(JTA) — J Street, the Jewish advocacy group that calls itself pro-Israel and pro-peace, has sought a seat at the Jewish establishment table since its inception in 2008 – and has been repeatedly rebuffed.

Now it is building its own table.

The lobby has lined up heavy hitters from the Jewish establishment to further its claim to speak for a substantial portion of the American Jewish community on Israel. In doing so, it’s making the case that its record of putting pressure on Israel’s governments and its criticism of the Israeli military should no longer be dealbreakers for mainstream Jewish organizations.

On Monday, J Street is forming a Jewish Community Advisory Council that includes past leaders of groups that define the establishment. They include the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Agency for Israel and the UJA-Jewish Federation of New York.

“Together their advice, support and critiques will help advance an agenda that bolsters the Israel promised in its Declaration of Independence, thriving in relationships with both the United States and the American Jewish community – steeped in our values – for generations to come,” the group said in a release shared exclusively with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

This fresh effort to test whether the American Jewish establishment can tolerate J Street’s brand of “tough love” Israel activism comes three years after Hamas’ deadly raids inside Israel. J Street supports the state’s existence but has been highly critical of how the Israeli military has prosecuted the war in Gaza. It also stridently opposes its right-wing governments and advocates for U.S. pressure on Israel to make peace with the Palestinians, including by withholding weapons sales to Jerusalem.

The move is happening amid seismic shifts the Gaza war has seeded in the American Jewish community: On one side, younger Jews are increasingly alienated from Israel, evident in polling, as the country is led by its furthest right government ever; on the other, the Diaspora has been roiled by an explosion of antisemitic expression with criticism of Israel often exploited by the worst enemies of the Jews.

At the same time, given Israel’s diminishing reputation among Americans, especially Democrats, J Street sees an opportunity to make inroads with Jewish leaders who want to have strong relationships with U.S. politicians. Its president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, told JTA in an interview that the group was the best avenue to stem the growth of extremist anti-Israel voices among Democrats – the party substantial majorities of Jews still vote for – especially as many Jews want to oppose the Trump administration because they believe it is veering toward authoritarianism and associates with bigots.

“The issue that I would say we’re well positioned to address is to say, for Jews who want to not live under MAGA and Donald Trump, ‘We want to ensure that there’s a Democratic Party that adheres to the J Street line, that does not negate the right of the Jewish people to a state, but does oppose what the Jewish state is doing,’” he said.

Ben-Ami argued that making J Street the voice of the community among Democrats would help it stem the insurgency on the party’s left because it would keep Jewish votes and donations flowing to Democrats, blunting both anti-Israel sentiments in the party and Trump’s power in the second half of his second term.

Among the names on the new council:

• Bob Goodkind, the president of the American Jewish Committee from 2004-2007.
• John Ruskay, the CEO of the UJA-Jewish Federation of New York from 1999-2014.
• Alan Solow and Seymour Reich, both past chairmen of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
• Charles Ratner, past chair of the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel from 2014-2017.
• Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism from 1996-2012.
• Nancy Kaufman, the CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women from 2010-2019.
• Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, the chancellor of the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary from 1986-2006.

J Street also announced in the same release that Rabbi David Saperstein, the director emeritus of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, is joining J Street’s Board of Directors.

The new council, its members said in interviews, will exert influence on the Jewish conversation about Israel by reaching out to local federations, where many of its members have served. And it will also do so simply by existing – with a panoply of people who were once ardent establishmentarians welcoming J Street.

“You have to try to find a way to get the leadership [of federations] to be at least open to hearing another point of view,” said Ratner, who headed the federation in Cleveland from 2000-2003 and who is a member of one of that city’s leading philanthropic families.

UJA’s Ruskay told JTA that the consensus he and others once hewed to – that American Jewish organizations must defer wholly to Israel’s government of the day when it comes to its security – is faltering. (70 Faces Media, the parent company of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, receives UJA funding.)

“There are now multiple views of what it means to be ‘pro-Israel’ in the American Jewish

community,” he said. “I believe this is healthy, reflecting different perspectives on what is best for Israel. We need to provide space for discussion and civil debate within our community for all groups committed to Jewish sovereignty in our ancient homeland –  those we agree with, and those we don’t.”

But many leaders of mainstream organizations aren’t convinced that endorsing J Street’s perspective is beneficial for Israel or American Jews.

Jason Shames, the executive director of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, said differing perspectives on Israel’s security are a gift to Israel’s enemies at a time when the country is in crisis.

“They want to see change within Israel, which is fair, and they do not want to see the demise of Israel,” Shames said. “The problem is that balancing act, in today’s social media era, means that the haters and those who do want Israel’s demise inherently see that as an asset and a value to their cause, and that’s where the breakdown is. That’s why I think you see resistance from people like me.”

Other critics of J Street, however, said the group is simply not representative of pro-Israel activism in this country, and it’s a mistake to invite in an organization so contrary to the stances of so many.

“Mainstream Jewish organizations should not pretend J Street represents the pro-Israel mainstream,” said one former top federation official who requested anonymity to speak frankly. “An organization that seeks to condition aid, block weapons, excuse votes to eliminate security assistance and support damaging actions against Israel at the United Nations has placed itself outside that consensus. A big tent still needs boundaries. If pro-Israel can mean anything, it means nothing.”

J Street has long faced resistance to its advocacy for U.S. pressure on Israel to move toward a two-state solution and its criticism of many Israeli actions since its inception in 2008. For a time, the group concealed the fact that a leading donor was George Soros, the billionaire who has been lacerating in his criticism of Israel’s governments and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. This is because J Street’s leadership believed his name was anathema in the community. Soros had initially declined to help launch the group out of concern that his involvement would be used against it. J Street initially avoided directly tangling with AIPAC, but in recent years, the two organizations frequently go head to head on social media.

The dissembling about Soros was exposed in 2010, but even before the revelations, J Street’s outreach to the mainstream was having little success. Establishment organizations discouraged synagogues and Jewish community centers from hosting its speakers. It sought membership in the umbrella group, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, in 2014 and was rejected.

J Street initially supported Israel’s military response in Gaza, saying that it “strongly supports Israel’s right to defend itself proportionately against the threat of relentless rockets and to destroy tunnels leading into Israel.” But it later accused the government of ignoring Palestinian suffering. “We take issue with those who say that discussing how to end the violence in the long run is not pro-Israel,” it said.

J Street joined other liberal groups in March 2024 in calling on President Joe Biden to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza. The move came after months of pressure from progressives who accused the liberal Zionist groups of not doing enough to call for an end to the fighting. It also came as Israel was preparing to enter Rafah despite U.S. pressure to refrain from doing so.

In November of the same year, when the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, J Street did not quite endorse the warrants. But it did call on the organized Jewish community not to “blame [the warrants] on antisemitism or inherent enmity for Israel” – a departure from the response of several major Jewish organizations, which strongly denounced the ICC’s action as anti-Jewish.

Last year, Ben-Ami, under what he acknowledged was pressure from the left, retreated from his argument that Israel was not committing genocide, and now J Street is ambivalent on the issue.

But despite the antagonism his positions have sparked among mainstream Jewish leaders, Ben-Ami argued that keeping young people invested in Israel’s survival is an acute challenge – and that it won’t happen by discouraging dissent.

Finally, he said, that point has been absorbed by the establishment, which made it easy to get the former bigwigs on board with the council.

“There is a level of fear setting in among people who have devoted decades and decades of their lives to Zionism and to the U.S.-Israel relationship,” he said. “Fear about where we’re headed, fear about where Israel is headed, the kind of Israel that is going to be left behind, and a recognition that perhaps after all these decades, providing unconditional support and no daylight wasn’t the best idea, you know, and we need to have an open and honest conversation.”

He continued, “Some of these folks are recognizing that the essence of what J Street argued for the last 20 years, it turns out, is really important right now.”

Solow, a past chairman of the Conference of Presidents, recalled making those arguments himself when he advocated in 2014 for J Street’s inclusion in the organization.

“It has become increasingly apparent that excluding J Street from these conversations is a communal error because it discourages many young people who want to be involved in a positive way in supporting an Israel that they very much want to believe in,” he said. “It discourages them from being included in the community and in the communal discussion.”

UJA’s Ruskay said he was appalled by reports that the Jewish campus organization Hillel discouraged its chapters from working with J Street U, J Street’s student affiliate, most recently in the case of the Hillel chapter at the University of Michigan.

“When I hear that J Street is not welcomed in certain Hillels, we need J Street in Hillels!” he said. Hillel did not return a request for comment.

NCJW’s Kaufman is on the board of a number of organizations that stridently oppose the current government led by Netanyahu. Similar to joining those other boards, her participation in the J Street council is a matter of penitence for her past at the NCJW and the Boston-area Jewish Community Relations Council before that.

“I feel like we didn’t say enough. I really do. It’s my issue. I feel like we should have spoken out more,” she said.

She recalled feeling ill when she saw J Street voted down at the Conference of Presidents, which at the same time allowed in AEPi, a fraternity that she believed held conservative views unrepresentative of young Jews.

“This was a ‘We have met the enemy and he is us’ moment,” said Kaufman, who at the time was present in her capacity as NCJW CEO. “It was a shanda,” she added, using the Yiddish word for scandal.

An influential vote against J Street at that meeting was the American Jewish Committee, which nullified the nod J Street had received from other mainstream groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Reform movement.

David Harris, then the AJC CEO, said he doesn’t regret the way his group voted then and that he would recommend the same vote now.

“I don’t believe it is the role of American Jews — who live thousands of miles from Israel, reject aliyah, don’t face life-and-death military service and don’t have to take their children and elderly to bomb shelters day and night — to seek to influence existentially important issues affecting Israel and its vital link with the United States,” he said.

He added that such lobbying for U.S. pressure on Israel is “inappropriate and, yes, harmful.” The same goes, he said, for right-wing groups that seek U.S. pressure on Israel for their favored outcomes.

The Jewish Agency’s Ratner, who once gave to AIPAC, said that organization is now too closely associated with the right wings in the United States and Israel. “I think as AIPAC became more and more reactionary and right wing, and it just didn’t feel right to me anymore,” he said.

AIPAC, which did not return a request for comment, has said that it continues to enjoy the support of donors and elected officials from both American parties.

Ratner said that whatever “center” there was among American Jews is disappearing.

“I don’t think J Street has yet achieved the position where it’s viewed as a centrist position. Nor do I think that AIPAC anymore is a centrist position, and I think that’s one of the challenges the community has. Where is there room for a centrist position?” he asked.

Jeremy Burton, the CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, said the notion that the community can rally around a single Israel position is antiquated, though it was once commonplace among establishment Jewish organizations.

“The project of American Jews speaking with one coordinated voice  – and I say this as a CEO of an independent JCRC that has 40 member organizations, including J Street – I don’t know that that project looks the same way it did even a decade or so ago in terms of the formal infrastructure of collective voice,” said Burton, who is not involved in the new J Street council.

The groups who participated in the 2014 vote did not return or declined requests for comment on where they stand now, as did a number of federation officials. Among those not commenting were the Jewish Federations of North America, AIPAC, the ADL, the AJC and the Conference of Presidents.

Saperstein said one role that he, as a board member, and the new council could play would be to advise J Street “that it has to be clearer about the Ahavat Yisrael aspect of its work,” referring to the principle of “Love of Israel,” which applies to the country and the Jewish community.

Religious Action Center’s Saperstein said he expected J Street would robustly speak out against those who oppose all weapons sales to Israel since the organization itself only opposes some offensive weapons sales, which it believes should be conditioned on Israeli behavior. It does not oppose sales of defensive weapons, which anti-Israel political forces have increasingly proposed.

Ben-Ami said J Street’s best strategy was to make its case and not seek the marginalization of others, however extreme their positions.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Jewish establishment heavy hitters are joining J Street in a sign of the changing times appeared first on The Forward.

On Oct. 7, Israelis will come together to commemorate the third anniversary of the Hamas attack. Three weeks later, they will gather again, this time at the voting booth, for the first national election since Nov. 2022. The shadow of the first event will no doubt loom large over the second.

The election is expected to serve, in large part, as a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition’s refusal to take responsibility for the failures of Oct. 7. But the fallout will also appear on the ballot itself, which will include several candidates whose lives were upended on that fateful day and the three tumultuous years that followed.

Some stepped into these leadership roles reluctantly, like Likud hopeful Talik Gvili, whose son Ran was the last deceased hostage to return from Gaza, and Sharon Sharabi of Yisrael Beiteinu, whose brothers Yossi and Eli were taken captive; only Eli returned alive.

Alongside those propelled unwittingly into the public eye are a slew of activists-turned-candidates whose path to political leadership was more deliberate. Many rose to prominence in early 2023, during the mass demonstrations against the government’s attempted judicial overhaul. After Oct. 7, they co-led the struggle to free the hostages, together with family members, and then went on to revive the anti-government protests, demanding accountability and calling for elections.

Elections in which they are now candidates.

With A Place for All, the Jewish-Arab party launched by Standing Together leaders, having withdrawn from the race earlier this month, the overwhelming majority of activists have found their political home inside the left-wing, liberal Zionist party formed in 2024 through a merger of Labor and Meretz now known as The Democrats.

Record-high voter turnout for the party’s internal primaries held this past July, and recent polling projecting they will secure at least 10 electoral seats, point to a groundswell of support among protest supporters. But can a movement that repeatedly brought tens of thousands of Israelis into the streets and helped force a pause in the judicial overhaul translate that mobilization into lasting political power? And for the candidates themselves – many with no prior political experience – what does it take to go from protesting outside the Knesset to making decisions inside of it?

For protest leader Yaya Fink, who secured the fifth position on The Democrats’ slate, the answer lies in shifting from resistance to rebuilding.

“The protests were about stopping things from happening. Now it’s time to make things happen,” Fink told the Forward, a transition he describes as “both critically important and completely natural.”

“You cannot stay in crisis-prevention mode forever,” Fink said. “We are incredibly proud of what we accomplished. But it’s time for the next phase: repairing what’s broken, creating change, building anew.”

Fink, a religious activist who helped establish the public-interest lobbying organization Lobby 99, has been involved in social justice movements for most of his adult life. But he describes the judicial overhaul as the first time he felt he was fighting for the country’s very identity as a liberal democracy. “It’s the cause that most affected me as a person and that I also feel I had the most effect on,” he recalled.

From outside the Knesset to inside

Fink is one of more than a dozen candidates near the top of The Democrats’ ticket with a background in activism. Joining him are reservist organizer Omri Ronen; high-tech protest leader Moshe Radman; Moran Zer Katzenstein, founder of Building an Alternative; Arab-Israeli peace activist Somaya Bashir; and Avi Dabush, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights.

Yair Golan, at the top of the ticket, followed by incumbent lawmakers Naama Lazimi, Gilad Kariv and Efrat Reytan were also regular fixtures on the protest circuit. “These were the politicians who were out on the streets with us day after day, week after week,” Fink said. “It was a natural fit for us to join their party.”

The transition from protest to politics has clear historical precedence in Israel, according to Doron Shultziner, a professor in the Government, Communication and Diplomacy department at Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College who studies social movements,

In the 1970s, Moroccan immigrants Charlie Biton and Saadia Marciano were part of Israel’s Black Panthers, a group of militant radicals who were regularly arrested and often faced police brutality in their struggle against the racism and poverty Mizrahi Jews encountered at the time. Eventually, the two men entered politics on left-wing tickets, continuing their fight for equal treatment for Mizrahi Jews and emerging as early supporters of peace with the Palestinians.

But infighting and limited political influence prevented them from affecting significant change, even for Biton, who served 15 years in the Knesset. In general, Shultziner cautions against assuming that prominence in a protest movement automatically translates to success in office.

“Clearly, politics and protest are two completely different ball games,” he said. “The career of a politician is haphazard and is affected by so many events that they cannot control.”

Similarly, Shultziner pointed to the social justice protest of 2011, when Israelis pitched tents on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Blvd. and marched in the streets to protest soaring housing costs and economic inequality. As the protest began to wind down, movement leaders Stav Shaffir and Itzik Shmuli moved into politics, securing spots on the Labor ticket in 2013. Shaffir gained prominence demanding budget transparency but spent her parliamentary career in opposition. After leaving Labor in 2019 for a rival left-wing alliance, she was excluded from subsequent electoral partnerships and left the Knesset in 2020.

Shmuli managed to became labor and welfare minister but, as Shultziner explained, his advancement came at a price: “Despite campaigning on a promise not to serve under Netanyahu, he joined Labor leader Amir Peretz in taking the party into the Netanyahu–Gantz unity government, a decision that alienated their supporters. He ended up retiring the following year.”

“So, it really depends on how you define success,” Shultziner noted.

Will protests and protesters change Israeli politics?

For Fink, who remembers these broken promises all too well, loyalty is central to The Democrats’ appeal. “In addition to standing shoulder to shoulder with us on the streets, they were also steadfast in representing the movement in the Knesset,” he said. “It just made sense to go in with people who have demonstrated they cannot be bought by Netanyahu.”

But before Fink can think about the Knesset, he and his fellow Democrats must focus on the road to get there. With Election Day only weeks away, the question is how wide to cast their net.

According to the Israeli Democracy Institute (IDI), by July of 2025, around 1.5 million Israelis were estimated to have taken part in at least one demonstration in the previous three years. And yet most polls have The Democrats at around 10 seats, or roughly 400,000 votes, a significant difference.

“Over time, we see a growing perception that the protests did not succeed in transforming Israel’s political system,” explained Dr. Tamar Hermann, a senior research fellow at IDI.

“With The Democrats’ identity so deeply intertwined with the protest movement, that disillusionment has led voters to look elsewhere.”

An even bigger obstacle may be the ideological gap between protester and party. “They were certainly united in their opposition to the judicial reform. But The Democrats as a party is significantly to the left of many of the protesters,” she said. “The majority of those who showed up consistently were quite conservative. They tend to benefit from a status quo they would like to preserve, which contradicts The Democrats’ message of change and revolution.”

Paradoxically, the movement’s public image may also hamper efforts to reach beyond it. ”In the collective Israeli psyche, the protestors, and by extension The Democrats, are so strongly associated with being Ashkenazi, urban, secular, quasi-socialist, and highly educated.” Hermann said. “Which doesn’t appeal to a broad audience.” That perception is not totally unfounded. A January 2023 IDI survey, conducted during the judicial overhaul protests, found that 20% of Ashkenazi respondents reported participating in protest activities, compared with 10% of Mizrahi respondents; participation among secular Jews was 27%, compared with only 4% among religious Zionists, with most of the large-scale demonstrations taking place in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa.

But beyond the data, the image carries historical baggage which still lingers today. Israel’s Labor movement, The Democrats’ political forebear, was dominated by Ashkenazi Jews of European ancestry while Mizrahi Jews, driven by the marginalization they faced, helped bring Netanyahu’s Likud party to power in the late 1970s.

Hermann notes that even reaching the projected 10 seats will be a huge accomplishment, a sentiment echoed by Shultziner. “Just the fact that they managed to register over 100,000 voters is an impressive feat,” he said. “People who would never have voted for labor in the past are now registering early with the Democrats just so they can vote in the primaries.”

Fink, however, remains determined to reach beyond the party’s base.

“I am a religious man who lives in the North,” he said, “not exactly the stereotypical ‘Kaplanist,’ ” a pejorative nickname for protesters drawn from Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street, the demonstrations’ main gathering place.

“But who you vote for should not be determined by whether you are religious or secular, Jewish or Arab. Whether you live in the big city or an outlying community.

“The only thing that matters is whether you want Israel to be a liberal democracy or a semi-fascist state. Do you want a government that is honest or one that is crooked? Do you want your money to go to draft dodgers or those who serve? To yet another illegal outpost or to recovery efforts?”

Fink’s message echoes that of the protest movement he helped lead for nearly four years. But it also captures the challenge facing his party: whether the solidarity forged in the streets can survive the compromises of coalition politics. Already, the Democrats’ willingness to govern alongside an Arab party has exposed divisions among their potential partners. Still, their growing momentum and strong polling numbers suggest they may be on the road to fulfilling another promise of the protests – unseating Netanyahu and rewriting the government’s agenda.

The post They led protests against Netanyahu. Can they turn outrage into political power? appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — A decision to bar the “stumbling stone” memorials to victims of the Nazis has touched a nerve in one small German town, and beyond.

At issue is a motion – passed Sept. 25 by the city council of Heidenau in the former East Germany – to stop installation of such memorials in local sidewalks, calling them disrespectful, and to use the town’s North Cemetery instead.

Set into the ground, the small, engraved brass “Stolpersteine,” or stumbling stones, are meant to make pedestrians stop and think about the fate of former residents. There are currently some 116,000 such stones laid in 1,860 municipalities across Europe, mostly in Germany, according to the project’s website.

A curious aspect of the Stolpersteine is that they are opposed by both Germany’s right wing, which view them as detracting from national pride, and by a vocal minority of Jews who feel they don’t do enough to uplift the memory of victims.

The effort to block the memorial stones in Heidenau was sponsored jointly by the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The town’s current mayor, Conny Oertel, is independent.

The city council’s decision comes as the AfD gains support in German elections nationwide. The party’s support for banning the project in Heidenau has sparked concern about potential moves to suppress official public commemoration of the Holocaust.

The AfD is known for challenging Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance in general. Bjoern Hoecke, who leads the party in the neighboring state of Thuringia, once even called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame” that detracted from German pride. In protest, an artist collective built a replica of the memorial outside his home.

On the other hand, some Jews, albeit a minority, object to the memorials because they say it’s disrespectful to place them where they can be walked on and covered with leaves or trash. The stones have also been targets of vandelism, they note.

But the Heidenau motion is not for the sake of victims; rather it’s a “transparent maneuver by the extremists of the AfD” to suppress Germany’s remembrance culture, said Charlotte Knobloch, who has successfully opposed the placement of Stolpersteine in her home city of Munich, in the state of Bavaria.

“Removing places of remembrance from the cityscape, as has now happened in Heidenau, is absolutely the wrong approach,” said Knobloch, a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, who heads the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria.

In a statement issued to the press Friday, Knobloch added that she was “appalled” that the CDU “would lend itself to supporting” the move. “The democratic center should and must find its way back to itself here and find a better solution.”

The joint opposition to the project by the AfD, the mainstream CDU and a local activist group creates a dilemma for Stolpersteine opponents like Knobloch who also abhor the AfD.

Heidenau, in the state of Saxony, is not the first town to act against the project. The city of Munich in Bavaria voted as early as 2004 not to allow the installation of the stones in public spaces, siding with Knobloch. In the city of Pulheim, in North Rhine-Westphalia, the project was blocked in 2011, but eventually the municipality reversed course and allowed the first installations to take place in 2022.

Heidenau is home to 17,000 people. Though the wartime local Jewish population was small, there are five such stones in the town already. An application for 12 more had been submitted by the Alternative Cultural and Educational Center (Akubiz), including for Fritz Goldstein and his wife Martha, who were expelled to Poland in 1938 and survived the war.

Arguing against the stones, the Heidenau motion noted that many citizens, relatives of victims, and activists actually disapprove of this form of commemoration.

Negative reactions to the decision in Heidenau were swift, both from proponents and detractors of the memorial concept itself.

In an email statement, the New York-based March of the Living educational organization called on the town of Heidenau “to reverse its decision and on Germany’s leaders and citizens to oppose every effort to hide this history.”

The city council decision “raises a deeply troubling question: Are political interests being allowed to push the memory of Nazi victims out of public life?” the statement read in part.

Like Knobloch, Munich resident Gabriella Meros doesn’t like the stumbling stones. “They are simply not a dignified way to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust,” said Meros, daughter of a Holocaust survivor and chair of the association Respect and Remember Europe.

She promotes placement of plaques on buildings instead.

But the political move in Heidenau by the CDU and AfD is “outrageous, because they’re exploiting this argument for their own purposes.”

The real problem is, she said, that the AfD “wants to abolish remembrance” itself.

In its platform, the AfD says it aims to promote “positive, identity-establishing aspects of German history.” Critics say that in practice, this could mean reducing funding for educational trips to Holocaust sites and for the memorial sites themselves.

The Stolpersteine project, initiated in 1992 by Cologne-based artist Gunter Demnig, sets engraved memorials into sidewalks in front of buildings where deported victims of the Nazi dictatorship once lived.

Usually, family members from around the world nominate sites and pay a nominal fee for materials. For many, the stumbling stones are a substitute for a grave, for ancestors whose place of death is unknown.

Israel’s Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor wrote on X

that he was “ashamed” of Heidenau’s decision, noting that members of his own family who were forced to flee the Nazis were commemorated by the stones in Berlin.

“Every person has a name. A world. A story. It is precisely this memory that is being erased here. Whoever erases the victims from the past erases the past itself.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post German city bans stumbling stone memorials to Nazi victims appeared first on The Forward.