Uncategorized
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.”
—
The post These Holocaust survivors were once classmates in a DP camp. They just reunited after 76 years. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
US ambassador demands that Belgium drop ‘ridiculous and anti semitic’ investigation of mohels
(JTA) — The U.S. ambassador to Belgium is demanding that Belgium end an investigation into mohels who may have been using unsafe practices while circumcising Jewish babies.
Bill White made the demand, an unusual intervention into another country’s domestic affairs, in a post on X on Monday directed toward Belgium’s minister of health.
“To the (very rude) Belgian Minister of Health FRANK VANENBROUCKE; You must make a legal provision to allow Jewish religious MOHELS to perform their duties here in Belgium. It’s done in all civilized counties as legal procedure,” White tweeted. “BELGIUM is a civilized country. Stop this unacceptable harassment of the Jewish community here in Antwerp and in Belgium. It’s 2026, you need to get into the 21st century and allow our brethren Jewish families in Belgium to legally execute their religious freedoms!”
White is a longtime advocate for veterans who became a Republican after Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016. He was confirmed as the ambassador to Belgium last fall despite criticism that he had amplified social media posts by Dries Van Langenhove, a far-right Belgian political activist had recently been sentenced to prison after being convicted of racism and Holocaust denial.
White’s post comes nearly a year after Belgian authorities raided multiple sites, including two in Antwerp’s Jewish Quarter, at the outset of an investigation into illegal circumcisions.
In Belgium, the law requires all circumcisions to be performed by licensed medical professionals. The country has a track record of limiting religious exemptions in laws: In 2024, Europe’s top court upheld a ban in most of the country against kosher slaughter, which its critics contend is inhumane to animals.
Belgian media reported that the Antwerp raids stemmed from a complaint made by a member of the Jewish community. In 2024, Moshe Friedman, a local rabbi, filed a police complaint against six mohels who practice metzitzah b’peh, a custom in which the circumciser cleans the circumcision wound with oral suction.
The custom, which can risk infecting infants with dangerous diseases, is practiced only in haredi Orthodox communities such as the substantial one in Antwerp. Several years ago, a number of babies in New York City were infected with herpes via metzitzah b’peh.
White’s X post, which he said was on behalf of Trump and a slew of administration officials, said three mohels were facing “RIDICULOUS AND ANTI SEMITIC ‘PROSECUTION,’” which he said must be dropped immediately to preserve the U.S.-Belgian relationship.
White alleged that Vanenbroucke had told him that he intended to avoid intervening in the case, calling it a “sneaky tactic.” Vanenbroucke and other Belgian officials did not immediately respond publicly to White’s post.
White said he would be traveling to Antwerp to meet with the mohels next week. “Frank you and Conner Rousseau should come with me!” White tweeted, referring to a Flemish politician with no public connection to the investigation. “It’s disgusting what’s happened to these fine men and their families because of your inaction. Thank you for your immediate attention to this matter!”
The mohel raids in Antwerp follow the arrest in 2024 in Ireland of a British rabbi suspected of performing circumcisions illegally. There, the law requiring a medical license to perform circumcisions includes an exemption for circumcisions performed for religious reasons — but the rabbi was alleged to have circumcised babies who were not Jewish. The prosecution in that case is reportedly ongoing.
The Trump administration says it aims to defend religious freedom around the world, and its ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has called attention to what he alleges is poor treatment of Christians there. Meanwhile, a Catholic member of Trump’s new domestic Religious Liberty Commission was removed last week after using a public hearing to attack Israel and press the case that opposition to Israel is not antisemitic.
The post US ambassador demands that Belgium drop ‘ridiculous and anti semitic’ investigation of mohels appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Spike Lee, Kyrie Irving wear pro-Palestinian outfits to NBA All-Star Game featuring first Israeli player
(JTA) — Deni Avdija scored five points and made four assists and one dunk in his first NBA All-Star Game — the first All-Star appearance ever for an Israeli player.
But while Avdija’s Team World squad fell short against the league’s top American players, his appearance continued to generate excitement for Israelis, who have viewed his success on the court as a matter of national pride.
Avdija’s jersey featured an Israeli flag on the back, in keeping with the uniform for Team World.
“I feel like when I come to play, I come with the entire nation, and it’s fun to show that it’s possible, even for a small country like us,” he said during a postgame press conference, in which most questions were asked and answered in Hebrew.
Lebron James, too, was asked by an Israeli reporter about Avdija’s performance and about Israel during his own postgame availability.
“I hope I inspire people over there not only to be great in sports, but to be better in general in life,” James said. “Hopefully, someday I could make it over there. Like I said, I’ve never been over there, but I’ve heard nothing but great things. I appreciate the question.”
Some cultural events featuring prominent Israelis since the start of the war in Gaza have been subject to anti-Israel demonstrations. There were no disruptions at the All-Star Game, but two prominent fans wore outfits designed to show pro-Palestinian solidarity.
The filmmaker Spike Lee wore a Palestinian flag-inspired outfit, with a keffiyeh-patterned sweater and flag badges on his bag strap.
The basketball player Kyrie Irving, meanwhile, wore a T-shirt that said “PRESS” on the front. The shirt, produced by the company Wear the Peace, says inside that it is “dedicated to our beloved journalists in Gaza showing the world the truth.” Irving had previously worn the shirt to another NBA game.
Irving, who was not playing in the All-Star Game, was traded to the Dallas Mavericks from the Brooklyn Nets in 2023 shortly after promoting an antisemitic film on his Twitter account and at first refusing to apologize for the tweet.
The post Spike Lee, Kyrie Irving wear pro-Palestinian outfits to NBA All-Star Game featuring first Israeli player appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
As the last generation of Holocaust survivors die, is AI the future of Holocaust education?
At a Brooklyn synagogue on a recent Monday afternoon, a video of Holocaust survivor Sonia Warshawski played on a two-foot-tall box. Seated in a leopard-print chair, her hands folded in her lap, Warshawski blinked and nodded her head expectantly on a continuous loop.
“Did anyone else from your family survive?” a Hebrew school student asked the AI-powered avatar.
The video cut to a separate clip. Warshawski said she and her sister had survived. Her brother, mother and father did not.
Warshawski, who survived three concentration camps and ran a tailoring shop in Kansas City until 2023, had made it part of her life’s mission to tell her story wherever she could. She spoke with students, filmed the 2016 documentary Big Sonia about her life, and was even a guest speaker at a local prison.
But Warshawski knew she wouldn’t live forever. So in 2021, with the help of the interactive media company StoryFile and her granddaughter’s production company, Inflatable Film, Warshawski recorded answers to hundreds of questions about her life, from “What do you remember about the death march?,” to “Why do you like leopard print so much?” Those answers were loaded into an AI-powered avatar of Warshawski that can converse through a video screen, which debuted as an exhibit at the Museum of Kansas City last year.
The technology also caught the attention of the Blue Card, a nonprofit that provides financial assistance to Holocaust survivors in need. The organization adapted it into a portable format and brought the virtual Warshawski to 20 schools and community centers across the New York area over the past year, with plans to expand nationwide. A parallel effort from the USC Shoah Foundation, called “Dimensions in Testimony,” also enables students to have conversations with virtual versions of Holocaust survivors.
The initiative reflects recognition that as survivors age, a model of Holocaust education built on firsthand testimony will be increasingly difficult to sustain. No lesson plan can match the impact of hearing directly from survivors, many of whom dedicate their golden years to speaking tours retelling their traumatic stories. But 90% of the world’s roughly 200,000 living Holocaust survivors are projected to die in the next 15 years. And for aging survivors — who have already lost so much of their lives to violence and deprivation — the weight of transmitting Holocaust memories to the next generation is a burden they cannot shoulder alone.
“It’s absolutely the future of Holocaust education,” said Masha Pearl, the Blue Card’s executive director. “It actually is as close as possible to hearing a live survivor speak.”
Warshawski’s story
Warshawski grew up in Międzyrzec, Poland, and was 17 years old when she and her family were forced into a ghetto. Sonia and her mother were deported to the Majdanek death camp, where she watched Nazis march her mother to her death via gas chamber. Warshawski was then sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was forced to spread her fellow prisoners’ ashes as fertilizer, and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she was shot in the chest on liberation day.
She recovered and met her husband, John, at the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp. The couple moved to Kansas City in 1948.
Using AI technology, students can ask the virtual Warshawski about all of those harrowing moments — with the added benefit that the real-life Warshawski only had to recall them once.
Many survivors “suffer from depression and PTSD, and it’s very difficult for them to recount these extremely painful experiences,” Pearl said. “This actually bypasses that in a way.”
The interactive element is also engaging for kids, Pearl said. At the Conservative synagogue Temple Sholom, after watching Big Sonia, nearly all 25 students ages 10 to 13 — half from the parochial school at the church across the street — raised their hands to ask the virtual Warshawski a question. A few students stayed after the programming had formally ended to ask more.
“It’s the same thing I heard from my uncle’s great grandpa,” said fifth-grader Noah Stein, who attends Hebrew school at Temple Sholom. “It’s amazing — I’ve never seen something like that.”
An imperfect technology
Warshawski, now 100 years old and still going strong, celebrated her birthday in November at a party with more than 1,000 people. But she doesn’t have as much energy as she used to and was unavailable to interview for this piece. So I interviewed her avatar instead.
My question — how she felt about her memory being preserved through AI — triggered an unrelated response.
“After we left [Majdanek], there were still people there, and I must tell you, one day when I was…”
“Can we pause this?” said Rechan Meshulam, special projects director at the Blue Card, who operated the technology at Temple Sholom.
Meshulam said the system had not matched my question to the correct response. She then manually selected the closest question, “Are you glad that you recorded this with StoryFile?”
“I feel this is a very important thing for the people in the world, not to forget and [to] read more about it. Read more history,” Warshawski said. “I’m very grateful that I had a chance to do it. I am thanking the Almighty for it, to give me the strength still to go on.”
The initial mismatched response illustrated the technology’s limits: Warshawski can only answer questions that StoryFile asked her during the original interview in 2021. If a question is similar enough, the AI is designed to redirect Warshawski to the appropriate answer. But this didn’t seem to work in practice. Whenever a student asked a question outside the suggested question bank, operators had to ask the student to rephrase — or pause Warshawski and jump in with their own knowledge about her story.
But according to Pearl, the limited scope of questions is a feature, not a bug. Limiting Warshawski to questions she actually answered prevents her words from being taken out of context or misconstrued, Pearl said.
“Sonia cannot tell you what the weather is today, what her thoughts are on politics — anything that’s really current,” Pearl said. “She can only speak to her experience.”
Not everyone draws the same line. Last year, a Utah-based tech startup called SchoolAI drew controversy for its AI-generated version of Anne Frank, which spits out responses that Frank never wrote herself. Henrik Schönemann, a German historian who tested the chatbot, found AI-Frank avoided holding Nazis responsible for her death and spun her story in an overly positive light.
“How anyone thinks this is even remotely appropriate is beyond me,” Schönemann posted to social media, adding that the technology “violates every premise of Holocaust-education” and amounted to “a kind of grave-robbbing.”
SchoolAI, which also offers the ability to chat with historical figures such as Alexander Graham Bell and Frederick Douglass, said it was implementing additional safeguards to help characters more directly address difficult questions.
I asked SchoolAI’s Anne Frank chatbot about how Frank feels about comparisons between ICE agents and the Gestapo. She didn’t take the bait.
“That’s a difficult question. When I lived in hiding, the Gestapo and police searched for people like us because of who we were, not because we had done anything wrong. I was always afraid,” AI-Frank wrote. “I believe it’s important to treat people with humanity and fairness, no matter their situation. What matters most is how we treat one another, especially those who are vulnerable.”
Yet even with careful control over the accuracy of testimony, some educators are uncomfortable with the idea of immortalizing Holocaust survivors in an interactive form.
In a research paper titled “Creating the ‘virtual’ witness: the limits of empathy,” Corey Kai Nelson Schultz argues that digital versions of Holocaust survivors can have the effect of undermining empathy. Viewers may treat the avatars more like virtual assistants than people, he wrote, and could be tempted to gamify the experience or test the technology’s limits.
Schultz told the Forward he prefers more traditional forms of Holocaust education — seeing artifacts like survivors’ shoes or toys, or watching video testimonies — mediums he believes better capture survivors’ humanity.
But the technology’s novelty was part of the appeal for Warshawski’s granddaughter, Leah, who directed Big Sonia — and said the AI component is just one more way to ensure her grandmother’s story lives on.
Warshawski “does authentically, passionately believe that everybody needs more education, and specifically, Holocaust education. And if this is the way to do it in the future, then so be it,” Leah told the Forward. “You know, ideally, everybody would be able to read more books.”
Pearl said the survivors she works with also have a different set of worries.
“We actually didn’t hear any ethical issues or concerns,” Pearl said. “The concerns that we heard were, Who will tell my story after I’m no longer here?”
The post As the last generation of Holocaust survivors die, is AI the future of Holocaust education? appeared first on The Forward.