At a cemetery outside Florence, Italy, two families gathered around the grave of a young American soldier. For decades, they were unknown to each other. Yet they had been connected for 80 years.

Private First Class Frank T. Kurzinger was born in Germany and arrived in the United States with his family in 1938 after fleeing Nazi persecution. A few years later, he returned to Europe in an American uniform as a soldier in the 10th Mountain Division.

During training, he became close friends with a soldier from Wisconsin named Del Riley. The two met in 1943.

In February 1945, the division was preparing to assault Mount Belvedere in northern Italy. The attack would take place at night. Soldiers climbed in silence. Even their weapons had been unloaded to prevent an accidental discharge.

Ahead of Riley, a scout stepped on a landmine. The explosion tore through the darkness, severely wounding both men.

Riley called for a medic, and Kurzinger responded. He took several steps toward his friend, stepped on another landmine, and was killed. He was 21. Riley survived.

For the rest of his life, he wondered whether Frank Kurzinger might have survived the war had he never shouted for help.

“It really pained him,” said Shalom Lamm, co-founder and chief historian of Operation Benjamin. According to family accounts, Riley lived with survivor’s guilt for the rest of his life.

For a time, it seemed possible that Kurzinger himself would slowly fade from memory.

His family was small. The Holocaust had left gaps in family memory and silenced many conversations about the past. In remarks delivered at the 2025 dedication of Kurzinger’s new headstone, family member Michael Stern reflected that Frank had become little more than a distant name.

“There were no photographs,” Stern said. “No yahrzeit to observe, no role for him in stirring the longings for the warmth and intimacy of the larger family.” He might have remained, Stern said, “an anonymous stranger.”

Instead, a grave brought his life into relief.

The ceremony at Florence American Cemetery was organized by Operation Benjamin, a nonprofit that identifies Jewish servicemembers and veterans buried beneath incorrect religious markers and helps restore headstones that reflect their faith.

Kurzinger had been buried beneath a Latin Cross. Aware of the danger a German-born Jew would face if captured by the Nazis, he identified as Catholic on his dogtags.

Eight decades after he was buried, a Star of David was placed above his grave.

Yet the headstones are only part of the work. There is also the responsibility of restoring stories before they fade.

Operation Benjamin’s researchers reconstructed Kurzinger’s story. They traced descendants and gathered family memories. They also located the family of Del Riley, the Wisconsin soldier whose life Kurzinger had tried to save. The two families met for the first time in Italy ahead of the ceremony.

The next day they stood together at the cemetery.

For Lamm, Operation Benjamin is not simply about correcting the historical record. It is about zachor, the Jewish obligation to remember. He points to an unexpected moment in the Book of Exodus. As the Israelites leave Egypt, Moses fulfills a promise made generations earlier: “And Moses took with him the bones of Joseph.”

Joseph asked the Israelites to swear that when God redeemed them, they would carry his remains with them.

Lamm sees Operation Benjamin’s work as a series of “Moses moments.”

“No matter what’s going on in the world,” he said, “never forget your heroes.”

The stories beneath the stones

The organization’s work grew from a simple question. In 2014, Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter visited the Normandy American Cemetery and remarked that he expected to see more Stars of David among the graves. The observation led researchers to discover cases in which Jewish servicemembers had been buried beneath crosses because of wartime paperwork errors, mistaken records, or decisions made under extraordinary circumstances.

Since then, Operation Benjamin has reviewed thousands of cases and helped facilitate dozens of headstone corrections.

But a new headstone is only part of the story. Operation Benjamin’s researchers reconstruct lives that might otherwise be forgotten. “We will not forget you,” Lamm said. “We go back. We tell your story.”

In his remarks at the graveside, Stern reflected on what the journey had meant to his family. “Through the unlikely context of death and burial,” he said at the ceremony, “he has become a tangible link to life, to our roots, our history and the lineage from which we come. A second cousin once removed no longer feels as distant or abstract.”

In prepared remarks released by the U.S. Mission in Italy, U.S. Consul General Daniela Ballard noted that Kurzinger’s name was one of 4,392 at the military cemetery.

“Every name represents a young life lost and a family left behind,” she said. “But today, we are all Frank’s family. We are the ones who carry his memory forward.”

In remarks shared by Operation Benjamin after the ceremony, members of the Riley family described climbing Mount Belvedere with a commemorative challenge coin. One side bore Del Riley’s name and a Christian cross. The other bore Frank Kurzinger’s name and a Star of David.

The two men had set out for the mountain together in February 1945. Neither completed the mission. Frank was killed. Del was wounded. Eighty years later, the Riley family carried both men to the summit. They buried the coin at the 10th Mountain Division memorial.

The post A Jewish soldier died saving a Christian friend. Eighty years later, a grave reunited their families. appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — The Supreme Court on Monday reinstated a murder conviction for the man convicted of killing Etan Patz, the 6-year-old Jewish boy whose 1979 disappearance riveted the nation.

In a 6-3 vote, the justices reimposed the conviction of Pedro Hernandez, who was found guilty of kidnapping and murdering Patz in 2017 and was serving a 25-year sentence until a New York federal appeals court ruled last year that he was entitled to a retrial.

The justices granted an appeal from New York prosecutors who urged them to overturn the decision last year, writing in an unsigned opinion that the lower court “exceeded its authority in holding that Hernandez is entitled to relief.”

“Today the Supreme Court agreed with the findings of multiple lower courts and upheld the trial conviction of Pedro Hernandez for the horrific murder of Etan Patz, which changed a generation of New Yorkers,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement Monday. “This office has remained steadfast in its pursuit of justice for Etan and the Patz family and will continue to stand by this important conviction.”

Harvey Fishbein, a lawyer for Hernandez, told the The New York Times Monday that the Supreme Court’s order meant Hernandez would not get a new trial, adding that his team was “terribly disappointed.”

“We firmly believe that an innocent man is in jail for a crime that he did not commit,” Fishbein said.

Patz vanished in May 1979 while walking to his school bus stop in New York City for the first time. The 6-year-old became one of the first missing children whose photograph appeared on milk cartons nationwide, but despite years of searches and public appeals, he was never found.

Patz’s parents, Julie and Stan, spent decades seeking an arrest for his disappearance, helping to establish a national missing-children hotline. The anniversary of Etan’s disappearance, May 25, also became National Missing Children’s Day.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Supreme Court reinstates murder conviction in Etan Patz disappearance case appeared first on The Forward.

(New York Jewish Week) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday defended his use of the word “monsters” to describe AIPAC at a rally Friday for progressive candidates, as some of his Jewish supporters expressed concern that the term may connote an antisemitic trope.

The war of words came as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is increasingly a target of the progressive movement — including in acts of attempted violence — and as progressive Jews have accused some Israeli right-wing figures of dehumanizing liberal pro-Israel lobbying groups.

“Calling AIPAC and its backers ‘monsters’ casts them as less than human, rather than as human beings who are one’s political opponents,” Rabbi Jill Jacobs, head of the progressive rabbinic human rights group T’ruah, wrote in a Substack post Monday.

“I was taken aback,” Rabbi Misha Shulman, a Mamdani supporter who leads the progressive Brooklyn synagogue The New Shul, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the mayor’s comments. “I didn’t like those remarks. It was a little bit of a flag for me.”

At a press conference, Mamdani said he had been quoting Italian anti-fascist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, whose quote ending “Now is the time of monsters” the mayor had cited at the top of his speech. The rally was intended to boost the mayor’s preferred progressive candidates, including Jewish congressional candidate Brad Lander, ahead of New York’s closely watched Tuesday primaries.

“I used the term to describe all those who are preventing the birth of a new world,” Mamdani told a reporter who asked about the word. He continued, “My use of the term is a broad use that speaks to the untenable nature of a status quo that is quite literally starving people in this city, all in the name of sustaining something that we simply cannot defend any longer.” He did not explain how he saw AIPAC as connected to poverty in New York.

Mamdani insisted he was referring to “not solely AIPAC,” but he singled out the organization again in his Monday remarks to reporters, saying the lobbying group was backing “a status quo for immorality.”

During the rally last week, Mamdani had stated that Gramsci’s “monsters take many forms today,” including “AIPAC, for whom the only thing more frightening than democracy being allowed to run its course is an end to genocide and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s wars.” He added that AIPAC’s “goal” is “to turn us against one another.”

For some of the progressive Jews who have supported the mayor, his comments sounded alarms about the use of dehumanizing or sinister rhetoric to describe Jewish groups.

But Shulman said it was actually Mamdani’s remarks in the same speech painting AIPAC as a “dark money” group that was most alarming to him. AIPAC, a lobbying organization that also operates a political spending arm, does not conceal its donors, unlike the traditional profile of a so-called “dark money” campaign finance operation.

“For me, the question of dark money was the tougher knot,” Shulman said, calling Mamdani’s remarks a “tactical mistake.” In the context of rising antisemitism, he added, “For a left-wing leader to use that phrase, and invite traditional antisemitism into this conversation in that way, was not smart.”

Shulman is a member of Israelis For Peace, a New York-based ad-hoc group of progressive Israelis who broadly back Mamdani. While not speaking on behalf of the group, he told JTA their internal group chat lit up with debates over the appropriateness of Mamdani’s speech.

Jacobs of T’ruah said Mamdani’s remarks were part of what she described as a “disturbing trend” of recent left-wing attacks on the lobbying group, including Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner accusing his GOP opponent of being “bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu” because of AIPAC’s donations to her campaign.

Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who has aspirations of higher office, also recently became the first sitting member of Congress to sign a pledge from Track AIPAC, a purported AIPAC watchdog that also targets donations from more liberal pro-Israel groups, including J Street.

Over the weekend, a cafe posted on Instagram that it had rejected a payment from liberal Jewish New York Rep. Dan Goldman, whom Lander is challenging in the primary, because the money was “probably coming from AIPAC.” (Goldman has been endorsed by both AIPAC and J Street.)

While noting that AIPAC “absolutely deserves to be criticized, sidelined, and rejected for its decades of negative influence on American foreign policy,” Jacobs wrote that such critiques should be done “without dehumanizing language, and without hinting at a grand Jewish conspiracy.”

Such pushback from Jews who have worked with Mamdani is rare. JTA reached out to representatives for several of the mayor’s most visible Jewish allies on Monday, including Lander and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who spoke at the same rally. Sanders also criticized AIPAC. Neither returned requests for comment by press time. On social media after the rally, Lander celebrated the event, calling it “a tremendous honor” to rally alongside Mamdani.

IfNotNow and Jews For Racial and Economic Justice, two Jewish activist groups that endorsed Mamdani, similarly did not respond to requests for comment by press time. A spokesperson for Rep. Jerry Nadler, the retiring liberal Jewish Democrat who had endorsed Mamdani’s mayoral bid, also did not respond by press time.

J Street, the liberal pro-Israel lobby that positions itself as a foil to AIPAC, declined to comment on Mamdani’s remarks. Last month, hundreds of Jewish leaders criticized Yehuda Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, after Leiter called J Street a “cancer within the Jewish community.” Nadler was among the signatories of an open letter that said Leiter “dehumanizes fellow Jews.”

Centrist Jewish groups and figures, already no fans of Mamdani, also bashed his AIPAC comments. “Referring to fellow New Yorkers as ‘monsters’ is outrageous and dangerous, and the impact of your words extends far beyond politics,” American Jewish Committee CEO Ted Deutch wrote on X, addressing Mamdani.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Jewish Democrat representing New Jersey, wrote, “Swap ‘AIPAC’ for ‘Jews’ and it’s the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theory in the books.”

Both posts were reposted by AIPAC, which otherwise did not comment.

The post Some of Mamdani’s Jewish allies criticize his use of ‘monsters’ to describe AIPAC appeared first on The Forward.