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Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’s 80th anniversary remembered with daffodils, 3 presidents and an 11th commandment against ‘indifference’
WARSAW (JTA) — Exactly 80 years ago, a few hundred ragtag, half-starved Jews emerged from sewers in Warsaw to battle Nazis – and held them off for nearly a month rather than surrender themselves and their Jewish brethren to the Treblinka and Majdanek death camps.
On Wednesday, thousands of Poles and international visitors, including Polish President Andrzej Duda, Israeli President Issac Herzog and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, marked the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in a stirring Holocaust commemoration festooned with daffodils, the emergent symbol of the largest Jewish rebellion against the Nazis during World War II.
“As German federal president, I stand before you today and bow to the courageous fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Steinmeier told a few hundred politicians, Jewish leaders and others at the Ghetto Heroes Monument, marking the first time a German president has joined in the annual commemoration. “I stand before you today and ask for your forgiveness for the crimes committed here by Germans.”
This was also the first time leaders from all three countries came together for the official uprising ceremony to commemorate the fighters, none of whom are alive today. The last surviving fighter, Simcha Rathajzer-Rotem, also known as Kazik, died in December 2018. A handful of Warsaw Ghetto survivors who were not old enough to join the fighting remain, according to Holocaust scholars.
In another first, the three heads of state attended a commemorative service led by Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schdurich at Warsaw’s Nozyk Synagogue. By the end of the ceremony, which was conducted mostly in Hebrew and featured Polish-Jewish children singing the Polish and Israeli national anthems, many attendees had tears in their eyes.
“I just thought, the leaders are here, this is something we should do, it’s part of building relationships and collective memory that partnerships are built on,” Schudrich told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Earlier in the day, Polish President Duda called the fighters “the heroes of the Jews all over the world” and “the heroes of Poland and the Poles.”
Herzog, a day after Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, praised the fighters for sparking hope during one of humanity’s most tragic times. “In a world falling apart, in the shadow of death, under conditions of humiliation, famine, and forced labor, in the ghettos… they succeeded — mothers, fathers, children, grandfathers, and grandmothers — in upholding human morality, mutual responsibility, faith and basic humanity,” he said.
From left to right: German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Polish President Andrzej Duda and Israeli President Issac Herzog hold hands before the 80th anniversary commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in front of the city’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, April 19, 2023. (German Government Press Office/Getty Images)
Wednesday’s diplomatic tribute, which also included speeches by World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder and Marian Turski, a Lodz Ghetto survivor whose so-called 11th commandment — “Thou shalt not be indifferent” — became the slogan for programming by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews around the commemoration.
Eleven years ago, POLIN commissioned Jewish artist Helena Czernek to design a simple paper flower daffodil that has since been worn on the uprising’s anniversary to raise awareness of the day. The pin design was inspired by a commander of the uprising, Marek Edelman, who died in 2009. Each year he would receive a bouquet of daffodils to mark the anniversary date from an anonymous sender, and he would in turn place them on the city’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes — a large sculpture standing at the site of the uprising’s first battle.
The daffodil marker has since changed the landscape of Holocaust memory in Poland, according to POLIN museum spokeswoman Marta Dziewulska.
“Our research shows that since we began our educational programs around this event, including handing out the daffodils, the rise in general public knowledge about the uprising has been enormous,” said Dziewulska.
This year, thanks in part to financial support from Lauder, a billionaire heir to the Estee Lauder fortune and a major Republican donor, the daffodil campaign reached far more people than ever, both in Poland and beyond. Throughout the center of Warsaw, the paper daffodil was ubiquitous among pedestrians and cafe dwellers across generations. All crew members on LOT Polish airline flights wore them.
For the first time, the daffodils were also distributed to 150,000 people in 100 Jewish communities around the world. More than 3,000 volunteers gave out 450,000 paper daffodils in six cities across Poland, and over 7,000 schools, libraries and cultural institutions participated in the museum’s daffodil campaign, which includes films and educational materials about the uprising.
Helena Czernek designed the paper daffodil over a decade ago. (Dinah Spritzer)
Krystyna Budnicka, who was 11 at the time of the uprising, told journalists about her story on Monday. The fighters of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) were armed with home-made grenades and Molotov cocktails. In the end, roughly 13,000 Jews were were burnt alive or suffocated as the Nazis burnt down the ghetto to quell the rebellion, sending the remaining some 50,000 Jews to be murdered further east.
Budnicka told the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza that “as the ghetto was burning, the underground was like a bread oven.”
But Budnicka and some of her 10 immediate family members, none of whom survived the Holocaust, had one advantage. Her brothers and father were observant Jews who happened to be carpenters. They had constructed a bunker to lead to the sewers so that eventually, at least she and her brother, who later died of typhus, were able to make it out.
Budnicka was later taken in by a Catholic orphanage while the war was still raging and hid her Jewish identity, changing her last name to Kuczer. Until the 1990s, she told almost no one of her travels. But today she is the ambassador of POLIN Museum.
Her recollection of life at the time is limited, except that she had hope for survival. The fighters slept during the day in bunkers the Nazis couldn’t easily find, and came out of the sewers to fight at night. She remembers hunger, being the only girl among many boys and dreaming about what bread tasted like, a distant memory.
Many decades later, after the end of the Communist dictatorship, a “Children of the Holocaust” association was formed in Poland. For the first time, Budnicka and many others started telling their stories out loud, and at schools.
“Now I feel that I have to do it,” she told Gazeta Wyborcza. “When I mention my loved ones at meetings, it’s like I’m erecting a monument to my family. They live then. I see them. It’s in order: my mother Cyrla, father Josef Lejzor, brothers Izaak, Boruch, Szaja, Chaim, Rafał.”
Budnicka is not the only Warsaw Ghetto survivor to ask the world to remember what she endured. Helena Birnbaum, 93, who also survived by hiding in a bunker, participated in this year’s March of the Living — an annual Holocaust remembrance event that brings thousands of participants from around the world to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She told reporters at the march on Tuesday why she flew all the way to Poland from Israel to talk about her ordeal.
“The importance of knowing about the Holocaust is to know the person in all situations, on the brink of death,” she said. “The importance of knowing that the Holocaust was life within death and not everyone died at once. The individual stories matter.”
An iconic photo from the Warsaw Ghetto shows Jews being led by Nazis in 1943. (U.S. Holocaust Museum/Wikimedia Commons)
The act of international unity in display at the official uprising ceremony comes at a time when Poland’s right-wing government continues to espouse a nationalist narrative that international scholars say downplays Polish antisemitism and violence towards Jews before, during and after World War II. Multiple Polish laws connected to Holocaust rhetoric and restitution payments caused diplomatic tensions between Poland and Israel for years, and the two only resumed more full relations last month. The rapprochement came after Israel’s foreign minister announced the resumption of Israeli student trips to Holocaust sites in Poland, which now could include sites that explain Nazi violence against non-Jewish Poles.
Six years ago, some Polish Jews who rejected their government’s patriotic narrative launched their own uprising commemoration, which has grown from a group of hundreds to nearly a thousand. During the alternative commemoration on Wednesday, which featured Yiddish songs sung by school children and recitations of poetry by Polish-Jewish authors, participants laid paper and real daffodils at Warsaw Ghetto monuments such as Umschlagplatz, where the Nazis deportee 350,000 Jews by train to Treblinka.
Patrycja Dolowy, director of Warsaw’s Jewish community center, was an early supporter of what she called a grassroots alternative to the pomp and circumstance of the government’s ceremony, only a few hundred feet away.
“Jews were sentenced to death in the center of their own city and the majority of people outside the ghetto were doing nothing about this,” said Dolowy, who believes government focus on heroism should not erase inquiry into less heroic actions by Poles.
“If Jews were not treated before the war as strangers, it would have been much easier for everyone, Jews and non-Jews, to rise together and resist,” she theorized.
The counter-commemoration reflects the contrasting attitudes in Poland towards honoring Jewish and Holocaust memory. In 2017, the government passed a law that assured public schools taught history from a heroic, patriotic perspective, and in 2018 made it illegal to insult the Polish nation’s Holocaust record, condemning scholars who dared delve into historical Polish aggression against Jews.
Attendees shown at an alternative Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemoration, which has grown in recent years. (Dinah Spritzer)
Jerzy Warman, 76, a Polish-born Jew participating in the non-governmental commemoration whose parents survived the Warsaw Ghetto, said the Polish government wants to turn the uprising commemoration into an event where “they can do a roll call of Poles who they say helped the Jews.”
Warman noted that his father joined Edelman at the Warsaw Uprising, a major Polish resistance campaign that took place year after the Ghetto Uprising. “The Jews tried to join the Polish Home Army as a group but were rejected by them,” Warman recalled his father explaining.
Moshe Kis, 22, a Jewish political science student from Warsaw whose grandmother spent two years in the ghetto, echoed Warman’s view.
“So many people here still don’t understand their own history,” said Kis, who will immigrate to Israel next year. He added, fiddling with a daffodil over coffee, “when the sirens went off today in honor of the uprising, I heard people around me saying on the street, ‘what is this for, are we being invaded?’”
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Their art was whimsical, elegant, ‘scandalous,’ and colorful. It was also revolutionary.
Even under glass, designer Fritzi Löw’s intricately beaded “Adam and Eve” bag manages to sparkle.
One of 200 objects and artifacts on display in “Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte,” a major new exhibition at the Jewish Museum, presented in cooperation with the MAK — Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, the piece captures the show’s theme of casting off old ways and old fashions.
Founded in 1903 and active through 1932, the Wiener Werkstätte, or Vienna Workshops, gave women, who were entering public life and the workforce in greater numbers, a way to turn specialized artistic skills into lifelong professions, including architecture, decorative arts, ceramics and textiles. In so doing they changed the way they and women outside the workshop saw themselves.
“For some, their first opportunities for paid artistic work were through the Wiener Werkstätte, which became a vital professional pipeline for women artists while also bringing an influx of virtuosic experimentation to the workshop,” Kristina Parsons, the museum’s assistant curator, said.
At least one-quarter of the nearly 200 women who worked for the multidisciplinary collective were of Jewish faith, Jewish descent, or came from Jewish families.
While the exhibition features many Jewish artists, it spotlights Vally Wieselthier and Felice Rix-Ueno. Their prolific work in ceramics and textile design has had a lasting influence on both disciplines.
The exhibit “brings together art, design, fashion and Jewish history to illuminate the central role Jewish women played in shaping modernity, both as visionary makers and as influential patrons,” said James S. Snyder, director of the Jewish Museum.
For example, Rix’s fanciful, colorful designs appeared on toys, tableware, wallpaper and dresses. The exhibit showcases her elegant tasseled cigarette case, a chiffon cinched waist dress as well as whimsical designs for a papier-mâche bird and another for a toy carriage pulled by a dog.
The early 1900s ushered in the era of the “New Woman,” a time when women were shedding the boned and corseted fashions of the past in favor of more fluid, and even fanciful, garments. It was also a time when women increasingly pursued higher education, fought for suffrage, and challenged restrictive gender roles and clothing.
That sensibility is captured in the dozens of fashion postcards on display, which served as both advertisements and collectibles. In one, a woman wearing a sky-blue turban and a form-fitting white-and-black dress trimmed with fur glances casually over her right shoulder as she walks a small black dog. In another, a woman peers assuredly from beneath a plumed hat, her curly hair cut in a bob, scarlet red lipstick her only hint of makeup.
As Parsons explained, the Wiener Werkstätte’s fashion department allowed women to directly address public perceptions of modern femininity by designing clothes and accessories that they, and other like-minded women, could incorporate into daily life.
“Women’s dress was an important point of convergence between larger impulses toward reform and feminist politics — fashion was then, as now, understood for its capacity to be a revolutionary statement,” she said.
It’s an idea captured in Wilhelm List’s 1910 “Young Woman in Undergarments.” The oil painting depicts a woman believed to be Wally Neuzil, who later trained as a nurse. She wears ruffled “umbrella drawers,” which fall loosely around her knees, and a sleeveless chemise. The garments allow for ease of movement and comfort in one’s own skin.
The exhibition also shows how Jewish women such as the noted socialite and arts patron Adele Bloch-Bauer and the journalist and salon hostess Berta Zuckerkandl helped ensure the workshop’s success.
In turn, upper-class clientele, including progressive Jewish intellectuals, commissioned furniture and interiors, wore Werkstätte fashions, sent Rosh Hashanah greetings on Werkstätte-designed stationery, and celebrated the workshop’s creations.
During its 30 years of operation, the workshop produced hundreds of patterns. Between 1910 and 1917 alone, it created more than 500 designs. One wall of the gallery is given over to textiles. Bold reds and purples evoke coral formations, while zigzag patterns combine purple and orange with chocolate and persimmon.
Aside from textiles and illustrations, there are also dozens of ceramics, such as Susi Singer’s design for a green and gold oven that, with its cake-like tiers, looks as if it belongs in a Disney animated film.
Artist Vally Wieselthier’s mirror, fashioned from glazed earthenware and adorned with a trio of busts, hangs near a collection of her outsized ceramic heads. The heads, some of which stand nearly two-feet tall, were modeled after mythological and classical figures, but also shopkeepers and everyday people. The works drew both praise and ridicule, dismissed by one newspaper as “scandalous bimbo business.”
While the Werkstätte sputtered out in 1932 for a host of reasons, including poor management, financial troubles, a resistance to mass production, and a decline in wealthy patrons, its influence remains.
According to Parsons, “In bringing together highlights from the remarkable body of work made by Jewish women for the Werkstätte, this exhibition spotlights their creativity, ambition, and influence, while inviting visitors to explore a group of artists who embraced decoration as a central expression of modernity.”
Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte continues through Nov. 15, 2026 at the Jewish Museum.
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‘Politically homeless’: As Maine’s Collins-Jackson Senate race kicks off, some Jewish voters find themselves adrift
(JTA) — BANGOR, Maine — With Maine’s marquee U.S. Senate race now set, many Jewish Democratic voters are confronting a difficult choice: whether concerns over newly nominated Democrat Troy Jackson’s rhetoric on Israel outweighs their longstanding opposition to incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
“I, and many Jews in Maine, certainly feel politically homeless at this point,” said Chris Myers Asch, a history teacher at Colby College and Jewish resident of Hallowell, Maine. “We don’t feel like there are candidates who actually represent us and that we trust to defend our interests, and I think that’s sad, particularly for people like myself who have been active and involved and supportive of many different candidates over the years.”
Jackson, 58, a former logger and state Senate president, secured the Democratic nomination Saturday following the party’s nominating convention to replace Graham Platner, who withdrew earlier this month following a sexual assault allegation, which he denies.
But as Jackson shored up his bid for the nomination, he began to echo the rhetoric of Platner, a staunch Israel critic whose Nazi-linked tattoo sparked concern across Maine’s Jewish community. Since joining the race, Jackson has, for the first time, embraced the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza and called for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel.
Those positions contrasted with the union advocacy and affordability agenda on which Jackson had built his two-decade political career in the state. They also alarmed some Maine Jewish voters, who overwhelmingly lean Democratic.
“I thought Platner was a disaster from the beginning, so pretty much anyone would be an improvement, and I think Jackson is an improvement,” said Myers Asch, who identifies as an independent. “But I can’t say I am wholeheartedly enthusiastic about him. I think he has bowed to the pressure of far-left activists on foreign policy issues, particularly on Israel, and I think that’s unfortunate.”
But while Jackson’s newfound stances on Israel have alienated some Jewish Democrats, it has not necessarily made their choice in November’s general election any easier. Many remain critical of Collins, 73, who has paired strong support for Israel with votes backing much of President Donald Trump’s agenda.
The latest polling in the race, conducted by the University of New Hampshire, finds the contest is a toss up, with Jackson receiving 49% of the vote compared with Collins’ 46%. The poll, which surveyed 1,236 likely voters from July 15 to 20, has a margin of error of +/-2.8%.
With Election Day just 99 days away, the choice facing Jewish voters carries stakes beyond Maine. Democrats see the Maine contest as one of their best pickup opportunities in the battle for control of the Senate. Independent analysts, including the Cook Political Report, rate Maine as one of the few GOP-held Senate seats that Democrats have a decent shot at this year.
While Jews make up a small share of Maine’s electorate, the community leans heavily Democratic. The state has roughly 19,000 Jews across 10,600 households, nearly 70% of which identify as liberal or very liberal, according to the 2024 Maine Jewish Community Study, conducted by Brandeis University in partnership with the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine.
Maine State Rep. Laurie Osher, who is Jewish and said she intends to vote for Jackson, said that despite the anxiety many Jews have felt since Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack, the stakes of defeating Collins outweighed broader political concerns.
“Long before that, we have had a problem with having Susan Collins give strength and support to crazies that are Republican,” Osher said. “We need to get rid of her, and most of the Jews I know agree with that.”
Despite the Maine Jewish community’s overwhelmingly liberal bent, Myers Asch said he had heard more Jews than ever before discussing voting for Collins.
“I have heard more people talking about voting for Susan Collins than I ever have before, because I think a lot of Jews in Maine feel abandoned by the Democratic Party and feel politically homeless,” said Myers Asch.
Brian Kresge, the president of Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor, Maine, said that while he had seen peers in the Jewish community “get behind (Jackson) and trying to overlook the word genocide,” he had also observed many throwing their support behind Collins.
“It’s that hard choice a lot of Jews are weighing. What does the rhetoric against genocide really mean when he’s so good in all these other ways?” Kresge said, referring to Jackson’s strong union ties. “We like him for all of this, and so that’s the hard part. I don’t envy any Jew that hasn’t already made up their mind about the election.”
While Collins has received an endorsement from Trump, she has also broken with the president on several key votes, including in April when she backed a resolution to end U.S. military action against Iran.
Still, during his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination Saturday, Jackson used much of his remarks to hammer Collins’ record of supporting Trump’s policies.
“Thirty years later, Susan Collins is still in Washington, so I do have one question. Who has she served? She has served Donald Trump. She voted with him 96% of the time,” Jackson said. “She helped deliver enormous tax breaks to the corporations and the wealthy on our backs, and she voted to confirm Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, the Supreme Court justice who overturned Roe versus Wade.”
Collins, who has worked to distance herself from Trump and voted with the president’s opinion 95% of the time in 2025, took her own stab at her new opponent Saturday, calling him “hyper-partisan” in an interview with News Center Maine.
“I have known him for more than 20 years, he has been an Augusta insider, and he’s very much a person who takes a hyper-partisan approach to the issues,” Collins said. “I think that’s one of the big contrasts between us. I have always prided myself in working in a bipartisan way.”
For some Jews in the state, the choice between Collins and Jackson has been much more clear-cut.
Lila Kohrman, a 33-year-old Jewish Portland resident, voted for Jackson during the nominating convention Saturday. “Susan Collins has been a senator for almost my entire life, and during that time, things have pretty clearly just gotten worse and worse for Americans,” she said.
“Jewish voters are not a monolith,” Kohrman added. “But I hope that people will be able to support a candidate who has clearly demonstrated that — and I mean Troy Jackson — that has clearly demonstrated that he cares for the lives of marginalized and oppressed people in the United States and around the world, and right now that means opposing sending money to Israel because they are using that money to commit a genocide against the Palestinian people.”
Jackson, who has raised over $1 million since announcing his bid for the nomination, is also facing a significant funding gap against Collins, who has $11 million in her campaign account, according to the latest Federal Election Commission findings.
While Jackson vowed he would not accept any “dark money,” and specifically said he won’t be taking any funding from AIPAC, Collins has received over $1.5 million in donations from at least 750 donors whose contributions were earmarked through AIPAC, according to the latest FEC findings.
The race has also already seen a massive influx of outside ad spending. Collins’ campaign, her allies and other groups aligned with Senate Republican leadership have reserved roughly $60 million in airtime through the fall, while the Senate Democrats’ main super PAC and its affiliates have purchased roughly $24 million.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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After New York stabbing, Netanyahu says Mamdani is making Jews less safe
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani of “fomenting” hate and making Jews less safe through his fierce criticism of Israel. Netanyahu suggested the mayor’s rhetoric on the Gaza war contributed to the climate that led to Thursday’s stabbing of an Orthodox man outside a Manhattan synagogue.
“I don’t think it’s accidental that after he made this hate speech against Israel and against me, the next day a Jew is stabbed coming out of a synagogue,” Netanyahu said Sunday morning on Fox News.
Authorities said the suspect, Jose Morales, 51, allegedly yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he stabbed an Asian man in the back with a knife and an Orthodox man in the torso with a screwdriver before being subdued and arrested. Morales was arraigned Friday on several hate crime charges and was held without bail. Both victims were hospitalized and are expected to recover.
Investigators have not publicly linked the suspect’s motives to the mayor’s comments in a video address last week conceding he did not have the authority to arrest Netanyahu when he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly in September, while also calling Netanyahu a war criminal and accusing him of orchestrating a genocide. Mamdani encouraged New Yorkers to protest instead.
The controversy has also been fueled by reports that members of Mamdani’s inner circle believed long before the legal review was completed that the city lacked the authority to arrest Netanyahu. Despite that, Mamdani proceeded with the review and used a mayoral address to announce the legal conclusion while renewing his criticism of the war in Gaza. Critics say the episode was a calculated political move aimed at energizing the pro-Palestinian and progressive base that helped elect him. The speech drew more than 200 million views across social media.
Speaking outside the Manhattan synagogue on Friday, Jewish leaders and some prominent rabbis expressed concern that the comments risked endangering Jewish New Yorkers, the largest concentration of Jews in the United States.
Netanyahu escalated his feud with Mamdani by directly linking the mayor’s embrace of the International Criminal Court’s case against him to the rise in antisemitism. “I speak to Jewish Americans in New York, and they’re afraid right now,” Netanyahu said. “I speak to quite a lot of my friends, and they say, ‘Look, it’s like a different world. We’re afraid to go into the streets. We certainly do not want to wear yarmulkes or any clothing that would give away that we’re Jews.’”
The Israeli leader further accused Mamdani of “basically supporting” Hamas, despite the mayor describing the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel as a “horrific war crime” that should be opposed “with every single fiber of our being.” Asked on Thursday whether he considers the Hamas massacre a genocide, Mamdani stopped short of using that term.
“The genocide charge belongs to our enemies,” Netanyahu said in the Sunday interview. “What we are doing is try to fight this genocidal terrorist organization that embeds itself among civilians.”
Netanyahu (6 minutes ⬇️) accuses Mamdani of fueling antisemitism by embracing ICC case:
“He’s fomenting hate… I speak to Jewish Americans in New York, and they’re afraid right now. And I don’t think it’s accidental that after he made this hate speech against Israel and against… pic.twitter.com/qjb5uj4xNM
— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) July 26, 2026
The latest clash shows how the war in Gaza has become one of the biggest political issues of Mamdani’s administration. His outspoken criticism of Israel has won support from progressives but has also deepened tensions with many Jewish leaders, who say his rhetoric has made an already difficult climate even worse. In an interview on Thursday, Mamdani suggested that New Yorkers “have been aghast at this genocide over the last few years, and not only the continued denial of that genocide but also the fact that it continues itself.”
A recent Associated Press survey conducted before Mamdani’s recent comments found that Mamdani, who won just 26% of the Jewish vote in last year’s mayoral election, is viewed more favorably by American Jews than Netanyahu, who is facing a tough reelection in October.
Netanyahu is expected to visit Washington, D.C., on Monday for a meeting with President Donald Trump and attend the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close political ally.
Despite acknowledging he cannot arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani has vowed to continue speaking out against the Israeli leader ahead of his expected appearance at the United Nations this fall. Netanyahu said Sunday that he still intends to travel to New York “to speak the truth” and defend Israel before the international body.
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