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Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor of Nazis at Nuremberg, dies at 103
(JTA) — Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving member of the prosecuting team at the Nuremberg trials that convicted Nazi ringleaders for crimes against humanity, died Friday evening in Florida. He was 103.
Ferencz was 27 and a graduate of Harvard Law School when he was named as the chief prosecutor at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, in which 20 members of the SS’s mobile death squads were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Two others were convicted of membership in a criminal organization.
Slight and boyish looking, he is seen in newsreel footage of the trials speaking deliberately and passionately in an accent shaped by his upbringing in Manhattan. “Vengeance is not our goal, nor do we seek merely a just retribution,” he tells the tribunal. “We ask this court to affirm by international penal action, man’s right to live in peace and dignity, regardless of his race or creed. The case we present is a plea of humanity to law.”
Ferencz would go on to play a key role on the team that negotiated the watershed 1952 reparations agreements under which West Germany agreed to pay $822 million to the State of Israel and to groups representing Holocaust survivors. Ferencz was featured in two recent documentaries about the Holocaust and its aftermath: Ken Burns’ PBS series, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” and “Reckonings: The First Reparations,” a 2022 film funded by the German government with support by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
In a statement about the latter film and his role in the reparations negotiations, Ferencz said: “At the time, we were just trying to do what was right. Looking back, I can see that it was this work, the legal work of negotiating agreements and finding justice, that led to peace. It is the indemnification that allowed both Israel and Germany to find a peaceful path forward and rebuild themselves on the world stage.”
In December 2022, the U.S. Congress awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal, its highest honor, thanks to lobbying by six House members led by Rep. Lois Frankel (D-Florida).
“Ben Ferencz was a giant,” said Menachem Rosensaft, the general counsel and associate executive vice president of the World Jewish Congress, in a statement. “He devoted himself to the very end of his long and distinguished career to making sure that the lessons of Nuremberg would become engrained in both international law and the consciousness of society as a whole. He was also a fierce and tireless champion of providing at least a modicum of justice to Holocaust survivors.”
Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz immigrated to the United States with his Jewish family as an infant. They settled in Manhattan, where he attended City College of New York and law school at Harvard. He joined the U.S. Army after graduation, where he was eventually assigned to the headquarters of Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army and a team tasked with collecting evidence for war crimes. At Buchenwald, he once recalled, “I saw crematoria still going. The bodies starved, lying dying, on the ground. I’ve seen the horrors of war more than can be adequately described.”
Ferencz was a civilian by the time he led the team at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, one of the “Subsequent” Nuremberg proceedings that followed the 1945-1946 International Military Tribunal. The Subsequent trials, held between 1946 and 1949, were held by U.S. military courts and dealt with cases of crimes against humanity, the use of slave labor and atrocities against prisoners of war and partisans. Of all the cases brought against Nazis, the Einsatzgruppen Trial, which lasted from September 1947 until April 1948, was the only one to have Holocaust crimes as its major focus.
In 2012, Benjamin Ferencz poses in Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice, where the Nuremberg Trials were held 65 years earlier. (Adam Jones/Wikipedia)
After the trials Ferencz became director-general of the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization and fought for compensation for victims and survivors of the Holocaust and the return of stolen assets. He entered private law practice, and later worked for the institution of the International Criminal Court, which was established in 2002. He was fiercely critical of the decision by the United States not to ratify the treaty that established the court. “War-making itself is the supreme international crime against humanity and … it should be deterred by punishment universally, wherever and whenever offenders are apprehended,” he wrote in 2018.
From 1985 to 1996, he was an adjunct professor of international law at Pace University in Manhattan. He eventually retired to South Florida, but remained vocal in his opposition to war.
Ferencz is survived by a son and three daughters. His wife Gertude died in 2019.
In 2017, the Municipality of The Hague honored Ferencz for his achievements by naming the footpath adjacent to the Peace Palace after him. That same year, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide launched the Ferencz International Justice Initiative.
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A Jewish soldier died saving a Christian friend. Eighty years later, a grave reunited their families.
At a cemetery outside Florence, Italy, two families gathered around the grave of a young American soldier. For decades, they were unknown to each other. Yet they had been connected for 80 years.
Private First Class Frank T. Kurzinger was born in Germany and arrived in the United States with his family in 1938 after fleeing Nazi persecution. A few years later, he returned to Europe in an American uniform as a soldier in the 10th Mountain Division.
During training, he became close friends with a soldier from Wisconsin named Del Riley. The two met in 1943.
In February 1945, the division was preparing to assault Mount Belvedere in northern Italy. The attack would take place at night. Soldiers climbed in silence. Even their weapons had been unloaded to prevent an accidental discharge.
Ahead of Riley, a scout stepped on a landmine. The explosion tore through the darkness, severely wounding both men.
Riley called for a medic, and Kurzinger responded. He took several steps toward his friend, stepped on another landmine, and was killed. He was 21. Riley survived.
For the rest of his life, he wondered whether Frank Kurzinger might have survived the war had he never shouted for help.
“It really pained him,” said Shalom Lamm, co-founder and chief historian of Operation Benjamin. According to family accounts, Riley lived with survivor’s guilt for the rest of his life.
For a time, it seemed possible that Kurzinger himself would slowly fade from memory.
His family was small. The Holocaust had left gaps in family memory and silenced many conversations about the past. In remarks delivered at the 2025 dedication of Kurzinger’s new headstone, family member Michael Stern reflected that Frank had become little more than a distant name.
“There were no photographs,” Stern said. “No yahrzeit to observe, no role for him in stirring the longings for the warmth and intimacy of the larger family.” He might have remained, Stern said, “an anonymous stranger.”
Instead, a grave brought his life into relief.
The ceremony at Florence American Cemetery was organized by Operation Benjamin, a nonprofit that identifies Jewish servicemembers and veterans buried beneath incorrect religious markers and helps restore headstones that reflect their faith.
Kurzinger had been buried beneath a Latin Cross. Aware of the danger a German-born Jew would face if captured by the Nazis, he identified as Catholic on his dogtags.
Eight decades after he was buried, a Star of David was placed above his grave.
Yet the headstones are only part of the work. There is also the responsibility of restoring stories before they fade.
Operation Benjamin’s researchers reconstructed Kurzinger’s story. They traced descendants and gathered family memories. They also located the family of Del Riley, the Wisconsin soldier whose life Kurzinger had tried to save. The two families met for the first time in Italy ahead of the ceremony.
The next day they stood together at the cemetery.
For Lamm, Operation Benjamin is not simply about correcting the historical record. It is about zachor, the Jewish obligation to remember. He points to an unexpected moment in the Book of Exodus. As the Israelites leave Egypt, Moses fulfills a promise made generations earlier: “And Moses took with him the bones of Joseph.”
Joseph asked the Israelites to swear that when God redeemed them, they would carry his remains with them.
Lamm sees Operation Benjamin’s work as a series of “Moses moments.”
“No matter what’s going on in the world,” he said, “never forget your heroes.”
The stories beneath the stones
The organization’s work grew from a simple question. In 2014, Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter visited the Normandy American Cemetery and remarked that he expected to see more Stars of David among the graves. The observation led researchers to discover cases in which Jewish servicemembers had been buried beneath crosses because of wartime paperwork errors, mistaken records, or decisions made under extraordinary circumstances.
Since then, Operation Benjamin has reviewed thousands of cases and helped facilitate dozens of headstone corrections.
But a new headstone is only part of the story. Operation Benjamin’s researchers reconstruct lives that might otherwise be forgotten. “We will not forget you,” Lamm said. “We go back. We tell your story.”
In his remarks at the graveside, Stern reflected on what the journey had meant to his family. “Through the unlikely context of death and burial,” he said at the ceremony, “he has become a tangible link to life, to our roots, our history and the lineage from which we come. A second cousin once removed no longer feels as distant or abstract.”
In prepared remarks released by the U.S. Mission in Italy, U.S. Consul General Daniela Ballard noted that Kurzinger’s name was one of 4,392 at the military cemetery.
“Every name represents a young life lost and a family left behind,” she said. “But today, we are all Frank’s family. We are the ones who carry his memory forward.”
In remarks shared by Operation Benjamin after the ceremony, members of the Riley family described climbing Mount Belvedere with a commemorative challenge coin. One side bore Del Riley’s name and a Christian cross. The other bore Frank Kurzinger’s name and a Star of David.
The two men had set out for the mountain together in February 1945. Neither completed the mission. Frank was killed. Del was wounded. Eighty years later, the Riley family carried both men to the summit. They buried the coin at the 10th Mountain Division memorial.
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Israeli citizen Michael Mizrahi killed in Montreal shooting
(JTA) — Michael Mizrahi, an Israeli citizen and longtime member of Montreal’s Jewish community, has been identified as the civilian killed in Monday’s shooting involving a gunman and Canadian police officers in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood.
The suspected gunman was killed during the incident, the investigation of which is ongoing. Police have not publicly released the suspect’s identity or provided details about a possible motive. They also have not confirmed who shot Mizrahi.
The Israeli Consulate in Montreal confirmed Mizrahi’s death, saying in a statement that he was an Israeli citizen and extended condolences to his family “on behalf of the people and the State of Israel.” The consulate said his family “knows all too well the horrors of terror and violence, making this tragic loss even more painful.”
Montreal police Constable Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, 34, was also fatally shot responding to the incident, according to police.
The Service de police de la Ville de Montréal said Benredouane died in the line of duty while protecting the public during an intervention in Côte-des-Neiges, a heavily Jewish neighborhood. He had served with the force since 2021.
A second officer, who is female, was also shot and remains in critical condition, police said.
Quebec’s Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes, the province’s police watchdog, has opened an independent investigation into the use of a firearm by a police officer in a fatal confrontation.The Quebec police watchdog group states that it is “mandated to fully investigate the facts surrounding police interventions. The BEI investigates all cases where a person, other than a police officer on duty, dies, suffers serious injury, or is injured by a firearm used by a police officer during a police intervention or while in police custody.“
A number of Canadian Jewish groups published statements assuring the Jewish community that they were not in danger. The UJA-Federation of Toronto put out two statements explaining that the Jewish community did not appear to be a target.
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the advocacy arm of Canadian Jewish Federations, also put out a statement mourning the loss of a community member.
“We mourn the tragic loss of Michael (Michel) Moshe Mizrahi z”l, a beloved member of Montreal’s Jewish community, an innocent victim of today’s events,” the group posted on X on Monday night. “Our thoughts and our deepest condolences are with his family, friends, and loved ones during this time of unimaginable pain.”
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar wrote on X that he had called the Chabad Rabbi of Montreal Mendel Raskin to extend his “deepest condolences to the families of the victims, to the Jewish community of Montreal, and to all Canadians mourning this terrible loss.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Supreme Court reinstates murder conviction in Etan Patz disappearance case
(JTA) — The Supreme Court on Monday reinstated a murder conviction for the man convicted of killing Etan Patz, the 6-year-old Jewish boy whose 1979 disappearance riveted the nation.
In a 6-3 vote, the justices reimposed the conviction of Pedro Hernandez, who was found guilty of kidnapping and murdering Patz in 2017 and was serving a 25-year sentence until a New York federal appeals court ruled last year that he was entitled to a retrial.
The justices granted an appeal from New York prosecutors who urged them to overturn the decision last year, writing in an unsigned opinion that the lower court “exceeded its authority in holding that Hernandez is entitled to relief.”
“Today the Supreme Court agreed with the findings of multiple lower courts and upheld the trial conviction of Pedro Hernandez for the horrific murder of Etan Patz, which changed a generation of New Yorkers,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement Monday. “This office has remained steadfast in its pursuit of justice for Etan and the Patz family and will continue to stand by this important conviction.”
Harvey Fishbein, a lawyer for Hernandez, told the The New York Times Monday that the Supreme Court’s order meant Hernandez would not get a new trial, adding that his team was “terribly disappointed.”
“We firmly believe that an innocent man is in jail for a crime that he did not commit,” Fishbein said.
Patz vanished in May 1979 while walking to his school bus stop in New York City for the first time. The 6-year-old became one of the first missing children whose photograph appeared on milk cartons nationwide, but despite years of searches and public appeals, he was never found.
Patz’s parents, Julie and Stan, spent decades seeking an arrest for his disappearance, helping to establish a national missing-children hotline. The anniversary of Etan’s disappearance, May 25, also became National Missing Children’s Day.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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