Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: When did Menachem Z. Rosensaft become an attorney?
Menachem Rosensaft received his B.A. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1971, together with an M.A. degree in creative writing from the university's Writing Seminars. From 1972 until 1975, he was an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Jewish Studies at the City College of the City University of New York and assisted Professor Elie Wiesel in his courses on Holocaust literature and Hasidism. He received a second M.A. degree in modern European history from Columbia University in 1975, and in 1979, he received his J.D. degree from the Columbia University School of Law, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and Book Review Editor of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.
He was appointed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council by President Bill Clinton in 1994, and reappointed to a second five-year term in 1999, chairing its Content Committee from 1994 to 2000, its Collections and Acquisitions Committee from 1996 to 2000, and its Committee on Governance from 2000 to 2002. He was a member of the Council's Executive Committee from 1996 until 2003. He is the editor of Life Reborn, Jewish Displaced Persons 1945-1951, published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2001. In September 2010, President Obama appointed Rosensaft to a third term on the US Holocaust Memorial Council.[15]
Rosensaft publicly confronted the Simon Wiesenthal Center's chief Nazi-hunter and Director for Eastern European Affairs Israeli Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff for denying Srebrenica genocide arguing that:
I cannot in good conscience mourn my brother as a victim of genocide unless I similarly mourn all other victims of genocide, including the victims at Srebrenica.[58]
Rosensaft, who was known to be a supporter of the Israeli peace movement,[51] was elected National President of the Labor Zionist Alliance in early 1988. Shortly thereafter, he confronted Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir at a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. Shamir had called on the American Jewish leadership to support his government's hard-line policies and criticized those who publicly espoused more dovish positions. Rosensaft responded by noting that since Israelis themselves were divided, "Why should we be accused of disloyalty?"[52] "We support Israel fully and identify with her totally," he explained, referring to the more liberal Jewish groups that belonged to the Presidents Conference. "But that does not mean we have to agree with every single decision or policy set by the government or a particular minister. Voicing our concerns does not indicate disloyalty."[53]
In September 1981, he was one of the founders of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and was elected the organization's first Chairman. Since June 1984, he has had the title of Founding Chairman. Under his leadership, the International Network organized major conferences of children of survivors in New York in 1984 and Los Angeles in 1987, and in 1982, it held the first citywide rally in New York City on behalf of Ethiopian Jewry.[20] Rosensaft also participated in the planning of and programming for the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem in June 1981, and the mass gatherings of thousands of Holocaust survivors in Washington, D.C. (1983), Philadelphia (1985), and New York (1986).
In 2012, he denounced immigration restrictionists Peter Brimelow and Pat Buchanan as racists who should be shunned from mainstream political debate.[47]
Rosensaft has also struggled with the theological implications of the Holocaust. "Where was God when the fires of Auschwitz failed to ignite the universe," he asked at a 1995 commemoration at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. As reported in the New York Times, he "posed the question of how God could be praised if he did not stop the killing. Then he suggested an answer: 'What if God was not with the killers, with the forces that inflicted Auschwitz on humanity?'" He explained that, "To me, the incredible element of the Holocaust is not the behavior of the murderers, because that is pure evil. It is the behavior of the victims and how they remained human and in many ways behaved in a superhuman manner. ... So the God I choose to pray to was at Auschwitz, but it was not in the manner of the victims' deaths, it was in the way in which they lived."[24] Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York City, Rosensaft elaborated on his belief that evil is perpetrated by human beings, not by God:
I cannot in good conscience condemn the perpetrators of the genocide in which my brother and my grandparents perished unless I also condemn the perpetrators of all other acts of genocide, including the genocide that took place at Srebrenica.
In July 2010, Save a Torah entered into an agreement with the Maryland authorities under which it would cease to provide Holocaust provenances for Torah scrolls unless "there is documentation or an independent verifiable witness to such history."[42] The following year, Youlus was arrested in Manhattan and charged with fraud by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.[43] Five months later, when Youlus pleaded guilty to mail fraud and wire fraud in a US federal court, Rosensaft told The New York Times that, "I am gratified that this charlatan will now be fully exposed, as a matter of law, as a petty crook."[44]
It is unconscionable and reprehensible for anyone to tell Adisada that the horrors to which her fellow Bosnian Muslims - including quite possibly members of her own family - were subjected at Srebrenica did not constitute a genocide, just as it is unconscionable and reprehensible for anyone to deny the genocide in which my brother, my grandparents, and millions of other European Jews were annihilated.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft (born 1948 in Bergen-Belsen, Germany) an attorney in New York and the Founding Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Survivors, is a leader of the Second Generation movement of children of survivors,[1] and has been described on the front page of the New York Times as one of the most prominent of the survivors' sons and daughters.[2] He also served as National President of the Labor Zionist Alliance, and was active in the early stages of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. As psychologist Eva Fogelman has written: "Menachem Rosensaft's moral voice has gone beyond the responsibility he felt as a child of survivors to remember and educate. He felt the need to promote peace and a tolerant State of Israel as well. He wanted to bring to justice Nazi war criminals, to fight racism and bigotry, and to work toward the continuity of the Jewish people".[3]
He was elected by the refugees in the DP camp to the Central Committee of Liberated Jews and served as the chairman of the British sector committee until it was disbanded in 1950. In addition to promoting the rights and interests of the refugees, he was an active opponent of the British policy of restrictive Jewish immigration to the British Mandate of Palestine. He met and married a fellow survivor, doctor Hadassah (Ada) Bimko, in the camp. Their son is noted activist Menachem Z. Rosensaft.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft, an adjunct professor of law at Cornell University and general counsel of the World Jewish Congress, was skeptical about Youlus's claim of discovering an old Torah at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as his parents were liberated from that camp and the camp was burned down by British Army during World War II.
In March 2010, Rosensaft sparked a formal investigation by the Maryland authorities into the activities of Menachem Youlus, a rabbi and scribe based in a Washington, DC, suburb who had falsely claimed to have "rescued" Torah scrolls that had survived the Holocaust, which he sold to synagogues and Jewish centers through his "Save a Torah" charitable organization.[39] "Any exploitation of the Holocaust for crass commercial purposes is appalling," Rosensaft wrote in the New York Post on March 7, 2010. "Creating false Holocaust histories for Torah schools is despicable."[40]
In 2009, he called on Pope Benedict XVI to publicly condemn controversial bishop Richard Williamson, a member of the Society of Saint Pius X and a noted Holocaust denier.[37] He has also written that Mitt Romney's faith should not be an issue in the 2012 presidential campaign.[38]
In the spring of 1985, Rosensaft was an outspoken critic of President Ronald Reagan's decision to pay homage to fallen German World War II soldiers, including members of Hitler's Waffen SS, at the military cemetery at Bitburg during a state visit to Germany.[28] Addressing some 5,000 Holocaust survivors and their families in Philadelphia on April 21, 1985, Rosensaft said, "For heaven's sake, let him find another cemetery. There must be at least one in all of Germany that does not contain SS men."[29] On May 5, 1985, Rosensaft organized and led a demonstration of survivors and children of survivors at Bergen-Belsen in protest against the visits that day by President Reagan and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to the mass-graves of Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg.[30] Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel wrote in his memoirs that Rosensaft was "one of the very few to strongly oppose President Reagan in the Bitburg affair."[31]
From September 2000 until December 2003 Rosensaft was a partner in the New York office of a national law firm, representing, among other clients, the Audit Committee and independent Directors of a New York Stock Exchange listed company in connection with an internal investigation of accounting irregularities, a related proceeding brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and class action litigation.[14] In January 2004 he joined a financial services firm in New York City as Special Counsel, becoming its General Counsel in May 2005. He played a key role in guiding the firm through a period of intense regulatory and governmental scrutiny and implementing good governance practices.
"In late March," reported James Barron of The New York Times on July 26, 2010, Rosensaft wrote to the Maryland attorney general, Douglas F. Gansler, alleging "possible fraud and/or misrepresentation" by Save a Torah. He asked for an investigation into whether Save a Torah had been 'soliciting funds under false pretenses.' Mr. Rosensaft, who is also an adjunct professor at Cornell Law School and teaches a course on World War II war crimes trials, took issue with Rabbi Youlus's description of [a Torah scroll that had allegedly been saved by a priest at Auschwitz who in turn supposedly had given it to Youlus]. 'There is no record of anyone even remotely fitting the description of the priest' Rabbi Youlus said had saved it, Mr. Rosensaft said in the letter. He also took issue with a Torah that Rabbi Youlus said had been at Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp where Anne Frank died in 1945. Mr. Rosensaft's parents met at Bergen-Belsen. Mr. Rosensaft said that Rabbi Youlus's description of finding a Torah beneath a wooden floor in a barracks was not possible. The original buildings at Bergen-Belsen, he said, were burned to stop a typhus epidemic and the survivors were moved to a former German military installation nearby in May 1945. Mr. Rosensaft said that he was born in that installation in 1948 and returned many times to visit.[41]
In October 2000, Rosensaft expressed his utter disillusionment with Arafat. "We believed him," Rosensaft wrote in the Washington Post, "when he said that he and the PLO were committed to a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We believed him when he proclaimed an end to terrorism. We were wrong. ... Of course the Palestinians were entitled to self-determination – even independence—but only on terms of mutual respect. The Palestinians' claims of nationhood could not stand separate and apart from their acknowledgment that Israelis are entitled to precisely the same rights. Arafat and his colleagues gave lip service to these lofty sentiments. We believed them. We were wrong. ... Perhaps, in time, the Palestinians will realize that a different leader will better serve them and their cause. Perhaps they will realize that stabbing and stomping Israeli soldiers to death and then parading their mutilated bodies in an obscene triumph is not acceptable behavior in the 21st century. Perhaps. But then, we also believe in the eventual arrival of the Messiah. In the meantime, those of us who wanted so desperately to see Arafat as a positive, constructive presence of any kind must reiterate over and over again: We were wrong."[57]
In December 2012, after Youlus had been sentenced to 51 months in jail, Rosensaft wrote told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) that, "This is extremely important because it sends a message that Holocaust deniers and Holocaust memory exploiters are not part of accepted society. There is very little if any difference between a Holocaust denier and someone like Youlus who exploits Holocaust memories in order to enrich himself."[45] Rosensaft then wrote in the New York Jewish Week that,
Twenty-one years later, on April 17, 2005, he reiterated these views in a speech at Bergen-Belsen on the 60th anniversary of its liberation. The children and grandchildren of the survivors, he declared:
In response to this sermon, Pope France wrote to Rosensaft in a personal email message that:
Rosensaft elaborated on this theme in a guest sermon at Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City on September 7, 2013, the Saturday between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, in which he concluded that as he remembered his parents on the anniversary of their death, "perhaps God did not hide His face from them after all during the years of the Shoah. Perhaps it was a divine spirit within them that enabled them to survive with their humanity intact. And perhaps it is to that God that we should be addressing our prayers during these Days of Awe and throughout the year."[26]
On complaint lodged by Menachem Z. Rosensaft, vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, the state of Maryland began investigating "Save a Torah". Having looked into the matter, state officials found that Youlus' stories "may be misleading". And, Michael P. Schlein, investigator for the Office of the Secretary of State of Maryland said: "we could probably or reasonably assume they could not be wholly accurate."