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U.N. exhibit remembers when the world turned its back on stateless Jewish refugees
(New York Jewish Week) — In 2017, Deborah Veach went back to Germany, looking for the site of the displaced persons camp where she and her parents had been housed after World War II. They were in suspension, between the lives her parents led in Belarus before they were shattered by the Nazis, and the unknown fate awaiting them as refugees without a country.
To her dismay, and despite the fact that Foehrenwald was one of the largest Jewish DP centers in the American-controlled zone of Germany, she found barely a trace. A complex that once included a yeshiva, a police force, a fire brigade, a youth home, a theater, a post office and a hospital was remembered by almost no one except a local woman who ran a museum in a former bath house.
“It was sort of an accident of history that we were there in that particular camp in Germany, of all places, with no ties, no extended family, no place to call home,” said Veach, who was born at Foehrenwald in 1949 and lives in New Jersey. Now, “they renamed it. They changed the names of all the streets. There is nothing recognizable about the fact that it had been a DP camp.”
Veach is part of a now-aging cohort of children born or raised in the DP camps, the last with a first-hand connection to the experience of some 250,000 Jewish survivors who passed through them at the end of the war. To make sure memories of the camps survive them, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the United Nations Department of Global Communications have staged a short-term exhibit, “After the End of the World: Displaced Persons and Displaced Persons Camps.”
On display at U.N. headquarters in New York City Jan. 10 through Feb. 23, it is intended to illuminate “how the impact of the Holocaust continued to be felt after the Second World War ended and the courage and resilience of those that survived in their efforts to rebuild their lives despite having lost everything,” according to a press release.
Residents of a displaced persons camp in Salzburg, Austria. Undated, post-Second World War. (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)
Among the artifacts on display are dolls created by Jewish children and copies of some of the 70-odd newspapers published by residents, as well as photographs of weddings, theatrical performances, sporting events and classroom lessons.
The exhibit is “about the displaced persons themselves, about their lives and their hopes and their dreams, their ambitions, their initiatives,” said Debórah Dwork, who directs the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Graduate Center-CUNY, who served as the scholar adviser for the exhibition.
“There’s no point where the residents of these DP camps were just sitting around waiting for other people to do things for them,” she told the New York Jewish Week. “They took initiative and developed a whole range of cultural and educational programs.”
As early as 1943, as the war displaced millions of people, dozens of nations came to Washington and signed onto the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Authority. (Despite its name, it preceded the founding of the U.N.) After the war, the British and U.S. military were in charge of supplying food, protection and medical care in hundreds of camps throughout Germany and Austria, and UNRRA administered the camps on a day-to-day basis.
Early on, Jewish Holocaust survivors — some who suffered in concentration camps, others who had escaped into the Soviet Union — were put in DP camps alongside their former tormentors, until the U.S. agreed to place them in separate compounds. Unable or unwilling to return to the countries where they had lost relatives, property and any semblance of a normal life, they began a waiting game, as few countries, including the United States, were willing to take them in, and Palestine was being blockaded by the British.
Abiding antisemitism was not the only reason they remained stateless. “Jews were [accused of being] subversives, communists, rebels, troublemakers, and the world war quickly gave way to cold war, and with it the notion that Hitler had been defeated and what we have to worry about is the communists,” David Nasaw, author of “The Last Million,” a history of the displaced persons, told the New York Jewish week in 2020.
In 1948 and 1950, Congress grudgingly passed legislation that allowed 50,000 Jewish survivors and their children to come to the United States. The rest were eventually able to go to Israel, after its independence in 1948.
The U.N. exhibit focuses less on this macro history — which includes what became another refugee crisis for the Palestinians displaced by Israel’s War for Independence — than on life in the DP camps.
“The exhibition illustrates how the displaced persons did not shrink from the task of rebuilding both their own lives and Jewish communal life,” said Jonathan Brent, chief executive officer at YIVO, in a statement.
Among those rebuilding their lives were Max Gitter and his parents, Polish Jews who had the perverse good luck of being exiled to Siberia during the war. The family made its way to Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, where Gitter was born in 1943. After the war ended, his parents returned to Poland, but repelled by antisemitism sought refuge in the American zone in Germany. They spent time in the Ainring DP camp, a former Luftwaffe base on the Austrian border, and at a small camp called Lechfeld, about 25 miles west of Munich.
Dolls made by stateless Jewish children residing in a DP camp near Florence, Italy, known as “Kibbutz HaOved.” The dolls are attired in local costumes based on the districts of the Tuscan city of Sienna. (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)
“I was there until we came to the United States when I was six and a half, so I have some very distinct memories and some hazy memories,” said Gitter, emeritus director and vice chair of the YIVO board. One story he hasn’t forgotten is how his father and a friend were walking through the camp when they came upon a long line of people. “They were from the Soviet Union, so they knew that when there’s a line that it might be of interest.” It turned out to be a line for the lottery that would allow them to get into the United States under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948.
The family came to the United States in 1950, to “pretty shabby lodgings” in the Bronx, before his father bought a candy store and moved to Queens. Max went on to attend Harvard College and Yale Law School, and became a corporate litigator.
Gitter’s brother was born in one of the camps, and the exhibit includes a poster depicting the population increase between 1946 and 1947 at the Jewish DP center Bad Reichenhall. The birthrate in the camps has often been described as evidence of the optimism and defiance of the survivors, but Dwork said the truth is somewhat more complicated.
“There was a very high birth rate among the Jews in DP camps. This is the age group of reproductive age, at 20 to 40,” she said. “However, this image of fecundity hides what was rumored to be a significant abortion rate, too. And women had experienced years of starvation. Menstruation had only recently recommenced. So many women, in fact, miscarried or had trouble conceiving to begin with.”
A chart by artist O. Lec depicts the natural population increase of the Jewish Center Bad Reichenhall, Germany, 1946-1947. There was a very high birth rate among the Jews in DP camps. (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)
“There is no silver lining here,” she added. “People live life on many levels. On the one hand, DPs look to the future and look with hope; at the same time, they carry tremendous burdens of pain and suffering and trauma and trepidations about the future.”
Veach, a member of the YIVO board, hopes visitors to the exhibit understand that such trauma is hardly a thing of the past.
“I think the real lesson is that history keeps repeating itself,” said Veach, growing emotional. “Basically we have DPs on our border with Mexico, you have DPs from Ukraine. I don’t think people realize the repercussions for these people who are trying to find a place to live. These are good people who are just placed where they are by history.”
Gitter, who like Veach will speak at an event Jan. 24 at the U.N. marking the exhibit, also hopes “After the End of the World” prods the consciences of visitors.
“A lot of the countries, a lot of places, including the United States, would not accept Jews after the war,” he said. “The issue of memory, the issue of statelessness, the issue of finally there was some hope for the Jews in their immigration to Israel and the United States — that part of the story also needs to be told.”
“After the End of the World: Displaced Persons and Displaced Persons Camps” is on view from Jan. 10-Feb. 23, 2023, at the United Nations Headquarters, 405 E 42nd St, New York, Monday-Friday, 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. Entrance to the United Nations Visitor Centre in New York is free, but there are requirements for all visitors. See the United Nations Visitor Centre entry guidelines.
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Global Court Decisions Spark Outrage as Antisemitic Crimes, Attacks See Reduced Sentences
Pro-Hamas demonstrators marching in Munich, Germany. Photo: Reuters/Alexander Pohl
Court rulings around the globe are raising alarm bells as judges in Germany, Australia, and France have overturned or reduced sentences for individuals accused of antisemitic crimes, sparking public outrage over the leniency shown in such cases.
For the first time, a local court in Germany has allowed antisemitic slogans calling for Israel’s destruction and denying its right to exist to be chanted at a pro-Palestinian demonstration, despite concerns that such calls incite hatred and violence, according to the German newspaper Bild.
The Higher Administrative Court in Münster, a city in North Rhine-Westphalia in western Germany, issued an expedited ruling overturning a previous ban that had restricted protests to prevent participants from disrupting public order and inciting violence.
The ruling came after local police had imposed restrictions on an anti-Israel demonstration scheduled for Saturday in Düsseldorf, a city that had drawn more than 5,000 registered participants.
Prior to the protest, local law enforcement had prohibited demonstrators from chanting slogans that deny Israel’s right to exist and promote hatred — including “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “There is only one state: Palestine 48,” and “Yalla, yalla, Intifada!” The first two slogans call for the Jewish state’s complete destruction, to be replaced by “Palestine,” and the third phrase calls for violence against Jews and Israelis.
However, the court ruled that “denying the State of Israel’s right to exist does not in itself constitute a criminal offense.”
Instead, the court emphasized that “a critical examination of the founding of the State of Israel and the call for a peaceful change of the existing conditions” is protected under the right to freedom of expression.
With this ruling, the ban on “There is only one state: Palestine 48” was lifted, even though the slogan calls for the annihilation of Israel, established in 1948.
But “Yalla, yalla, Intifada” and “From the river to the sea” will remain banned, the first for its potential to incite violence and the second as a slogan associated with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
In a separate and controversial ruling thousands of miles away, a man who set fire to a synagogue in Melbourne while worshippers were inside received a lenient sentence after an Australian court ruled that his actions were the result of mental illness rather than antisemitism.
On Monday, an Australian magistrate ruled that 35-year-old Angelo Loras was not driven by antisemitism but by a severe psychotic episode caused by his failure to take schizophrenia medication when he set fire to a local synagogue, with more than 20 worshippers inside sharing a Shabbat meal.
Earlier this year, Loras pleaded guilty to arson and recklessly endangering lives after pouring flammable liquid on the front door of the East Melbourne Synagogue and setting it alight, though no one was injured. This attack was one of three suspected antisemitic incidents across Melbourne over the weekend of July 4–6.
At the time, government officials and Jewish leaders denounced the attack as a clear hate crime.
With this ruling, Loras was given a four-month prison sentence — less than the 138 days he had already spent in custody — and was also ordered to continue schizophrenia treatment for 20 months and perform unpaid work. He will be eligible for release on Monday.
Meanwhile, a local court in France has dramatically reduced the sentence of one of the two teenagers convicted of the brutal gang rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl, citing his “need to prepare for future reintegration.”
More than a year after the attack, the Versailles Court of Appeal retried one of the convicted boys — the only one to challenge his sentence — behind closed doors, ultimately reducing his term from nine to seven years and imposing an educational measure
The original sentences, handed down in June, gave the two boys — who were 13 years old at the time of the incident — seven and nine years in prison, respectively, after they were convicted on charges of group rape, physical violence, and death threats aggravated by antisemitic hatred.
The third boy involved in the attack, the girl’s ex-boyfriend, was accused of threatening her and orchestrating the attack, also motivated by racist prejudice.
Because the girl’s ex-boyfriend was under 13 at the time of the attack, he did not face prison and was instead sentenced to five years in an educational facility.
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New X Policy Reveals Foreign Locations of Anti-Israel Propagandists Spreading Gaza Disinformation
A 3D-printed miniature model of Elon Musk and the X logo are seen in this illustration taken Jan. 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
Billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform X over the weekend implemented a new feature revealing the locations behind all accounts, exposing that many individuals claiming to report from Gaza lived in other countries while some popular right-wing American accounts who had promoted patriotism and loyalty to US President Donald Trump actually resided overseas.
“The. Gaza. Lie. Exposed. New X feature ripped mask off countless fake ‘Gazan’ accounts,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry posted on X on Sunday. “Some chap posting from Pakistan, another in London. Another manipulative abuser somewhere else. All claiming to be suffering in Gaza while in the comfort of some coffee shop far away.”
The Foreign Ministry said that X’s decision to test the feature showing an account’s physical location “is to be praised & encouraged. Freedom of speech is a core principle. So is transparency & accountability. The ‘citizen-journalist’ on social media also needs to meet certain minimum standards. Kudos X.”
In a follow-up post, the Foreign Ministry gave an example with a screenshot of journalist Motasem A Dalloul’s account, writing, “196,900 followers being lied to by fake ‘journalist’ claiming to be in Gaza. New @X feature reveals his actual location is Poland. Reporting from Gaza is fake & not reliable. Makes you wonder how many more fake reports have you read?”
The New York Post identified multiple Gaza-associated accounts who X now revealed as based in India, the United Kingdom, or the West Bank.
On Saturday, journalist Eitan Fischberger began identifying X accounts he described as “subverting the US by flooding X with anti-American, anti-Israel, demoralizing, or Marxist content aimed specifically at Americans. Several of them pose as Americans. But now the jig is up.” He then featured accounts located in North Africa, India, Serbia, Turkey, Norway, and Saudi Arabia.
Here’s a thread of prominent accounts that have been subverting the US by flooding X with anti-American, anti-Israel, demoralizing, or Marxist content aimed specifically at Americans.
Several of them pose as Americans. But now the jig is up.
Add more examples in the comments
pic.twitter.com/M1H6y0dG90
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) November 22, 2025
Pirate Wires also reported on Gaza-based content coming out of Egypt, North Africa, Indonesia, and Canada.
Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, had described the change as “an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square. We plan to provide many more ways for users to verify the authenticity of the content they see on X.”
Some users protested the location displayed with their account was inaccurate, with X admitting as much in some cases. In one instance, the account for the US Department of Homeland Security stated its origin in Tel Aviv, prompting an official statement denying the connection.
Business Insider reported that X account MAGA NATION, a supporter of Trump that proclaims itself “America First” and has collected 400,000 followers, is based in Eastern Europe. NBC News found pro-Trump accounts based in Africa, Macedonia, and South Asia. Pirate Wires described conservative American content as originating in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea.
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US Justice Department Launches Probe Into Anti-Israel Mob Targeting New York City Synagogue
Nov. 19, 2025, New York, New York, USA: Anti-Israel protesters rally outside of Park East Synagogue. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
The US Justice Department has started an investigation into a gathering of demonstrators who called for violence against Jews outside a prominent New York City synagogue last Wednesday night, according to a senior official.
“Investigation is underway. [The Justice Department] has zero tolerance for violence/obstruction around any American house of worship,” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the department, announced on social media on Sunday.
Investigation is underway. @TheJusticeDept has zero tolerance for violence/obstruction around any American house of worship. https://t.co/rEEFAifj6n
— AAGHarmeetDhillon (@AAGDhillon) November 23, 2025
Dhillon’s comments came amid ongoing furor over last week’s protest, where demonstrators harassed those attending an event being held by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a Zionist organization that helps Jews immigrate to Israel, at Park East Synagogue in Manhattan.
Protesters were recorded screaming obscenities to event attendees and blocking the entrance into the synagogue.
“We don’t want no Zionists here!” the group of roughly 200 anti-Israel activists chanted in intervals while waving the Palestinian flag. “Resistance, you make us proud, take another settler out.”
One protester, addressing the crowd, reportedly proclaimed, “It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events! We need to make them scared.”
Footage on social media also showed agitators chanting “death to the IDF,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces, as well as “globalize the intifada” and “intifada revolution.”
Community figures described the scene as openly threatening and a stark escalation of anti-Jewish hostility in New York City.
“It’s a federal crime to block access to a house of worship in the US. @CivilRights under @AGPamBondi will NOT tolerate it and we are gathering information about this incident!” Dhillon posted on X/Twitter on Friday, two days before announcing the department was investigating the incident.
Jessica Tisch, commissioner of the New York City Police Department (NYPD), addressed the demonstration while speaking to Park East Synagogue on Saturday. Tisch, who is Jewish, cited the demonstrators’ rights to assemble, protest, and speak freely but also apologized for allowing “turmoil” to take place.
“People have the right to protest, including within sight and sound of a house of worship. They have the right to say things that are incredibly painful to hear. I understand that pain, deeply and personally,” Tisch said. “But the right to say those things is protected by the First Amendment, and the NYPD must uphold that right.”
“Our other job that night was to ensure that people could easily enter and leave shul. That is where we fell short. And for that, I apologize to this congregation,” she added, noting that police should have set up a “frozen zone” at the synagogue’s entrance. Because one was not set up, she said, “the space right outside your steps was chaotic.”
“You deserved an NYPD posture that recognized the sensitivity of this location, the climate we’re living in, and the heightened fear within our community,” Tisch told the congregation. “Instead, you had turmoil.”
New York City has experienced a historic surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes over the last two years, following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
Since entering the White House in January, the Trump administration has vowed to crack down on antisemitism, making it a priority of federal law enforcement.
Zohran Mamdani, who was elected New York City’s next mayor earlier this month, issued a statement that “discouraged” the extreme rhetoric used by the protesters on Wednesday night but did not unequivocally condemn the harassment of Jews outside their own house of worship. Mamdani’s office notably also criticized the synagogue, with his team describing the event inside as a “violation of international law,” an allegation apparently referencing Israel’s settlement policies in the West Bank.
“The mayor-elect has discouraged the language used at last night’s protest and will continue to do so,” Mamdani spokesperson Dora Pekec said in a statement on Thursday. “He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation, and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
Jewish leaders reacted with disappointment, arguing that Mamdani effectively provided political justification for a protest that targeted Jews for participating in a mainstream, fully legal pro-Israel program. Critics said the mayor-elect’s framing implied that the synagogue’s event, not the threatening chants outside, was the real problem, a position they described as deeply irresponsible amid rising antisemitism in the city.
During his short tenure in the state assembly as a lawmaker, Mamdani spearheaded a series of efforts to marginalize and penalize organizations with ties to Israel, spiking fears that the incoming mayor might weaponize the government against the city’s Jewish population. Mamdani is an outspoken supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination.
Mamdani also defended the phrase “globalize the intifada” — which references previous periods of sustained Palestinian terrorism against Jews and Israelis and has been widely interpreted as a call to expand political violence — by invoking the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during World War II.