Meet Harry Ettlinger, the Real-Life Jewish 'Monuments Man'

70 Years Later, Newark Kid Still Proud of Looted Art Unit

By Anna Goldenberg for The Jewish Daily Forward

There is hardly a white spot visible on Harry Ettlinger’s calendar.

As we tour the 88-year-old Ettlinger’s immaculate apartment, he ignores the ringing phone; someone from Sony Pictures leaves a voicemail: “I will be emailing you today or tomorrow your confirmation number for your limousine pickup.”

He pulls press clippings and pictures out of folders, and in his ever so slight German accent, he points out the family photographs, certificates and awards — and the drawings and copies of paintings on his walls.

For most of his adult life, Ettlinger worked as a mechanical engineer, but it is his role in assisting with art repatriation that is making him the subject of so much attention right now. A soldier in the United States army during World War II, he spent a year and a half as part of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Program.

The 350 men involved with the program, which endeavored to save cultural treasures from the frontlines and return looted artworks to their rightful owners, were nicknamed the ‘Monuments Men.’ A movie with the same title and a cast that includes George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett and Bill Murray arrives in cinemas on February 7. The director is Clooney.

Translating and summarizing German documents were among Ettlinger’s main tasks in the MFAA. Born Heinz Ludwig Chaim Ettlinger in Karlsruhe in 1926, he escaped Germany together with his parents and two brothers in September 1938. They managed to get visas for the United States, and settled in Newark, N.J.

Hailing from a wealthy, influential family — he can trace his mother’s ancestors, the Oppenheimer family, back to the 15th century — Ettlinger worked odd jobs after school, such as running errands for a butcher and delivering newspapers; the family had lost its women’s fashion business in Germany.

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Remember How Danes Donned Yellow Stars To Protect the Jews? That Never Happened.

But a new play explores the equally amazing—and real—tale of how an SS chief foiled Hitler’s plan to exterminate the country’s Jews

By Alexander Bodin Saphir for Tablet Magazine

You know the legend: At the height of the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Berlin ordered all Danish Jews to don the infamous yellow star on the outside of their clothes. But the morning the decree was set to take effect, Denmark’s King Christian X rode out into the city wearing a yellow star of his own. By evening, the message had spread and the entire population of Copenhagen was wearing yellow stars, thwarting the Nazi program by making it impossible to tell Jew from gentile.

It’s an incredible story—probably the best-known example of mass civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance to come out of WWII. The trouble is it’s just that—a story. It never happened, and couldn’t have, because the Danish Jews were never forced to wear the yellow star. But the tale was prominently featured in American news outlets during the war, and after making its way into Leon Uris’ novel Exodus became one of the great unchallenged myths of European resistance.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Nazis failed to deport Danish Jews in significant numbers, thanks to an operation that became known as the “Miracle Rescue,” by which the vast majority of Danish Jews were spirited away to Sweden—a neutral country—in October 1943, where they lived out the rest of the war in relative safety. I first became aware of the story of the “Miracle Rescue” from my grandfather, Raphael “Folle” Bodin, who was a young, talented, up-and-coming Jewish tailor in Copenhagen when the Nazis invaded Denmark. In late 1943, a high-ranking Nazi broke party rules prohibiting fraternization with Jews and came to buy a new suit at the tailor shop owned by my grandfather’s father-in-law on Istedgade, in the red light district of Copenhagen, where my grandfather worked along with his brother-in-law, Nathan Golman.

I imagine my grandfather taking measurements and calling them out to Nathan, who noted them down on a small index card to be filed away. I imagine him trying to stop his hands from shaking and sweating as he stuck pins into the trouser hems of a man who symbolized everything evil in occupied Europe. And I imagine his astonishment when the Nazi, upon returning to collect his new garment, turned to the two Jewish men and warned them that a roundup of the Jews was imminent, telling them to flee.

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2014, the UN Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People

By Anne Bayefsky for the Jerusalem Post

The UN propaganda campaign against the legitimacy of Israel has now reached epidemic proportions.

Palestinians, and their undemocratic UN cohorts, are off to a roaring start for 2014, the UN Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

Last week UNESCO tore down an exhibit on the Jewish people’s ties to the land of Israel, just before it opened to the public, because it offended Arab states. Unfortunately, the move was only the tip of the UN iceberg.

All visitors to UN Headquarters in New York, including school children from across America, walk off the elevator straight into the “Palestine” exhibit.

The UN tour’s first stop communicates malignant historical revisionism. According to the display, Palestinians are the new Jews, having suffered an “exodus” in 1948. Total Arab rejection of a Jewish state (contrary to the 1947 UN partition resolution), and repeated efforts to annihilate Israel, are not mentioned. Instead, in 1948 “the first Arab-Israeli war breaks out.” Nor is there any apparent reason for the “two wars” of 1967 and 1973.

The only “contravention of international law” is by Israel. The year 1987 began not a murderous campaign against Israeli civilians, but a justifiable “Palestinian uprising.” There are triumphant photos of Yasser Arafat, maps pre-dating modern Israel, and lots of photos of miserable-looking Arab children. Not a Jewish victim in sight. And the exhibit announces, there are now 11 million Palestinians worldwide.

The UN propaganda campaign against the legitimacy of Israel has now reached epidemic proportions.

On January 20, 2014 the UN organized its first Solidarity Year event for “civil society.” In one of the UN’s main galleries, it conducted a public screening of the film “Where should the birds fly?” and sponsored a subsequent discussion with Palestinian filmmaker Fida Qishta and journalist Laila El-Haddad. Here is just some of what the film included:

Mona Samouni (age 11 or 12): “The Israeli soldiers were shooting at the people, as if they were not human, as if they were chickens or mice. For the Israeli army this is something without meaning. But the victims were very precious to us, even though they didn’t consider them human.”

Fida Qishta: “Even the presence of international observers does not prevent daily random Israeli gunfire. The Israelis seem to be playing a deadly game with Palestinians who are just trying to work and live, taunting them and intimidating them, sometimes killing them.”

Fida Qishta: “Israel justified its war on Gaza as retaliation for rockets fired into southern Israel. Hamas said Israel provoked the rockets by breaking the ceasefire agreement. But you can get trapped in all this. Who did what to whom first?...It doesn’t matter if they are the relatively simple and ineffective rockets from Gaza into southern Israel or Israel’s sophisticated US-made missiles launched from F-16’s and Apache helicopters. The real question is the imprisonment of the people of Gaza.”

At the end of the film, the child Mona asks that “the Goldstone report” be “reactivated.” In fact, the film is marketed by the distributor as the “visual documentation of the Goldstone Report.” Indeed, the film mirrored the infamous UN report’s slanderous claim – which Goldstone subsequently recanted – that Israelis “indiscriminately kill and injure” Palestinian civilians. Or as El-Haddad told the UN audience when the film ended, Israel engages in the “systematic targeting of the Palestinian civilian sector.”

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Time To Put the Pollard Case to Rest—by Demanding He Be Set Free

A newly clear aspect of the case reveals evidence of a deeper injustice—which must now be addressed

By the Editors of Tablet Magazine

It should be ever more difficult for patriotic Jewish Americans—or anyone else, for that matter—to believe that Jonathan Pollard, who has spent 29 years in prison for passing secret intelligence documents to Israel, is being punished for the very real crime to which he pleaded guilty in 1986. Pollard, a former naval intelligence analyst, has spent nearly three decades in prison for a crime that carries a maximum penalty of 10 years under current U.S. law—more time than any other convicted spy in American history. He is the only person in American history to receive a life sentence for the crime of spying in a case involving a friendly country, and the only person convicted of such a crime to be sentenced to more than 10 years in prison.

And what you are about to read is not a knee-jerk, tribalist defense of Pollard—you will be subjected to no whining about his health, no assertions about how serving time in a maximum security prison is hard, or the like—but is rather an argument about a newly clear and deeply problematic aspect of the case.

In an op-ed published this week in the New York Times, M.E. Bowman, former deputy general counsel for national security law at the FBI and coordinator of the investigation that put Pollard behind bars, did his best to revive the idea that the spy deserved his extreme sentence and should remain in prison. Yet the logic of Bowman’s argument is so tenuous, and so noxious, that it only magnifies the perception that Pollard was railroaded by an American national security establishment animated by a very personal animus towards one particular spy—and one that has spent the past three decades trying to cover up its own failures.

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