NEW YORK, Sept 24, 2007 (AFP) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday rejected accusations that he has denied the Holocaust actually happened, while arguing for more research to be conducted on the subject.

'I'm not saying that it didn't happen at all,' Ahmadinejad said when questioned during an appearance at New York's Columbia University on comments he has made in the past over the mass killing of the Jews during World War II.

WASHINGTON, Sept 20, 2007 (AFP) - A judge stripped US citizenship from a Romanian-born man who worked as a Nazi death camp guard in Germany during World War II, and barred him from returning to the United States, authorities said on Thursday.

Martin Hartmann, 88, 'acknowledged that by serving as an armed SS guard of civilian prisoners he personally assisted in Nazi-directed persecution,' the US Justice Department said in a statement.

ROME, Sept 18, 2007 (AFP) - A Holocaust memorial is to be installed on a platform at Milan's central railway station where hundreds of Jews boarded trains destined for the gas chambers of Auschwitz, the Italian railway said Tuesday.

The memorial, which will take two years to build, will aim 'to create a space open to dialogue, debate and confrontation among different opinions,' the national railway said in a communique.

TORONTO, Sept 6, 2007 (AFP) - The 32nd Toronto International Film Festival opened Thursday with a cautionary tale about the lasting impact of deeds, good or bad, through the eyes of a boy suffering from Holocaust survivor guilt.

On the red carpet, moviegoers screamed for Canadian filmmaker Jeremy Podeswa, the son of a Holocaust survivor himself, whose gala presentation 'Fugitive Pieces' is based on Anne Michaels' 1997 award-winning novel.

ZAGREB, Sept 2, 2007 (AFP) - A leading Nazi-hunter organisation on Sunday slammed Croatia over its failure to prosecute a World War II official suspected of war crimes who has taken refuge in Argentina.

'Croatia's failure to prosecute Ivo Rojnica, the Ustashe governor of Dubrovnik, currently residing in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is one of the most disappointing results of the period under review,' said Efraim Zurrof, Israel director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, in a statement.

BERLIN, Aug 31, 2007 (AFP) - Germany's biggest synagogue reopened Friday after a major restoration, in a defiant symbol of the rebirth of Jewish life in the city where the Nazis planned the Holocaust.

A special ceremony was held at the century-old, red-brick building in east Berlin which narrowly avoided being destroyed on Kristallnacht -- the night in 1938 when Adolf Hitler's followers torched Jewish homes, businesses and places of worship.

BERLIN, Aug 29, 2007 (AFP) - German rabbi Leo Trepp has seen his share of the horrors and glories of modern history in his 94 years. But he reserves the word 'miracle' for the reopening of Germany's biggest synagogue Friday.

The stunning red-brick house of worship on Rykestrasse in the heart of trendy east Berlin district Prenzlauer Berg is an architectural landmark and a defiant symbol of Hitler's failed attempt to wipe out European Jewry.

JERUSALEM, Aug 15, 2007 (AFP) - Israel's government watchdog on Wednesday issued a report slamming the state's assistance to hundreds of thousands of elderly Holocaust survivors living in the Jewish state.

State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss's report came amid intensive talks between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and representatives of the Holocaust survivors on revising state aid following weeks of high-profile protest.

JERUSALEM, Aug 8, 2007 (AFP) - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Wednesday met a delegation of Holocaust survivors to discuss a revision of state aid following protests that planned payments were 'insulting.'

The talks came after several dozen survivors, accompanied by several hundred mostly youthful supporters, staged a demonstration on Sunday slamming the amount of planned state aid.

Olmert's office said last week that from 2008, the government would begin paying grants to the estimated 120,000 needy survivors over 70 years old living in Israel.

BERLIN, Aug 7, 2007 (AFP) - Berlin's sprawling Holocaust memorial is showing signs of structural damage just two years after it opened which could lead to major repair costs, its sponsors said Tuesday.

The managing director of the Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Uwe Neumaerker, said 393 of the more than 2,700 gray concrete blocks comprising the monument showed cracks that had to be filled.

'We have ordered a full report on what is causing the damage,' he told AFP.

'We hope we can manage to have them fixed by the winter.'

BERLIN, Aug 6, 2007 (AFP) - One of Germany's most prominent Holocaust survivors, Anja Lundholm, whose books recounted the horrors she experienced in a Nazi camp after she was allegedly denounced by her own father, has died aged 89, her publisher said Monday.

The Munich-based publishing house LangenMueller said Lundholm died Saturday in Frankfurt. It did not release the cause of death.

JERUSALEM, Aug 5, 2007 (AFP) - Bent with age and many leaning on canes, Israeli Holocaust survivors rallied in front of government offices in Jerusalem on Sunday to protest against 'insulting' state aid announced last week.

A few dozen survivors, accompanied by hundreds of mostly youthful supporters, walked from parliament to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office nearby, slamming the financial assistance the government plans to pay them.

'We are demanding the right to finish our days decently,' said Yosef Charnyi, 82, a survivor of the Treblinka death camp.

JERUSALEM, Aug 5, 2007 (AFP) - Israeli Holocaust survivors were to rally on Sunday in protest of what they consider paltry state aid, with controversy swirling over their planned use of yellow Stars of David and prison garb.

Holocaust survivor organisations called for the afternoon demonstration in front of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office after the government announced last week the amount of state aid to be paid to the victims.

WARSAW, July 31, 2007 (AFP) - A group of Orthodox Jews from Israel broke in Tuesday to the former Nazi extermination camp of Majdanek in eastern Poland, police said.

Security guards at the camp, now a musuem, called the management and the police when the 33 Orthodox Jews penetrated the camp on Tuesday afternoon after the end of visiting hours.

'They forced open two gates that lead to the army barracks of the former Nazi camp,' a police spokeswoman at the nearby town of Lublin, Anna Smazak, told AFP.

JERUSALEM, July 29, 2007 (AFP) - Israel will provide millions of dollars in financial aid to aged and needy Holocaust survivors beginning next year, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said on Monday.

For three years beginning in 2008, the government would allocate 'financial grants to the approximately 120,000 Holocaust survivors over 70 who receive... pensions and income support payments,' it said in a statement.

JERUSALEM, July 29, 2007 (AFP) - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday promised to provide state funds to needy Holocaust survivors, amid criticism over the Jewish state's foot-dragging on the issue.

'We have defined the criteria to distribute hundreds of millions of shekels to Holocaust survivors so that each one of them can live decently,' he said during the weekly cabinet meeting.

The ministries of finance, social affairs and pensioners will sign an accord cementing these criteria on Monday, he said.