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‘Club 2600’ is Brooklyn’s hottest party — for Holocaust survivors
(New York Jewish Week) — The music is blasting at a banquet hall in Midwood, Brooklyn — everything from “Hava Nagila” to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” Pink, purple and turquoise balloons float above the large tables that each fit a dozen guests.
It’s just past noon on Tuesday, and waiters weave through the room to dole out lunch: golden loaves of challah and flaky knishes, steaming soup, a colorful array of pickled vegetables and roast chicken. Several guests are up and dancing; a few couples sway together in the center of the room, while a group of buoyant women make their way to the front, holding hands as they swing together to the music. Dozens of other partygoers are deep in conversation with each other while some sit by themselves, listening to the music.
The gathering is not in celebration of a bar mitzvah, a wedding or a just-born baby. Rather, the party is in honor of everyone in the room: This is a gathering for Holocaust survivors who live in Brooklyn. Nearly everyone here, almost 200 people in total, is a survivor. The youngest of the bunch in their late 70s, the oldest over 100.
“Everybody says hello to me — that’s what I love about it,” a survivor named Clara told the New York Jewish Week, adding that, every time she hears the voice of a social worker calling to invite her to the monthly party, “I can feel goosebumps.” She doesn’t stick around to answer any more questions — the music is on and she’s off to dance again.
Guests wear their favorite clothes and jewelry and often get their hair and makeup done for the party. (Julia Gergely)
Called “Club 2600” — homage to the party’s previous location at a senior center on 2600 Ocean Avenue — this festive gathering, which began nearly 20 years ago. is thrown every month by the Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island, a social services organization and community center in Southern Brooklyn. Since 2018, the party has taken place at Merkaz HaSimcha, a kosher banquet hall.
“I’m very happy when they have these meetings and I always try to come,” said Ruth Mermelstein, a 95-year-old survivor who was liberated from Auschwitz when she was 16 and who has now lived in Flatbush for more than 70 years. “I enjoy meeting a lot of people here.”
Ruth Mermelstein pulls up her sleeve to reveal the tattoo numbered on her body during her time in Auschwitz. On her wrist, she wears a watch that holds a picture of her and her husband, Ernest, who passed away 15 years ago. (Julia Gergely)
In addition to the guests of honor, about a dozen of JCCGCI’s social workers, three of whom speak Russian like many of the survivors, drift around the room. They chat and kibbitz with the survivors, as well as check in with them about any assistance they may need in their lives, from making doctor’s appointments to help with household repairs to aiding holiday preparations.
“If you listen in a little bit, they’ll be arguing about who sits next to who and who gets served first — there’s a certain level of reverting back to high school drama,” said Aliza Kelman, the director of client services for Holocaust survivors at the JCCGCI, who was the very first social worker for the program in 2012. “But they are so sweet, every one of them.”
“They have built so much — their jobs, their families, their legacy,” she added. “Every one of them has such a story to share. Everyone is a fascinating individual.”
Social outlets like this are just one of the many services that JCCGCI, one of the largest social services agencies for Holocaust survivors in the city, provides for Brooklyn’s survivor population. They do so with a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (aka the Claims Conference) — which last year was $57 million, according to Hudi Falik, the director of Holocaust survivor support systems programs and services. The JCCGCI is a vital resource in Brooklyn, where more than 70% of New York’s 14,700 Holocaust survivors currently live, according to a demographic report released this week from the Claims Conference.
By far the organization’s biggest budget line is for home care assistance, Falik said; this includes evaluating a client’s independence and needs and staffing full or part-time caretakers. They also provide transportation, hot meal delivery and Medicaid advocacy.
Even then, the organization would like to be able to do more — despite the dwindling population of Holocaust survivors, JCCGI receives some five to 10 client referrals weekly, said Kelman, with a waitlist of around 275 people that last year took 11 months to clear. To be able to provide everyone with the complete care they require would cost another $10 million, she added.
“Some other organizations triage the waitlist based on their age. I can tell you — if you look around this room, you won’t know how old anyone is,” Kelman said. “We have one man who still goes to work at the OBGYN department at Maimonides Hospital. You would never know he is over 100. Then we have a 79-year-old who has no other family and a disabled child that they’re responsible for. There’s no right answer.”
Kelman added that when she started her job 12 years ago, the JCCGCI worked with approximately 400 survivors. Today, the organization serves some 3,000 survivors.
Despite a decrease in the total number of living survivors, the Claims Conference demographic report attributes the increase in need to the aging of the population — the average age of Holocaust survivors in New York City is now 86. In many cases, as survivors age and see an increase in disability, they either need assistance for the first time or require more assistance than previous years.
“The data we have amassed not only tells us how many and where survivors are, it clearly indicates that most survivors are at a period of life where their need for care and services is growing,” Gideon Taylor, the president of the Claims Conference, said. In 2023 the organization distributed more than $118 million to agencies in New York that provide services to Holocaust survivors. “Now is the time to double down on our attention on this waning population. Now is when they need us the most.”
The JCC’s monthly party provides an opportunity for survivors to connect with each other in an easy, low-stakes, low-commitment environment. (Julia Gergely)
The JCC’s monthly party provides an opportunity for survivors — whether they are perfectly lucid and independent or require full-time care — to connect with each other in an easy, low-stakes, low-commitment environment. For most of the attendees, the JCCGCI arranges transport, either picking them up in a mini bus (many live in Flatbush, Midwood, Coney Island or Borough Park) or arranging for a car service.
Judith Weiss said she started coming to the Club 2600 parties four years ago, when her husband died. “He was sick for a while, so I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t know anyone. I only started to go places since he passed away,” she said.
Now, the parties are the main way she stays involved with the JCCGCI. Every month, they pick her up at her home in Flatbush, drive her to the party, and drive her home again afterwards. “I go to see people,” Weiss, 87, said. “I go more [now] than all the years before put together.”
Despite the participants’ advanced ages, new connections can always be made. At one party a few months ago, Weiss was waiting to get on the bus home when she heard another woman, Katy Lowy, speaking Hungarian, the language of her childhood. Weiss heard the women mention a particular brick factory-turned-ghetto in Debrecen, Hungary, where many local Jews were rounded up to be taken to concentration camps.
“I said, ‘You were there? I was there,’” Weiss recalls saying — and it turns out that she and Lowy had last seen each other when Weiss was 7 years old and Lowy was 10. Both remember the harrowing, six-day journey they took via cattle cars in June 1944 — Weiss was eventually taken to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and Lowy to Mauthausen.
“So many years later, I’d never met anyone who was at that particular place at that particular time,” Weiss told the New York Jewish Week. “It’s strange. I felt myself back there, 7 years old.”
A bus waits outside to transport the guests to and from their homes. (Julia Gergely)
Still, despite harrowing experiences the survivors endured during the Holocaust, the vibe at the catering hall is a markedly carefree one. Near the end of the two-hour party, one of the social workers, Zehava Birman Wallace, steps to the microphone and wishes hearty “happy birthday” to everyone in the room who has celebrated one since the last gathering, doling out roses as gifts.
One man, tired out from the dancing, gets up to leave. “I live nearby,” he said, explaining he can walk home and has no need for a bus.
A huge smile breaks out across his face. “That was so great,” he tells Kelman, placing a hat on his head and walking to the front door. “I feel so happy. Thank you so much.”
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The post ‘Club 2600’ is Brooklyn’s hottest party — for Holocaust survivors appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Iran Rejects US Nuclear Proposal, Says ‘Counteroffer’ Coming as Talks Stall Over Uranium Enrichment, Sanctions
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, May 20, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran has denounced the latest nuclear proposal from the United States as “unprofessional and untechnical,” reaffirming the country’s right to enrich uranium and announcing plans to present a counteroffer in the coming days.
“After receiving the American proposal regarding the Iranian nuclear program, we are now preparing a counteroffer,” Ali Shamkhnai, political adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in an interview on Wednesday.
Shamkhani criticized the White House draft proposal as “not well thought out,” emphasizing its alleged failure to address sanction relief — a key demand for Tehran under any deal with Washington.
“There is no mention whatsoever of lifting sanctions in the latest American proposal, even though the issue of sanctions is a fundamental matter for Iran,” Shamkhnai said.
The Iranian official also warned that Tehran will not allow the US to dismantle its “peaceful nuclear program” or force uranium enrichment down to zero.
“Iran will never relinquish its natural rights,” Shamkhani said.
Washington’s draft proposal for a new nuclear deal was delivered by Omani officials — who have been mediating negotiations between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff — during last month’s talks in Rome.
On Wednesday, Khamenei dismissed such an offer, saying it “contradicts our nation’s belief in self-reliance” and runs counter to Iran’s key objectives.
“The proposal that the Americans have presented is 100 percent against our interests,” the Iranian leader said during a televised speech.
“The rude and arrogant leaders of America repeatedly demand that we should not have a nuclear program. Who are you to decide whether Iran should have enrichment?” Khamenei continued.
After five rounds of talks, diplomatic efforts have yet to yield results as both adversaries clash over Iran’s demand to maintain its domestic uranium enrichment program — a condition the White House has firmly rejected.
In April, Tehran and Washington held their first official nuclear negotiation since the US withdrew from a now-defunct 2015 nuclear deal that had imposed temporary limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanction relief.
Since taking office, US President Donald Trump has sought to curtail Tehran’s potential to develop a nuclear weapon that could spark a regional arms race and pose a threat to Israel.
Meanwhile, Iran seeks to have Western sanctions on its oil-dependent economy lifted, while maintaining its nuclear enrichment program — which the country insists is solely for civilian purposes.
As part of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran — which aims to cut the country’s crude exports to zero and prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon — Washington has been targeting Tehran’s oil industry with mounting sanctions.
Amid the ongoing diplomatic deadlock, Israel has declared it will never allow the Islamist regime to acquire nuclear weapons, as the country views Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat.
However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to uphold any agreement that prevents Tehran from enriching uranium.
“But in any case, Israel maintains the right to defend itself from a regime that is threatening to annihilate it,” Netanyahu said in a press conference last month, following reports that Jerusalem could strike Iranian nuclear sites if ongoing negotiations between Washington and Tehran fail.
The post Iran Rejects US Nuclear Proposal, Says ‘Counteroffer’ Coming as Talks Stall Over Uranium Enrichment, Sanctions first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Day After Colorado Attack, Founder of Anti-Israel Group Chides Activists Who Are Insufficiently ‘Pro-Resistance’
Nerdeen Kiswani, founder of WithinOurLifetime (WOL), leading a pro-Hamas demonstration in New York City on Aug. 14, 2024. Photo: Michael Nigro via Reuters Connect
Nerdeen Kiswani, the founder of the radical anti-Israel organization Within Our Lifetime, chastised those within the pro-Palestinian movement who only support “resistance” in the abstract but not in practice following Sunday’s antisemitic attack in Boulder, Colorado.
“A lot of people who call themselves anti-Zionist or pro-resistance don’t actually understand what resistance is,” Kiswani posted on X/Twitter on Monday. “They support it in theory, but when it shows up in practice, they hesitate, distance themselves, or shift the conversation entirely.”
She continued, “And it makes it even harder for those of us who are principled to take public stances. We’re already marginalized, already painted as extreme or dangerous and that isolation only deepens when others in the movement won’t stand firm when it counts.”
Kiswani’s comments came the day after a man threw Molotov cocktails at a Boulder gathering where participants were rallying in support of the Israeli hostages who remain in captivity in Gaza — which resulted in 15 injuries, including some critically, in what US authorities called a targeted terrorist attack. Her tweets also came less than two weeks after a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, while they were leaving an at the Capital Jewish Museum hosted by the American Jewish Committee. In both attacks, the perpetrator yelled “Free Palestine” as they targeted innocent civilians, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
After Kiswani’s social media posts sparked some backlash among pro-Israel users on X, she provided limited pushback on the idea that it was an expression of support for the prior day’s attack in Colorado.
“Zionists are freaking out in the QTs about this, insisting it’s about Colorado,” she wrote. “Newsflash: the world doesn’t revolve around you. Resistance hasn’t stopped in Gaza, look at what just happened in Jabalia [where three IDF soldiers were killed] for instance. The perpetual victimhood is getting old.”
However, Kiswani did not say her comment had no connection to the attack in Colorado, and she did not say that she opposed the firebombing.
Kiswani and her group, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), have been at the forefront of anti-Israel and pro-Hamas activism since Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists killed 1,200 people and abducted 251 hostages during their invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, a massacre that started the war in Gaza.
On Oct. 8, 2023, one day after the biggest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, WOL organized a protest to celebrate the prior day’s attack, which it described as an effort to “defend the heroic Palestinian resistance.” Kiswani notably refused to condemn Hamas and the Oct. 7 massacre following the atrocities.
Then, in Apil 2024, Kiswani refused to condemn the chant “Death to America” and organized a mass demonstration to block the “arteries of capitalism” by staging a blockade of commercial shipping ports across the world in protest of Western support for the Jewish state. That same month, she was banned from Columbia University’s campus in New York City after leading chants calling for an “intifada,” or violent uprising.
The following month, Kiswani led a demonstration in Brooklyn, New York in which she lambasted the local police department, claimed then-US President Joe Biden will soon die, and called for the destruction of Israel.
That proceeded the activist saying she does not want Zionists “anywhere” in the world while speaking in defense of a person who called for “Zionists” to leave a crowded subway car in New York City.
WOL, which planned a protest last year to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, was also behind demonstrations at the Nova Music Festival exhibit, which commemorated the more than 300 civilians slaughtered by Hamas while at a music festival.
The latter protest prompted widespread condemnation, including from Biden and even progressive members of the US Congress who are outspoken against Israel.
US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), for example, posted on social media that the “callousness, dehumanization, and targeting of Jews on display at last night’s protest outside the Nova Festival exhibit was atrocious antisemitism – plain and simple.”
The post Day After Colorado Attack, Founder of Anti-Israel Group Chides Activists Who Are Insufficiently ‘Pro-Resistance’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel’s Defense Exports Hit Record $15 Billion in 2024 Despite European Pressure, Calls for Arms Embargo
Israeli troops on the ground in Gaza. Photo: IDF via Reuters
Israel reached a new all-time high in defense exports in 2024, nearing $15 billion — the fourth consecutive year of record-breaking sales — despite mounting international criticism over the war in Gaza and growing pressure from European countries to suspend arms deals.
In a press release on Wednesday, Israel’s Defense Ministry announced that defense exports reached over $14.7 billion last year — a 13 percent increase from 2023 — with more than half of the deals valued at over $100 million.
According to the ministry, Israel’s military exports have more than doubled over the past five years, highlighting the industry’s rapid expansion and growing global demand.
“This tremendous achievement is a direct result of the successes of the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] and defense industries against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, the Ayatollah regime in Iran, and in additional arenas where we operate against Israel’s enemies,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a statement.
“The world sees Israeli strength and seeks to be a partner in it. We will continue strengthening the IDF and the Israeli economy through security innovation to ensure clear superiority against any threat – anywhere and anytime,” Katz continued.
In 2024, over half of the Jewish state’s defense contracts were with European countries — up from 35 percent the previous year — as many in the region have increased their defense spending following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Despite increasing pressure and widespread anti-Israel sentiment among European governments amid the current conflict in Gaza, this latest data seems to contradict recent calls by European leaders to impose an arms embargo on the Jewish state over its defensive campaign in Gaza against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
On Wednesday, Germany reversed its earlier threat to halt arms deliveries to Israel, reaffirming its commitment to continue cooperation and maintain defense contracts with Jerusalem.
“Germany will continue to support the State of Israel, including with arms deliveries,” German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul told lawmakers in parliament.
Last week, Berlin warned it would take unspecified measures against Israel if it continued its military campaign in Gaza, citing concerns that exported weapons were being used in violation of humanitarian law.
“Our full support for the right to exist and the security of the State of Israel must not be instrumentalized for the conflict and the warfare currently being waged in the Gaza Strip,” Wadephul said in a statement.
Germany would be “examining whether what is happening in the Gaza Strip is compatible with international humanitarian law,” he continued. “Further arms deliveries will be authorized based on the outcome of that review.”
Spain and Ireland are among the countries in Europe that have threatened or taken steps to limit arms deals with Israel, while others such as France have threatened unspecified harsh measures against the Jewish state.
According to the Israeli defense ministry’s report, since the outbreak of war on Oct. 7, 2023, after the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, the operational successes and proven battlefield performance of Israeli systems have fueled strong international demand for Israel’s defense technology.
Last year, the export of missiles, rockets, and air defense systems reached a new high, making up 48 percent of the total deal volume — up from 36 percent in 2023.
Similarly, satellite and space systems exports surged, accounting for 8 percent of total deals in 2024 — quadrupling their share from 2 percent in 2023.
While Europe dominated Israel’s defense export market in 2024, significant portions also went to other regions. Asia and the Pacific made up 23 percent of total sales — slightly lower than in previous years, when the region approached 30 percent.
Exports to Abraham Accords countries fell to 12 percent, down from 23 percent in 2022, while North America remained stable at around 9 percent.
The post Israel’s Defense Exports Hit Record $15 Billion in 2024 Despite European Pressure, Calls for Arms Embargo first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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