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On display at Germany’s embassy in Israel: portraits of Holocaust survivors that seek to reclaim their stories
TEL AVIV (JTA) — The first time Gidon Lev encountered Holocaust denial was after becoming an unwitting TikTok star at the age of 86.
“I was totally shocked. How could this be?” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about receiving dozens of comments accusing him of lying about the years in a Nazi concentration camp as a child.
“If only I was a liar,” he said. “Then I would have a father, grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles. I would have had a childhood.”
With half a million followers on the popular social media platform and 8.3 million likes, Lev says his message, of fighting hate and standing up for the oppressed, is a universal one. “The Holocaust is an example of just how cruel and horrible hate can get if you let it,” he said.
Now, his story is getting another showcase — on the walls of the German Embassy in Tel Aviv. Lev is one of 25 Holocaust survivors featured in a new exhibition titled Humans of the Holocaust set to open there on Wednesday, in a display timed to Yom Hashoah.
The Humans of the Holocaust exhibit at the German embassy in Tel Aviv. (Erez Kaganovitz)
“The significance of exhibiting on Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day at the German embassy in sovereign Israel is not lost on me,” said Erez Kaganovitz, the photographer behind the Humans of the Holocaust project.
Kaganovitz, who is based in Tel Aviv, said he launched Humans of the Holocaust as an offshoot of his Humans of Tel Aviv photo project several years ago after one photograph in the series went viral. (Humans of Tel Aviv itself is inspired by the landmark Humans of New York project.) The photo portrays four forearms — those of Holocaust survivor Yosef Diament, his daughter and his grandchildren — all tattooed with the same number. Diament’s family tattooed his Auschwitz inmate number as a tribute to him. Kaganovitz was shocked when commenters asked why someone would tattoo a barcode on their arm.
Around that time, Kaganovitz, the grandson of survivors who worked as a journalist and in government before turning to photography, came across a survey highlighting ignorance among young people about the Holocaust. The survey, commissioned by the Claims Conference, found that 66% of American millennials did not know that Auschwitz was a Nazi death camp.
At first, he said, the survey angered him. But then he realized that by the time he was in his late teens, and after having Holocaust education hammered into him from a young age, he didn’t want to have any connection to the Holocaust either.
“I thought if I don’t connect with it, why would someone from Lexington, Kentucky, want to engage with it?”
Kaganovitz has joined a growing coterie of photographers seeking to change the paradigm of “dark and gloomy” Holocaust-related material, of black-and-white stills, of unfathomable despair, of numbers too large to comprehend.
“I wanted to tell human stories with a global message, with optimism. Something that people could engage with,” he said, while stressing that by doing so he is not trying to whitewash or downplay the Holocaust atrocities.
That mission resonated with the German embassy. “We need to find new ways to engage the public and especially the younger generation,” German Ambassador to Israel Steffen Seibert said in a statement about the exhibition, which is billed as digital storytelling for a digital age.
Left; Photographer Erez Kaganovitz at work on his Humans of the Holocaust project. (Courtesy of Erez Kaganovitz); Right: Portrait of Michael Sidko, the last survivor of the Babyn Yar massacre, surrounded by bullets. (Erez Kaganovitz)
The photos are intentionally arresting, aimed at piquing people’s curiosity enough to stop them scrolling their feeds. One example is a portrait of Michael Sidko, the last survivor of the Babyn Yar massacre, whose head, which appears to be dismembered, is embedded in thousands of bullet casings. The image, which took six months to stage because of the complexity involved, aims to raise awareness about the 2 million people exterminated in the Soviet Union and Ukraine, the so-called “Holocaust by bullets.” In the text accompanying it, a quote from Sidko reads: “The sights, sounds, and smell of gunpowder still haunt me to this day.”
Another photograph features Dugo Leitner, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, clutching a yellow-gold balloon in the shape of a Jewish star with the word “Jude” on it. Leitner’s expression, like the rest of the photo, is a jarring blend of whimsy and enervation.
The pose represents one of Leitner’s attempts at reclaiming his story — along with his growing movement to make eating falafel an act of survival. “I am taking ownership of the symbol that turned me into a subhuman and turning it into an optimistic and smiling creation,” he said.
Among the images of elderly survivors, some with yarmulkes and some without, is a portrait of a woman in a black hijab with Quranic verses behind her. Leila Jabarin was born Helene Berschatzki in a concentration camp in Hungary. At 15, after fleeing with her family to Israel, she fell in love with a Muslim Arab with whom she eventually married. Jabarin, who did not share her identity with her children until they were adults, rejects particularism in her message to the world. “Hatred knows no boundaries. Once I was persecuted for being a Jew; now people are after me for being a Muslim,” she told Kaganovitz.
Lev’s own portrait features the TikTok star in front of a wall with the words “we were all once refugees” graffitied on it, a remnant of a raging dispute surrounding African migrants in Israel. Lev became a refugee at 3 years old when Hitler occupied the Sudetenland. He recalls the moment that he was forced to abandon his new red tricycle as marking his transformation into a “human without a country.” After his release from the Theresienstadt concentration camp at age 10, Lev would become a refugee in New York and later in Toronto, Canada. In 1959, he emigrated to Israel, “the only country that would have me, not as a refugee, but as a bonafide citizen.”
About 147,000 Holocaust survivors currently live in Israel, according to data released this week. Their average age is 85, and about 15,000 survivors died over the past year — a pace that is prompting innovations around the world in how the Holocaust is memorialized and taught about.
Kaganovitz is careful not to “coerce” his own knowledge about the Holocaust onto his viewers, he said. Both in their online format and at the exhibition, the photographs are accompanied by a short text to provide context and links are shared for further reading.
“I just want to bring them to the table for now. When you’re fighting for attention alongside all these celebrities that get millions of views, you have to make your content interesting enough,” he said. “Because if we don’t, it’s only a matter of time before 90% [of youth] have never heard of Auschwitz.”
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Remains of last Israeli soldier missing from First Lebanon War’s Sultan Yacoub battle found
(JTA) — The remains of Yehuda Katz, the last Israeli soldier still missing from the 1982 Battle of Sultan Yacoub during the First Lebanon War, have been recovered after 44 years, the Israeli military said Tuesday, bringing to a close one of the country’s longest-running missing soldier cases.
Katz, a 22-year-old tank gunner and yeshiva student who disappeared just 10 days before he was due to complete his military service, was one of three soldiers whose fate was unknown for decades after Israeli forces became trapped by Syrian troops in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on June 11, 1982.
Twenty Israeli soldiers were killed and dozens more were wounded in the battle, with six initially listed as missing. Three were later returned or confirmed dead, leaving Katz, Zachary Baumel and Zvi Feldman as the only soldiers whose fate were unknown. The remains of Baumel and Feldman were recovered in separate operations in 2019 and 2025.
Katz’s remains were located during a special overnight operation carried out by the IDF in cooperation with Mossad and based on intelligence obtained in recent months. They were returned to Israel and military representatives informed Katz’s family of the discovery Tuesday morning.
For the soldiers who survived Sultan Yacoub, the news ended a wait that had followed them for much of their lives.
Avi Rath, who fought alongside Katz, said the unresolved fate of his comrade had stayed with him for decades. “The look on the family’s faces stays with you your entire life, a look that says, ‘You didn’t finish the job,’” Rath said in an interview on Tuesday with KAN public radio’s “Kalman Liberman” program. “Thank God, this closes a circle and resolves some of the uncertainty, but there is also great pain. It weighs on our conscience.”
Katz had studied in the Hesder program at Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, combining Torah study with military service. According to the yeshiva, he slept barely four hours a night while immersed in his studies. He had planned to become a rabbi and teach at a yeshiva after completing his military service.
On the night before the battle, Katz gathered fellow soldiers around him and taught them Maimonides’ laws governing the conduct of Jewish soldiers in battle, the yeshiva said on its website. He then led them in singing Psalm 23, including the verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Remains of last Israeli soldier missing from First Lebanon War’s Sultan Yacoub battle found appeared first on The Forward.
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What Florida Senate nominee Angie Nixon has said about Israel and Gaza
Angie Nixon is not the first progressive and outspoken critic of Israel to win a major-party nomination for statewide office. But her upset victory in Florida’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate makes her the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America to do so.
The milestone comes after a string of victories for DSA-backed insurgents in local and congressional races from New York and New Jersey to Pennsylvania and Colorado since 2025, with criticism of Israel and the war in Gaza being central issues in many of their campaigns.
Nixon did not make Israel the centerpiece of her Senate campaign, which focused heavily on affordability, health care and other economic issues. But on Israel and Gaza, her record puts her broadly in line with the DSA’s approach.
Appearing on Morning Joe the morning after her victory, Nixon called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a war criminal who needs to answer to his crimes” and said she opposed sending Israel U.S. money or weapons “at this moment.”
Nixon will face Republican U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody in November. Moody, who was appointed to the Senate after Marco Rubio became secretary of state, is considered a favorite in a state that shifted toward Republicans in recent elections. A University of North Florida poll released in July showed Moody leading Nixon 50% to 42%.
A state representative from Jacksonville, Nixon said after her victory that her formal ties to the DSA are new. In an interview with The Contrarian on Wednesday, she said she had “just recently joined the DSA because I was asked.”
The affiliation connects Nixon to a national organization that has made Palestinian advocacy a major part of its political identity. The DSA describes Palestinian liberation as an “essential part” of its broader socialist struggle. Its national co-chair, Megan Romer, recently said the group’s goal is “a free Palestine with a capital in Jerusalem,” which she acknowledged could be understood as support for a one-state solution.
The organization has at times enforced that position aggressively even with its own elected officials. In 2021, DSA members debated expelling then-U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a one-term New York Democrat, after he traveled to Israel with J Street, the liberal pro-Israel advocacy group, met with then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and voted for funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system. The national organization ultimately decided against expelling him, while publicly criticizing his actions.
What Nixon has said on Israel and the Palestinians
Long before her upset Senate victory and DSA affiliation, Nixon had become one of the most outspoken critics of Israel in the Florida Legislature.
In November 2023, weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the subsequent war in Gaza, Nixon introduced a resolution calling on the Biden administration to push for “an immediate de-escalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine.”
The resolution sparked a heated and highly emotional debate in the Florida House, according to the Florida Phoenix. Nixon was largely isolated, with Republicans and members of her own party speaking against the measure and turning their backs on her. Nixon cried as she defended the resolution.
“Many of my colleagues have stated that folks are fearful of another massacre occurring to the Jewish people,” Nixon said. “Well, guess what? A massacre is occurring now.”
The Florida House ultimately rejected it 104-2.
In May 2024, Nixon joined pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of North Florida, telling students she was “in awe” of their generation. She later said she wanted the protesters to know that elected officials supported them and that they were “on the right side of history.”
In the campaign for Senate, her official foreign-policy platform called for ending unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel, which she said had “fueled a genocide in Palestine.” She advocated for ending U.S. support for Israeli settlements and creating a path to Palestinian self-determination through the United Nations Security Council.
Jewish Insider reported that Rick Stark, chair of the Florida Democratic Jewish Caucus, said that during a Zoom meeting with the group, Nixon did not give a clear answer when asked whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. He also said Nixon was unfamiliar with the meaning of the slogan “from the river to the sea,” but told participants that Palestinian friends had said it was not a call for Israel’s destruction.
Last month, Nixon said in an interview with WMNF Radio that she would have voted for a House amendment to end the $3.3 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel. The amendment, introduced by U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a fierce critic of Israel who lost his Republican primary in May, received support from 103 of 212 House Democrats.
In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program Wednesday, the hosts asked Nixon what she would tell Jewish voters concerned about her position on the conflict. “We need to make sure that we’re putting Americans first before we go ahead and start sending money or military aid to any country outside of the U.S.,” Nixon said.
Pressed specifically on whether that meant cutting off all military aid to Israel, Nixon said: “At this time, I believe what’s happening over in Israel and in Palestine is not good for Israelis or Palestinians. And I do not support sending any money or any weapons to Israel at this moment.”
The post What Florida Senate nominee Angie Nixon has said about Israel and Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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Manhattan Central Synagogue attacker faces federal hate crime charges
(JTA) — The man accused of disrupting Shabbat services at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue last week now faces federal hate crimes charges in addition to the state ones leveled against him immediately after the attack.
“These charges serve as notice that the Department of Justice will intervene to protect the public in the face of antisemitic and racially motivated attacks,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement on Tuesday.
Larry Montes, 46, of the Bronx, New York, was charged with two counts of committing hate crimes, each of which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, and one count of damage to religious property resulting in bodily injury, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
During the attack last Friday at the Reform synagogue in Manhattan, Montes, who was sitting near the front of the sanctuary, allegedly stood up nine minutes into the service and began shouting, “You know who the f–ck I am.”
Montes then approached the stage of the synagogue and knocked over two ceremonial silver candle sticks, causing them to be damaged, according to the complaint filed by an FBI agent investigating the case.
As the synagogue’s head of security attempted to remove Montes from the sanctuary, he then said “F–ck you people” and “I don’t f–ck with you people” before punching a 63-year-old congregant in the face and knocking her to the ground.
While Montes was handcuffed and arrested in the lobby of the synagogue, he then allegedly told a security guard “F–ck you [n-word]” and headbutted him near his left eye socket.
During his subsequent interview with NYPD officers following his arrest, he allegedly told officers, “F–ck the Jews. … It’s racial” and “I will never affiliate with no filthy f–cking synagogues, either here or in fucking Israel.” Montes allegedly told officers that he had felt disrespected at the service, so he “got up, start[ed] some sh–t, [and] smacked somebody around.”
When asked by NYPD officers why he felt disrespected at the service, Montes allegedly replied, “it’s all a racial thing” and that it was “all religious motivated.” Montes also stated during his post-arrest interview that he identified as Jewish, according to the complaint. Montes’ aunt previously told the New York Post that he was “mentally traumatized because of his desire to belong to that religion [Judaism].”
Montes has been in custody since his arrest immediately after Friday’s attack. He was arraigned that same night and is due in Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday.
The federal charges come as the attack has sparked widespread condemnation from New York leaders, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and spurred a Jewish security watchdog group to call on the NYPD to place more officers in hotspots for potential hate crimes.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Manhattan Central Synagogue attacker faces federal hate crime charges appeared first on The Forward.
