An unspecified number of men in Orthodox Jewish garb handed out flyers on Nov. 1 in a Boulder, Colo. mall saying that it’s “statistically impossible” for six million Jews to have died during the Holocaust, Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports.
They also handed out index cards saying, “Jews run the porn industry,” “Jews ran the Atlantic Slave Trade” and “academia is dominated by Marxist Jews.”
Boulder police told the Daily Camera that they didn’t receive any complaints about the flyers.
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Mountain States tweeted, “We are disgusted and enraged that these white supremacists would spew such vile lies and mock Jews by dressing in fake attire. It is important to speak loudly and clearly that hate in all of its forms will not be tolerated in our communities.”
We are disgusted and enraged that these white supremacists would spew such vile lies and mock Jews by dressing in fake attire. It is important to speak loudly and clearly that hate in all of its forms will not be tolerated in our communities. https://t.co/NGvbS1D33D
The Denver Post reported in May that Colorado has seen “the highest totals” of anti-Semitic incidents in 2016-2018 “in more than 12 years,” according to ADL data. However, the number of anti-Semitic incidents did decline from 57 in 2017 to 39 in 2018.
ADL Mountain States Regional Director Scott Levin told the Post at the time, “Unfortunately, it’s a time of a great deal of fear and insecurity in faith-based institutions.”
A series of flyers stating “It’s Okay to Be White” and “Islam is Right About Women” were found on West Connecticut State University’s (WCSU) campus on Oct. 31.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “It’s Okay to Be White” is a phrase that white supremacists have used for years, but was popularized in 2017 after 4chan users thought it would be a good way to trigger “liberals.” The flyers were placed in a WCSU residence and classroom hall.
Additionally, WCSU spokesperson Paul Steinmetz told News 12 Connecticut that a neo-Nazi flag was found on campus as well.
WCSU President John B. Clark said in a Nov. 1 statement that the police are investigating the “hate-filled” flyers and the university is working with police on the matter.
“I am both shocked and immensely saddened about this sick and outrageous behavior, especially since our university has worked so hard to be a warm, diverse and caring community for all, no matter their race, color, gender, sexual orientation/identification, disability and age,” Clark said. “All members of our community should feel comfortable, safe and secure at the university. Indeed, we all should feel that WCSU is our second home.”
He added that if a “member of the university community” was behind the flyers, they will face “the severest disciplinary actions, including dismissal as well as possible civil and criminal actions.”
Surveillance footage showed an unspecified number of people putting up the flyers, but it was difficult to determine the perpetrators since they were dressed in Halloween costumes, according to News 12 Connecticut.
ADL Connecticut tweeted, “Disturbed but not surprised to see the national trend of white supremacist propaganda distribution on college campuses come to Connecticut.”
Disturbed but not surprised to see the national trend of White supremacist propaganda distribution on college campuses come to Connecticut. Thank you to WCSU and LE for investigating. Read ADL’s report on this scourge of hate here: https://t.co/vg5lVwLKQEhttps://t.co/O9DagDVaHC
(JTA) — Jewish figure skater Jason Brown has skated to a wide variety of music in his career, from Simon and Garfunkel to the “Hamilton” musical soundtrack to the latest James Bond song by Sam Smith. This season, he’s added a particularly Jewish track to his free skate routine: music from the seminal Holocaust film “Schindler’s List” by John Williams.
“My background, obviously, is Jewish, and the story is so touching,” Brown, 24, told NBC Sports earlier this month after debuting his new routine at Skate America, the first event in the Grand Prix series of international skating competitions for the 2019-20 season. “I grew up learning about the Holocaust and about Oskar Schindler and the stories. I always wanted to skate to it, but it has to be when I’m at the level, maturity-wise, that I’m really ready to skate to it.”
Brown ended up wining silver in the men’s singles division. Fellow American skater Nathan Chen took home gold.
“I think as performers a part of our job is to teach and to get people engaged in the story you’re trying to tell on the ice,” Brown added. “The point is to have the passion and intensity with I skate to it and get the story across.”
(JTA) — Yvette Lundy, a member of the French Resistance who provided false identification papers to Jewish families, has died. She was 103.
Lundy, who also survived two Nazi concentration camps, died in the northern French town of Epernay on Sunday.
She would go on to become a schoolteacher and also worked at the town hall.
Lundy joined the Resistance at the beginning of the Nazi occupation of France, the French news agency AFP reported. She provided fake papers to Jewish families and escaped prisoners of war.
She was arrested, interrogated and imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1944, when she was 28. Lundy was imprisoned at the Ravensbrück concentration camp and later at Buchenwald. Later she later was assigned to a Kommando slave labor unit near Weimar and was liberated by the Russian army in April 1945.
Lundy returned to France but did not begin speaking about her experiences until 1959.
“The words of Yvette Lundy were a powerful call for citizen vigilance, so that the darkest hours of the 20th century would never be repeated,” a statement issued by the office of President Emmanuel Macron said.
Her memoir “Le Fil de l’araignée” (The Spider’s Web) was published in 2012. In 2017, she received one of France’s highest honors, becoming a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour.
A 27-year-old man was arrested on Nov. 1 for allegedly plotting to bomb a synagogue in Pueblo, Colo.
According to court documents, the suspect, Richard Holzer, is alleged to have told an undercover FBI agent over Facebook that he wanted to start a race war and that he was going to scope out Temple Emanuel for an attack. After Temple Emanuel, he allegedly had “bigger and better” aspirations.
At the agent’s suggestion, Holzer and his friend “Skeeter” met with the agent and two other undercover agents at a Colorado Springs restaurant on Oct. 17, where “Holzer repeatedly expressed his hatred of the Jewish people.” He allegedly claimed that in October 2018, he had paid a “witch doctor” to poison Temple Emanuel’s water with arsenic material; the temple told Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) that their water was not poisoned. Holzer is alleged to have said during the Oct. 17 meeting that he wanted to send a message that “[Jews] are not welcome in this town,” saying that when he sees Temple Emanuel, “I see these little k––– kids and they have their little toys, they have their ‘Jewla hoop’ shaped like a star.”
The five of them later cased the temple, where Holzer and the agents discussed using pipe bombs against the synagogue. Holzer met with the three agents at an unspecified motel on the evening Nov. 1, where they showed him two pipe bombs and seven sticks of dynamite, all of which were not functional. Holzer allegedly called the explosives “absolutely gorgeous” and suggested that they conduct the attack shortly thereafter to avoid police. The agents then arrested Holzer.
When Holzer was taken to the police station, he waived his Miranda rights and confessed the plot to the FBI, per the court documents. “Although Holzer stated that he had not planned to hurt anyone, when asked what he would have done if there had been someone inside the synagogue when he arrived last night, he admitted that he would have gone through with the attack because anyone inside would be Jewish,” the documents state.
Holzer faces charges of domestic terrorism.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said in a statement that they had been tracking Holzer since 2016.
“White supremacists continue to pose a serious threat to Jews and other communities in the United States and in our own backyard as this arrest indicates,” ADL Mountain States Regional Director Scott Levin said. “We commend law enforcement for acting quickly to prevent this individual from engaging in life-threatening violence. No one should have to live in fear of white supremacy, simply because of who they are or where they pray.”
Retired Ukrainian-born auto-worker John Demjanjuk was quietly living the American Dream in suburban Cleveland until 1986, when Holocaust survivors identified his photograph as the sadistic death camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible. Extradited to Israel for murdering tens of thousands of Polish Jews at Treblinka, Sobibor and other death camps, he stood trial in Jerusalem in the biggest war crimes case since Adolf Eichmann’s in 1961. But this time, questions about the evidence cast doubt on the proceedings that would ultimately take 25 years to resolve.
Combining devastating courtroom testimonies from Treblinka survivors, news footage and interviews with judges, journalists and lawyers, the five-part Netflix miniseries “The Devil Next Door” follows the story through its emotional twists and turns.
“The show is about these different narratives clashing, which is what makes it exciting and painful at the same time,” Daniel Sivan (“The Oslo Diaries”), who made the documentary with Yossi Bloch, told the Journal. The Tel-Aviv based directors shot more than 1,000 hours of interviews and sifted through more than 1,000 hours of archival footage, including courtroom tapes found at Yad Vashem,the Holocaust center in Jerusalem. They had the tapes restored and digitized and returned them to Yad Vashem.
Sivan, who was too young to remember the trial broadcasts and wasn’t taught about it in school, didn’t know much about the case. “For Israelis, it’s a grand fiasco. We just don’t talk about it. I learned about it by working on this show,” he said. Although he’d seen his share of painful Holocaust material before, he had to leave the room while Bloch was editing the Treblinka testimonies. “They just break me down,” he said. “I can’t cope.”
Bloch did grow up knowing about Demjanjuk and had always wanted to make a film about the case. As the son of a Holocaust survivor, it hit close to home. “My mother was born in Warsaw and grew up in the Ghetto. My grandfather had eight brothers and four sisters and each had four to six kids. My grandmother had 11 brothers and sisters and they had kids as well. They all went to Treblinka,” he said. “There should have been thousands of us.”
“The Devil Next Door” Photo courtesy of Netflix.
Sivan’s forebears were from Romania and Germany. “They escaped at the last minute, but they had a lot of relatives that didn’t,” he said. He believes that the Demjanjuk case has new relevance now. “It’s such a timely topic,” he said. “You can’t detach it from the rising anti-Semitism in the U.S. and Europe. The current administration in America gives anti-Semitism and the radical right some acceptance by looking away. Fifty percent of people in the U.S. don’t know anything about the Holocaust, and a growing movement of Holocaust deniers can slap lies on Facebook and it becomes reality. A million people died at Treblinka and all we have to show for it are the survivors’ memories and testimonies and documents. The show is our way of bringing it back to life and saying, ‘Yes, it did happen.’ In an era of fake news, it’s refreshing [to show that].”
“Whether he was Ivan the Terrible or not, [Demjanjuk] was a vicious monster that killed tens of thousands of people in many death camps in the cruelest, most barbaric way. Justice was done. But this will never be over.” —Daniel Sivan
Having access to Netflix’s 150 million subscribers worldwide, three times that when you factor in users per account, the filmmakers hope to reach and educate a younger and non-Jewish audience with the series. In Israel, Sivan is aware that the series may open old wounds. But he believes that they presented the Demjanjuk case fairly and objectively. “It’s quite a roller coaster, a turbulence of emotions, and I hope that people will watch it to the end before forming an opinion on his guilt or innocence,” he said.
“For the past three years, Yossi and I were arguing over the evidence and I’m more confused than ever because we never found that one iron-clad piece of evidence that is proof either way,” he said. “We are not judges. We cannot come to a conclusion. But I trust the survivors who identified [Demjanjuk]. Whether he was Ivan the Terrible or not, he was a vicious monster that killed tens of thousands of people in many death camps in the cruelest, most barbaric way. Justice was done. But this will never be over. There are other Nazi henchman and collaborators and supporters. We need to learn about the dangers of rising anti-Semitism, and racism and fascism toward everyone, not just Jews.”
The filmmakers, who met 10 years ago and collaborated on the military documentary “Poisoned,” have nothing else in the works — yet. “When we finish a project, we don’t want to see each other. We want to drink beer and talk about anything but film. Then in a couple of years, we start it again,” Bloch said.
“We always say, ‘The next project is going to be something fun, happy and beautiful but it always turns into the darkest most hideous project,” Sivan added. “I wish for us to find something happy for a change.”
“The Devil Next Door” is streaming now on Netflix.
You won’t find the phrase “civic engagement” in the Torah, and yet it’s almost impossible to imagine Jews as anything other than engaged citizens. A people that feels charged with being a light unto the nations and repairing the world has never been shy about fighting for justice in the wider world.
It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that a recent survey by the Pat Brown Institute (PBI) for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles of 1800 Jews in California, almost 80% had signed a letter or petition at some point about a political issue, almost 60% had communicated directly with an elected official, and 45% had attended a rally or protest. Equally unsurprising, if heartening is that 87% of Jews surveyed found that working for justice and equality in our society was important or essential to their Jewish identity. That’s even more than the number who assigned similar importance to identifying with Israel.
This conviction has biblical roots, with notable figures like Zelophehad’s daughters petitioning Moses for their rights of inheritance as women. In fact, petitioners to Moses were so numerous that Jethro, his father-in-law, had to teach him the virtues of bureaucracy.
As we evolved as a people, this concern moved from self-interest to an interest in justice in society. Whether it was the praying legs about which Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote upon his return from Birmingham, the Jewish policy wonks who hosted the drafters of the Civil Rights Act in the Religious Action Center in Washington, or those at the forefront of political actions today, where there has been a political fight for justice, there have been Jews.
I write today not only to share data, but to harness that passion in a new fight for justice. A recent national poll of 200 voters by RespectAbility, an organization that fights stigma and advances opportunities for people with disabilities found that 70% of Americans across the political spectrum describe themselves as more likely to support candidates who want to expand job and career opportunities for people with disabilities. Despite this enthusiasm, the employment rate of people with disabilities in Los Angeles ranks lower than that of the lowest ranked state, West Virginia, at less than 23%, more than 14 points below the national average. Our policies and practices, well-intentioned though they may be, are out of date and chaotic, with much to learn from top performers like the Dakotas and other states, or Montgomery County Maryland, where employment for people with disabilities is over 50%.
This is a fight for justice to which I think we Jews everywhere are called to pursue in the finest Jewish tradition. After all, Maimonides taught us that the greatest tzedakah we can do is to help a person achieve self-sufficiency.
You may be wondering what you can do. You may be wondering what you can do. October was National Disability Employment Awareness Month, but we need to focus on these issues’ year around.
In October, RespectAbility sent letters to every governor on these topics. More than a dozen states acted as a result. We also sent letters to every elected official serving LA city or county with a number of suggestions. Two of the most resonant are ones that you might consider. We suggested that elected officials could create a true “Employment First” system for youth with disabilities that breaks down silos and advances collaboration so more people with disabilities have jobs. We referred them to Florida where they have tremendous job growth for people with disabilities.
Our second suggestion was that they should reach out to local media by writing an op-ed, visiting an inclusive worksite or meeting with press. This will bring public attention to key issues facing your students with disabilities. Raising awareness of successes can change perceptions around disability in the workforce.
These are two of many ways that a civically engaged Jew can advance this issue, whether in Los Angeles, New York or Des Moines, or anywhere with a free democratic civil society. Whatever you do, do something if not now, when?
(JTA) — The number of anti-Semitic hate crimes recorded in Sweden rose to a record high last year, jumping 53 percent over the 2016 figures, government statistics show.
The 2018 report, which the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention published Thursday, listed 280 anti-Semitic hate crimes that year compared to 182 in 2016. The latest numbers are the highest on record since at least 2006, when the Council began collecting aggregated data.
Overall, the number of hate crimes with a racist or xenophobic motive rose by 69 percent over 2016 in Sweden to 4,865 cases last year, the report stated.
The council decided not to publish hate crime figures for 2017 without explaining the decision. In one attack from 2017, the Jewish assembly synagogue in Gothenburg was firebombed by approximately 10 men protesting Israel’s policies.
Anti-Semitic motives represented the largest increase from 2016 in hate crimes and was the largest hike in anti-Semitic crimes on record, the report said.
Anti-Semitic attacks accounted for 4 percent of all hate crimes in 2018. The Jewish population of 20,000 comprises approximately 0.2 percent of Sweden’s population.
Anti-Muslim hate crimes accounted for 8 percent of the hate crimes recorded in 2018, a proportion slightly lower than that minority’s estimated share of the population in Sweden.
The report did not specify the identity of perpetrators of hate crimes against Jews, but it did say the data include “cases both when the offender belongs to the majority population and when the offender belongs to another minority group.”
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Republican Jewish Coalition launched a $10 million campaign — an unprecedented amount in partisan Jewish advertising — with online ads depicting 2020 Democratic presidential candidates as a “disgrace.”
Videos titled “Shanda,” Yiddish for “disgrace,” blast the Democrats for saying they would consider reducing aid to Israel.
“The radical Left has taken the reins of the Democratic Party, and their policy proposals will devastate our national security, our alliance with Israel, our economy, and our health care system,” Matt Brooks, the RJC’s executive director, said in a statement announcing the release of the 15- to 30-second ads.
The placement of the videos on Facebook, YouTube and other media will cost $50,000. Brooks confirmed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a report in Axios that the RJC had budgeted $10 million for its 2020 efforts.
In the 15- to 30-second spots, “leading Democrats” are accused of “turning their back” on Israel. They show House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish.
Schumer and Pelosi were featured speakers last week at the J Street annual conference, where three of the four Democrats leading in polls ahead of primaries said they would consider cutting some aid to Israel to leverage compliance with U.S. policy. Those three are Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, as well as Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana. Four other candidates rejected leveraging aid, including former Vice President Joe Biden, another front-runner, in forceful terms.
“Front-running Democrats are campaigning on cutting critical aid to the world’s only Jewish state,” the ads say.
