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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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Jewish authors get a lifeline
Susan Blumberg-Kason, a Jewish author whose work explores Jewish history and identity, was deep into a book about Golda Meir’s Milwaukee childhood when her literary agent abruptly dropped her early last year.
The agent offered only a vague explanation, saying, “We can no longer champion your career.”
Blumberg-Kason was surprised at the 180-degree turn by an agent who had been with her for years. But she soon discovered three other Jewish writers in her online community also had been suddenly dropped by their agents with little explanation other than the same phrase she heard: “We can no longer champion your career.”
It didn’t feel like coincidence.
“It wasn’t just that she dropped me,” Blumberg-Kason said. “It was that suddenly several of us were hearing the exact same sentence. It felt coordinated. It felt like something had shifted under our feet.”
It turns out many other Jewish writers have had similar experiences over the past two years, since the beginning of the Oct. 7 war and the boom in anti-Israel and antisemitic ferment that followed. In writers’ groups and forums, Jewish authors describe a sense that their work is being railroaded because they are Jewish. They’ve lost agents, publishers and book events. Some report that editors have cooled the moment Jewish themes appeared in their work.
In May 2024, anti-Israel boycotters propagated a shared spreadsheet called “Is your fav author a Zionist?” that went viral, “outing” Jewish writers for any kind of connection to Israel.
Author Elissa Wald felt the anti-Jewish sentiment so strongly that she created the Never Alone Book Club for Jewish authors to give one another support. The group now has 3,500 members, a Facebook community and a Substack, and it hosts Jewish book events and shares resources for writers who no longer feel safe in mainstream literary spaces.
The challenging climate prompted UJA-Federation of New York to begin funding projects aimed at helping Jewish authors, awarding a total of $300,000 in grants to six organizations working in different areas of the literary ecosystem.
“Supporting Jewish writers is an important part of UJA’s overall strategy to confront rising antisemitism,” said Eric S. Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York. “Efforts to marginalize Jewish voices in culture and the arts must be met by even greater efforts to ensure they’re heard.”
The organizations receiving UJA grants are helping Jewish writers with everything from publishing logistics and visibility to offering emotional support.
“Jewish writers were being dropped, disinvited, and sidelined — and many were questioning whether they could continue writing Jewish stories,” said Rina Cohen, who manages strategy across UJA’s Combating Antisemitism portfolio. “By supporting them with tools and resources, UJA is sending a clear message: You deserve to create freely, and we’ll stand behind you as you do.”
The Jewish Book Council used funding from UJA for a unique program to kick off the 100th anniversary of Jewish Book Month: The council designed and distributed 100 Jewish Book Kits to libraries and public spaces across New York City that offer a curated selection of Jewish literature, visual displays, QR codes and author highlights. The aim is to give librarians and community centers an accessible way to showcase Jewish books, helping make Jewish writing visible in the very spaces where many writers feared their work was being erased.
“Jewish books need visibility,” said Jewish Book Council CEO Naomi Firestone-Teeter. “We said: Let’s bring more Jewish books out into the world — into more readers’ hands — and build community around them. That’s what the kits do. They let people see Jewish books where they live their lives.”
It’s not always clear that a Jewish writer’s professional setback stems from antisemitism. Publishing is a brutal industry, and even successful writers experience abrupt and opaque rejection.
But many Jewish writers say that what they’re experiencing suggests something nefarious. They’ve felt their Jewishness was treated as suspect in classrooms, critique groups or conferences. They’ve felt pressure from editors to strip Jewish elements from their work.
When the Jewish Book Council opened a portal inviting Jewish writers to share incidents affecting their creative or professional lives, over 400 authors wrote in.
“Some of what we see is subtle and hard to pinpoint, and some of it is very direct: events canceled, students pushed out of MFA programs for being ‘Zionists,’ bookstores refusing to stock books,” Firestone-Teeter said. “Things are not okay. This is not just the normal difficulty of publishing.”
In addition to the Jewish Book Council, UJA’s other five grants went to Artists Against Antisemitism, PJ Library, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Jewish Life Foundation and 70 Faces Media (the parent organization of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency).
In October, 70 Faces Media held a one-day Jewish Authors’ Summit, offering writers practical tools, digital strategy training and community-building to navigate this increasingly hostile publishing environment.
PJ library will hold a Jewish children’s book festival for authors and families at New York’s 92nd St. Y on Jan. 11, 2026. In just the first few days, an unprecedented 3,500 registrants signed up.
The Jewish Theological Seminary held a literary festival in September that brought together 450 writers, students and community members for masterclasses, public panels and craft development.
The Jewish Life Foundation is creating a TV and podcast series, “The People of the Book with Josh Radnor,” that will spotlight Jewish authors and conversations about Jewish identity and culture.
Artists Against Antisemitism created a full-day gathering for 140 authors, the Jewish Writers Mifgash, that included pitch sessions with literary agents, professional development workshops, mentorship matching and mental health support. Project Shema, a training and support organization focused on contemporary antisemitism, led a session at the conference on how to recognize antisemitism in creative spaces.
Elizabeth Berkowitz, one of the event’s organizers, said several authors came away with promising leads.
“Agents were asking, ‘Can you send me the full? I want to see more,’” Berkowitz said. “We definitely had some shidduchs made — real follow-ups between writers and agents who were actively seeking Jewish authors.”
Zeeva Bukai, a longtime editor who said she’d experienced open hostility in a professional editing group, said just being around others experiencing the same challenges was a welcome relief.
“I realized it’s not just me experiencing this; other are too,” she said. “That validation was just as important as the tools we learned to deal with it.”
That’s the point, said the Jewish Book Council’s CEO.
“We want authors to know we’ve got you on the other side,” Firestone-Teeter said. “Your job is to keep writing. Our job is to deal with the industry issues and build a community that celebrates you and your work. Jewish writers need to feel confident writing the books only they can write.”
The post Jewish authors get a lifeline appeared first on The Forward.
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Iceland joins 4 other countries in boycotting Eurovision over Israel’s participation
(JTA) — The public broadcaster of Iceland announced on Wednesday that it will not participate in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest after Israel’s participation was confirmed by the European Broadcasting Union last week.
The decision drew support from prominent Icelandic artists, including the singer Björk and the former Eurovision representative Paul Oscar, as well as a supportive rally outside of the broadcaster’s Reykjavik headquarters.
The decision by the Icelandic public broadcaster Ríkisútvarpið, or RÚV, makes it the fifth country to bow out of the competition, following similar calls made by the public broadcasters of Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands and Slovenia. RÚV first signaled it would boycott competition with Israel in September.
The boycott decisions came after the EBU, which organizes the competition, dismissed calls for a vote on Israel’s participation last week. Instead, the EBU approved a new set of rules prohibiting voter interference from governments and third parties following allegations that Israel interfered in last year’s competition.
In a press release Wednesday, RÚV said its board had requested that the EBU remove Israel from the song competition, saying that such a move had the support of the Icelandic public.
“Given the public debate in this country and the reactions to the decision of the EBU that was taken last week it is clear that neither joy nor peace will prevail regarding the participation of RÚV in Eurovision,” it said in a press release. “It is therefore the conclusion of RÚV to notify the EBU today that RÚV will not take part in Eurovision next year.”
Iceland came in 25th out of 37 countries in the 2025 competition, where Israeli listeners noted that its song sounded remarkably similar to an Israeli pop hit. The Icelandic contestants denied knowing about the Israeli song before writing their own.
RÚV’s boycott decision came hours before the final deadline to withdraw from this year’s Eurovision, which is slated to take place in May in Vienna.
“We respect the decision of all broadcasters who have chosen not to participate in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest and hope to welcome them back soon,” said Eurovision director Martin Green in a statement, according to the BBC.
The post Iceland joins 4 other countries in boycotting Eurovision over Israel’s participation appeared first on The Forward.
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IDF Warns of Growing West Bank Threat, Presence of Iranian Weapons Amid Major Counterterror Operations
Israeli soldiers walk during an operation in Tubas, in the West Bank, Nov. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is sounding the alarm over a growing terrorist threat from the West Bank, warning that Iranian-backed arms smuggling could spark an Oct. 7-style attack.
Concerns over the presence of significant Iranian-supplied firepower in the hands of Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank has prompted Israeli intelligence and security forces to intensify operations across the territory.
According to a new report from Israel’s Channel 14, a senior IDF official warned that the West Bank presents a growing threat to Israeli communities, with the potential to spark an attack similar to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“We have to start from the clear fact that weapons in Judea and Samaria [Israel’s preferred name for the West Bank] could upset the current stalemate,” the IDF official told Channel 14.
However, while the military has prioritized preparing for large-scale scenarios, such as an Oct. 7-style attack, the senior IDF official also warned that more attention needs to be paid to “smaller” threats — like a situation in which a small group of terrorists infiltrates a settlement home and kills an entire family — an event he described as “highly probable.”
“We shouldn’t see this scenario only as an attack on dozens of communities. A single deadly strike is enough — we must also prepare for lethal, localized attacks,” the IDF official said. “Our responsibility is to protect both individuals and the broader community.”
He warned that terrorists in the West Bank are believed to possess arms capable of breaking Israeli defenses, including what he called “standard Iranian weapons.” However, he also noted that security forces are actively working to intercept these arms and dismantle any terrorist cell in the area.
On Tuesday, the IDF uncovered a major terrorist infrastructure in the Tulkarem area in the northern West Bank, including three rockets at various stages of assembly, explosive devices, operational equipment, and materials for making bombs.
According to Joe Truzman, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based think tank, Israeli officials should be closely monitoring the West Bank as the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas regroups and rearms in the Gaza Strip after two years of war.
“Hamas and its allied factions understand that igniting violence in the territory would divert Israel’s attention during a critical time of rebuilding the group’s infrastructure in Gaza,” Truzman said last month.
“The release of convicted terrorists to the West Bank under the ceasefire agreement may be a factor in the resurgence of organized violence in the territory,” he continued.
At the time, the IDF completed a three-day, multi-branch military exercise in the West Bank called “Lion’s Roar,” designed to enhance operational coordination and joint capabilities in the region, with scenarios shaped by lessons learned from the Oct. 7 atrocities.
More than 180 Israeli Air Force aircraft supported ground troops during training for over 40 scenarios, including attacks on outposts, simultaneous terrorist infiltrations into multiple communities, urban combat, mass-casualty rescue and medical evacuation, multi-casualty response, intelligence integration, and real-time command and control.
“We have many lessons to implement from this exercise and from Oct. 7,” the IDF spokesperson said in a statement at the time.
“The IDF will continue to conduct regular exercises to ensure high readiness, strengthen cooperation among all troops, and maintain the security of residents in the area and of all Israeli civilians,” the statement read.
According to a survey released earlier this year by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, 70 percent of all respondents — and 81 percent of Jewish respondents — expressed fear of an Oct. 7-style attack coming from the West Bank. In contrast, 53 percent of Arab respondents said they were not worried about such an attack.
“The stipulations of the ceasefire in Gaza, mainly the requirement for Hamas to fully disarm in future phases, should also be applied to the terrorist organization’s operatives in the West Bank,” Aaron Goren, research analyst at FDD, said at the time.
“Otherwise, Israel may face a threat from Hamas, which, unlike in Gaza, where it is relatively contained, is dispersed amongst Israeli communities in the West Bank,” he continued.
Earlier this year, the IDF arrested a Hamas and Fatah terror cell from Ramallah that was planning a bombing attack on a bus in Jerusalem, with investigators saying the group intended to remotely detonate an explosive device smuggled into Israel.
As of February, Israeli security forces had foiled nearly 1,000 terrorist plots over the past year, with senior military officials increasingly worried that the volatile situation in the West Bank could lead to a large-scale attack similar to the Oct. 7 onslaught against Israeli settlements and communities near the security barrier.
In response to these concerns, the IDF has established a special command to address potential threats in the West Bank and launched a nearly unprecedented counterterror operation in the northern part of the territory.