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A new mural in Nolita celebrates a Holocaust rescuer
(New York Jewish Week) — In the heavily trafficked neighborhood of Nolita, a larger-than-life mural has popped up on the corner of Spring St. and Elizabeth St. Bright orange and pink paint spell out the words “Saved 3,000 Jewish Lives” next to a black and white portrait of Holocaust rescuer Tibor Baranski.
The mural, an art piece designed to combat hate and spark conversation, is the brainchild of “Artists 4 Israel,” a non-profit organization that aims to “prevent the spread of antisemitic and anti-Israel bigotry by helping to heal communities that have been affected by hate through art,” according to its CEO and co-founder Craig Dershowitz.
“Our rallying cry is art over hate,” Dershowitz said. Baranski’s portrait, painted by Fernando “SKI” Romero, a renowned graffiti artist based in Queens, is part of the organization’s “Righteous Among the Nations Global Mural Project.” It aims to establish a network of murals painted in cities around the world that feature other “Righteous Among the Nations” members who helped save Jews during the Holocaust.
“His story was beautiful and it really touched me,” Romero, who is Dominican, said of Baranski, who collaborated with Artists 4 Israel on deciding whom to feature in the New York mural. “The want to paint something came very easily with something so selfless.”
The Baranski mural in Nolita is the third installment of the mural project; eventually there will be 10 murals around the world, said Dershowitz. Each subject is given a mural in their home state or country where they aided Jews: In Portugal, a mural of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a diplomat who helped arrange passports for Jews has become a popular tour bus stop. In Greece, a mural of Mayor Loukas Karrer and Archbishop Dimitrios Chrysostomos led to national media coverage.
Though Baranski was Hungarian, he lived in Buffalo, New York for nearly six decades and felt at home in New York, which is why the Artists 4 Israel chose him for the mural in Manhattan.
In 1944, Baranski was 22 and studying to become a Catholic priest in Slovakia when the Russian Army invaded and he was forced to return to Budapest, where he grew up.
He never returned to the seminary, and abandoned his dream of becoming a priest. Instead, he dedicated the next years of his life to orchestrating the escape of more than 3,000 Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust.
After arriving in Budapest, Baranski headed to the Vatican embassy residence of the Papal Nuncio Angelo Rotta, where a long line of people were requesting help. The Vatican embassies in Switzerland, Sweden, Spain and Portugal were some of the only places where Jews and other refugees were able to secure letters of protection and necessary documents to leave their countries.
Carol Romeo, who said her family survived the Holocaust, pauses to touch the mural of Holocaust rescuer Tibor Baranski created by Fernando “SKI” Romero, a Dominican-American artist born and raised in Queens. “I never knew he existed,” she said of Baranski. “And he lived here in New York. Everyone should know his story.” (CAM and Artists4Israel)
Pretending to be a priest, Baranski managed to arrange a meeting with Rotta, where he secured documents for a Jewish family he knew. As the story goes, Rotta soon recruited Baranski to help organize protection letters, baptismal certificates and immigration certificates for Jews trying to escape Hungary. He also helped coordinate food and housing for the escapees. Over the next two months, Baranski saved 3,000 Jewish lives, according to official records — though his sons have said he believes the number was closer to 15,000.
After the war, Baranski was imprisoned by the Soviet army for five years for his anti-communist beliefs. He became a freedom fighter during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 before moving to Rome to start a refugee camp with his wife Katalin.
Eventually the couple moved to Canada and then settled in Buffalo, where they were active members of the community and raised their three children, Tibor Jr., Kati and Peter.
Baranski, who died in 2019, was recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations in 1979, and was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.
In an obituary in the New York Jewish Week, writer and close friend of Baranski’s Steve Lipman recalls an anecdote Baranski often repeated: “’Why do you, a Christian, help Jews?’ Uncle Tibor told me the Nazis asked him. ‘You are either silly or an idiot,’ he would answer. ‘It is because I am a Christian that I help the Jews.’”
For Dershowitz, who is based in Los Angeles, one of the goals of the murals — and his organization at large — is fighting antisemitism through education about Israel and the Holocaust. By making the art public and accessible, Dershowitz hopes people of all backgrounds will enjoy the art, and learn from it.
“These murals are very much for everyone to enjoy,” he said. “For the most part, they’re not geared towards the Jewish community as much as they’re geared towards a younger demographic, regardless of their religion or cultural heritage.”
Since its foundation in 2009, Artists 4 Israel’s principal mission has been to bring diverse groups of graffiti, street and mural artists to Israel to create projects that “benefit people in a direct, on-the-ground way,” such as painting murals in hospitals, bomb shelters and army bases. The organization has worked with more than 5,000 professional and amateur artists from 32 countries around the world, according to its website.
“When [the artists] come back [from Israel], they’re able to talk about the country and they’re able to speak about the Jewish people and be a window into the reality of Israel in the Middle East to their millions of followers,” Dershowitz explained.
In 2020, when COVID-19 arrived and international travel halted, the organization switched gears and started bringing their advocacy to cities around the world with the “Righteous Among the Nations” project.
For the artist Romero, the work has been especially gratifying. The 44 year-old artist has been involved with Artists 4 Israel since its inception and has visited Israel three times, painting murals for battered women’s shelters, community shelters and army bases.
“I’m creating art with purpose, which is beautiful. I’m also creating a dialogue. There’s a conversation,” Romero said. “This is one of those murals that touches home and it makes you really feel good. It is art that just separates itself from a lot of the noise out there.”
Painted over the course of two days, the mural will remain on the downtown corner for the next nine months.
At the unveiling party last month, which included a performance by singer Neshama Carlebach and blessings led by Rabbi Menachem Creditor, Baranski’s son Tibor Jr. retold his father’s story and emphasized the strong Catholic faith that guided him.
“Tibor Baranski was the merger of intellect and faith,” said his son, who drove from Buffalo for the event. “My father’s deeply held belief in God was uncompromising. It was the core driver in his saving thousands of innocent Jewish lives in 1944 in Nazi-occupied Hungary.”
“I will quote my father since his words captured the essence of our Catholic faith and what this mural that Fernando painted commemorating him represents: ‘Love each other, love each other sincerely. God is love. Love destroys hatred,’” he added.
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The post A new mural in Nolita celebrates a Holocaust rescuer appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Like Trump, Hitler also wanted to build monuments to himself — so did Franco, Gaddafi and Alexander the Great
As the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler laid out plans for structures that would serve as monuments to himself. His grandest scheme was predicated on his absolute certainty Germany would conquer the world: rebuilding Berlin into a Wagnerian monument to Teutonic superiority and renaming the city World Capital Germania.
Just as Hitler sought to inscribe himself onto Berlin’s skyline, Donald Trump has been pursuing his own form of self-mythologizing — having his name added to the Kennedy Center façade; proposing an arch larger than the Arc de Triomphe; floating other grandiose ideas meant to ensure the world doesn’t forget him.
All around the globe, wherever you find megalomaniacs you will find monuments to their egos. Among them are Francisco Franco’s “Valley Of The Fallen,” a colossal bust of Ferdinand E. Marcos on a hillside in the Philippines, Joseph Stalin’s Stalingrad, streets in Syria named after the Assads, a Libyan square named after Muammar Gaddafi, North Korean streets and institutional buildings named after the Kim dynasty, and a Turin stadium that bore Mussolini’s name.
It is clear that Donald Trump envisions himself as a member of this rogue’s gallery.
Alexander the Great is among the best-known world figures to immortalize himself in this way, by founding a city in Egypt and naming it Alexandria. He was followed six centuries later by Constantine the Great, who founded a new Roman capital on the Bosporus Strait and named it Constantinople. A 100-foot column topped with a gold-encrusted statue of the emperor dominated the city’s forum.
European wars in the 18th and 19th centuries sprouted multitudes of monuments to victorious leaders — glorious and otherwise. After Kaiser Wilhelm I’s armies defeated Denmark, Austria and France, the Germans raised gargantuan memorials that blended modern triumph with mythic antiquity. Many are still standing: towering figures of Germania, medieval emperors and legendary warriors.
“Herman the German,” an 82-foot-tall tribal chieftain in a winged helmet, and mounted atop an 88-foot temple-like pedestal, looms over the north German countryside with his sword raised as if daring anyone to challenge him. The figure is actually Hermann — the Germanized name of Arminius, as the Romans called the Cheruscan leader who annihilated three legions in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 A.D.
At the Deutsches Eck in Koblenz, an enormous bronze statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I astride his horse rises above the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle, announcing Germany’s arrival as a great power. Forty miles upstream, on the east bank of the Rhine, stands the Niederwalddenkmal, a 125-foot colossus celebrating Germany’s victory over France and the founding of the Reich in 1871.
On the other side of Germany, perched on a mountain in Thuringia is the Kyffhäuserdenkmal — 266 feet of terraces, arches and towers built to celebrate Kaiser Wilhelm I and the new German Empire he presided over. At its base sits a massive stone figure of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, the 12th-century ruler who, according to legend, never died but sleeps inside the mountain, waiting to return when Germany needs him.
All of these monuments, bespeaking the glory of Germans and their ancestors, were repurposed by the Nazis to project a sense of historical inevitability — as if Hitler’s regime were the next chapter in a lineage stretching from Arminius to Barbarossa to Wilhelm I.
Long before Hitler became chancellor, Berlin already possessed grandiose monuments to Teutonic greatness: the Siegessäule (Victory Column) and the Brandenburg Gate, crowned by a bronze quadriga driven by Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory. Hitler and his architect, Albert Speer, envisioned even grander transformations. The centerpiece of World Capital Germania was to be a structure called the Volkshalle (People’s Hall), a domed monstrosity that would be able to hold 180,000 people. Also on the drawing board was a Triumphal Arch, so large that the Arc de Triomphe would have fit within its opening.
After France’s defeat in 1940, Hitler signed a decree asserting: “In the shortest possible time Berlin must be redeveloped and acquire the form that is its due through the greatness of our victory as the capital of a powerful new empire.”
Hitler added: “I expect that it will be completed by the year 1950.”
Obviously, Hitler didn’t last that long. Neither did work on “World Capital Germania.” And all across defeated Germany, the thousands of street signs bearing Hitler’s name came down and were replaced.
Donald Trump, perhaps glimpsing his own mortality, seems to be in a hurry to leave an indelible and grandiose imprint on the nation’s capital and beyond. Much of the country watched in disbelief as heavy equipment tore into the White House East Wing to clear ground for a super-sized new ballroom designed in the gilded idiom of America’s 47th president. His name newly affixed beside JFK’s on the façade of the Kennedy Center only amplified the sense that Trump is racing to secure the permanence he has long craved.
And he is far from finished.
His most extravagant project is one reminiscent of Hitler’s ideas for World Capital Germania — that “triumphal arch” that the White House has cast as a defining pillar of Trump’s legacy.
“The arch is going to be one of the most iconic landmarks not only in Washington, D.C., but throughout the world,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle declared.
But even as Trump pursues these monumental ambitions, he keeps running into the limits of democratic resistance. In one of the more brazen episodes, he told Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that he would release long-delayed federal funds for a critical rail tunnel between New Jersey and New York if Dulles International Airport and Penn Station were renamed for him. Schumer refused, and the gambit collapsed.
The only way Trump managed to get his name onto the Kennedy Center was by replacing multiple board members with loyalists and then having himself appointed board chair. His newly installed board approved adding his name to the building’s façade — a move that cannot legally alter the institution’s official name, which only Congress can change. This particular gambit backfired, prompting a long list of prominent performers to cancel appearances in protest.
Trump’s plans for a grand arch could also face some obstacles, because of laws designed to protect the capital’s commemorative landscape.
Who knows how much of Trump’s ambitions to remake Washington, D.C. in his own image will come to fruition. But even if a Trumpian analog of Germania never arises, with the way he has disrupted this country and the world, he’s already molded himself into something like a menacing monument in human form.
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Jeremy Carl is latest Trump nominee facing Senate pushback over history of antisemitic remarks
(JTA) — A key GOP senator is opposing the appointment of a Trump nominee over his past remarks about Jews, the Holocaust and Israel, potentially dooming Jeremy Carl’s bid for a top State Department post.
Carl, who is seeking the role of Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, drew scrutiny during his Thursday confirmation hearing for past writings and statements about Jews. Those included a 2024 interview on a podcast called “The Christian Ghetto” in which the first-term Trump official said, “Jews have often loved to play the victim rather than accept that they are participants in history.” On the same podcast, he opined that there was “an extent to which the Holocaust kind of dominates so much of modern Jewish thinking, even today.”
Following his appearance, Utah Sen. John Curtis, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, announced he would not be supporting Carl’s nomination.
“After reviewing his record and participating in today’s hearing, I do not believe that Jeremy Carl is the right person to represent our nation’s best interests in international forums, and I find his anti-Israel views and insensitive remarks about the Jewish people unbecoming of the position for which he has been nominated,” Curtis said in a statement.
Carl, however, is continuing to push for the post on X. Since the hearing, he has used the platform to defend his performance and repost allies, including some who responded directly to Senate accusations of his antisemitism. Vice President JD Vance this week also shared a post of Carl’s, though not one directly related to his confirmation bid.
Carl also denied accusations from Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy that he is a white nationalist, though he continued to insist that “white culture” is under threat.
A Claremont Institute fellow, Carl was born Jewish but has since converted to Christianity. He served in the first Trump administration’s Interior Department and has argued that “white Americans are increasingly second-class citizens in a country their ancestors founded.”
The White House also continued to defend its pick of Carl after the hearing in a statement to the New York Times late Friday.
And at least one of Carl’s defenders is Jewish: Michael Rubin, a conservative historian and longtime government advisor on Middle East affairs, called the campaign against his former Yale classmate a “lynch mob” in the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.
Carl, Rubin wrote, “is a man whose record of action and allies belie any serious consideration that he is antisemitic, anti-Zionist, or racist.”
Carl’s grilling came days after Republicans booted another Trump appointee from the administration’s religious freedom commission over her remarks about Israel and Zionism during an antisemitism hearing.
If Carl’s bid fails, he would not be the first Trump nominee with a history of questionable comments about Jews to fail to clear the Senate — though other Trump officials remain in their positions despite histories of antisemitic posts.
On the “Christian Ghetto” podcast interview, Carl also gave advice to Christians “looking to convert Jews” like him. He did, however, reject certain conspiracy theories about cabals of Jewish power. “I’m very critical of, overall, the political stance and the sociology of the Jewish community, particularly in this century. It’s been very destructive overall. But I don’t think that that’s a result of a conspiracy,” he said. His other podcast appearances include Tucker Carlson in 2024.
His new role — if confirmed — would put him in a critical position of influence over U.S. policy related to the United Nations, at a moment when both Israel and the U.S. are highly critical of that governing body over its perceived anti-Israel bias.
That concerned Curtis, who said that Carl’s past comments that the U.S. “spends too much time and energy on Israel, often to the detriment of our own national interest” would damage his credibility at the UN.
“Share with me specifically, what in the US interest has been harmed by sustained American support of Israel?” Curtis asked. Carl did not directly answer the question, instead pivoting to criticizing the UN for antisemitism.
“In the UN context, I wish the UN would stop being antisemitic all the time, and so therefore we could stop — there’s a million other problems, like the Rohingya,” he said. Upon Curtis’s repeated questioning, Carl added, “I think diplomatic support of Israel in the UN context is absolutely critical.”
Curtis also noted that Carl seemed to agree with a podcast host’s remarks that Jews were “claiming special victim status because of the Holocaust” and that “the state of Israel is not a victim but instead a perpetrator,” among other remarks.
“This was your response: ‘Right, right, yeah, no, I mean, I think that’s true,’” Curtis said, of Carl’s appearance on the “Christian Ghetto” podcast.
“I do a lot of podcasts,” Carl responded, adding that he was “sure” his quotes were “accurate.”
Democratic Senators, including some Jews, were more forceful in condemning Carl’s remarks about Jews.
Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada, quoting a recent American Jewish Committee study that one in three Jewish Americans have experienced antisemitism, produced placards of some of Carl’s past pronouncements on Jews, including that “the Jews love to see themselves as oppressed.”
“To my colleagues that may consider voting for Mr. Carl’s nomination, understand what the vote signals,” she said. “It tells Jewish Americans they simply don’t matter.”
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Spike Lee says his pro-Palestinian NBA All-Star Game fit wasn’t meant as a dig against Deni Avdija
(JTA) — The director Spike Lee says he was not targeting the first Israeli NBA All-Star when he wore a pro-Palestinian outfit to the All-Star Game on Sunday.
Lee’s outfit which featured a keffiyeh-patterned sweater and flag-themed bag strap. Some of his critics charged that he had chosen the outfit especially because Deni Avdija, the Israeli star of the Portland Trail Blazers, was taking the court.
Lee put that idea to rest in a post on Instagram late Tuesday, saying that he had not known Avdija was Israeli because the Trail Blazers are a West Coast team. (Lee is a New York Knicks superfan.)
“There has been some conjecture about what I wore to the games on Saturday and Sunday. The clothes I wore are symbols of my concern for the Palestinian children and civilians, and my utmost belief in human dignity for all humankind,” Lee wrote. “What I wore was not intended as a gesture of hostility to Jewish people or to support violence against anyone, nor was it intended as a comment on the significance of Deni being an an All-Star.”
About his lack of familiarity with Avdija, whose World Team fell short in the round-robin contest featuring 28 NBA stars, Lee added, “He can BALL. NOW I DO KNOW.”
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