Uncategorized
How Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture kicked off a democratic crisis
WEIMAR, Thuringia, Germany — Walking through Weimar, Germany, the legacy of the Holocaust seems inescapable. Stolpersteine — German for “stumbling blocks” — are placed outside the homes of people killed during the Shoah, essential evidence of Erinnerungskultur, or memory culture, a national commitment to memorializing, and learning from, the Nazis’ atrocities.
But this commitment is being challenged. Alan Bern, a Yiddish musician described to me as “the man who solved the Shoah,” had just returned from a press conference when I met him, where he spoke alongside local law enforcement officials about a 51-year-old man charged with the 33rd case of vandalism of the memorial stones in the Eastern German city this year.
Bern, 70, an American who came to Germany nearly 40 years ago and holds the nation’s highest civilian honor, said, “Attacks on Stolpersteine are not primarily attacks against Jews, but rather against society and, not least, against human dignity.”
Bern, a composer, founded a school called the Other Music Academy, where he and his colleagues are creating encounters critical to the fight against Jew-hatred in Germany.
They bring together Jews and the descendants of Nazis, Israelis and Palestinians, and Germans and Syrian migrants in an attempt to apply the lessons of the Holocaust forward to the issues facing Germany today. Democracy is in the center’s DNA both in ethos and architecture — the entrance to their dance hall is a 100 year-old door from the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar, where Germany’s first constitution was written and ratified.
“I believe that the encounter with otherness,” Bern said, “is essential to transforming yourself and transforming society.”
Bern’s work helps extend Germany’s memory culture, applying its lessons beyond the Holocaust to address threats against democracy posed by the far-right, which is gaining popularity around the country.
Although not all incidents of antisemitism in Germany are coming from the right, the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has forced a new debate over Germany’s commitment to remembering the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. AfD holds a plurality in Thuringia’s state parliament, and, after this year’s February elections, became the main opposition party in Germany’s federal parliament. The party’s most radical wing says that memory culture is a “guilt cult” and calls for a “180 degree turnaround” in the nation’s approach to remembering its history.
And while many Jews are deeply concerned about the right’s desire to abandon memory culture, some Jews in Germany, particularly those on the left, feel that the societal commitment to preventing another Holocaust has caused the state to police their ability to act and think freely, particularly when critiquing Israel. Since Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish activists have lost awards and speaking engagements, and have even been labeled extremists and put under surveillance by Germany’s state intelligence service.
Memory culture is not just essential to Germans, however; it’s a key for Jews around the world, who take heritage trips to concentration camps and ancestral homes there as part of memorializing the Holocaust. And worldwide, memory culture is essential to remembering global atrocities — yet its tenets are under attack. The Trump administration has criticized the Smithsonian’s approach to slavery, while Turkey refuses to acknowledge the existence of the Armenian genocide.
I went to Germany to speak with both Jews and non-Jewish Germans who are doing the work of bringing memory culture to life, to see how their work is being impacted by these political shifts, and to find out: What is lost if Germany loses its memory?
A brief history of memory culture
After the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, the newly reunited and democratic Germany defined its national identity as a state committed to learning from the atrocities it committed in the past, thus preventing them from ever happening again.
But this devotion to the Holocaust wasn’t always the case. At the end of World War II, fewer than 15,000 Jews remained in Germany, the majority of whom went to West Germany when the country was partitioned after World War II. West Germany largely avoided accepting responsibility for the Holocaust until 1970, when Chancellor Willy Brandt visited the Warsaw Ghetto, in Poland, and laid a wreath at its memorial.
Meanwhile, under East Germany’s Soviet-style system, Nazi crimes were stripped of their antisemitic motivations and recast as offenses to communism; the small Jewish community of less than 1,000 people who remained there continued to be persecuted by the Stasi for perceived opposition to socialist values.
After the Berlin Wall came down and Germany reunified the following year, Chancellor Helmut Kohl oversaw the immigration of some 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union. The majority of Germany’s new Jews moved to Berlin, but others repopulated Jewish communities in the former East.
With the formation of the new German republic, the government moved back to Berlin, and in 1999, voted to construct the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of the city — next to Berlin’s famous Brandenburg Gate. They expanded concentration camp memorials to include details about the Holocaust and built a world-renowned Jewish museum designed by Daniel Libeskind. Visits to these sites became a regular part of German school curricula. A centralized national Jewish council — The Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland, or the Central Council of Jews in Germany — today receives €22 million in government funding to serve as the official voice of Jewish people and to advocate against antisemitism across society.
Memory culture is palpable everywhere in Germany, whether in large memorials and historical sites like concentration camps, or the small plaques and reminders, like the stumbling blocks, about the Jews who once lived there.
For years, however, shame over the Holocaust has muted national pride. Many Germans avoided flying their flag for fear of invoking the kind of nationalism that led to the rise of the Nazi party. (Though in the past two decades, flags have become more common at German sporting matches and events.)
That has led some, such as the far-right AfD party, to claim that memory culture has harmed Germany. Former party leader Alexander Gauland referred in 2018 to the Nazi era as a speck of “bird shit” in an otherwise grand national history, a speck that was given outsize importance.
And more recently, memory culture has become complicated by modern political concerns. In 2008, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that supporting Israel was Germany’s “reason of state,” and the government has consistently operated with an iron-clad support for Israel as a form of reparations for the Holocaust.
But as Israel’s actions have come under increasing international condemnation since Oct. 7, Germany’s memory culture too has come under broader criticism by Jews and non-Jews alike. Some Jews in Germany are concerned over what they see as Germany abandoning Israel after Chancellor Friedrich Merz halted weapons exports to the Jewish state in August to curb the supply that could be used in Gaza. Other Jews, meanwhile, feel unable to speak out against the war given the national devotion to Israel.
And the Central Council, the state Jewish voice, believes that AfD is taking advantage of the war to inflame tensions between a new wave of Muslim immigrants and Germany’s Jews — and, in turn, win Jewish support for their party, including their belief in dismantling memory culture. Before this year’s elections, the Council circulated a letter signed by the leaders of every Jewish state organization warning that the AfD “uses Jews as an excuse to spread its racist and anti-Muslim slogans.”
The right-wing critique of memory culture in Germany
The AfD was officially designated a ‘rightwing extremist’ force by Germany’s intelligence agency, a status the far-right party is contesting in court. Still, it is the largest party in Thuringia and is poised to take over at least one state in next year’s elections. This would give it control over the educational and cultural agencies that fund memory culture in Germany, agencies it hopes to defund. Clearly, the AfD is not a fringe group.
And it is gaining increasing influence nationally and visibility internationally. Prior to their strong showing in February’s elections, both vice president JD Vance and President Trump’s ally Elon Musk encouraged German voters to vote for AfD.
The official voice of the Jewish community in Germany unambiguously says that the AfD is a growing threat to German Jews, and Jews around the world. In their 2024 annual report, the Council called the AfD a “legitimizing bridge” between the political mainstream and extremist actors — like the man who livestreamed himself ranting about the Great Replacement Theory before trying and failing to break into the synagogue in Halle with a gun in 2019, killing two people outside its doors.
“There is a will in this party to change the remembrance and the memory of National Socialism in focusing on the positive parts of German history,” said Shila Erlbaum, the Council’s director of policy. “This is an attack on Jewish history and Jewish memory.”
But not all Jews agree the AfD is such a threat. In 2018, a group of Jewish party members founded the Federal Association of Jews in the AfD (JAfD), a small caucus within the party’s 70,000 members. Today, JAfD has only 25 members, along with another 80 supporters who are not full members.
Artur Abramovych, the JAfD’s 29-year-old chairman, told me that they established the caucus after anti-immigrant demonstrations broke out in the eastern city of Chemnitz, when two Kurdish immigrants stabbed and killed a man.
Like the party’s leaders, the JAfD believes, according to its website, that “the greatest threat to Europe in the 21st century is the growth of the Muslim population” and adds that “the rise of political Islam is also primarily a threat to Jews.” While party leaders’ statements contradict AfD’s official support for Israel, the JAfD is strongly and unequivocally pro-Israel.
In January 2024, the German investigative newsroom Correctiv reported that AfD members secretly met with neo-Nazis and wealthy businessmen to plan the mass deportation of immigrants from Germany in a plot called “remigration.” The news brought hundreds of thousands of Germans into the streets in protest.
AfD initially disputed what was discussed at the meeting, though eventually party leader Alice Weidel embraced remigration as the official party platform. Though the party is once again trying to distance itself from the controversial remigration concept to create a broader appeal among the mainstream electorate, JAfD still believes that the plan is essential. Abramovych himself is an immigrant — from Ukraine — but claimed that immigration is threatening German society due to Muslim fertility rates.
Like the party’s hardliners, JAfD is also critical of Germany’s memory culture. Abramovych said that it didn’t originally hurt Jewish people, but now does “because people are forcing German politics to keep the borders open and let millions of Jew haters into the country” due to the state’s Holocaust guilt.
Germany’s immigration politics have moved to the right since Oct. 7, 2023. In an interview with Der Spiegel after the Hamas attack, former Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the magazine, “We have to deport people more often and faster.” Earlier this year, Merz’s government tightened border controls, and in October the Bundestag, analogous to the U.S. House of Representatives, voted to revoke a fast-track to citizenship law passed by Scholz.
While he smoked handrolled cigarettes and drank a cup of black coffee outside of a Ukrainian cafe in Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg neighborhood, I asked Abramovych if he was concerned that Jewish immigrants like himself could be deported from Germany in the future if the AfD gained power and remigration became government policy.
“What? Who would deport the Jews? That’s ridiculous,” Abramovych said.
An alternative critique of memory culture from the left
AfD had its first electoral win in the Bundestag, Germany’s lower parliamentary house, in 2017, becoming the third-largest party in the parliament. Shortly after, poet and political scientist Max Czollek published the best-selling De-Integrate!: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century, a polemic about Jewish assimilation into German culture. As a result of his edgy take on memory culture in Germany, Czollek has become something of a celebrity, and a bit of a pariah.
For Czollek, AfD is the symptom of a greater problem in Germany where the nation’s guilt over the Holocaust creates a “theater of memory” — a term borrowed from the late sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann — in which Jews play out their dutiful role on the national stage, held up by the state as model minorities, but are subject to losing its protection if they deviate from accepted norms.
Thuringian AfD leader Bjorn Höcke gained infamy when he called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame,” but Czollek wrote that the idea was not new; in 1998, famed German left-wing intellectual Martin Walser called Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture “monumentalization of shame” in his acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Publishers’ Association.
To Czollek, AfD is just the latest step in a proud German tradition of tacitly accepting Nazism, albeit by a different name, in the East.
Behind Balenciaga sunglasses outside of a Kreuzberg cafe, Czollek described his family’s life in the former East Germany, part of a very small community of Jews who stayed after the war instead of departing for West Germany, America or Israel.
“The Jewish rituals I grew up with when my father started to reconnect to this tradition is more like the old, dark, empty synagogue singing of 20 people,” he explained. “And it’s like, ‘Why are there no people?’”
Czollek was born just before the Berlin wall came down, but for his family in East Germany, the Shoah was ever present in the absence of Jews. And it was magnified by what he described as a betrayal by the communist government that took over, which declared itself, its state and all of its citizens to be anti-Nazi — even if they had previously been active members of the Nazi party.
A report by the CIA in 1959 identified over 150 former high-ranking Nazi officials then working in positions of power within the communist East German government, and called it “doubtful” that they were sincere in the “change of political thinking.”
“You have this first generation of Jewish communists who came to Germany to build a better Germany and build up on this idea of anti-fascism as a proper fighting position,” he explained. “Suddenly, a lot of former Nazis were declared anti-fascist. So this is where the memory work fails.”
After the wall came down, Czollek argues that memory culture became a branding tool for Germany to prove itself as a democracy on the international stage — a tool that never offered anything meaningful to the few East German Jews like him, and that has proved ineffective at preventing the revival of a new ethno-nationalist right.
“Memory culture has become a tool in legitimizing and justifying the pride in Germany,” he said. But, he noted, memory culture is a relatively young part of German life; its widespread adoption came, ironically, during the “Years of the Baseball Bat” in the ‘90s, when neo-Nazi violence against migrants escalated severely.
After Oct. 7, Czollek believes that memory culture warped into something else entirely; today, anyone who speaks out against Israel’s response to the attacks in Gaza faces cancellation, disinvitation or even arrest.
“Memory culture used to be a pretty self-centered process of German self-improvement and reinvention,” Czollek said. “By now, it has become a tool of dominance and hegemony.”
“It’s almost like we have done the worst, and we have remembered the best,” he continued, opining that Holocaust and concentration camp memorials boost Germany’s national self-esteem and identity as a moral actor. Then, “you can start accusing migrants of not being as good as you are.”
And Jews who criticize the government’s version of memory culture risk losing state protection.
“There’s a tempting quality to playing along with the theater of memory, because being Jewish is rewarded if you do it in a specific way,” he continued. “Being a non-aligned Jew comes with a price.”
Although solidarity between Germany’s minorities — particularly Jews and Muslims — has become strained post-Oct. 7, exacerbated by the AfD, Czollek believes it’s the only way through the crisis brought about by memory culture and the rise of the far-right.
That’s why Czollek’s new book is called Alles auf Anfang — or, Everything Back to the Beginning. It’s a search for a new culture of remembrance in German life that includes not just Jews, but recognition of other migrant victims in German society.
Currently, much of Germany’s memory culture, exemplified in memorials like the Buchenwald concentration camp, keep their focus firmly in the past. But Czollek believes that, to address the current era, Germany needs to also find ways to commemorate violence perpetrated against its other minority groups.
“If you want to have memory culture as a living, active and productive thing today, it has to be updated every generation,” he said. “Sadness or grief is not a limited resource. We can all grieve together.”
The weaponization of memory culture against Jews
Immediately after Oct. 7, Wieland Hoban, a Jewish German living in Frankfurt am Main, began demonstrating against Germany’s support for Israel, and was arrested multiple times — the first time for wearing a shirt displaying a revolutionary fist logo, which is associated with the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel organization Samidoun that was banned in Germany a few days following the attack.
The next month, Hoban gave a speech where he said, “Germany can’t wash away its Holocaust guilt with the blood of Palestinians.” Afterwards, he was taken aside by police and charged on suspicion of Volksverhetzung — “incitement to hatred” — a charge that has been used by the German government to prosecute neo-Nazis and far-right extremists, and carries a sentence of up to five years in prison.
In Hoban’s view, memory culture had extended past its logical limits to charge him, a Jew, with a violation of the German criminal code for invoking his own history.
“They explained to me that I had mentioned the Holocaust and that in Germany, they take the Holocaust very seriously,” Hoban said. “This was a bit surreal.”
Hoban, a composer and translator, has been chairman of Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East) since 2021. He told me that, like many artists in Germany, the cause of Palestinian self-determination has been important to him.
“This occupation of Judaism, through Zionism, had just pushed me away from any identification with Jewishness,” Hoban said. But joining Jüdische Stimme helped him resolve “an inner contradiction” he felt in being Jewish and also supporting Palestinians.
This June, Hoban received a text from a journalist asking him if he’d seen the latest report from the BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, on extremist groups in Germany. He hadn’t, but when he looked it up, Hoban learned that his organization had been labeled as a “foreign-related extremist” group.
While AfD is using the courts in an attempt to clear their domestic extremist label, Jüdische Stimme is not pushing back. Hoban doesn’t dispute the reasons for the label — he does criticize Israel and Germany’s memory culture — so his group sees no way to clear its name.
“I wish more people would just have the balls to say, ‘I don’t care if you call me antisemitic, I’m sticking to my guns here,’” Hoban said.
With the BfV’s extremist designation, Jüdische Stimme is now vulnerable to surveillance by the intelligence agency, as well as infiltration by informants.
But while the state is adamantly opposed to their cause, Hoban believes that public opinion is changing. The week that we spoke in September, a poll showed that 62% of all German voters believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, including a majority of both Christian Democratic Union and AfD voters. A report by the International Federation for Human Rights also found in October that Germany, among other nations, has weaponized the fight against antisemitism to suppress dissent.
And, over a year after Hoban was charged with incitement to hatred, he received a letter from the public prosecutor’s office informing him that the charge against him had been dropped.
A concentration camp gets political
The Buchenwald Memorial was established in 1958 on the site of the former concentration camp by the government of East Germany to commemorate communist resistance fighters; it did not memorialize the dead Jews. But after reunification, the Memorial’s focus expanded to include the more than 56,000 people killed and 280,000 who were imprisoned at the site, becoming a centerpiece in Germany’s tapestry of memory.
Today, Buchenwald — one of the centerpieces of Germany’s memory culture — finds itself caught in the middle of the debate over how to remember the Holocaust. It’s using its mission to confront its dark history in a new way: fighting back against politicians who distort the Holocaust.
When an AfD member ran for mayor of Nordhausen, a city in Thuringia, in 2023, the Memorial’s official social media pages called him out online for dog whistling to right-wing extremists, invoking a false Holocaust-distorting conspiracy theory. The post changed the course of the election; in the first round of elections, the candidate had more than 45% of the vote, but after the Memorial’s statement, he failed to win in the second round.
“Many older inhabitants of Nordhausen who had not voted for many years said, ‘No, we don’t want to have a Holocaust denier as a mayor,’” the memorial’s director, Jens-Christian Wagner, said in an interview.
Last year, Wagner pursued a more extensive outreach with 300,000 letters mailed to seniors in Thuringia ahead of the state’s elections. The letters warned of the ways in which AfD party leaders have used Nazi language and distorted history.
The AfD fought back, taking the Memorial to court and accusing the Memorial of interfering in “political decision-making.” They lost.
“The court says explicitly that we can’t be neutral against any kind of Holocaust distortion,” Wagner explained to me.
With that mandate, Wagner now considers it his duty and the mission of the Memorial to combat Holocaust distortion, especially when it might affect elections. The Memorial has a particular interest; it’s located in Thuringia, where the AfD is gaining power, and it could lose its funding if the party wins control.
“With our interventions, we don’t think that we can change the positions of the AfD,” Wagner said. “We want to reach all these people who are not specifically voting for the AfD, who are in the gray zone, who can be rescued for democracy.”
Looking towards Germany’s future generations
The AfD has lately focused on reaching youth voters, spending heavily on digital outreach. As a result, young people in Germany are becoming increasingly anti-migrant, embracing far-right political ideas that were once verboten in Germany for being too close to Nazism.
Despite the Memorial’s successful interventions to deter adults from voting for AfD, Wagner is concerned about the rightward shift of younger generations, who are less likely to treat information from a Holocaust memorial with reverence — or even respect its history.
The director described young people who visit the Memorial on school trips displaying the Hitler salute, shouting “Sieg Heil” and photographing each other in front of crematory ovens.
“There were some right-wing young people in every school class for years, but these were only one or two, and the majority was against them, and this has completely changed,” Wagner said. “Now, spreading Holocaust distortion, being right-wing, is common sense in these school classes, and it’s very, very difficult for our educators to have a discourse with them.”
The Memorial has been attempting to revise their educational programming to make visits longer and more in-depth, and even built a youth hostel on the site so that school groups can stay and have extended experiences that they hope will make a lasting impact.
Alan Bern, of the Other Music Academy, also is also worried about the younger generations; he sees resonating with Germany’s youth as one of his most urgent and important challenges.
“Young people in Weimar have almost no real relationship to what it is that we’re doing,” Bern said. “So when they’re told ‘You shouldn’t be antisemitic,’ it’s just some adult telling them ‘Don’t do this.’”
Like at Buchenwald, where the education department has placed its hopes for the future into its youth hostel, Bern wants to transform the former youth prison next to Other Music Academy into a dormitory of sorts where young people can stay for several days. The dichotomy of the prison’s barbed wire courtyard and its painted exterior wall, which artists have covered with colorful Keith Haring murals, pose a striking question about the direction of Germany’s future: Which way?
Pointing towards the floor and then to the prison across the driveway, Bern said, jokingly: “It’s either this or that.”
Challenged from both the left and the right, it’s unclear what is next for Germany’s memory culture. For now, the younger generations are caught in the middle.
While waiting at the bus stop to head back from Buchenwald, I found myself unexpectedly sandwiched in the middle of a high school tour group as they posed for a class photo. After we all boarded the bus, about half of them sat quietly — maybe contemplating the horrors they’d just seen, maybe dozing off. But as we drove down the hill toward Weimar, the bus also filled with the sound of laughter.
The future of memory culture, ultimately, will be up to them.
The post How Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture kicked off a democratic crisis appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Flyers for ‘IsraelFest’ at New York high school ended up in a urinal. Now the school board president is facing calls to resign.
(JTA) — The school board president in a heavily Jewish suburb of New York City is facing calls to resign after flyers promoting a student-led Israeli culture club event were torn down and later found in a boys’ bathroom urinal last week.
The flyers advertised an “IsraelFest” event to celebrate Israel’s 78th Independence Day this week at Scarsdale High School. Among those posting photographs of the vandalism was the daughter of the board president, James Dugan. She added a caption: “Keep up the good work.”
The incident quickly drew condemnation from leaders within the school district of the heavily Jewish New York City suburb, including Superintendent Drew Patrick, who wrote in a letter to the community that the vandalism “places our collective sense of community in jeopardy.”
“We live in a time of rising antisemitism, political polarization, and a degraded civil discourse,” Patrick wrote. “I want the community to know that we take these complex challenges seriously and work to confront them every single day.”
Patrick said the district had already been developing a “clear, written set of guidelines regarding student speech and dress at school sponsored student activities,” which will be introduced at a Board of Education meeting on May 11.
Scarsdale High School Principal Kenneth Bonamo also decried the incident in a letter to the community on Friday, adding that the student government’s Instagram post advertising the event received “two replies criticizing the event using vulgar language.”
Bonamo said the school’s investigation into the incident was “active and ongoing,” and that officials were “currently interviewing students and reviewing camera footage to identify those involved.”
“The Israeli Culture Club was well within its right to plan this type of an event, for which they sought and received administrative approval,’ Bonamo wrote. “Denigrating the club’s efforts in this way is wholly inconsistent with our values, both as a matter of basic fairness to support appropriate and approved student activities and because these actions constitute antisemitism.”
The event promised “Israeli food (and pizza), drinks and desserts alongside Israeli music and games,” suggesting no focus on current events or geopolitics.
The incident comes as younger Americans increasingly adopt anti-Israel stances, setting up clashes in places like Scarsdale, where many Jewish families have connections to the country and to Jewish communities. In 2024, two stores in a Scarsdale shopping plaza, one of which had a sign reading “We stand with Israel” in its window, were targeted with anti-Israel graffiti.
In his letter, Bonamo added that the school had received “concerns that the unlabeled map in the flyer seems to include disputed territories as part of the State of Israel.” The map did not delineate the West Bank and Gaza.
“This is a core conflict in this debate, one that is worthy of exploration in civil discourse, but responding in this way is still not appropriate,” Bonamo wrote of the map.
An online petition calling for the students responsible for the vandalism to face “meaningful disciplinary action” as well as for Dugan’s ouster nearly 1,000 signatures by Tuesday morning.
“When a Board member’s immediate family is directly connected to the approval, encouragement, or defense of antisemitic behavior, it undermines public confidence in the Board’s ability to lead fairly and credibly during moments of crisis,” the petition read. “For that reason, we call for the resignation of any Board of Education member whose household is implicated in supporting these acts.”
A separate petition calling for the school board to reject calls for Dugan’s resignation drew over 100 signatures.
Dugan appeared to address his daughter’s post in a letter to the school community on Friday, writing, “Recent events have provided a profound teaching moment for me as a parent and have impacted me and my family.”
He added, “As a parent, I will focus on healing my family. But as a school board member, my focus will continue to be on our students, our schools, and our educational program.”
The incident follows others at high schools in the region that have unsettled Jewish students and watchdogs. In February, a New York City high schooler was arrested for allegedly sending an email threatening to “kill all the Jews in this school,” and earlier this month, students at a Connecticut Catholic school were punished for making antisemitic posts about a rival hockey team.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Flyers for ‘IsraelFest’ at New York high school ended up in a urinal. Now the school board president is facing calls to resign. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Isaac Accords, Wave of IRGC Terror Designations Signal Deepening Israel–Latin America Ties
Argentina’s President Javier Milei receives Presidential Medal of Honor from Israel’s President Isaac Herzog in Jerusalem, April 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
As Israel deepens its diplomatic outreach across Latin America, a quiet but notable convergence is taking shape, with regional governments tightening security cooperation and increasingly aligning efforts to counter Iranian-linked terrorism and illicit networks operating across the hemisphere.
During a state visit to Israel on Sunday, Argentine President Javier Milei and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally signed the Isaac Accords, a new framework aimed at deepening ties between Israel and Latin American governments while jointly addressing antisemitism and terrorism.
According to Toby Dershowitz, senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC–based think tank, this initiative builds on rising regional momentum for closer cooperation with the Jewish state and sets in place a framework for intelligence-sharing and coordinated law enforcement efforts aimed at countering Iranian proxy networks operating across the hemisphere.
Latin America has long been regarded as a hub for Iran-backed Hezbollah’s illicit drug trafficking and other criminal activities, which have been used to finance its broader terrorist operations worldwide.
“While just formally signed in recent days, there is already momentum behind some of the Isaac Accords’ goals,” Dershowitz told The Algemeiner. “Several countries have taken steps – including terrorism designations – to counter the Islamic Republic’s threat.”
“The Western Hemisphere has been plagued by Iran-backed terrorism for decades and countries are increasingly leveraging support from allies in the region to address the threat,” she continued.
Modeled after the Abraham Accords — a series of historic, US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries — this new initiative aims to strengthen political, economic, and cultural cooperation between the Jewish state and Latin American governments.
During the signing ceremony, Milei described the launch of the accords as “a historic moment for our nations,” saying they are intended to advance peace through efforts to strengthen long-term regional stability, security, and economic prosperity.
The Isaac Accords “will not only strengthen the relationship between Argentina and Israel, united by shared values, but also mark a step toward a freer and more prosperous hemisphere,” the Argentine leader said.
According to a joint statement between the two leaders, the new initiative will focus on technology, security, and economic development, with an emphasis on deepening cooperation in innovation, commerce, and cultural exchange.
It will also seek to encourage partner countries to relocate their embassies to Jerusalem, formally designate Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, and shift longstanding voting patterns on Israel at the United Nations.
Dershowitz explained that the push to formally designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its proxy groups as terrorist organizations — an approach already adopted by several Latin American countries — is central to strengthening states’ ability to investigate and prosecute terrorism networks.
She also noted that such designations facilitate cooperation with global financial intelligence units, expanding the legal tools available to track and disrupt illicit financing.
“Iran has a concerning footprint in Latin America. Some countries in the region face major Hezbollah-linked drug trafficking challenges and, as a result, exposure to illicit financial flows,” Dershowitz said. “It is no doubt part of the calculus that led to these designations.”
Since the start of the war in Gaza, and even more so amid the broader confrontation with Iran, Latin American countries have increasingly sought to align their domestic legislation with international sanctions frameworks targeting Hezbollah, Hamas, and the IRGC — all of which are designated by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.
Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Paraguay are among some of the countries that have designated Hamas, Hezbollah, and the IRGC as terrorist organizations.
More recently, Costa Rica and Trinidad and Tobago have also followed suit, proscribing all three Iranian and Iran-backed entities.
Once a formal designation is in place, authorities can immediately freeze a wide range of assets belonging to designated entities without the need for a prior criminal conviction.
The designation also makes it a criminal offense to provide such entities with material support — such as funding, transportation, housing, or false documentation — while giving authorities additional tools to track and map a group’s logistical and financial networks.
Last month, Argentina also designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization, after previously designating the Palestinian group Hamas in 2024 and the Lebanese group Hezbollah in 2019.
After Iran accused Buenos Aires of “siding with the aggressors” and violating international law with its latest designation, the Argentine government declared Iranian chargé d’affaires Mohsen Tehrani “persona non grata” and gave him 48 hours to leave the country.
Uncategorized
Steeped in history, Pensacola Jews celebrate the 150th anniversary of Florida’s oldest synagogue
(JTA) — PENSACOLA, Florida — Mention the Jewish exodus to Florida, and people immediately think Miami Beach, Boca Raton or Aventura.
But it was here in Pensacola — along the Gulf Coast’s fabled “Redneck Riviera” — that German-speaking Jewish pioneers first put down roots in the Sunshine State. In 1876, when Pensacola’s Temple Beth El was founded, Florida had 200,000 inhabitants, just 2,000 of them Jews.
Today, Florida is home to 24.3 million people and a Jewish population exceeded only by New York and California. Most of the state’s 762,000 Jews reside in three South Florida counties — eclipsing much older congregations in Tallahassee, Jacksonville and Pensacola that thrived long before the advent of air-conditioning and interstate highways.
Pensacola is home to only about 1,800 Jewish adults, according to the American Jewish Population Project — a number that has remained constant for a century. Yet locals in this laid-back resort in Florida’s Panhandle, more than 600 miles northwest from the bustling Jewish communities of South Florida, say it is ripe for a Jewish renaissance.
“I’d like to make the case that this is also Florida, even though we’re only 10 miles from Alabama,” said Rabbi Joel Fleekop, 47, spiritual leader of Beth El since 2012. “The cost of living here is very low, we have no traffic or congestion, and there are plenty of good jobs.”
Pensacola also has three synagogues: a Chabad, an Orthodox-style congregation and Beth El, which this month is marking the 150th anniversary of its founding with a weekend of prayers, local art, Israeli music and dancing.
Beth El’s celebration began on Friday with a Shabbat service led jointly by Fleekop and Cantor Richard Cohen, former director of the Hebrew Union College’s School of Sacred Music and a and Pensacola native.
In a sermon, Fleekop told the story of the children’s book “Bone Button Borscht,” in which a wandering man helps the people of an impoverished town to create soup from their own meager ingredients that somehow taste far better together than separately.
“For 150 years, this temple — our temple, Temple Beth El — has thrived because similar to the people making soup in the story, its members have contributed and done what they could to nourish and enhance and better our community,” he said. “Our founding families like the man who set up the pot provided the vision that this little corner of the world could have a thriving Jewish community. Others provided the resources to build the sacred spaces our congregation has called home and to keep on the lights and, this being Florida, the air conditioning also on.”
Summarizing the wide range of contributions that members have made over the decades, Fleekop also noted changes that Temple Beth El experienced over the last 150 years: the number of stars on the American flag grew, the the Israeli flag was created, the amount of Hebrew in the service increased; and congregants are wearing “fewer neckties and fewer fancy hats” but more kippahs and tallits than they once did.
“Inevitably each generation had its own taste and so added their own ingredients, the spiritual equivalent of maybe some okra, or zaatar, or even some sriracha,” he said to laughs. “At 150 years, our congregation is no doubt very different from what was imagined at its inception. … The soup that is our temple has gone from a Bavarian borscht to a Gulf seafood gumbo to a gluten-free, Asian fusion matzoh ball soup. But in many ways, in the most essential ways, we are still the same congregation.”
The following evening, a gala dinner featured dancing and a live band. And on Sunday morning, congregants toured Pensacola’s Jewish cemetery, where the oldest tombstone dates from 1874 and many inscriptions are in Hebrew and German as well as English.
Among those buried in the cemetery is Florida’s first Jewish mayor, Adolph Greenhut, who served from 1913 to 1916 — two decades after his stint as Beth El’s president. Beth El also takes great pride in having been home to the nation’s first de facto female rabbi, Paula Ackerman, in the 1960s.
“There were really very few Jews in South Florida until the 1940s. People can’t believe there was a thriving Jewish community here at the turn of the century,” said Bill Zimmern, 74, a native Pensacolan like his mother and grandmother whose wife, Beverly, was once mayor of suburban Gulf Breeze.
That community was born after the Civil War, when Jews settled in Milton — a northwest Florida lumber hub — bringing their skills from heavily wooded areas of Bavaria and southern Germany. They began relocating to Pensacola in the 1870s as the city developed.
Zimmern added that nearby Naval Air Station Pensacola, home to the Blue Angels, has long welcomed Jews to the area, and that many Jewish men and women in uniform who were once stationed there eventually settled in Pensacola and joined the congregation.
Beth El’s first home was a wooden structure on Chase Street in downtown Pensacola, but it burned down in 1901 and all records of the shul’s first 25 years of existence disappeared in that fire. It was later rebuilt near what is today the on-ramp for Interstate 110, but closed in 1931 when its members inaugurated the current synagogue on nearby Palafox Street, and the previous structure became a roller-skating rink.
Soon after Beth El’s founding, Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe — mainly traders and merchants — settled in the area, and they were not especially happy with its Reform services. So in 1899, they parted ways and established B’nai Israel as an Orthodox synagogue.
In 1923, congregants bought a house and converted it into a house of worship; by 1953, they had finally raised enough money to construct the building it currently occupies, according to Yehoshua Mizrachi, B’nai Israel’s rabbi.
At the time, it also chose to affiliate with the Conservative movement, then the largest denomination in the United States. It remained part of the movement until about a decade ago, separating after the Conservative movement opted to ordain gay rabbis and sanction same-sex marriages.
“I am the 19th rabbi to hold this pulpit, and all but three or four of them were Orthodox,” said Mizrachi, 62. Originally from Lakewood, New Jersey, he said B’nai Israel’s membership consists of 60 to 70 families, compared to 185 families at Beth El.
“This congregation is independent, so they dropped their affiliation 10 years ago. When they hired me, I told them not to expect me to do anything to compromise my personal integrity as a Jew,” Mizrachi said.
Even so, the rabbi added, “we are not an Orthodox congregation. We have mixed seating and women are called to the Torah. In all other aspects, this shul operates according to the standards of halacha,” or Jewish law.
Rabbi Mendel Danow runs the Pensacola Chabad Jewish Center along with his Israeli-born wife, Nechama, from a 120-year-old house less than a mile from B’nai Israel. Between 500 and 600 people are on his mailing list, he said.
“A lot of Jews here are unaffiliated. They don’t have that natural connection,” said Danow, 30. The best way of drawing them in is by inviting them to Friday night services and Shabbat dinner; anywhere from 20 to 80 people usually show up, he said. “It’s laid back. Davening [prayer] is shorter, dinner is longer. It’s been a very important part of our community.”
Danow is clear-eyed about the challenges of living an observant Jewish life in Pensacola.
“There’s no kosher restaurant within a 400-mile radius. The closest is in Jacksonville or Atlanta,” he said. “Obviously we’re not the first destination for an Orthodox Jew looking to move to Florida.”
But he’s trying to make things easier. His Chabad recently opened Pensa-Kosher — a mini-market for the handful of locals who strictly observe Jewish dietary laws. He and his wife, who have six children together, run a Hebrew school with close to 20 students, as well as a preschool with 10 children. And they are trying to support the few Jewish students at the nearest university.
“When we moved here, one of the first things we noticed was a lack of Jewish life on campus, so we started a Chabad student club at the University of West Florida,” Danow said.
With Pensacola enjoying a relatively low cost of living and ranking high when it comes to job growth, beach quality and even the density of Waffle House restaurants, the city is growing — and Chabad is bursting out of its current home. Early next year, it will relocate to a larger complex two blocks down the street. Among other things, the new facility will include a synagogue, Hebrew school and Pensacola’s first full-service mikvah.
Danow said any antisemitism in the city is dwarfed by support for Israel and Jews.
“Three years ago, a gang of four teenagers threw a brick through our window, and ‘Heil Hitler’ was spray-painted on the brick,” he recalled. “But after Oct. 7, people began dropping off flowers and giving donations. There was such a sense of sharing in our pain. People would stop me on the street to say, ‘We’re praying for Israel.’”
Mizrachi shared similar experiences. “There’s a church on every street corner. People are very pro-Israel here,” he said. “Strangers stop me in the supermarket and tell me they love Israel. It happens all the time.”
The front lawn of Zimmern’s best friend, Charles Kahn, 74, a retired federal judge, boasts two signs: “Go Gators” — a reference to his alma mater, the University of Florida — and “We Stand With Israel.”
“Right after Oct. 7, I got that sign,” Kahn said while sipping coffee as he sat on his porch overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. “My neighbor on one side is a retired Navy captain. He asked for one also, and my other neighbor on the other side asked for one too — and then the people across the street, then two houses down. We ended up with five of them just on this street.”
Kahn is a past president of Beth El, as is his wife Janet. Their Reform synagogue is by far the largest Jewish house of worship in the city.
“We’re a full-function, mainstream Reform synagogue. We follow Reform rules, and our house of worship is a place where people who disagree on politics can still be friends,” said Fleekop, a Philadelphia native who grew up in Reno, Nevada, and moved to Pensacola 13 years ago. His wife, Andrea, runs the temple’s School for Jewish Living, which has 55 children enrolled.
“We welcome the LGBTQ community. Some gay and lesbian Jews who were rejected elsewhere have found themselves here at Beth El,” he said. “We also have a lot of Jews by choice.”
One of them is Nichole Friedland, 51, a Pensacola-born nurse who was raised Catholic but converted to Judaism 16 years ago — on Easter Sunday no less — under Fleekop’s guidance. She’s now the vice-president of Beth El and treasurer of the Pensacola Jewish Federation.
“Most of our congregants are either interfaith or have converted to Judaism,” said Friedland, who with her husband is raising a blended family of eight kids. “I wanted my children to have a good foundational religion, and Judaism made the most sense to me. It was, and is, the correct choice.”
The federation, based inside Beth El, is entirely volunteer-run and rarely publicizes events or occasions — a sharp contrast to the vibe in the Jewish metropolises of South Florida.
But Mizrachi sees potential for Pensacola in some of the same forces that are luring Jews to Boca and Aventure — including unhappiness among New Yorkers with the city’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
“After Mamdani’s win, a lot of people are thinking of moving to Florida,” Mizrachi said. “But instead of going to Dade or Broward, they should consider Pensacola. There is Jewish life here.”
The post Steeped in history, Pensacola Jews celebrate the 150th anniversary of Florida’s oldest synagogue appeared first on The Forward.