Holocaust archives go digital

I just read that Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, is teaming up with Google to make its photographs and documents interactive and searchable on the Internet.

A collection of 130,000 photos can now be searched directly from Google, using standard keywords and other data that make it far easier than in the past to find the desired information.

Viewers can also add their own comments, stories and document.

This sounds very neat. It's amazing how the internet has opened up so much in terms of doing historical research or researching one's family history.

http://collections.yadvashem.org/photosarchive/

New Monument in Nova Scotia commemorates St. Louis

Monument commemorates Jewish tragedy


The Associated Press
Thursday, January 20, 2011; 4:20 PM
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia -- A new monument has been unveiled in eastern Canada marking the country's decision to turn away a steamship carrying Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939.

The luxury liner MS St. Louis was first turned away by Cuba, then the United States and finally Canada before returning to Europe just before the outbreak of war.

Of the 900 German Jews aboard, almost a third died in the Holocaust.

The sculpture by Daniel Libeskind is called the Wheel of Conscience and was unveiled Thursday in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Libeskind says his work tells the story of a tragic, dark period of Canadian history where anti-Semitism and anti-immigration policies led to the deaths of hundreds of people.