H eadlines
Criminals Continued from Page 1
United States.

For years, much of the infor-
mation known today about the
existence of Nazi war crimi-
nals in the U.S. was unknown
outside of the offices of the
now-defunct Immigration
and Naturalization Services.

It wasn’t until a campaign
by Elizabeth Holtzman, a
Brooklyn-born Harvard Law
graduate who was only the third
Jewish woman to serve in the
House of Representatives, that
public scrutiny was brought to
bear on the phenomenon.

On June 16, Holtzman
will deliver the 2021 Sol
Feinstone Memorial Lecture
on the Meaning of Freedom, an
annual address held at Gratz
College. Holtzman’s speech,
titled “Nazi War Criminals in
America: The Historic Forty-
plus Year Effort to Bring Them
to Justice,” will cover the legal
and moral questions that vexed
her and those who joined her
initially lonely effort to identify
and deport Nazi war criminals.

The event is free and will be
presented online.

Holtzman, counsel and
co-chair of the government
relations group at Herrick,
Feinstein LLP, worked in the
administration of John V.

Lindsay, a former congressman
and New York City mayor,
before she ran for Congress
in 1972. Holtzman upset
50-year incumbent Emanuel
Celler to become, at 31, the
youngest woman ever elected
to Congress. That record held
until 2014.

L ater i n her c a reer,
Holtzman, a Democrat, would
spend eight years as district
attorney of Kings County, the
first woman to be elected DA
in New York City. She was the
first and only woman to be
elected comptroller of New
York City, ran for Senate on
several occasions and served
on the Homeland Security
Advisory Council.

A 2020 article in Tablet
recounted the beginning of
Holtzman’s political career:
“She used her new office to
ask ‘unpopular questions’ of
those in power, probing the
legality of military action
in Cambodia ordered by
President Richard Nixon and
criticizing his deflective use of
executive privilege. Sitting on
the Judiciary Committee, she
played a significant, public role
in Nixon’s impeachment.”
In 1973, a man approached
Holtzman with a tip. The INS,
he said, kept a list of Nazi war
criminals living in the country,
a list that they were content to
keep and do little else with. To
this day, Holtzman said, she
doesn’t know why she was the
one who the man approached
with that explosive piece of
information. “I mean, I was one of 535
members of the House and
Senate,” Holtzman said.

Incensed, but unsure of what
to do with what she’d been
told, Holtzman didn’t move on
the information until later that
year when two articles in The
New York Times corroborated
the man’s story, according to
Tablet. The following April,
during a congressional hearing
involving INS commissioner
Leonard F. Chapman Jr.,
Holtzman asked him flat-out:
Was there a list of Nazi war
criminals in the U.S.? He
answered yes.

“I said, ‘OK. I want to see
the files,’” Holtzman recalled.

“I didn’t take their word for
an end. That was just the
beginning.” T h e f o l l o w i n g M a y,
Holtzman held a press confer-
ence excoriating the laxity of
the INS, and called for a task
force to be created with the
purpose of expelling Nazi war
criminals in the U.S., with the
goal of seeing them stand trial
Elizabeth Holtzman
for war crimes. At first, it was
a lonely fight; people simply
could not believe that the
government had allowed such
a thing to happen, Holtzman
said. But as her fight grew
in prominence, many were
willing to lend Holtzman their
swords in order to slay the
“bureaucratic dragons” that
had slowed her down.

It wasn’t until 1978, five years
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after the initial disclosure of the
list, that Holtzman was able to
form a Special Litigation Unit.

The Holtzman Amendment
to the Immigration and
Nationality Act, passed that
year, “provided additional
grounds for deportation and
exclusion for individuals who
collaborated with the Nazi
government,” according to
lawyer Talia Zikel Lissner.

Her work was far from
over, as Holtzman knew. The
legal process of identifying,
trying and deporting Nazi war
criminals was a decades-long
project. It would eventually
outlast her career as an elected
official; just last year, a former
concentration camp guard
named Friedrich Karl Berger
was deported from Tennessee,
an action made possible by the
Holtzman Amendment.

“I’m not someone who
gives up,” Holtzman said. “I
didn’t know what was going to
happen. All I know is that I had
to keep fighting and pushing
and prodding and cajoling and
persuading.” l
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



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H eadlines
Fears Continued from Page 1
retracted, but the story remains
posted without a correction.

FOX 29 did not respond to a
request for comment.

The affair tells a story
about the current climate
around antisemitism, one
that Anti-Defamation League
Philadelphia Regional Director
Shira Goodman said is
emblematic of the “whisper-
down-the-lane” problems that
can be created by social media
furor. “There’s clearly a heightened
sense of anxiety and fear right
now,” Goodman said.

According to the police
report cited in the article, a
Jewish woman was walking in
the area of 21st and Sansom
streets on May 28 when she
was approached by “three
Middle Eastern males dressed
as Orthodox Jewish men.” They
greeted the woman by wishing
her Shabbat Shalom, a greeting
that she returned. “When the
complainant returned the
greeting, the males stopped
and said ‘Oh, you’re Jewish,’”
the report reads. They began
to ask her if she “had Shabbat
candles for them.”
The woman walked away
as the men continued to
speak to her. She then ran
into a nail salon and called
the Philadelphia
Police Department, who noted her
claims that the offenders were
“3 Middle Eastern males, 20s,
dressed in all black Orthodox
Jewish attire.”
On May 30, the woman
issued a statement from her
Instagram account, which
was once again posted by the
StopAntisemitism.org Twitter
account. The three men, she’d
been made aware, had actually
been Jewish, not non-Jews
dressed up as Orthodox Jewish
men. According to several
people familiar with the situa-
tion, they were local yeshiva
students whose weekly Shabbat
afternoon rounds frequently
take them to the area where
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM & & TAY-SACHS
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only lead to more fear and
refresh the vicious cycle.”
e-mail: ntsad@aol.com;
Yehudah Mirsky,
a visit: www.tay-sachs.org
■ professor of Near Eastern and
Screening for other
Judaic studies as well as Israel
Jewish Genetic
Diseases studies at Brandeis University,
also available.

said that Jewish people play a
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“Antisemitism is clearly a where paranoia and anxiety
more salient force in American regarding antisemitism reign.

People are “very not used to
society than we’ve seen in a
Yehudah Mirsky, a professor at Brandeis University
Courtesy of Yehudah Mirsky long time,” Mirsky said. The it and that’s why, understand-
widespread proliferation of ably, it’s very, very rattling,”
conspiracy theories, hitched to Mirsky said. l
the incident occurred.

they have been in recent weeks, the incentive structure of social
“With the massive rise in easily sharable, unverified media — share-ability and jbernstein@jewishexponent.com;
antisemitism happening in reports of antisemitism can incendiary content — combine 215-832-0740
America these past few weeks, spread quickly on social media,
my body and mind understand- regardless of their veracity.

ably went into fight vs. flight
Goodman cited an October
mode as I, along with many 2020 incident where three
others, have been traumati- Orthodox Jewish men at a Black
cally affected by current events Lives Matter rally appeared
in the Jewish community,” to have been harassed in an
the woman’s statement read. antisemitic fashion by BLM
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Israel-Hamas conflict began, resources.

compared to the two weeks
“We don’t want to heighten
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