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Wall Street Journal
7 days ago
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Antisemitism and the Teachers Union
Anti-Israel and anti-American radicals have set college campuses afire in the past two years. In too many places, they turned quads into combat zones, harassed Jewish students in dorms, and shut down debate in classrooms. Now we have a new, even more terrifying problem: The radicals are turning their sights on K-12 classrooms. Last week the National Education Association used its annual conference to adopt a measure that effectively prevents the union's members from 'using, endorsing or publicizing' any educational materials created by the Anti-Defamation League, one of the oldest and leading Jewish organizations in America. For decades ADL curricula has been the gold standard for helping students understand and navigate the complex issues of bigotry and prejudice. Our peer-reviewed programs have helped educators instruct pupils about how bias can grow and mutate over time if left unchecked. We developed our Holocaust education offering, 'Echoes and Reflections,' in collaboration with Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the USC Shoah Foundation. It offers lessons on the Holocaust and its eternal resonance for all people. One of our main educational offerings, 'No Place for Hate,' is a student-led program used in more than 2,000 schools across the U.S. every year. Through classroom content and extracurricular activities, the program offers a message of inclusion that is entirely apolitical. It's designed solely to bring students together to better understand the differences that too often divide us. Against this backdrop, the NEA's move is both insidious and vindictive. This wasn't about the ADL. It was a clear and unambiguous statement to Jewish educators, parents and children: You don't count. And it perversely takes this stance at a time when anti-Jewish hate is skyrocketing.
Express Tribune
14-07-2025
- Express Tribune
Holocaust AI fakes spark alarm
The Facebook post shows a photo of a pretty curly-haired girl on a tricycle and says she is Hannelore Kaufmann, 13-year-old from Berlin who died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. But there is no such Holocaust victim and the photo is not real, but generated by AI. Content creators, often based in South Asia, are churning out such posts for money, targeting Westerners' emotional reactions to the Holocaust, in which six million Jewish people died, researchers told AFP. Critics say that such AI-generated images, text and videos are offensive and contribute to Holocaust distortion by conjuring up a "fantasy-land Auschwitz". The Auschwitz museum sounded the alarm over the trend. "We're dealing with the creation of a false reality -- because it is falsifying images... falsifying history," museum spokesman Pawel Sawicki told AFP. The museum at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration and extermination camp, where one million Jews were murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland, first noticed the posts in May, Sawicki said. Some reproduced the museum's posts about victims but changed the images using AI, without flagging this. "You can see the photo is based on the original but it's completely changed", Sawicki said. A recent post about a Polish man was recreated with an "outrageous" AI image of an Asian man, he added. In others, "both the photo and the story are fabricated"" Sawicki said, portraying "people who never existed". A girl with a flower in her hair is named as Yvette Kahn who died in Auschwitz. No such victim appears in databases of the victims. In other cases, details do not match. A girl called Hanni Lore or Hannelore Kaufmann lived in western Germany -- not Berlin -- and died in Sobibor camp -- not Auschwitz, according to Israel's Yad Vashem remembrance centre. Posts add emotive elements such as Kaufmann loving her tricycle. But the Auschwitz museum spokesman stressed: "We generally don't have information about these people's lives." Complaints to Facebook owner Meta have not resulted in action, Sawicki said. AFP
Int'l Business Times
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Int'l Business Times
Before the Silence Falls: How 'The Last Ones' Is Preserving Holocaust Memory for a New Generation
Time is running out. Fewer than 245,000 Holocaust survivors are alive today. With each passing day, that number shrinks—and with it, the living connection to the past. Soon, the world will lose its last witnesses to a horror that defies comprehension. But one organization is working urgently to make sure that when the voices go quiet, the stories won't. The Last Ones is not a museum. It's not a textbook. It's a movement—one that meets history where it lives: in the hearts and words of the survivors who are still here, and in the eyes of the next generation who must carry their memory forward. At its core, The Last Ones is a global storytelling initiative co-founded by French-American journalist Leslie Benitah, herself the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors. What began as a personal journey to understand her family's silence has become a sweeping, multimedia project spanning continents, languages, and generations. Benitah doesn't record these testimonies in studios. She sits with survivors in their living rooms. Over coffee tables. In small kitchens. No scripts. No agenda. Just deep listening and earned trust. "These aren't interviews," she explains. "These are conversations survivors were never sure they'd live long enough to have." Each film captures more than history—it captures humanity. The smell of the bread their mothers baked. The knock on the door. The walk to the train. Life is rebuilt, brick by emotional brick. It's intimate. It's raw. And it's unforgettable. But what truly sets The Last Ones apart is how it speaks to today's youth. Its team has embraced the platforms young people live on—TikTok, Instagram, YouTube—creating short, emotionally charged videos that reach millions. Their most-watched clip? A 90-year-old survivor showing his striped concentration camp uniform. Over 7 million views. One minute. One man. A lifetime remembered. The organization has also developed a first-of-its-kind geo-located mobile app. Walk through Warsaw, Paris, or Berlin, and one's phone will light up with the testimony of a survivor who lived on that very street. It's memory, mapped. And students are paying attention. In Florida alone, thousands of public school classrooms now use The Last Ones ' short films and guided lesson plans. Teachers report that the emotional entry point helps students connect deeply, even those with little prior knowledge of the Holocaust. "We don't need kids to memorize dates," says Benitah. "We need them to understand what happens when we forget what hate looks like." The work hasn't gone unnoticed. Yad Vashem has offered its endorsement. The Claims Conference awarded a major grant for international expansion. And most recently, The Last Ones launched a new educational platform, offering free access to all their content—films, podcasts, teaching tools—to educators worldwide. Benitah describes it this way: " The Last Ones isn't just preserving history. It's keeping humanity awake." Indeed, what makes this project stand out isn't just its digital innovation—it's its moral clarity. In a time when disinformation, antisemitism, and extremism are once again rising, The Last Ones is not simply teaching the past. It's building a firewall for the future. Benitah puts it plainly: "If we don't give young people the tools to feel, to understand, to empathize—then we risk raising a generation that sees history as irrelevant. We can't let that happen. Not on our watch." As the last survivors grow fewer, the responsibility grows greater. The Last Ones is doing more than honoring memory—it's making sure memory has a voice that echoes forward. And that may be the most urgent story of all.
Ottawa Citizen
29-06-2025
- General
- Ottawa Citizen
They saved Jews from the Nazis. Eighty years later, two Dutch-Canadian couples named among the 'righteous'
Article content It is an elite club, numbering 28,486 people from 51 countries, unimaginably courageous non-Jews who risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. Article content They are the Righteous Among the Nations, honoured by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum and memorial, on behalf of the State of Israel. Article content The club was expanded last Thursday in Toronto when the honour was bestowed posthumously on two couples who sheltered Jews in Nazi-occupied Holland. Article content Article content 'What did they have to lose? I would say everything,' said Elizabeth Quinlan, whose honoured grandparents, Eimericus and Anna Maria Tijssen, took a young Jewish girl, Annie Muller, into their already large family in southeastern Holland. Article content Article content Also honoured at the moving ceremony at Israel's consulate in Toronto were Hendrik and Frederika Veldboom, who hid a Jewish couple in their rural farmhouse near the border with Germany and rescued their newborn son. Article content The ceremony, attended by Ontario MPPs and other dignitaries, was crowded by dozens of descendants of both couples who came from points across Ontario, Edmonton, Texas, and the Cayman Islands. The dangers the Dutch couples faced were clear: Hiding Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe was punished by shipment to a concentration camp or being shot on the spot. Add to that tension food scarcity, regular Allied shellings, and neighbours and even relatives who were Nazi collaborators. Article content Article content It was in 1943 when the Dutch underground brought Elia 'Annie' Muller, then 2-1/2 years old, to the Thijssens after the child had been moved through several hiding places. Despite the fact that five of the couple's seven children were still living at home, they welcomed the Jewish girl, who would call her saviours Opa (Grandpa) and Moeke (Grandma). Article content Article content The Thijssens' married daughter, Lena, helped with the cover story: She said she was friends with Annie's mother, who was in a sanatorium. The child was kept safe until six months after Holland's liberation in May 1945, when she was reunited with her parents. Article content In a video hookup from her home in Holland, Muller, now 84, recalled with deep thanks her memories of a big family, how Moeke sliced the bread, the hams hanging from the ceiling, the old telephone, playing outside with the other children 'and being naughty.' No talk of fear or the sudden need to hide. An artist, her work has centred on themes of memory and resistance – 'a tribute to the people who saved me.'
Forbes
23-05-2025
- Forbes
Searching For A British Princess Buried On Jerusalem's Mount Of Olives
Britain's Prince William visits the grave of his great-grandmother Princess Alice of Battenberg ... More during a visit to the Mary Magdalene Church, in east Jerusalem, on June 28, 2018. (Photo by SEBASTIAN SCHEINER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) On a sunny day in Jerusalem, I decided to go looking for a princess. Not just any princess, but Princess Alice of Battenberg, also known as Royal Highness Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark, grandmother of King Charles III. Alice was also named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust center, for saving a Jewish family. Royal watchers know her as the mother of the late Prince Phillip, as shown in an episode of the popular British TV show The Crown. How did the British-born Princess end up on the Mount of Olives, outside the Garden of Gethsemane, under the seven golden domes of a Russian Orthodox church? We drove the narrow roads of East Jerusalem to find out. The Mount of Olives is an appropriate place for a princess to be buried. King David named it as a site for prayer and would prostrate himself there. The local olive trees have long furnished the oil used to anoint kings and high priests. At his coronation, King Charles III of England was anointed with olive oil from the Monastery of Mary Magdalene, where his grandmother is buried. The Mount of Olives, across a valley from Jerusalem's walls, has been a Jewish graveyard for 3,000 years. The view towards the walls of the old city, the Dome of the Rock and the Tower of David, is literally to die for. No wonder with over 150,000 graves, locals call it 'the most expensive real estate in Jerusalem.' Mount of Olives View in Jerusalem city scape, Israel. But Princess Alice is not buried amongst the stone crypts on the hillside. Instead, she resides within the Monastery of Mary Magdalene, a beautiful Russian Orthodox church. Princess Alice lived a long and difficult life with courage and conviction. A great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she was born in Britain's Windsor Castle in 1885. She was related to most of Europe's royal families. Yet that did not guarantee an easy life. She was born profoundly deaf but learned lip-reading by age eight. She also learned to sign, and was fluent in English, German, French and later, Greek. At 17 she met Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark at the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902. She married him a year later. The Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene, where the tomb of Princess Anne now resides, was built in 1888. Known for its distinctive golden onion domes it was built in memory of the Russian Czar's mother, Empress Maria Alexandrovna. In 1908 Princess Alice visited Russia and met with her aunt Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna. Alice was impressed with the plans of the Duchess to found a religious order of nurses. After her own conversion to Orthodoxy in 1928, Alice worked with the poor and gave away most of her possessions. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, is shown in a reunion ... More with his mother, Princess Alice of Greece. Princess Alice, widow of Prince Andrew of Greece is living a semi-cloistered life as a nun on the Aegean Island of Tinos, where she has formed an order of deaconesses. She wears a habit similar to that of the Greek Orthodox religious orders. In 1918, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna were killed by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution. Duchess Feodorovna's remains were ultimately buried at Monastery of Mary Magdalene. At the end of her life, Princess Alice would ask to be buried in Jerusalem next to her aunt. Princess Alice had four daughters and Phillip, who was born in Greece in 1921. However, shortly after his birth, defeat in the Greek Turkish war resulted in Alice's husband Prince Andrew being charged with treason. Well aware of the murders of their cousins the Romanovs, the family fled in a Royal Navy ship in 1922, with Phillip hidden in a fruit box. The family lived briefly in Paris, but Philip was sent to live in England for boarding school. Princess Alice had a breakdown, claiming she was receiving divine messages and had healing powers. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she was forcibly removed from her family and committed to a Swiss sanatorium in 1930, She was treated by Sigmund Freud, who insisted Alice had a sex addiction and needed to have her ovaries X-rayed. Alice was eventually released in 1932, but the family had dissolved. The daughters were married off to German noblemen. Prince Andrew had gone to live on the French Rivera with a countess. Princess Alice returned to Greece alone in 1938. When Axis forces took over Greece in 1941, she worked with the Red Cross and organized soup kitchens and shelters. Because her daughters had married Germans, the Nazis presumed she was pro-German. But when a German general asked what he could do for her, she said, 'You could leave my country.' Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, visits the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Museum on September 7, ... More 2007 in Jerusalem, Israel. During the Second World War, Prince Edward's grandmother Princess Alice of Battenberg sheltered Jewish refugees, for which she is recognised with a symbolic tree as 'Righteous Among the Nations' at Yad Vashem. (Photo by Mati Milstein/British Embassy via Getty Images) During the German occupation, more than 85% of the 77,000 Jews living in Greece were murdered. Princess Alice had long known the family of Haimaki Cohen, a Jew and former member of Parliament. In 1941, they fled to then Italian-controlled Athens. But in 1943, the Germans occupied Athens and began deporting Jews. Rachel Cohen, her daughter and son were unable to escape. When Princess Alice heard about their situation, she offered to shelter the family. The Germans were suspicious. When Alice was questioned by the Gestapo, she pretended not to understand their questions due to her deafness until they left. The Cohens were successfully hidden until liberation in 1944. Princess Alice survived the war, attending Phillip's wedding to Elizabeth in 1947. At Elizabeth's coronation in 1953, she wore a gray nun's habit. The royal family insisted she leave Greece again after a coup overthrow the government in 1967. She died in Great Britain in 1969 and was buried in Windsor Castle. But before her death she had asked to be buried near her Aunt Elizabeth. In 1988, her remains were moved to the Church of Mary Magdalen. In 1993 Yad Vashem bestowed the title of Righteous Among the Nations on Princess Alice. A year later, her children, Prince Philip and Princess George of Hanover, traveled to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to plant a tree in her honor. Prince Philip said, "I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special. She was a person with deep religious faith and she would have considered it to be a totally human action to fellow human beings in distress." In 2018 her great-grandson Prince William visited her crypt, on the first official Royal visit to Israel. Finding Princess Alice and getting in to see her can be tricky. Many tours will take you to the church and many holy sites nearby. One can also hire a taxi for the day. There is little parking in the area so drop-off and pick-up should be coordinated. Landscape view of Mary Magdalene Church on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Several websites state that the church is open to visitors only on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM. However, we were told that it is open to visitors throughout the week. To view Princess Anne's tomb, you must request that the tomb area be opened. On our visit, after circling around on the narrow, dusty roads, we found an entrance. Father Roman, a distinguished figure with curly black hair and floor-sweeping black cassock, let us in. We walked through the garden tended by the nuns and into the beautiful church. After marveling at the glittering artifacts inside, he brought us outside again. He opened a door to Princess Alice's crypt. It was like a journey to the past, with photographs of the Romanovs and other royal families. Princess Alice lay in a simple coffin, finally at peace. circa 1910: Alice, Princess of Greece, (1885 - 1969), the wife of Prince Andrew of Greece, (1882 - ... More 1944), and mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Born Princess Alice of Battenberg, she was a great grand-daughter of Queen Victoria. (Photo by) We stayed a moment, alone with our thoughts. But before we left, we had an only-in-Israel moment. I asked Father Roman how long he had been in charge of the church. 'Six years,' he said. 'Is that when you came from Russia?' I asked, visualizing him stepping off an Aeroflot jet. 'No, I grew up here. I served in the IDF Givati Brigade.' Open-mouthed, our guide, a Jerusalem deputy mayor, and Father Roman started swapping army stories.
