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Judy Heumann, Jewish disability advocate who spurred a movement, dies at 75
(JTA) — In Judith Heumann’s 2020 memoir, the lifelong advocate for people with disabilities describes feeling shocked upon being invited to read from the Torah at her synagogue in Berkeley, California. Not only were women permitted to carry out the sacred task, unlike in the Orthodox synagogue of her Brooklyn childhood, but the bimah, or prayer platform, had been made accessible just for her.
“Oh my God, I thought, I’ve never been asked to do an aliyah,” Heumann wrote, using the Hebrew word for the ritual. “I learned how to do it.”
The moment was just one of many when Heumann, who died Saturday at 75, charted ground that had previously been off-limits to wheelchair users like her. Since contracting polio as a toddler, Heumann broke down barriers for disabled children and educators in New York City schools, protested until federal legislation protecting people with disabilities was passed and advised multiple presidential administrations on disability issues.
A cause of death was not immediately given for Heumann, whose website announced her death on Saturday in Washington, D.C. Heumann had lived there for 30 years, since being tapped by the Clinton administration to serve as assistant secretary of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services.
Heumann was born in 1947 to two parents who had separately fled Nazi Germany as children in the 1930s; all of her grandparents and countless other family members were murdered in the Holocaust.
She said she believed it was her parents’ experience that led them to reject doctors’ advise to have their daughter institutionalized after she contracted polio and lost the use of her legs. “They came from a country where families got separated, some children sent away, others taken from their families by the authorities and never returned — all part of a campaign of systematic dehumanization and murder,” she wrote in her memoir, “Being Heumann.” “Their daughter, disabled or not, wasn’t going anywhere.”
Instead, her parents and in particular her mother, Ilse, set about to advocate for her. When the city school system said Judith could not attend her neighborhood school, Ilse got a rabbi to agree that she could attend his yeshiva if her daughter learned Hebrew. Judith did, but the rabbi did not keep his word. Instead, Ilse lined up an array of activities for Judith, including thrice-weekly Hebrew school classes accessible only if her father carried her in her chair up a flight of stairs, until the city opened a program for children with disabilities.
Judy Heumann attends the 2022 Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Organization Summit at United Nations in New York City, May 20, 2022. (Chance Yeh/Getty Images)
There, Heumann wrote, she first encountered “disability culture” — what she described as “a culture that has learned to value the humanity in all people, without dismissing anyone for looking, thinking, believing or acting differently.” She would experience and then help craft this culture during a decade at summer camp, in a movement captured in the 2020 documentary “Crip Camp,” and then throughout a lifetime of advocacy that earned her the moniker “mother of the disability rights movement.”
One notable win came in 1970, after Heumann graduated from college with a degree in speech therapy. Told that she could not teach in New York City schools because she could not help children leave in case of fire, Heumann sued. She was represented in part by an attorney who would argue Roe v. Wade in front of the Supreme Court, and the case came before Judge Constance Baker Motley, the only woman on the NAACP legal team that argued Brown v. Board of Education. The city quickly settled and Heumann ultimately got a job at her old elementary school.
The public fight propelled Heumann into the leadership of an inchoate disability rights movement. Two years later, she participated in New York City protests in favor of federal anti-discrimination laws that President Richard Nixon ultimately signed. In 1977, she was one of dozens of disability advocates to occupy a federal building in San Francisco in a demonstration calling for enforcement mechanisms. Their advocacy led to Section 504, a federal statute that requires entities receiving government funds to show that they do not discriminate on the basis of disability.
The episode was dramatized on Comedy Central’s “Drunk History.” Heumann was played by Ali Stroker, a Jewish actress who was the first wheelchair user to perform on Broadway. Heumann was also recognized as Time Magazine’s 1977 Woman of the Year in a 2020 retrospective.
Heumann was a cofounder of the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley before returning to the East Coast and the government advisory roles. Through it all, Heumann remained involved with the Jewish communities where she lived, including by having a bat mitzvah ceremony as an adult. In Washington, she was a member of Adas Israel Congregation.
In 2016, she cited tikkun olam, the ancient rabbinical imperative to repair the world, during a 2016 White House event during Jewish Disability Awareness and Inclusion Month. “The Jewish community has an obligation, I believe, to be leaders,” said Heumann, then special advisor for international disability rights in the State Department.
She also traveled as an adult to her father’s hometown in Germany, Hoffenheim, where she was taken to the site of the synagogue that the Nazis destroyed but noted that no one there spoke openly about what had happened to the local Jews.
In “Being Heumann,” she connected the experience to her own efforts to bring people with disabilities into the mainstream. “What a pervasive influence silence and avoidance have had on my life,” she wrote. “Why wasn’t I in school? Silence. Why aren’t we allowed on buses? Silence. Why can’t disabled people teach? Silence. Where are all the Jews going? Piercing silence.
“I refuse to give in to the pressure of the silence,” she concluded.
Heumann’s allies in the Jewish disability advocacy community mourned her death.
“So sad to learn of Judy Heumann’s passing,” tweeted Jay Ruderman, whose family foundation has been a leader in supporting Jewish disability inclusion. “She was one of the preeminent disability rights leaders in our country’s history and her accomplishments made our world a better place. I’ll miss you Judy and may your memory be a blessing.”
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The post Judy Heumann, Jewish disability advocate who spurred a movement, dies at 75 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Mossad Reveals Foiled Iranian Terror Plots in Australia, Greece, and Germany
Iranians carry a model of a missile during a celebration following an IRGC attack on Israel, in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – The Mossad announced on Sunday that it had uncovered the mechanisms behind several Iranian-led terrorist plots thwarted in Australia, Greece, and Germany between 2024 and 2025. Israeli intelligence said multiple terror cells linked to these operations have been dismantled and their members arrested.
According to the agency, the Iranian regime has intensified efforts to target Israelis and Jewish communities worldwide in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks.
Mossad said close cooperation with international security services helped prevent multiple attacks, saving lives and enabling prosecutions.
One of the key figures named in the revelations is Sardar Amar, a senior commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and head of the 11th Brigade under Quds Force chief Esmail Qaani. Mossad claims Amar led a network tasked with striking Israeli and Jewish targets abroad and was directly connected to the foiled operations in Greece, Australia, and Germany.
The repeated failures of this network, according to the agency, led to the exposure of its operatives and infrastructure.
In response to the discovery of Iranian cells operating on their soil, Australia and Germany have taken diplomatic action. Canberra expelled the Iranian ambassador, declaring him persona non grata, while Berlin has called for similar measures. Both moves were described as signals of “zero tolerance” for state-sponsored terrorism.
Mossad said Iran continues to use terrorism as a strategic tool to attack Israel and Jewish civilians abroad while avoiding direct military or political confrontation. The exposure of Amar’s network, it added, highlights the growing challenges faced by Tehran’s covert apparatus.
The Israeli intelligence service emphasized that international efforts are increasingly constraining Iran’s ability to operate abroad, imposing diplomatic costs on the regime. “Mossad, together with its global partners, will continue to thwart terrorist threats emanating from Iran and its proxies to protect Israeli citizens and Jewish communities around the world,” the agency said.
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Israeli Military Says It Conducted ‘Targeted Strike’ in Central Gaza
A Palestinian man points a weapon in the air after it was announced that Israel and Hamas agreed on the first phase of a Gaza ceasefire, in the central Gaza Strip, October 9. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
Israeli forces carried out a “targeted strike” on an individual in central Gaza who was planning to attack Israeli troops, Israel’s military said on Saturday.
A US-backed ceasefire is in force between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas just over two years since the war in the Gaza Strip began, but each side has accused the other of violations.
Israel said it had targeted a member of Islamic Jihad. On Sunday, the Palestinian terrorist group said in a statement that the Israeli military’s claim of a planned attack by the group was a “mere fallacious allegation.”
It did not say whether one of its members was killed in the Israeli strike.
Witnesses told Reuters they had seen a drone strike a car and set it ablaze. Local medics said four people had been wounded, but there were no immediate reports of deaths.
Witnesses said separately that Israeli tanks had shelled eastern areas of Gaza City, the Gaza Strip’s biggest urban area. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Several Israeli media sites said Israel, in a reversal of a policy of barring entry to foreign forces, had allowed Egyptian officials into the Gaza Strip to help locate the bodies of hostages taken captive in the Hamas-led attack on Israeli communities on October 7, 2023, that triggered the war.
As part of the ceasefire agreement, Hamas has said it will return all the hostages it abducted, but the remains of 13 are still in the enclave.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Does that Trump Time Magazine cover really reference a Nazi war criminal?
As Adolf Hitler’s armies rampaged across Europe and the Soviet Union, they were followed by German industrialists who plundered the occupied countries —seizing raw materials, dismantling factories and exploiting civilians as forced laborers. Private enterprise became embedded in the machinery of conquest and genocide.
Among them, few wielded more power than Alfried Krupp, owner and CEO of the vast industrial empire that bore his family’s name.
During the war, Krupp’s factories produced tanks, artillery, ships and munitions, operating more than 80 plants across Nazi-occupied Europe. About 100,000 forced laborers toiled in his mines and factories, including Jewish inmates from Auschwitz. Conditions were inhumane, especially for Jews and Soviet POWs, who endured beatings, starvation and exposure. The death toll remains uncertain, but it likely numbered in the many thousands.
Krupp was convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg in 1948 and sentenced to 12 years in prison. He served just 30 months.
After West Germany’s founding in 1949, the occupying powers came under intense pressure — from federal, state, and local officials, civilians, former Wehrmacht soldiers, and even religious leaders — to grant amnesties to war criminals. Many West Germans wanted to bury the past. As part of a deal to secure West Germany’s partnership in the emerging Cold War confrontation with the Soviet bloc, the U.S. and its allies acquiesced, freeing thousands of convicted war criminals. Among them was Krupp, who walked out of Landsberg Prison on Feb. 3, 1951.
Most Americans today have never heard of Alfried Krupp or his war crimes. And few could have guessed that his name would resurface because of a photograph of Donald Trump on the cover of Time Magazine.
Almost as soon as the Time cover appeared on social media, people began noticing that Trump’s pose was eerily similar to Krupp’s in a 1963 Newsweek photo. The resemblance went viral. Time denied any connection, but the visual echo struck a nerve — especially given Trump’s authoritarian turn in his second term.
So who was Alfried Krupp?
As often happens with Germans born into old dynasties, his full name is a mouthful: Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach.
The Krupp family’s involvement in arms production dates back to the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), when Anton Krupp oversaw a gunsmithing operation in Essen. Over the centuries, the family pioneered high-cast steel, revolutionized artillery, and gave Germany a decisive edge in conflicts like the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), cementing Krupp’s role as the empire’s premier arms supplier.
Alfried was the son of Bertha Krupp, heiress to the industrial empire, and Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, a diplomat and industrialist. The Krupp firm supplied weapons and materials to Imperial Germany during World War I. Alfried joined the Nazi Party in 1938, though the company had aligned itself with the regime’s militarization years earlier. He assumed his father’s duties after the war began and collaborated closely with the SS, personally negotiating contracts for the use of concentration camp labor — including Jewish inmates from Auschwitz.
Krupp and 11 other executives were tried before a U.S. military tribunal in Nuremberg from December 1947 to July 1948, charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes and plunder. Krupp denied personal guilt and claimed his role was apolitical.
“We Krupps never cared much about [political] ideas. We only wanted a system that worked well and allowed us to work unhindered. Politics is not our business,” he said in 1947.
Prosecutors argued that Krupp’s firm was not merely complicit but actively expanded its empire through Nazi aggression. They documented the systematic looting of industrial assets from France, Belgium and the Netherlands, contracts with the SS for concentration camp labor, and the use of punishment cages for workers.
Convicted of war crimes for plundering occupied nations, Krupp was sentenced to 12 years in prison and ordered to forfeit all property and industrial holdings. One defendant was acquitted; the rest received sentences ranging from three to 12 years.
In the immediate postwar years, capturing Nazi war criminals was a top priority for the Allies. But priorities shifted. The Soviets came to be seen as a greater threat than ex-Nazis — a view welcomed by large segments of the West German public, who vocally demanded an end to war crimes trials and the release of prisoners.
On Jan. 31, 1951, John J. McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, reduced the sentences of 79 inmates at Landsberg, many to time already served. Among them was Alfried Krupp, released four days later. McCloy also restored Krupp’s industrial holdings.
Across West Germany, government officials, judges, professors and captains of industry who had dutifully served the Third Reich returned to prominence — with tacit U.S. approval. It’s a theme I explore in my book Nazis At The Watercooler: War Criminals In Postwar German Government Agencies.
Krupp was among them.
After his release, he resumed control of his empire — steelworks, coal mines, munitions plants — his rehabilitation aided by silence and selective memory. He died of bronchial cancer on July 30, 1967, at age 59. His funeral drew about 500 guests, including prominent figures from West German business, politics and labor.
The 1963 Newsweek portrait of Krupp was taken by Jewish photographer Arnold Newman, who was initially reluctant.
“When the editors asked me to photograph him, I refused,” Newman told American Photo. “I said, ‘I think of him as the devil.’ They said, ‘Fine — that’s what we think.’ So I was stuck with the job.”
In the photo, taken at one of Krupp’s factories, he appears almost diabolical — leering at the camera with a calculating gaze, his chin resting on folded hands in a pose that suggests both command and contempt. The industrial backdrop — steel beams, harsh lighting and stark shadows — frames him like a villain in a modern morality play.
Trump hasn’t publicly commented on the new Time photo. But he complained bitterly about one that appeared just two weeks earlier: “They ‘disappeared’ my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird!” he remarked.
The new cover, titled “Trump’s World,” seems more flattering. It shows him as the undisputed center of gravity — arms folded, gaze locked, seated in the Oval Office like a man who owns the room. Unlike Krupp, whose portrait radiated menace, Trump’s image is more ambiguous: part statesman, part strongman, part brand.
The post Does that Trump Time Magazine cover really reference a Nazi war criminal? appeared first on The Forward.