Concordia will host a conference for those wanting to get involved with preventing crimes against humanity next Tuesday. Along with the conference, entitled 'Canada and the Darfur Crisis,' the day will also include the launch of a new student organization: Students Helping Others Understand Tolerance. Read more.

Award 40 Canadian university students with a subsidized trip to Europe-Poland, specifically-and the mind naturally conjures images of pub nights, expeditions to major shopping centres and plenty of hung-over mornings. A natural assumption, yes, but this scenario does not describe the truth behind SHOUT's (Students' Helping Others Understand Tolerance) genesis. Read more.

For the first time, the March of the Living invited non-Jewish students to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Muslim-Canadian Rafi Mustafa, a Ryerson student, was among them this summer. Here is his experience. Read more.

The March of the Living, which for the last 18 years has taken some 100,000 young Jews to Poland for Yom Hashoah and then to Israel for Yom Ha’atzmaut, strengthens the participants’ Jewish identity. The experience has brought many of them closer to Judaism and the Jewish people. But the project, admirable though it is, has its flaws and we would be doing it a disservice by ignoring them ... Read more.

I have a bit of an insecurity about being typical. I don’t like to be a typical girlfriend or a typical punk rock or hip hop fan, and I love to play the devil’s advocate. I realized the real extent of that insecurity when I found that my anticipation of the March of the Living was weighted with a worry that my expectations for a typical March experience would come true ... Read more.

Before arriving in Poland as a university participant on the March of the Living, I had several expectations. I expected to cry all day, every day, for a week. I expected to find the answers to my many questions. I expected to understand the atrocity that occurred only six decades ago. I expected to leave Poland feeling depressed. Prior to leaving Toronto, these expectations seemed realistic to me. While in Poland however, it occurred to me how idealistic they really were ... Read more.

JERUSALEM — March of the Living participants who landed in Israel last week after being in Poland could not kiss the tarmac as in the past because the gleaming new airport connects aircraft directly to the terminal. But that mattered little. They were more than content, the consensus seemed to be, to kiss the Western Wall, celebrate Israel’s 57th birthday with a May 12 March of the Living parade through Jerusalem, and leave behind Poland’s relentless drizzle and nightmarish images of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Majdanek for the glorious sunshine of the Jewish state and the sheer sense of empowerment that came with Jews revelling in their own nationhood ... Read more.

'Do you know why Poland is called Po-lan-ya?, asked an Auschwitz survivor who accompanied Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last week to the death camps.

"Tell me," I replied.

"Because it stands for 'here' (po) 'slept' (lan) 'God' (Ya)." Indeed, the question of where God was while His children were being tortured, humiliated, murdered and incinerated throughout Europe has bothered - and continues to bother - theologians and ordinary people, religious and not, for the last 60 years ... Read more.

More than 18,000 people from around the world – including more than 1,000 Canadians – remembered Holocaust victims on a march from the Polish town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz) to the site of the Birkenau concentration camp last week. The event was part of March of the Living – an annual pilgrimage made mostly by young people seeking a connection to their Jewish roots. Canadian participants attended under the aegis of UIA (United Israel Appeal) Federations Canada. The goal of the program is to unite different faith and ethnic groups to honor Holocaust victims and survivors. Multi-cultural student groups, teachers and a number of politicians also took part. Many of the participants went on to spend a week in Israel ... Read more.

OSWIECIM, Poland – Standing shoulder to shoulder and pressed in by history, 18,000 Jews from dozens of countries amassed on Yom Hashoah at the Birkenau death camp for the 14th March of the Living. They listened as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called on them to carry the torch of memory forward to honour the 1.5 million Jews murdered there by the Nazis ... Read more.

As he entered the Auschwitz camp, supported on both sides by his two daughters, Doctor Moshe Yageel, a 78 year-old survivor of the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps, glanced at the words inscribed at the entrance of the camp. "I remember these words.  They were there when we were brought here," he said.  The words, written in German, say that "work will set you free" ... Read more.

WARSAW - At a remnant of the Warsaw Ghetto wall, a bit of grim masonry that survived the retributive destruction of the Jewish quarter in 1943, a historical guide rattles off the chilling numbers. Four hundred thousand Jews, one-third of the city's population, confined behind the barriers of Europe's largest ghetto. One-quarter of them are under the age of 15 ... Read more.

A group of Canadian politicians led by Vaughan Mayor Michael Di Biase wrapped up a week-long trip to Nazi concentration camps in Poland Friday. The March of the Living event marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of prisoners from the death camps. The group, which included York Region chairperson Bill Fisch and Thornhill Councillor Alan Shefman, visited the Majdanek, Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. The York contingent marched with 18,000 people, including two dozen Canadian politicians, from the Auschwitz train station to the Birkenau camp in a silent tribute to the prisoners who perished and those who survived the death marches of 1945 ... Read more.

OSWIECIN, Poland - The last time Terry Guttman walked into the Birkenau death camp, she was among the few selected to live. Yesterday, on a rainy and windy day here, the 77-year-old stepped back in joining 18,000 people from around the world on the recreation of a Nazi death march now known as The March of the Living ... Read more.

OSWIECIM, Poland (CP) - Led by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, thousands of Jews from around the world remembered the victims of the Holocaust on Thursday in emotional but defiant ceremonies and a march at the site of the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau ... Read more.

OSWIECIM, Poland — From a mile away, a disembodied voice reaches our ears. Someone is reciting the litany of the dead. Their names echo through the birch trees that give this dreadful place its pastoral name, Birkenau, wafting across the pond where tons of ashes — human residue — lie submerged, reverberating through the rows upon rows of barrack chimney stacks. Mass murder still resonates, six decades on ... Read more.

WARSAW, May 9 (JTA) — Nazis murdered Mary Karaso’s entire family at Birkenau. Her mother, father and three siblings all died at the notorious death camp. And yet, sitting in a wheelchair just a few feet from the train tracks on which cattle cars herded her relatives into the camp — and looking out at row after row of the red-brick barracks that likely were her loved ones’ last home — Karaso was content ... Read more.

KRAKOW, Poland - Seven thousand people, including 800 Canadians, gathered in the heart of Krakow's historic Jewish quarter last night for an emotional ceremony marking Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. With some still recovering from visits only hours earlier to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp of the Second World War, they mourned the millions dead in the Holocaust that ended 60 years ago ... Read more.

Rosie DiManno, Columnist
AUSCHWITZ—This is where humanity died, sagged to its knees and bled into the dirt. Not in the lives extinguished here — some 1.5 million Jews murdered — but in the abandonment of every virtue that defines a civilized people. It was a place without pity, without conscience, yet in its ruthless efficiency a bizarre testament to the ingenuity of mankind. To call it madness would be to absolve guilt ... Read more.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has told thousands at a march in Poland recalling the Holocaust to "always remember the victims and never forget the murderers." Jews across the globe Thursday observed Yom HaShoah, the day commemorating the deaths of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust during WWII ... Read more.

KRAKOW, Poland , May 3 (JTA) — About 20,000 people from around the world, Jews and non-Jews alike, are expected in Poland for the 15th March of the Living this week. The annual trip, which began in 1988, takes Jewish high school students — and, increasingly, adults and non-Jews — to Poland, where they spend a week visiting Holocaust sites. Many groups then continue to Israel to see the homeland of the Jewish people ... Read more.

The largest single delegation in the world taking part in the 2005 March of the Living trip to Poland and Israel is preparing to depart on May 2.

Montreal is sending 513 people on the two-week journey – the most from any one community, said Susan Laxer, chair of the Bronfman Jewish Education Centre (BJEC), which co-ordinates the Montreal part of the march with the Bronfman Israel Experience Centre.

That number includes 251 local high school students, 86 young adults, a 126-member adult mission, and a “chairman’s mission” of 50.

“It’s indeed a historic occasion,” Laxer told an overflow final information session recently at Montreal’s Beth Israel Beth Aaron Congregation.

Participants from Toronto and elsewhere in Canada, who will leave the same day, will push the national total to well over 1,000.

Included on the trip – for the first time – are several dozen non-Jewish Toronto high school students, as well as university students, municipal leaders, Canadian educators and Holocaust survivors.

Organizers said the record march number reflects the fact that this year is the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. In January, hundreds from around the world came to Auschwitz to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the camp’s liberation.

In Montreal, March of the Living national director Eli Rubenstein of Toronto, national co-chair Ralph Lipper and local chair Jeffrey Mandel were among the officials on hand to provide helpful tips and present the itinerary to a hall brimming with boisterous participants and doting parents.

“You will be seeing a sea of blue,” Laxer said, referring to the 18,000 people from around the world dressed in the march’s traditional colour who will walk the few kilometres from Auschwitz to Birkenau on May 5. “You can only imagine the power of that vision.”

Israeli leaders, as well as Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, will join the march for its most solemn moment when all the participants are together for a commemoration ceremony at Birkenau.

The first week, the itinerary includes visits to Jewish centres in Poland where communities flourished before their total decimation – Krakow, Lublin and Warsaw – and trips to the infamous camps, including Treblinka, Majdanek, and Plashow.

“Those are the two themes,” Laxer said. “Life as it was, and then its destruction.”

March participants will leave May 8 for Israel, where the schedule will include visits to traditional tourist sites, including the recently rebuilt Yad Vashem. They will experience the commemorations of Yom Hazikaron, followed by the celebration of Yom Ha’atzmaut.

The second week underscores the reaffirmation of Jewish life and nationhood after the Holocaust.

Sylvain Abitbol, president of Federation CJA, which helps to fund the high school portion of the trip, said as the number of Holocaust survivors dwindle, the role of march participants will become even more vital in order to “keep the memory alive.”

Before splitting up into groups and picking up their personalized duffel bags, participants heard a moving account on the nature of Jewish resistance from Beth Israel Beth Aaron’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Reuben Poupko, who, they heard, has gone on the march more often than anyone else from Montreal.

In a voice that cracked with emotion several times, Rabbi Poupko, who is again leading Montreal’s Young Adult group (ages 18-40), prepared the crowd for the trip by citing examples of Jewish resistance in an effort to dispel the myth that Jews went to their deaths “like sheep to the slaughter.”

These acts of revolt included courageous physical uprisings, as well as holding Passover seders and efforts to bring some semblance of normalcy to Jewish community life inside the ghettos.

Rabbi Poupko cited the example of a Jew who said he was an atheist, but still recited the Shema before a German killed him.

This was resistance as much as any other form, Rabbi Poupko said. “Why did he say the Shema? Because whether he believed or not, he would die as a Jew.”

Rabbi Poupko said participants in the March of the Living will return home, “knowing more, but understanding less.

“You will only have more questions,” he said. “But you will know that as Jews, you have every reason in the world to hold your heads high.”