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JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT. |
| WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION |
| | | Today: Hamas expected to free American hostage this week • Musk urges far-right German party to move beyond ‘past guilt’ • Wikipedia bans editors over Mideast bias • Brooklyn eatery hit with antisemitic vandalism • and much more. |
| | | | Holocaust survivor Stanislaw Zalewski attends a ceremony today at Auschwitz, marking the 80th anniversary of the camp's liberation. (Getty) |
| Never forget
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
At Auschwitz… Ten years ago 300 survivors attended the anniversary. Today, as survivors die or become too frail to travel, 50 made the trip. One of them is Naftali Fürst. He survived Auschwitz. His granddaughter, Mika Peleg, survived the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. (AP, JTA, Times of Israel)
President Donald Trump sent a delegation to the ceremony, including Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy; Howard Lutnick, nominee for commerce secretary, Ellen Germain, the special envoy for Holocaust issues; and Charles Kushner, Trump’s pick for ambassador to France and Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law.
Dozens of world leaders are expected to attend the event, including Britain’s King Charles III, French President Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz, along with kings and queens from Spain, Denmark and Norway. (AP)
“We thought the virus of antisemitism was dead,” said Ronald S. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress and chairman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation. “But it was just in hiding.” (New York Times)
The house where the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz lived with his family — which was the subject of the Oscar-winning movie The Zone of Interest — opened to visitors for the first time. (AP) |
| | Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday at the site in Kyiv where Jews were massacred during the Holocaust. (X) |
| And elsewhere… Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy placed a candle at the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial in Kyiv, where tens of thousands of Jews were executed during the Nazi occupation. (X)
Pope Francis warned of the “scourge of antisemitism,” adding that “the horror of the extermination of millions of Jewish people” should “never be forgotten or denied.” (AP)
Israeli President Isaac Herzog is set to speak today at a Holocaust memorial service at the United Nations. (Jewish Insider)
Roughly 123,000 Holocaust survivors are living in Israel; 61% of them are women, according to new data. (Times of Israel)
A video billboard in Times Square is sharing the stories of a dozen Holocaust survivors who live in New York. (NY Jewish Week)
As the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles, French Jewish leaders are hoping to engage younger generations through, among other methods, school trips to Auschwitz and videos on TikTok. (AFP)
A bipartisan group of more than 60 lawmakers in Congress is set to reintroduce a Holocaust education bill. (Jewish Insider)
A Czech composer wrote an opera while in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. A 14-year-old violinist who was working with him escaped and ended up in Kentucky, where he became concertmaster of the Louisville Orchestra in 1957. On Saturday, the orchestra staged a one-night performance. (JTA)
📚 Read: Journalist Jonathan Freedland wrote The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, which won the National Jewish Book Award. Read our review, and watch our 2023 interview with Freedland.
🎧 Listen: Check out our Playing Anne Frank podcast, hosted by executive editor Adam Langer. It explores how The Diary of Anne Frank changed the lives of the people who brought it to Broadway, Hollywood and the rest of the world. Listen here. |
| | | | Israelis cheer at the arrival of a military helicopter carrying newly released hostages to a hospital in Tel Aviv on Saturday. (Getty) |
| Shared grief
Steve Witkoff, the U.S. envoy to the Middle East, said Sunday that his son’s 2011 death from an opioid overdose has deeply connected him to the struggles of Israeli hostage families. In his remarks at a Manhattan synagogue, Witkoff said that President Donald Trump, who attended his son’s funeral, knew that Witkoff could empathize with the hostage families because he was “a member of the club of parents who had buried a child. And there could be nothing worse than that — because we would all give our lives for our children.” Go deeper ►
The hostages… Hamas released hostages Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Daniela Gilboa and Naama Levy on Saturday. In exchange, Israel released 200 Palestinian prisoners, including those serving life sentences for murder and other acts of terror. (JTA)
Three hostages are expected to be released on Thursday, and another three on Saturday. American hostage Keith Siegel, 65, is expected to be among the captives released this week. (JTA, Times of Israel)
Hostage Emily Damari, 28, who was released last week, reportedly asked if Siegel could take her place. (JTA)
The Jerusalem high school of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a hostage killed in captivity in August, has lost 10 graduates in the war in Gaza. It’s lost dozens more in wars since 1969. But its principal is careful not to let grief define the school. “First and foremost,” he said, “school is a place of life.” Go deeper ► |
| | Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends his trial on corruption charges today in Tel Aviv. (Getty) |
| Elsewhere in the war… As part of the ceasefire, tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians began walking home to northern Gaza. (AP, NPR)
Trump said he is urging leaders in Jordan and Egypt to take in Palestinian refugees from Gaza, which he called “literally a demolition site right now.” Both countries rejected the idea. (JTA, New York Times, Washington Post)
Trump reversed a decision by President Joe Biden, allowing the delivery of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, which had been withheld due to concerns about their potential use. (JTA)
Israel and Lebanon agreed to extend their ceasefire, moving the deadline for Israeli troop withdrawal from southern Lebanon to Feb. 18. (Times of Israel)
Netanyahu… Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called newly appointed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to congratulate him on being confirmed. (Times of Israel)
Netanyahu returned to court today to testify in his criminal corruption trial. The trial had been on hiatus since the prime minister’s prostate surgery in late December. (Times of Israel)
A new poll found that 63% of Israelis think Netanyahu should resign. (Times of Israel)
Plus… Wikipedia banned eight editors — six who are pro-Palestinian and two who are pro-Israel — due to disruptive editing practices, amid an ongoing battle over Middle East content and neutrality on the platform. (JTA)
Justice Isaac Amit was tapped to be the new president of Israel’s Supreme Court, filling a role that had been vacant for 16 months. (Times of Israel) |
| | | | | | Elon Musk speaks virtually at a rally Saturday for the far-right Alternative for Germany party. (Getty) |
| Man of the moment
Elon Musk, who holds an outsize role in the new Trump administration, spoke by video at a rally Saturday for a far-right German political party, some of whose members have downplayed the Holocaust. “There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that,” Musk said. “Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents.” (JTA)
Musk continues to draw condemnation for making what appeared to many as a Nazi salute at an inauguration event. As does the Anti-Defamation League for seeming to brush off the gesture. Here are two opinion essays on the matter…. Our editor-in-chief, Jodi Rudoren, writes in her latest column: “Antisemitism, like most complicated societal problems, is not linear or binary. We do not live inside a baseball game; our job is not to cheer one side and jeer the other. But we do need, now more than ever, leaders we can trust to call balls and strikes regardless of who is throwing the pitch — or making historically dangerous gestures.” Read her essay ►
Jodi will be live on ABC News at 9:30 a.m. ET discussing the latest Musk news. Watch it here.
As a Black Jew, Rabbi Tamar Manasseh wonders why the ADL slammed Whoopi Goldberg for making offensive comments about the Holocaust in 2022, but now gave a pass to Musk. “Being an apologist for the richest man in the world is not a good look,” she writes. Read her essay ►
Plus: The family of Itay Chen, a slain Israeli soldier whose body is held captive in Gaza, met with Musk at the White House and urged him to use his influence to ensure the hostage deal be fully implemented. (Times of Israel) |
| | WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY |
| | Sen. Chuck Schumer visits on Sunday with Rafael Hasid, whose Brooklyn eatery was vandalized. (X) |
| ☹️ Vandals accusing Israel of genocide splattered red paint onto the front of Miriam, a popular Israeli restaurant in Brooklyn. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who has eaten there several times and visited there on Sunday, called it “despicable and antisemitic.” (New York Jewish Week, X)
🤦 A Tennessee Republican women’s group removed from its website a reading list that cited Adolf Hitler as an example of leadership. (Chattanooga Times Free Press)
🎒 The Supreme Court agreed to hear a case about a plan to create the nation’s first religious charter school paid for by taxpayer funds. (New York Times)
🇮🇶 Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ Al Sudani is working to free Elizabeth Tsurkov, an Israeli-Russian Princeton graduate student held hostage by an Iraqi militia since 2023. (Forward, Reuters, X)
🔥 One of the victims in the California wildfires was Mark Shterenberg, an 80-year-old retired NASA engineer who, in 1980, fled antisemitism in the Soviet Union to move to America. (Los Angeles Times)
🎞️ The documentary No Other Land, about Israeli military demolitions in the occupied West Bank, had no U.S. distributor. But after getting nominated for an Oscar last week, it will now screen in more than 20 cities. (JTA)
Shiva calls ►Mira Shelub, a Holocaust survivor and Yiddish scholar, died at 102 … Rabbi Moshe Herson, the longtime leader of the Chabad of New Jersey, died at 90.
What else we’re reading ► Deborah Lipstadt on why antisemitism threatens Jews — and democracy (New York Times) … Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, falsely accused of eating people’s pets during the campaign, turn to faith amid deportation fears (AP) … Does D.E.I. help or hurt Jewish students? (New York Times)
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| | | | Watch the four Israeli hostages released Saturday reunite with their families. |
| Thanks to Jacob Kornbluh for contributing to today’s newsletter, and to Julie Moos for editing it. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at [email protected]. |
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