Kerry's Jewish grandfather: various EU locations want credit!

[papau]

http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2004/Art/0219/news3.php

German statements spark debate over U.S. candidate's background

By Kevin Livingston Staff Writer, The Prague Post
(February 19, 2004)


It seems that everyone wants a piece of American Democratic Party presidential front-runner John F. Kerry these days. <snip>

Their interest stems from the tracing of Kerry's roots back to the once-prosperous mining town. It was in Horni Benesov that his Jewish grandfather, Fritz Kohn, worked as a brewer before emigrating to America, converting to Catholicism and changing his name at the beginning of the last century, according to a genealogical study carried out last year by the Boston Globe. <snip>

The Sudeten claims to Kerry first surfaced in the Sudetenpost, a twice-monthly publication that says it presents the "real truth about the brutal treatment of the Sudeten Germans by the Czechs." The paper, which is the official mouthpiece of the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft, reported that although Kohn, who later changed his name to Frederick Kerry, was born in Bohemia into a Jewish family, he was German by origin. "The future president might really be a Sudeten German," the paper wrote.

The paper based its findings on information that in 1873, when Kohn was born, 100 percent of the people living around Horni Benesov were German. Neither Bernd Posselt, a German member of the European Parliament and head of the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft, nor Peter Barton, the head of the group's office in Prague, could be reached for comment about the claims.<snip>



Jennifer Anne Perez, a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, is now an international freelance journalist based in Prague, and is the writer of an article that is in an email making the rounds, and quoted below.- I do not have a link - it is a very, very long article, so this excerpt is also a bit long due to the lack of a link.

Subject: fascinating info about John Kerry's Jewish ancestry
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 16:02:41 -0600

A JEWISH CZECH IN JOHN KERRY'S COURT
by Jennifer Anne Perez

The saga of a U.S. senator and presidential contender in search of his roots--and his reaction to the "revelation." Seven years ago, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was confronted with a genealogical discovery: her Czech Ã(c)migrÃ(c) parents were Jewish. They'd hidden their Jewish roots during and after the Second World War. More than a dozen of her Jewish relatives, including three grandparents, an aunt, an uncle and a first cousin, had all perished in the Nazi concentration camps. Albright has been reluctant to comment on the discovery, telling the Washington Post, "I have to look into this myself...it's a very personal matter."

A similar revelation occurred on February 2, 2003, when the Boston Globe reported that Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, thought by many to be a "Boston Brahmin" of Irish-Catholic ancestry, was the grandson of Czech immigrants who also had concealed their Jewish heritage.The story begins in the hamlet of Horni Benesov on the tenth of May 1873--the day Benedikt and Mathilde Kohn had a son they named Fritz. Like his father, Fritz became a simple brewer. Yet it was difficult for him to succeed in an area dominated by German-speaking Catholics. Many Jews hid their religious identity, posing as Gentiles. "It was easier to do business as a Christian," says Prague-based genealogist Julius Miller, who specializes in tracing Jewish lineage. "Many Jews just stopped practicing Judaism during this period and had no belief at all." On March 17, 1902, shortly before his 30th birthday, Fritz took his wifeIda and infant son Erich to a government office in Vienna and changedtheir family name. Fritz Kohn would henceforth be known as Frederick Kerry.<snip>


Ellis Island records note that upon boarding the ship, Kerry identified his family as Germans from Austria, their former place of residence as Vienna. By the time the ship arrived in New York City on May 18, 1905, Frederick Kerry had left his Jewish heritage behind. A 1920 census records of the Kerry household...Frederick and Ida had been practicing Catholics for nearly twenty years, and by all accounts were regarded as devout in their faith.<snip>

The Kerrys' youngest child, Richard, would also achieve success, but unlike his father, would sustain it. He served as an Army pilot during World War II; married Rosemary Forbes, a descendant of two wealthy Massachusetts families, the Forbes and the Winthrops; and became a U.S. diplomat, holding posts in Oslo, Berlin, and Paris. Richard and Rosemary's first son, John Forbes Kerry, was born on December 11,1943 <snip>

...while Bush lived the fraternity life, Kerry, an admirer of John F. Kennedy, found his niche in politics and became president of the Yale Political Union, a nonpartisan group providing a forum for a wide range of political debate. Upon graduation in 1966, he joined the Navy to fight in Vietnam. <snip>

In the late 1980s Kerry learned from a relative that his grandmother Ida had been born Jewish--a surprising revelation, as he had remembered her as a zealous Catholic. But he knew virtually nothing about his paternal grandfather, Frederick. John Kerry's constituency assumed that, with his father's name and his mother's lineage, the senator was a full-blooded Irish Catholic. Even his hometown newspaper, the Boston Globe, regularly made the mistake, despite Kerry's repeated attempts to set the record straight. During a 1993 interview with TV host John McLaughlin, Kerry addressed the incorrect presumption that his father was Irish by stating that his grandfather was Austrian and that his grandmother had been born Jewish. He added: "We're still trying to find all the details." And try he did. Once, while on a visit to Europe, he stopped off in Vienna and called every Kerry in the phone book.! And in 2002, his office contacted the regional Czech archives, which, he would later discover, actually possessed information on Fritz Kohn's birth, but the senator never received a reply--two years earlier the bureau had stopped conducting searches for foreigners.<snip>

Richard Kerry died in 2000. He never revealed that his father had been a Jew. Born in the United States and only 5 years old when Frederick died, it is likely that Richard did not know of his grandfather's hidden past.

Stibor told Gundacker that on June 20, 2002 he had received an unusual inquiry--a letter in English from a certain "Samuel C" which carried the seal of a high-ranking Washington, D.C. official. The mysterious letter noted that John Kerry was a candidate for president (though the senator had yet to! publicly announce his intention to run) and inquired about a man named "Fritz Cohn." Stibor knew he couldn't be of assistance; the archives had stopped processing foreign requests several years earlier. <snip>

Over time, the entire town--except for the Catholic chapel, parish, and church--has been completely rebuilt. An unremarkable box-shaped apartment building now sits on the lot where Kohn's house once stood. Gone is the small Jewish cemetery where Kohn's parents Benedikt and Mathilde were likely buried. In place of the Kohn brewery there is a public sauna advertising discount rates to local residents.<snip>

[papau]

1. has anyone found a link to the Jennifer Anne Perez research?

I'd like to cut back on the size of this post.

thanks