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DC’s new Jewish museum highlights Jews who shaped the nation’s capital, from a Confederate spy to RBG
WASHINGTON (JTA) – Washington, D.C.’s new Jewish museum features at least two notorious women from history.
One is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first Jewish woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice, who was dubbed “Notorious RBG” late in her life by a cluster of fans. When the Capital Jewish Museum opens next week, it will launch with Ginsburg at its center when a traveling exhibit on her life has its final stop here.
The other is the 19th-century figure Eugenia Levy Phillips, whom the museum characterizes as “notorious” without irony.
“One of DC’s most notorious Confederate sympathizers, Eugenia Levy Phillips (1891-1902) came to town in 1853 with her congressman husband, Philip Phillips (1807-1884) of Alabama,” one of the exhibits says. “Eugenia, a spy, delivered Union military plans and maps to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.”
Another description of Levy Phillips in the museum is more straightforward: “SPIED for the CONFEDERACY,” it says below her photo.
An exhibit on Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the new Capital Jewish Museum in Washington D.C.;, June 1, 2023. (Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Photos)
The late justice and spy are two of an assemblage of notable Jews throughout history who grace the Capital Museum, which opens next Friday in northwest Washington’s Judiciary Square neighborhood, which was a local center of Jewish life more than a century ago. Showcasing the warts-and-all history of Jews in and around the nation’s capital — both prominent officials and ordinary denizens of the city — is the point of the museum, its directors say.
“Jews are a Talmudic people, we like to argue, we like to look at different sides of a story,” Ivy Barsky, the museum’s interim executive director, said Thursday at a tour for members of the media. Sarah Leavitt, the museum curator, involved the Jewish idea of “makhloket l’shem shamayim,” Hebrew for “an argument for the sake of heaven” — in other words, for sacred purposes.
“We’re telling the story in this museum in a Jewish way,” Leavitt said. “So that it’s not just that we might not agree, but actually the disagreement is important and preserving those disagreements is important.”
Barsky, who was previously the CEO of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, said that in relating the local history of Washington’s Jews, the new museum fills a gap. Unlike many of the country’s other longstanding Jewish communities, Washington attracted Jews not because it was a port but because it was the center of government. Like the district’s broader community, Jews in the area have been prone to transitioning in and out of the city.
“Lots of our stories start in other places, with folks who end up in D.C.,” Barsky said. “This is a unique community, especially because the local business is the federal government.”
An exhibit at the new Capital Jewish Museum asks visitors, “Who are you? and features a diverse array of Jews , in Washington D.C., June 1, 2023. (Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Photos)
Jews have been in Washington since it was established in 1790, and the area now includes some 300,000 Jews, according to a 2017 study. The museum chronicles that community’s expansion from the capital to the Maryland and the Virginia suburbs, driven at times by Jews joining “white flight” — when white residents left newly integrated neighborhoods — and other times by restrictions that barred Jews from certain areas.
Larger historical events have also at times played a role: The Jewish population in the city grew in the 1930s and 1940s because of the expansion of government during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War II.
An exhibition asks visitors “Who are you?” and features a diverse range of Washington Jews, past and present, as well as others with quirky biographies, including Tom King, a CIA spy who became a comic book writer.
The changing fortunes of American Jewry are embedded in the date the museum opens, June 9: On that date in 1876, Ulysses Grant was the first president to attend synagogue services, when he helped dedicate the new building of the Adas Israel congregation. Fourteen years earlier, as a Union general, he infamously expelled the Jews of Paducah, Kentucky, accusing them of being war speculators. President Abraham Lincoln rescinded the order, which has been described as “the most sweeping anti-Jewish regulation in all of American history,”
Esther Safran Foer, the museum’s president and the former executive director of the city’s historic Sixth & I synagogue, said Grant’s presence in 1876 in the Adas Israel building was emblematic of the upward trajectory of American Jewry. “He sat here for more than three hours in the heat, no air conditioning, and he even made a generous personal contribution,” she said.
The museum’s core is the 1876 building that Grant helped dedicate. It has since been physically moved in its entirety three times in order to preserve it, most recently in 2019 as part of the initiative to build the museum, which began in 2017. The museum’s upper floor reproduces the sanctuary, with the original pews. Its walls, however, are renovated: they display an audiovisual chronicle of the area’s Jews.
The museum’s permanent exhibition aims to traverse that history in other engaging ways as well. The same section that highlights Levy Phillips’ adventures (including her diary’s account of her arrest — “I am not in the least surprised Sir” she told the agent who had come to take her away) also mentions Rabbi Jacob Frankel, who was commissioned by Lincoln during the Civil War as the first Jewish military chaplain.
A photo of Jews and Blacks joined in a bid to desegregate a local amusement park in the early 1960s gets equal billing with one of Sam Eig, a Jewish developer who in 1942 advertised the new Maryland suburb he built as “ideally located and sensibly restricted,” a euphemism for not allowing Black people to buy property.
Interactive exhibits include a Seder table that encourages guests to debate immigration, Israel and civil rights. Parts of the museum’s exhibition recount Jewish debates over pivotal issues such as those and others, including abortion.
Ginsburg will be the museum’s first main attraction, and it makes clear she was a role model. The special exhibition on her life and career includes a glamorous photo of the two Jewish women who coined the “Notorious RBG” nickname, Shana Knizhnik and Irin Carmon. Visitors can go into a closet and don duplicates of Ginsburg’s judicial robes.
One of the first events is on July 12, when museum goers will join in fashioning the special “I Dissent” collars that Ginsburg would famously wear over her robes when she was ready to dissent from the bench.
Jonathan Edelman, the museum’s collections curator, described one prized collection — items he persuaded disability rights advocate Judy Heumann to donate before she died in March.
“Judy’s is a Washington story,” he said. “She came to this city first as an outsider as a protester protesting for disability rights. And then she came back to the city as an insider working within the government to make change both in D.C. government and in the federal government.”
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Number of Holocaust Survivors Falls Below 200,000, Half Reside in Israel, New Figures Show
People with Israeli flags attend the International March of the Living at the former Auschwitz Nazi German death camp, in Brzezinka near Oswiecim, Poland, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Kuba Stezycki
The number of living Holocaust survivors around the world fell from 220,000 to 196,600 over the course of 2025, according to newly released data.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), a nonprofit organization that negotiates and secures compensation for survivors of the Nazis’ atrocities worldwide, unveiled its latest figures on Tuesday.
Tracking survivors across more than 90 countries, the Claims Conference found that 50 percent of them live in Israel, totaling 97,600. The country with the next highest population is the United States with 31,000, representing 16 percent.
Seventeen percent of survivors live in Western Europe, with 9 percent in France (17,300 people) and 5 percent in Germany (10,700). Meanwhile, 11 percent reside in former countries of the Soviet Union. Seven percent (14,300) live in Russia, and 3 percent (5,200) live in Ukraine.
Other countries with notable populations of Holocaust survivors include Canada (4,800), Hungary (2,800), Australia (2,000), and Belarus (1,600).
The Claims Conference describes nearly all — 97 percent — of remaining Jewish Holocaust survivors as “child survivors,” those born between 1928 and 1946, now with a median age of 87. The youngest survivors are 79, while just over 1 percent of them are over 100. Thirty percent are over 90, and most — 62 percent — are female.
Social services provide for a sizable portion of the survivors with 71 percent — approximately 139,000 — currently or previously receiving support and grants administered through the Claims Conference. Through its Basic Needs Fund, the organization provides for 67,600 who are not receiving monthly pensions, and the organization delivers “targeted food security assistance to the most economically vulnerable Holocaust survivors.”
These new figures were released a week before International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday.
They followed new data from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust showing the number of schools in the United Kingdom memorializing the Holocaust has fallen by nearly 60 percent since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, as such discussions have now been labeled “political” and “propaganda” by some pro-Palestinian advocates.
Last year, the Claims Conference released the results of an eight-country survey investigating Holocaust knowledge across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. The group found that 48 percent of those surveyed in the US could not name a single concentration camp used by the Nazi regime to imprison and murder Jews during World War II — including Auschwitz, the largest and most infamous of the Nazi camps. This figure fell to about 25 percent of those answering in the UK, France, and Romania. In Germany and Hungary, the level of ignorance reached 18 percent, while in Austria it hit 10 percent and in Poland it stood at 7 percent.
The same study found that many respondents did not know that the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews. The number of people who believed that 2 million or fewer Jews died reached 28 percent in Romania, 27 percent in Hungary, 24 percent in Poland, 20 percent in the UK, and 18 percent in Germany. In France, the US, and Austria, 21 percent of respondents expressed ignorance about the total death count.
A new survey released this month by the Claims Conference asked 1,000 Irish adults about their views on the Holocaust, finding that half did not know the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews and that 19 percent of young people believed accounts of the mass slaughter had been “greatly exaggerated.” Among all respondents, 12 percent said they had never heard of the Holocaust, a number that increased to 15 percent for younger adults. Of all adults surveyed, 8 percent said they believed the Holocaust was a myth.
Gideon Taylor, president of the Claims Conference, called this moment an “inflection point” in a statement and warned that “soon we are going to live in a world without Holocaust survivors, without a Holocaust survivor voice.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) also released research results last year which showed high levels of global confusion about the historical reality of the Holocaust.
The ADL found that “20 percent of respondents worldwide have not heard about the Holocaust. Less than half (48 percent) recognize the Holocaust’s historical accuracy, which falls to 39 percent among 18- to 34-year-olds, highlighting a worrying demographic trend. Respondents younger than 35 also have elevated levels of antisemitic sentiments (50 percent), 13 percentage points higher than respondents over 50.”
The Claims conference also revealed that worries about another potential Holocaust to destroy the Jews people were highest in the United States, where 76 percent of adults thought it could happen again.
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University of Toronto Jewish Studies Department Targeted With Anti-Israel Posters
Students walk outside one of the exam buildings on the campus of the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada, on Dec. 13, 2025. Photo: Mike Campbell via Reuters Connect
Agitators at the University of Toronto kicked off the new academic year by tacking posters promoting anti-Israel propaganda near the Jewish Studies Department, continuing to fuel concerns of a hostile environment for Jews and Israelis.
The posters accused Israel of being a “colonial settler state” and claimed that Israeli officials have uttered the falsehood themselves. According to The J.CA, an online Jewish media outlet, the posters also came with QR codes linked to a website containing atrocity propaganda regarding Israel’s conduct in the war with Hamas in Gaza.
“Some claims reference the destruction of universities and the deaths of academics and students, without attribution to independent or verifiable sources,” the outlet said. “Several QR codes direct viewers to advocacy materials calling for political action against Israel.”
Speaking to The J.CA, a local Jewish organization said, “Posting highly charged political material outside Jewish Studies is not neutral. It sends a message to Jewish students that their academic spaces are contested and that their identity is inseparable from geopolitical accusations.”
The Algemeiner reached out to the University of Toronto for comment and is waiting to hear back.
The school previously faced antisemitic incidents and came under fire for refusing, in response, to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which is widely used by governments, corporations, and nonprofits around the world.
According to the definition, antisemitism “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It provides 11 specific, contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere. Beyond classic antisemitic behavior associated with the likes of the medieval period and Nazi Germany, the examples include denial of the Holocaust and newer forms of antisemitism targeting Israel such as demonizing the Jewish state, denying its right to exist, and holding it to standards not expected of any other democratic state.
In 2022, the university said it believes that IHRA’s definition “is both insufficiently responsive to many of the most troubling instances of antisemitism in the university context and in tension with the university as a place where difficult and controversial questions are addressed.” It added that “protecting these freedoms is essential to our university’s mandate and mission of discovery, research and education, which can only thrive in an environment of free expression and critical inquiry.”
Critics have argued the IHRA definition unfairly categorizes criticism of Israel as antisemitic. Proponents counter that the definition makes a clear distinction between legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and efforts to demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state. According to research and civil rights groups, anti-Israel animus has motivated an increasingly significant percentage of antisemitic incidents, especially following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
The University of Toronto has witnessed multiple examples of such outrages in recent years.
In 2021, for example, a student union at the Scarborough Campus passed a resolution which called for sourcing kosher food from providers that do not support Israel, a measure which would have effectively banned kosher food on campus, while a second motion was stripped of language proposed to protect Jewish students. The measure also endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign — and, in another provision that would have marginalized Jews, pledged to “refrain from engaging with organizations, services, or participating in events that further normalize Israeli apartheid.”
Earlier that year, the University of Toronto Students’ Union (UTSU) voted to sign an open letter accusing Israel of “genocide and demanding the cancellation of trips to Israel. Then in February 2022, it endorsed a motion linked to the BDS campaign against Israel.
Campus antisemitism continues to affect Jewish faculty, students, and staff at colleges across Canada.
In November, a pro-Hamas mob spilled blood and caused the hospitalization of at least one Jewish student at Toronto Metropolitan University after forcibly breaching a venue in which the advocacy group Students Supporting Israel had convened for an event featuring veterans of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
The former soldiers agreed to meet Students Supporting Israel (SSI) to discuss their experiences at a “private space” on campus which had to be reserved because TMU denied the group a room reservation and, therefore, security personnel that would have been afforded to it. However, someone leaked the event location, leading to one of the most violent incidents of campus antisemitism since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel sparked a surge of anti-Jewish hostility in higher education.
Six suspects, including Qabil Ibrahim, 26, were ultimately arrested on suspicion of being involved in the incident and appeared in court this month.
Canadian Jews have been hit by a wave of antisemitic incidents, with at least 32 reported across five provinces in just the past week alone, according to data collected by the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith.
“Antisemitism in Canada is now accelerating at an increasing rate, spreading across provinces, platforms, and public spaces. That is a warning signal, and it demands more than piecemeal reactions” the group wrote on Wednesday in a letter urging Prime Minister Mark Carney to create a Royal Commission that would explore the problem and draft policy proposals for solving it.
According to the group’s latest audit of antisemitism in Canada released last year, antisemitic incidents in 2024 rose 7.4 percent from 2023, with 6,219 adding up to the highest total recorded since it began tracking such data in 1982. Seventeen incidents occurred on average every day, while online antisemitism exploded a harrowing 161 percent since 2022. As standalone provinces, Quebec and Alberta saw the largest percentage increases, by 215 percent and 160 percent, respectively.
According to the report, incidents included someone firing a gun at a Jewish school for girls in Toronto, Ontario; a man trying to burn down the Tzedeck Synagogue in Vancouver, British Columbia; and a newspaper in Quebec depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the vampire Nosferatu, a Nazi-era trope.
“We cannot permit this to become normalized,” B’nai Brith Canada research and advocacy director Richard Robertson said in a statement. “Antisemitism is not only a threat to Jews — it represents a total repudiation of Canadian values. Those who foment hate against any marginalized group stand in direct opposition to our multicultural, diverse national identity.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Iranian Regime Crackdown Went Beyond Protesters, Hitting Bystanders Too, Witnesses Say
People attend the funeral of the security forces who were killed in the protests that erupted over the collapse of the currency’s value in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 14, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Art student Arash was walking home through the streets of Tehran when a shotgun blast ended his life. He had not shouted slogans, joined protesters, or raised a fist.
A friend, speaking by telephone from the Iranian capital, described the moment in a voice cracking with grief: Arash fell instantly, lifeless on the pavement. He was 22.
The friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear for his security, said they had paused on the sidewalk to watch a protest in nearby Vanak Square when security forces in black uniforms arrived and began firing randomly toward the demonstrators.
Arash’s death on Jan. 8 is an example of what witnesses say has been a reality of the country’s latest anti-government protests — bystanders uninvolved in the unrest caught in gunfire, or killed as they tried to flee the chaos.
Reuters was unable to independently verify this account or similar witness reports of deaths during the state’s crackdown on the unrest, and could not determine how many of the thousands killed were bystanders or people merely near the protests when they were shot.
But accounts from families and witnesses suggest that indiscriminate force used by security forces to crush the unrest killed many civilians who were not participating, leaving relatives to scour hospitals, morgues, and detention centers for answers.
UNLAWFUL LETHAL FORCE USED IN IRAN, AMNESTY REPORTS
Officials in Iran could not be reached for comment about the deaths described in this story as authorities began blocking telephone lines and internet connections from Jan. 8, when protests spread nationwide. From Jan. 13, Iranians have been able to make outgoing international phone calls, while calls into the country remain blocked.
There was no immediate response to requests for comment sent to the Iranian UN missions in Geneva and New York.
Authorities have blamed the unrest and deaths on “terrorists and rioters” backed by exiled opponents and foreign adversaries, the United States and Israel. State TV aired footage of burned police and government buildings, mosques and smashed banks it said had been attacked by “terrorists and rioters.”
The US-based HRANA rights group said it has so far verified 4,519 unrest-linked deaths, including 4,251 protesters, 197 security personnel, 35 people aged under 18 and 38 bystanders who it says were neither protesters nor security personnel.
HRANA has 9,049 additional deaths under review. An Iranian official told Reuters the confirmed death toll until Sunday was more than 5,000, including 500 members of the security forces.
The protests began on Dec. 28 as modest demonstrations in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar over economic hardship and quickly spread nationwide.
INDISCRIMINATE FIRE REPORTED BY WITNESSES
Within days crowds in cities and towns were calling for an end to clerical rule, and state TV showed footage of what it called “rioters” burning images of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Amnesty International said in a report it had documented security forces positioned on streets, rooftops — including those of residential buildings, mosques, and police stations — repeatedly firing rifles and shotguns loaded with metal pellets, often aiming at unarmed individuals’ heads and torsos.
It said the evidence points to a coordinated nationwide escalation in the security forces’ unlawful use of lethal force against mostly peaceful protesters and bystanders since the evening of Jan. 8.
The unrest has posed one of the gravest threats to Iran’s clerical establishment in years, with US President Donald Trump repeatedly threatening to intervene if protesters continued to be killed on the streets or were executed.
Iran‘s judiciary has indicated that execution of those detained during protests may go ahead.
Numerous accounts from inside Iran, including from people who have since left the country, said security forces fired live ammunition indiscriminately, turning streets — particularly on Ja. 8 and 9 — into what witnesses likened to war zones.
Among the victims was Fariba, a 16-year-old girl described by her mother, Manijeh, as curious and full of life.
On a night when she went with her mother to a nearby square simply to observe, security forces on motorcycles attacked the protesters.
‘THEY KILLED MY CHILD,’ SAYS MOTHER OF 16-YEAR-OLD
Manijeh clutched her daughter’s hand and sought shelter behind a parked car amid the gunfire. In the ensuing panic, she lost her grip and mother and daughter became separated.
“I searched street after street, screaming her name,” Manijeh recounted, sobbing over the phone. “She was gone.”
That night, the family scoured police stations and hospitals. They found Fariba two days later in a black body bag inside the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Center in south Tehran, shot in the heart, her body cold.
Officials told the family that “terrorists” had killed her.
“No,” her mother said. “I was there that night. The security forces opened fire on people. They killed my child.”
Videos on social media showed footage of families searching for their relatives among hundreds of body bags in morgues and the Kahrizak Center. Reuters verified the location of the videos as Kahrizak Center, although the identity of the people and the date when the videos were filmed could not be verified.
A physician who left Iran on Jan. 14 said hospitals were overwhelmed with gunshot victims. In Karaj, west of Tehran, a resident described security forces deploying automatic rifles against protesters and bystanders on Jan. 8.
Similar accounts emerged from the western city of Kermanshah, where Revolutionary Guards used armored vehicles and tanks to contain demonstrations.
‘THEY SMASHED DOORS, CURSING,’ SAYS BROTHER OF MISSING WOMAN
In Isfahan, the brother of a 43-year-old man recounted holding his sibling’s blood-soaked body after security forces shot him. “His only act was sheltering teenage protesters fleeing into his shop,” said Masoud, 38, by telephone.
Like other Iranians interviewed for this story, Masoud asked for his full name to be withheld for fear of reprisals.
In another case, the family of Nastaran, a 28-year-old elementary school teacher in Tehran, spent days searching for her after she visited a cousin on Jan. 9 and never returned.
They found her body in a warehouse near Tehran. She had been shot by security forces, said Nastaran’s father.
Authorities allowed retrieval only on condition of burial in the family’s hometown in central Iran and pressured them to blame “terrorists” — a claim the relatives rejected, he said.
Another family in the northern city of Rasht said security forces stormed their apartment after spotting their 33-year-old daughter, Sepideh, watching protests from a window.
“They smashed doors, cursing and yelling. They detained her. We don’t know where she is,” said Morteza, her brother.
“My sister’s two young children cry for her; her husband has been warned of arrest if he keeps searching for her.”