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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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Ladino-speaking pirates, genies and grumpy demon cats: PJ Library expands bookshelves with Sephardic stories
In 1940s Baghdad, a little girl named Na’ima tries desperately to stay awake all night for Shavuot. In wartime Libya, a young boy embarks on a supernatural quest to find a lost city. In 19th-century Morocco, a father’s frustration with his son’s teacher leads him to a rabbinical court.
Until recently, none of those stories would have been likely candidates for mainstream American Jewish children’s books. Now, they are among the first titles slated for publication through PJ Library’s Sephardic Stories Initiative, a fellowship launched in 2024 to support authors writing tales that reflect Sephardic, Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jewish traditions.
For more than two decades, PJ Library has mailed free Jewish children’s books to families around the world. Today, it distributes roughly 670,000 books monthly in more than 40 countries. According to Alisa Koyrakh, the organization’s director of books, those stories have historically reflected a familiar slice of Jewish life.
“There are just a lot of Ashkenormative stories out there—a lot of stories about Yiddish, the Lower East Side and immigration from Eastern Europe,” Koyrakh said. “Those are all really important stories. But we saw gaps. It was kind of obvious.”
The Sephardic Stories Initiative intends to fill those gaps, bringing together Sephardic and Mizrahi writers for a year of workshops, editorial mentorship and critique from their peers.
Arnon Z. Shorr, whose first foray into children’s literature was a fiction book about Ladino-speaking Jewish pirates (yes, those were actually a thing), described his forthcoming graphic novel, Pedahzur and the Quest for the Hidden City, as a supernatural adventure set in Libya in the mid-1940s.
Knowing 1940s Libya is more often associated with Fascist persecution of Jews in North Africa—not talking cats and magical quests – Shorr laughed.
“I just got a kick out of it because it’s so not what anybody ever expects,” he said.
For Shorr, it was important to write a story connected to his family’s Libyan heritage. He spent hours digging into North African Jewish folklore to draw inspiration.
“There are historians and academics who do fantastic work looking into these things,” he said. “But their work doesn’t necessarily get read by 10-year-olds. I try to channel some of that into a fun genre—a desert adventure with genies and grumpy demon cats.”
Israeli author Rinat Hadad Siegel also found inspiration in an unlikely place: the Farhud, the violent pogrom that erupted in Baghdad during Shavuot in 1941, killing scores of Jews.
Her book, Na’ima’s Shavuot Eve, follows a little girl determined to stay awake all night alongside the adults celebrating the holiday that marks when God gave the Torah to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai.
For Siegel, writing about a place she has never been to —and cannot visit—posed a challenge. Once home to one of the world’s oldest and largest Jewish communities, Iraq today is believed to have only a handful of Jews remaining, and travel there by Israelis like Siegel is effectively impossible.
She worked to piece together the Baghdad her family inhabited by interviewing relatives —including an aunt who survived the Farhud—and digging through Iraqi Jewish archives.
“I would go to different libraries and find books about it, and you can see the amount of dust,” she said. “Nobody has touched them for years.”
Although the book doesn’t mention the Farhud directly, it contains subtle nods to the tragedy, including an illustration of a memorial for family members who perished and decorative amulets that Iraqi Jewish children typically wore on Shavuot.
Siegel hopes children will connect with the story’s universal moments—wanting to stay up all night with the grown-ups—as well as its distinctly Iraqi Jewish setting, from sleeping on rooftops overlooking the Tigris River on warm nights to eating kahi, a flaky Iraqi pastry traditionally served on Shavuot.
But expanding the offerings of Jewish children’s literature beyond Ashkenazi narratives is not merely a creative endeavor. It’s also a way to broaden the public conception of Jewish identity at a challenging time, Shorr said.
According to an analysis of the Publishers Marketplace database, there was a 76% decrease in fictional book deal announcements that mentioned Jews, Judaism or Israel between 2023 and 2024. By 2026, there was an 82% decline.
A July report by PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free expression and writers’ rights, found that many Jewish authors have faced challenges publishing openly Jewish work since Oct. 7. Many of the authors interviewed for that report cited publishers’ fears of boycotts of Jewish or Israeli stories, which made getting their work published challenging.
“The narrow view that we get of who Jews are and what Judaism is about through Hollywood, mass entertainment—whatever—leaves too much room for people to invent more of the story for themselves,” Shorr said. “I think that becomes very dangerous for us.”
Koyrakh said getting Jewish children’s books with unfamiliar settings and storylines published by major publishing houses has long been a challenge.
“It’s much easier to get a Hanukkah book published by a major publishing house because that’s an easy story for publishers to know how to sell, put in the market and recognize. But we know there’s so much more to Jewish life than Hanukkah.”
The four inaugural books of the Sephardic Stories Initiative will be published by PJ Library and distributed to the Jewish families it serves. They include Na’ima’s Shavuot Eve, Pedahzur and the Quest for the Hidden City, Shai’s Lesson, set in 19th-century Morocco, and Signs of Magic, which takes place in mid-19th-century Tiberias.
Shorr hopes their publication will inspire the next generation of Jewish storytellers.
“I didn’t want to commit my career to backing myself into somebody else’s tale,” he said. “Because I hadn’t ever seen a story about anybody like me, I couldn’t imagine it.” Looking back, he said, “The lack of mirrors meant it took much longer for me to start creating mirrors of my own.”
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Netanyahu and Lapid vie for a critical title: Who is Israel’s most adept U.S. whisperer?
(JTA) — WASHINGTON – Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Yair Lapid, the leader of his opposition, are in Washington, ostensibly to attend the funeral of one of the staunchest pro-Israel American politicians, Lindsey Graham.
They are also, as Lapid made clear in an appearance Monday at the influential Atlantic Council think tank, launching a bruising election campaign and are intensely seeking the favor of a constituent who does not vote in Israel on Oct. 27: President Donald Trump.
Or more broadly, the favor of Americans.
Israeli-born Netanyahu, who was raised in Philadelphia, has made a career of defining himself as his country’s best, even inevitable, envoy to its most important ally. He met with Trump on Tuesday. Lapid in his speech sought to portray Netanyahu’s public diplomacy – the defining characteristic of his political career – as busted and harmful.
“The first step is obvious” to restoring Israel’s reputation, Lapid said. “Send into retirement Benjamin Netanyahu and his group of extremists who are tearing us apart at home and abroad.”
Lapid, who speaks in fluent but accented English, says he wants to be the foreign minister in the next government, one led by Naftali Bennett, a security hawk, as prime minister. He, too, claims an intimacy with the American psyche, evident in an essay he just published in The Atlantic about the cross-country road trips he takes every several years.
Netanyahu is on a mission to secure support for continuing and winning the war he and Trump launched against Iran. In remarks in Hebrew he recorded just prior to leaving Israel on Monday, he leaned into his friendship with Trump.
“I am on my way to Washington to a meeting with our friend the president of the United States, Donald Trump,” he said, standing with his wife, Sara, outside the airplane. “This is my eighth meeting with him since he was elected for his second term, more than any other world leader. It is a great privilege, and also a great responsibility.”
Both Lapid and Netanyahu claimed a closeness to Graham, the South Carolina Republican senator who helped Netanyahu cajole Trump into the war with Iran. Graham, Netanyahu said, was “a true friend of mine and the state of Israel.” Lapid inserted Graham into his argument that the long term goal for Israel and the United States should be the collapse of the Iranian regime. “The last conversation I had with the late Lindsey Graham was about this,” he said Monday.
Lapid at the outset of his remarks sought to erode Netanyahu’s reputation as an America whisperer, saying the coming election would “be the most dramatic, the most crucial, the most intense the country has ever seen.”
“Here is the not to-do list for the Israeli government if you don’t want to witness the complete collapse of the country’s international status.”
Lapid accused Netanyahu of isolating Israel by caving to extremists in his government and alienating allies. Instead, he laid out a formula for how the next prime minister would govern.
“If a minister in your government says a nuclear bomb should be dropped on Gaza, fire him. If a minister in your government says there are circumstances in which it is acceptable to starve the civilian population, fire him. If a minister stands over a large group of handcuffed activists lying on the floor of a detention facility, waving a flag and mocking them, fire him,” Lapid said.
He was referring, respectively, to controversial statements and actions by Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, some of which have been used to fuel the claim that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the war Hamas launched on Oct. 7, 2023 with deadly raids inside Israel.
Netanyahu’s mission comes at a perilous juncture in the U.S.-Israel relationship, and his own reputation. Trump’s approval ratings are at a low as the war appears to have generated victories for Iran, which now controls the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway critical to the passage of a fifth of the world’s petroleum. Inflation has skyrocketed, US allies are furious, and Americans in large majorities oppose the war, just as Trump is facing his own electoral test less than 100 days before the midterm elections.
Netanyahu is unpopular in the United States, and for the first time, Americans are more likely to favor Palestinians than Israelis. An Economist poll published Tuesday showed half of Americans supported Netanyahu’s arrest. Trump wants Israel to stay out of the war, crippling Israel’s ability to influence the outcome of the conflict that continues to loom on its border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy, hopes to regain its strength.
Lapid’s audience here is mostly left of center: His host at the event was Daniel Shapiro, the Obama administration’s ambassador to Israel. A spokesman for Lapid said that other than his attendance at Graham’s funeral, his only public appearance on his trip to the United States this week would be with a group of Democratic senators.
The Atlantic Council is bipartisan, but its Republican component is made up mostly of the old-school believers in alliances that Trump has all but ousted from the party. Seated in the front row was Stephen Hadley, the national security advisor to former President George W. Bush, who is a board member of the Atlantic Council.
Lapid said reconciling with Democrats would be a priority in the next government, should his dream team emerge victorious: Bennett as prime minister, Lapid as foreign minister and Gadi Eisenkot as defense minister. Eisenkot, who has in recent polls surpassed Bennet and Netanyahu, obviously might have different ideas about who gets which job.
“Elizabeth Warren, John Ossoff and Tim Kaine are not the enemy,” he said, referring to Democratic senators from Massachusetts, Georgia and Virginia who have been critical of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war, and who have voted to suspend defense assistance to Israel. “The Democratic Party is not the enemy.“
Bennett and then Lapid were rotating prime ministers during the last government’s eighteen months of tenure in 2021 and 2022, interrupting Netanyahu’s 12 year run launched in 2009. Netanyahu by then was already persona non grata among Democrats for his all-out campaign against President Barack Obama’s Iran policies.
Lapid, like others running against Netanyahu, appeared cowed by Netanyahu’s attempts to tar their past association with Mansour Abbas, the leader of the United Arab List. Bennet and Lapid made history by including the party in the governing coalition. That would not happen again, Lapid said, although garnering enough seats to govern is more daunting without the inclusion of Arab parties.
“I have a lot of conversations about this with Mansour Abbas, who seems to understand this better than some of my Jewish friends, the fact that maybe it’s time for a coalition that will be made of only of Zionist parties,” he said.
Lapid’s greater affinity to Democrats notwithstanding, he took shots at Netanyahu’s relationship with Trump – arguing that he was the better friend to the president’s Middle East agenda. He noted that last year he brought Trump’s 20-point plan for bringing peace to Gaza to a Knesset vote – and that Netanyahu and his coalition partners absented themselves from the Knesset rather than vote for it.
“I passed the 20-point plan, I did it just to bend Netanyahu’s arm into it,” he said. Netanyahu could not afford to back the plan because its provisions anticipating Palestinian self-governance might have cost him his right-wing coalition partners. ”So I got all the compliments from the American administration,” Lapid said. “It was fun.”
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2 Jewish-owned Toronto bagel shops hit with gunfire, vandalism
(JTA) — Locals lined up outside a Toronto bagel shop on Monday in a show of support after attacks on two outposts of the Jewish-owned chain, adding to a string of incidents facing Jewish businesses in the city.
Two locations of Kiva’s Bagel Bar, a fixture for Toronto Jews since it opened in 1979, were targeted late Saturday and early Sunday. Gunfire hit the windows of one storefront just an hour after another storefront was vandalized and its front glass shattered, according to the Toronto Police Service.
Police said their Hate Crime Unit was investigating, and they believed the same SUV may have been involved at both scenes. The bakeries were closed at the time and no injuries were reported.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said he was “appalled” by the attacks. “Jewish Canadians should be able to live, work, and worship free from fear, intimidation, and hate,” he said on X on Monday. “Canada’s government is absolute in our commitment to combatting the scourge of antisemitism.”
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow added on X that the incidents were “vile and unacceptable” and said she “will always stand with Toronto’s Jewish community against antisemitism.”
Residents flocked to Kiva’s and sold out their bagels by 10:30 a.m. on Monday, according to the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, an advocacy arm of the Jewish Federations of Canada. Resident Adrian Rocca, the founder of a local real estate company, posted a photo on LinkedIn of his employees lined up outside.
CIJA said the Canadians rallying around Kiva’s sent a message that “there are a lot of good people ready to take a stand against hate, intimidation, and violence.” The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reached out to Kiva’s for comment.
As police searched for suspects in the bagel shop attacks, a gunman opened fire on the U.S. Consulate in Toronto early Monday morning, setting off a high-speed chase and a manhunt. Police have not confirmed any connection between the gunfire at the consulate and at Kiva’s.
The shooting at the consulate marked the second in four months. Toronto police have arrested three people connected with the previous consulate attack, as well as several others accused of shooting at Jewish targets in the city in recent months. At a press conference last month, Police Chief Myron Demkiw identified a “broader pattern” between the shots fired at the consulate and at Toronto-area synagogues and Jewish schools over the past year.
“What we are dealing with in this case and in other unrelated incidences, including shootings at synagogues and Jewish schools, is a recurring and similar modus operandi — and that is criminals for hire,” said Demkiw. “Through encrypted messaging apps, young people are hired to carry out attacks against various targets, and in order to get paid, they’re required to film their attacks.”
Carney pledged in June to fight antisemitism through a new Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion. In his speech at Toronto’s Holy Blossom Synagogue, he said that the country was “failing Jewish Canadians.” Two-thirds of Canada’s religion-motivated hate crimes last year were directed at Jewish Canadians, who make up only 1% of the population, Carney said.
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