Search Results for: auschwitz

On Friday, March 7, just ahead of the Jewish Sabbath, a South Carolina firing squad will shoot to death my longtime pen pal and friend Brad Sigmon. This will mark the first American firing squad execution to take place in 15 years. Accordingly, it will be the first since I co-founded the 3,800+-member-strong L’chaim! Jews [...]

Over 40 human rights groups warned Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk against implementing his plan to temporarily suspend the right to claim asylum in an open letter on Monday. Among the groups are Amnesty International, several asylum law organizations, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation. The organizations stressed that the fundamental right to asylum is binding on [...]

A German court rejected an appeal against the conviction of Irmgard Furchner, a 99-year-old former Nazi concentration camp secretary, on Tuesday. Furchner was employed as a stenographer in the commandant’s office of the Stutthof concentration camp located near the Polish city of Gdansk (formerly Nazi-occupied Danzig), where over 60,000 people were killed. Run by the [...]

Recently, the Alabama Supreme Court approved a request by the state to execute Allan Eugene Miller with nitrogen gas. This will be the second time Alabama will attempt to execute Miller and the second use of nitrogen gas for the purpose of execution. Alabama wants to kill with nitrogen gas despite widespread reporting of a [...]

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo decried the vandalization of the Shoah Memorial, a memorial dedicated to the Holocaust and Jewish history during the Second World War, as “unspeakable” in a press release issued in the French capital on Tuesday. Overnight Monday, about 20 red hands were spray painted on the Shoah Memorial, including the Wall of [...]

At its core, the death penalty feeds one of the basest desires known to humankind: the craving for revenge. The 3,200+ members of “L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty” — a group I co-founded — along with millions of other death penalty abolitionists across the world have demonstrated time and again in recent years how [...]

Alabama’s experimental use of gas to torture to death Kenneth Smith on January 25th — like all executions by lethal injection — has perpetuated a horrific Nazi legacy in the United States and is a traumatizing affront to many in the Jewish community. The fact that this torment was blindly carried out just ahead of [...]

I am an ordained Jewish cantor, a former Jewish prison chaplain, a third-generation Holocaust survivor, and co-founder of L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty. I write these words on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and on the morning after Alabama executed Kenneth Eugene Smith with nitrogen gas — the first execution of this [...]

The US government has again desecrated the memory of the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the latest example of the Biden administration having broken its promise to work to end the death penalty, it announced its intention to seek a federal death sentence against Peyton Gendron, the 19-year-old who horrifically murdered 10 [...]

A lawyer-turned-death penalty abolitionist and a Jewish cantor join forces for JURIST to argue that the Jewish community has a unique obligation to voice resistance to Alabama’s plans to begin using nitrogen gas as a means of executing death row convicts. In Part 1, Stephen Cooper reflects on his great-grandmother’s death in a Nazi death [...]