommy, a private investigator, recorded a video tape of the encounter between Schulder and Susanna. Charlie asked the O’Tooles to make copies of the video and to print eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch still photographs, with the woman’s face pixelated out. For months, Charlie did nothing. In March, Rae passed away. In May, Christie began sending out target letters, a sign that his investigation was intensifying.
Two days after they were received, Charlie called O’Toole and asked him to have Tommy send the video and the stills to Esther on the eve of her son Jacob’s engagement party. Jacob had been born just a week after Jared, and the two boys had grown up like brothers. Charlie wanted to send the package to Jacob, too, and to Jacob’s two sisters. Jimmy O’Toole talked him out of it.Upon receiving the video, Esther recoiled in shock. She called her lawyer, who brought it to the attention of Christie, who soon thereafter indicted Charlie on charges of witness tampering, tax fraud, and campaign-finance violations. “When people under investigation decide to take the law into their own hands, to obstruct justice, to attempt to impede the rule of law,” Christie said at a press conference, “it is our obligation to act swiftly and surely to end the obstruction.”Charles Kushner pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers predicted that he would be exonerated.
But, in the next month, Christie showed that he had more cards to play. It wasn’t a coincidence that Charlie had told Jimmy O’Toole to call Susanna and tell her he was a “friend of John’s.” Prosecutors learned that, for years, Charlie had been living a double life, using the pseudonym John Hess to travel to Manhattan and avail himself of Susanna’s services, seven people with knowledge of Charlie’s activities told me.To gain a conviction at trial on witness-tampering charges, prosecutors would have needed Susanna’s testimony and that of a second woman, who had tried and failed to catch Charlie’s former accountant, Bob Yontef, in a similar plot. Christie’s office was prepared to put both women on the stand, to let the world know about John Hess. In his book, Christie alludes to his own knowledge about the details of the case. He writes that he later told Jared Kushner, during the Trump campaign, “I’m burdened with facts about your father that even you don’t know, that I can never tell you, because if I did I would break the law.”Charlie Kushner’s criminal attorney, Ben Brafman, disputes this version of events. He says that his team conducted its own investigation and found “zero evidence” to support the findings about Charlie’s double life as John Hess, but Charlie opted to avoid the embarrassment of a trial. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison.
He was sent to the Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Alabama, where he remained behind bars for about a year.Following his release, Charles Kushner was interviewed by The Real Deal, a New York-based real-estate magazine, in which he invoked his parents’ survival of the Holocaust. Charlie explained that his Hebrew name was Chanon and that he was named after his mother’s brother. Charlie’s namesake had been a leader of the group that dug the tunnel out of Novogrudok before being shot by the Nazis. As the group prepared to escape, they had strangled to death a Jewish teen they feared might collaborate with the guards. The Nazis offered Jews small perks to inform on their fellow ghetto residents, as a means of control, Rae once explained. The residents decided that they could not take the risk.
For Charlie Kushner, nothing was worse than what he saw as collaboration.The Real Deal interviewer asked Charlie if he had reached any resolution with his sister and her husband. Charlie called his actions a “family tragedy” and expressed little remorse. “I believe that God and my parents in heaven forgive me for what I did, which was wrong. I don’t believe God and my parents will ever forgive my brother and sister for instigating a criminal investigation and being cheerleaders for the government and putting their brother in jail because of jealousy, hatred and spite,” he said.
“On my worst day in prison, I wouldn’t trade places with my brother and sister, and yet I know what I did was wrong.”. In November, 2015, Jared Kushner, the son of a man who’d gone to prison for, among other things, making illegal donations to Democrats, flew with his father-in-law to a campaign rally in Springfield, Illinois. “We don’t have victories anymore,” Trump said at that rally. “We’re stupid. We have stupid people leading us.” That night in Illinois was an awakening, Kushner told Forbes in a rare post-election interview: “People really saw hope in his message.” Kushner said that he realized “they wanted the things that wouldn’t have been obvious to a lot of people I would meet in the New York media world, the Upper East Side, or at Robin Hood Foundation dinners.”Jared saw himself as a disrupter, people who worked with him told me.
His grandparents had, improbably, survived Nazi-occupied Poland, escaped, and immigrated to America, against all odds. His father, in contrast to the other “Holocaust builders,” had aggressively raised his profile and his family fortune. And Jared had found success by taking what others saw as impossible, foolhardy risks: becoming, in his mid-twenties, the publisher of a weekly newspaper in an era when newspapers were cratering, purchasing 666 Fifth Avenue on the eve of the Great Recession. The building had nearly failed when the Kushners managed, barely, to refinance it. The lesson he took from this, according to someone familiar with the deal, “was not ‘holy shit, I almost lost everything,’ it was ‘I should take on as much risk as I can.’ ”Jared Kushner threw himself into his father-in-law’s campaign. It was a business model he was exceedingly familiar with—a family business.
As Trump’s lead grew over the months, Kushner expanded his role in Trump’s foreign policy.As Trump closed in on the nomination, complaints emerged regarding his heated rhetoric. A fringe of the U.S.
Body politic that had largely lived below the surface poked its head up: white supremacists and neo-Nazis. In December, 2015, Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” after in San Bernardino, California. In the summer of 2016, Trump retweeted an image of Hillary Clinton and a six-sided star, both superimposed on piles of cash.
An entertainment writer at the Observer, Dana Schwartz, published an article in which she asked Kushner how he could countenance such behavior. “You went to Harvard, and hold two graduate degrees,” Schwartz wrote. “I’m asking you, not as a ‘gotcha’ journalist or as a liberal but as a human being: how do you allow this?”Kushner penned his own response. “This is not idle philosophy to me.
I am the grandson of holocaust survivors,” Jared wrote, describing the multiple horrors his grandparents had experienced. “I go into these details, which I have never discussed, because it’s important to me that people understand where I’m coming from when I report that I know the difference between actual, dangerous intolerance versus these labels that get tossed around in an effort to score political points. The difference between me and the journalists and Twitter throngs who find it so convenient to dismiss my father-in-law is simple. I know him and they don’t.”By the time of this exchange, unbeknownst to almost everyone, Jared had attended a now-infamous, with, and emissaries of a Russian oligarch the Trumps had once worked with, to discuss “some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia,” as one member of the group wrote in an e-mail to Donald Trump, Jr. No one seemed to question the seamless pivot from business to politics to discussing “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” and, which, by this time, the Russian government did indeed have.After Trump’s surprise victory, the Russians were back again, seeking strengthened ties with Trump and Kushner.
The meeting with Gorkov was just a part of this strategy. At the time the meeting occurred, there was not much of a vetting apparatus inside the transition team. By federal law, because transitions are vulnerable times, all campaigns, including Trump’s, had to name a transition chief months in advance, for national-security reasons. Trump hired Chris Christie, who scrutinized applicants for Administration positions and, with his aides, put together some thirty binders of information. A few weeks later, Jared saw to it that Christie was fired. The thirty binders were tossed into the dumpsters behind Trump Tower. Last December, the Washington Post, in a periodic update of a running tally it keeps, found that President Trump had made 15,413 false or misleading statements since taking office.
As proceedings have continued, his rate of false claims has increased, reaching an average of thirty-two per day last fall. In 1967, in an essay called “,” which was published in The New Yorker, Hannah Arendt warned where mendacity can lead. “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. Falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.”Truth has been replaced by a new currency: dirt. That is what Donald Trump was seeking in Ukraine.
That is what Russia was offering in 2016.Rae Kushner, who died in 2004, pushed for remembering, for the past serving as a caution for the future, for building an edifice of fact and truth that would stand as a levee against the rising tide of relativism that was, for her, the vanguard of a murderous regime. “People should know what happened to us,” Rae said in 1982, in testimony she gave at Kean College. “If we are not going to tell now, in twenty years, I don’t know who’s going to be to tell. And now we have still the strength and the power to do this, and to warn the rest of the world to be careful: Who is coming up on top of your government?”Fifteen years after his grandmother’s death, Jared Kushner defends his father-in-law’s contention that refugees are a danger to the United States. Indeed, he has been tasked with overseeing the construction of a wall at the southern border and has been a prime advocate of installing a “wall cam” to record the building of the wall in real time.In a June, 2019, interview for “Axios on HBO,” Jonathan Swan asked Kushner how he justified Trump’s drastic cuts in the number of refugees allowed in the United States, given his own grandparents’ experience. “It doesn’t make a difference one way or the other,” Kushner replied. “In the scheme of the magnitude of the problem we have, I think that we’re doing our best to try to make as much impact to allow refugees to be able to go back to their places.”A divide has emerged in the Kushner family, though, regarding Rae’s legacy and how to honor it.
“I have a different take away from my Grandparents’ experience in the war,” Jared’s first cousin Marc Kushner, Murray’s son, wrote on Facebook, in 2016, after Jared invoked their grandparents while defending Trump against charges of racism and anti-Semitism. “It is our responsibility as the next generation to speak up against hate. Anti-Semitism or otherwise.” Marc’s sister Melissa posted a similar message on Instagram the day of the Tree of Life massacre, in Pittsburgh, which coincided with the birth of Marc’s daughter.
“I will not allow hate to beget hate, but rather use hate to embolden kindness and love,” Melissa wrote.Jared Kushner continues to defend his father-in-law. In his “Axios” interview, Swan asked Kushner if Trump has ever done anything that he would “describe as racist or bigoted.” Kushner responded, “Absolutely not.” Swan then asked Kushner about Trump’s 2015 proposal to bar Muslims from entering the country. “Would you describe that as religiously bigoted?” Swan asked.
Kushner deflected. “Look, I think that the President did his campaign the way he did his campaign,” Kushner said. Swan asked again, “But do you wish he didn’t, do you wish he didn’t make that speech?” Kushner responded, “I think he’s here today and I think he’s doing a lot of great things for the country, and that’s what I’m proud of.”This piece was drawn from “,” by Andrea Bernstein, published by Norton.
During the, Bielski served as an interpreter for the, which were of the. Already a speaker of, he learned to speak the from these men and remembered it all his life. In 1927, he was recruited into the, where he eventually became a in the 30th Infantry Battalion. After completing his military service, Bielski returned home. In an effort to add to his family's income, he rented another mill. This income was still inadequate, so in 1929, at the age of 23, he married an older woman named Rifka who owned a general store and a large house.
The couple lived in the nearby small town of Subotniki. In Soviet-controlled Lida, Bielski met and fell in love with another woman named Sonia Warshavsky. The love affair became serious. In late 1939, Bielski divorced his wife, Rifka and married Sonia, though they were not yet 'officially' married due to wartime conditions. Sonia was killed while taking shelter with others in a peasant home. Not long after, Tuvia married Lila 'Lilka' Tiktin, who was only 17 at the time.
They knew each other before the war and stayed married until his death 44 years later. World War II. When broke out, Tuvia, Zus, and Asael were called up by their army units to fight against the occupiers.
Tuvia recalls: 'Suddenly about fifty planes ( ) flew over the town dropping incendiary bombs. In a very few minutes the entire place was on fire. The commander called us in, ordered us to leave the burning town and regroup in a forest about five kilometers from there. We were to continue working. We carried out his command but soon after we began our job in the forest another wave of planes flew over the area and set the woods on fire. The commander called us in and said: 'Friends, you are on your own!'
' After the units disbanded, the Bielski brothers fled to Stankiewicze, where their parents lived. In early July 1941, a German army unit arrived in Stankiewicze and Jewish residents were moved to a ghetto in. The four Bielski brothers managed to flee to the nearby forest. Their parents, two of their brothers and other family members, including Rifka and Zus' wife and child, were killed in the ghetto on December 8, 1941. Tuvia Bielski led a group of who hid in the forest. Although always hunted by, Bielski's group continued to grow. They periodically raided the ghettos to help people escape.
They lived in the forests for over two years, and in their camp, they built a school, a hospital, and a nursery. As leader of the, his aim was to save the lives of Jews, where he could make a large impact, rather than getting involved with skirmishes with Nazis, where their effect would be negligible. Thus, they did not explicitly seek to attack railroads and roads that the were using as supply routes, but did sometimes carry out such attacks in order to save Jews at risk of being killed by Nazis in the. The Bielski partisans ultimately saved the lives of more than 1,200 Jews. After the war, Tuvia, Zus and their wives went to Israel via Romania, and ultimately immigrated to the United States in 1956. They joined their older brother Walter in New York, where he had gone before the war. Tuvia and Zus ran a small trucking firm in for 30 years.
He married Lilka, another Jewish escapee; they remained married for the remainder of their lives. They had three children: sons Michael and Robert, and daughter Ruth, and ten grandchildren.
Granddaughter Sharon Rennert made a documentary about her family called In Our Hands: The Legacy of the Bielski Partisans. The Bielski partisans spent more than two years living in the forest. By the end of the war they numbered as many as 1,236 members, most of which were non-combatants, including children and the elderly. The Bielski partisans are seen by many Jews as heroes for having led as many refugees as they did away from the perils of war and the Holocaust. However, as their relations with the non-Jewish population were strained and occasionally violent, their wartime record has been a subject to some controversy in Poland. The unit's commander was the oldest brother, Tuvia, who had served in the from 1927 to 1929, rising to the rank of.
He had been interested in the. He sent emissaries to infiltrate the area's ghettos, recruiting new members to the unit, which was sheltering in the. Hundreds of men, women, and children eventually found their way to the Bielski encampment; at its peak, the unit hosted 1,236 people, 70% of them women, children, and elderly; no one was turned away. About 150 persons engaged in armed operations. Organization.
The partisans lived in underground dugouts. In addition, several utility structures were built: a kitchen, a mill, a bakery, a bathhouse, a medical clinic for the sick and wounded and a hut for those who suffered from infectious diseases such as. Herds of cows supplied milk. Artisans made goods and carried out repairs, providing the combatants with logistical support that later served the units in the vicinity as well. More than 125 workers toiled in the workshops, which became famous among partisans far beyond the Bielski base. Tailors patched up old clothing and stitched together new garments; shoemakers fixed old and made new footwear; leather-workers laboured on belts, bridles and saddles. A shop established by Shmuel Oppenheim repaired damaged weapons and constructed new ones from spare parts.
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A tannery, constructed to produce the hide for and leather workers, became a de facto synagogue because several tanners were devout. Carpenters, hat-makers, barbers and watchmakers served their own community and guests. The camp's many children attended class in the dugout set up as a school. The camp even had its own jail and court of law. Tuvia Bielski was known for his authoritarian leadership style and was constantly involved in power struggles with other members of the unit.
Israel Kessler, who tried to organize a group of people to leave the Bielski camp and form their own unit, and others sent letters to General Platon and other Soviet officials that Tuvia Bielski was holding gold and jewelry in contradiction to partisan orders to hand these over to headquarters. A unit member, Stepan Szupien, suggested to the Soviets that they arrest and execute Bielski, accusing him of confiscating money under the pretext of buying weapons. The Soviet command, concerned about the unit's leadership, began an internal investigation into an alleged conducted by Bielski. Chernishev cleared Bielski of the charges following an investigation. Bielski viewed Kessler's actions as rebellion, put Kessler on trial, and executed him. According to witness Estera Gorodejska, a drunk Bielski personally executed Kessler with three shots.
Later Bielski ordered the destruction of Kessler's grave. Activities. The Bielski unit's partisans were primarily concerned with survival. Due to their poor equipment and training, they were not assigned main combat roles. Instead, its members operated field kitchens, hospitals, and bakeries and provided tailoring and cobbling services for Soviet soldiers. Their main task, though, was forced requisitioning of food and other supplies from the local population. The Bielski partisan group decided to prioritize saving Jews, according to Tuvia Bielski 'I would rather save one old Jewish woman than kill ten German soldiers'.
In August 1943 the Germans conducted a major clearing operation, also dubbed the 'big hunt', against villages and partisan groups in the Naliboki Forest. Partisan groups in the forest and surrounding villages suffered major casualties.
The Bielski partisans, however, split into small groups and assembled back in their former base in the Jasinowo forest. The communities around the Naliboki forest were devastated, the Germans deported the non-Jewish residents fit for work to Germany for slave labor and murdered most of the rest. Prior to the manhunt, homeless refugees were mainly Jews who had escaped the ghetto, but in the fall of 1943 non-Jewish Belorussian, Polish, and Gypsies who managed to flee roamed in the forest. Many joined partisan units, special family camps set up by the Soviets, and some joined the Bielski group who returned to the area and accepted anyone willing to join. While the Germans wrecked many communities, much was left behind in and around the forest that could sustain life. Fields, orchards, and beehives all had their produce and farm animals roamed the area around the forest.
Rae Kushner Family History Photos
While the buildings of the villages were partially demolished, much of the building material was left usable as well as some household goods. The Bielski group foraged and gathered much of these materials, and tended to the fields. In September 1943 General Platon ordered the splitting of the group. The first group, named Ordzhonikidze (a famous Georgian communist), was a 180 mainly Jewish fighting detachment (commanded by a non-Jew Lyushenko). All the rest were designated as Kalinin and included some 800 people, including 160 armed defenders, that were based in Naliboki forest and provided services to other partisan groups in the forest as well as participating in sabotage and diversionary actions. On 1 April 1944 the group was renamed as the Bielski otriad. Like other Soviet-affiliated partisan groups in the area, the Bielski partisans raided nearby villages and forcibly seized food; on occasion, peasants who refused to share their food with the partisans were subjected to violence, even murder.
This caused hostility toward the partisans on the part of the peasants, though some willingly helped the Jewish partisans. Other peasants informed on the Jewish partisans in the forests to the Germans. As the region had already been completely pacified by the Germans, and many villages had been burned down, the local population was in an especially dire situation. The Belorussian farmers struggled to supply all the forces who were demanding food (Germans, Soviet, and Jews). One of the partisans said that 'A partisan was something between a hero and a robber. We had to live and we had to deprive the peasants of their meager belongings', and that 'Often we took by force from poor peasants who were not even pro-Nazi.' The partisans of the Bielski and units became infamous among locals for their ruthlessness during raids, so much so that stopping their depredations became a chief point in negotiations between the Soviet command and the Polish Home Army.
The Polish resistance officially complained to the Soviets about alleged rapes and murders, including murders of young children, committed by these Soviet partisan groups, and asked the Soviet command to stop their food-requisitioning expeditions. At the beginning of December 1943, Bielski's unit gathered 200 tonnes of potatoes, 3 tonnes of cabbage, 5 tonnes of beets, 5 tonnes of wheat, 3 tonnes of meat and one tonne of sausages. Dividing this by members of the camp (1200) it made 160 kilos of potatoes, 4 kilos of wheat, 2.5 kilos of meat, and 0.83 kilos of sausages per person. The partisans themselves admitted that they had overabundance of food, and the Zorin unit even sent some of the food supplies back to Moscow using delivery planes that supplied newspapers and propaganda materials.
Assessment of combat operations. According to Kazimierz Krajewski, a November 1943 report from Tuvia Bielski to the Soviet command stated that in two years' operations their group of nearly a thousand people had managed to kill 14 Germans, 17 policemen, and 33 spies and provocateurs (Krajewski thinks these likely included peasants unsympathetic to Soviet partisans or who had resisted being plundered). In Krajewski's opinion, 14 Germans killed was not a substantial number for a two-year period. Krajewski believes even these numbers, in Tuvia Bielski's report to Soviet authorities, to be overestimates. Despite their previous collaboration with the Soviets, relations quickly worsened. The started interrogating the Bielski brothers about the rumours of loot they had reportedly collected during the war, and about their failure to 'implement socialist ideals in the camp'.
Asael Bielski was conscripted into the and died in the in 1945. The remaining brothers escaped Soviet-controlled lands, emigrating to the West. Tuvia's cousin, Yehuda Bielski, was sought by the NKVD for having been an officer in the pre-war, but managed to escape with Tuvia's help and made his way to and then to. Two English language books have focused on the Bielski story: Defiance (1993) by and (2004) by Peter Duffy. The group is also mentioned in numerous books about this period in history.
Fugitives of the Forest: The Heroic Story of Jewish Resistance and Survival During the Second World War, by Allan Levine (first published 1998, 2008 reissue, by Lyons Press), tells the story of Jewish fighters and refugees in forests across Europe, including the Bielski partisans. With Courage Shall We Fight: The Memoirs and Poetry of Holocaust Resistance Fighters Frances 'Fruma' Gulkowich Berger and Murray 'Motke' Berger tells the story of two Bielski Brigade fighters before, during and after the war. Giuliani shrugged off recent revelations that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had shared polling data with Kremlin-linked associate Konstantin Kilimnik, telling Cuomo: “Manafort was only there for six months or four months the polling data was given to everybody I mean he shouldn’t have given it to them it’s wrong to give it to them.” Giuliani added that he and Trump had no idea that Manafort had shared polling data with Kilimnik until it was inadvertently revealed in a court document filed by Manafort’s lawyers, Julia Arciga reports at. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday ridiculed claims that Trump could have worked for Russia’s interests, labeling the accusations as “absurd” and “stupid.” Lavrov claimed that U.S. Newspaper reports – regarding Trump’s withholding of details of his with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and an F.B.I. Of whether he was working on Moscow’s behalf – reflected a decline in journalistic standards, also dismissing the prospect of releasing the minutes of the Trump-Putin meetings and claiming that to do so would defy the basic culture of diplomacy. Vladimir Isachenkov reports at the.
Ranking members of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) are demanding access to interpreters present at all of Trump’s meetings with Putin since he took office. In a sent to the president yesterday, the pair state that “in light of the continuing level of secrecy shrouding your interactions with the Russian leader, we insist that the interpreters for these interactions, especially the individual who interpreted for your meeting with President Putin in Helsinki, be made immediately available for interviews with the relevant committees in Congress,” Tal Axelrod reports at the.
Has rejected Moscow’s offer to inspect a new Russian missile suspected of violating the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (I.N.F.,) and warned that it would suspend observance of the agreement on Feb. 2, giving six-month notice of a complete withdrawal. Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security – Andrea Thompson – confirmed the U.S.
Intention to withdraw after a meeting with a Russian delegation in Geneva, which both sides characterized as a failure, Julian Borger reports at the. “We’ll stay in the region and we’ll stay in the fight to ensure that I.S.I.S.
Does not rear its ugly head again,” U.S. Vice President Mike Pence told a gathering in Washington of U.S. Ambassadors stationed around the world just hours after the attack. “Thanks to the leadership of this commander-in-chief and the courage and sacrifice of our coalition partners, we’re now actually able to hand off the fight against I.S.I.S. In Syria to our coalition partners and we are bringing our troops home the caliphate has crumbled and I.S.I.S. Has been defeated,” reports. “President Trump and I condemn the terrorist attack in Syria that claimed American lives and our hearts are with the loved ones of the fallen,” Pence said in a statement, adding “we honor their memory and we will never forget their service and sacrifice.” In a separate statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders offered “our deepest sympathies and love” to the families of the troops who were killed,” though the president himself has yet to publicly address the soldiers’ deaths, Jordain Fabian reports at the.
The “long-awaited” missile defense review recommends additional deployments of anti-missile systems at home, abroad and possibly in space, according to a senior administration official. The two-year review, ordered by the president just days after he took office, calls for a third suite of interceptors located on U.S. Territory to defend against intercontinental ballistic missiles, also recommending additional study of the “controversial” idea of placing weapons in orbit to strike enemy missiles launched from Earth, Bryan Bender reports at. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Claif.) yesterday asked President Trump to scrap or delay his Jan. 29 State of the Union address amid the partial government shutdown, in an “extraordinary” request intensifying the partisan battle over Trump’s proposed border wall. In a to Trump, Pelosi cited security concerns as her reason for proposing that the president postpone the annual ritual of addressing a joint session of Congress in a prime time televised speech, Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Nicholas Fandos report at the. Jared is my best friend for many reasons, largely because I’ve allowed him to see who I truly am and he still loves me.
I don’t feel like I have any defensive walls built up around me. He’s so kind as a human being, I look up to him.
He’s a bit of a hero of mine. His ability to remain focused — he lacks an anxiety that’s natural for someone his age handed so much responsibility Sometimes I catch myself looking at him and being thankful that I have grown to a level of personal maturity that I would value so much the qualities he has.
Last May, Mr. Kushner’s sister Nicole Meyer mentioned her brother and Mr. Trump in Beijing. This time the Kushners were seeking $150 million in financing for a Jersey City housing development, derided as “U.S.
Citizenship for sale” because it awards foreigners who invest at least $500,000 in American enterprises with a path to citizenship. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Kushner Companies’ past use of the EB-5 visa program. Federal prosecutors have sought records on Kushner Companies, which over the years has lent hundreds of millions to the Kushner and Trump family businesses. Last week, the New York State Department of Financial Services, which regulates New York and some international banks, asked Deutsche Bank, Signature Bank and several others for information about their relationships with Mr. Kushner and his finances,. Clearly, Americans deserve better from their public servants, but the law doesn’t provide sufficient protection from a president who doesn’t get that.
Firming up the anti-nepotism law to cover White House advisers has been criticized as an infringement on a president’s right to seek private personal counsel. But Congress could require that presidential appointees across the federal government possess relevant credentials and experience, that they meet enforceable performance metrics, and — do we really need to say this? — that they can pass a background check.
Kushner’s performance inspires such reforms, it could prove his only real achievement. Card”, “Call 9/11”, and “MuckCart-hy” The Open Letter to the World Leaders – By Michael NovakhovM.N.: One is out, the scores to go. Investigate and Purge. Purge and Investigate. Not a single fact, detail or occurrence of the “Trump – Russia Affair”, Manafort – Ukraine – Hapsburg Group Affair”, “Salisbury Poisoning Affair”, and most likely many others were unknown to the German Intelligence. Investigate them in the UTMOST DEPTH, their connections with the Abwehr after the WW2, and all the other relevant issues raised in this and other blogs and posts which address them. This reality show is performed in the genre of cabaret, with The Demiurge playing the role of the invisible, omnipotent, omniscient, obsessive-compulsive, meticulous, artistic, pedantic Master of Ceremonies., as usually.
The latest of them are: “Boshirov” and “Petrov”: Boshi (the Germ. 1 ShareA federal appeals court said Tuesday that Deutsche Bank must turn over detailed documents about to two congressional committees, a ruling that will most likely be appealed to the Supreme Court.The decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York was the latest victory for House Democrats investigating Mr. Trump and his businesses. And it put extensive information about Mr. Trump’s personal and business finances — which the president has spent years fighting to keep secret — one step closer to becoming public.Democratic-controlled congressional committees — Deutsche Bank, long Mr.
Trump’s biggest lender, and Capital One — this year for. – »18/11/19 10:32 fromFrom: FoxNewsChannel Duration: 00:00 This week House Democrats' open impeachment inquiry hearings will intensify. Day 3 of the public impeachment proceedings will take place in two parts with two panels. The first panel will be Lt. »18/11/19 10:02 fromThe New Abwehr's and German hands are almost evident in both the Flynn Affair, with its Turkish - European underpinnings, and in the Ukrainian Affair ('Ukraine Is Not For Yankees'), with its historical-political background.&nb.