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A new portrait collection showcases 90 Holocaust survivors who lived long and full lives
(JTA) — Werner Reich had his opening line ready when he sat down for B.A. Van Sise to take his portrait.
“Before I could say anything, he said, ‘Everybody comes to me and they want me to talk about the Holocaust. What am I supposed to say? I went to Auschwitz. It was lousy,’” Van Sise said, recalling that Reich’s comment felt like a joke, not a lament.
But instead of dwelling on the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp, the two men spoke about magic, a refuge for Reich as a Jewish teenager trying to survive. The resulting portrait shows a man in his 90s wearing retro glasses, a cloud of smoke floating a few inches above his open palm, in a picture vibrating with life and with enchantment.
Van Sise’s portrait of Reich is the first in “Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust,” his new portrait collection of 90 Holocaust survivors. The accompanying text acknowledges Reich’s experience at Auschwitz, but it focuses more on Reich’s life after the war and his long career in magic — striking a balance that Van Sise says is core to his project.
“This is not something that people are inclined to talk about because it’s not always bombastic. It’s not the part that you sell movie tickets to,” Van Sise said. “You can make, and people have, a hundred movies about Jewish people being imprisoned, tortured, and enslaved. Why doesn’t anybody talk about them thriving afterwards?”
Holocaust survivor and hiking enthusiast Sam Silberberg poses for “Invited to Life”. (Courtesy of B.A. Van Sise / Design by Grace Yagel)
Van Sise is far from the first photographer to capture the faces of survivors in the decades following the end of the Second World War. Famed portrait photographers Martin Schoeller and Mark Seliger, both known for their iconic celebrity portraiture — Schoeller for his uniform, stylized close-ups and Seliger as a magazine photographer who also recently photographed Jerry Seinfeld in a fashion shoot — have also set their cameras in front of Holocaust survivors. Countless other photographers have done the same. But what Van Sise says is sometimes missing from survivor photography is a focus on the postwar lives, many of them joyous, that the subjects have experienced over the last 70-plus years.
“I suspect that one person might see these folks and see victims,” Van Sise said. “And I see them as survivors.”
Holocaust survivor and Park East Synagogue Rabbi Arthur Schneier poses for “Invited to Life”. (Courtesy of B.A. Van Sise / Design by Grace Yagel)
“Invited to Life” was inspired by a 2015 photo assignment Van Sise took on for the Village Voice. Motivated by the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee rhetoric of then-candidate for president Donald Trump, he realized that a particularly cohesive cohort of refugees to come to the United States had arrived more than 75 years ago, at the end of the Second World War, and a photographic retrospective on their lives in America could be a valuable project. He reached out to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York to be put in touch with a dozen survivors for the story. He ended up taking more than 30 portraits. When the alternative newsweekly ceased publication in 2017 (it was revived in 2021) before he could publish the photos, the museum invited Van Sise to turn the portraits into a solo exhibition, in what became the museum’s first-ever public art installation.
Then the pandemic arrived, and like many photographers whose everyday work required travel, Van Sise was out of a job.
“It had never been a marquee project for me,” said Van Sise, who is Jewish but has no familial connection to the Holocaust. “I kept coming back and thinking about them, and about the fact that these people had been through the worst there ever was, the worst that ever has been, the worst there ever might even be.”
Holocaust survivor and painter Fred Terna poses for “Invited to Life”. (Courtesy of B.A. Van Sise / Design by Grace Yagel)
Van Sise spent the better part of 2020 driving around the United States, getting COVID swabs every three days so he could safely photograph 140 elderly survivors, 90 of whom ended up in the book. (He was insistent with his publisher that the final number of portraits in the book be a multiple of 18, the Jewish numerical symbol for “life”.)
The photos are all in black and white, but beyond that, they are as diverse as Sise’s subjects. Some incorporate backgrounds, some are solo portraits; some are serious, some are silly; some include children, grandchildren, husbands, wives, props; some are in profile, and some are shot straight on. The subjects are Nobel Prize-winning chemists and homemakers; pilots and psychologists; haberdashers and teachers; famed rabbis and partisans-turned-conmen.
All of them, Sise says, were photographed with a sense of generosity.
“A person who wants to be critical of me — which is fair — might say that I’m overly charitable,” Van Sise says of his own work, acknowledging that no photographer can avoid bias completely while behind the camera. (It didn’t help that many of the survivors he photographed were eager to feed him cookies, as he frequently recalls.)
In the nearly three years since Van Sise began photographing the subjects of his book, the reality of working with more than 100 elderly people set in. Several of the survivors, including Holocaust educator René Slotkin, Budapest-born legal secretary Kathy Griesz and Reich died before they got the chance to hold a copy of the book in their hands, much to Van Sise’s dismay.
“As a writer, you carry them with you,” he said. “So for me, there were a few where I got pretty rattled.”
Holocaust survivor and educator René Slotkin poses for “Invited to Life”. (Courtesy of B.A. Van Sise / Design by Grace Yagel)
The photographs reflect acknowledgment by all involved that the survivors in the pictures are all nearing the ends of their lives. Many of his subjects chose to include their children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren in their portraits, and the photographer was intentional in closing the book with a portrait of Irving Roth, a longtime Holocaust educator, with his 3-year-old great-granddaughter Addie sitting on his lap. In the text, Roth remarks on the origins of his Hebrew name, Shmuel Meir, which came from his great-grandfather and imagines what life will be like for Addie when she turns 103, and what she will remember of him.
Roth passed away in February 2021 at age 91.
“Those stories don’t end in 1945,” Van Sise said. “These people have lived for, now, 77 years since and have done plenty with that time. And that’s worth exploring, because that’s the part they have control over.”
Reflecting on different styles of Holocaust survivor portraiture at a discussion at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the original home of Van Sise’s portraits, German photographer Martin Schoeller remarked on his own preference for images of older faces.
Holocaust survivor and educator Irving Roth and great-granddaughter Addie pose together for “Invited to Life”. (Courtesy of B.A. Van Sise / Design by Grace Yagel)
“They have more life in them. You see the wrinkles and you feel that there’s more to discover in the face, in an old face. So they almost feel like they’re telling the story of the suffering of the Holocaust more visually, because they’re older faces,” Schoeller said.
“But then, it’s been 75 years since the end of the war,” he added. “So these people have lived 75 years; so to say, ‘Now I see the horror in this old man’s face’ feels a little bit — I don’t know if that’s really true. I leave it up to the people looking at the pictures.”
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The post A new portrait collection showcases 90 Holocaust survivors who lived long and full lives appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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War with Iran puts the US-Israel alliance at grave risk
The Iran war is strategically sound yet politically unsupported — an unstable foundation for a gamble that could reshape the Middle East. That creates danger for Israel, which needs the support of an American public that is rapidly drifting away.
For decades, the country’s greatest strategic asset has not been its military technology or intelligence capabilities — spectacular as these are — but rather the political, diplomatic and military backing of the United States. That relationship has not been merely transactional. It was supposed to rest on shared values and deep public support across the American political spectrum.
If that support erodes or disappears, Israel’s strategic environment will fundamentally change. To be blunt: it will not be able to arm its military. This creates a paradox. A campaign that has so far demonstrated extraordinary value for the Jewish state also stands a risk of fundamentally weakening it.
An alliance at its strongest
The conflict has showcased the depth of the current U.S.–Israel alliance. To many observers, and critically to Israel’s enemies, the operation has underscored not only Israel’s capabilities but also the reality that it stands alongside the world’s most powerful state.
The strikes have projected deep into Iranian territory, revealed astonishing intelligence penetration, and destroyed or degraded key threats. Israel’s enemies across the region have already been weakened by previous rounds of fighting since Oct. 7, and the current operation has reinforced the impression that Israel can reach its adversaries wherever they operate.
Moreover, Iran’s regime has managed to isolate itself to the point where most Arab countries are in effect on the side of Israel and the U.S. That projection — of an unbreakable and strong alliance – may ultimately be the most important strategic element of this war.
But therein lies the rub.
The political foundations of American support for Israel are eroding, which means the very element that currently strengthens Israel’s deterrence — American participation — may also be the one most at risk.
A just war, unjustified
Americans do not understand why their country is at war.
A Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted at the start of the conflict found only 27% of Americans supported the U.S. action, while 43% opposed it. Other surveys show similar results, with roughly six in ten Americans against the military intervention.
In modern American history that is highly unusual. Most wars begin with a “rally around the flag” moment when public support surges. Even conflicts that later became controversial — from Afghanistan to Iraq — initially enjoyed majority backing.
This one did not — in part because the case for it has not been made clearly to the public.
That error is compounded by years of polarization in American politics; declining trust in institutions and leadership; and the record of President Donald Trump, who has spent years spreading conspiracy theories and demonstrating a remarkable indifference to factual truth. It is no exaggeration to say that many Americans do not believe a word he says – which is perhaps unprecedented.
When a president with that record launches a war, at least half the country assumes the worst. Even if the strategic logic is sound, the credibility deficit remains.
The tragedy is that the war is, in fact, eminently justifiable. The Islamic Republic has long since forfeited the moral legitimacy that normally shields states from outside force. It brutally suppresses its own population, jailing and killing protesters, policing women’s bodies, and crushing dissent with an apparatus of repression. Its foreign policy is not defensive but revolutionary. Through proxy militias it has destabilized Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, as well as the Palestinian areas, in some cases for decades.
The regime has pursued nuclear weapons through a series of transparent machinations, deceptions and brinkmanship. Negotiations have repeatedly been used as delaying tactics while enrichment continued. Any deal that relieved sanctions would not simply reduce tensions; it would also inject new resources into a system dedicated both to repression at home and aggression abroad — one that is despised by the vast majority of its own people, as murderous dictatorships inevitably will be.
There is a doctrine in international law known as the Responsibility to Protect — the principle that when a state systematically brutalizes its own population, the international community may have the right, even the obligation, to act. By that standard, the Iranian regime has been skating on thin ice for years.
But with this clear rationale left uncommunicated, the politically dangerous perception has spread that the U.S. was reacting to Israel rather than acting on its own strategic judgment.
A perilous future
If Americans come to believe that Israel caused a costly war that they did not support in the first place, the backlash could be severe.
For centuries, one of the most persistent antisemitic tropes has been the accusation that Jews manipulate powerful states into fighting wars on their behalf. The suggestion that Israel can pull the U.S. into conflict feeds directly into that mythology. Once such perceptions take hold, they can be extremely difficult to reverse.
Even people who reject antisemitism outright can absorb a softer version of the same idea: that American interests are being subordinated to Israeli ones. In a political environment already marked by growing skepticism toward Israel, that perception risks deepening the erosion of support that has been underway for years.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed to inadvertently feed such notions by suggesting in recent days that the U.S. had to attack Iran because Israel was going to do so “anyway,” and then America would have been a target. It was a short path from that to conspiracy theorists like Tucker Carlson blaming Chabad for the war.
A future Democratic president, facing a base that appears to have abandoned Israel, may feel far less obligation to defend it diplomatically or militarily. Even a Republican successor could prove unreliable if the party continues its drift toward isolationism.
That likelihood is compounded by studies showing that a large part of the U.S. Jewish community itself no longer backs Zionism. That process is driven by Israel’s own policies, including the West Bank occupation and the deadly brutality of the war in Gaza.
So the very war that is showcasing the best the U.S.-Israel alliance has to offer is also at risk of fundamentally damaging that partnership. Particularly if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the rightful object of much American ire — manipulates the Iran campaign into an electoral victory this year, the alliance’s greatest success could also be its undoing.
The post War with Iran puts the US-Israel alliance at grave risk appeared first on The Forward.
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Report: Iran’s New Military Plan Is Regime Survival Through Regional Escalation
Members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attend an IRGC ground forces military drill in the Aras area, East Azerbaijan province, Iran, Oct. 17, 2022. Photo: IRGC/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – After last year’s devastating conflict with the United States and Israel, Iranian leaders have reportedly adopted a major strategic shift aimed at expanding the war across the Middle East to secure the regime’s survival, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Previously, Iran responded to foreign strikes with limited, targeted reprisals. The new doctrine abandons that approach, aiming instead to escalate the conflict regionally, particularly against Gulf Arab states and critical economic infrastructure. The goal is to disrupt the global economy and pressure Washington into shortening the war.
This decision followed the twelve-day war with Israel in June 2025, during which Israeli and US strikes eliminated senior Iranian military leaders, destroyed key air defense systems, and severely damaged nuclear facilities. In response, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—before his elimination early in the current conflict—activated a strategy designed to maintain continuity even if top commanders were neutralized.
Central to this approach is the so-called “mosaic defense” doctrine: a decentralized military structure in which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operates through multiple regional command centers. Each center can conduct operations independently, allowing local commanders to continue fighting even if national leadership is incapacitated. This makes the military apparatus more resilient to targeted strikes.
Analysts cited by the Wall Street Journal suggest that Tehran’s calculation is to make the conflict costly enough for all parties to force the US and its allies into a diplomatic resolution.
However, the plan carries enormous risks. By escalating attacks on regional states and international economic interests, Iran could provoke a broader coalition against itself. Despite prior military losses, Iranian forces retain the capability to launch drone and missile strikes, maintaining their influence over the ongoing conflict.
For Iranian leaders, the immediate priority remains unchanged: the survival of the regime, even if it requires a major regional escalation.
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Katz Warns Lebanon to Disarm Hezbollah or ‘Pay a Heavy Price’
Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz and his Greek counterpart Nikos Dendias make statements to the press, at the Ministry of Defense in Athens Greece, Jan. 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki
i24 News – Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz on Saturday warned Lebanon’s leadership that it must act to disarm Hezbollah and enforce existing agreements, cautioning that failure to do so could lead to severe consequences for the Lebanese state.
Speaking after a high-level security assessment with senior military officials, Katz directed a message to Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, saying Beirut had committed to enforcing an agreement requiring Hezbollah’s disarmament but had failed to follow through.
“You pledged to uphold the agreement and disarm Hezbollah — and this is not happening,” Katz said. “Act and enforce it before we do even more.”
The meeting took place in Israel’s military command center and included Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir and other senior defense officials, as Israel continues operations on multiple fronts.
Katz emphasized that Israel would not tolerate attacks on its communities or soldiers from Lebanese territory.
“We will not allow harm to our communities or to our soldiers,” he said. “If the choice is between protecting our citizens and soldiers or protecting the State of Lebanon, we will choose our citizens and soldiers — and the Lebanese government and Lebanon will pay a very heavy price.”
The defense minister also referenced Hezbollah’s leadership, warning that the group’s current chief could lead Lebanon into further destruction.
“If Hassan Nasrallah destroyed Lebanon, then Naim Qassem will destroy it as well,” Katz said.
Katz stressed that Israel has no territorial ambitions in Lebanon but said it would not accept a return to the years in which Hezbollah launched repeated attacks on Israel from Lebanese territory.
“We have no territorial claims against Lebanon,” he said. “But we will not allow Lebanese territory to again become a platform for attacks against the State of Israel.”
He concluded with a warning to Lebanese authorities to take action against Hezbollah before Israel escalates its response.
“Do and act before we do even more,” Katz said.