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Eli Rosenbaum takes skills honed Nazi-hunting to investigating war crimes in Ukraine
WASHINGTON (JTA) –– During the 35 years Eli Rosenbaum spent hunting Nazis, he always looked up to his forebears in the profession. But it was only recently, as he ventured into Ukraine to track down Russian war criminals, that he felt a personal connection with the investigators who pursued Adolf Hitler’s henchmen in the years following World War II.
For the first time in his career, Rosenbaum was seeking evidence of crimes as soon as, or almost as soon as, they were committed.
“I’m accustomed to working on atrocity crimes when the conflict is over — World War II, Rwanda, Bosnia, Guatemala, et cetera,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. “But in this case, the atrocities are being committed every day.”
Rosenbaum said he has been working “if not 24/7, 20/7” since June, when Merrick Garland, the Jewish U.S. attorney-general, named him to lead the Justice Department’s War Crimes Accountability Team in Ukraine. Rosenbaum had previously spent the bulk of his career in the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which he directed from 1995 to 2010. The OSI tracked down and deported 70 Nazis hiding in the United States. In 2004, it expanded its purview to track down war criminals from other conflicts who had entered the United States.
Rosenbaum’s current team, he said in congressional testimony in September, “provides Ukrainian authorities with wide-ranging technical assistance, including operational assistance and advice regarding criminal prosecutions, evidence collection, forensics, and relevant legal analysis.”
Rosenbaum rattles off names and events in the evolution of war crimes prosecution in a way that sends a listener scrambling to a search engine. He’s been a war crimes geek since college, when he took a film course and a professor screened Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film, “Triumph of the Will.”
Rosenbaum told his parents about the movie. His father, Irving, a refugee from Nazi Germany who enlisted in the U.S. Army, had been tapped to interrogate Nazis and their enablers after the war because he spoke German.
“I mentioned to my dad that I was taking this course and we had just seen this film. And my father said, ‘Oh, Leni Riefenstahl. I questioned her after the war.’ I [said], ‘Oh, my God. Really?’”
Rosenbaum recalls his father responding, “Yeah, and I have the report on it. Might your professor want to see it?”
As a student at Harvard Law School, Rosenbaum interned in 1979 for the then-just-established OSI, where he spent the next three decades. Garland, in naming Rosenbaum, said that made him a natural fit for the Ukraine job, noting at the time Rosenbaum’s experience in coordinating among different U.S. government departments.
Describing his work to JTA, Rosenbaum repeatedly circled back to the pioneers of war crimes prosecution, among them, Aron Trainin, the Soviet Jewish scholar, and Robert Jackson, the U.S. Supreme Court justice who established the framework for prosecuting Nazis for the “crime of aggression” at the Nuremberg trials, a concept unknown until then.
The relevance of their theories persists, he said, because Russia is not a signatory to the agreement that established the International Criminal Court, making it difficult to prosecute Russians in that body. Instead, Ukraine wants to set up a special tribunal to try Russians, modeling it on the proceedings at Nuremberg.
“We look to Nuremberg routinely, it is the mother of all trials for international crimes,” Rosenbaum said. “It’s in many ways the origin of international criminal law.”
Rosenbaum feels the “crime of aggression” is particularly relevant in the Ukraine case because Russia’s invasion was unprovoked. He described how the “crime of aggression” became, with President Harry Truman’s blessing, part of the canon in international law enshrined in the principles framing the Nuremberg trial, and then in the United Nations charter.
Rosenbaum is awed by Jackson and his intellectual journey.
“There’s an amazing letter that he wrote to Harry Truman, which I just reread the other day, in the course of my Ukraine work, in which he explains to the president why … there’s no precedent for prosecuting aggression. In the old days, this was how nations behaved. They attacked one another and, under international law, they were considered to have equal standing,” Rosenbaum said. “So [Jackson] said that had to end, and he persuaded President Truman, and now we have that crime in international law.”
Rosenbaum says Ukraine proves Jackson’s prescience. He quoted Jackson’s opening statement at the Nuremberg trials: “What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust.”
Rosenbaum, like Jackson before him, is appealing to the U.S. government to expand its capacity to prosecute war crimes. In his congressional testimony, Rosenbaum described one area of frustration: Unlike crimes of genocide, war crimes must have a U.S. party (as perpetrator or victim) to be prosecutable in a U.S. court.
Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy and counselor for War Crimes Accountability at the US Department of Justice, testifies about the war in Ukraine during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “From Nuremberg to Ukraine: Accountability for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity,” Sept. 28, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
“This means that if a war criminal from the current conflict in Ukraine were, for example, to come to the United States today and were subsequently identified, our war crimes statute would not apply, thus potentially allowing that war criminal and others to walk the streets of our country without fear of prosecution,” Rosenbaum said in his congressional testimony.
Another parallel with World War II that has surprised Rosenbaum is that he is getting reports from survivors of Russian atrocities who are gathering evidence in real time. He mentioned two men he admires: Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, Slovak Jews who fled Auschwitz and were the first to describe, in a detailed report, the mechanics of the Nazi genocide to the outside world.
“I got to meet Rudolf Vrba, who was a witness for [the OSI] in our very first case that was going to trial — eventually it didn’t go to trial, the defendant gave up — but it was an Auschwitz case in Chicago, and Rudolf came out there,” Rosenbaum said. “It’s just amazing that we have his analogs in people who are gathering evidence, people are escaping from Russian captivity.”
Another pair of Nuremberg trials-era researchers that Rosenbaum names as relevant again are Budd and Stuart Schulberg, Jewish brothers who worked for the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA under legendary Hollywood director John Ford. The brothers tracked down films of atrocities that the Nazis themselves had produced, which the Schulbergs then compiled for presentation at the trials. (Budd Schulberg went on to be a celebrated novelist and screenwriter.)
Rosenbaum is a contributing expert to a just-released hour-long documentary on the brothers, titled “Filmmakers for the Prosecution.”
“The Schulberg brothers really pioneered something that’s extremely important in the history of law enforcement and accountability in courts, [which] is something we take for granted here in the 21st century, and that is the presentation of full-motion film [and] video evidence in courts of law,” he said.
Such evidence-gathering is happening today in Ukraine as well, Rosenbaum said.
“The Ukrainian authorities with which we work very closely have a website onto which the public or to which the public can upload their own videos,” he said. “And now that everybody who has a cell phone, has a video camera…so much evidence of the aftermath of atrocities and even the perpetration of atrocities has been captured via moving images.,”
He says he has been rattled at times by researching war crimes as they happen, especially during his visits to Ukraine.
“It was an unforgettably moving experience to meet our colleagues in the middle of a war in Ukraine,” he said. “One of the senior prosecutors was actually in his military fatigues, because he had taken off briefly from his unit for this meeting, and then he went right back.”
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5 important questions for Abdul El-Sayed
Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow victory in the Michigan Democratic primary means he’s going to have to work hard to persuade skeptical liberal Michigan voters.
I’m not from Michigan, but I am liberal. And I am skeptical.
I appreciate El-Sayed’s political skills and his relentless focus on the health and economic disparities that undermine the American dream for so many.
But while many Jewish Michiganders supported El-Sayed, his narrow victory over Rep. Haley Stevens has many other Michigan Democratic voters worried. It’s “ridiculous” that Democratic Jews wouldn’t vote for El-Sayed based on his positions on Israel, former Rep. Andy Levin told the Forward, but I’m not sure El-Sayed’s views on Israel are the main concern.
“If he wants to be senator of a state that has such a large Jewish population,” Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told JTA, “he must demonstrate an ability to stand with that community as we face the rise of antisemitism.”
Many of El-Sayed’s comments and actions during the primary cast that support into doubt. Here are the five questions I’d like to see Michiganders put to him:
You said, “Hurt people hurt people.” Do you also believe that enraged people hurt people?
After a man whose family members were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon attacked children at a West Bloomfield, Michigan synagogue, you said, “Hurt people hurt people.” You said you were explaining the act of terror, not excusing it. But we know too that incendiary rhetoric also foments violence. The Egyptian man who attacked Jews at a peaceful march in Boulder, Colorado, in June 2025 screamed anti-Israel political phrases and said he targeted the group because he believed they were “Zionists.” You have called Israel “evil” like Hamas, “bloodthirsty,” and you singled out AIPAC as uniquely nefarious and powerful among all influence groups in the country. Doesn’t such rhetoric endanger the lives of constituents you claim you want to protect? After extremists attempted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, you accused President Donald Trump of inciting them via tweet. Will you cool your own rhetoric?
Is there any circumstance you would vote to send military aid to Israel?
Oct. 7, 2023 was supposed to be an all-out war. Hamas along with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran and the Houthis discussed striking Israel in unison, and could have. In such a scenario, as in the October 1973 war, Israel would have faced many thousands of casualties if not an existential threat as it quickly exhausted its defensive shield. Now imagine you were in the Senate during such a scenario. Would you have voted to send help to an ally? You said you supported sending military aid to Ukraine when it faced invasion. Why not Israel in a similar scenario?
How would you work toward a two-state solution?
You told CNN that every definition of a Jewish state “ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.” You told The New Yorker that you support a two-state solution with equal rights and self-determination for Israeli Jews and Palestinians — which is a mainstream liberal Zionist position. So explain: What’s so illiberal about a Jewish-majority state you support? And do you believe in it enough to work toward one?
Is money really the only reason politicians and others support Israel?
You accused Israel’s supporters in Congress of being motivated solely by money. Is there really no other possible reason? Until Israel’s post-Oct. 7 destruction of Gaza, a majority of Americans and the vast majority of American Jews supported Israel. Couldn’t congressional support reflect their constituents’ support or their own religious or political beliefs? Could they believe in Jewish self-determination, especially post-Holocaust? Or is support for a Jewish state only a function of Jewish money (see #1)?
Which do you care about more, the Jewish vote, or Hasan Piker?
The Twitch streamer Hasan Piker said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel. He called a Jewish man a “bloodthirsty violent pig dog.” You defended your appearance with Piker by saying you needed to reach his three million followers. I get that: Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris helped tank their campaigns by refusing to engage young voters wherever they could. But you continued to campaign with Piker, and refused to disavow his extreme rhetoric, saying you wouldn’t be distracted by “cancel culture.” No one is asking you to cancel him. But why won’t you, at least, confront him on his rhetoric?
There is, as you and countless pundits have pointed out, a lot at stake in this election. Right now too many American Jews feel that one of those things is their own safety. Please answer these questions, Dr. El-Sayed.
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The post 5 important questions for Abdul El-Sayed appeared first on The Forward.
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Sing to me, Muse, of two Moshes and their Odysseys!
If you have read any one of the at least 60 English translations of Homer’s Odyssey or have seen Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey movie, then you are probably aware that Odysseus leads a more active life than the average person. As if living through the Trojan War weren’t hard enough, he blinds the cyclops Polyphemus and gets cursed by Poseidon with epically bad weather. His men are regularly transformed into pigs, picked off by Laestrygonian giants, and drowned in storms. The nymph Calypso detains him on her island for seven years and forces him to be her lover, (although whether this counts as a hardship depends on your perspective). The man of twists and turns has seen a lot. But he probably never predicted his story would be translated into Yiddish. Or Ladino.
At first, the parallel lives of the two men who translated The Odyssey into Yiddish and Ladino sound like the makings of a sphinx’s riddle, or a cryptic prophecy from the Oracle at Delphi: both men would be called “Moshe”; both would be alive at the beginning of the Holocaust; only one would survive to the end. Their names were Moshe Leyb Pitshenik (1895 – 1941) of the Odiseye (אָדיסייע) and Moshe Ha-Elion (1925-2022) of La Odisea.
The two men never met, yet there are unexpected rhymes between the lives of the Moshes, as if their lives were composed in the same meter. Not even a photo survives of scholar, writer and translator Moshe Leyb Pitshenik, but the Congress for Jewish Culture records that he was born in Zlotshev, eastern Galicia, now Ukraine. He spent his whole life traveling various pathways to erudition. As a child, he attended a religious elementary school and a small synagogue study hall before working as a bank employee in Vienna. The corporate life must not have been for Pitshenik, for he soon moved back to Poland and enrolled in a teachers’ seminary. He spent the rest of his life as a teacher and director at the local Jewish high school in Loyvitsh (Łowicz), writing ferociously on the side.
His poems, articles, short stories, and translations appeared in publications in Krakow, Warsaw, Łodz, and Vilna. Occasionally he would publish under pen names like “A Zaytiker,” an outsider, and “Nekhed Mohel,” which translates to “the grandson of the mohel (ritual circumciser),” but sounds suspiciously like something else.
In 1937, he pulled off his translational tour de force: the Odiseye, so literally epic an achievement that he won an award from the Yiddish PEN Club, the Yiddish branch of the PEN international network with epicenters in Warsaw, Vilnius and New York City. In the book’s introduction, fellow poet and translator Shloyme Shaynberg gave Pitshenik a hearty mazal tov for “anchoring one of Homer’s magical ships on our shores.”
But the time to celebrate ran short. Just two years after the Odiseye’s publication, the Nazis invaded Poland, confining Pitshenik and thousands of other Jews in the Łowicz ghetto. He had been working on an original epic poem in ancient Greek at the time of the invasion. Had he been allowed to finish it, the poem would have been the first original ancient Greek epic to be published since the 5th century C.E. In 1941, he was led into the Kazimierz Forest and murdered, leaving the poem unfinished.
Pitshenik was already 30 years old when Moshe Ha-Elion, his Sephardic counterpart, was born in Thessaloniki in 1925. Like Pitshenik, Ha-Elion studied at a Jewish primary school before receiving a secular education, discovering The Iliad and The Odyssey in ancient Greek during junior high. Ha-Elion was 16 when the Nazis invaded Thessaloniki, he recounts in his oral history for the United States Holocaust Museum. Two years later, in 1943, Ha-Elion and his mother, sister, and grandparents boarded freight wagons believing that they would be resettled in Poland. But these wagons were headed for Auschwitz. On arrival, every member of Ha-Elion’s immediate family was sent to the gas chambers but him.
For the next 21 months, Ha-Elion labored in Auschwitz. Teaching became his lifeline: He gave Greek lessons to a Christian prisoner with special privileges in exchange for food. In 1945, as the Allies approached, the Nazis transferred Ha-Elion and thousands of other prisoners to concentration camps in Austria. The hunger, Ha-Elion recalled later in an interview with El Mundo, was so unbearable that he ate train coal to survive.
After the liberation of the camps, Ha-Elion entered mandatory Palestine on a refugee ship. He fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and earned a B.A. and an M.A. in Humanities at the University of Tel Aviv. Like Pitshenik, he spent the rest of his life stirring up a tornado of writing across genres: He wrote a memoir of his time in the camps, a book of autobiographical poems in Ladino entitled En Los Kampos de la Muerte, or In the Death Camps, and even music to accompany one of these poems, La Djovenika al Lager (The Young Girl in the Lager), about the murder of his sister Nina.
But it was not until the end of his life that Ha-Elion undertook his translation of The Odyssey. When Ha-Elion was 90, he and the Israeli poet Avner Peretz published a Hebrew and Ladino dual translation of The Odyssey. He even managed to keep the poem in dactylic hexameter, a line-for-line Ladino mirror of the ancient Greek epic.
There are strange reflections of each Moshe in the Odysseys that they translated. For Pitshenik, the story seems omen-like: In the poem’s first line, Pitshenik translates the first adjective to describe Odysseus, polútropon, as the Yiddish word farvoglt, or “far from home.” This is unusual. English translators usually style Odysseus as “cunning” or a “man of twists and turns” or just downright “complicated.” It is as if Pitshenik read the signs of his own coming displacement in Odysseus before he read them in himself. But the translation’s strange prescience deepens just a few words later. Odysseus, Pitshenik says, participated in the “khurboynes” of holy Troy. At the time Pitshenik wrote this, a “khurbn” meant a total, cataclysmic destruction. It was reserved to describe horrors like the destruction of the first and second Temples and pogroms in Russia during World War I. But Pitshenik could not have known then that the word “Khurbn” would one day be used as a metonym for the approaching Holocaust. In Pitshenik’s translation, far-from-home Odysseus would survive a “khurbn” and find his way back. But Pitshenik himself never did.
For Ha-Elion, The Odyssey is like another form of autobiography. Like Odysseus, he was flung far from home by war, and spent the rest of his life trying to find his way home — or some place that felt like it. If translation is the process of rendering something foreign into something familiar, then perhaps translation is an attempt at homecoming in itself. Pitshenik and Ha-Elion never returned to their homes again after the War. But in the Odiseye and La Odisea, a piece of home survives. And it sounds like this:
Kontame, Muza, del ombre astuto…
O Muze! Bazing mir di maysim fun farvogltn gvir…
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns!
The post Sing to me, Muse, of two Moshes and their Odysseys! appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Uncommitted’ founder who pushed Democrats to vote against Biden over Gaza wins primary
(JTA) — Abbas Alawieh, a founder of the Uncommitted movement that pressured former President Joe Biden to change his Israel policy, is the projected winner of a Democratic primary for Michigan’s state Senate.
Alawieh rose to national prominence as a key architect of the campaign to withhold votes from Biden during Michigan’s presidential primary in 2024, a protest against the administration’s support for Israel as it inflicted mounting casualties in Gaza.
Alawieh defeated state representative Erin Byrnes in Tuesday’s primary to represent Michigan’s 2nd Senate District, a heavily Arab-American area covering Dearborn and parts of Detroit — and the epicenter of the Uncommitted effort. He won 59% of the vote to Byrnes’ 41% after more than 95% of votes were counted, according to the Associated Press, and is now almost certain to win the solid-blue state Senate seat in November.
Alawieh, who was born in Lebanon and grew up in Dearborn, acknowledged his victory without giving a speech on Wednesday. His staff announced that Alawieh’s maternal grandfather, Hajj Kassem Bazzi, died Tuesday night as they awaited the election results.
“Please keep Abbas’s family in your prayers as they take needed time together,” Alawieh’s team said in a statement. “Abbas will share his own thoughts on the race soon. For now, thank you to every community that made this win possible.”
Alawieh was backed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. He previously worked as a staffer for congressional Democrats, including Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, former Michigan Rep. Andy Levin and former Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, who lost a primary against Rep. Wesley Bell on Tuesday.
Alawieh, alongside Layla Elabed, co-founded the campaign urging Michigan Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in the 2024 Democratic presidential primary. The movement attracted a groundswell of support, including from some Jews, and won more than 100,000 votes, or 13% of the overall vote. Biden was beaten by the uncommitted vote in Dearborn, where Arab Americans make up more than half the population.
The Uncommitted movement also spread to other states, rallying more than 650,000 voters nationwide, and crystallized a lack of enthusiasm for Biden, who eventually stepped off the presidential ticket.
Alawieh served as one of the Uncommitted delegates at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, where he and other delegates unsuccessfully lobbied to place a Palestinian speaker on the agenda.
Alawieh did not make Israel and Gaza a central part of his campaign for the state Senate seat, instead focusing on supporting working families and investing in healthcare, housing, public transit and education. Still, he told the Michigan Advance in February that his role in the Uncommitted movement resonated with people in his district.
“For the people in real life — not on Twitter — it is clear to them that parties’ focus on prioritizing funding for war crimes was out of touch with what voters wanted,” he said. “The party was undoubtedly wrong about Gaza in 2024.”
While some Democrats blamed the Uncommitted campaign for contributing to President Donald Trump’s defeat of former Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost Michigan in her 2024 presidential run, Alawieh and Harris have mended fences enough to recently sit down for a meeting.
Harris “initiated” the meeting after months of phone calls, Alawieh said in July. “I urge VP Harris and all of our party’s leaders to side with peace-loving Americans against endless wars, in opposition to the Israeli military’s genocide in Gaza, and against the ethnic cleansing campaign in Lebanon.” Alawieh has said that he voted for Harris against Trump in the 2024 general election, while Elabed did not.
The centrality of Israel in Michigan’s primaries has spawned bitter divides between Jewish Democrats and others in the party concerning the threat of antisemitism. In one incident that shook Detroit-area Jews earlier this year, Temple Israel in the suburb of West Bloomfield was rammed by a truck laden with explosives. The man who drove the truck, a U.S. citizen from Lebanon, had recently lost several family members in an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon.
Alawieh responded to the attack by declaring his support for Jewish Michiganders.
“We must stand in unequivocal defense of the humanity and safety of our Jewish siblings and denounce this heinous act,” he said in a statement. “My family and I are praying for safety for communities across our state who are feeling afraid right now, and we are holding our Jewish community members extra close.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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