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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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‘Israel is politics’: Was a woman kicked out of a salon for supporting Israel or being Israeli-American?
An Israeli-American woman who was denied service at a Northern Virginia eyebrow salon is now taking legal action against the business.
The Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law is filing a civil rights complaint on behalf of Jessica Walton, who was at Karimi Brows in Alexandria, Virginia, on Aug. 6 when Fatana Karimi, the shop’s owner, recorded and posted a video of her telling Walton to leave the store. The video has received more than 270,000 likes and garnered concern from antisemitism watchdog groups.
“This case is about a basic civil rights principle,” says Omer Wiczyk, senior counsel at the Brandeis Center. “A business that is open to the public cannot reclassify a customer’s Israeli identity as objectionable politics.”
The two sides disagree about whether Karimi’s decision was made based on Walton’s ethnicity, identity or politics.
Karimi said in a TikTok video that her decision to deny service to Walton was not about Walton’s identity but her politics. “Any ethnicity or nationality or person who comes from a certain religion, any religion, comes to me and tells me that they support Israel, I would kick them,” she said.
Karimi said she “would have, you know, let it slide by” if Walton had denounced the Israeli government and called the Israel-Hamas war a genocide.
Walton, in the video taken at Karimi Brows, characterized the dispute as being about her identity. “I had no idea that you would do this based on my ethnicity,” she said.
According to the complaint, Walton said she did not discuss politics and only mentioned she was Israeli-American before Karimi asked her to leave the studio.
In another video, Karimi explained that Walton said she was Israeli-American “three different times” before Karimi started “throwing shots back at her.” Karimi said that in that moment, she was imagining Palestinian people, “looking at me saying, ‘But I thought you supported us? Why are you playing nice with the girl that is the reason we’re going through this?’”
“I was like, ‘the gloves are f—ing off,’” Karimi said. “‘I’m not doing your f—ing brows. Get out of my f—ing face.’”
The complaint also says that before the camera started rolling, “Ms. Karimi stated that, for her, ‘Israel is politics.’ ”
Politics-based discrimination would not necessarily constitute a civil rights violation, said Michael Helfand, a professor at the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. However, if Karimi was placing special scrutiny on Walton’s beliefs because of her Israeli identity, it would — facts that the parties dispute.
“I think this gets you into the question of how you want to classify anti-Zionism,” says Helfand. “I think that’s a bigger question that the law hasn’t fully wrapped its head around.”
Both women said they have received violent messages online following the incident, including death and rape threats. Karimi said her Yelp reviews were spammed with negative comments from users she doubted had been to the store.
The post ‘Israel is politics’: Was a woman kicked out of a salon for supporting Israel or being Israeli-American? appeared first on The Forward.
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Vance meets with Temple Israel rabbi on Michigan visit
(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance recently met with representatives of Temple Israel in Michigan to offer “his support in the wake of the attack on our community,” clergy from the synagogue told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Vance’s Monday meeting with representatives of the suburban Detroit synagogue that had been attacked by a terrorist in March came as the vice president has upped his outreach to Jewish voters ahead of a likely 2028 presidential run. He also invited a rabbi and security guard to a rally Monday in the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights, where he called them out from the podium and said he was “honored” to have them attend.
The Reform synagogue’s clergy later offered more details about his outreach, telling JTA that he had met with one rabbi, as well as with a security officer who had stopped the assailant from harming anyone at the preschool that was in session.
The meeting was held at Vance’s request, Rabbi Jen Lader told JTA, and the vice president did not visit the synagogue itself.
“This was an important opportunity to ask for the Vice President’s support in the fight against antisemitism, and for additional security funding through the Jewish American Security Act,” Lader wrote in an email to JTA, referring to a bipartisan bill introduced in the U.S. House this summer to increase federal funds for both Jewish organizations and synagogue security.
Lader continued, “We’ve made the same requests to elected officials on both sides of the political aisle.”
Later that day the vice president traveled to Las Vegas, where he met in a closed-door session with members of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who have been riled by his close relationship with podcaster Tucker Carlson and other points of contention.
Vance sought to draw a contrast with Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, who spent the weekend offering apologies for his earlier comments about the temple attack, when he appeared to describe the attack as a response to Israel’s incursion in Lebanon.
Some Michigan Jewish leaders are publicly mobilizing against El-Sayed, a harsh critic of Israel: As of press time, more than 400 Jews in the state, including some who hold prominent community positions, have signed a petition pledging to vote for the GOP candidate, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, in the Senate race.
A representative for Vance did not respond to a request for comment on the vice president’s Temple Israel meeting or for his views on the Jewish American Security Act.
At the RJC meeting, where he also received a standing ovation but did not address his Carlson ties, attendees told JTA that Vance highlighted his outreach to Temple Israel.
The nation’s largest Reform synagogue, Temple Israel was attacked in March by a man who had recently lost family in an Israeli strike on a Hezbollah position in Lebanon. In two statements following the attack, El-Sayed initially condemned it outright. He then changed his wording to include what he now says was “context” about Israel’s war in Lebanon, including the phrase, “Hurt people hurt people.”
Speaking with the state Democratic Party’s Jewish caucus at the party convention on Saturday, El-Sayed apologized for those remarks, saying, “I made a mistake.” He also attended the caucus’s “Summer Simcha” fundraiser the next day, where he repeated his apology and asked for forgiveness. He told JTA the “context” he’d sought to include in his initial remarks was related to “violence in all its forms, in all circumstances.”
Temple Israel clergy have declined to comment to JTA on El-Sayed’s two apologies for his past comments. Lader had penned an op-ed in The Free Press criticizing his response.
Vance’s Michigan visit also included a rally in Sterling Heights, where he discussed the synagogue attack and called it “a terrible, antisemitic terrorist attack.”
“It could have been so much worse, ladies and gentlemen,” Vance told the crowd, who had given the Temple Israel personnel a standing ovation. “That guy showed up at that synagogue, at that school with a desire to kill a lot of children, and he killed precisely zero children because of the brave security guards who did their job and did it very well.”
Vance also called El-Sayed, a progressive and a Muslim, “very, very evil” from the podium.
“Abdul El-Sayed made an apology for the very people who would perpetrate violence against hundreds of innocent American school children,” Vance told the crowd. “You’ve got to ask yourself, if he’s willing to empathize, not with the children who almost had their lives destroyed at the most innocent and what should be the safest place in the world, their school, what is he going to do when he goes to Washington, D.C. when the cameras aren’t on?”
Vance added, “What I see is a man who has sympathy and compassion for people who share his religion, but have nothing for people who don’t. A person who will apologize for a murderer so long as he looks the right way, but will not understand the plight of an innocent child if that person has the wrong faith.”
The Jewish voters petition, titled “Michigan Jews Against Extremism,” was spearheaded prior to El-Sayed’s apologies but has picked up more signatures in their aftermath.
The petition’s language states that “many” of the signatories “have been fiercely supportive of Democratic candidates and principles,” but that all of them “declare our intent to vote for Mike Rogers for US Senate in 2026.”
“If El-Sayed were to win the general election in this important swing state, we fear the far-left and anti-Jewish elements in the Democratic Party would become dominant, including in the imminent 2028 presidential race,” the petition says. “We cannot allow him to become the Democratic standard-bearer or Michigan’s senator.”
The petition specifies that their vote for Rogers “does not require that we agree with him on every issue or that we support President Trump.”
Benji Rosenzweig, a real-estate agent and music podcaster based in West Bloomfield, was one of the letter’s signers.
“I’ve watched Abdul El-Sayed, for the last number of months, surround himself with people who cheer for the destruction of our families and the annihilation of our community,” Rosenzweig told JTA. He signed the petition before El-Sayed’s apologies but wasn’t swayed by them: “What he said was, ‘I’m sorry that you were hurt.’ That’s not an apology.”
Rosenzweig describes himself as a “centrist” who holds “liberal values,” and who would have voted for El-Sayed’s primary opponent, U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, in the general November election if she had won the nomination. He recently met Rogers at an event, he said, and told him that “I will be holding him accountable to the liberal values that I still value.”
As of press time, the petition’s signatories include Brian Hermelin, current president of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit; Mark Davidoff, CEO of the Michigan Israel Business Accelerator; Rabbi Eli Mayerfeld, CEO of the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills; Amy Newman, CEO of Jewish Family Service of Metro Detroit; and David Victor, past president of the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
The petition included their names but not their titles, suggesting they were signing as individuals and not as representatives of their organizations. The list also includes the names of several people who had previously told JTA they would commit to fundraising for Rogers if El-Sayed won the Democratic primary.
Local rabbi Asher Lopatin, currently on leave from his role as community relations director for the Ann Arbor Jewish federation, has stumped for Rogers but told JTA he does not have a formal role with the campaign. In the Forward this week, Lopatin again urged the state’s Jewish Democrats to back Rogers over El-Sayed.
“To show the Democrats that such candidates should never be nominated, we must show them that such candidates can never win,” the rabbi wrote on Monday.
The El-Sayed campaign did not return a request for comment from JTA about the petition.
For the approximately 100,000 Jews in Michigan, the question of whether to vote for El-Sayed has proven hugely divisive. At the same Sunday event that hosted the candidate, state Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish and has publicly sparred with El-Sayed over his rhetoric, implored the crowd to “place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival” — suggesting that Jewish voters should put their own feelings of personal safety aside in order to elect a Democrat.
Nessel’s comment, coming one day after she sat out a state Democratic convention over what she said was fear of antisemitic harassment, has sparked some backlash outside of Michigan. Ron Halber, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, called the attorney general “an absolute embarrassment.”
Mark Goldfeder, who runs the litigation group National Jewish Advocacy Center, wrote on the social network X, “Jewish voters can care deeply about democracy, climate, health care and the welfare of their neighbors while still treating Jewish safety as entirely nonnegotiable.”
Rosenzweig said he had once been an admirer of Nessel but that he was “really sad” over what he interpreted as her suggestion that voting for Abdul “may put Jewish people in danger, but do it anyways.”
“If Abdul wins she gets to say, ‘Well, Jews are endangered,’” he said. “It’s just such a crazy place to put people in.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Vance meets with Temple Israel rabbi on Michigan visit appeared first on The Forward.
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Spain’s prime minister blames Israel, Russia for disinformation around Ceuta border crisis
(JTA) — MADRID — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said on Monday that Israel and Russia spread disinformation about Spain’s migration policy after a rush of migrants arrived in Ceuta, a Spanish exclave in North Africa.
Over 72,000 migrants crossed into Ceuta between July 30 and July 31, with at least 100 people dying in the attempt, according to local authorities. Sánchez, along with Morocco’s Interior Ministry, have blamed the surge on human trafficking networks that exploited misinterpretations of a change in Spain’s border policy.
In Sánchez’s first interview since the border crisis, he also said that Israel and Russia organized internet campaigns to undermine Spain’s government during the chaotic aftermath. Online theories proliferated widely after the Ceuta crossings, including some that said Israel orchestrated the crisis.
“After July 30th and 31st, there was an expansion of these hoaxes and this disinformation by social networks associated with both Russia and Israel, and with an international far-right movement that always uses migration, not only to attack Spain, but also to attack Europe and divide it,” Sánchez said in an interview with the Spanish radio network Cadena SER.
Sánchez said research from the European Union’s European External Action Service showed that Israel and Russia were behind disinformation campaigns, without giving further details on the evidence. The EEAS did not immediately respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s request for comment.
He added that it was “evident” that Israel and Russia were motivated by Spain’s political positions “regarding the genocide in Gaza and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Sánchez is among Europe’s most vocal critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and Iran.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said Monday that Sánchez was “lying shamelessly,” adding that the statements “will not distract from Sánchez’s disgraceful failure to manage his country’s affairs.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also told the Russian state broadcaster RBC that Russia had no involvement in the migrant crisis or disinformation campaigns.
Spanish-Israeli diplomatic ties, first established in 1986, have deteriorated since the start of the Gaza war in 2023, with Madrid since recognizing Palestine as a state and banning ships carrying arms to Israel from docking in its ports. By 2026, both countries had recalled their ambassadors.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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