Norwegian film star Liv Ullmann was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by Haifa University this week, her seventh honorary doctorate.
Ullmann pledged that “for as long as I shall earn money,” she would finance the education of an Arab student at Haifa University, and her husband Donald Saunders, who is Jewish, would finance that of a Jewish student.
Ullman dedicated the Ph.D. to the memory of Pavel Friedman, an 11-year-old Jewish boy murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Two years previously, in the Theresienstadt ghetto, he wrote a poem about a yellow butterfly which survived him.
The award-winning actress said she often read the poem at fund-raising events.
Ullmann, who portrayed Soviet Jewish activist Ida Nudel in a recent film, met with Nudel, who arrived in Israel two weeks ago. She said Nudel had asked her, in her public appearances, to alert the world to the dangers of a new phenomenon in the Soviet Union — the officially sanctioned existence of a far right-wing, promonarchist, anti-Semitic organization known as Pamyat.
The Soviet authorities point to Pamyat as an indication that they allow expressions of diverse opinion. Actually, the experts say, Pamyat is used as a safety valve to divert the criticism of the more liberal policies of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
