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These Holocaust survivors were once classmates in a DP camp. They just reunited after 76 years.
(New York Jewish Week) — The last time Michael Epstein, 87, and Abe Rosenberg, 83, were in the same room, they were in Germany, studying in a classroom in a displaced person’s camp in Bavaria after the Holocaust.
On Sunday, March 19, the two men — along with Rosenberg’s older sister, Ada Gracin, who was also in the DP camp — reunited after 76 years. This time around, it was in the social hall of Young Israel of New Hyde Park, New York, where the pair embraced, said the Shehecheyanu prayer to mark their reunion and shared their survival stories with an in-person audience of about 100.
The reunion came together quickly, just a few weeks after the two men learned they lived less than 40 miles from one another — Rosenberg in New Hyde Park, on the eastern border of Queens, and Epstein in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Originally intended to be an intimate meeting between the two families, the reunion soon broadened to a festive brunch and celebration open to the public.
“The Torah says it’s a mitzvah to relate what happened to us,” Rosenberg said. “Hitler’s goal was to destroy Yiddishkeit, Judaism. When we gather here, we are involved in a victory over him.”
Michael Epstein, Abe Rosenberg and Ada Gracin, left to right, stand together for the first time in 76 years after meeting as children living in a displaced person’s camp after the Holocaust. (Julia Gergely)
The two were brought together by a sharp-eyed videographer. In February, Epstein participated in an interview at a Jewish day school in Edison, New Jersey as part of the “Names Not Numbers” oral history project, which is dedicated to preserving the memories of Holocaust survivors and ensuring their legacies live on in future generations. As part of the project, high school students interview survivors about their experiences, which are filmed and made into mini-documentaries.
During the interview, Epstein presented a photograph of himself as a 7-year-old in “cheder” or elementary school at Feldafing, an all-Jewish displaced person’s camp near Munich, where he lived from 1945 to 1949.
As it happens, the videographer that day recognized the photograph. He had seen the same one during an interview he had filmed the prior year with another survivor — Rosenberg — who was living in Queens. When Epstein and his two daughters learned this, they knew they had to arrange a meeting.
“This is the first time I know of a reunion happening between survivors as a result of our program,” Daniel Mayer, a Names Not Numbers board member, told the New York Jewish Week.
As for Rosenberg, when he got the call from Epstein, “it just concretized the fact that the whole experience [of Feldafing] wasn’t a dream,” he said.
Though the two men did not specifically remember each other — Rosenberg was 8 and Epstein and Gracin were 11 at the time of the picture, taken in 1947 — at the event, they acutely recalled their lives at the DP camp.
Rosenberg and Epstein point themselves out in the picture of their childhood classroom, taken in 1947. (Julia Gergely)
Rosenberg, for example, remembers living in Barrack Nine with his sister and parents. During the war, the Nazis used Feldafing as a training ground for Hitler Youth. In Feldafing, like at other Jewish DP camps, survivors waiting for a country that would taken them in opened Jewish schools, started newspapers, composed music and began to rebuild their identities.
“We were hoping to go to Palestine, to Eretz Yisroel — that was our dream,” Rosenberg said. “It was not available to us” under the British Mandate. “Unfortunately, the doors of the whole world were closed to us.”
“So what did we do?” he continued. “We started to build on Jewish life again.”
On Sunday, as the assembled crowd noshed on bagels, lox and egg salad — and other participants joined via Zoom from California, Florida, New Jersey and Canada — Epstein, Rosenberg and Gracin shared their experiences with those in attendance.
First to speak was Epstein, who brought with him a scrapbook of pictures from his childhood. Epstein was born in Łódź, Poland, in 1935, which his family was forced to flee when Germany invaded in 1939. They went to Bialystok, which soon fell under the control of the Russians, who transported Poles and Jews to labor camps in Siberia via cattle cars. After spending time at a gulag camp in Siberia, Epstein and his family were moved to another in Uzbekistan.
When the war ended, Epstein and his parents returned to Łódź, only to find that their entire extended family had been killed and a Polish family was living in their apartment. With nothing left for them in Poland, they left for Feldafing. They lived there until they could find a way to get to the United States, where they eventually arrived in 1945.
Epstein, who is known as Zayde to his 11 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren — many of whom were in the room — left the crowd with a message to invest in Jewish education, and to work to uphold democracy. “We live in ‘di Goldene Medine’ (the Golden Land),” he said. “We thought, in Europe, that meant there was gold on the street. There’s no gold on the street but there is gold on paper in our Constitution, and in our Constitution there is still mining to do. There is still work to be done to make our Constitution’s morals realistic.”
The family of Michael Epstein gathered from New York and New Jersey to celebrate his life story. Epstein, second from the right in the front row, is holding one of his five great-grandchildren. (Julia Gergely)
Rosenberg and Gracin, who spoke next, were also from Łódź. Gracin, born Ada Rosen in 1935, recalled wearing the mandated yellow Jewish star patch on her clothing as a 4-year-old. Her mother was pregnant with her brother when they left Poland for Soviet Georgia, a journey she said was “fraught with peril,” as they were stopped multiple times by the Gestapo. The family lived in Georgia for six years and “fear was a constant.”
When the war ended, the family also returned to Łódź to look for surviving family members — there were none. They connected with the Jewish Agency and HIAS, which helped them get to Feldafing in 1945.
There, “we were referred to as ‘she’arit hapletah,’ the surviving remnants,” Gracin said. “I refer to this period in my life as ‘life reborn,’ as I lost my childhood prior to this. Although we lacked many things, I never felt deprived. The survivors cherished each child as if it were their own. We were precious jewels to them, as they had lost their own children.”
“For the first time in my life, I went to school, made friends, played and laughed,” she added. “I was a happy 9 year old.”
Gracin, her brother and her parents arrived in New York Harbor on April 6, 1949. “At last we were free of fear, free to live and practice our religion and thrive,” she said. “I feel blessed to have been given this chapter in my life and my revenge to Hitler is that I was blessed with three children and six grandchildren.” Two of Gracin’s children and four of her grandchildren were at the event.
In his remarks, Rosenberg recalled the heroism of the parents, teachers and rabbis in Feldafing, many of whom had lost their entire families but made it their mission to educate the few children who made it to the camp. “They were the heroes,” Rosenberg said. “They deserve the accolades — we were kids.” It is in their honor and memory that Rosenberg continued to share his story throughout his life, he said.
Though Epstein and Rosenberg did not stay in touch upon their respective arrivals to the United States, their lives continued to follow similar paths. Both went on to study engineering at the City College of New York and for a time both worked at Bendix Corporation, though in different departments — Epstein in the space program and Rosenberg on the supersonic transport team.
Congregants and community members brunched on bagels and listened to the survival stories in the social hall of Young Israel of New Hyde Park. (Julia Gergely)
Chuck Waxman, a docent at the Museum of Jewish Heritage who moderated the discussion, told the New York Jewish Week he was “blown away” by the event — he said he expected less than half the room to be filled.
But full it was, with family, friends, community members and other survivors who wanted to be a part of the miracle — both the miracle that happened in Feldafing and the miracle of the reunion in Queens.
The event also included speeches from Mayer Waxman, executive director of Queens JCC and Torah commentaries from Lawrence Teitelman, the rabbi of Young Israel of New Hyde Park, where Rosenberg is a member, and Benjamin Yudin, the rabbi of Congregation Shomrei Torah in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, where Epstein is a member.
At the close of the event, the lyrics of “Zog nit keynmol,” the “Song of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising” — which was sung by Jewish partisan groups around Eastern Europe — were passed in sheets around the room. Rosenberg heartily led everyone in Yiddish.
“We plan to meet again in another 76 years,” Rosenberg joked to the New York Jewish Week. “Everyone is invited.”
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Pro-Israel Providence Mayor Brett Smiley loses to DSA pro-Palestinian challenger
(JTA) — The pro-Israel mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, lost his reelection campaign Wednesday to a progressive pro-Palestinian challenger in the latest demonstration of how Israel politics are seeping into local U.S. elections.
Incumbent Brett Smiley, who converted to Judaism in 2024 while in office, was bested by state Sen. David Morales in the Democratic primary in this deep blue city. Morales, a democratic socialist, carried endorsements from leading progressives, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna. With 99% of ballots counted, Morales had garnered 52.5% of the vote to Smiley’s 47.5%.
During the campaign, pro-Smiley flyers were defaced with Hitler mustaches and devil horns, acts which his opponent condemned.
The city’s Democratic primary also serves as a preview for a significant general election vote on divestment. In November, Providence will become the largest American city to cast a vote on a measure that, despite not naming Israel directly, could stop the city from investing in companies linked to Israel.
Morales supports the binding divestment vote, while Smiley and local Jewish and pro-Israel groups have opposed it. The mayor called the ordinance “both unenforceable and likely in violation of existing state law” in a statement to Jewish Insider.
During the campaign, Morales criticized Smiley for participating in a mayoral summit run by the Combat Antisemitism Movement, in which Smiley serves in a leadership capacity. Morales accused the group of suppressing pro-Palestinian speech and not being transparent about its funders.
The Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative, which promotes business ties between the state and Israel, opposes both the ballot initiative and Morales. Avi Nevel, the group’s founder, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency prior to the primary that Morales was “fueled by pro-Palestinians and Israeli haters.”
It was a night of overthrowing incumbents in the state, as Rhode Island’s sitting governor also lost his primary to an intra-party challenger. That race, however, did not pivot on Israel: Gov. Daniel McKee’s popularity in the state has sunk following a scandal involving the closure of a major bridge.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Attacks on Mamdani test Jewish efforts to confront Islamophobia as 9/11 anniversary nears
The image was vintage AI slopcraft: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his trademark black suit, holding a sealed cardboard package labeled 9/11 MEMORIAL.
“Honey,” the cartoon Mamdani calls, “where’s my box cutter?”
The cartoon, shared Sunday on social media by the Orthodox Jewish comedy account Heimish Humor and referencing the weapon used in the 9/11 hijackings, reflected an increasingly caustic attitude toward Mamdani, Muslim elected officials and Islam itself in some Jewish spaces as the 25th anniversary of the attacks approaches — with much of the charged rhetoric tied to Sept. 11.
Jewish groups that staged an anti-Mamdani protest in downtown Manhattan Tuesday invoked the mayor’s religion on a flyer for the event, which was sponsored by the Lawfare Project, the Israeli-American Council and a slew of other Jewish groups. The flyer depicted Mamdani with his eyes blotted out and read, “Islamist ideology was not defeated. It was normalized. In 2001 they needed planes. Today the DSA hands them a platform.” One speaker at the event said Mamdani believed law enforcement was “haram,” Arabic for forbidden.
To some who saw it, the poster — and many of the Jewish attacks against Mamdani — contained anti-Muslim dog whistling, if not downright Islamophobia.
“This is coded language to smear all Muslim leaders as terrorists to hold them accountable for 9/11,” said Amy Spitalnick, chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “The same way that we as a community rightfully push back when we hear people using ‘Zionist’ as a pejorative — that’s what’s happening here. We should be calling it out if we expect people to call it out when it happens to us.”
The wave of antagonism in the Jewish community comes amid a broader Republican backlash to high-profile victories for Muslim elected leaders. Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for New York governor, called incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is Catholic, “tone deaf” for wearing a hijab at a mosque so close to the 9/11 anniversary. Islamophobic posts targeting Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, surfaced by The Washington Post, found copious 9/11 references.
But no politician has attracted as much vitriol as Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor. His antagonism toward the Israeli government and his leftist politics have made him a target for many pro-Israel New Yorkers. Some have used his religion as a cudgel in joining calls for him to skip Friday’s memorial service at Ground Zero.
Spitalnick said such rhetoric was coming from a small, non-representative portion of the Jewish world that wanted to advance a conservative political agenda — but that Jews “should be concerned that this is ostensibly being done in our name.”
“We can be concerned for multiple reasons,” she added. “One, bigotry is wrong regardless, and two, it actually makes our work to fight the real and rising antisemitism our community is facing that much harder.”
Yet posts like the cartoon also revealed the resistance to growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Jewish spaces. Heimish Humor’s post drew a number of critical replies from Jewish accounts. “Incredibly racist, you should delete this,” wrote one. “Not funny,” said another. As anti-Muslim rhetoric escalates, Jewish voices are among those fighting hardest to combat it.
Echoes of history
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the rise in Islamophobic rhetoric has resurfaced old memories of its aftermath.
The end of 2001 was a dangerous time for Muslim Americans, who faced being conflated with the Al Qaeda terrorists who perpetrated the hijackings. Despite President George W. Bush’s admonition that the attacks were committed by extremists who did not represent the religion, anti-Muslim violence spiked across the U.S. A number of mosques were burned in arson fires, and eight Arabs or Muslims were killed in the three months following 9/11 in what some believed to be Islamophobic murders.
Relations between Jewish and Muslim American communities, already strained by the Second Intifada, bottomed out in some places after 9/11. But in the ensuing years, Jewish-Muslim relations took a surprising turn. By 2006, news media were describing an “unprecedented swell of interfaith activities” — including dialogue groups, “peace walks” and joint Israel trips — even as agreement on Middle East politics remained elusive.
And while the 2010 proposal for a mosque and Muslim community center at Ground Zero reignited some old tensions — with the Anti-Defamation League headlining the opposition — broader trends of Muslim-Jewish mutual aid held: When a St. Louis Jewish cemetery was defaced in 2017, Muslim groups raised tens of thousands of dollars to repair it. Jewish groups anchored the opposition to President Donald Trump’s 2017 immigration ban targeting Muslim countries. And in 2021, the ADL apologized for its earlier stance on the mosque near Ground Zero.
The day everything changed
The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, however, caused many Jewish-Muslim partnerships to collapse. Israel’s response in Gaza only deepened resentments, as opposition to the war on college campuses and in public protests coincided with an increase in antisemitic incidents.
Then in 2025, Mamdani rode into office on the back of the pro-Palestinian movement. Mamdani vowed to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was reluctant to disavow the slogan “globalize the intifada” — a phrase many see as calling for violence against Jews. Though Mamdani has repeatedly condemned antisemitic violence in the city, some Jewish New Yorkers say his anti-Israel invective has nevertheless exacerbated a dangerous environment for the city’s Jews.
“The DSA is a movement of hate, pro-terror anti-American and anti-minority ideology,” said Brooke Goldstein, the founding director of the Lawfare Project, which organized Tuesday’s anti-Mamdani protest. She said it was the DSA and the mayor who were promoting division, extremism and racism — not groups like hers, who were holding the mayor accountable.
The prominence of the Democratic Socialists of America is one key difference between today’s political environment and that of late 2001.
But the environment around Israel has also changed. “The response to 9/11, including from most Jewish organizations, was an American response,” said Jonathan Jacoby, president of the Nexus Project, a nonprofit that combats antisemitism — whereas the response to Mamdani today, he said, is “coming from a quote-unquote ‘pro-Israel’ space.”
Jacoby said Mamdani’s election in particular had elicited an unprecedented level of panic among some pro-Israel groups. He pointed to the ADL’s Mamdani Monitor as an example, saying that there was a throughline between the efforts to undermine his candidacy and the calls for him to not attend the 9/11 ceremony. (The ADL has not commented on whether Mamdani should participate, and declined to comment for this story.)
Some of the people who have pushed back against the anti-Mamdani rhetoric consider themselves among the mayor’s critics.
“I’m not happy with the atmosphere he’s brought into New York City since being elected,” Avital Levene, a Jewish influencer who called the Mamdani cartoon “not funny,” said in an interview. “However, he’s stood with the Jewish people since taking office. People literally call him a terrorist and use terms like ‘yemach shemo’ (may his name be erased). There’s a way to criticize someone’s political views without using racist slurs.”
Like Levene and Spitalnick, Jacoby said he disagreed with some of the mayor’s beliefs about Israel. But he said those disagreements “pale in the face of the danger of authoritarianism, neo-fascism and white nationalism in this country.”
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Argentine court orders return of Nazi-looted painting to Jewish collector’s heir
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES – A Dutch journalist hunting for art treasures belonging to an Amsterdam Jewish art dealer spent years trying to get answers from Patricia Kadgien, the daughter of the Nazi financier who had made off with some of them, with no luck. So last year he went to her house in Mar del Plata, a resort city on Argentina’s Atlantic coast.
No one was home, but the journalist, Peter Schouten, noticed a “for sale” sign outside the property from Robles Casas & Campos, a local real estate agency.
Schoten went to the agency’s website, where the house was listed for $265,000. As he scrolled through the listing, he noticed something in a photograph of the living room. Schouten recognized the painting hanging above a sofa: “Portrait of a Lady,” most likely the work of the 18th-century northern Italian painter known as Il Pitocchetto.
On Friday, Argentine federal judge Santiago Inchausti authorized the restitution of “Portrait of a Lady,” which belonged to the collection of Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, to his daughter-in-law and sole heir, Marei von Saher.
“The property had been listed for sale on a real estate agency’s website, and one of the photographs showed a painting in the living room that matched one of the works from Goudstikker’s collection that had been sought for years,” Inchausti wrote in his ruling.
Goudstikker was one of Holland’s most prominent Jewish art dealers before World War II. In 1940, he fled the Nazi-occupied Netherlands with his wife and son, carrying a black notebook listing some 1,400 artworks. After his death during the voyage, his widow preserved it, and the notebook later became key evidence in the family’s restitution efforts.
His gallery and collection fell under Nazi control. Hermann Goering, a powerful deputy to Adolf Hitler, acquired hundreds of paintings from Goudstikker’s collection in a forced sale that Dutch authorities later determined was directly linked to Nazi persecution.
Herberto Robinson, von Saher’s lawyer who specializes in estate planning and asset protection, described what happened after Schoten’s sleuthing in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“At that point, the journalist contacted attorney Yael Weitz in Freedman Normand Friedland of New York where she specializes in art and cultural property law,” he said “She then contacted us and asked us to take on the case. The family’s sole intention was to recover the painting. They were not interested in pursuing those who had possessed it or in seeking financial compensation, they wanted the artwork returned.”
Kadgien is the daughter of Friedrich Kadgien, a German financial official who worked for the Nazi regime and later escaped to South America. The elder Kadgien, who had close ties to Goering, fled Germany in 1945 to Switzerland, eventually making his way to Argentina, where he started a business and raised a family. He died in 1978.
Kadgien and her husband at first did not cooperate. The realtor’s listing was removed after the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad published its report. Argentine authorities then searched the property on Aug. 26, 2025, but the painting had been removed and replaced with another artwork, while an outline matching its dimensions remained visible on the wall.
Kadgien and her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, were placed under house arrest for 72 hours while authorities searched the family’s other properties. They subsequently turned the artwork over to federal prosecutors and were charged with aggravated concealment.
Experts from Argentina’s National Academy of Fine Arts attributed the work to Giacomo Antonio Melchiorre Ceruti, known as Il Pitocchetto, and valued it at approximately €250,000. The local and national Jewish communities took a keen interest in the case.
“We are very pleased and hope this marks the beginning of many more restitutions, as we know there are undoubtedly other works out there that rightfully belong to families who suffered this tragic fate,” Clauda Beatriz Malamud, the president of Sociedad Union Israelita Marplatense, the local Jewish community body, told JTA.
Under an agreement Inchausti approved, the criminal proceedings against the couple were suspended for two years, subject to a set of conditions. They irrevocably renounce any right or claim to the artwork, clearing the way for its restitution. The painting will remain in the custody of Argentina’s Supreme Court until the restitution is carried out. They also agreed to pay 4.8 million Argentine pesos — approximately $3,180 — in 24 monthly installments to the support association of Mar del Plata’s Interzonal Specialized Maternal and Child Hospital.
According to well-placed sources at the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum, von Saher has expressed interest in lending the painting to the museum for a temporary exhibition, possibly for one or two years. The exhibition would help raise awareness of the systematic theft of Jewish-owned art under the Nazi regime and the continuing international effort to return such works to their rightful owners. No final agreement about this has been announced.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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