JANUARY 2020 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 7
ANTI-SEMITIC CRISIS
PUSHBACK AGAINST HATE
Protesters march across the Brooklyn Bridge on Jan. 5 for the No Hate. No Fear. Solidarity March against Anti-Semitism. (Photo by Todd Maisel)
BY TIMOTHY BOLGER
At age 15, Yetta Zimmer repeatedly
snuck through the barbed wire of a
concentration camp in Poland during
World War II. She begged for food,
then snuck back in to help feed her
captive parents and three sisters.
Seventy-five years after being freed at
the war’s end in 1945, the 92-year-old
Holocaust survivor, Romanian immigrant,
and widowed grandmother
now living in Commack shares her
harrowing story with a reporter for
the first time. But she remains reluctant
to have her photo published out
of fear that anti-Semites might target
her for speaking out.
“The picture of that day I never
forget,” she says through tears while
recalling soldiers forcing her family
to leave their home in Romania after
her mother refused her father’s calls
to escape before the Nazis arrived in
1940. “We went through walking hell
… I was lucky they didn’t kill me.”
Turns out her fears of anti-Semitism
persisting nearly a century after the
Nazis killed 6 million European Jews
in the Holocaust are not unfounded.
The FBI found a 40 percent increase
in anti-Jewish hate crime reports
nationwide — from 609 to 835 — between
2014 and 2018, the most recent
year that national data is available.
More recent local high-profile hate
crimes have many on edge. Incidents
include a spate of anti-Semitic
assaults in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish
community, a suspect allegedly
stabbing five people at a rabbi’s house
during a Hanukkah party in surburban
Rockland County, and racist
graffiti and swastikas found at the
Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance
Center of Nassau County in Glen
Cove — weeks before the museum
hosts an International Holocaust
Remembrance Day event on Jan. 26.
“As a historical institution charged
with the responsibility of educating
about the hatred that led to the
Holocaust, we are deeply aware of
the fear these incidents create in
the Jewish community, particularly
among Holocaust survivors and
their families, and the dangers that
these acts of anti-Semitism pose to
the broader society,” the Holocaust
center said in a statement. “We ask
all Long Islanders to stand together
in a collective call for safety, unity,
and tolerance.”
The incidents prompted Nassau and
Suffolk county leaders to join with
the center in December to form an
anti-bigotry coalition dubbed the
Islandwide Task Force Against
Anti-Semitism and Symbols of Hate.
And a week after thousands of people
packed the streets of Manhattan
for the No Hate. No Fear. Solidarity
March against Anti-Semitism on
Jan. 5, Long Islanders are holding
a follow-up march in Mineola on
Jan. 12.
“We will be neither silent nor complacent
in the face of this horrifying
rise in anti-Semitic attacks,” said Nassau
County Executive Laura Curran.
“Together, Long Islanders of all faiths
and backgrounds will march in solidarity
with our Jewish community to
make clear that an attack on one of us
is an attack on all of us.”
The march is expected to draw Long
Islanders from across the region.
“The ugliness of anti-Semitism and
bigotry have no safe haven on Long Island,”
said Suffolk County Executive
Steve Bellone. “We will continue to
stand united, marching side by side,
rejecting anti-Semitism whenever it
rears its ugly head and sending the
message loud and clear that we are a
hate-free community which embraces
and promotes diversity.”
Jewish leaders say enough is enough.
“We will not be intimidated,” says
Rabbi Anchelle Perl, director of
Chabad of Mineola. “We will not be
defined by anti-Semitism. The arc
of history will ultimately bend towards
tolerance and understanding
between people.”
Of course, for those who’ve seen the
worst of history’s anti-Semitism, that
may be harder to believe.
“It’s terrible that picture, I never
forget,” says Zimmer, the Holocaust
survivor. “I been through hell.”
IN THE NEWS
“We will not be defined by anti-Semitism,”
says Rabbi Anchelle Perl.
/LONGISLANDPRESS.COM
