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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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New Report Exposes Docters Without Borders for Pursuing Anti-Israel Activism
A Palestinian woman helps a burn victim, Maria Abu Aawad, at a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Zawaida, in the central Gaza Strip, Jan. 26, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
A new report is raising questions about whether one of the world’s most prominent humanitarian organizations has crossed the line from medical advocacy into political campaigning in its approach to Israel and the war in Gaza.
The analysis — published by NGO Monitor, an independent Jerusalem-based watchdog group that monitors nongovernmental organizations — scrutinizes the statements and activities of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, following the Palestinian terrorist group’s Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.
“Despite the slaughter of over 1,200 people, the injuries to thousands, and the kidnapping of over 250 hostages into Gaza [during Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities], MSF’s public communications and almost daily updates immediately pivoted to a singular focus on condemning Israel’s response,” the report says.
NGO Monitor also points to a December 2023 finding by former MSF Secretary General Alain Destexhe, who found that many MSF employees celebrated Hamas’s brutal incursion into Israel, contending that “over 40 percent of statements by staff, including senior figures, praised Hamas and the attacks.”
Destexhe warned last year that “MSF is no longer neutral; its humanitarian language now serves a political cause.”
According to NGO Monitor’s report, MSF, which purports to be a neutral provider of emergency medical care, has increasingly adopted language and positions that align with political advocacy, including accusations that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. NGO Monitor argues that such claims are not supported by verified evidence and risk distorting the realities of a complex and ongoing conflict.
The report contends that MSF’s public messaging has relied on incomplete or unverified information while omitting key context, including the role of Hamas in embedding military infrastructure within civilian areas such as hospitals and residential neighborhoods. Israel has repeatedly cited these conditions as a central challenge in its efforts to target terrorist networks while minimizing civilian harm.
Further, the report accuses the MSF of “systematically omitting essential details and context” such as “the basic military requirements faced by Israel for neutralizing a terror organization with a massive underground tunnel network embedded in civilian infrastructure, and in which hostages were hidden.”
Critics highlighted in the report say that by failing to acknowledge these dynamics, MSF presents a one-sided narrative that could mislead policymakers, media organizations, and international institutions. The watchdog group further argues that statements from globally recognized NGOs carry significant weight and can influence legal proceedings and diplomatic pressure against Israel.
The report criticizes the MSF for asserting that Israel’s military tactics are tantamount to “death sentences,” claiming that the humanitarian organization “sought to leverage its influence” on world leaders” to pressure them to curtail supposed “indiscriminate violence unleashed on a helpless people.”
NGO Monitor also raises concerns about accountability within large humanitarian organizations, calling for greater transparency in how public claims are verified and communicated. It suggests that NGOs operating in conflict zones must maintain strict standards of neutrality to preserve credibility and avoid contributing to misinformation.
MSF has repeatedly defended its work in Gaza, emphasizing the dire humanitarian conditions and the urgency of medical needs on the ground. The organization maintains that its statements are based on firsthand observations by its staff and reflect the severity of the crisis facing civilians.
The report came out two months after Doctors Without Borders publicly acknowledged that armed individuals — many of them masked — were present inside the large compound of Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, citing intimidation of patients, arbitrary arrests, and suspected weapons movement as reasons for halting some of its work there.
The admission, buried in a rarely referenced FAQ page on the group’s website, lends factual support to claims long asserted by Israeli authorities about the use of medical facilities by Hamas and allied terrorists during the conflict in Gaza.
Last year, NGO Monitor obtained documents revealing that Hamas has long run a coordinated effort to penetrate and influence NGOs in the war-torn enclave — contradicting years of denials from major humanitarian organizations.
The study showed how Hamas has for years systematically weaponized humanitarian aid in Gaza, tightening its grip over foreign NGOs operating in the territory and exposing patterns of complicity and collaboration that contradict the groups’ persistent denials.
According to the documents, Hamas officials designated specific points of contact with “highly respected” international NGOs, including Doctors Without Borders and several others.
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Trump Admin Investigates New York City for Antisemitism Following Nonprofit’s Exposure of ‘Palestine Teach-Ins’
A general view of the US Department of Education in Washington, DC, on Dec. 1, 2020. Photo: Graeme Sloan via Reuters Connect
The Trump administration is investigating the New York City Department of Education (DOE) for allegedly violating federal civil rights laws by failing to stop K-12 teachers from procuring students for membership in anti-Zionist study groups, an enterprise which the government says will flood public school classrooms with antisemitism.
The US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) said last week that reports regarding the activities of a group which calls itself “NYC Educators for Palestine” prompted its inquiry. First publicized by the North American Values Institute (NAVI), they range from teaching extracurricular courses on “Palestinian resistance” to holding “Palestine teach-ins” on federal holidays.
NAVI has noted that public sector union leaders enrolled in the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) are some of the group’s most eager participants and endorsers. The problem, according to critics, is that their affiliation implies the approval of a city government that the Trump administration says should be ending the practice.
NYC Educators for Palestine targets children as young as five, the US Education Department alleged in a press release announcing the action, describing long sessions in which teachers drill into them the notions that Israelis are “genocidal white supremacists” and that Hamas terrorists are “martyrs.”
The group also targets high school students preparing to transition to college and the workplace as well. In January, it held a “teach in” on the Martin Luther King holiday, casting a wide net for children “ages 6-18.”
The inexorable outcome of the group’s indoctrination is the radicalization of students who will point to disinformation confected by anti-Zionist activists as cause to abuse their Jewish classmates, the Education Department said.
“No child should be taught by his or her teachers to hate their peers. Neither should Jewish children be taught that being Jewish somehow makes them inherently guilty or proponents of hate and violence,” Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in a statement. “Discrimination has no place in our schools, and, unlike the previous administration, the Trump administration will not turn a blind eye to antisemitic harassment. [The Office for Civil Rights] will investigate these appalling allegations to ensure the equal treatment of all students.”
According to NAVI, the leading supplier of money and support for the NYC Educators for Palestine’s initiatives is a little-known nonprofit titled “Rethinking Schools,” which describes its mission as “strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism.”
Rethinking Schools in turn is a beneficiary of the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the country, and the Lannan Foundation — a benefactor of Mohammed El-Kurd, an anti-Zionist activist who has trafficked in antisemitic tropes, demonized Zionism, and falsely accused Israelis of eating Palestinians’ organs. The Schwab Charitable Fund, founded by investment banker Charles Schwab in 1999, has also donated some $78,000 to Rethinking Schools, according to NAVI.
In an exclusive interview with The Algemeiner, NAVI chief strategy officer Josh Weiner said that NYC Educators for Palestine’s activities clearly violate civil rights laws even as they transgress professional ethics.
“First off, they’re actively advertising and speaking at these events and sharing their status as New York City public school teachers to attract attendance, which is misleading for suggesting that they are sponsored by the Department of Education or New York City,” he explained, noting that the group will hold at least six more events before the end of the academic year. “Essentially what they’re doing is training students to be hostile toward fellow students based on their identity as Jews as Israelis. That likely creates a hostile environment at school and limits their access to an equal education.”
The federal government’s intervention in the matter is “long overdue,” Yael Lerman, executive director of StandWithUs Saidoff Law, a legal advocacy group based in California, told The Algemeiner in a statement.
“Jewish and Israeli students are afforded the same protections as every other child under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act,” Lerman said. “Schools are not free for qll political activism — especially when that activism creates a hostile environment for students based on their identity. When educators blur the line between instruction and indoctrination, and when repeated warnings from parents and advocacy groups go unaddressed, federal intervention becomes necessary. This case matters not just for New York City but for school systems across the country.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Social Justice Academy in California Tormented Jewish Student After Oct. 7 Attack, New Lawsuit Says
Illustrative: High school students participating in anti-Israel demonstration on Jan 26. 2024: Photo: Michael Ho Wai Lee / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect
Another California public school district has been accused of allowing antisemitic discrimination and harassment in a disturbing new civil lawsuit filed by The Deborah Project, a legal advocacy group that has contested a slew of similar cases across the state.
The victim in the case is Eden Horowitz, a female Jewish student from Alameda County who says the San Leandro Unified School District (SLUSD) stood down while students and instructors at the Social Justice Academy of San Leandro High School tormented her for nearly three years.
“This case exemplifies a disturbing trend: schools that champion social justice while turning a blind eye to antisemitism,” Jerome Marcus of The Deborah Project said in a statement announcing the action. “We are holding these institutions accountable to their own shared values.”
The complaint that says that, on paper, Horowitz should have fit in at the Social Justice Academy, which says that its mission is to uplift minority students by teaching them to oppose “power oppression, capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia … and transphobia.” In addition to being Jewish, she is a multiracial American of Brazilian, African American, Native American, and Eastern European heritage — an archetype of the kind of student sought by progressive institutions across the US.
However, the complaint alleges that Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel caused students and faculty to cancel out everything that once merited Horowitz’s being embraced by the SJA community. Overnight, her “intersectional” racial identity became second to the fact that she is Jewish, and her lawyers say that attending the Social Justice Academy became a daily tribulation.
One teacher, Erica Viray Santos, led the movement against her, the complaint charges. In class, Santos made a show of accusing Israel of “genocide” and proclaimed that she would not teach key units on the Holocaust. Allegedly, Santos also publicly paraded her contempt for Horowitz, denouncing her in arguments with the school’s principal that she initiated within earshot of the class. Meanwhile, her classmates began calling her a “Zionist” and a “racist,” according to the lawsuit.
The profusion of anti-Jewish sentiment fused with near manic obsession over the Middle East conflict to inspire criminality, the complaint continues. As the SJA community fulminated over Horowitz’s refusal to accept their views, someone allegedly graffitied antisemitic messages alluding to the Holocaust and other classic antisemitic tropes in a school bathroom. Having already refused to acknowledge the situation’s rising severity despite receiving a stack of complaints related to it, SLUSD officials responded to the hate crime with more indifference, according to the suit. District officials saw to the graffiti’s erasure, delayed condemning it, and later dropped its search for the culprit.
Ultimately, the district allegedly found cause to punish the Jewish victim. While her bullies walked free, the Social Justice Academy “expelled” her from every initiative she had joined to foster the better world envisioned in the school’s mission statement. It then, according to the complaint, refused to perform services related to disability accommodations for the student to sabotage her academic performance and “isolated” her from everyone else. Topping off what her lawyers describe as “retaliation,” SJA placed her in a probationary program under the threat that she would be expelled from the school if she did not fulfill its cumbersome requirements.
By that point, a doctor had clinically diagnosed Horowitz with depressive and anxiety orders, and she was suffering panic attacks. Her parents’ last recourse for remedying the situation, filing a lawsuit, ultimately prompted SJA to act on its threat to expel her, which it did after an attorney notified a district official of the coming action.
SJA staff allegedly announced the news to the student body as a way of “further humiliating” Horowitz, who then received failing grades in every course.
On Friday, SLUSD declined to comment on the troubling allegations, telling The Algemeiner it “is aware of the lawsuit, and because it is an active legal matter, cannot comment at this time.”
In the meantime, Horowitz’s attorneys say that SLUSD has to be held accountable for “state-sponsored exclusion” and for corrupting progressive values to use them as instruments of racial hatred.
“Faculty didn’t just ignore the antisemitic abuse — they fueled it,” said Ryan Weinstein, counsel for The Deborah Project’s partner in the case, Ropes & Gray LLC. “When confronted with the truth, the district didn’t investigate it; it retaliated. We are seeking systemic change to ensure that ‘social justice’ is never again used as a shield for discrimination against a Jewish student — or any student.”
All of California is under scrutiny over K-12 antisemitism, as The Algemeiner has previously reported.
In February, a consortium of Jewish advocacy groups — the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and StandWithUs — sued the state, alleging that Jews have been called “k—kes,” threatened with gang assaults, and subjected to chants proclaiming “F—k the Jews” at anti-Israel demonstrations promoted by faculty.
In one highly disturbing incident described in the legal complaint, fifth graders from the Oakland Unified School District were filmed telling their teacher, “Another major thing that I’ve learned is that the Jews, the people who took over, basically just stole the Palestinians’ land” and “one thing that’s really surprising to me, and that appeals to me is that the US is helping the Jews.” In another incident, the Oakland Education Association created a curriculum in which the intifada — two prolonged periods of terrorism in which Palestinians murdered Israeli civilians — was taught to third graders as a nursery rhyme.
“Jews consistently are being targeted with hostility because of who they are, including in California and particularly in K-12 public schools. This lawsuit seeks to remedy that,” StandWithUs chief executive officer Roz Rothstein said in February. “It is imperative that California K-12 schools not be co-opted by those seeking to indoctrinate students into antisemitic hate. However, Jewish students and parents indicate that this is precisely what is happening in California. Shockingly, those tasked with enforcing non-discrimination laws in our schools have failed to intervene effectively to put a stop to this growing problem.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.