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These Holocaust survivors were once classmates in a DP camp. They just reunited after 76 years.
(New York Jewish Week) — The last time Michael Epstein, 87, and Abe Rosenberg, 83, were in the same room, they were in Germany, studying in a classroom in a displaced person’s camp in Bavaria after the Holocaust.
On Sunday, March 19, the two men — along with Rosenberg’s older sister, Ada Gracin, who was also in the DP camp — reunited after 76 years. This time around, it was in the social hall of Young Israel of New Hyde Park, New York, where the pair embraced, said the Shehecheyanu prayer to mark their reunion and shared their survival stories with an in-person audience of about 100.
The reunion came together quickly, just a few weeks after the two men learned they lived less than 40 miles from one another — Rosenberg in New Hyde Park, on the eastern border of Queens, and Epstein in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Originally intended to be an intimate meeting between the two families, the reunion soon broadened to a festive brunch and celebration open to the public.
“The Torah says it’s a mitzvah to relate what happened to us,” Rosenberg said. “Hitler’s goal was to destroy Yiddishkeit, Judaism. When we gather here, we are involved in a victory over him.”
Michael Epstein, Abe Rosenberg and Ada Gracin, left to right, stand together for the first time in 76 years after meeting as children living in a displaced person’s camp after the Holocaust. (Julia Gergely)
The two were brought together by a sharp-eyed videographer. In February, Epstein participated in an interview at a Jewish day school in Edison, New Jersey as part of the “Names Not Numbers” oral history project, which is dedicated to preserving the memories of Holocaust survivors and ensuring their legacies live on in future generations. As part of the project, high school students interview survivors about their experiences, which are filmed and made into mini-documentaries.
During the interview, Epstein presented a photograph of himself as a 7-year-old in “cheder” or elementary school at Feldafing, an all-Jewish displaced person’s camp near Munich, where he lived from 1945 to 1949.
As it happens, the videographer that day recognized the photograph. He had seen the same one during an interview he had filmed the prior year with another survivor — Rosenberg — who was living in Queens. When Epstein and his two daughters learned this, they knew they had to arrange a meeting.
“This is the first time I know of a reunion happening between survivors as a result of our program,” Daniel Mayer, a Names Not Numbers board member, told the New York Jewish Week.
As for Rosenberg, when he got the call from Epstein, “it just concretized the fact that the whole experience [of Feldafing] wasn’t a dream,” he said.
Though the two men did not specifically remember each other — Rosenberg was 8 and Epstein and Gracin were 11 at the time of the picture, taken in 1947 — at the event, they acutely recalled their lives at the DP camp.
Rosenberg and Epstein point themselves out in the picture of their childhood classroom, taken in 1947. (Julia Gergely)
Rosenberg, for example, remembers living in Barrack Nine with his sister and parents. During the war, the Nazis used Feldafing as a training ground for Hitler Youth. In Feldafing, like at other Jewish DP camps, survivors waiting for a country that would taken them in opened Jewish schools, started newspapers, composed music and began to rebuild their identities.
“We were hoping to go to Palestine, to Eretz Yisroel — that was our dream,” Rosenberg said. “It was not available to us” under the British Mandate. “Unfortunately, the doors of the whole world were closed to us.”
“So what did we do?” he continued. “We started to build on Jewish life again.”
On Sunday, as the assembled crowd noshed on bagels, lox and egg salad — and other participants joined via Zoom from California, Florida, New Jersey and Canada — Epstein, Rosenberg and Gracin shared their experiences with those in attendance.
First to speak was Epstein, who brought with him a scrapbook of pictures from his childhood. Epstein was born in Łódź, Poland, in 1935, which his family was forced to flee when Germany invaded in 1939. They went to Bialystok, which soon fell under the control of the Russians, who transported Poles and Jews to labor camps in Siberia via cattle cars. After spending time at a gulag camp in Siberia, Epstein and his family were moved to another in Uzbekistan.
When the war ended, Epstein and his parents returned to Łódź, only to find that their entire extended family had been killed and a Polish family was living in their apartment. With nothing left for them in Poland, they left for Feldafing. They lived there until they could find a way to get to the United States, where they eventually arrived in 1945.
Epstein, who is known as Zayde to his 11 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren — many of whom were in the room — left the crowd with a message to invest in Jewish education, and to work to uphold democracy. “We live in ‘di Goldene Medine’ (the Golden Land),” he said. “We thought, in Europe, that meant there was gold on the street. There’s no gold on the street but there is gold on paper in our Constitution, and in our Constitution there is still mining to do. There is still work to be done to make our Constitution’s morals realistic.”
The family of Michael Epstein gathered from New York and New Jersey to celebrate his life story. Epstein, second from the right in the front row, is holding one of his five great-grandchildren. (Julia Gergely)
Rosenberg and Gracin, who spoke next, were also from Łódź. Gracin, born Ada Rosen in 1935, recalled wearing the mandated yellow Jewish star patch on her clothing as a 4-year-old. Her mother was pregnant with her brother when they left Poland for Soviet Georgia, a journey she said was “fraught with peril,” as they were stopped multiple times by the Gestapo. The family lived in Georgia for six years and “fear was a constant.”
When the war ended, the family also returned to Łódź to look for surviving family members — there were none. They connected with the Jewish Agency and HIAS, which helped them get to Feldafing in 1945.
There, “we were referred to as ‘she’arit hapletah,’ the surviving remnants,” Gracin said. “I refer to this period in my life as ‘life reborn,’ as I lost my childhood prior to this. Although we lacked many things, I never felt deprived. The survivors cherished each child as if it were their own. We were precious jewels to them, as they had lost their own children.”
“For the first time in my life, I went to school, made friends, played and laughed,” she added. “I was a happy 9 year old.”
Gracin, her brother and her parents arrived in New York Harbor on April 6, 1949. “At last we were free of fear, free to live and practice our religion and thrive,” she said. “I feel blessed to have been given this chapter in my life and my revenge to Hitler is that I was blessed with three children and six grandchildren.” Two of Gracin’s children and four of her grandchildren were at the event.
In his remarks, Rosenberg recalled the heroism of the parents, teachers and rabbis in Feldafing, many of whom had lost their entire families but made it their mission to educate the few children who made it to the camp. “They were the heroes,” Rosenberg said. “They deserve the accolades — we were kids.” It is in their honor and memory that Rosenberg continued to share his story throughout his life, he said.
Though Epstein and Rosenberg did not stay in touch upon their respective arrivals to the United States, their lives continued to follow similar paths. Both went on to study engineering at the City College of New York and for a time both worked at Bendix Corporation, though in different departments — Epstein in the space program and Rosenberg on the supersonic transport team.
Congregants and community members brunched on bagels and listened to the survival stories in the social hall of Young Israel of New Hyde Park. (Julia Gergely)
Chuck Waxman, a docent at the Museum of Jewish Heritage who moderated the discussion, told the New York Jewish Week he was “blown away” by the event — he said he expected less than half the room to be filled.
But full it was, with family, friends, community members and other survivors who wanted to be a part of the miracle — both the miracle that happened in Feldafing and the miracle of the reunion in Queens.
The event also included speeches from Mayer Waxman, executive director of Queens JCC and Torah commentaries from Lawrence Teitelman, the rabbi of Young Israel of New Hyde Park, where Rosenberg is a member, and Benjamin Yudin, the rabbi of Congregation Shomrei Torah in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, where Epstein is a member.
At the close of the event, the lyrics of “Zog nit keynmol,” the “Song of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising” — which was sung by Jewish partisan groups around Eastern Europe — were passed in sheets around the room. Rosenberg heartily led everyone in Yiddish.
“We plan to meet again in another 76 years,” Rosenberg joked to the New York Jewish Week. “Everyone is invited.”
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The post These Holocaust survivors were once classmates in a DP camp. They just reunited after 76 years. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Why this Zionist Israeli is running with an Islamist party
(JTA) — KIBBUTZ EIN HAHORESH, Israel – He’s been called a “terror supporter” and a “traitor,” and even accused of devious steps to enable Islamists to “infiltrate” Israel’s next government. But Yoav Segalovitz, the Jewish parliamentarian who recently broke strict taboos by teaming up with an Arab Islamist party, is unperturbed.
“There are always crazy people, and it doesn’t matter what they say on television; I think when you’ve chosen your path, you just have to ignore it all,” he said in a recent interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
It has been just over a month since Segalovitz, 67, a veteran member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, made his unprecedented decision to leave the centrist Yesh Atid party for Ra’am, an Arab-Israeli party with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, in the hopes of bridging the gap between Jews and Arabs in Israel.
“Are all the old patterns going to change in the coming month? Absolutely not,” Segalovitz, a former deputy minister for public security and a former police investigator, said. “But I’m thinking long term, not just about these particular elections. From my perspective, this is a long-term story. It’s not about the here and now.”
At a recent campaign event in the well-worn communal dining room of Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, an agricultural community in the Emek Hefer region of central Israel, Segalovitz explained to a group of around 80 Jewish voters why he made the radical decision as a self-declared Zionist to team up with an Islamist party.
“I wanted to have an impact,” he said, describing how he knew it would somehow be related to the Arab community in Israel that makes up around 21% of the total population.
“I knew I wanted to break down the paradigms that exist; I wanted to cross the bridge; the only question was how I could do this,” Segalovitz said, speaking to the small crowd of kibbutz members and residents of the surrounding communities.
Microphone in hand, the neatly dressed former police officer described how, when tensions were high and societal divisions deeper than ever during the final days of the previous Knesset, he asked himself how he could make a meaningful difference in Israeli society.
Segalovitz said that at first he considered creating a brand new joint Israeli-Arab party. But he quickly realized that he could make greater change by joining forces with Ra’am, an Arab party whose leader, Mansour Abbas, is already known for his own paradigm-breaking political moves.
Abbas, a deeply religious conservative Muslim who, in his own words, identifies as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, was the first Arab party leader to join an Israeli government, breaking deep-rooted taboos in his own community. In 2021, his bold move to join former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in a ruling coalition helped to briefly oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from power.
While the move signaled an unprecedented shift in Israeli politics, it was also fraught with tension and ultimately proved to be deeply unpopular with much of the Israeli public and some in the Arab community. Ultimately, Ra’am’s inclusion in the Bennett-Lapid government was one of the factors that led to its rapid downfall.
If including an Arab party in the government was controversial before Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, today it is close to unthinkable. In the run-up to the Oct. 27 election, most predominantly Jewish parties have avoided saying publicly that they would consider including Ra’am, or any other Arab party, in a future coalition. And, beyond Ra’am, the other Arab party – the Joint List – remains emphatically against any such alliance.
But recent polls suggest that bringing Arab parties into a governing alliance could be the only way to secure the parliamentary majority needed to form a new government. With Segalovitz now running on Ra’am’s list, such a prospect may be slightly more realistic.
However, the challenges of reaching such an arrangement were evident at the recent Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh meeting.
An aging audience of casually dressed kibbutzniks sauntered into the sparse hall curious to hear Segalovitz’s story. They gave him a warm and polite reception, and grilled him with questions after listening to him speak. But most said they were not swayed to vote for him.
“He’s very brave for doing what he did,” said Elie Aloni, 80, a resident of nearby Beit Herut. But she continued to say that she would not vote for Ra’am because she’s already committed to the left-wing Democrats Party.
Aloni said her party’s leader, Yair Golan, had already stated that he wanted to see Ra’am join the government, and she hoped that would happen. She was also hopeful that having an Israeli Jew on Ra’am’s list would make it easier for the party to be included in the next coalition.
But she acknowledged that, after Oct. 7, including Arab parties in a government could prove difficult.
“I’m a peace activist, but even I have become disillusioned,” she said. “After Oct. 7, it has become more difficult to trust the Arabs. But they are not going to disappear, and neither are we.”
Segalovitz knows that his support is unlikely to come from Jewish voters. Instead, he has been focusing on reaching the Arab community and encouraging them to exercise their democratic rights.
Since joining Ra’am in early September, he has traveled around the country to address Arabic-speaking audiences – Muslims, Christians and Druze – about why he joined the party and what he hopes to achieve. The meetings are conducted in Hebrew because, as he admits, he does not speak a word of Arabic.
Segalovitz told JTA that despite the cold reception, including some outright attacks, from Israeli Jews, the Arab community has overwhelmingly embraced him – even though there is some skepticism.
Michael Milshtein, head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, who has researched political trends in Israel’s Arab community for years, called Segalovitz’s decision to join Ra’am “pioneering.”
However, he noted that the Jewish MK has also faced attacks from within the Arab community from those who struggle to accept an openly Zionist Israeli joining their political ranks.
Although there are some Jewish Israeli members of Arab parties, namely the communist-leaning Hadash, they often identify as anti-Zionist. Segalovitz’s arrangement with Abbas is slightly different. He has not formally joined the Islamist party but rather forged an agreement whereby he will retain the freedom to vote independently on issues including religion and state, national security and LGBTQ rights.
“His move is revolutionary; he is not a post-Zionist or an anti-Zionist like some Jewish members of Hadash,” Milshtein said. “He [Segalovitz] is creating connections with a traditional religious party and it’s just bizarre.”
Segalovitz’s presence in Ra’am, which emerged from the southern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, historically linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, has also prompted questions across the Arab world about how Abbas can continue to be associated with the movement that also includes more extreme groups such as Hamas, Milshtein said.
But Milshtein said the two men were “pioneering” in much the same way.
“It’s kind of a mirror: Mansour breaks all kinds of taboos, and so does Segalovitz,” he said, adding that many Jews respected Segalovitz, and even supported his decision, “even if they won’t end up voting for him.”
Ra’am’s changes started in the 1990s when Israel’s Islamic Movement split into two, enabling the southern branch, the political home of Ra’am, to seek political engagement with state institutions as a way to make changes within the community. Abbas’s ascent to the leadership brought Ra’am’s current goals into even sharper focus.
Abbas, 52, a dentist by training, succeeded in breaking the party’s organizational ties with the religious leadership, allowing it to work even more harmoniously with institutions in Israel and focus on improving life for the country’s Arab citizens.
At this point in Ra’am’s history, Segalovitz’s arrival could be a significant political asset. The party’s focus is on improving life for Israel’s Arab community, and Segalovitz brings experience tackling violent and organized crime, one of the sector’s most pressing concerns.
As head of the Israel Police’s Investigations Unit from 2009 to 2013, and as deputy public security minister from 2021 to 2022, Segalovitz focused on violent crime. As deputy minister, he headed a government program aimed at addressing violent crime, successfully reducing homicides in the Arab sector by some 16%, the lowest level since 2014.
After Netanyahu’s return to office in 2022, Segalovitz’s program was scrapped. Since then, the murder rate has soared, with organized crime reaching beyond the Arab community. According to statistics compiled by the Abraham Initiatives, the number of murders in the Arab sector more than doubled between 2022 and 2025, rising from 116 to 252.
“Today, Israel has similar crime rates to those in South American countries,” said Segalovitz, referring to the organized crime that has been surging in the Arab community. He pointed the finger at Netanyahu and his government for failing to address deeper social and economic problems in Arab society.
Segalovitz is also a firm believer in some type of national community service for the Arab sector, akin to the mandatory military service most Jewish Israelis must undertake.
“Arabs make up 21% of Israel’s population,” Segalovitz said. “They are involved in every area of daily life in Israel, in medicine, economics, education and more. We live together with one another, and we need to decide how to manage a future partnership.”
“Our future does not allow us not to work in partnership with each other,” he said. “We have partnerships in all areas of life, except in politics.”
While running with Ra’am is his way of trying to change that, Segalovitz is under no illusion that his efforts will translate into votes. Instead, he sees his candidacy as a small first step toward a longer-term shift in Israeli politics.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Why this Zionist Israeli is running with an Islamist party appeared first on The Forward.
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From Holocaust survivor to Nazi hunter to Entebbe hero
(JTA) — When Boaz Dvir flew from the United States to Israel in late September to screen his new film, “To Kill a Nazi,” he didn’t expect its story to become newly relevant. But just as Dvir arrived, the thwarting of an apparent hijacking of a flydubai flight bound for Israel offered an uncanny echo of the history his film recounts.
The film tells the largely overlooked story of Michel Cojot, a French Jewish Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter who helped fellow hostages during the Entebbe hostage crisis and later provided intelligence that aided the Israeli rescue mission. For Dvir, the timing was striking.
“As I’m driving around, what do I hear?” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Somebody tried to hijack a plane from Dubai to Israel and do a 9/11 type of terrorist attack? And the passengers saved the day? Ordinary guys?
“And of course, people brought it up everywhere I went, because the parallels are uncanny.”
Michel Goldberg was born in Paris in 1938. After the Nazis invaded, his father Joseph Goldberg was captured and sent to Auschwitz, where he was killed. According to his 1982 memoir “Namesake,” Michel was raised in France’s so-called “free zone,” which the Nazis would also occupy starting in 1942, and took his last name from his stepfather after his mother remarried.
Growing up to become a successful banker, Michel teamed with the famed Nazi-hunting couple Beate and Serge Klarsfeld and in 1975, while working in South America, embarked on a plot to find and kill Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo commander who had signed the arrest papers for Cojot’s father, and who was at that point hiding out in Bolivia.
Posing as a journalist, an armed Cojot met the “Butcher of Lyon,” but given the opportunity, Cojot failed to pull the trigger. In his memoir he writes that Barbie instead deserved to live in constant fear of reprisal, and that murder was a “Nazi” solution.
The year after his mission to Bolivia, Cojot and his son were on the fateful Air France flight that, bound from Tel Aviv to France, was hijacked by Palestinian terrorists and West German far-left radicals, with 102 Israelis on board. It led to the standoff at Entebbe International Airport in Uganda and the heroic rescue by Israeli commandos.
During the seven-day crisis, Cojot acted as a translator and go-between among the hijackers and passengers. When the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin spoke to the hostages, Cojot translated his English into French. He was even credited with persuading the lead hijacker, Wilfried Böse, to release the non-Israeli hostages. After his release, Cojot provided information to Mossad, including the layout of where the hostages were being held, which greatly assisted the Operation Thunderbolt rescue mission.
Cojot went on to write a book about Barbie’s crimes, and then testified in Barbie’s war crimes trial in the late 1980s. Barbie was sentenced to life in prison; he died of cancer in 1991. Cojot himself passed away in 1999. While the story of Entebbe is very well-known, Cojot’s role in it has often been left out of such tellings. None of the feature films about the rescue, most recently 2018’s “7 Days in Entebbe,” include him as a major character.
Divir hopes to give the forgotten hero the recognition he deserves. The grandson of Holocaust survivors who was born in Petah Tikva a few weeks after the Six-Day War in 1967, the filmmaker remembers the weeklong Entebbe crisis. He was nine years old then.
“I was like most Israeli kids at the time, outside most of the day and playing,” Dvir said. “But my brother and I, who was a year younger, decided that in solidarity with the hostages, we’re gonna ground ourselves, and so we did for that whole week.”
At the end of the week, he remembers his father waking him up and telling him, “The IDF did it.”
“We knew immediately what he meant, and of course we were thrilled for everybody, the released hostages, the military, but we’re also happy to be able to go outside again,” said Dvir.
While histories of the Entebbe affair omitted the actions of Michel Cojot, another Frenchman, pilot Michel Bacos, has often been recognized as a hero of the affair for having refused to be freed in the first release of the hostages. Most obituaries of Bacos, who died in 2019 at age 95, included this.
In fact, Dvir originally planned to make a documentary about Bacos. However, his research, including an interview with Bacos himself, led Dvir, a journalist and journalism professor at Penn State, to doubt Bacos’ version of the events.
But those former hostages kept mentioning another Michel, a genuine hero. “The story that I knew so well, Operation Thunderbolt, that I grew up with, now suddenly took on a whole new meaning,” Dvir said.
The film includes interviews with all four of Cojot’s children, including his son Olivier, who was with him in Entebbe, along with hostages and experts; Cojot himself appears in archival footage.
Dvir also composed the film’s music, which Penn State musicians perform on the soundtrack.
Dvir worked on the project for nearly a decade, even presenting it publicly as a work in progress as early as 2018.
“This project took a lot longer than most of my projects,” the director said.
A familiar voice narrates the film: Jason Alexander, the Jewish actor best known for “Seinfeld.” Dvir’s manager and business partner is a friend of Alexander’s, who agreed to narrate after viewing a rough cut.
“To Kill a Nazi” premiered at the Dances With Films festival in June. It has also screened at the Nashville Jewish Film Festival and the Croatian International Film Festival, and premiered in New York City on Oct. 16 at Regal Battery Park as part of the Chelsea Film Festival.
It’s also set to play the Austin Film Festival at the Boulder Jewish Film Festival, and the Silicon Valley Jewish Film Festival on Oct. 29; at the Galaxy Theatre in Austin, Texas on Oct. 31; and at the Harrisburg Jewish Film Festival on Nov. 12. Dvir hopes it will be picked up by a streaming service.
Some Jewish and Israeli filmmakers, especially since Oct. 7, have complained that they’ve had difficulty getting their films into festivals.
Dvir said that while “To Kill a Nazi” is “doing very, very well” and has been accepted to film festivals both Jewish and non-Jewish, “it’s been a little more of an effort than I’m used to putting in.”
“I don’t have any proof for it, but my sense is that there are some film festivals to which we submitted that may not have even really watched it or given it a fair shot,” said Dvir, who denounced the apparent boycotts of other films and artists. “At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter. Because we can only do so many film festivals anyway. I’m very happy with what we got.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post From Holocaust survivor to Nazi hunter to Entebbe hero appeared first on The Forward.
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Michigan’s El-Sayed doubles down: Israel ‘not an ally’
(JTA) — Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, is doubling down on his view that Israel is not a U.S. ally as the Nov. 3 midterm elections draw closer.
El-Sayed, a vocal critic of Israel who faces former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in one of the country’s most competitive Senate races, told ABC News on Monday that Israel is “not actually our friend.”
“An ally that takes your money to push you into wars you shouldn’t be fighting is not an ally,” said El-Sayed, referencing Israel’s reported lobbying of the United States to enter into a war with Iran.
He compared Israel with a friend who “keeps bumming off [your kid’s] money” and “talks about them behind their back and then gets them into fights with other friends.”
“What would you tell your kid to do with that friend? You’d probably tell them, maybe it’s not actually your friend,” he said.
El-Sayed made similar remarks in an interview with MS NOW on Thursday, saying that “the government of Israel has done nothing but use us” and “has done terrible things with our money.”
He added that he would continue to question whether Israel was an ally regardless of the outcome of Israel’s election on Oct. 27, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has served as Israel’s leader for most of the past 18 years, seeks another term.
“Netanyahu is one part of it, but the Israeli military has done heinous things, like heinous things, full war crimes, genocide,” said El-Sayed. “So I think we got to just get serious about whether or not we as a country should be subsidizing that government.”
El-Sayed previously affirmed that he does not consider Israel an ally to the United States in his first bitter debate with Rogers on Oct. 8. The candidates will meet for a final debate on Wednesday.
He told MS NOW that he was “committed to the safety and security” of Jewish voters, some of whom have pressured him to moderate his views on Israel. “Now, we may have differences when it comes to Israel, but the things that unite us are a lot bigger,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Michigan’s El-Sayed doubles down: Israel ‘not an ally’ appeared first on The Forward.
