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This 16-year-old turned her grandmother’s Holocaust survival story into a novel
(New York Jewish Week) — In May of 1937, 7-year-old Inge Eisinger lived in a luxurious Vienna apartment with a pantry stocked with favorite foods and a staff to keep her company. Though she had a strained relationship with her mother and an absent father, Inge, who was mostly raised by her maternal grandmother Anna, was living a charmed life.
This is the scene that opens “Running for Shelter,” a young adult novel about the Holocaust written by a young adult herself: 16-year-old Suzette Sheft, who is a junior at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. In the novel, Sheft retells her grandmother’s story of surviving the Holocaust.
Published by Amsterdam Publishers, which specializes in Holocaust memoirs, the book is a delicate and powerful reminder of the importance of recording one’s family history. It’s a lesson Sheft learned too early in life: Her father died of pancreatic cancer when Sheft was just 13 and she soon realized she was forgetting all the stories he told her about his childhood.
“I fantasized about rewinding time, so I could go back and record my favorite stories about his childhood,” Sheft writes in an author’s note. “I wished I had taken the time to write these stories down when I had the chance, because his death allowed me to understand the vitality of preserving the stories of our loved ones before it is too late.”
In memory of her father, Sheft recorded the story of his mother, her grandmother Monique Sheft, who was once the Viennese school girl Inge Eisinger.
In pre-war Austria, Eisinger had been living a completely assimilated life — so much so that her parents never even told her that she was Jewish. Following the Nazi takeover of Austria, her mother managed to whisk the two of them away to Switzerland, then Paris, but soon abandoned her. After a twisting and tragic story, Eisinger eventually reunited with her grandmother and moved to a village in Central France to wait out the war, changing her name to the more French “Monique.”
Sheft’s novel ends in 1946, when the two are on the boat to New York after the war and Eisinger’s grandmother reveals to her that she and her family are actually Jewish.
In spite of this — or perhaps because of it — Sheft, who lives in Manhattan with her mom, her twin brother and two dogs, is very committed to her Jewish identity. “Although my grandmother never really practiced Judaism, my dad was very involved in the Jewish world,” she said. “He was very passionate about Jewish causes and just Judaism, in general. So I felt very connected to the Jewish world because of him.”
The New York Jewish Week talked with Sheft about what the book means to her, why its subject matter is important and what she learned in the process of putting it together.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
New York Jewish Week: What was the process of writing the book; how did the idea begin and how did you collect your grandmother’s story?
Suzette Sheft: I had heard a lot of my grandmother’s stories from my dad. I always had an interest in the Holocaust — I would go to Holocaust museums in every city I visited, and I almost exclusively read books about World War II and the Holocaust growing up. So I kind of knew in the back of my head that I wanted to do something like this, but [my father’s death] sparked and ignited the necessity of doing it as soon as possible.
As for the process, a few summers ago I spent a week with my grandmother, interviewing her every day about her escape from Austria to France. At first she shared physical elements of her life, like her apartment and her family dynamics and her school life, but then she began to talk to me about the time leading up to the war — the years before the Germans invaded Austria. As she spoke, I recorded everything she said in bullet point form and I would periodically stop and ask for more detail. The next day, at the beginning of the conversation, I would recap what we had talked about, and then allow her to elaborate or clarify the story.
Later, I wanted to widen my perspective and uncover other stories and details that she may have forgotten, so I watched an interview she did with the USC Shoah Foundation. This was really helpful because there were some details that she had forgotten or that she had left out.
Even though the book is about your grandmother’s life, you wrote it as fiction. How much of the story came from your grandmother’s details, and how much did you have to research or create on your own?
Every event that happens is true, and everything actually happened to her, but there are some small details that I embellished. For me, it was really helpful because, while I love creativity and writing, I sometimes struggle to pick an idea. So the fact that she had all these little stories, and I could expand from those, was something I loved while writing this. I had to use fiction when describing the atmosphere of certain places and also to write the dialogue because I can’t know exactly what they said or how they said it.
Do you have a favorite story your grandma told you that you made sure to get in the book?
Inge goes to a boarding school [in France] with her host family and there the children play a game where they pick someone to be the “torturer,” who is usually whoever they think the ugliest person is. My grandma had red hair and green eyes, and I guess she wasn’t the traditional standard of beauty. They picked her to be the torturer and she would have to pull people’s hair and scratch them. There would also be a queen, who was usually the prettiest girl with blond hair and blue eyes, and she would be protected. I thought it was interesting because to me it was the children’s way of understanding what was going on in the world around them. It’s a bit complicated, but when she told me this story I was completely shocked. It was really fascinating.
For people your age, why do you think Holocaust education is still relevant and important?
Some people my age don’t know anything about the Holocaust. I recently came across a statistic that talked about how little Gen Z knew about the Holocaust. There’s also been a spike in antisemitism and a decrease in awareness of history. For example, with Kanye West, who has a lot of followers, saying antisemitic remarks, a lot of people are going to just go along with what he says. There’s also just been a lot of hate crimes towards Jewish people, especially during COVID.
Lastly, the number of living Holocaust survivors is diminishing by the day. Gen Z is the last generation probably that is ever going to have the ability and the opportunity to speak with Holocaust survivors before they’re all gone. It’s important that we share this book now and then we educate people now before it’s too late.
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The post This 16-year-old turned her grandmother’s Holocaust survival story into a novel appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Six People Killed After Missile Strike on Israeli Town of Beit Shemesh, Ambulance Service Says
Emergency personnel work at the site of an Iranian strike, after Iran launched missile barrages following attacks by the U.S. and Israel on Saturday, in Beit Shemesh, Israel March 1, 2026. REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Six people were killed after a missile strike on the Israeli town of Beit Shemesh, the Israeli ambulance service said on Sunday.
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What happened during the 2025 Israel-Iran war? A timeline.
(JTA) — The U.S.-Israeli military attack on Iran that launched early Saturday morning comes eight months after the last Israel-Iran war, in June 2025.
As we wait to see what happens in the current war, here’s a look back at how the 2025 conflict played out, from uneasy tensions to U.S. intervention to a grim death toll for Israelis.
- April 2024: First exchange of missiles between Israel and Iran in the 45-year history of the Islamic Republic:
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May-June 2025: Tensions built in the weeks and days leading up to the attack, with the international community condemning Iran’s failure to abide by past nuclear agreements. Diplomatic efforts stalled as officials on all sides signaled that a direct confrontation was possible.
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June 13: Israel launches its attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and ballistic missile program, followed shortly by a warning from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that retaliation by Iran was “expected in the immediate future.”
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June 13—: As Israel continues to pummel targets in Iran, Tehran counter-attacks, sending missiles almost nightly. Twenty-eight people are killed in Israel, including four women in an Arab town in northern Israel; a Ukrainian family that had come for cancer treatment for their daughter; and an activist at her home in Beersheba. Many others lost their homes. Flights, schools and workplaces are all massively disrupted.
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June 18: Donald Trump, who had run on a platform of opposing all war, sends mixed signals about whether he will jump in, as the Israelis clearly hoped he would. Trump tells reporters days into the conflict that “nobody knows what I’m going to do.”
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June 21: The United States joins the fight, striking three sites associated with Iran’s nuclear program, including Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan, alongside Israeli forces. The deeply buried facilities were seen as impossible to target without U.S. arms.
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June 23: Trump announces a ceasefire on social media. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council claims victory following the announcement despite striking Israel in its immediate wake. Israel does not say it had acceded to a ceasefire until many hours later.
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Aftermath: The extent of damage to the Iranian regime was unclear. Even on Saturday, as Trump renewed the fight against the Islamic Republic following negotiations that he said had not been satisfactory, he said last year’s strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. But the regime was rebuilding it, he and other observers said, and Iran had reportedly stockpiled more missiles than it had before the 2025 war. And the regime remained intact, clamping down a domestic protest movement by killing tens of thousands of protesters within 48 hours last month. Trump initially threatened to strike over the mass killings but did not.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post What happened during the 2025 Israel-Iran war? A timeline. appeared first on The Forward.
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Sirens, shelters and an empty Old City: Jerusalem rattled on the first day of war with Iran
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Jacob Phillips’ first trip to Israel from his home in Germany was in 2023, to visit Holocaust survivors in Tel Aviv as part of a university program. It was cut short by the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack, which forced him to leave the country.
He returned with his girlfriend this month to see the sites he missed. “Because the last trip, it was a harsh cut,” he said. “That’s why we came back, to visit the people I met here in Israel.”
On Saturday, Phillips and his girlfriend Michelle were among the very few people walking the streets in Jerusalem as another war unfolded, with Iran. The war, which began when Israel and the United States together attacked Iran early Saturday, had already sent them multiple times to shelters and scrambled their departure plans for next Thursday. Ben Gurion Airport is closed until at least March 7.
Phillips said he was in touch with the German consulate and felt safe in Jerusalem despite the incoming missiles, citing Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system. He said he remained happy to be in Israel.
“I wanted to come here to learn about the Jewish experience, especially as a German, and I feel like I have gotten to see so much of it,” Phillips said.
While missile impacts rocked Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel, an eerie calm pervaded the streets of Jerusalem on Saturday, extreme even for Shabbat, as residents hunkered down at home between the sirens that indicated that war with Iran had begun anew. The sirens scattered the prayer services that dot the holy city and disrupted plans for shared meals.
The gates of the Old City were closed by Israeli police to everyone but residents. A crowd of Hasidic Jews argued with officers, petitioning for entry to pray at the Western Wall but ultimately giving up and turning back.
One resident who ventured out between air raid alerts said the assault had provided “pauses just long enough to walk up the stairs before heading back [to the shelter] again.”
Those who braved journeys away from their homes offered a general consensus that the war would be significantly worse this time around, only nine months after a 12-day war that led to the deaths of 32 Israelis. In that conflict, Iran launched more than 500 ballistic missiles at Israel and targets throughout the Middle East in retaliation for strikes that Israel initiated and the United States joined.
This time is indeed different. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are gunning for regime change and said they believed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been killed in an opening salvo. Sensing an existential threat, the Islamic Republic of Iran has already escalated its response, using its firepower against not only Israel but U.S. targets throughout the Middle East.
Richard Weiner and Rolly Feld had been in Nahariya, in Israel’s north, until Saturday morning. When the sirens began, they drove back to Jerusalem in the hope they would be safer in the city and farther from significant military targets for the Iranian regime, including the port of Haifa, which was struck by an Iranian barrage at 10 a.m.
Feld recounted that while driving down Route 4 toward Jerusalem, it felt as if they were being chased by missiles. Periodically, another batch of air raid alerts would sound, forcing them to shelter in tunnels along the highway.
Feld said he would have preferred to continue driving, contrary to the advice of Israeli authorities who recommend pulling over and lying flat to avoid exposure to shrapnel from missile impacts.
“My wife wanted all the time to stick to the guidelines, to stop the car and stay away, and I keep driving fast then stopped in the tunnels. It’s a compromise,” Feld said.
Weiner, who grew up in Israel but has lived as an adult in South Africa, was critical of Netanyahu’s decision to launch the strikes.
“What he’s doing is horrible for the Iranian people and it’s horrible for the people over here. The government is pushing for this; the people are not.” Weiner identified himself as “something of a pacifist,” adding, “We have to look for other ways of dealing with the Iranian government, as irrational as they are. We should be supporting the people who are protesting and not trying to topple the government by killing the leadership.”
Weiner and Feld bantered back and forth on a sidewalk in the leafy neighborhood of Rehavia, discussing the possibility of further escalation and whether it was Israel’s place to intervene on behalf of the Iranian people — if that was indeed part of the calculus.
Weiner concluded, “I have a love-hate relationship with this country. I come back and this happens again. This is clearly not the answer. Many people will be killed, and it’s horrible that tens of thousands have been killed due to their dissent, but how does this help?”
The question of whether the war would succeed in the U.S.-Israeli ambition of achieving regime change in Iran was a preoccupation of many of those who were out and about.
“The chance of actual change is so low,” said Ishay, 44, a Jerusalem resident. “Like in Israel, there is such a strong contingent of those with radical beliefs in Iran. Even if the regime is toppled, who will replace Khamenei?”
Information was hard to come by throughout the day, though over time it became clear that missile impacts had been confirmed in multiple locations, including Bnei Brak, where Magen David Adom treated people who were wounded. By overnight, it was clear that one woman had been killed and another man had been seriously wounded in Tel Aviv.
The war comes as Israel prepares to celebrate Purim, a Jewish holiday commemorating the overthrow of an oppressive Persian regime, offering a powerful parallel for the current moment.
In the lead-up to the holiday, two Israelis stood talking down the street, seemingly unconcerned by the sirens, both in costume — one wearing a sombrero, the other dressed as a clown.
Yael, who lives in Rehavia, was walking her dog, Lucky, in Meir Sherman Garden Park in central Jerusalem.
“We’ve just come to expect this. I am raising my children here in Israel, but sometimes I wonder if there is a future here,” she said.
For Phillips, the fact that both of his visits to Israel have been derailed by two different conflicts did not dampen his support for Israel’s decision to launch the attacks on Iran.
“It’s time to change the regime there because of the nuclear weapons; it’s important to have this under control,” he said. “For Israel, it will be a hard time, I think, but nothing is free. You have to pay with something.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Sirens, shelters and an empty Old City: Jerusalem rattled on the first day of war with Iran appeared first on The Forward.