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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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Prominent Jewish figures call for sanctions on Israel: ‘The ceasefire must be the beginning, not the end.’

As the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas enters its second week, prominent Jews from around the world who have criticized Israel throughout the war have now signed onto a letter urging global leaders to ensure that the deal results in a “new era of peace and justice for all.”
The letter, which was addressed to António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, and world leaders, also demands that Israel be held to account for “grievous violations of international law.”
“It was international pressure that helped to secure this ceasefire, and it must be sustained to guarantee that it endures. The ceasefire must be the beginning, not the end,” the letter says. “The risk of reverting to a political reality of indifference to occupation and permanent conflict is too great. This same pressure must be continued to deliver a new era of peace and justice for all—Palestinians and Israelis alike.”
The letter, titled “Jews Demand Action,” was released Wednesday as Vice President J.D. Vance visits Israel, amid signs casting doubt on the durability of the ceasefire deal.
It was signed by a host of prominent Jewish celebrities and public figures, many of whom have been outspoken in their criticism of Israel since the beginning of its two-year war in Gaza.
They include Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov, Emmy Award-winning actors Ilana Glazer and Hannah Einbinder, Canadian trauma guru Gabor Maté, and Oscar winners Jonathan Glazer and Yuval Avraham, who co-directed the documentary “No Other Land.”
The initiating signatories included American author and editor-at-large of Jewish Currents Peter Beinart; former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg; former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy; Libby Lenkinski, the vice president for public engagement of the New Israel Fund; British activist Em Hilton, and former Belgian member of parliament Simone Susskind.
“We launched this initiative because the deeds of Israel’s government in Gaza have been an affront to collective Jewish consciousness worldwide,” Burg said in a statement. “Pressure from people mobilizing across the world, which led to leaders taking a stand, helped produce a ceasefire. Now international pressure must be sustained to end this cycle of violence and oppression once and for all.”
The letter also urges “businesses, labor unions, civil society” and the United Nations’ member states to take four steps: comply with decisions of the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court (which issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year), impose sanctions and arms embargoes on Israel, ensure humanitarian aid reaches Gaza and “refute false accusations of antisemitism.”
“We shall not rest until this ceasefire carries forward into an end of occupation and apartheid,” the letter continued. “We write in the hope that this initiative further emboldens a moment of renewed Jewish commitment to act with conscience and compassion. We vow to work urgently to achieve equality, justice, and freedom for Palestinians and Israelis.”
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I was a villain on ‘Love is Blind.’ The antisemitic backlash brought me back to Judaism
Within hours of the debut of Love is Blind’s seventh season on Netflix in late 2024, “Leo the Art Dealer” became America’s newest reality TV villain.
That’s me.
TikToks mocking me gained millions of views; gossip columnists published pieces calling me arrogant, pretentious, obnoxious and a “walking red flag”; soon, Walmart was selling “Art Dealer” Halloween sets based on my style, and Netflix added the words “art dealer” to their official IG bio.
But I could deal with the hate. Until it turned antisemitic.
Most viewers knew I was Jewish from the Star of David chain around my neck. I didn’t anticipate how much negative attention that small piece of jewelry would attract. People weren’t just commenting on my behavior from the show. They were calling me a greedy Jew, indulging in antisemitic tropes, calling me the worst Jew ever, and much worse. My DM’s were filled with obscene and toxic messages that would make anyone nervous.
I felt the gamut of negative emotions – shock, hurt, anger and panic.
This experience is common among Jews in the public eye today. Sam Klein described the non-stop antisemitic comments he received after his appearance on Love in Blind UK season one. In 2022, internet personality Lizzy Savetsky dropped out of Real Housewives of New York, citing a “torrent of antisemitism” in response to the announcement that she would join the cast.
However, instead of making me cower or want to hide my Jewish identity, this experience actually pushed me to explore my roots more deeply. What started out as a traumatic experience became a catalyst for my return to my Jewish faith and community.
Before learning, grief
I had begun returning to Judaism during the COVID pandemic, well before my reality TV debut. I lost my mother and two grandparents early in the lockdown, and my father and stepfather received concurrent cancer diagnoses.
My inner world was completely falling apart.
That’s when, while scrolling YouTube one day with a close friend, I stumbled across the channel of Rabbi Shais Taub, a Chabad rabbi with a gift for taking complex Torah ideas and distilling them into easy-to-understand, bite-sized concepts. My Jewish knowledge at that point was pretty limited — we’re talking bagels and Seinfeld. But something about how Rabbi Shais broke down Jewish ideas and principles just grabbed me.
So I did what Jews have done for centuries when they needed guidance, in the mold of Pirkei Avot, which says “Make for yourself a teacher.” I reached out to the rabbi to ask some of my pressing questions: “Why does G-d allow tragedy in the world?” “How do I mourn for my deceased family?” and “How can I be a good Jew?”
Through his patient teaching, I slowly began to understand how Judaism could become a meaningful, active part of my life, and not just a cultural identity that I acknowledged once or twice a year.
Shidduch dating on steroids
In the early stages of my spiritual journey, I applied to be on Love is Blind. After a year of interviews, I was cast on the show, and filming began in October of 2023. For two weeks, I lived with 29 strangers in a surreal alternate universe, where I was surrounded by cameras and spent eight hours a day dating. It was like shidduch dating on steroids.
In the high-stakes environment of Love is Blind, I connected with a wonderful woman called Brittany. As part of the show’s editing process, however, the ways my Judaism played into our developing connection got cut. In reality, we had long conversations about how important it was to me to raise a Jewish family — even though I was still only beginning to figure out just what Judaism meant to me — and the process of conversion.
I proposed. Then, almost out of nowhere, the show’s producers decided our relationship wasn’t compelling enough to continue filming, and we were cut from the show. Shortly after, we discovered that while we seemed like a match during filming, in real life we realized we weren’t meant for each other, although today we remain great platonic friends.
The one-two punch of not being on the show and realizing Brittany and I weren’t meant for each other left me feeling completely lost and dejected.
Gaining fortitude — and needing it
I was spiraling, until Rabbi Shais invited me to visit the Ohel —the resting place of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, in Queens, New York. I’d never been to the gravesite of a holy person before, but I figured I had nothing to lose.
Walking into that place just a few months after wrapping up the filming was like stepping into an altered space of spirituality. All the chaos and noise seemed to fade away, and I felt a profound stillness and inner peace, unlike anything I’d ever experienced.
Jewish tradition teaches that a righteous person like the Rebbe can help us spiritually and bring us blessings even after they’ve passed. Standing there at his resting place, something just opened up in my heart. I found myself praying — really praying — for the first time in my life.
To my surprise, shortly after my Ohel visit, Love is Blind producers let me know that Brittany and I were being re-edited into the show. Several months later, when the season was finally released on Netflix, the sense of profound peace I had begun to cultivate that day proved newly necessary. Beyond the reality show gossip, and crude and inflammatory comments, I received a crash course in online antisemitism — including insults about my appearance and death threats against me and my family. Some social media users, in response to my appearance, issued called for Hitler and Hamas to finish the job.
It was everywhere — in my social media comment sections and DM’s, in my personal email and text messages, as well as my business contact form and voicemail. I disconnected my business phone because the messages wouldn’t stop. Internet trolls flooded my business with one-star ratings on Google, just to hurt my prospects.
However, rather than demoralizing me, the hate and negativity gave me a push to go deeper into my Jewish identity and start observing practices I’d never seriously considered before. I began taking a digital Shabbat, disconnecting from social media every week between sundown on Friday and Saturday night. I also started putting on tefillin daily, and at Rabbi Shais’ suggestion, studying Sha’ar HaBitachon, a classic text about developing trust in God.
For the first time in my life, I felt truly connected to and cared for by something greater than myself.
What’s next
In our chaotic times, when hate speech goes viral and authentic connection feels increasingly rare, our community and traditions can bring a needed sense of grounding.
While online antisemitism is real and impacts everyone differently, I make the conscious choice to not make it the center of my identity. For me, being a Jew is more than combating antisemitism. It’s about feeling a sense of Jewish pride, connection and empowerment. I’ve become much more involved with my local Chabad, and even attended the Chabad Young Professionals international retreat.
Ultimately, while I didn’t find my life partner in the Love is Blind pods, it was a crucial step on my journey to becoming a proud and active Jew. Through thick and thin, our people have always overcome adversity by doubling down on our Jewish pride and traditions, and always finding a reason to kvell rather than kvetch.
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Every Friday for 26 years, this rabbi has circled Manhattan to inspect the eruv — even missing the birth of his 13th child. Now, he’s getting help
(New York Jewish Week) — Around 6:15 a.m. on a recent Thursday, Rabbi Moshe Tauber parked his van in the merge lane of the Henry Hudson Parkway at 72nd Street. He turned on his hazard lights and ran out of the vehicle with a flashlight. His wife, Chaya, sitting in the passenger seat, watched anxiously.
Tauber, 51, turned his head upward, shined his flashlight on the nylon fishing wire strung up 30 feet from the ground between two poles, and ran back to the car. All clear — the boundary was unbroken.
For the past 25 years, this process has been the rabbi’s routine on both Thursday and Friday mornings: leaving his home in Monsey, an Orthodox enclave in Rockland County, hours before sunrise in order to circumnavigate the entire island of Manhattan. His mission: to check every part of the borough’s eruv — the symbolic boundary, marked by strings and other man-made and natural elements, inside of which observant Jews may carry objects like food, keys and even babies on Shabbat and certain holidays.
Maintaining the eruv, which must be unbroken to be considered kosher, has been Tauber’s job since 1999. Tauber says it doesn’t make sense for someone else to sub in for him, simply because he knows the eruv so well and can do it so efficiently, after having inspected it for so many years. With Chaya’s approval, he even missed the early-morning birth of his 13th and youngest child, now 7, to check the eruv on a Friday morning. He immediately went to the hospital to visit mother and baby after his inspection was done.
“I don’t know if I can explain what I like in this job,” Tauber said. “I like it.”
Now, for the first time, the eruv inspector is getting some high-tech assistance.
Installed in August, a new sensor system created by technology entrepreneur Jerry Kestenbaum — also the creator of the residential building software company BuildingLink — magnetically snaps onto multiple locations of the eruv. The 142 sensors detect changes in the angle of the wire and send a signal to a receiver held by Spectrum on Broadway, the lighting and electrical company responsible for maintaining the line per Tauber’s instructions. The sensors themselves are battery-operated and meant to last for six to 10 years, sealed in a waterproof case.
“It gives me more comfortability,” Tauber said. But he’s not planning on ceding oversight entirely to the machines, saying, “I know I need to check because the sensors are not 100%.”
The sensors mark the first major innovation to Manhattan’s biggest eruv, installed in 1999 after Adam Mintz, then the rabbi of Lincoln Square Synagogue, requested its installation to surround his Upper West Side neighborhood. (Prior to the borough-wide eruv, different parts of the city each had their own, but travel between them while carrying anything was prohibited on Shabbat.)
According to Jewish law related to Shabbat, no items can be carried outside the home on what is supposed to be a day of rest and prayer. Recognizing this as a potential burden, rabbis in the Talmudic era devised a workaround: The boundary defined by the eruv would extend the “private” zone where carrying is permitted. Despite some community objections — sometimes from Jews and non-Jews who worry that the eruv will change the “character” of their neighborhoods, or civil libertarians who worry about the blurring of church and state — nearly every observant community, from big cities to small towns, is surrounded by an eruv.
The Lincoln Square eruv has expanded multiple times since 1999, now encompassing most of Manhattan, from 145th Street between Riverside Drive and Malcolm X Boulevard at its northernmost point, roughly down FDR Drive all the way to the bottom of Manhattan at the South Street Ferry, and back up the Henry Hudson Parkway.
In the years since he became its inspector, Tauber’s dedication to the eruv has been unflagging. He made sure it was unbroken after 9/11 (it didn’t extend all the way downtown at the time), after the 2003 citywide blackout, after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In Tauber’s 25 years of inspections, the eruv has only been down once over a Shabbat, during a snowstorm in 2010.
In addition to checking the eruv twice a week, Tauber helps his wife run a daycare, and he teaches boys at a yeshiva. He hasn’t taken a vacation longer than a few days for a quarter century.
Chaya Tauber said she has a theory about why he likes the eruv job so much. “[It’s] many hours of a busy week — he has more jobs, it’s not the only job — that he can be by himself,” she said.” Quiet time. I think he likes the traveling, also.”
Just two weeks ago, he helped establish an eruv around Columbia University Medical Center in Washington Heights and the surrounding apartments. Eventually, the plan is to connect it to the main Manhattan eruv — and potentially to other smaller eruvs in Upper Manhattan. There, smaller eruvs serve portions of Washington Heights with many observant Jews, including one that is home to the Orthodox flagship Yeshiva University.
Kestenbaum, whose new business, Aware Buildings, provides sensors for home security, said the idea for the electronic eruv technology came about during a conversation with Mintz, now the rabbinic leader of Kehilat Rayim Ahuvim (The Shtiebel) on the Upper West Side at the Marlene Meyerson JCC.
“I was saying to him that the sensors can be applied to many, many things that we’re used to doing manually,” said Kestenbaum, whose wife converted to Judaism under Mintz’s supervision.
“It’s a complicated eruv where the deployed environment changes,” Kestenbaum explained. “It’s not [like] in the suburbs, where the outline of the eruvs remains constant. Things go wrong. You’ve got scaffolding that gets put up. You’ve got other things that happen. The weekly eruv job is not just fixing, sometimes it’s rerouting.”
The complications are what gets Tauber out the door around 3:30 a.m. on inspection days. Not only does he beat rush hour, but once the sun begins to come up, it’s far more difficult to see the wire.
Now, the sensors can help him locate the wires more easily — and safely. “I used to walk [out of the car] because I couldn’t see it without the sensors,” Tauber said, pointing to a section near the Manhattan Bridge. “See the sensors? You don’t have to see the actual line.”
Tauber has been surprised by the willingness of various city agencies and construction crews to accommodate him in his unusual line of work.
“Even though we are Jewish, and we know we are not the most liked people here, but I never, ever had a problem with any organization or department officials, or even a construction company — they always come across,” he said. “They always look like they admire something which is religious.”
For Chaya Tauber, the early mornings and constrained vacations are worth it because of the way her husband’s work allows Manhattan Jews to observe one major law of Shabbat with ease.
“There is so much less desecration of Shabbos,” Chaya Tauber said, adding that when the eruv is up, “at least they’re not transgressing on this particular halacha. That makes this job such a responsibility.”
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