New Anti-Semitism Wave On Minds At Holocaust Remembrance Event

When he sees headlines about bomb threats at Jewish centers across the U.S., Norman Feitelson has a feeling that he’s read this story before.

He knows that it ends after a great battle. In a concentration camp. Where he’s fighting to save the few lives that are still left.

Feitelson, a 92-year-old World War II veteran who helped liberate camps and now lives at New Haven’s Tower One/Tower East senior apartments, told that story Thursday afternoon at a ceremony recognizing and commemorating Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, before it is held next month in New Haven.

Proclaiming that ​“the people of New Haven should always remember … [and] remain eternally vigilant against tyranny,” Mayor Toni Harp signed a proclamation declaring April 23 to April 29 not just national days of remembrance, but local ones as well. The proclamation follows a 37-year-old precedent set by Congress. 

Hovering over the event was the recent spate of attacks and threats on Jewish cemeteries, community centers and schools across the country, including here in Connecticut. Feitelson and other participants in Thursday’s ceremony announced that the rally cry of ​“never forget” had taken on new importance. 

Drafted in June 1943, Feitelson watched as fellow soldiers, many of them Jewish, died in battle between 1943 and 1945. As the war neared its end, he had one final duty: performing what his superiors called ​“cleaning up” in Austria and Czechoslovakia with Company A of the 11th Regiment.

Near the then-Czechoslovakian border, he and his fellow soldiers were taken to Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, where only 1,600 survivors remained — those who had been too sick to follow the forced evacuation orders (also called ​“death marches”) of Nazi commanders in retreat toward the end of the war.

With Holocaust survivor Isidor Juda by his side Thursday, Feitelson recalled walking into the camp and watching a person from the town pass a row of 30 dead bodies, all women, heaped atop one another in the dirt.

A man still in the camp ambled toward Feitelson, recognizing an ​“H” that Feitelson said was on his uniform. He weighed no more than 58 pounds.

“Bist du a Yid?” he asked Feitelson. ​“Are you a Jew?”

Feitelson nodded. ​“I’m proud to be a Jew,” he responded in Yiddish. 

He said he remains proud today — but is also fearful for the Jewish community. Each time he reads a newspaper or sees one of President Donald Trump’s Twitter outbursts, he said, he’s hit with a sickening sense of déjà vu.

He’s said he’s heartened by this week’s call by all 100 U.S. Senators for action against anti-semitic threats. He said he wants to see more of a response from the Trump administration. He sees the possibility of history repeating itself each time he hears a Holocaust denier speak up, he said — and that seems to happen more frequently. 

“I’ve voted in 18 presidential elections, and I have never seen anything like this,” he said after the ceremony.

“Never forget the Shoah,” he said earlier from a podium at the front of the room, a catch in his throat.

Then he pounded the podium, his left arm striking it with a thud. ​“It can never happen again.”