On the first night of Passover, an intruder firebombed the Pennsylvania governor’s residence as Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family slept upstairs. The attacker was angered by the Jewish governor’s support for Israel.
A few weeks later, two young Israeli Embassy employees were shot dead in Washington, D.C., allegedly by a man shouting, “Free Palestine.”
And just days ago, an illegal immigrant from Egypt threw Molotov cocktails and used an improvised flamethrower to injure a group of Jewish people walking at an outdoor mall in Boulder, Colo. They were there to show support for the hostages held by Hamas. The attacker was there, he told police, because he wanted to “kill all Zionist people.”
If American Jews and their allies thought the response to the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 would be deepening support for Israel and world Jewry, they’ve learned a harsh lesson since, according to Marcy Gringlas, Ph.D.
The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Gringlas is concerned that the escalating antisemitism—not just in America but around the world—echoes the period leading up to World War II and Hitler’s attempt at a “Final Solution.”
Gringlas participated in the fifth annual Holocaust Survivor Day celebration at Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel. The event was sponsored by Seed the Dream Foundation, a nonprofit Gringlas co-founded with her husband, Joel Greenberg; the Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Greater Philadelphia; and the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. The survivors were treated to lunch, klezmer music, and dancing. They recited prayers and lit candles in memory of the six million Jews who perished during the Holocaust.
With the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, “there’s the hostages being kidnapped, then there’s the Gazan war, a war where everyone’s focus and critique and opinion (is) and not enough focus on what happened on Oct. 7 and the hostages,” said Gringlas, a Gladwyne resident. “So, we are narrowly, in terms of legacy media, we’re narrowly focused on the war without understanding how we got here, without understanding how important it is to acknowledge what happened on Oct. 7 and that the hostages are still there.”
“It shows what my father said always, if there had been an Israel (during the Holocaust), millions would have survived. What’s happening today shows how critical it is for us to have our home, our state.”
“And it’s also similar to the pre-Holocaust years, in the U.S., in Europe, in Australia, in Canada,” she said. “Every single horrible incident of propaganda, of dehumanization, of denialism, is all out of a playbook from the 1930s.
“So, it seems to me that one of the lessons we need to have learned, if we did not learn already, is that you can’t remain silent. All people, not just Jewish people, should be standing, screaming, and fighting for the humanity of the Jewish people, who have endured so much on Oct. 7, and are being criticized for defending themselves in a war they didn’t ask for.”
Yury Kremenets, 86, was also part of the Holocaust Survivor Day event. He and his family fled Kyiv, Ukraine, for Siberia at the beginning of World War II when he was 2 years old.
After the war, they returned to Kyiv. He and his wife, Eugenia, both had careers in IT. They tried to immigrate to America in 1979 but were refused because of the war Russia was waging against Afghanistan. The Maple Glen couple finally made it to the U.S. in 1987.
“At that time, there was a lot of antisemitism in the Soviet Union (which Ukraine was part of),” he said. “We wanted freedom and to be free people.”
The antisemitism in the U.S. now is “unbelievable,” said Eugenia. And she blames the press.
“I think it’s the media bias,” Eugenia said. She believes American media has downplayed the motive of the recent firebombing in Boulder and other antisemitic incidents.
“It’s like the media in the Soviet Union,” she said. While not controlled by the government, “American media should make an effort to be less biased.”
They are both concerned about the Russia-Ukraine war and hope it ends soon.
Ukraine “depends on help from Europe and the U.S.,” said Yury. “Currently, the help isn’t enough.”
In April, Gringlas traveled to Auschwitz for the March of the Living. It was her fifth visit to the concentration camp, which is located in Poland.
“This time it was completely different because of Oct. 7,” she said. And because Gringlas was visiting the infamous death camp without her father, the late Joseph Gringlas, who survived Blizyn, Auschwitz, and Mittelbau-Dora.
“What was overwhelming was we were marching with 80 Holocaust survivors,” said Gringlas. “And also marching alongside many family members and released hostages from Israel to stand together, to stand proud, and to stand loud. And also, to say that we have endured in the past and we’re enduring now, and to give some kind of credence to the words ‘never again.’
“It made me question, what does never again mean when I’m standing here beside these Oct. 7 survivors… Maybe we should be saying ‘no more’ versus ‘never again.’”