Latest news with #BarbaraSteinmetz
New York Post
2 days ago
- Politics
- New York Post
Boulder Jewish Fest kicks off a week after antisemitic firebomb attack: ‘Healing is a marathon'
Thousands of people packed Sunday's Boulder Jewish Festival at the Pearl Street Mall in Colorado — not far from the site of last week's antisemitic firebomb attack. Among the event's speakers were members of Run for Their Lives, the peaceful group targeted by the firebomber. The festival, hosted by the Boulder JCC, featured dozens of community Jewish organizations, food vendors, an art market and live music and performances — under a noticeably stepped-up security presence. Thousands of people show up for a day of solidarity, unity and healing at Sunday's 30th annual Boulder Jewish Festival. REUTERS The festival served as a showing of community solidarity, healing and hope in the wake of the terror attack that injured 15 people participating in a pro-Israel walking event. Event organizers worked closely with the Boulder Police Department, JEWISHColorado's Secure Community Network and state officials to ensure the event was safe. Bomb-sniffing dogs could be seen walking around areas where the public gathered accompanied by uniformed police officers. The 30th annual Boulder Jewish Festival was held with increased security in the wake of last week's terror attack. REUTERS The festival kicked off with a walk of solidarity for the Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas. Run for Their Lives was holding such a walk when its members were allegedly targeted by Mohamed Sabry Soliman last week. Among last week's injured was Barbara Steinmetz, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor described by a local rabbi as a 'very loving' woman. Members of Run for Their Lives took the stage to address the crowd. Susan Rona, the Mountain State's regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, also was on hand to thank those in attendance. 'The thousands strong showing up today are saying, 'Enough, enough, enough,' ' she said. 'Hate toward the Jewish community has no place in Boulder, hate has no place in Boulder. 'After the headlines fade, don't pretend this isn't happening. This is life for Jews in America today, and healing is a marathon,' she added. 'We in boulder have the power to change our polarized nation together. Let us show the world how we respond to hate. Let's make some new memories together in this space and show the world what hate cannot extinguish: love, shared humanity, community and joy,' she urged the cheering crowd. 'That is how we respond, and that is how we will move forward together, undeterred and more committed than ever to each other.'
USA Today
5 days ago
- General
- USA Today
Holocaust survivor burned in Boulder speaks after attack: 'We are better than this'
Holocaust survivor burned in Boulder speaks after attack: 'We are better than this' "Jews in Boulder and maybe Denver and probably in cities all around the world, are afraid of wearing their Jewish stars." Show Caption Hide Caption Boulder community honors attack victims, condemns antisemitism The Boulder Jewish Community Center hosted a vigil for community members to come and support victims of a fire-bomb attack. Barbara Steinmetz survived the Holocaust as a child, fleeing from one country to the next as her Jewish family was stripped of its citizenship. They left Italy for Hungary, then to France and finally Portugal before finding refuge outside of Europe in the Dominican Republic. The first five years of her life with her big sister Margaret and parents was a blur of escapes, never with anything more than what they could carry. The one thing that remained constant: their family stayed together. It's a message that resonates with her nearly 90 years later and why she was marching in Boulder on Sunday. She was part of a small group bringing attention to the Jewish hostages held by Hamas to bring them home when she was attacked. A man threw Molotov cocktails at the group, injuring 12 people. Steinmetz, 88, told NBC News earlier this week that she and other members of the group Run for Their Lives were peacefully demonstrating when they were attacked. "We're Americans. We are better than this,' she told the news outlet. They should be 'kind and decent human beings." Steinmetz spent much of her life trying not to talk about what her family endured. Her father's message to her was always to move to forward. In 1998, she sat down to share her story with the University of Southern California's Shoah project, which documents the lives of Holocaust survivors. In an interview stretching almost three hours, Steinmetz talked about her family's escape, the relatives who died in the war, and the lessons they learned. She was 61 when she did the Shoah interview, one of thousands of 52,000 stories recorded over eight years. 'Family is what's most important,' Steinmetz said. She was too young to remember much from her family leaving Italy in 1938 when Benito Mussolini stripped Jewish people of their citizenship at the direction of Adolf Hitler. What she remembers, she said in the interview, was an atmosphere of trauma. Boulder attack: Firebombing suspect Mohamed Soliman charged with 118 criminal counts Her father, who had run a hotel on the northern Italian coast after leaving Hungary, visited embassies and wrote letters to various countries to try to move his family as Hitler's power grew. Each time, their move was temporary. Each time, they brought only what they could carry. But each time, they stayed together. 'Things were not important, people are important. What you have in your brain and in your heart that is the only thing that's important,' she said. 'And that's totally transportable.' In the past few years, Steinmetz has told her family's story at Holocaust remembrance events and classrooms, libraries and churches. She wants people to understand history to understand that Jewish people are being targeted again. 'Hitler basically took (my father's) life, his dream away…. The rest of life was chasing, running, trying to make a living,' she said. The family eventually settled in Sosúa where the Dominican Republic Resettlement Association (DORSA) had established a refugee camp for Jewish people. Life was difficult there, she said, as her family and had to learn to build houses, farm the rocky terrain, and raise their families. Steinmetz and her sister, three years older, were soon sent to a Catholic school, where only the head nun knew they were Jewish. A nun used to let her change the clothes of the Baby Jesus figurine at the church, and for a few minutes each day, she felt like she had a doll. She remembers sleeping next to her sister, and crying inconsolably. 'I never cried again. Years and years and years later, when something happened, my mother and father died, I had a hard time crying. And to this day, I have a hard time crying,' she said. "It is just something I don't do.' The family didn't speak of these moves for years, she would say. "They couldn't help where they were living, it was the only thing they could do to stay alive." The family settled in Boston in 1945, and soon learned much of their family in Europe had died, some in the war, others after. The family would move several times again as her father found different jobs, and she and her sister began going to Jewish summer camps. It was there, she said, that she "fell into the Zionist spirit. I loved the feeling that there would be a state of Israel." She finally felt like she had a community, she said. "These were my people,"she said. "This group was very tight. I was very welcome there. It was a really important part of my life." Her life, she said, was shaped by the war. "It was an experience that affected everything we did," she said, lessons she and her husband, who died in 2010, passed to their three daughters. In all the years of moving from place to place, she remembers they never went to sleep without saying a prayer for their family in Europe, to "bless Aunt Virgie, Emra and Oscar and Pearl... our grandparents." When she met some of this family again in the mid 1950s, "I knew them. They had been part of my everyday life … they were part of my vocabulary." At the end of telling her story, of two hours and 54 minutes of mostly emotionless factual testimony, the interviewer for the Shoah project asks if there is anythingshe hopes people could take away from her story. "We need a broader picture of all of humanity," she said. "We need to educate ourselves and always need to be on top of what is going on in the world and be alert and be responsive to it." And it's why she continues to tell their story, to warn about antisemitism ― even as hate against Jews soars to historic levels. Just last year, Steinmetz showed up to a Boulder City Council meeting in support of her local Jewish community. A woman sat down next to Steinmetz, she recounted in a video interview in June 2024. The woman had a Palestinian flag and a sign that read, "from the river to the sea," a phrase that can be used to promote antisemitism. Steimetz turned to her and said: "Do you realize that that means you want to kill me? You want me destroyed?'" The woman just turned away. "Jews in Boulder and maybe Denver and probably in cities all around the world, are afraid of wearing their Jewish stars," Steinmetz said. People are taking down their mezuzahs so that no one will know that it's a Jewish house, she said. But in the following breath, Steinmetz rejected the notion that silence is ever an option. "It is up to each of us to say something, to say something and do something. 'You can say no; I'm a human being just like that other person. We are all humans.'"
Daily Mail
6 days ago
- General
- Daily Mail
Holocaust survivor who was burned in the Colorado terror attack breaks her silence
An 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who was burned in the shocking terror attack in Boulder, Colorado broke her silence with a message of unity. Barbara Steinmetz spoke out to condemn the attack on Sunday, where at least 12 people were injured when suspect Mohamed Soliman allegedly threw Molotov cocktails at a pro-Israel protest, but said the community would recover. 'We are better than this,' she told NBC News. The 88-year-old said she and other members of the Run for their Lives event were 'peacefully' demonstrating when the attack unfolded. 'It's about what the hell is going on in our country,' Steinmetz continued. 'What the hell is going on?' Steinmetz's family fled Italy and Hungary to escape the Nazis decades ago, but said the attack on Sunday had 'nothing to do with the Holocaust, it has to do with a human being that wants to burn other people.' The outlet said Steinmetz appeared to still be rattled by the shock attack, but said she just wanted 'people to be nice and decent to each other, kind, respectful, encompassing.' 'We're Americans,' she said. 'We are better than this. That's what I want them to know. That they be kind and decent human beings.' Police said Soliman screamed 'Free Palestine' as he threw the Molotov cocktails at the protestors, and he is now facing 16 counts of attempted murder as well as federal hate crime charges. Rabbi Marc Soloway, the leader of Congregation Bonai Shalom in Boulder, where Steinmetz is a member, said the elderly woman suffered minor burns but is 'going to be okay.' Soloway added that although Steinmetz will recover, he wondered how someone who survived the Holocaust would process the anti-Israel attack. 'Can you imagine the trauma that that reactivates?' the rabbi said. 'It's just horrendous.' Steinmetz, an active and visible member of Boulder's Jewish community since she and her late husband moved from Michigan 20 years ago, was born in 1936 in her parents' native Hungary. Shortly after her birth, they returned to Italy, where they'd run an island hotel since the 1920s – but as Steinmetz progressed through her toddler years, it was becoming more and more dangerous for Jews in Europe. Steinmetz fled with her parents and sister in 1940 to Hungary, but her father saw the dangers there, too, and quickly planned to get out of the country. 'My dad encouraged the rest of my family to leave,' Steinmetz told CU Boulder students at a 2019 talk. 'They were scared — they simply couldn't envision what was to come…or that their friends [and] customers would turn on them.' As their family and Jews suffered increasingly under Hitler's regime, her 'cousin stole a Nazi uniform and brought food into the ghetto and caused plenty of mischief to the Nazis,' Steinmetz wrote in 2014 in a Holocaust film review. Her father eventually fled with his wife and children to France, then Portugal, then the Dominican Republic, stopping at Ellis Island on the way just for processing. The island nation's dictator, Rafael Trujillo, had agreed to accept Jewish refugees, and a Jewish resettlement organization established a community at Sosua. 'Sosua was an abandoned banana plantation … and these bedraggled refugees, doctors and lawyers and professors, came to this piece of land where there was one building we all slept,' Steinmetz said in an interview posted to Instagram in April. 'And there was water, and the women did the cooking, and the men tried to do the agriculture.' After four years of attending a Dominican Catholic school, telling no one she was Jewish or European, Steinmetz and her family were granted visas to the US. She and her sister immediately began attending Jewish summer camps, where they 'knew no one and didn't speak any English,' Boulder Jewish News reported five years ago, as Boulder JCC prepared to honor Steinmetz at its annual gala. The camps 'offered the opportunity to excel in sports and exposed them to what it means to be a Jew,' it continued. The family eventually settled in Detroit, where her mother ran the lunchroom at the Jewish Community Center (JCC), which became Steinmetz's 'home in America,' the outlet reported. 'Barb met and married Howard while still a teenager and college student. They moved to Saginaw, Michigan when she was a young mom,' it continued. 'They built a life there around Jewish community.' The Steinmetz had three daughters – Ivy, Julie and Monica – and lived in Saginaw for decades before moving to Boulder two decades ago. They left Michigan after filing suit against Dow Chemical over alleged dioxin poisoning on their property. Both Ivy and Howard Steinmetz died of cancer, ten months apart, in 2011. Steinmetz has been a frequent featured speaker in Colorado, sharing her experience as a Holocaust survivor for students and local groups as recently as March. She has been a vocal Jewish presence in Boulder for decades. Steinmetz's son-in-law, Bruce Shaffer, is a co-lead of Run for Their Lives, which orchestrated the event attacked on Sunday. The Shaffers split their time between Boulder and Jerusalem. Steinmetz had previously expressed fears about anti-Semitism and hate finding her in Boulder, writing to city authorities in 2016 to oppose the establishment of Nablus, in Palestine, as a sister city – which ultimately went ahead. 'I AM NEAR 80 YEARS I ONCE AGAIN HAVE TO DEAL WITH ANTI - JEWISH SENTIMENT IN MY OWN TOWN?' she wrote to Boulder's council in a letter publicly available online. 'HAVE I NOT COME TO AMERICA WHERE I CAN FIND DON'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME AND MY COMMUNITY OF VERY ACTIVE CIVIC CITIZENS.'
Daily Mail
6 days ago
- General
- Daily Mail
BREAKING NEWS Holocaust survivor who survived Colorado terror attack breaks her silence
An 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who was burned in the shocking terror attack in Boulder, Colorado broke her silence with a message of unity. Barbara Steinmetz condemned the attack on Sunday, where at least 12 people were injured when suspect Mohamed Soliman allegedly threw Molotov cocktails at a pro-Israel protest, as a horror event. 'We are better than this,' she told NBC News. She said the attack 'has nothing to do with the Holocaust, it has to do with a human being that wants to burn other people.' The 88-year-old said she and other members of the Run for their Lives event were 'peacefully' demonstrating when the attack unfolded. 'It's about what the hell is going on in our country,' Steinmetz continued. 'What the hell is going on?' The outlet said Steinmetz appeared to still be rattled by the shock attack, but said she just wanted 'people to be nice and decent to each other, kind, respectful, encompassing.' 'We're Americans,' she said. 'We are better than this. That's what I want them to know. That they be kind and decent human beings.'
