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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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Trump Warns of More Strikes on Iran’s Kharg Island, Pressures Allies to Secure Oil Chokepoint
An LPG gas tanker at anchor as traffic is down in the Strait of Hormuz, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Shinas, Oman, March 11, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier/File Photo
US President Donald Trump threatened more strikes on Iran’s main oil export hub Kharg Island and said he was not ready for a deal with Tehran to end the war which has shut off the vital Strait of Hormuz and caused chaos in global energy markets.
With the US-Israeli war on Iran in its third week, Trump said US strikes had “totally demolished” much of the island and warned of more, telling NBC News on Saturday, “We may hit it a few more times just for fun.”
The comments marked a sharp escalation from Trump, who had previously said the US was targeting only military sites on Kharg, and dealt a blow to diplomatic efforts to end a war that has spread across the Middle East and killed more than 2,000 people, most in Iran and Lebanon.
Trump called on countries that have been impacted by the choking off of oil supplies through the Strait of Hormuz to join efforts to reopen shipping lanes. The Financial Times reported that European Union foreign ministers would discuss widening of the EU’s regional Aspides naval mission.
Washington has brushed aside attempts by Middle Eastern allies to open talks, three sources told Reuters, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Sunday they had fired more missiles at Israel and three US bases in the region.
Trump, who has made a series of varying demands, including a say in choosing Iran’s leader and an end to its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, told NBC News that Tehran appeared ready to make a deal to end the fighting but that “the terms aren’t good enough yet.”
In his interview with NBC, Trump raised the possibility that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei may have been killed, but Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said Khamenei was in full health and managing the situation.
WAR, ENERGY CRISIS LOOK SET TO PERSIST
As missile and drone exchanges continued on Sunday and shipping remained blocked, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said he expected the war to end within “the next few weeks,” bringing a swift rebound in supplies and lower prices.
But with global air transport heavily disrupted and no clear end in sight, Iran’s ability to choke off traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the conduit for a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas, has emerged with increasing urgency as a decisive threat to the global economy.
Although some Iranian vessels have continued to pass, the passage has been effectively closed for most of the world’s shipping since the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28 at the start of an intensive bombing campaign that has hit thousands of targets across the country.
Khamenei, who succeeded as supreme leader after his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day of the attacks, has said the Strait of Hormuz should remain closed.
The International Energy Agency said last week the closure of the narrow passage along Iran’s coast had triggered the largest disruption to global oil markets in history, and was expected to cut around 8% of global supplies in March.
Underlining the impact the war has had on energy infrastructure in the region, the global ship-refueling hub of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates was closed after barrages on Saturday but resumed oil-loading operations on Sunday, a Fujairah-based industry source said.
With crude oil prices above $100 a barrel and expected to rise further next week, the issue has hung over Trump’s Republican Party, which faces a major test at midterm elections in November.
Trump himself has dismissed worries about spiking gas prices for American consumers, saying they will fall back quickly. But he has called on China, France, Japan, South Korea, Britain and others to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz to ensure shipping can pass.
“The Countries of the World that receive Oil through the Hormuz Strait must take care of that passage, and we will help – A LOT!” Trump wrote in a social media post on Saturday. “The U.S. will also coordinate with those Countries so that everything goes quickly, smoothly, and well.”
The FT said EU foreign affairs ministers holding a regular meeting on Monday would discuss potentially widening the EU Aspides naval mission that protects shipping against Houthi attacks in the Red Sea to include the Strait of Hormuz.
France has been seeking to assemble a coalition to secure the strait once the security situation stabilizes, while Britain is discussing a range of options with allies to ensure the security of shipping, officials have said.
Araqchi told his French counterpart that countries must refrain from anything that could escalate the conflict. He also said Iran would respond to any attack on its energy facilities.
ISRAEL DENIES TALKS WITH LEBANON
Araqchi denied Iran was targeting civilian or residential areas in the Middle East and said it was ready to form a committee with its neighbors to investigate the responsibility for such strikes. Gulf countries have suffered damage to energy facilities and residential areas during the two-week war.
But as the standoff continued, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said it had fired more missile and drone barrages at targets in Israel and at US military bases in the region, where Saudi Arabia said it had intercepted 10 attacks.
Israel said its jets hit more targets in western Iran, including headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia forces in the city of Hamadan.
A source briefed on Israel’s military strategy told Reuters that Israel had begun targeting roadblocks and bridges it believed Revolutionary Guards commanders were using. Iranian security forces detained dozens of people accused of sharing information with Israel, Iranian media reported.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar rejected claims that Israel had told the United States it was running low on interceptors and dismissed a report that it could soon hold direct talks with Lebanon, where it has resumed its campaign against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement.
In Iran, at least 15 people were killed when an airstrike hit a refrigerator and heater factory in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, the semi-official Fars news agency said on Saturday. The Revolutionary Guards promised further retaliation for workers killed in Iran’s industrial areas.
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IDF Says Brother of Michigan Synagogue Attacker Was Hezbollah Commander
FBI agents work on the site after the Michigan State Police reported an active shooting incident at the Temple Israel Synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, US, March 12, 2026. Photo: Rebecca Cook via Reuters Connect
i24 News – The IDF said the brother of Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, who carried out last week’s attack on a Michigan synagogue, was a Hezbollah commander who managed weapons operations and was killed in an Israeli airstrike last week. The IDF added that the Hezbollah unit Ghazali served in had launched hundreds of rockets toward Israel.
Ghazali, 41, rammed a vehicle into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, on March 12. He later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound during a gunfight with police, the FBI said. The agency is investigating the incident as a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.
The FBI reported that Ghazali had large quantities of commercial-grade fireworks and several jugs of flammable liquid in his truck, which ignited during the attack. No children or staff at the synagogue and its preschool were injured. A security guard sustained injuries and was expected to recover, while police officers were treated for smoke inhalation.
Before the IDF published the confirmation of the “elimination” of the attacker’s brother, Dearborn Heights Mayor Mo Baydoun said the suspect had suffered “devastating and personal losses overseas.”
The mayor also stressed that “this is not an excuse” for the attack, adding that his actions “do not reflect our values as a city.”
Temple Israel Rabbi Jen Lader described the scene as “sheer terror” and emphasized the necessity of full-time armed security. “American Judaism is such these days that every synagogue is a target. Every synagogue is aware that we need to take precautions to keep our people safe,” she said, adding that the temple had prepared for similar incidents.
The IDF’s statement links the Michigan attack to broader Hezbollah operations and highlights the ongoing threat the group poses to Israel and Jewish communities abroad.
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After attacks, Jewish security watchdogs warn of ‘most elevated and complex threat environment’ in recent history
(JTA) — A string of recent synagogue attacks across North America and Europe has left security officials sounding the alarm bells.
“We are in the midst of the most elevated and complex threat environment the Jewish community and this country has seen in modern history,” said Kerry Sleeper, chief of threat management and information sharing for the Secure Community Network, a Jewish security organization.
Sleeper’s comment came during an SCN webinar on Friday, held in response to the previous day’s attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where an assailant rammed into the synagogue armed with rifles and smoke bombs.
Though the attack was successfully thwarted by existing security measures, Mitchell Silber, executive director of the Community Security Initiative, said in an interview that Jewish institutions may now need additional layers of protection.
“This might be a bit of a tipping point where we’ve gone to a new level, where really what’s required to secure a Jewish institution in the U.S. starts to look like almost a Europeanization of security,” Silber said.
That would include posting multiple armed guards outside entrances and requiring increased screening before entry, he said. Many European synagogues also require attendees to go through security screening at some distance from the building, rather than at their doors.
“Unfortunately that seems to be where we are right now — the Jewish community has to up its game in terms of the external security of its locations,” he said.
Currently, a shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security since Feb. 14 is halting the review of millions of dollars in security funding for nonprofits, constraining the ability of Jewish institutions and other vulnerable groups to upgrade their security infrastructure.
The Temple Israel attack came within two weeks of attacks in Austin, Texas, and at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Those other attacks were not on Jewish institutions, but Sleeper, a former FBI assistant director, said the “various motivations of the attackers appear to be affiliated with the war between the U.S., Israel and Iran.” He added that the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran, and President Donald Trump’s stated desire to facilitate a regime change, have “contributed to the extremely high threat environment.”
Meanwhile, things have escalated outside the United States. Three Toronto-area synagogues were hit with gunfire over the last couple of weeks, and a synagogue in Rotterdam was targeted by an arson attack early Friday morning, allegedly by a group that has also claimed credit for an explosion at a synagogue in Belgium.
The flurry of attacks has the entire Jewish world on edge going into Shabbat — and some watchdogs say things could soon get worse.
“It is not entirely shocking to those of us who’ve watched this space for a long time,” said Mike Jacobson, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who served in the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau. “I would think things would continue to ratchet up again, at least in the short term.”
He pointed to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ activation of sleeper cells — their agents lying in wait until called to action to commit an attack — across the West, as a danger to vulnerable targets, which includes Jewish communities.
Another source of danger, Jacobson said, comes from copycat attacks.
“There’s also this mix that makes it really hard to sort out in the initial stages, where you’ve got people, not only who may be directly tied to Iran, but people who are so-called ‘inspired’ by this,” Jacobson said. “Those are often really hard for law enforcement to get advance notice on.”
Not always does the threat come from direct orders from Iran, he said. “It’s often difficult to tell: Is this something that is directly tied to the organization, or is this something that is more by someone inspired [by the IRGC]?”
He added, “They are trying to inflict pain in as many directions as they can.”
As security organizations encourage increased caution and awareness of suspicious activity, they are also emphasizing that those measures shouldn’t come at the expense of gathering in communal Jewish spaces.
“We’re not going to let the terrorists take away our confidence or the ability to embrace our religion,” said Michael Masters, SCN’s national director, during the Zoom webinar.
Masters’ sentiment is also shared by congregational leaders like Rabbi Adam Roffman, of Congregation Shearith Israel in Dallas.
“Sure, security is something we think a lot about, and we’ve done our best to protect ourselves,” Roffman said. “And at the same time, the life of this community goes on.”
At Temple Israel, Shabbat services are being streamed from the nearby country club that served as a reunification center for families after the attack. The synagogue wrote on Facebook: “We’re so glad you’re joining us tonight as our community comes together to welcome this much needed Sabbath.”
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