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Pro-Palestinian activists are banned from Buchenwald, where survivors vowed to fight for peace
(JTA) — As pro-Palestinian activists were shut out of the former Buchenwald concentration camp this weekend, a timeworn fight about the site’s history resurfaced.
That dispute, which dates back to the camp’s liberation in 1945, centers on how the victims of Buchenwald wanted to be remembered. The activists, a group called Kufiyas in Buchenwald, said their fight for Palestinians upheld a pledge made by thousands of Buchenwald survivors days after they were freed.
The inmates swore to punish the guilty, destroy Nazism and create a new world of peace. That promise, known as the “Oath of Buchenwald,” has been invoked by varying regimes and political movements ever since it was uttered.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald was blocked from holding a pro-Palestinian vigil at the Buchenwald memorial on Sunday after a court in the nearby city of Weimar upheld a police ban. The planned event would have marked the 81st anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation by U.S. troops — and the day before the Jewish world observes Yom HaShoah, Holocaust memorial day.
Judges decided that the rally would likely “violate the dignity of victims” of the Nazis. The activists were offered the alternative of protesting in downtown Weimar, which they refused.
Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps on German soil, holding Jews along with political prisoners, Roma, gay people and prisoners of war. Roughly 56,000 people were killed there, among them some 11,000 Jews.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald argued that their protest would honor the memory of Buchenwald’s victims together with all “victims of genocide and fascism.” The campaign was formed after a German court ruled that Buchenwald could refuse entry to visitors who wear a Palestinian keffiyeh, which has been adopted by left-wing anti-Israel protesters. The memorial foundation argued that in some contexts, the symbol could be disruptive and undercut the memorial’s purpose. Its critics said the foundation was suppressing speech that criticized Israel — and fell in line with the mission of Holocaust remembrance.
By not addressing “the genocide in Gaza,” Kufiyehs in Buchenwald said the memorial became “a place of historical revisionism and genocide denial.”
The memorial site said that Kufiyas in Buchenwald were the ones abusing history.
“This is a completely inappropriate instrumentalization of the memory of the victims of National Socialism for one’s own political, misanthropic agenda,” Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau, a spokesperson for the memorial foundation, told the German broadcaster Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk. The planned rally was also excoriated by the European Jewish Congress, the Conference of European Rabbis and other groups.
Current-day atrocities have been invoked at Buchenwald before, according to William Niven, an emeritus professor of Nottingham Trent University who teaches German history.
In 1993, about 3,000 people demonstrated on the site against the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during the Holocaust, said in a speech, “Europe has learnt nothing since the Holocaust. Nothing was done to stop the murdering. What happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina is a posthumous victory for Hitler.”
But Niven said he viewed the planned pro-Palestinian rally as problematic because it would have interrupted the anniversary of the camp’s liberation, a program that annually draws descendants of Buchenwald victims and a dwindling number of survivors. That risked both upsetting the visitors and hijacking their mourning, he said.
“If you’ve got a group of people standing there with political placards or making political statements, then they are transforming that commemorative event into a political act,” Niven said. “They are using it because they’ll get media attention.”
Tair Borchardt, an organizer for the campaign who is Jewish, countered that the activists include a substantial proportion of Jews, among them children and grandchildren of Nazi victims. She said that drawing a direct line between Buchenwald inmates and the Palestinians was their form of commemoration.
“I think that honoring the victims of Nazi fascism also really should be principled in making sure that it doesn’t happen again,” said Borchardt. “And this is what’s happening right now. So drawing these connections, I don’t think it’s a contradiction in honoring the victims at all.”
Kufiyas in Buchenwald is a leftist alliance that includes activists from communist, anti-fascist and Jewish anti-Zionist organizations. The group collaborated in its campaign with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the German group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East.
Rachel Shapiro, an organizer with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, said in a statement that the memorial foundation’s “insistence on the singularity and exceptionalism of the Nazi genocide of European Jews” served to “actively provide cover for Germany’s participation in and funding of the mass murder of Palestinians.”
Shapiro argued that state-funded institutions like the Buchenwald memorial should not singularly decide how Nazi victims are remembered, saying that anti-fascist Jews “wholeheartedly reject the German state dictating conditions around commemoration.”
That is exactly what states do, according to James E. Young, a Holocaust scholar and professor emeritus of Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
“The irony is that by definition, in all national memorial sites everywhere, including Buchenwald, the state always dictates ‘the conditions of commemoration.’ That’s the point,” Young said in an interview.
Since the day Buchenwald was liberated, meanings of the place — and interpretations of what happened there — have shifted under changing regimes.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald said its demands from the memorial site were faithful to the Oath of Buchenwald, a pledge made by 21,000 survivors of the camp on April 19, 1945. That day, the freed inmates marched onto the roll call square and surrounded Buchenwald’s first memorial monument, a wooden obelisk made in the camp’s wood shop. They read a memorial address in Russian, Polish, German, French, Czech and English, ending with the jointly spoken oath.
“We will only give up the fight when the last guilty has been judged by the tribunal of all nations,” they said. “The absolute destruction of Nazism is our motto. The building of a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal.”
Just a few days later, the oath was revised. A new version swore to pursue the destruction of Nazism “down to its roots.” That addition had a clear meaning for communist survivors, a meaning solidified when Buchenwald came under Soviet-occupied East Germany: The “roots” of fascism were understood as capitalism and the West.
In 1958, the German Democratic Republic unveiled Buchenwald’s first state memorial, a path linking mass graves to a bell tower where the oath was inscribed.
“It was politicized during the GDR as an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-West message. Pretty much up to 1990, that’s how it was framed,” said Niven.
Buchenwald became a monument to the communist-led struggle and ultimate victory over fascism, a site symbolizing solidarity across national boundaries. For decades, wide gaps remained in this history, such as the Hitler-Stalin pact and the fate of Jewish inmates.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, Buchenwald was reconceptualized. In 1991, an independent historical commission recommended an array of changes, including emphasizing the concentration camp and installing memorials for groups that had not yet been commemorated.
A memorial was also installed for the “special camp” that the Soviets set up from 1945 to 1950. The regime used this camp to intern Nazis, along with numerous perceived enemies who were not Nazis. An estimated 7,000 people who died there were buried in a forest near the camp, their graves kept a state secret. Now, Nazis are remembered among the victims in mass graves.
In the 1990s and 2000s, a new doctrine shaped Germany’s memory of the past: its special responsibility to Israel. During the process of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” or reckoning with the Nazi era, the robustness of the State of Israel became key to Germany’s rehabilitation.
“Just as the Holocaust did justify the birth of the State of Israel, in Germany’s eyes, part of the reason for the memorial is to commemorate the reason that Jews must never be attacked again — or, there must never be another genocide of Jews, in particular,” said Young.
Still, the Oath of Buchenwald has been invoked throughout the 2000s with a globalized urgency. During the 70th anniversary of liberation in 2015, survivor Bertrand Herz pleaded with young people around the world to defend human rights and fight racism. As long as repression persisted in the world, he said, the oath would not be fulfilled.
That commemoration came in the midst of terrorist attacks on Jews in Europe and a Syrian refugee crisis that changed the makeup of Germany. Beside Herz, the politician Martin Schulz said Buchenwald’s victims left behind a moral compass to navigate these challenges. Their memory obligated Europe to “fight the return of demons that we thought were overcome but which still show their ugly face — racism, anti-Semitism, ultra-nationalism and intolerance,” said Schulz.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald is not the only group to object to the Buchenwald memorial in recent years. Thuringia, the state housing the memorial, is a stronghold for the far-right Alternative for Germany party. The party received 38.6% of the vote there in last year’s federal elections, more than in any other German state.
The leader of the AfD in Thuringia, Bjoern Hoecke, has urged Germany to break with its culture of repentance for Nazism. He has called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame.” In 2021, AfD election posters in the Buchenwald parking lot advertised “courage to speak the truth.” The site has seen attacks from graffiti of swastikas to people cutting down trees planted in memory of survivors.
The AfD’s takeover of Thuringia in 2024 prompted an outcry from the International Committee Buchenwald-Dora and Kommados, founded in 1952 to preserve the memory of Buchenwald’s resistance.
“The ICBD thanks all the people in politics and civil society who fought fiercely in Thuringia and Saxony to defend our values — the values of the Buchenwald Oath,” the group said.
The AfD, predicted to surge in the region in September’s election, has presented an agenda to overhaul German life toward social conservatism and drive out immigrants and refugees.
Borchardt, the Kufiyas in Buchenwald organizer, said the memorial recently published a handout that placed images of a keffiyeh, a watermelon (a symbol of Palestinian solidarity) and the words “ceasefire now” next to swastikas, all shown as examples of antisemitism. She repudiated that comparison.
For her, there is no confusion in the Oath of Buchenwald, which she said “stands for itself.”
“It’s not very hard to understand that the current genocide happening in Palestine, the imprisonment of political prisoners — who are imprisoned, lots of them, without any court hearing or right to defend themselves — that this was probably meant by the Oath of Buchenwald, too,” said Borchardt.
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In Congress, a measure to tighten U.S.-Israel military ties sparks backlash on both sides of the aisle
Next year’s National Defense Authorization Act has made its way to the House floor, and has some Democrats and conservatives alike rallying against a provision that critics in Congress say would embroil the U.S. in unprecedented levels of military integration with Israel.
The measure, Section 224 of the House Armed Services Committee’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act, was advanced by Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and ranking member Adam Smith, D-Wash., as part of the committee’s annual defense bill. If enacted, it would establish a framework for expanded U.S.-Israel defense cooperation. An official designated by the Pentagon would be responsible for coordinating collaboration with Israel on technologies ranging from missile defense and drones to artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and biotechnology. The provision also encourages joint research projects, shared manufacturing arrangements, military training exercises, and closer cooperation between American and Israeli defense companies.
While the proposal has generated controversy in its own right, it is also fueling a broader conversation about what the U.S.-Israel defense relationship should look like after 2028, when the current 10-year memorandum of understanding governing American military assistance to Israel expires.
The United States has provided military assistance to Israel since 1960, but since 1998, the bulk of that aid has been directed by a series of such memoranda negotiated between the two countries. Congress must still approve the funds annually, but lawmakers have historically funded the agreements as negotiated.
But in recent months, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear that he does not wish to renew the 2016 MOU to its full extent, stating that he hopes to “taper off” U.S. aid over the next decade and wishes to focus instead on a more collaborative defense relationship.
His comments come as public support for Israel has declined in the United States and military aid has come under increasing political scrutiny, with many Democrats and some Republicans calling to reduce or cut off assistance. An April Pew Research Center survey found that 60% of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53% a year earlier. Negative views have risen among both Democrats and Republicans, particularly among younger generations. Today, 57% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats ages 18 to 49 have an unfavorable view according to the Pew survey.
Rachel Brandenburg, managing director and senior policy analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, said Israeli leaders are likely aware that future aid packages could face greater scrutiny from both Democrats and an increasingly isolationist wing of the Republican Party, a factor that helps explain the Israeli interest in reducing its reliance on U.S. aid. At the same time, she said, Israel’s increasingly sophisticated defense industry and strong economy have made it less reliant on American financing than in the past.
Against that backdrop, supporters of Section 224 argue that deeper cooperation could help lay the groundwork for a future relationship based on mutual benefits.
“The United States has more to gain by harnessing Israel’s defense tech ecosystem, their innovative capabilities,” Brandenburg said. “Their economy is strong, so there’s quite a bit that they could be buying with their own dollars.”
Michael O’Hanlon, the Chair in Defense and Strategy and director of research in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, told the Forward he believes the concerns that Section 224 would integrate the U.S.-Israel defense relationship to unprecedented levels are overblown. “My overall sense is that this would move the US-Israel relationship in the direction of AUKUS,” he said, referring to an existing trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
“In theory, it shouldn’t really be needed because collaboration is already close,” he explained. “In practice, this kind of provision might help cut through bureaucratic red tape and speed up collaborations. But on balance, I don’t expect huge change because the partnership is already very tight.”
Critics, however, see the proposal very differently.
Its opponents worry that if the U.S. and Israel move away from a military-aid relationship and toward a more collaborative partnership, large parts of the U.S.-Israel defense relationship will be harder to scrutinize or limit. Instead of debating aid packages, lawmakers could find themselves dealing with defense projects that are already built into Pentagon programs and contracts.
“It’s taking one program that’s become unpopular and turning it into another program that those who would disapprove of an intensified U.S.-Israeli defense relationship won’t really know about,” said Steven Simon, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute.
If combined with Israel’s stated desire to reduce its reliance on aid and other efforts to deepen defense cooperation, Simon says Section 224 could produce a relationship that is “much more integrated, immutable, and immune to political pressures than has ever existed.”
Similar concerns have been raised by lawmakers on the left.
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Monday that he intends to “strongly oppose” the provision, arguing that “Netanyahu is lobbying for Section 224 in the national defense bill, a provision that quietly expands U.S.-Israel military cooperation and weapons development with almost zero oversight.”
Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, also opposes the provision and introduced an amendment to strike Section 224 during committee markup, stating, “The American people are tired of the arrogance and insolence of Prime Minister Netanyahu telling America what we should do.”
On the right, political figures and commentators have framed the measure as a threat to American sovereignty.
Former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tied the provision to the recent reports of Israeli espionage against the U.S., stating on X, “The Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on the U.S. to the highest level and AIPAC is openly cheering Republicans for section 224 in the NDAA that merges our military with Israel’s military.” Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie — who this week held a hearing premised on the conspiracy theory that Israel intentionally killed U.S. soldiers on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War — pledged to offer a floor amendment to strike the section.
The debate has also been picked up by far-right commentators, including podcaster Alex Jones, who stated: “This is beyond treason. This is absolutely a foreign government merging with us. Israel is now the main threat to the existence of this country.”
Brandenburg pushed back on concerns that the proposal would weaken oversight. Rather than moving cooperation further from public view, the legislation calls for additional reporting to Congress and public disclosure of some forms of existing coordination between the two countries, Brandenburg noted.
“That’s new,” she said, “in the sense of adding the accountability and transparency to these elements of the relationship in ways that didn’t exist previously.”
She also asserts many critics have overstated the significance of Section 224, noting that many of the forms of cooperation described in the legislation — including collaboration on missile defense, cyber security and counter-drone technology — are already taking place.
“Those who want to counter the idea that Israel and the United States should be working together have exaggerated what this legislation is actually saying,” she said. “They are accusing it of things like integrating the U.S. and Israeli militaries, or subjugating the U.S. military to the Israeli military. None of that is actually called for in here.”
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Israel names a street after renowned Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever
The Israeli city of Netanya has renamed one of its streets Rechov Avrom Sutzkever (Abraham Sutzkever Street), after the renowned Yiddish poet and Vilna partisan.
The event on June 10 marked an important cultural moment, recognizing the legacy of a poet who devoted his life to Yiddish language and Jewish culture. During his lifetime, Sutzkever was celebrated not only for his poetry, but also for editing the storied Yiddish literary magazine Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) for 46 years. His work remains a fixture in the field of Yiddish literature today.
Sutzkever was born in 1913 in the shtetl of Smorgon, in what is now Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother Rayne moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder.
Sutzkever survived the Vilna Ghetto. He was a leader of the “Paper Brigade” that rescued Jewish cultural treasures from the Nazis and later became the only Jewish witness called by the Soviets to testify at the Nuremberg Trials.
His poetry chronicled his childhood in Siberia, his life in the Vilna ghetto and his escape to join the Jewish partisans. In 1947 he settled in Palestine, later Israel.
In Israel, he continued to create, publish and preserve Yiddish culture for decades. Yet, despite his immense influence around the world, he remained less known in Israel because he chose to write and fight for the Yiddish language rather than switch to Hebrew.
This is the first time a street in Israel has been named after him. Even Tel Aviv never did so, despite the fact that Sutzkever lived there for many years and the city was once a hotbed of Yiddish cultural activity, due to the influx of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who settled there after the Holocaust.
The street-naming ceremony was attended by the Mayor of Netanya, Avi Slama; representatives of the Lithuanian Embassy; public figures, artists, and members of the family, including Sutzkever’s granddaughter, Hadas Kalderon.
In the past decade, Kalderon has been instrumental in keeping Abraham Sutzkever’s memory alive, most notably through two documentary films: Ver Vet Blaybn? (Who Will Remain?) in 2021, and Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever in 2018.
Kalderon told me that she was very moved by Netanya’s decision to name the street after her grandfather, in a garden overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. “It was not only a tribute to Sutzkever himself, but also a powerful moment of recognition for Yiddish language and culture within the State of Israel,” she said.
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At the dawn of the World Cup, the story of the Jews who helped bring soccer to America
When the North American FIFA World Cup starts in Mexico City on June 11, the story will largely be told through the familiar lenses of Lionel Messi, the geography of the 48 participants and three hosts, and — because 75% of the games will be played there — the continuing rise of soccer in the United States. But there is another, less familiar story woven through the tournament: the long, strange and often overlooked history of Jews in North American soccer.
Mostly that’s been in the United States where players and owners have included a larger proportion of Jews than in Canada and Mexico. By my count, no Jewish players have represented Mexico, and only two Jewish men have represented Canada at senior international level and one of them, Tomer Chencinski, only did so once, in a friendly game where Canada lost 2-0 to Belarus in Doha. (Daniel Haber played 5 international games in his career).
For whatever reason, whether more closely linked to Europe, denied entry to other sports, or just arbiters of excellent taste, Jewish Americans have been at the forefront of soccer in the United States for over a century. The first American to play for a major European team was Eddy Hamel for Ajax Amsterdam in 1922. Hamel was a New York-born winger who became a star for Ajax in Amsterdam during the 1920s. An injury forced his retirement in the 1930s and, after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he was deported and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. His story remains one of the most tragic intersections of Jewish history and world football.
Jews also comprised the largest soccer crowd in America when 46,000 New Yorkers watched Hakoach Vienna play New York All Stars in 1926. That record stood for over 50 years but it also encouraged a number of members of the Hakoach team to emigrate to the US and start a New York team that was a crucial part of the American Soccer League of the era.
Later, in the 1970s, the National American Soccer League — the glitzy NASL — became a success thanks to the glamorous New York Cosmos. As head of Warner Communications, their CEO Steve Ross, born Rechnitz, was the person who brought Pele over and made the league the star-studded affair it became. After Herman Sarkowsky co-founded the Seattle Sounders, the continent was almost ready for football.
When the NASL faded and folded, soccer dwindled as a major sport in the United States. Alan Rothenberg saw an opportunity to revive the sport by hosting the 1994 World Cup and founding the MLS as a reset. As president of the U.S. Soccer Federation and the chief executive of the World Cup USA 1994 organizing committee, he made both of those happen and laid the foundations for the current shape of U.S. soccer.
The success of the MLS was not a foregone conclusion, though; indeed, it barely survived to the millennium. It was founded in 1993 but only started playing in 1996 — losing an estimated $350 million between its founding and 2004. The league initially turned to Don Garber, a former NFL executive, in August 1999 but even he couldn’t turn it around. By late 2001, it looked like the league would fold like its predecessors but it was able to secure new financing from owners Lamar Hunt, Philip Anschutz, and the Kraft family to take on more teams. Over the past 20 years, it has become robust, enjoying the general boom of all things soccer, riding the coattails of the English Premier League.
Without Robert Kraft and Anschutz, Major League Soccer might not exist today. During the league’s precarious early years, the two billionaire owners absorbed enormous losses to keep the fledgling competition alive. Kraft, the owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, was also a central figure in bringing the 2026 World Cup to North America. As chairman of the United Bid Committee, he played a crucial role in securing the tournament for the United States, Canada and Mexico.
If Kraft represents one side of the Jewish soccer story, Chuck Blazer represents another.
The larger-than-life American soccer executive helped expose corruption inside FIFA, serving as a key witness in the investigations that ultimately toppled some of the most powerful figures in world football. Yet Blazer was a product of the very system he later helped unravel. His spectacular rise and fall remains one of the strangest chapters in soccer history, a tale of luxury apartments, exotic pets and global corruption.
Unlike baseball, basketball or boxing, soccer never became known as a major arena of Jewish achievement in the United States. Perhaps that has been due to the historic lack of status for soccer in the country. Despite the excellence of Yael Averbuch West for the USWNT and a number of Jewish players for the USMNT including Jonathan Bornstein, Benny Feilhaber, Dan Calichman, DeAndre Yedlin, Kyle Beckerman and the maverick Yari Alnutt there have been no soccer equivalents of Sandy Koufax or Hank Greenberg.
The stalwart defender Jeff “Goose” Agoos came closest with 134 international appearances and six more for the U.S. soccer Olympic team. But playing with a mediocre USMNT, he enjoyed few legendary moments. In fact, arguably no professional moments outshone the bizarre story of his 1989 NCAA championship ring in his junior year, the season that he played in the Maccabiah. On Dec. 3 of that year, his Virginia Cavalier team (playing for future USMNT coach Bruce Arena) met the top ranked, undefeated Santa Clara team in a freezing cold stadium in Piscataway, N.J. The teams were still tied 1-1 after FOUR overtimes and, with no penalties on the books, they shared the spoils. It was the third time that two teams shared the championship and has never happened again.
This year’s USMNT squad does include the only Jewish player at this summer’s tournament — reserve goalkeeper Matt Turner. If, as coach Mauricio Pochettino plans, Turner exclusively warms the bench, he will take his place alongside many of America’s notable Jewish soccer figures who have furthered the game, even if not on the field.
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