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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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Whatever you think of Ilhan Omar, these threats are unconscionable
The Trump administration is reportedly planning to build a case to strip Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) of her citizenship and eventually deport her.
It is my hope that American Jews — even those who do not like Omar and can recite every questionable comment she has made over the past 15 years to illustrate why — will understand this as offensive and outrageous not only because they are Americans, but because they are Jews.
The Trump administration may claim that it is building a case against Omar due to paperwork (reports suggest that they are interested in whether her father listed her age as 17 on her citizenship application when she was really 18). It is similarly filing dozens of lawsuits attempting to denaturalize citizens by trying to prove they lied in the process of gaining citizenship. However, that this is happening now, ahead of the midterm elections against a sitting member of Congress, a high-profile progressive whom the president has said should “go back” to her country of origin, suggests that it is, to put it mildly, politically motivated.
Evidently, the Trump administration sees citizenship not as a right or a responsibility but as a reward, one that can be taken away if that is seen as useful to the president and his adherents. That use could be silencing political opposition or something as simple (and callous) as an opportunity to brag about the sheer number of attempted denaturalizations.
Jews, too, have found themselves on the wrong end of political denaturalization. I do not mean to compare the Trump administration to the Nazis, but the stubborn fact is that Jews were indeed stripped of their citizenship as part of a political project in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. And in the early 20th century in the United States, it was Jews who politicians claimed were incapable of assimilating, of ever really being a part of the United States. These arguments culminated in legislation that kept out Jews who could have found refuge here. The threat of denaturalization and the experience of perpetual otherness is a grievous part of modern Jewish history; we should be offended by its presence in our political present.
Jewish tradition as well as history encourages us to stand up to authority when that authority is wrong. Mordecai refuses to bow to Haman; Nathan yells at King David for sleeping with Bathsheba and having her husband killed; Moses famously urges Pharoah to change his oppressive ways. Even God is on the receiving end of pushback when Abraham pleads and negotiates to spare Sodom.
I do not think one needs to be Jewish to be outraged by the attempt to denaturalize Ilhan Omar. I think it is also bone-chilling as an American who believes we, including our elected officials, have the right to openly oppose our president, and I am worried as a person who thinks it would be good to continue to live in a democratic republic. And I am sure that there are Jews who will say that Omar deserves to lose her citizenship because she has said things about Israel they do not like.
But the Jewish lens through which I see this is that it is right to challenge power when it is abused, and it is wrong for the powerful to make a show of trying to cast their opponents out of the country.
The point is not whether Trump can make good on the threat to strip Omar of her citizenship and deport her, but that it is obscene to use denaturalization as punishment for being a high-profile political opponent in the first place. If he is trying to make it more dangerous to speak out while being from the “wrong” country, then the rest of us need to say that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be an American citizen.
We should do this because we are Americans and we should do this because we are Jews. We should do this because of the ways in which our American and Jewish identities bleed into one another. And, we should do this because we may not know exactly whether it is as Americans or as Jews that we know we have to protect the right to speak truth to power, but we know we need to do it all the same.
The post Whatever you think of Ilhan Omar, these threats are unconscionable appeared first on The Forward.
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Germany couldn’t stop Hitler’s election tactics; can America stop Trump’s?
Herding political opponents into prisons and concentration camps, suspending civil liberties, and sending SA thugs to destroy newsrooms and beat up journalists were among the means used by Adolf Hitler to game Germany’s parliamentary election of March 5, 1933, won by the Nazis.
As much as Donald Trump might fantasize about deploying such brutal tactics to subvert our midterm elections, he hasn’t done so — yet. But his objective is the same: Detonate constitutional barriers standing in the way of his lust for power. “Cheat like hell,” Trump told the GOP’s midterm convention last month.
Historian Timothy Ryback has just published a book about the last gasps of the Weimar Republic, titled 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled A Democracy. The 53 days begin when Hitler becomes chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, and end with the Reichstag’s March 23 passage of the Enabling Act, which gave him absolute power.
For our own perilous time, there is another number to take note of: 652 — the number of days between Trump’s second inauguration and our Nov. 3 midterm elections.
Hitler’s long march to despotic power occurred over 3,422 days — from his failed Beer Hall Putsch on Nov. 8-9, 1923, up until passage of the Enabling Act.
After spending less than a year of a five-year sentence for the failed 1923 coup, Hitler returned to a Nazi party that was in utter disarray. But the Great Depression turned the Nazis’ fortunes around, as jobless and disaffected Germans flocked to Hitler with his promises to make Germany great again. In parliamentary elections in 1930, the number of Reichstag seats held by the Nazis rose dramatically from 12 to 107, and more than doubled that in elections in 1932, making them the largest party. After some backroom political wheeling and dealing, President Paul von Hindenburg offered the chancellorship to Hitler, which he accepted on Jan. 30, 1933.
Even though Hitler was chancellor, his coalition wasn’t dominated by Nazis. When the Reichstag went up in flames on Feb. 27, 1933, der Führer had the pretext he needed to begin dismantling the last remnants of democracy. The Nazis’ first targets were Communists. More than 4,000 were arrested in the initial hours after the fire. It didn’t take long for Social Democrats, trade unionists and Jews to also face raids, arrests, beatings and terror, as Hindenburg — at Hitler’s urging — issued a decree that suspended Germans’ civil liberties.
There was still a barrier standing in Hitler’s way: the Reichstag. But Hitler had a scheme for getting rid of it: calling for a new election and ultimately engineering a vote by the Reichstag to abolish itself.
In the days and nights before the national election, set for March 5, Nazis carried out a campaign of repression and menace across the country. Brandishing firearms, storm troopers ruled the streets. Homes of Hitler critics were raided. His campaign speeches were blasted from loudspeakers. Voters were offered rides to the polls in transports organized by the Nazis, an unsubtle hint at which party they should vote for.
In the election, the Nazis and their Nationalist allies won a majority of seats in the Reichstag but fell short of the two-thirds needed to amend the constitution. But Hitler had a workaround: Convene the Reichstag to vote on a measure that would allow him to declare laws without the approval of the federal legislative body. With Communist delegates of the Reichstag either in hiding or in custody, Hitler already had a structural advantage; they wouldn’t be there to vote. With the Reichstag building destroyed, the delegates convened on March 23 inside the Kroll Opera House, which swarmed with armed storm troopers and members of the SS who harassed and threatened delegates who were either on the fence about giving Hitler absolute power or were known to oppose it.
In the end, weeks and months of trying to tilt elections through terror and intimidation gave Hitler his ultimate prize: of 538 delegates in the Kroll Opera House, only 94 — all Social Democrats — voted against the Enabling Act. In effect, German democracy was steered by Hitler into committing suicide.
In an essay for Literary Hub, Timothy Ryback noted parallels between Hitler’s election victory on March 5, 1933 and our midterm elections and cataloged them.
They include Trump’s “brazen attempt to quash negative press coverage” and Hitler’s and Trump’s virtually identical pre-election low approval ratings. Both the Nazi leader and the American president had gone to court to try to have earlier election results overturned, and the German election, like our fast-approaching midterms, was seen as a referendum on the nation’s leader.
“Amidst all the turmoil, everyone understood that the March 5 election was a make-or-break moment not only for the Hitler chancellorship but for democracy itself,” Ryback wrote.
With the midterms just around the corner, this can be said about America as well.
Since Trump’s second inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, he has thrown more effort into trying to rig the midterms for the Republicans than into virtually any other endeavor — other than perhaps misusing his powers to enrich himself and his family, and dreaming up monuments to himself.
Trump’s pardon of 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed the capitol on Jan. 6 was an early signal that the defeated president had no intention of playing fair during the 2026 midterms. What followed was a barrage of assaults on the election system. Here’s just a partial list: lawsuits demanding sensitive voter data, the gutting of oversight bodies, intimidation of election officials and orders for key GOP-led states to redraw their congressional districts — all designed to both undermine Americans’ trust in the election system and manufacture pretexts for contesting any midterm outcomes that displease him.
Amid these relentless attempts to subvert the midterms, the Democrats have had success at blocking some of Trump’s poisoned salvos, such as holding the line against the so-called SAVE America Act and fending off Trump’s attempts to seize voter information. But none of this deters Trump, who just comes back with more schemes. The latest revelations come from documents obtained by Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy organization.
Those documents show that “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) collected tens of millions of voter records, explored undercover investigations against voter registration groups and considered feeding state election data into a system used to locate people for deportation as part of a sweeping federal effort to find alleged voter fraud ahead of the 2026 midterms,” according to Democracy Docket, which reviewed the documents.
“This is an absolute smoking gun,” said Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias.
Trump has openly suggested a federal takeover of election administration, and during the past several months it seems like he’s been laying the groundwork for that to happen if he doesn’t get the results he wants on Nov. 3. It’s all too easy to imagine horror scenarios: Trump claims massive voter fraud, his supporters storm county election offices in protest, the FBI seizes ballots and voting machines, unrest erupts across the country, Trump declares martial law.
If Trump’s schemes trigger the kind of disorder he appears to be preparing for, the question will be whether our courts, our press, our civil servants and our voters stand firm. Germany’s institutions bent until they broke. Ours have bent, but they have not yet snapped. What happens next will reveal whether they still possess the steel that Germany’s lacked.
The post Germany couldn’t stop Hitler’s election tactics; can America stop Trump’s? appeared first on The Forward.
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Sally Rooney’s publisher stops selling her books in Britain, citing ban on pro-Palestinian group she backs
(JTA) — Sally Rooney’s publisher says it will stop supplying her books in the United Kingdom because current legislation prevents it from passing her earnings on to her.
The best-selling Irish writer, whose work includes the novel “Normal People,” which was adapted into a hit BBC drama, has long been a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause.
Faber said it would no longer supply her books in the United Kingdom because of her backing for Palestine Action, a group that the British government last year proscribed as a terrorist organization, saying it had “orchestrated a nationwide campaign of direct criminal action against businesses and institutions.”
“Current legislation in the UK has led to circumstances where Faber cannot pass on UK earnings to Sally Rooney for her work,” the publisher said.
“To sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher,” it said. “As such, and in full agreement with Sally, we have taken the decision that we can no longer supply her works in the UK in any format. We remain the proud publisher of her remarkable body of work, which we will continue to sell in other territories.”
Faber had no further comment, the statement said.
Yvette Cooper, then the Home Secretary, banned Palestine Action last year following an attack by the group on the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton which caused millions of pounds of damage. It had previously targeted businesses and premises which it said were linked to Israeli defence companies.
Soon after the announcement, Rooney wrote an opinion piece in the Irish Times in which she doubled down on her support for Palestine Action, adding that she would give the proceeds of her books to back the group. “If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under British law, so be it,” she wrote.
In a statement following the action announced by Faber, Rooney cited her Irish Times opinion piece as she explained that the publication of her books “could now constitute a serious criminal offence.”
The ban of Palestine Action has proven to be highly contentious in Britain. Back in February, the group’s co-founder Huda Ammori challenged the move in the High Court, with Rooney providing a supportive witness statement. She said at the time that she was “almost certain” her work would be dropped in Britain if the ban persisted.
The court ruled in Ammori’s favor, but that decision was overturned by the Court of Appeal in June. The Supreme Court is due to hear an appeal next month.
Rooney said on Wednesday: “After a process of consultation and deliberation, and with my full agreement, my publisher Faber has therefore determined that it can no longer supply my work within the UK.
“I have made every effort to be honest with the public about my beliefs and intentions, and I am wholly prepared to accept the consequences.”
Rooney’s support for the Palestinian cause predates the attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza. In 2021 she declined to sell Hebrew translation rights for her novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You?” to the Israeli publisher that had previously released her books in Hebrew.
At the time, she said she supported the BDS movement and would not work with an Israeli publisher unless it is willing to “publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the U.N.-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.”
That move prompted backlash in Israel and beyond, including calls to boycott Rooney’s work. Israeli bookstore chains reportedly removed some of her books from shelves.
However, earlier this year she agreed to have her latest novel, “Intermezzo,” published by an Israeli publisher approved by boycott activists.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Sally Rooney’s publisher stops selling her books in Britain, citing ban on pro-Palestinian group she backs appeared first on The Forward.
