Joseph Riwash, a Nazi-hunter and authority on the Holocaust, has been asked by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to provide material for an investigation of Jim Keegstra, a former Alberta high school teacher suspended last spring for insisting in the classroom that the Holocaust never occurred.
Riwash, a Montreal resident, is the author of “Resistance and Revenge” which is compulsory reading for students of the Holocaust at McGill University and the University of Montreal. He served as an investigator with the legal department of the U.S. army in Germany from 1945-1959. His files were used in the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Keegstra, 48, taught junior and senior high school students in Eckville, a small village in northern Alberta of which he also served as Mayor. He is an official of the Social Credit Party which once espoused anti-Semitic views but has long since renounced them. He preached to his classes that the Jews are the root of all evil and contended that Jesus was not a Jew.
Keegstra was suspended by the Alberta school authorities after Eckville parents complained he was indoctrinating their children with anti-Semitic propaganda. Eckville, with a population of 900, has no Jewish residents. Efforts to remove Keegstra as Mayor failed.
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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.