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As European nations celebrate their past, a US Holocaust envoy reminds them of its darker corners
WASHINGTON (JTA) — At a time when some European nations are seeking to revise their Holocaust histories to emphasize victimhood, a senior Biden administration official says the United States should keep reminding them of the dark corners of their past.
Ellen Germain, the State Department’s special envoy on Holocaust issues, said she has spent a lot of time recently engaging with leaders of countries who are seeking to venerate heroes who resisted Soviet oppression. The problem is that many of those figures also worked with the Nazis to persecute Jews.
Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this week, Germain framed her job as ensuring that countries take the totality of that history into account. She has repeatedly made the case for removing or at least modifying plaques, statues and other memorials to people who collaborated with the Nazis.
“I understand why they’re being glorified as national heroes after World War II, but you can’t just erase what they did during the war,” Germain told JTA.
Germain’s office was established in 1999, and she has served in the role since August 2021. The envoy’s role is to persuade countries to give financial restitution to families of Jews who were murdered and exiled during the Holocaust. In the late 1990s, many countries were still coming to terms with their long-overlooked obligations toward Jewish communities that had been persecuted and wiped out. Stuart Eizenstat, the U.S. deputy treasury secretary at the time, pressed the Clinton administration to create the position to show U.S. commitment to seeking restitution.
Since 2017, the office has written reports on how countries are implementing the Terezin Declaration, a 2009 agreement between 47 countries to pay restitution to survivors. The office also works closely with the World Jewish Restitution Organization to push countries to pass laws facilitating restitution. And it works with the State Department’s antisemitism monitor to track antisemitism and campaign against it, to promote education about the Holocaust, to preserve Holocaust-era archives and to organize Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations.
Germain, a career diplomat who has served in multiple posts in Europe, the Middle East and the United Nations, said most countries now have advanced restitution mechanisms, lessening the need for U.S. pressure. She added that some countries, including Poland and Croatia, still need to pass legislation to that effect.
Her focus more recently has been on pressing countries to more openly and honestly confront their roles in the Holocaust, a job complicated by states’ natural tendency to create heroic national myths. She would like to see monuments to perpetrators of atrocities removed, or at least modified.
More broadly, a resurgence of the far right has worried Jewish groups and the Biden administration. Poland has passed laws criminalizing accusations that some Poles collaborated with the Nazis, and others restricting restitution. Hungary’s approach to its role in the Holocaust has long been a matter of debate between the government and Jewish community. Far-right parties have made gains in recent elections in Austria, Germany and France, among other countries. Neo-Nazi marches also still make headlines across the continent.
“You get a certain amount of what we call revisionism or rehabilitation, like rehabilitation or glorification of people who are considered national heroes because they fought the communists,” she said. “They fought the Soviets after World War II, but they also participated in acts of Nazi genocide. During World War Two, they collaborated — sometimes they were directly involved in deportations or mass killings. There are figures like that in Lithuania, Ukraine, in Croatia, you’ve got street names named after some of them.”
Germain named Juozas Krikštaponis and Jonas Noreika in Lithuania; Roman Shukhevych in Ukraine; and Miklos Horthy in Hungary as examples of people memorialized for their anti-Soviet campaigns who also collaborated with the Nazis.
Germain has been having conversations about the resurgence of such memorialization in her travels. How receptive her interlocutors are, she said, depends on the country. Late last year, she traveled to Lithuania and Hungary, and in Germany she addressed a course on the Holocaust for diplomatic and security professionals from across Europe. In January, she accompanied Douglas Emhoff, the Jewish second gentleman, on his heritage tour of Poland and Germany.
Lithuanian officials were receptive to her efforts to get them to grapple with their Holocaust history, she said.
“I was really, really pleasantly surprised and impressed by how open everyone was in Lithuania to the discussion of this,” she said. “Everyone from the government to academics to journalists. “I did a panel event there that live-streamed and had 20,000 viewers, and the questions and comments just from the people in the audience about this — they were just much more open to saying, ‘Yeah, you know, we realized this is a problem and we need to figure out how to deal with it.’”
The Hungarians, by contrast, appeared wary. Hungarian officials have sought to equate the Holocaust with Soviet-era repression and revive the reputations of figures like Horthy. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has unsettled many in the West with his hard-right turn and rhetoric that, at times, appears to cross over into racism and antisemitism.
“Hungary is a more difficult question,” she said. ”I didn’t find the same level of openness. But I did find a willingness to at least talk to me about it.”
She did not mention the opposite democratic trajectories of both countries: Lithuania, along with Estonia and Latvia, have eagerly turned toward Europe and the United States in recent years, particularly as the Russian threat looms directly across the border. Hungary, by contrast, has become more insular and hyper-nationalist.
Germain said she takes a nuanced approach to making the case for confronting the past. Some of the people she wants to see made accountable for their crimes were genuinely at the forefront of their countries’ struggles against the Soviets.
“They don’t have to be written out of history, and in fact, they shouldn’t be because people need to know what they did, both good and bad,” she said. “But the point is, make the history more nuanced and teach the citizens of these countries what the full story is, and if there are statues and memorials to some of these guys… either take it down or add some context to it.”
She cited “a plaque to Jonas Noreika on the National Library in Vilnius, in Lithuania, that just says that he was a great man.” Noreika was a high-ranking police officer who is believed to have personally overseen the murder of Jews. He is venerated in Lithuania as a hero for fighting the Soviet Union alongside the Germans.
Germain said understands the impulse to seek heroes to forge a national identity after the Soviets sought to negate the histories of the countries they dominated — and especially in the face of a resurgent imperialist Russia that has invaded Ukraine.
“I think it took a while for them to start sorting out their history,” she said. “And so, sometimes, there’s only in the last five or 10 years been real attention paid to the fact that some of these figures might not be as 100% heroic as they were initially thought to be.”
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The post As European nations celebrate their past, a US Holocaust envoy reminds them of its darker corners appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Manhattan Central Synagogue attacker faces federal hate crime charges
(JTA) — The man accused of disrupting Shabbat services at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue last week now faces federal hate crimes charges in addition to the state ones leveled against him immediately after the attack.
“These charges serve as notice that the Department of Justice will intervene to protect the public in the face of antisemitic and racially motivated attacks,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement on Tuesday.
Larry Montes, 46, of the Bronx, New York, was charged with two counts of committing hate crimes, each of which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, and one count of damage to religious property resulting in bodily injury, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
During the attack last Friday at the Reform synagogue in Manhattan, Montes, who was sitting near the front of the sanctuary, allegedly stood up nine minutes into the service and began shouting, “You know who the f–ck I am.”
Montes then approached the stage of the synagogue and knocked over two ceremonial silver candle sticks, causing them to be damaged, according to the complaint filed by an FBI agent investigating the case.
As the synagogue’s head of security attempted to remove Montes from the sanctuary, he then said “F–ck you people” and “I don’t f–ck with you people” before punching a 63-year-old congregant in the face and knocking her to the ground.
While Montes was handcuffed and arrested in the lobby of the synagogue, he then allegedly told a security guard “F–ck you [n-word]” and headbutted him near his left eye socket.
During his subsequent interview with NYPD officers following his arrest, he allegedly told officers, “F–ck the Jews. … It’s racial” and “I will never affiliate with no filthy f–cking synagogues, either here or in fucking Israel.” Montes allegedly told officers that he had felt disrespected at the service, so he “got up, start[ed] some sh–t, [and] smacked somebody around.”
When asked by NYPD officers why he felt disrespected at the service, Montes allegedly replied, “it’s all a racial thing” and that it was “all religious motivated.” Montes also stated during his post-arrest interview that he identified as Jewish, according to the complaint. Montes’ aunt previously told the New York Post that he was “mentally traumatized because of his desire to belong to that religion [Judaism].”
Montes has been in custody since his arrest immediately after Friday’s attack. He was arraigned that same night and is due in Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday.
The federal charges come as the attack has sparked widespread condemnation from New York leaders, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and spurred a Jewish security watchdog group to call on the NYPD to place more officers in hotspots for potential hate crimes.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Manhattan Central Synagogue attacker faces federal hate crime charges appeared first on The Forward.
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He’s campaigning to regulate Texas oil and gas. Why is he linking his Jewish opponent to the Bolshevik Revolution?
A Texas race that would normally focus on oil wells, pipelines and energy policy has spilled into accusations of antisemitism.
In a fundraising email last month, Bo French, the Republican nominee for the powerful Texas Railroad Commission, circulated an AI-generated image of Jon Rosenthal, his Jewish Democratic opponent, smiling inside the room where Russia’s Romanov royal family was killed after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Rosenthal has “much in common with the Marxist revolutionaries who brutally executed the Romanov family,” the email reads. “My opponent has spent his time in office mocking Christianity, the Virgin Birth, and Christian Communion, while voting against religious liberty and for the spread of Islam.”
The text “Radical Rosenthal” with a blood-red outline overlays the black-and-white image.
“I do see it as antisemitic,” Rosenthal, the only Jewish member of the Texas statehouse, told the Forward. “Look at the history of the Bolsheviks and how the Jews were scapegoated. To invoke that here and now is disturbing.”
French did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
The message echoes the antisemitic conspiracy theory “Judeo-Bolshevism” that Jews created or controlled communism to undermine Western society. It became central to the Nazi propaganda used as a justification for violence against Jews. The fundraising email was first reported by Texas Monthly magazine.
“This is something that Jews have faced in the arena forever,” said Arthur Pronin, the Jewish president of the Meyerland Area Democrats Club in Houston. “This sort of thing that ‘They’re not one of us. They’re communists. They don’t have allegiance to the values of this country.’ It has a very specific resonance.”
Rosenthal, 63, was raised as a Reform Jew in an interfaith family, with a Jewish father and Christian mother. When Rosenthal was 14, he spent a year in Israel attending school in Hebrew and learning to speak the language while his father taught at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He later became a mechanical engineer and worked in the oil and gas industry for 30 years before entering politics in 2017. In 2018, Rosenthal was elected to the state legislature, taking his oath of office on a Torah he received as a bar mitzvah gift.
In an interview with the Forward last year, Rosenthal said that he has at times faced antisemitic comments from members in the state legislature, including stereotypical remarks about Jews and money.
“Antisemitism is alive and well in Texas,” Rosenthal told the Forward.
Last year, he led opposition to a bill requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom, which was signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in May 2025.
To underscore what he considered hypocrisy of self-identified Christian nationalists who supported the legislation, Rosenthal introduced an amendment to require the display of both the Jewish and Roman Catholic versions of the Ten Commandments, a measure that failed.
Rosenthal ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination for Railroad Commissioner. He is seeking to become the first Democrat in more than three decades to win a seat on the three-member commission, created in 1891, that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry. (Despite its name, the Railroad Commission stopped regulating railroads in 2005.) Members are elected to serve six-year terms.
Rosenthal, who previously flipped his district in northwest Houston from red to blue, is making a case that his victory would “rebuke the politics of hate.”
A recent poll of 1,200 likely voters, with a reported margin of error of plus or minus 2.8%, showed French with a slim three-point lead over Rosenthal. Rosenthal could benefit from the competitive U.S. Senate race, as other polls show Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton locked in a dead heat.
French’s past antisemitism accusations
It’s not the first time French, who previously served as a GOP leader in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has been accused of antisemitism. Last June, he posted a social media poll asking “Who is a bigger threat to America?” and gave two options: “Jews” or “Muslims.”
After backlash, French deleted the poll and apologized, writing that “Some people clearly misunderstood the intent.” Ignoring calls to resign from high-ranking Texas Republicans, he announced in November 2025 that he was stepping down to run for railroad commissioner.
He narrowly won the Republican primary in May against the incumbent railroad commissioner, Jim Wright, with 50.5% of the vote.
Rather than focus solely on traditional regulatory issues in his campaign, French has infused culture war themes. His campaign website says he will end “the influence of radical Islam and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) in Texas oil” and strengthen the railroad commission’s “partnership with our allies like Israel.” In March, French called on the U.S. to deport 100 million people and for Texas Republicans to more openly condemn Islam.
“To be fair, he seems to be a pretty equal opportunity hater,” Rosenthal told the Forward. “He says antisemitic stuff, but he’s also Islamophobic and anti-immigrant.”
The state’s top Republicans — Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows — had all endorsed Wright in the primary. Now, all three are backing French.
Others won’t embrace French but see his victory as inevitable. Fred Zeidman, a Houston-based Jewish Republican donor who supported French’s rival in the primary, said the controversial campaign talking points are unrelated to the commission’s work on regulating gas and oil.
“I mean, I’m dead set against all that, and that’s why I worked against him,” said Zeidman, who serves as chairman of the board of Petroflow Energy, an independent oil and gas production and consulting firm. “Would I vote for him? Probably not. But he’s going to win. He might be effective at what he’s doing.”
The GOP support for French alarms Jewish Texans like Pronin, who said the candidate’s social media poll alone should have disqualified him.
The July fundraising email “should be roundly condemned by the Democratic Party, but also by Republicans,” Pronin said. “They’ve had a history of saying French is not acceptable. So why is it acceptable now?”
The post He’s campaigning to regulate Texas oil and gas. Why is he linking his Jewish opponent to the Bolshevik Revolution? appeared first on The Forward.
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‘An Israel run by undereducated Haredim risks being overrun by its enemies’
There is something surreal about Israel’s confrontation over Haredi education, which is rapidly coming to a boil. A dispute that has simmered for decades over whether ultra-Orthodox schools should be required to provide a basic secular education has become a test of something much larger: whether the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is still capable of governing in the interest of society when doing so threatens his own political survival.
At the center of the fight are the two major Haredi education networks, which educate most Haredi elementary-school children and receive full state funding in return for an obligation to teach the full core curriculum. For years, however, the state has largely failed to enforce that bargain, and the schools taught mainly religion.
The High Court in February demanded that the government explain why full funding continues despite failures to teach the required subjects. Still waiting for an answer, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara several days ago took the next logical step, declaring that continued funding will depend on schools actually teaching the core curriculum, employing qualified teachers, participating in national assessments and accepting meaningful state supervision.
The immediate fight is about schools and money, but there is a larger story.
The stakes are considerably larger than the argument over a few hours of mathematics or English. They concern whether Israel can remain the kind of modern state it has spent three-quarters of a century building.
Haredim already constitute almost a sixth of the population, their fertility rate remains around six and a half children per woman, and they account for more than a quarter of elementary-school pupils. On current demographic projections, their share of the population will continue rising dramatically for decades.
That might not in itself pose a national problem if the community were being equipped to participate fully in a sophisticated 21st-century economy. But among Haredi men especially, low employment, low earnings and weak proficiency in the basic skills demanded by the modern labor market remain profound problems.
A smaller proportion of highly productive workers would increasingly be asked to finance a larger population, sustain an advanced technological economy, support an expensive welfare state and pay for one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world.
At some point the math becomes strategic. An Israel that becomes substantially poorer will find it harder to finance cutting-edge weapons, intelligence, research, universities and the other institutions on which its military superiority depends. An Israel run by undereducated Haredim risks being overrun by its enemies.
Clearly this cannot continue. But the Likud-led right has spent years avoiding decisions that might antagonize indispensable Haredi coalition partners. When the moderates were in power they had little stomach for this fight, preferring to kick the can down the road as they focused on a resolution with the Palestinians.
That left the attorney general, the courts and the civil service to enforce rules that elected politicians have proved unwilling to defend.
It is important to note that in Israel the attorney general is a very powerful civil servant. Indeed, curtailing this power has been at the center of Netanyahu’s attempted “judicial reforms.”
Baharav-Miara has effectively ruled that one cannot demand the full financial benefits of the state system while rejecting the obligations that accompany them.
For years Israel has managed to avoid confronting this contradiction by maintaining requirements on paper while tolerating a political system in which they were weakly supervised, inconsistently enforced or simply ignored.
The numbers suggest how hollow enforcement became. Research by the Israel Democracy Institute found that only a small fraction of Haredi boys’ schools failing to meet core-curriculum requirements actually suffered budget reductions. It was a failure to make the rules mean anything.
The political explanation is not difficult to discern. Haredi parties have become indispensable to governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who became Israel’s longest-serving prime minister by cementing this alliance. Thus their bargaining power has allowed questions of education, avoiding military service and ever-growing public subsidies to become matters of coalition arithmetic rather than coherent national policy.
Governments understood that enforcing requirements could provoke a confrontation with parties on which their parliamentary survival depended, while postponing enforcement carried almost no immediate political cost – until now. It is the demographic reality caused by the Haredi birthrate that is transforming the argument over mathematics and English into an argument about Israel’s future.
Judging by statements from Israel’s leading opposition politicians, a new Israeli government led by them would address the issue of a core curriculum and take significant steps to end the Haredi draft evasion.
Meanwhile, even if Netanyahu somehow wins, continuing the status quo will be hard, as the High Court and the Attorney-General are now forcing the issue. The rulings mean that schools must demonstrate that they are teaching the required curriculum, employ appropriately trained teachers, participate in assessment programs, cooperate with supervision and enforcement mechanisms and comply with reporting requirements.
This, of course, intersects with Israel’s larger and increasingly poisonous argument about the power of judges, legal advisers and civil servants. There is a legitimate democratic concern when unelected officials acquire enormous influence over public policy. Neither judges nor attorneys general should be treated as infallible guardians whose decisions are beyond criticism. But there is another danger, and Israel has spent years demonstrating it: elected politicians can become so dependent on organized political interests that they cease to perform some of the basic functions for which they were elected: to protect the country from great dangers. In this case the dangers are internal – and for all the regional wars of the past several years, the main coming conflict in Israel will be the one within.
The post ‘An Israel run by undereducated Haredim risks being overrun by its enemies’ appeared first on The Forward.
