Just as a new flotilla purportedly carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza set sail Sunday from Barcelona, new allegations emerged that a senior figure on last year’s voyage — which included pro-Palestinian climate activist Greta Thunberg — was involved in a sex scandal with multiple activists aboard the ship, along with claims of financial misconduct tied to the same network.

According to a statement initially circulated internally and then republished on X, a senior organizer from the Global Sumud Flotilla’s steering committee, a member referred to only as “BL,” was involved in sexual misconduct with multiple fellow activists. 

“Not one person. Not Two. Three different individuals,” the statement from the Heart of Falastin admin team said, adding that BL’s conduct was jeopardizing the flotilla’s “sacred” mission. 

“Let’s be clear about something. We don’t care what anyone does in their private time,” the statement said, but added that such conduct on “a boat heading to Gaza, a space that should be sacred, focused, and disciplined … is a red line” and a “clear violation of ethics and power.”

Such behavior was “an abuse of power, creat[ing] a toxic environment [that] compromises the integrity of the entire mission,” the English and Arabic statement read. 

GAZA FLOTILLA SEX SCANDAL EXPOSED
No, his is not the “Love Boat”, this is a “human Rights Flotilla” aimed at freeing the Gaza People.
But things got out of hand and the senior leader was forced to make a statement:
“We do not care what anyone does in their private time… But… pic.twitter.com/PvNPtFJoqO

— Mossad Commentary (@MOSSADil) April 13, 2026

The Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) leadership was informed more than six months ago, the statement said, but the individual remained on the steering committee, the movement’s highest governing body, with no investigation opened and no public statement acknowledging the alleged violation.

“We gave them time. We gave them every opportunity to do the right thing. They refused,” it said. 

Last year’s voyage drew significant attention due to the participation of Thunberg, former Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau, and European Parliament member Rima Hassan, and ended with activists detained by Israeli authorities after attempting to breach the naval blockade of Gaza. Videos released by Thunberg and other activists in one of the earlier voyages over the summer described their detention as a “kidnapping,” while footage published by the Israel Defense Forces showed Thunberg eating sandwiches given to her by troops. 

The flotilla also faced criticism over the small quantity of aid onboard. Both Israel and Italy offered to transfer the supplies into Gaza through existing channels to avoid confrontation, but the proposals were rejected by the GSF.

According to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, the 42 vessels in the September flotilla carried roughly two tons of aid, which it said at the time was “less than one-tenth of a single aid truck,” noting that about 300 trucks entered Gaza each day. The ministry also dubbed the convoy a “selfie yacht of celebrities.”

The New York Times and other news sites reported claims from GSF participants of explosions from Israeli attack drones. “We believe these drones are intended to intimidate, potentially gathering intelligence for Israel,” the Times cited the group as saying, adding that it “suggested ‘Israel and its allies’ were involved.”

But the drone attack allegations were later challenged by video footage that appeared to show an activist misfiring a flare.

The latest flotilla has been described as the largest to date, with 39 vessels departing from Barcelona and additional participants expected to join. Its launch coincides with a fragile two-week ceasefire with Iran.

Levi Buxbaum boarded the S.S. St. Louis on May 13, 1939, both relieved and hopeful. Relieved to be leaving Nazi Germany behind, hopeful that he would soon reunite with his daughters. But 14 days later, when the ship arrived in Havana, most of its passengers were denied entry.

Refused safe harbor in Cuba, the United States and Canada, the refugees were forced to return to Europe. That June, Buxbaum and 222 other passengers disembarked in France. Discouraged but undeterred, he clung to the hope that he would eventually secure a visa to America.

It was not to be. Sometime between Nov. 6 and Nov. 8, 1942, Buxbaum died aboard a transport bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Until recently, that was all Bonnie Elkaim knew about her great-grandfather.

Now, thanks to the Center for Jewish History’s newly launched initiative, “Histories and Mysteries,” Elkaim knows what happened between Buxbaum’s arrival in France in 1939 and his death three years later. The project helps families investigate Holocaust-era cold cases through crowdsourced genealogy, expert archival research and community collaboration.

“I’m extremely grateful that I filled in some of the pieces. I didn’t want my great-grandfather to just be a statistic,” Elkaim, 58, told me in a Zoom interview.

The initiative was made possible by a nearly $300,000 grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or the Claims Conference. Since the project was launched in January, genealogists at CJH have received nearly 50 inquiries from the United States, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and have begun work on 11 cases.

“This project brings together passed-down family stories and the irreplaceable truth found in the archive. By taking part in this work, each person helps restore histories stolen in the Holocaust and gives families a chance to reclaim pieces of their past,” said Jenny Rappaport, head genealogist at the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute.

Elkaim’s story will be the first shared publicly, released in weekly social media posts through July 31.

Miriam Frankel, CJH’s director of social media, said she hopes the project’s collaborative nature will resonate with audiences.

“What I love about the project is the communal aspect and being able to steward these stories into the digital world and affirm that they matter,” Frankel said.

The idea for the project grew out of the family history of Ilana Rosenbluth, CJH’s communications director.

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Rosenbluth’s father, then four years old, was living with his parents in eastern Poland. By month’s end, the country had been divided between Germany and the Soviet Union.

Rosenbluth’s family fled eastward, moving from Lvov to Siberia and eventually Uzbekistan, where food was scarce and disease rampant. During that time, her grandmother gave birth to a daughter, Lucia, known as Lucy, who later died of starvation.

In 1943, desperate to support his family, Rosenbluth’s grandfather boarded a train carrying bolts of fabric and disappeared.

“There are varying accounts of what happened to him, but the truth is my family has never had closure,” Rosenbluth said, adding that this initiative may be the last chance for us, and people like us to find answers.

As the number of living witnesses declines, preserving Holocaust history has taken on new urgency, said Gideon Taylor, president of the Claims Conference.

“We’re at a unique moment in time in terms of Holocaust memory and education. Fewer and fewer people have direct knowledge of it,” Taylor said.

A 2020 Claims Conference survey found that 63% of Americans do not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and nearly half cannot name a single one of the more than 400,000 camps and ghettos that existed across Europe.

Elkaim, a retired New York City teacher, says she first learned about the Holocaust when she was nine years old.

“I only knew a few limited facts. I knew my grandparents had survived and my great-grandfather hadn’t. My grandmother felt a lot of survivor guilt and didn’t talk about it, and people didn’t ask questions then,” she said.

Now an educator and guide at CJH’s Anne Frank exhibition, Elkaim spent years searching for fragments of information that might transform her great-grandfather from an abstraction into a living, breathing person.

“I wanted to feel a connection with him,” she said.

When Rappaport received Elkaim’s inquiry, she immediately began contacting archivists in Germany and France. She also worked with CJH partner organizations, including the Leo Baeck Institute and YIVO, which held a census record from the General Union of French Israelites. The document placed Buxbaum in Vienne, France, between 1941 and 1942 and showed that he was unemployed. Rappaport also combed databases such as Ancestry.com, which contains extensive German vital records.

“Sometimes a single clue can rewrite an entire family story,” Rappaport said.

In Elkaim’s case, it was three clues.

The first breakthrough was the death record of Elkaim’s great-grandmother, Pauline Rothschild Buxbaum, which confirmed that he was in Kassel, Germany, on March 24, 1939.

Next came his 1876 German birth record, which verified his identity across multiple French documents.

Finally, a typed marriage record for Levi Buxbaum and Pauline Rothschild further confirmed the timeline, placing him definitively in Germany shortly before his flight from Nazi persecution.

Piece by piece, Rappaport reconstructed what followed.

In September 1939, Buxbaum was interned as an “enemy alien” at Camp du Ruchard, a former convalescence hospital for Belgian soldiers after World War I. He lived as a refugee for four years before being arrested and transferred to the Drancy internment camp. All the while he never stopped trying to get to America.

The last document bearing his name appears on Transport 42 from Drancy to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

“He either died on the transport or immediately after arriving. There’s no way to know exactly. But I admire him so much and how hard he fought to survive,” Elkaim said.

 

The post A chance for the descendants of Holocaust victims to reclaim a piece of the past appeared first on The Forward.

The first academic study comparing the experience of Jewish students on college campuses to that of other minority groups found that Jews and other marginalized populations, including Black and Muslim students, face comparable levels of discrimination.

The findings were part of a national survey involving thousands of respondents focused on antisemitism that also polled student attitudes toward other identity groups.

Nearly half of Jewish students said they had experienced at least one antisemitic incident during the current academic year — mostly seeing offensive graffiti or posters — but when it came to the overall campus climate Jews were slightly less likely than Muslims, and slightly more likely than Black students, to say that their campus was a hostile environment.

“Everybody is walking around with a chip on their shoulder,” said Leonard Saxe, director of the Cohen Center of Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, which produced the study released Tuesday. “Addressing prejudice toward protected groups is perhaps seen as a zero- sum game: ‘If we pay attention to Black students that’s taking away from what we can do for Jewish students, but paying attention to Jewish students means not paying attention to Muslim students.’”

While a flurry of research about campus antisemitism followed the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel and the college protests of the Gaza war that followed, few have sought to determine whether Jews are facing more or less discrimination than other students.

But the Brandeis study tracks with a less scientific study commissioned by the antisemitism task force at Columbia University in which high levels of both Jewish and Muslim students said they had felt endangered on campus amid protests related to the Gaza war.

In the Brandeis report, Jewish students were most likely to express concern related to traditional antisemitic stereotypes (62%) and antisemitism from the political right (60%) while fewer said they were worried about antisemitism related to Israel (45%) or coming from the left (also 45%).

When it came to college students overall, 9% showed a pattern of hostility toward Jews, meaning they were likely to agree with a series of antisemitic statements, compared to 17% who exhibited what researchers called “anti-Black resentment.”

Muslim, Black and Hispanic students, and those who identified as liberal or moderate, were the most likely to agree with negative statements about Jews, while white, Muslim and conservative students were most likely to agree with anti-Black views.

“It means that we need to target some of our interventions — educational interventions — to these groups if we want to have effects,” Saxe said. “If you only engage the Caucasian students, you’re not going to be addressing the problem.”

Jewish students expressed some of the lowest levels of prejudice toward other groups, according to the study, but 18% expressed “anti-Black resentment” while 3% were categorized as expressing hostility toward Jews.

The report also found that strident hostility toward Israel — opposing Israel’s “right to exist” and avoiding peers who support a Jewish state in Israel — did not neatly correlate to holding antisemitic views.

Half of “extremely liberal” students agreed with those statements about Israel but overall the very liberal population was least likely to express a pattern of hostility toward Jewish students. Very few moderate or conservative students expressed those negative views about Israel, but both groups were more likely to agree with anti-Jewish statements.

The 14% of Jewish students who agreed with the anti-Israel statements was similar to the number of students from other backgrounds who did.

The study was conducted during the fall semester last year. Researchers polled 3,989 undergraduate students at four-year colleges and universities in the U.S. through an online survey fielded by Generation Lab that included an oversample of 743 Jewish students.

The post Jews and other minorities face similar levels of campus hostility, Brandeis survey finds appeared first on The Forward.