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Class assignment: Get to know your murdered Jewish neighbors
Last Sunday, my cousin, his cousin, their spouses and I arrived by rental car into a small city that until then had existed for us only as a blip on a genealogy chart: Saint-Quentin, in northeast France, where my cousins’ great-uncle Marcel had lived alongside, for a time, their grandfather.
We were here thanks to the determined efforts of a history teacher named Damien Bressolles, who since 2023 has been assigning his classes of high school seniors to construct written portraits of neighbors dragged out of France and deported to their deaths during the Holocaust.
Bressolles has done the math: Saint-Quentin had around 400 Jewish residents before the war, 87 of whom were deported. Only five returned from the camps.
The last Sunday of April is National Deportation Remembrance day in France, marked with marching band processions, flag rituals and hearty renditions of “La Marseillaise” and Resistance songs. This year in Saint-Quentin, the proceedings that began at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial by the River Somme included something new: a strong showing of Jews.
Bressolles and his students had given us the gift of getting to know our own families, and gathered us for a reunion. A couple dozen of us got to know one another over champagne at City Hall, where we toasted Bressoles, and then during a tour around town. We ended at the cemetery where Bressoles first spotted the deportation memorial that sparked his yearning to learn about his lost Jewish neighbors.
Many participants were descended from parents and grandparents who had left Saint-Quentin before it could betray them — but not everyone. Yvon Doukhan’s family survived in town because they were Algerian, and the Nazis didn’t recognize their name as Jewish. He showed us their house, just off the main square.
Alain-Sam Federowski’s father, a military officer, was protected, ironically, as a prisoner of war in Austria. His mother fled with other family members to the south of France and worked in melon fields. The Federowski family gravestone, which sits next to the deportation memorial pylon in the cemetery, is crammed with names, with a small blank spot on the lower left reserved for one more: Alain-Sam’s own.
Gilles Weiss is a magician and local son, who bought a house in Saint-Quentin to use as for storage midway between performances in Paris and Brussels, and discovered wood paneling with Hebrew carved in it. He determined that those panels had been salvaged from the deportation train cars, the desperate farewells of passengers to their loved ones.
Saint-Quentin is a quiet and dignified little city that, before Nazis controlled France, had been a hub for the textile industry, and therefore home to hundreds of Jews. They operated looms, sold merchandise, ran the shops that lined the Rue D’Isle, learned there and prayed there.
Now, just three Jewish families remain.
Restoring Jewish presence
Bressolles, who is in his mid-30s and hails from southern France, is not alone in asking young Europeans to confront the Holocaust person by person, story by reconstructed story, participating in bringing the dead to a shadow of life.
A family-led French project called Convoi 77 is working with teachers and students to identify and produce biographies of everyone on the last train from Drancy to Auschwitz in July 1944 — a train that carried some residents of Saint-Quentin.
But Bressolles’ project at Jean Bouin high school brings a distinctively local lens — one that Bressolles calls “historical, civic, and deeply human.” He and his students are restoring Jewish presence to a place from which it had been eradicated with intent. As elsewhere, Nazis destroyed the synagogue after the human purge.
Camille Sazerin, a 17-year-old participating in the school project, had no idea that Jews had been part of her community — never mind that they had so violently been torn away, sent to another country to be slaughtered. (Bressolles has brought some of his students to Auschwitz and Birkenau.) She became so committed to Bressoles’ project that she, alone among the students, spent the entire last day of spring break with us, after delivering a speech with a classmate at the ceremony by the Somme.
She hopes she’ll find a way to continue with the project after graduation, she told me. “I don’t want to finish,” she said.
Another student, Manon Jurczinsky, who is 18, wrote me in a testimonial translated into English about her research on the Goldblum family. “This project made me realize that these events could also happen in our own town and not only in large cities like Paris,” she said. “I also understood that wherever Jews went, they were hunted and persecuted, and most of them were deported to camps. Saint-Quentin showed us that this family had come here to ‘hide.’ They had jobs and a way to live, but it was not enough. Perhaps they could even have been part of our own family.”
Bressolles has focused the project on individual people, starting with the few dozen names on the cemetery memorial. He digs up an array of documents, such as birth, marriage and death records, then asks his students to read through and write up narratives based on the information.
Verifying and building on the student work, Bressolles puts together detailed dossiers on each of the people profiled, including historical context for their biographies. Eventually, he expects, their collective research will become a book.
Revived relatives
That effort has connected Bressolles to the descendant families, who get relief from the common burden of working alone to excavate the stories of murdered relatives. His files, gleaned from the French National Archives, go far deeper than merely facts and dates.
In reading the students’ historical portrait of Marcel Rapaport — my uncle’s uncle — my cousins discovered details they hadn’t known about his brother Max, who was their grandfather, and another brother, Jacob, who had also passed through Saint-Quentin.
Using naturalization records, the eight-page writeup details the intensive bureaucratic efforts that Marcel had to go through in order to bring his fiancée, Chaja Grynsztejn, over to France from Łódź, Poland — proof that the immigrant will have a source of financial support and not be a burden on the state, that they are not a criminal, and so on.
Saint-Quentin police records document pivotal moments during the Occupation — such as when Marcel had his Grammont 5555 radio confiscated in 1941 under a German law forbidding Jews from possessing receivers. Even the issuance and ongoing monitoring of the stars of David they were forced to wear as identification has been preserved in a local police file — as was the record of their arrest by local French authorities. Marcel and Chaja were on the first transport from Saint-Quentin to Auschwitz, and died there.
My cousin Gill Pratt rallied our little delegation here as part of his global project of repairing family ruptures. Starting during the COVID pandemic with questions to his mom during her isolation in a senior living facility, in the years since he has tracked down relatives in Poland and Brazil and brought us together to get to know one another.
They were lost to us, not because they were killed but because their parents chose to protect them from what they considered dangerous knowledge of their Jewish identity.
One of the relatives Gill found was Krzyzstof Goszcyzynska, who lives in Łódź, and had had no idea his grandfather was Jewish. That was Max Rapaport, who lived in Saint-Quentin for a time but at some point, for reasons unknown, moved back to Łódź, Europe’s textile manufacturing mothership.
“Talking to dead people is much easier. You can invent any characteristic for them,” reflected Gill about the unknowns. “It’s really wonderful because you see them; you discover documents about them and you make up a story about what they were like. They were always wonderful, never difficult.” (Gill, for the record, is always wonderful.)
A shared conversation
The corollary: talking to the living is hard, especially when all my years of high school and college French have collapsed in a rusty heap of disuse doused in Spanish I since learned.
Over lunch, I sat near Camille, the 17-year-old student, and did the thing that journalists do, while she, the dutiful and sharp student, answered my questions, with both of us switching back and forth between French and English to ensure we were understood.
How did the project make her feel? Sad. She described it as “very intense.”
Which families did she document? Apel and Goldblum.
What do you want to do professionally? Teach special ed, or work with survivors of domestic violence.
Then the student had questions for me.
How do Americans see the French? (A lesson on red states and blue states, and the Iraq War and Freedom Fries followed.) Are there things about French culture that I do not like? (The pop music, with an extremely specific exception for Serge Gainsbourg.)
Then, in politely coded English, she asked me: How do I approach political subjects, when so often people are not able to talk to one another about it? I suspected she was alluding to Israel and Gaza, and she confirmed that’s what she meant.
I responded in unexpectedly fluent, confident French. To translate: I do it by having conversations just like this one, where I speak to the person in front of me, respect their individual humanity, offer my perspective, and listen. I don’t take my views to social media. And, I said, more people need to do exactly this: talk, and listen. She nodded.
By the end of the day, dozens of us had joined a new WhatsApp group Bressolles created, called Communauté Juive Saint-Quentin. The hundreds who had lived here were gone, their stories and photos bare traces of their lives. The synagogue — which Weiss, the magician, designed, and where he has installed the carved wood from the deportation train — has to bring in people from nearby communities for the high holidays in order to have a minyan.
Nonetheless, from Paris and Lodz and California and New York here we briefly were as a collective presence in the city that had almost forgotten us, and revived in the name of the WhatsApp group: the Jewish community of Saint-Quentin.
The post Class assignment: Get to know your murdered Jewish neighbors appeared first on The Forward.
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This Israeli filmmaker harshly criticizes his country. Pro-Palestinian activists boycotted him anyway
(JTA) — Earlier this year Nadav Lapid, the award-winning Israeli dissident filmmaker, traveled with his son to Marseille for a screening of his latest film. He fell in love.
“This city reminded me of Tel Aviv, in a way, with the beach and everything,” he recounted Wednesday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — referring to the city he no longer lives in, having built a career with movies that take sharp aim at what he calls the “moral abyss” of Israeli society. When a Marseille film festival then invited him to serve on its jury for its upcoming installment in July, he readily accepted.
Then the boycotts started. Last month around a dozen pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to pull out of the upcoming Marseille International Film Festival over Lapid’s planned participation because, they said, he had accepted funding from the Israeli government to support his work. (Lapid’s movies, including his latest, have received funding from Israel’s film fund.) Following this, according to the accounts of both Lapid and the festival’s director, the festival had second thoughts about him serving on the jury.
While the festival offered him the opportunity to participate in a public master class instead, Lapid said, the protesters hadn’t relented: “It’s not enough for these people.”
Frustrated, the director earlier this week decided to pull out of the festival altogether. He’s not happy about it.
“To make people like myself the enemy when the actual state of things is so terrible, it’s insanity. It’s stupidity,” he told JTA. “For them, the highest triumph of the Palestinian cause is if they will cancel my master class in Marseille? I think it’s pathetic.”
Lapid has received a groundswell of support this week: Natalie Portman and hundreds of other film-industry figures have signed open letters criticizing the boycotts against him. While he’s uncomfortable with being in the spotlight for reasons unrelated to his films, Lapid said he’s pleased with this outcome.
“You could have composed an unbelievable cinematic program from only the filmmakers that texted me during the last hour,” he said.
Even so, the filmmaker says, he’s now unsure if he is still welcome in France as a dissident Israeli.
“I asked myself whether they would like me to stop doing movies, or to leave France,” he told JTA. Elsewhere, he’s described himself as “homeless.”
It’s the latest unspooling of painful dynamics around artistic boycotts of artists and institutions seen by the left as normalizing Israel. Last month another French cultural figure, the Jewish comics artist Joann Sfar (“The Rabbi’s Cat”), faced calls to boycott his presence at a literary festival, also in Marseille. In its justification, a pro-Palestinian artist collective, pushing an Instagram post reading “Zionists out of our city,” cited Sfar’s signing of an open letter last year that argued a Palestinian state should not be recognized unless Hamas could be disarmed and Gaza’s Israeli hostages freed.
In recent months, in addition to broader boycotts of the Israeli film and TV industry, several leading cultural critics of Israel — both Jewish and not — have been targeted as well. Those include bestselling author Sally Rooney for publishing a Hebrew-language translation of her novel with a left-wing Israeli publisher (some prominent activists accused her of exploiting a “loophole” in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel); Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart for speaking at Tel Aviv University; and Jewish author Joshua Leifer for associating with a “Zionist” rabbi at a book event.
In Lapid’s case, the group organizing against him, La Palestine Sauvera Le Cinéma, argued that “Nadav Lapid is not being targeted because of his Israeli nationality.”
Instead, the collective asserted, their objection was due to Lapid having accepted funding from Israel to complete his latest film, “Yes!”; the fact that the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as an Israeli co-production and competed for Israel’s highest film awards; and Lapid’s past participation in an Israeli film festival in Paris.
“The cultural boycott does not target artists because of their nationality or personal opinions,” the filmmakers wrote, in French, in a blog post. “What is at issue here is the reality of their integration into the institutional and political structures of the Israeli state.”
For Lapid, whose new movie follows Israeli musicians hired to write an openly genocidal post-Oct. 7 anthem for their nation, this argument doesn’t hold water. Lapid has long been critical of cultural boycotts, including BDS. Such measures, he told JTA, are a form of “dogmatic Stalinism” and don’t “move one piece of sand” in Israel.
“I became a test case of purity,” he mused.
Others agree. More than 350 entertainment industry figures signed the first of two open letters in the French newspaper Le Monde backing him, which was published Sunday.
“Inviting an artist to a festival does not make them a cultural ambassador,” the letter reads, in French, decrying a “campaign of intimidation” against Lapid while also noting what the signatories said was the “genocidal logic” of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
Among this letter’s signatories were Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, the Oscar-winning team behind “Anatomy of a Fall”; Harari is Jewish and a critic of Israel himself. Arnaud Desplechin, a French filmmaker who often features Jewish characters in his work, also signed. Other signers include acclaimed directors Claire Denis, Mati Diop, and Kleber Mendonça Filho; Romanian director Radu Jude, whose films have explored his country’s complicity in the Holocaust; and Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar.
A second open letter, published on Monday, calls the campaign against Lapid an “intellectual failure” and states, “No matter what crimes a state may commit, no one should be reduced to a passport.” It was signed by a smaller cohort of 10 names, including Portman; French-Jewish director Rebecca Zlotowski; and Oscar-winning filmmakers Jacques Audiard and Michel Hazanavicius.
Like Lapid, Portman — an Israeli-American actress who is one of the most prominent Jews in Hollywood — is a longtime critic of the Israeli government and opponent of the BDS movement.
Creative Community For Peace, a pro-Israel entertainment group, said Wednesday its members also oppose the boycott of Lapid, adding that Israel “funds, screens, and honors films that challenge its leaders, criticize its society, and engage openly with its most difficult debates.”
Unusually, the Marseille festival’s own director, Tsveta Dobreva, also signed one of the open letters in support of Lapid after she appeared to acquiesce to the earlier demands to pull him from the jury.
In an email, Dobreva told JTA her festival “fully supports Nadav Lapid,” saying that she had removed him from the jury out of concern he would be targeted at the event. She did not believe she had “agreed to the boycotters’ demands,” she said.
“Few festivals or cultural institutions in our days have the courage to extend invitations that may provoke controversy, and we stand with Nadav in believing that this form of self-censorship must be resisted, as it only contributes to the problem,” Dobreva wrote.
Lapid intends his next movie to be a follow-up to “Synonyms,” his 2019 film about an Israeli expat in Paris that won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. The Marseille festival is scheduled for July, but he says now he has no intention of going: “I’ll find other beaches.”
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Trump is imagining an Israel after Netanyahu. So are many Israelis. Netanyahu isn’t biting.
(JTA) — The party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected speculation that he might not run in Israel’s election this fall, following an offhand comment by U.S. President Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl tweeted that Trump had told him he was unsure if Netanyahu wanted to press forward in the elections.
“He’s had an amazing career,” Trump said, according to Karl. “Does he want to continue? Because, you know, he’s a wartime prime minister. We will very shortly win the war one way or the other, and you know he’s a wartime prime minister.”
Netanyahu has been prime minister for more than 15 of the last 17 years, losing power only briefly in 2021 and 2022. Israel’s current wars began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, triggering regional conflict that has grown to include a joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Trump’s reported comments left some wondering whether he knew something they did not, amid polling suggesting that Netanyahu will struggle to secure enough votes to put together a governing coalition after elections this fall. Could Trump know that Netanyahu is considering suspending his already-active campaign? Or could Trump, who this week told the BBC that Netanyahu does anything the U.S. president tells him to, be planning to order his Israeli counterpart to stand down amid growing anti-Israel sentiment in the United States?
Netanyahu’s Likud party soon demolished the idea. “Prime Minister Netanyahu will run in the upcoming elections — and with God’s help, he will win,” the party posted Wednesday on X.
Only a minority of Israelis were primed to appreciate the declaration, according to a poll released this week by the Israel Democracy Institute. It found that 61% of Israelis, including 27% of Likud members, do not want to see Netanyahu run again this fall. The same proportion said they want to see Israel adopt a two-term limit for prime ministers in the future.
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Spain reports 86% rise in antisemitic incidents, as interior minister takes aim at ‘xenophobia’
(JTA) — Antisemitic offenses in Spain rose 86% last year amid the country’s highest total hate incidents on record, according to a report from the Spanish government.
Jews were targeted in 69 hate crimes and incidents in 2025, up from 37 in 2024, according to a report released last week by Spain’s Interior Ministry. Islamophobic attacks also increased from 15 to 35 incidents.
Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said in a video posted on Facebook that his office documented 2,417 total hate incidents last year, the highest figure since it began recording in 2014. Spain is home to about 70,000 Jews, according to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain.
The ministry defined antisemitism as any act of hatred, violence or discrimination directed against Jews or “nationals of the State of Israel.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has become one of Europe’s sharpest critics of Israel and its military action in Gaza, which he says constitutes genocide. Spain imposed a total arms embargo on Israel in 2025 and permanently withdrew its ambassador in March, following Israel’s withdrawal of its ambassador to Spain in 2024.
The Interior Ministry said hate crimes motivated by racism and xenophobia accounted for the largest number of offenses at 934. Grande-Marlaska called out “public officials” for rhetoric and policies that he said inflamed xenophobic sentiment.
Grande-Marlaska released his report as Spain’s far-right, anti-immigration Vox party advocates for a “national priority” policy that favors Spaniards over others in access to public aid and benefits, such as subsidized housing and healthcare. Vox recently struck deals with the conservative People’s Party to insert the “national priority” clause into coalition agreements in the regions of Extremadura, Aragón and Castile and León.
“The national priority is xenophobia,” Grande-Marlaska said. “It is institutionalized xenophobia, protected and promoted by public officials who legitimize and amplify hate speech that, in the past, would have been condemned when it entered the public sphere.”
Vox is strongly supportive of Israel, whose government has allied with the party despite a history of neo-Nazis in its ranks. Vox leader Santiago Abascal visited Israel in 2024 to show his support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Sánchez recognized a Palestinian state.
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