Uncategorized
A new portrait collection showcases 90 Holocaust survivors who lived long and full lives
(JTA) — Werner Reich had his opening line ready when he sat down for B.A. Van Sise to take his portrait.
“Before I could say anything, he said, ‘Everybody comes to me and they want me to talk about the Holocaust. What am I supposed to say? I went to Auschwitz. It was lousy,’” Van Sise said, recalling that Reich’s comment felt like a joke, not a lament.
But instead of dwelling on the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp, the two men spoke about magic, a refuge for Reich as a Jewish teenager trying to survive. The resulting portrait shows a man in his 90s wearing retro glasses, a cloud of smoke floating a few inches above his open palm, in a picture vibrating with life and with enchantment.
Van Sise’s portrait of Reich is the first in “Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust,” his new portrait collection of 90 Holocaust survivors. The accompanying text acknowledges Reich’s experience at Auschwitz, but it focuses more on Reich’s life after the war and his long career in magic — striking a balance that Van Sise says is core to his project.
“This is not something that people are inclined to talk about because it’s not always bombastic. It’s not the part that you sell movie tickets to,” Van Sise said. “You can make, and people have, a hundred movies about Jewish people being imprisoned, tortured, and enslaved. Why doesn’t anybody talk about them thriving afterwards?”
Holocaust survivor and hiking enthusiast Sam Silberberg poses for “Invited to Life”. (Courtesy of B.A. Van Sise / Design by Grace Yagel)
Van Sise is far from the first photographer to capture the faces of survivors in the decades following the end of the Second World War. Famed portrait photographers Martin Schoeller and Mark Seliger, both known for their iconic celebrity portraiture — Schoeller for his uniform, stylized close-ups and Seliger as a magazine photographer who also recently photographed Jerry Seinfeld in a fashion shoot — have also set their cameras in front of Holocaust survivors. Countless other photographers have done the same. But what Van Sise says is sometimes missing from survivor photography is a focus on the postwar lives, many of them joyous, that the subjects have experienced over the last 70-plus years.
“I suspect that one person might see these folks and see victims,” Van Sise said. “And I see them as survivors.”
Holocaust survivor and Park East Synagogue Rabbi Arthur Schneier poses for “Invited to Life”. (Courtesy of B.A. Van Sise / Design by Grace Yagel)
“Invited to Life” was inspired by a 2015 photo assignment Van Sise took on for the Village Voice. Motivated by the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee rhetoric of then-candidate for president Donald Trump, he realized that a particularly cohesive cohort of refugees to come to the United States had arrived more than 75 years ago, at the end of the Second World War, and a photographic retrospective on their lives in America could be a valuable project. He reached out to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York to be put in touch with a dozen survivors for the story. He ended up taking more than 30 portraits. When the alternative newsweekly ceased publication in 2017 (it was revived in 2021) before he could publish the photos, the museum invited Van Sise to turn the portraits into a solo exhibition, in what became the museum’s first-ever public art installation.
Then the pandemic arrived, and like many photographers whose everyday work required travel, Van Sise was out of a job.
“It had never been a marquee project for me,” said Van Sise, who is Jewish but has no familial connection to the Holocaust. “I kept coming back and thinking about them, and about the fact that these people had been through the worst there ever was, the worst that ever has been, the worst there ever might even be.”
Holocaust survivor and painter Fred Terna poses for “Invited to Life”. (Courtesy of B.A. Van Sise / Design by Grace Yagel)
Van Sise spent the better part of 2020 driving around the United States, getting COVID swabs every three days so he could safely photograph 140 elderly survivors, 90 of whom ended up in the book. (He was insistent with his publisher that the final number of portraits in the book be a multiple of 18, the Jewish numerical symbol for “life”.)
The photos are all in black and white, but beyond that, they are as diverse as Sise’s subjects. Some incorporate backgrounds, some are solo portraits; some are serious, some are silly; some include children, grandchildren, husbands, wives, props; some are in profile, and some are shot straight on. The subjects are Nobel Prize-winning chemists and homemakers; pilots and psychologists; haberdashers and teachers; famed rabbis and partisans-turned-conmen.
All of them, Sise says, were photographed with a sense of generosity.
“A person who wants to be critical of me — which is fair — might say that I’m overly charitable,” Van Sise says of his own work, acknowledging that no photographer can avoid bias completely while behind the camera. (It didn’t help that many of the survivors he photographed were eager to feed him cookies, as he frequently recalls.)
In the nearly three years since Van Sise began photographing the subjects of his book, the reality of working with more than 100 elderly people set in. Several of the survivors, including Holocaust educator René Slotkin, Budapest-born legal secretary Kathy Griesz and Reich died before they got the chance to hold a copy of the book in their hands, much to Van Sise’s dismay.
“As a writer, you carry them with you,” he said. “So for me, there were a few where I got pretty rattled.”
Holocaust survivor and educator René Slotkin poses for “Invited to Life”. (Courtesy of B.A. Van Sise / Design by Grace Yagel)
The photographs reflect acknowledgment by all involved that the survivors in the pictures are all nearing the ends of their lives. Many of his subjects chose to include their children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren in their portraits, and the photographer was intentional in closing the book with a portrait of Irving Roth, a longtime Holocaust educator, with his 3-year-old great-granddaughter Addie sitting on his lap. In the text, Roth remarks on the origins of his Hebrew name, Shmuel Meir, which came from his great-grandfather and imagines what life will be like for Addie when she turns 103, and what she will remember of him.
Roth passed away in February 2021 at age 91.
“Those stories don’t end in 1945,” Van Sise said. “These people have lived for, now, 77 years since and have done plenty with that time. And that’s worth exploring, because that’s the part they have control over.”
Reflecting on different styles of Holocaust survivor portraiture at a discussion at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the original home of Van Sise’s portraits, German photographer Martin Schoeller remarked on his own preference for images of older faces.
Holocaust survivor and educator Irving Roth and great-granddaughter Addie pose together for “Invited to Life”. (Courtesy of B.A. Van Sise / Design by Grace Yagel)
“They have more life in them. You see the wrinkles and you feel that there’s more to discover in the face, in an old face. So they almost feel like they’re telling the story of the suffering of the Holocaust more visually, because they’re older faces,” Schoeller said.
“But then, it’s been 75 years since the end of the war,” he added. “So these people have lived 75 years; so to say, ‘Now I see the horror in this old man’s face’ feels a little bit — I don’t know if that’s really true. I leave it up to the people looking at the pictures.”
—
The post A new portrait collection showcases 90 Holocaust survivors who lived long and full lives appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Israel’s Top Diplomat Calls on Jews to Make Aliyah Amid Global Surge in Antisemitic Violence
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar attends a press conference with the Danish Foreign Minister (not pictured) in Jerusalem, Sept. 7, 2025. Photo: Ritzau Scanpix/Ida Marie Odgaard/via REUTERS
Amid a global surge in antisemitic violence, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar has urged Jews living abroad to make aliyah to Israel, warning that diaspora communities are increasingly vulnerable to hatred and hostility as foreign governments fail to protect them.
“Over the past year, we have concentrated efforts in the fight against the rising antisemitism around the world,” Saar said Sunday during a Hanukkah candle-lighting event in Rishon LeZion, a city in central Israel.
“We demanded that foreign governments take real steps against the new antisemitism. Few did so. Most allowed an unrestrained surge of overt antisemitism in the public sphere,” the top Israeli diplomat continued.
Saar’s latest remarks come in the wake of a deadly attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach last Sunday, which left 15 dead and at least 40 injured.
Earlier this year, a string of deadly terrorist attacks also targeted Jewish communities, including the Yom Kippur assault in Manchester that killed two Jewish men, the firebombing of a march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado – which killed one and injured 13 – and the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, DC.
“Jews have the right to live in safety everywhere. Today, Jews are being hunted across the world. Today I call on Jews in England, Jews in France, Jews in Australia, Jews in Canada, Jews in Belgium: come to the Land of Israel! Come home!” Saar said during his speech.
“We are waiting for you here with open arms. With love. In the true home of the Jewish people. Why raise your children in this atmosphere?” the Israeli diplomat continued. “Come with your families to the land of our forefathers, to the State of Israel, where the Jews taught the entire world what Jewish self-defense means. The time has come.”
Jewish communities around the world, especially in Europe, have faced a troubling surge in antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel sentiment since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Jewish leaders have consistently called on authorities to take swift action against the rising wave of targeted attacks and anti-Jewish hate crimes, ranging from the vandalism of murals and businesses to violent physical assaults, that their communities continue to face.
In the United Kingdom, more than half of British Jews — 51 percent — believe they have no long-term future in the country or elsewhere in Europe, according to a survey conducted by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, released Monday.
Amid this climate of rising hostility, almost half of British Jews (45 percent) report feeling unwelcome in the UK, while a majority (61 percent) have considered leaving the country in the past two years, citing the recent surge in antisemitism as the main reason.
The newly released report also found that 59 percent of British Jews try to avoid displaying visible signs of their Jewish identity out of fear of antisemitic attacks, while 96 percent believe that Jews in Britain are less safe now than they were before the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Fewer than one in ten British Jews believe authorities are doing enough to tackle antisemitism, with only 14 percent feeling that the police are adequately protecting them.
In France, the local Jewish community has also faced a growing climate of hostility and antisemitic violence, which has even extended into politics, sparking national debates and drawing condemnation from leaders and civil society groups.
In one of the latest controversies, Bernard Bazinet, the mayor of Augignac in the southwestern Dordogne region, was expelled from the French Socialist Party earlier this month after posting antisemitic comments online about Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest.
“France is too Jewish to boycott [Eurovision]!” Bazinet wrote in a post on Facebook.
French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez strongly condemned Bazinet’s comments, warning that he could face sanctions ranging from suspension to outright dismissal.
However, the rising wave of antisemitic attacks and hatred has spread beyond Western countries, reaching nations across the Eastern Mediterranean and other regions worldwide.
On Sunday, a group of Jews in Istanbul were attacked by pro-Palestinian protesters while on their way to light the eighth and final Hanukkah candle at the Neve Shalom synagogue.
According to widely circulated social media videos, the attackers approached the group while shouting, “These Zionists should leave this country,” waving Palestinian flags as they tried to get closer.
In a separate incident over the weekend, an Israeli man was attacked outside the hotel where he was staying in Limassol, Cyprus, after assailants reportedly heard him speaking Hebrew on the phone.
According to the victim’s father, his son was talking on the phone when a man approached him, asked for a cigarette, and then brutally assaulted him.
The victim was rushed to a local hospital and then flown to Israel on Sunday for emergency eye surgery after the attack, but doctors were unable to save his vision.
“My son, a young Israeli, was violently attacked at the entrance to the hotel where he was staying in Cyprus. Not on the street, not in a bar. At the entrance to the hotel — a place that is supposed to be safe and secure,” the victim’s father wrote in a post on Facebook. “He was brutally beaten, injured in the head and face, and evacuated for medical treatment.”
Uncategorized
Northwestern University’s Doha Campus a ‘Pipeline’ for Qatari Elites, New Report Finds
Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani speaks on the first day of the 23rd edition of the annual Doha Forum, in Doha, Qatar, Dec. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
The children of the Qatari aristocracy are vastly overrepresented at the Northwestern University campus in Qatar (NU-Q), a fact that, according to a new report, undermines the school’s mission to foster academic excellence by acting in practice as a “pipeline” for the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class.
The Middle East Forum (MEF), a think tank whose mission is to protect Western values and promote US interests in the Middle East, published its findings on NU-Q in a damning new report. MEF found that 19 percent of NU-Q graduates carry the surnames of “either the Al-Thani family or other elite Qatari families.” Additionally, graduates from the House of Thani, the country’s royal family, are overrepresented in NU-Q by a factor of five despite being only 2 percent of the population.
“Northwestern’s Qatar (NU-Q) campus has become a de facto elite access pipeline, admitting members of Qatar’s most powerful royal and ruling families at rates that bear no resemblance to the country’s demographic reality,” says the report, titled “How the Qatari Royals and Elite Conquered Northwestern University’s Qatar Campus in Doha.”
“Rather than functioning as an open academic institution, NU-Q operates as a selective training ground for the same families who finance and control the campus, effectively blurring the line between a US university and a state-run patronage system,” the report continues. “What emerges is not merely an educational partnership, but a closed-loop system of influence production which a US university’s foreign campus helps cultivate the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class, with direct implications for US policy, national security, and foreign influence.”
The report goes on to say that NU-Q uses its immense wealth, which includes a whopping $700 million in funding from Qatar, to influence the Evanston campus in Illinois, Northwestern’s flagship institution. “Endowed chairs, faculty exchanges, and governance links” reportedly purchase opinions which are palatable to the Qatari elite instead of investments in new NU-Q campus facilities and programs.
“The financial flows raise concerns about whether the Doha campus is a facade and whether the funding is in effect underwriting access and institutional influence rather than solely supporting the overseas campus,” the report continues. “The pattern at NU-Q mirrors the dynamic uncovered by the US Department of Justice in the 2019 Varsity Blues Case, where federal prosecutors exposed how a small group of privileged families exploited side-doors into elite universities through fraudulent athletic recruiting and exam manipulation. While the tactics differ, the structural similarity is clear: insiders repeatedly securing access that ordinary applicants could never obtain.”
MEF’s report has deep roots in debates over the Middle East and the ambiguities inherent in how countries conduct their international affairs.
Until the collapse of the British Empire in the years following the conclusion of World War II, Qatar functioned as a pillar and beneficiary of Great Britain’s regional order in the Middle East, having agreed to be one of many Persian Gulf protectorates which blocked Ottoman expansion and protected Great Britain’s sea route to its imperial holdings in India. The US opened diplomatic relations with the oil-rich kingdom in 1971 after it achieved independence from Great Britain, and the two states continue to enjoy what the US State Department describes as a “strategic partnership” for fostering economic growth, counterterrorism, cultural exchange, and defense and security cooperation.
The US designated Qatar as a major non-NATO ally in 2022, and President Donald Trump earlier this year committed, via executive order, to defend it if attacked.
However, Qatar has also been a patron of Hamas for years, hosting the Palestinian terrorist group’s political bureau in Doha since 2012.
During the same period, the Middle Eastern monarchy has invested tens of billions of dollars in the US. MEF released a separate report in May exposing the extent of Qatar’s far-reaching financial entanglements within American institutions, shedding light on what experts described as a coordinated effort to influence US policy making and public opinion in Doha’s favor. The findings showed that Qatar has attempted to expand its soft power in the US by spending $33.4 billion on business and real estate projects, over $6 billion on universities, and $72 million on American lobbyists since 2012.
This effort has focused heavily on higher education.
A recent report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), for example, found that Qatar has funneled roughly $20 billion into American schools and universities over five decades as part of a coordinated, 100-year project to embed Muslim Brotherhood ideologies in the US.
The 200-page report, unveiled in Washington, DC to members of Congress, chronicled a 50-year effort by Brotherhood-linked groups to embed themselves in American academia, civil society, and government agencies, exposing what ISGAP called the Brotherhood’s “civilization jihad” strategy, while maintaining an agenda fundamentally at odds with liberal democratic values.
In June, ISGAP released a separate report titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood,” a 132-page document which described dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown University’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its Qatari benefactors — who have given it over $1 billion over the past decade — the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.
“The Qatari regime targets Georgetown due to its unrivaled access to current and future leaders. Over two decades, that investment has paid off — embedding Muslim Brotherhood scholars and narratives deep within the American academic and political culture,” Dr. Charles Asher Small, executive director of ISGAP, said in a statement on the report. “This masterful use of soft power is not only about Georgetown. It is how authoritarian regimes are buying access, narrative control, and ideological legitimacy — and too many universities are willing sellers.”
According to the report, the trouble began with Washington, DC-based Georgetown’s decision to establish a campus on Qatari soil in 2005, located in the Doha Metropolitan Area. The campus has “become a feeder school for the Qatari bureaucracy,” the report said, enabling a government that has disappeared dissidents, imprisoned sexual minorities without due process, and facilitated the spread of radical jihadist ideologies.
In the US, meanwhile, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding “minimize the threat of Islamist extremism” while priming students to be amenable to the claims of the anti-Zionist movement, according to ISGAP. The ideological force behind this pedagogy is the Muslim Brotherhood, to which the Qatari government has supplied logistic and financial support.
Trump signed an executive order last month directing his administration to determine whether to designate certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
The order did not mention Qatar, but experts have flagged Doha’s support for a wide range of Islamist groups.
“From the Taliban to Hamas to violent Muslim Brotherhood offshoots to Somalia’s Al-Shabab, Qatar allows the groups it hosts to access the global financial system and launder money,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Michael Rubin wrote in September. “Qatar has long been part of [a] war on the West, even as it tries to escape accountability for its actions. Moral clarity matters.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
Uncategorized
Pennsylvania principal to be fired over antisemitic voicemail: ‘They control the banks’
A Pennsylvania elementary school principal is facing termination by his school district after he accidentally recorded himself making antisemitic remarks in a voicemail to a Jewish parent.
Philip Leddy, the principal of the Lower Gwynedd Elementary School in Montgomery County, confirmed to the Wissahickon School District that he had made the antisemitic remarks heard on the voicemail message Friday morning after he believed he had disconnected the call, according to an email sent to the district’s parents.
In the recording, Leddy made a reference to “Jew camp,” and told another staff member at the school that the parent has “Jew money” and claimed that “they control the banks,” according to the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. Later, when asked whether the parent was a lawyer, Leddy responded, “the odds are probably good.”
“What is most concerning is not only the language itself, but the mindset it reflects,” the federation wrote in a statement. “The comments rely on well-known antisemitic stereotypes that reduce a parent to caricature and signal hostility rather than respect. For a family entrusting their child to a school community, hearing this kind of language, particularly from a principal, is profoundly unsettling.”
Leddy was hired as the principal for the Lower Gwynedd Elementary School in 2023 after previously serving as committee chair of the district’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee, according to a since-deleted profile for him on the school’s website.
In an email to the Wissahickon School District, Superintendent Mwenyewe Dawan wrote that the district’s administrative team was recommending immediate termination of Leddy, pending an “informal private hearing on Monday morning.”
The school district did not immediately respond to a request for an update on the hearing from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Monday morning.
Dawan wrote that Leddy had been placed on administrative leave, and that another staff member heard on the call was also placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.
“The fact that any employees entrusted with the care and well-being of students could make, or passively tolerate, such remarks raise concerns that extend beyond the conduct of a single individual,” wrote Dawan. “This incident underscores concerns for broader, systemic issues related to antisemitism that must be examined and addressed.”
The Jewish parent, who requested anonymity, told Action News 6ABC that Leddy had initially called him in response to an email about an incident involving his daughter.
“I couldn’t believe it, like I was seeing Jew this, Jew that, and I was thinking, ‘This can’t be the principal leaving a voicemail,’” the parent told Action News 6ABC.
Rabbi Kevin Lefkowitz, the leader of Tiferet Bet Israel, a Conservative congregation in Montgomery County, told Action News 6ABC that Leddy’s rhetoric had “boiled my blood.”
“He’s in charge of keeping our kids safe. For it to come out of his mouth so carelessly, so easily, it boiled my blood,” Lefkowitz said.
The incident comes one month after the House Education and Workforce Committee launched an investigation into the School District of Philadelphia for allegedly promoting a hostile environment for Jewish K-12 students.
In 2024, Pennsylvania saw 465 antisemitic incidents, marking a 18% rise from 2023, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual antisemitism audit.
“No one promoting antisemitic rhetoric should be leading and teaching our children,” said Andrew Goretsky, the senior regional director of ADL Philadelphia, in a post on Facebook. “We are urging them to fully investigate the situation, take the appropriate systemic action, and meet with Jewish families to begin the process of rebuilding trust.”
In her email to the district community, Dawan added that the school had already partnered with the ADL to provide trainings on antisemitism and bias response to the district’s administration in November and December, and that the trainings would be provided to the rest of its teachers and staff as planned.
‘While this incident is clearly deeply damaging, upsetting, and concerning, it is important to remember that our staff as a whole are deeply caring, respectful, and sensitive,” wrote Dawan. “I do not believe the actions and words of this principal reflect the views of our staff. One person’s hateful actions should not negatively impact the way our community views the rest of our staff.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Pennsylvania principal to be fired over antisemitic voicemail: ‘They control the banks’ appeared first on The Forward.