The Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture has announced grants totaling more than $4.5 million to support Jewish cultural projects and to train Jewish scholars, teachers and communal workers in 33 countries.
The announcement came at the end of the foundation’s biennial meeting, which was held here last month. It was the first time the New York-based foundation convened in South America.
Jerry Hochbaum, the foundation’s executive vice president, said that “the meeting was convened in Buenos Aires so our members could learn about conditions in Latin America, where Jewish life takes place far from the critical mass of worldwide Jewry.”
Buenos Aires also was chosen so foundation members could demonstrate solidarity with Argentine Jews two years after a terrorist bombing destroyed the community’s headquarters, leaving 86 dead and more than 300 wounded.
“We set the date of this year’s meeting to coincide with the anniversary of the AMIA bombing,” Hochbaum said. Foundation members participated in the July 18 memorial ceremony here.
“We wanted to show we were with Argentine Jews, because we know that the bombing left a deep scar in the Argentine Jewish psyche,” Hochbaum added.
The foundation, an international body dedicated to advancing Jewish cultural activities worldwide, was established in 1965 with reparations from West Germany and has since allocated more than $62.5 million.
The foundation announced new projects for the next two years, including publishing interactive educational software for teaching Eastern European history in Russian; publishing a “Documentary History of the Jews of Italy”; publishing a comprehensive history of the Holocaust in Poland and Russia; and developing a multimedia curriculum for Holocaust education using CD-ROM technology.
The foundation has had a role in the publication of more than 3,000 books in 30 languages.
Other grants approved went to students and scholars from Morocco, Bosnia, South Africa, China, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Sweden and the Czech Republic.
The foundation will also finance the publication of the Steinsaltz Talmud in Russian.
At the biennial meeting, Rabbi Alexander Schindler of Westport, Conn., immediate past president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, was elected president of the foundation. He succeeds Jack Spitzer of Seattle, who was named honorary president.
The foundation announced that its first Pan-American meeting would take place in late October in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
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