Teaching History Matters

This is kind of a quiet big deal. There is a boy from Hudson Falls, New York, and he and 387 others are buried here in commingled settings at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii. Exhumations began last week and are going on right now. He was 19 when he died, his remains were under water for 18 months, and he never came home. Definitely the first boy killed in World War II from our town, and county, maybe even the state. He left school at 17 and joined the Navy. A year later, he was declared missing, and he has never properly been identified.

Imagine what that did to his mother and father, and sister. He’s a big part of my upcoming book, which will be published this week.  Looks like I have to go back and add another endnote! But a good one.

Photo by Bruce and Debbie Almeida.

From NPR: Pentagon To Exhume Remains Of Sailors From USS Oklahoma
APRIL 15, 201512:39 PM ET
KRISHNADEV CALAMUR

The Pentagon says it will exhume the remains of 388 sailors and Marines who died on Dec. 7, 1941, in the capsizing of the USS Oklahoma during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

They are all currently buried as unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. In all, 429 sailors and Marines perished aboard the Oklahoma; 35 were identified in the years after the attack. The 388 personnel who remained unidentified were buried in 61 caskets at 45 grave sites at the memorial, locally dubbed the “Punchbowl.”

As recently as last year, the Navy told families of those aboard the ship that it opposed the exhumation, noting “a full DNA testing and accounting could take many years and likely leave many of the missing still unaccounted for.” But on Tuesday, the Pentagon reversed course.

Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, in a memorandum, said: “Recent advances in forensic science and technology, as well as family member assistance in providing genealogical information, have now made it possible to make individual identifications for many Service members long-buried in graves marked ‘unknown.’ ”

The memorandum states that the Defense Department “has contacted families, collected and analyzed DNA from 84 percent of applicable USS Oklahoma family members, and has collected 90 percent of antemortem medical and dental records from the ship’s crew.” Analysis of the evidence suggests that most of the Oklahoma’s crew members could be identified if the 61 caskets were disinterred — a process, the memo said, that should be completed within five years.

More broadly, Work established a broader policy that applies to all unidentified human remains from permanent U.S. military cemeteries from which remains are exhumed for identification. For commingled remains, there must be a 60 percent chance of identification; for individuals, 50 percent.

Moss St. Cemetery. Photo by Judith Yole Graham. He is not here.

source article: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/04/15/399825301/pentagon-to-exhume-remains-of-sailors-aboard-uss-oklahoma

Further reading, update: http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/pentagon/2015/07/27/uss-oklahoma-remains-dug-up-for-identification/30750103/

Photo by Bruce and Debbie Almeida.

Photo by Bruce and Debbie Almeida.

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Portrait by Rob Miller.

We just launched the new website! Come on over and see. Find out more about the new book. Bonus material here for the book, also. Tons of photographs and artifacts, and my new photo blog. It’s launch time! E-book is out, Print to follow Aug. 1. Signed copies available.

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Matt

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The Things Our Fathers Saw: 

The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation from Hometown, USA –

Voices of the Pacific Theater

288 pages

27th Infantry Division. Saipan, July, 1944.
New York State Military Museum.

‘I hope you’ll never have to tell a story like this, when you get to be 87.

I hope you’ll never have to do it.’

‑Marine veteran of the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima, to his teenage interviewer

At the height of World War II, LOOK Magazine profiled a small upstate New York community for a series of articles portraying it as the wholesome, patriotic model of life on the home front. Seventy years later, a high school history teacher and his students track down over two dozen veterans residing around ‘Hometown, USA’ who fought the war in the Pacific, from Pearl Harbor to the surrender at Tokyo Bay. They rescue and resurrect firsthand accounts of combat and brotherhood, of captivity and redemption, and the aftermath of a war that left no American community unscathed. Here are the stories that the magazine could not tell, from a vanishing generation speaking to America today.

About the Author

Matthew Rozell’s teaching career is now spanning four decades. He has been recognized as an OAH Tachau History Teacher of the Year and as a recipient of the NSDAR National Founders’ Medal for History Education. Rozell is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Teacher Fellow, has had his lessons filmed for NBC Learn and the New York State United Teachers, and has even been selected as an ABC World News ‘Person of the Week’. He is also a recipient of several state and local awards for history education.

Receive regular updates by ‘liking’ the Facebook page at the bottom of our HOME page or visiting it at  AuthorMatthewRozell

The first author appearance is scheduled in Hudson Falls, NY, one of the book’s settings,  for August 8th , 1-4pm, at the Village Booksmith.

Address: 223 Main St, Hudson Falls, NY 12839
Phone:(518) 747-3261

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This was published in the Washington Post this week. The link is at the bottom. I repost it for noting the methodology, given some earlier articles about this topic. You can go to the original link to see comments. MR

Has the global Jewish population finally rebounded from the Holocaust? Not exactly.

By Adam Taylor July 2, 2015, Washington Post

In 1939, the global population of Jewish people worldwide peaked at around 16.6 million. That population was soon decimated by the Holocaust, which saw Nazi Germany and its collaborators kill approximately 6 million Jews. In just a few horrifying years, the global population of Jews had fallen by more than a third.

This week, a new report by the Jerusalem-based think tank Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) made a startling announcement: The world’s Jewish population was finally approaching 16.6 million again. The announcement sparked headlines around the world, with many observers shocked that it could have taken 70 years for the global Jewish population to return to its pre-Holocaust peak.

The problem is, it wasn’t entirely accurate.

Professor Sergio DellaPergola, perhaps the most well-known expert in Jewish demographics in the world today, is among those who have rebutted the reports. “It is a canard,” DellaPergola told the Times of Israel this week, suggesting that the numbers widely reported were both a result of “misunderstanding” and “journalistic counterfeit.”

When you look closely at the JPPI’s numbers, DellaPergola’s objections make sense. The report makes no bones that the number of self-identifying Jews in the world are around 14.2 million – a number DellaPergola had come to in his own work last year, published

It then, however, adds on to this a number of other people, including those with only one Jewish parent or those who identify as partially Jewish due to their family history. Some 348,000 Israeli citizens who came to Israel under the Law of Return but are not recorded as Jews are also included in the higher figure.

Traditionally, Judaism has a comparatively strict definition of who is Jewish, with halakha (Jewish religious law) requiring either that a person’s mother was Jewish or that they go through a formal conversion process. Not all Jews agree with these definitions, however. The Law of Return, an Israeli legislation that allows Jews to immigrate to Israel, was amended in 1970 to allow “child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew” to enter the country, leading hundreds of thousands of non-Jews to move to Israel.

In a phone call earlier this week, JPPI president Avinoam Bar-Yosef was keen to emphasize that the higher figure included these people, who others might not consider fully Jewish, in order to help with policy discussions (the JPPI report was presented to the Israeli Cabinet on Sunday). The JPPI report argues that there were “changing patterns of Jewish identification” in the past few years, hence the use of the larger number. Indeed, a 2013 Pew study on the nature of Jewish Americans found that more and more people could be considered “partially Jewish,” in part due to the shifting attitudes to intermarriage and religion.

DellaPergola’s own estimates of the world’s Jewish population have made a point of not including these people, noting that if “we add persons who state they are partly Jewish and non-Jews who have Jewish parents, an extended global aggregate population estimate of 17,236,850 is obtained.” DellaPergola disagrees with using these broader definitions, however: “If the United States had 6.7 million holders of a doctorate, and 1 million of these hold a doctorate partly, how many Ph.D.s are there in America?” he asked in the Forward in 2013.

So when will the core Jewish population actually reach its pre-Holocaust heights? Recent estimates by Pew found that the world’s Jewish population would rise by 15 percent in the next two and a half decades, compared to 35 percent for the overall global population, to reach 16.1 million in 2050. DellaPergola’s research has suggested that, had the Holocaust not taken place, the global Jewish population would have been at least 26 million and possibly as much as 32 million today.

Adam Taylor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. Originally from London, he studied at the University of Manchester and Columbia University.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/07/02/has-the-global-jewish-population-finally-rebounded-from-the-holocaust-not-exactly/

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