Maduro’s government has cracked down on thousands of protesters who took to the streets over the results of Venezuela’s July 28 election, arresting 2,000 people and killing 20. Venezuela’s electoral authority said that Maduro was reelected with 51% of the vote but has refused to release precinct-level tallies.

Detailed tallies from his opposition say that Maduro’s opponent Edmundo Gonzalez likely won with 67% of the vote, aligning with independent exit polls and analyses by the Washington Post and the Associated Press.

The disputed election quickly fanned unrest in Venezuela, ruled by Maduro’s socialist government for 11 years — a period that saw nearly 8 million Venezuelans flee the country amid a devastating economic collapse, exacerbated by U.S. oil sanctions. Maduro himself came into power in 2013 after being hand-picked by late President Hugo Chávez.

This week, he pinned the turmoil on his opposition, which he said was “supported” and “financed” by “international Zionism.”

“All the communication power of Zionism, which controls all the social networks, the satellites and all the power is behind this coup d’état,” Maduro said in a televised address.

Venezuela and Israel have not had formal relations since 2009, when Chavez broke off ties in response to that year’s Gaza war. Maduro is among a broad cohort of Latin American leaders who are deeply critical of Israel and strong supporters of the Palestinians.

His comment was slammed by Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, who accused him of harnessing historic antisemitic tropes about Jews controlling the world.

“Maduro’s absurd claim that Jews are behind election protests in Venezuela is antisemitic and unacceptable,” Lipstadt tweeted. “The Venezuelan people have gone to the streets to peacefully call for their votes to be counted. We reject all forms of antisemitism, and the use of these types of age-old tropes fans the flames of Jew hatred in Latin America and throughout the world.”

Venezuela is home to about 6,000 Jews, down from a height of about 25,000 in the 1990s. Many left over the economic policies of Chavez and Maduro.

The criticism adds to a wave of international condemnation over Maduro’s claim to victory. Though Russia, China, North Korea and Iran have stood by Maduro, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said there was “overwhelming evidence” that Gonzalez won the election and Washington recognized him as the victor. The European Union also said that it does not recognize Maduro’s proclaimed result.

The leaders of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico have urged Maduro to allow an audit of the vote and called on the electoral authorities to release detailed voting data.

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It was also home to one of the world’s largest and most important Jewish libraries — about 60,000 books of theology, history and literature that reflected the diversity of German-Jewish society before the Holocaust. Few traces remain of the institute, ​​known in German as the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, and its storied bookshelves: The Nazis shuttered the Hochschule, killed many of its members and plundered its library. After Germany’s defeat, the books were scattered across the world.

But a group of researchers believe they can track down those lost books — with help from the public. The Library of Lost Books, an international project from the Leo Baeck Institute, has created a series of online and physical exhibitions aimed at recruiting citizen scientists. The latest pop-up exhibition launched last month at London’s Wiener Holocaust Library, following similar events in Berlin and Prague, and runs until July 10.

“It’s a very vital part of the whole project to include the public in this search for the Nazi-looted books,” Bettina Farack, a research fellow at the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Experts have been trying to locate those looted books over the last 20 years, and even though our colleagues have put a lot of effort into it and found quite a few books, there’s still so much more to do that cannot be done by just a handful of experts.”

So far, Farack and her colleagues have located 5,000 of the Hochschule’s 60,000 books. They are virtually uniting the volumes in a digital library, leaving the physical copies where they were discovered in institutions across Germany, Czechia, Britain, Israel, the United States, Mexico and South Africa. Without a successor to the Hochschule, there is no one to give the books back to.

Operating from 1872 to 1942, the Hochschule pioneered Jewish studies as a research discipline alongside rabbinical study and training. Previously, Germany had seminaries dedicated to ordaining rabbis, but no place for academic study of Jewish history and culture.

“That was partly due to the reluctance of German public universities to integrate Jewish Studies into their curriculum,” said Farack. “You could study Christian theology of course at the universities, but there was no way of studying Jewish Studies. And so you needed an institution that actually offered this possibility.”

The school’s vast library supported its intellectual range. Works on both Jewish and Christian theology were available to students who researched the relationship between religions. Close to rare manuscripts, readers could find contemporary literature for their entertainment. The reading room was a social space filled with intellectual debates and sometimes even doubled as a dance floor.

The Hochschule also advanced the modern movement of liberal Judaism in Germany, known as Reform Judaism in the United States. Its professors taught rabbinical students about Judaism as an avenue for questions about universal ethics, philosophy and social change.

Among its students was Leo Baeck, ordained there as a rabbi in 1897. Baeck became a defining liberal Jewish theologian and the last leader of German Jewry under the Nazis, continuing his writings and lectures while imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He survived the Holocaust, moved to London and became the first president of the Leo Baeck Institute in 1955.

Women at the Hochschule set new standards as educational and religious leaders. Jenny Wilde, who became the library director in 1926, was likely the first woman to helm a scholarly library in Germany. Student Regina Jonas graduated in 1930 with a thesis titled, “Can women hold rabbinical office?” She answered her own question in 1935, when she was ordained as the first female rabbi in history. She was killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944.

Kafka also attended the school, taking classes in Hebrew and studying Talmud while living in Berlin during the last year of his life. He wrote to a friend in 1923, “To me the Academy for Jewish Studies is a refuge of peace in wild and woolly Berlin and in the wild and woolly regions of the mind.”

Looting Jewish libraries became a crucial part of Nazi Germany’s project to control narratives about Jewish history and culture. Though the Nazis may be better known for burning books than stealing them, book burnings took place earlier in their regime and were typically propaganda stunts destroying books they believed to have little value. Later, they developed an infrastructure of antisemitic studies, founding research institutes, departments and universities for Germans to rewrite Jewish history — and they needed primary sources.

“There was actually an academic discipline in Nazi Germany to ‘study the enemy,’” said Kinga Bloch, deputy director of the Leo Baeck Institute in London. “There were lots of young scholars using these sources in what they considered at the time to be academic research into the ideological enemy of Nazi Germany — or what they considered to be their enemy, the Jews.”

The Wiener Library exhibition reveals how the London institution has become intertwined with the Hochschule’s history, said Barbara Warnock, senior curator at the Wiener Library. Founder Alfred Wiener was himself a student at the Hochschule. Like Baeck, he was driven from Germany to Britain by Nazism, arriving as a refugee in 1939. While preparing for the exhibition, researchers found Hochschule documents in the Wiener Library’s collections — including an original call slip from the Hochschule library.

The exhibition commemorates the Hochschule and its lost library through photographs, original documents and a model of the original building. But it also instructs visitors, including young students, on how to identify Hochschule books by examining library stamps and other unique markings.

“There’s a notebook that we’re giving to people for free that has instructions about this, and pencils and pens,” Warnock told JTA. “And then there’s information about some of the missing books, like reproductions of front covers.”

The Leo Baeck Institute joins other groups seeking to recover fragments of Jewish culture that were destroyed by the Nazis. In Poland, researchers at the Grodzka Gate-NN Theater Center are searching for the lost library of the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva, another famed Jewish school whose books were plundered while its students were murdered. They have cataloged 850 books worldwide, including 10 volumes that were actually returned to the building of the former Lublin Yeshiva.

But unlike Lublin’s researchers, the Leo Baeck Institute does not aim to physically reunite any books from the Hochschule library. According to Bloch, their displacement is an important part of their story.

She hopes that exhibition visitors will be inspired not only to document the missing books, but also to follow their journeys — the historical winds that blew them — with looters, refugees and restitution organizations across the globe. Though the Hochschule is gone, in some way she believes that detectives who trace the paths of its books can bring the school back to life.

“The more books we can find, the more we empower the Hochschule as a space, even though it doesn’t exist any longer,” said Bloch.

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Nine years after his death, when McCabe was 18, she inherited part of his proud stamp collection. She rifled through relics of a lifelong hobby, including his first stamp album from 1926, an assortment of envelopes and, finally, 36 postcards that made her shudder. Though she could not read them, she recognized Hebrew letters and Jewish names. All the postcards were addressed to one place: The Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva.

McCabe didn’t know it at the time, but the yeshiva was a famed Jewish house of study in Poland before the Holocaust. And there in her hands, she held rare fragments of a world ruptured by her grandfather’s army. She soon learned that as the Jews of Lublin were murdered, her grandfather — stationed in the district until 1941 — fished some of their letters from a trash bin to augment his stamp collection.

On April 11, more than 80 years later, McCabe finally returned the postcards to their home in a ceremony at the former Lublin Yeshiva. Before an audience of about 25 people, she handed the collection to Iwona Herman, coordinator of the city’s Jewish community, along with directors from Lublin’s State Archive. Some 40 Jews live in Lublin today and a handful attended the event.

In a speech that turned shaky and trailed into tears, McCabe said, “These cards are neither a gift nor a donation. I am simply bringing home Holocaust loot.”

Before World War II, Lublin was a vibrant center of Jewish culture in Poland dating back to the 16th century. A large share of the city was always Jewish, roughly one-third — or 40,000 people — when the Nazis invaded. The Lublin Yeshiva opened in 1930, led by Rabbi Meir Shapiro, and lasted only nine years. In its brief life it became one of the world’s largest Jewish religious schools and boasted a library of between 15,000 and 40,000 religious books, among them some of the earliest manuscripts in print.

The Nazis turned Lublin into a center of mass extermination, killing 99% of its Jews and eradicating symbols of Jewish culture. Although the broad yellow structure of the yeshiva remained, used as an office by the German army, its vast library disappeared. The destruction was so effective, leaving so few traces of the yeshiva’s documentation, that even how its books vanished has remained a subject of speculation. For decades, a popular theory said they went up in flames at a Nazi book burning.

Only in recent years have local researchers including Piotr Nazaruk, who studies the city’s Jewish history at the Grodzka Gate-NN Theater Center, strenuously investigated the fate of the Lublin Yeshiva and its historic library. Nazaruk believes the Nazis looted the books and planned to transport them to Germany, but when the Russians marched in, the collection was abandoned and eventually scattered across the globe.

Nazaruk has tracked down 850 books with Lublin Yeshiva Library stamps worldwide, which he is documenting in a digital catalog. The vast majority cannot be physically returned, since they now belong to public and private collections, but 10 volumes have made their way home to the former yeshiva.

The postcards returned by McCabe offer a rare window into the workings of an ambitious Jewish school. Voices from these letters agonize over the funding for such a large building, along with all its staff and students. Chaim Schwanenfeld from Przemyśl wrote in April 1939, “To the respected management board, in response I would like to inform you that I have transferred the sum of twenty-five guilders to our friends, Mr. Mosze Katz and Niestemfajer. I have about twenty guilders left. What’s the point in sending such a small amount? I will send, God willing, a large sum after Yom Tov [Passover].”

Other cards are more personal, noting holidays and the anniversary of Rabbi Shapiro’s death in 1933. A letter from student Efraim Flajszman of Sochaczew, dated 1937, details his arduous journey to being admitted into the yeshiva, from demanding studies to a miscommunication at the Rabbinate in Warsaw. “I have already made so much effort to be accepted into Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin. I worked hard to get there,” he wrote.

After McCabe presented the postcards at the ceremony, they were spread out for viewing, drawing awed murmurs from a lingering crowd. The documents have since been transferred to Lublin’s State Archive for professional preservation and will be available to view on request. The Grodzka Gate-NN Theater Center has posted the collection online, along with translations into Polish and English, and plans to exhibit copies of the originals in the former yeshiva in May.

“We have so little left of the yeshiva,” Nazaruk told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We know so little about how it actually functioned. You couldn’t find such documents in the Lublin archives, regarding the yeshiva — everything was destroyed.”

Until McCabe arrived in Lublin, she didn’t know the cards were such a precious remnant of the city’s Jewish heritage. But for much of her life, the pile of papers in her cupboard weighed on her. Like other East Germans growing up in the 1980s, she felt stifled by an “endless silence” from her parents and grandparents about the Holocaust — and unlike in West Germany, rocked by student protests over the enduring Nazi past in 1968, rebellious youth movements were suppressed in the communist East.

“In my mother’s generation, it was still clear it’s a taboo, you can’t ask your father if he killed people. But my generation was the one that asked,” McCabe told JTA.

She tried and failed for more than 30 years to rid herself of the postcards, contacting Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum and memorial; scholars; and even members of Lublin’s small Jewish community, but no one expressed interest.

Still, she regularly checked for updates on the Lublin Yeshiva. After many years of being used by the Medical University of Lublin, the building was returned to the Jewish community in 2003. Twenty years later, McCabe saw Nazaruk advertise his search for Lublin Yeshiva books. She had found her recipient.

She considered sending her delivery by mail, but feared it could get lost. So on April 10, she placed an envelope of 36 postcards in her car and drove eight hours from her home in Chemnitz, a city in the east German state of Saxony where she works in an organization aiding needy residents, to Lublin.

“I’m just relieved they’re no longer in my care,” McCabe told JTA. “I’m totally overwhelmed with the attention they’ve been getting, so one hopes they will be of use to someone — that’s what I really wanted.”

Already, Jews from disparate corners of the world have identified family members in the postcards.

Tzvi Grossman, who works for a real estate development company in Israel, knew some of his family lived in Lublin before World War II. When Grodzka Gate published the postcards online, he clicked through and was stunned to recognize the name of his uncle, Shlomo David Grossman — marked right above his father’s childhood address at Babina 1 in Kalisz.

Grossman has verified through Yad Vashem that his uncle was a student at the yeshiva. He was killed along with most of the family; Grossman’s father was the only survivor from Poland. The 1933 postcard is hard to understand without context, but Grossman said he was struck by his uncle’s voice as a teenager.

“This boy who was writing at that time was 19, but it seems like a very mature conversation,” he said.

Meanwhile in Antwerp, author Toby Orlander saw her own uncle, Meir Lamet. Another Lublin Yeshiva student, Lamet traveled to obtain religious books for the library and funds for the maintenance of the yeshiva. He survived the war by hiding on a farm outside of Sambor, a city in today’s Ukraine, and moved to the United States in 1948.

The postcards are not only meaningful for descendants who look up Lublin online. Agnieszka Litman, a 30-year-old dance teacher in Lublin, said the city’s tiny Jewish community holds few traces of the past. Though a few dozen Jews meet regularly for Shabbat and holidays in the yeshiva building, they are mostly secular and aging. Some younger members join only to accompany their grandparents, who are gradually dying. Litman’s own grandfather, who was born in a nearby town, escaped to Russia during the war and returned to settle in Lublin, died three years ago.

As her grandfather’s generation passes on, Litman worries about how Lublin Jews will continue to learn about their history and remain a community. Already, they often go unacknowledged as a minority — many residents of Lublin don’t even know that Jews still live there. But the yeshiva’s postcards offer a tangible connection to the city’s Jewish past and present.

“These postcards show us a little bit more of who people were,” Litman told JTA. “People in the community are interested in it and talking about it, because it’s a little bit of a mystery that we are now uncovering, especially because we don’t have a lot of things that we can touch from that time. It seems so little, it’s just postcards — but also it’s someone’s life, it’s someone’s story.”

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But “The Tattooist of Auschwitz,” a new television series, is based on two Slovakian Jewish prisoners — Lali Sokolov and Gita Furman — who really did meet at Auschwitz, survive, marry and move to Australia together after the war. The six-part drama premiering May 2 on Peacock and Sky draws from a 2018 novel of the same name by Heather Morris, who interviewed Sokolov over three years before his death in 2006.

“It’s what drew me in, when I read the book a few years ago — that something like this could happen was so surprising,” Jonah Hauer-King, who plays young Lali at Auschwitz, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Any kind of love at first sight is surprising, let alone in a context like this.”

Alongside Hauer-King, known for his role as Prince Eric in Disney’s live-action “The Little Mermaid,” Academy Award nominee Harvey Keitel plays Lali’s older counterpart in his late 80s, recounting his experiences to Morris (Melanie Lynskey) from his home in Melbourne shortly after Gita (Anna Próchniak) has died.

Directed by Tali Shalom-Ezer and executive produced by Claire Mundell, the series will also feature an end-title song by the legendary Jewish artist and EGOT holder Barbra Streisand. “Love Will Survive” is Streisand’s first recording for a TV series, set to release ahead of the series premiere.

“Because of the rise in antisemitism around the world today, I wanted to sing ‘Love Will Survive’ in the context of this series, as a way of remembering the six-million souls who were lost less than 80 years ago,” Streisand said in her announcement. “And also to say that even in the darkest of times, the power of love can triumph and endure.”

“The Tattooist of Auschwitz” joins a crop of World War II-period TV series inspired by buzzy bestselling novels. Hulu recently launched “We Were the Lucky Ones,” based on Georgia Hunter’s 2017 novel about her Jewish family’s dispersion across the world. And in just the past year, Netflix adapted “All the Light We Cannot See” from Anthony Doerr’s 2014 war novel and aired “Transatlantic,” about Varian Fry’s mission to rescue Holocaust refugees, based on Julie Orringer’s 2019 book “The Flight Portfolio.”

Like the other networks, Peacock has billed its series as “inspired by the real-life story,” with the added interest of a real-life romance “in the most horrific of places.” But preserving the authenticity of Lali’s story in a TV show, based on a novel that fictionalized his testimony 12 years after his death, comes with a new set of challenges — especially when the novel was critiqued for inaccurately portraying life in Auschwitz.

Morris’s “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” raised eyebrows from the Auschwitz Memorial in 2018, which said the book “cannot be recommended as a valuable position for those who wish to understand the history of the camp” and is “almost without any value as a document.”

A report from Wanda Witek-Malicka of the Auschwitz Memorial Research Center said the book’s “based-on-facts” marketing, combined with its international success — selling over 12 million copies with translations into more than 40 languages — raised concern that many readers might treat it as a historical source on the realities of Auschwitz, despite several errors and misleading representations.

These inaccuracies include the number that Lali was forced to tattoo on Gita’s arm in the story’s pivotal scene. In the book, she is branded with the number 34902, but Gita herself said in a testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation that her number was 4562, a claim supported by evidence from the Auschwitz Memorial.

Witek-Malicka also disputed a plot line in which Lali obtains penicillin for Gita’s typhus in January 1943, saying this event was “impossible” because penicillin only became readily available after the war. Elsewhere, the book depicts a revolt by the “Sonderkommando,” predominantly Jewish prisoners who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoriums. Though the Sonderkommando did revolt at Auschwitz in 1944 and set fire to one crematorium, the book says they blew up two.

The sexual relationship between an SS commander and a Jewish prisoner in the book also raised questions for Witek-Mailcka, who said the possibility of such a long-term relationship was “non-existent.” She also pointed out that the building where the characters supposedly rendezvoused was only completed in January 1945 and never put into use.

Meanwhile, Lali’s son Gary told the New York Times he was bothered to see his father’s name misspelled “Lale” in the book.

Some of these inaccuracies have been corrected in the TV series, which depicts Gita’s original number and corrects the spelling of Lali’s name. But Shalom-Ezer told JTA that she relied heavily on the judgment of Morris, who worked as a story consultant for the show.

“Heather devoted her life to this,” Shalom-Ezer told JTA. “I’m not just talking about the last three years of Lali’s life, when she spent three times a week sitting with him for hours, listening to his story — all the 11 years it took her to find a publisher for the book and even later, she just devoted herself to this. So I felt confident enough that I believe her, that she’s trying to tell us the story in the most genuine way she can, as close as possible to his truth.”

Morris herself has said that she did not aim to write an academic historical account, only to share Lali’s memories of his life.

“It is Lali’s story,” she told the New York Times in 2018. “I make mention of history and memory waltzing together and straining to part, it must be accepted after 60 years this can happen but I am confident of Lali’s telling of his story, only he could tell it and others may have a different understanding of that time but that is their understanding, I have written Lali’s.”

In its TV form, “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” nods to the fickle nature of memory, particularly the memory of a traumatized person. Sometimes the viewer sees one version of events — for example, Lali discovering that a younger friend was selected for the gas chamber at random — and then the older Lali remembers a different story, in which his own number was on that selection list, only changed to his friend’s after the Nazis employed Lali as a tattooist.

The character Lali shares some of these revisions with the character Morris. Others come to him after she has left, when he is alone and haunted by the dead who occupy his kitchen at night. The series shows Lali talking to these ghosts, bargaining with his memory and making deals with the guilt of survival.

“I think that this is the nature of trauma, it creates a kind of dissociation from what happened so you cannot really remember it correctly,” said Shalom-Ezer. “So the team and I, we thought that this is the most authentic way to portray a man with a trauma that for the first time is trying to share his story with someone.”

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But no museum has chronicled the full story of the country’s role in the Holocaust — until now.

Amsterdam’s National Holocaust Museum, which opened to the public on March 11, is the first institution dedicated to the overarching history of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, where three in four Jews were killed.

The museum’s leadership believes it offers a necessary corrective to narratives that have prevailed over the 80 years since the Netherlands was liberated from Nazi occupation.

“We’ve all been very happy with 1.2 million [annual] visitors to the Anne Frank House, but at the same time, it is one of so many different personal histories,” Emile Schrijver, director general of the Jewish Cultural Quarter, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “As the Franks were a relatively well-to-do family of German refugees in Amsterdam, their story was in a way very untypical of what went on here — with the clause, of course, that they were killed like all the others.”

The Holocaust museum was nearly 20 years in the making, originating in 2005 as a proposal from the Jewish Cultural Quarter, which runs Jewish cultural institutions in Amsterdam. For decades before that, the notion that the Holocaust was an integral part of Dutch history faced broad resistance.

“The Dutch have cherished the false notion that we were a country of resisters, that we became the victim of Nazism — the occupier versus the occupied — and that the war was difficult for everybody and there was no reason to give the specific Jewish experience a special place in memorialization,” said Schrijver.

The National Holocaust Museum’s head curator, Annemiek Gringold, said even in the process of establishing the museum, she often fielded questions about the project’s necessity. Some Dutch audiences suggested that since memorials to Dutch victims of the Holocaust already existed, this museum should broaden its scope.

“In the public debate and academia, we had discussions saying that the museum should deal with genocides in general, or be a museum about human rights,” Gringold told JTA. “Our argument was always that this history, in which more than 100,000 Jews from the Netherlands were persecuted, deported, robbed and murdered, should be firmly part of our national collective memory.”

That history, which is detailed in the museum’s main exhibition, might find a more receptive audience now than in the past. The museum launches amid widening openness to discussing Dutch collaboration with the Nazis, seen as crucial in making Holland the Western Eurpean country with the highest per capita number of Jewish victims.

Next year, the country will open its archives about Dutch collaboration with the Nazis to the public for the first time. And last week, historians revealed that GVB, the Amsterdam public transport company that still operates today, sought compensation even after the war for transporting local Jews — including Anne Frank — to trains that would take them to concentration camps.

Ronald Leopold, the executive director of the Anne Frank House, said he welcomed the museum as another entry point for education about the Holocaust in the Netherlands. He argued that the “full story” is impossible to tell, with every museum offering a different window to history.

“The new Holocaust museum in Amsterdam will not paint a full picture of the Holocaust when you look at how the Holocaust played out in Eastern Europe,” he said. “I don’t think any one of us will be able to paint that full picture. We always put a certain light on certain aspects of it.”

The museum stands across the street from the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theater that was popular with Jewish performers and audiences before the Nazis turned it into a major deportation center. In this building, 46,000 Jews were forced to await their transit to Westerbork.

The museum building was converted from a former teachers college that played a significant role in resistance against the Nazis. The school was next to a nursery, torn down after the war, where the Nazis placed children who could not fit in the overcrowded Hollandsche Schouwburg. Thousands of children waited at this nursery for deportation.

But the nursery’s director, Henriëtte Pimentel, helped about 600 children to escape. On her direction, children were lifted onto the schoolyard of the teacher’s college and handed to members of the Dutch resistance. These people, mainly young non-Jews in their twenties, took the children to a safe house and then to hiding addresses throughout the country.

“In just a few hundred square meters, we have two very important sites,” said Gringold. “One extremely burdened, sad, guilty landscape — the main site of deportations where most people who were imprisoned were deported and murdered. And on the other side, we have this site where 600 Jewish lives were rescued.”

The museum contains 2,500 items, including hundreds donated by survivors. Its installations include mementos from unknown victims along with stories of the Jewish and non-Jewish resistance. One exhibit is dedicated to the deluge of bureaucratic regulations that progressively restricted, segregated, robbed and finally deported Jews.

Schrijver said it was important to him that the museum feel much like its predecessor during the war: a bright, airy school building with sun streaming through the windows.

“A large majority of Holocaust museums worldwide, especially from the past, are dark places where the walls are dark gray or dark brown to transmit a feeling of narrowness — whereas the persecution and murder of the Jews happened during full daylight,” he said. “So you want this to be a light place and, if you put it bluntly, the darkness comes from the content.”

Though Schrijver and Gringold pushed for years to dedicate a museum exclusively to Holocaust history, they have not escaped the shadow of the present. As they prepared to open a museum “about the impact of exclusion and dehumanization,” the organizers said they were compelled to issue a statement on Israel’s war in Gaza, which began when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

In a statement, the Jewish Cultural Quarter said it supported “a just and secure resolution for all those directly involved,” including Israel’s right to exist and Palestinians’ right to autonomy.

The presence of Israeli President Isaac Herzog during a dedication ceremony the day before the museum’s opening drew more than 1,000 pro-Palestinian protesters.

Gringold said she is heavy-hearted about the war in Israel and Gaza and the pall it cast over the museum opening. But she said she believed the museum she has labored over for 20 years would prove to hold a message that lasts beyond any particular moment.

“I didn’t work so hard on this museum for an opening event, I built this museum for a long-term event, a trend that we have been witnessing for many years — that knowledge about the mass murder of Jews in occupied Europe is diminishing, that we take democracy, the order of law, European cooperation and human rights for granted,” said Gringold. “It’s important that we know what the alternative was just over 80 years ago. We seem to forget that slowly as a nation, and when we don’t know about what humans are capable of, we are at risk of repeating history.”

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Three days later, she arrived in Lublin — soon to be an epicenter of Nazi extermination in occupied Poland — with a new identity. She was now Countess Janina Suchodolska, a self-assured Polish aristocrat — and she would soon negotiate the release of thousands of prisoners from the Nazis and save thousands more through deliveries of food and medicine.

Beneath her masquerade as an aristocratic welfare official, Janina concealed that she was an officer in the underground Polish Home Army, where she in turn concealed that she was a Jew. This enigmatic character is the largely unknown heroine of “The Counterfeit Countess,” a new book by historians Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa.

Janina’s story was nearly lost to history, disclosed in an unpublished memoir that slipped through three pairs of hands before White and Sliwa embarked on corroborating it and researching their book.

After World War II, Janina and her husband Henry Mehlberg immigrated to the United States and settled in Chicago, where she taught mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology and he taught philosophy at the University of Chicago. She wrote her memoir shortly before her death in 1969.

Her husband translated the manuscript into English and tried unsuccessfully to publish it. Before his own death in 1979, he entrusted the package to Arthur Funk, a history professor at the University of Florida. Funk also sought in vain to interest publishers and in 1989 gave the manuscript to White, who had a career investigating and prosecuting Nazi criminals with the U.S. Department of Justice before serving as a historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“At that time, survivor memoirs and diaries were not frequently published,” Sliwa told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The focus was on the perpetrators — on understanding how the Holocaust happened — and not on witnesses, because of questions about the reliability of survivor testimony.”

When White received the manuscript, she was a new mother busy at the DOJ, with neither the time nor the Polish language skills to conduct research in Poland. In 2007, Funk became the third custodian of Janina’s account to die without seeing it published.

White was haunted by a sense of responsibility and eventually connected with Sliwa, an expert on the Holocaust in Poland, forming the partnership that finally brought Janina’s story to the light of day.

The authors supplemented Janina’s testimony with wartime documents and statements from her colleagues and former prisoners at Majdanek, the camp where she worked, along with details about her life that Janina herself did not deem important to record — such as her first 34 years.

Born Pepi Spinner in 1905, she enjoyed a privileged childhood in Żurawno (today’s Zhuravno), a town that was then Polish and is now part of Ukraine. Her father was a wealthy estate owner who socialized with Polish nobles; their children were her friends. The family experienced little overt antisemitism and Janina absorbed the Polish patriotism of her class. Along with Polish and French, she spoke German, English and Russian.

Janina’s childhood was abruptly shattered by World War I. Along with other Jewish landowners, her father was abducted by Russian forces and died in 1918. A wave of pogroms swept through Central and Eastern Europe after the war, killing as many as 100,000 Jews.

Still, Janina thrived as a star mathematics student at Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów (now Lviv). Despite the closed doors to both women and Jews in academia, she studied with the leading philosopher Kazimierz Twardowski and obtained a doctorate in philosophy. In 1933, she married another ambitious Jewish student of Twardowski, Henry Mehlberg.

The couple enjoyed a comfortable existence as Polish intellectuals, with him teaching philosophy in Lwów and her teaching math at a girls’ high school. But the global war soon encroached on their quiet lives. In 1939, the Soviet occupation brought hunger, totalitarianism and a war on intellectuals. Then German forces took Lwów in 1941.

With the help of Ukrainian nationalists, the Nazis immediately carried out mass shootings of Jews and prominent Polish professors, including many non-Jews who were friends of Janina and Henry. Trucks full of Jews drove daily to a hill above the city, where they were shot and buried in mass graves. Then Lwów’s Jews were ordered to move into a ghetto, which Janina and Henry knew to be a death sentence. They fled with the help of Janina’s family friend, Count Andrzej Skrzyński, who promised to procure them false papers, jobs and a place to live in Lublin.

Transformed into Count Piotr Suchodolski, Henry got an agricultural job that allowed him to keep a low profile. But Janina — now Countess Suchodolska — was not content to evade death narrowly. Instead, White and Sliwa said that she followed one mathematical principle: “The value of one life is less than the value of multiple lives, and her life, if she survived without seeking to save others, would have no value.”

Janina joined the Polish Main Welfare Council (known by its Polish initials RGO), the only Polish civil society organization allowed to operate under the Nazi government. While working undercover for the Polish resistance, Janina walked into Majdanek several days a week to meet with mass murderers and argue that saving a certain number of Polish lives would serve their interests.

“The Counterfeit Countess” details how Janina’s mathematical mind gave her insight into Nazi Germany’s calculations of life and death. She took advantage of a shift in the war, when the Nazis realized they would not conquer the Soviet Union as quickly as they had hoped. By February 1943, Russian forces had crushed the Germans at Stalingrad and Allied bombs were incinerating German cities.

“They needed to have foreign workers replace all the German men who had to go to the front,” said White. “Heinrich Himmler wanted to develop his concentration camps as reservoirs of forced labor, and he ordered thousands of Poles be sent to the camps — especially Majdanek and Auschwitz.”

The concentration camps were not designed for productive labor, but for mass death: Many of the prisoners who were not immediately murdered died from starvation, exhaustion or disease. But if Himmler’s underlings wanted to profit the Reich, they needed more prisoners who actually survived to continue working — ideally through an organization that fed them without SS spending.

Janina used this bargaining chip to deliver increasing amounts of food and clothes to Polish inmates of Majdanek. When typhus raged through the camp, defying quarantines and even spreading to German soldiers, she negotiated the provision of medicines. On top of her authorized deliveries, she smuggled more food and messages from the Polish resistance.

She also pushed for the release of Polish inmates who were rated unfit to work, such as the sick, orphaned children and disabled detainees, to the care of the RGO. In total, White and Sliwa documented that Janina negotiated the release of at least 9,707 Poles, including 4,431 from Majdanek.

The RGO could solely aid those considered racially Polish by the Germans — so Janina’s efforts could not be directed toward her fellow Jews. And no mathematical gymnastics could help her against the killing machine meant for her people. Within Nazi race ideology, Jews were the most dangerous of Germany’s “subhuman” enemies and had to disappear from the “Lebensraum” (“living space”) Hitler intended to conquer for the German people. A minority of ethnic Poles, who ranked slightly higher on the subhuman scale, would be allowed to survive as laborers for their German masters.

That meant that even within the Polish Home Army, Janina had to keep her Jewish identity secret. Members of the underground ranged from friends of Jews, such as Count Skrzyński, to right-wing nationalists who wanted no Jews in their ranks.

Her efforts to help Jews were solitary and confined to the margins of her bureaucratic labor. She knew that Jews lived together with Poles at Majdanek and that each compound’s kitchen fed prisoners from the same cauldrons. As she strove to deliver more and more food into the camp, she held onto hope that it would enrich soup fed to all the prisoners, staving off starvation for thousands of Jews alongside Poles.

But on one visit to Majdanek in May 1943, she smelled the burning flesh of the last Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, who were sent to be gassed by the thousands after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. She also saw 30,000 Lublin Jews deported to the Bełżec death camp in 1942 — a crucial component of Operation Reinhard, Germany’s Final Solution to murder all the Jews in Poland.

One and a half million Jews were murdered at the killing centers of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka as part of Operation Reinhard. Janina was one of the first Poles to learn how the operation ended, with 42,000 Jews shot at Majdanek, Trawniki and Poniatowa on Nov. 3 and 4, 1943. It was the largest German mass shooting of the Holocaust, code-named Operation Harvest Festival by the Nazis.

In her memoir, Janina never described how she, a Jew in disguise, was affected by witnessing the slaughter of Jews. That might be because she intended her book for a Polish audience in the 1960s, when antisemitic narratives about the Holocaust were prevalent in the Soviet Union, said White and Sliwa.

She also considered herself, according to her own accounts, as much a Pole as she was a Jew. She and Henry were not religious, although they would partake in secular Jewish communal activities in Toronto and Chicago after the war.

Notwithstanding the Nazi-imposed racial hierarchy, many Polish Jews did not feel they had to choose between two identities in the 1930s. Only a minority of Jewish women in the resistance were religious, according to Judy Batalion, who researched Jewish women in Poland’s resistance for her 2021 book, “The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos.”

“They were fully Polish. Many of these women had a lot of questions about their position in Polish society in the Second Republic but they were Polish,” said Batalion, using a term for the Polish state during the interwar period.

Though she was never religious, Janina ended her memoir with a gesture toward both her Jewish faith as Janina Mehlberg and her Christian one as the Countess Suchodolska. In this final chapter, excerpted at the end of “The Counterfeit Countess,” she described taking a tour of Majdanek with a Swedish delegation after it was liberated. The ever-pragmatic mathematician, who lived by the principle of maximizing the number of lives saved, then considered all of the people for whom such calculations were no solace.

“I thought of those who had been broken, physically and morally, who had betrayed other lives in the hope of saving their own,” she said. “However we risked our necks, it was of our own will. But they were in bondage, and all human pride was beaten out of them. They didn’t ask to be martyrs. Most of them no doubt wanted nothing more than to live out their days in an average, humdrum existence, without great impact and without glory.”

For those souls, Janina turned momentarily from mathematics to prayer, perhaps finding her sorrow too great for the world of the living.

“There is nothing left to do for them but to remember,” she wrote. “And in the way of my ancestors, intone ‘Yisgadal, v’yiskadash,’ the Kaddish for the dead, and like the real Countess Suchodolska, ‘Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison,’” its Christian equivalent.

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The Nazis set fire to thousands of books stored at the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva in 1939, the popular story went, leaving no trace of its enormous library even as its students were sent to their deaths.

But while Lublin’s Jews were murdered, that great bonfire never occurred, according to Lublin local Piotr Nazaruk, who researches the city’s Jewish history at the Grodzka Gate-NN Theater Center. Nazaruk was fascinated by a set of mysteries cloaking the Lublin Yeshiva, once among the largest Jewish educational institutions in the world, whose yellow building still stands in the former Jewish quarter — now mostly empty of Jews.

“We’ve all seen images of books being burned by the Nazis during the war,” Nazaruk told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But if this yeshiva and its library were so famous, and it was such a prestigious thing for the Nazis to destroy it, why are there no traces — no photos or documents — actually proving that it happened?” And if there were no fire, might those books still be available today, in attics, private collections and on the shelves of people unaware of their tragic provenance?

There are about 40 Jews in Lublin today, but over 40,000 lived there before the Holocaust, roughly one third of the city’s population. Nazaruk, who is not Jewish, became fascinated with Poland’s Jewish history over 10 years ago. He happened upon a series of Yiddish newspapers at a library in his hometown of Biała Podlaska, north of Lublin. The discovery inspired him to study Yiddish.

“For me, this Jewish, Yiddish-speaking world of prewar Poland is almost like a parallel universe,” he said. “It happened in places that I know, on streets I walk. It was like discovering a hidden history of places I know very well.”

Nazaruk threw himself into investigating the disappearance of the Lublin Yeshiva Library. He had on his side other skeptics of the bonfire story, including Adam Kopciowski, a Lublin historian at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University who found five of the yeshiva’s books at the former Chevra Nosim synagogue — Lublin’s only surviving prewar synagogue — in the early 2000s.

Nazaruk found press reports, dated after Lublin’s liberation by the Russian army in 1944, that indicated the library had survived. Then, one slow afternoon at work, he was scrolling through the digital archive of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and came across a treasure trove: 130 books with Lublin Yeshiva stamps.

That discovery began a quest to reunite the books that once belonged to the Jewish library, estimated to hold between 15,000 and 40,000 volumes at the dawn of World War II. Nazaruk now feels sure that most of the historic collection was not burned, but instead scattered across the globe.

Over the past three years, he has amassed a digital catalog of 850 books with stamps identifying their roots at the Lublin Yeshiva Library. The vast majority of these cannot be physically returned to Lublin, since they are now the property of public and private collections worldwide — from Warsaw and Jerusalem to New York, Prague and elsewhere.

Only 10 of the lost volumes have made their way home. In addition to the five found by Kopciowski, two were returned by Berlin’s Freie Universität in 2022, and three more found by an Israeli who personally delivered them to Lublin in December.

Together with Lublin’s small remaining Jewish community, Nazaruk is planning a public display for these 10 books in the former yeshiva building.

His project belongs to a recent trend of “memory activism” in Poland, according to Geneviève Zubrzycki, a sociologist who researches nationalism and religion at the University of Michigan. Education about the mass murder of Polish Jews did not start until the 1980s, when the Soviet Union fell and Poland began a process of democratization. Even then, silence about the past prevailed for decades in many small towns of Galicia once filled with Jews.

“Ninety percent of Polish Jewry was exterminated, and those who survived very often decided not to return to Poland,” Zubrzycki told JTA. “So if you have few Jews left in Poland to talk about their experience, and you have a large Polish population who remembers their [own] suffering — and that suffering is also folded into a socialist narrative that’s imposed by the Soviets — it leaves very little for Jewish memory-making.”

Although some books on the Lublin Yeshiva Library’s shelves dated back to the 16th century, the yeshiva itself lived less than 10 years.

The school opened in 1930 under the leadership of Rabbi Meir Shapiro, who planned a new kind of yeshiva to raise the prestige of the Torah student. His goal was not only to offer the highest caliber of religious education, but also to house students in a modern institution with respectable dormitories and lecture halls, showers, good meals and an infirmary.

“Before Lublin, boys in yeshivas usually lived in very poor conditions, they ate poorly,” said Nazaruk. “Being a yeshiva student was not like being in some prestigious university.”

With the help of donations from Jewish communities across Poland and abroad, Shapiro rapidly built one of the largest Jewish libraries in Poland. A New York rabbi, Benjamin Gut of the Chasam Sopher synagogue, sent an estimated 4,000 books and $1,000 to Lublin. After Shapiro died in 1933, the library also absorbed his own private book collection.

Lublin was a vital center of Jewish culture in Poland and home to a significant share of Jews since the early 1600s. Under the Nazis, the city became a center of mass extermination and its Jewish population was obliterated. About 5,000 Jews settled there after the Holocaust, but most left in the late 1940s, after local Poles killed Holocaust survivors in the Kielce Pogrom of 1946 and antisemitism in the Soviet Union convinced many there was no future for Jews in Poland.

In the war’s aftermath, a widespread story about a Nazi bonfire emerged to explain the disappearance of the Lublin Yeshiva Library . This account, cited by researchers and historians over the years, has been traced to a note reportedly published in a Nazi youth magazine titled “Die Deutsche Jugend-Zeitung.”

The newspaper allegedly boasted that the library’s books were devoured by a fire lasting 24 hours, while a Nazi band played military music to “cover the cries of the Jews.” But no one has ever seen that magazine in person, according to Nazaruk. The first reference to it appears in Hatsofe, a newspaper in British-mandate Palestine, in 1941.

The spectacle of book burnings was typically photographed, filmed and used to supply propaganda for Nazi newsreels. But if a Lublin Yeshiva Library fire was indeed reported in a “Die Deutsche Jugend-Zeitung,” it was never corroborated by any other Nazi newspapers or German authorities.

Nazaruk said it’s unclear how the rumor started. But it is known that the Germans tasked Rabbi Aron Lebwohl, a yeshiva graduate, with cataloging the library — an indication that they did not plan to destroy it. Lebwohl worked on this inventory until he was murdered at Majdanek in 1942.

Several Nazi organizations were interested in cataloging and looting Jewish collections for their own purposes, according to Daniel Lipson, a librarian at the National Library of Israel.

“Many were interested in antisemitic scholarship — starting to study the Jewish people that no longer existed, as they hoped would happen,” Lipson told JTA.

Nazaruk reasons that the yeshiva’s collection was carefully stored and prepared for transport to Germany. When the Russians marched into Lublin and the Germans fled, he believes, the books were abandoned.

How the books were dispersed through the world is a question that Nazaruk is still piecing together. Kopciowski has theorized that many were destined for Prague, where the Germans were amassing a collection of artifacts looted from Jewish communities across Europe. Lublin books may also have been pillaged by the Russian army, which took as many as 2 million books — including Jewish books and manuscripts — to the Soviet Union, according to journalist Anders Rydell.

Nazaruk has ascertained that over 100 Lublin Yeshiva books were shipped to Warsaw, where the Jewish Historical Institute was established in 1947 and where he first uncovered a collection of volumes with yeshiva stamps.

Another 100 have been identified at the National Library of Israel. At the end of the war, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem sent scholars to trace famous archives of Jewish books in Europe and bring them to Israel. The Central Committee of Polish Jews handed about 85,000 books to the Hebrew University, including an uncertain number from the Lublin Yeshiva Library, Lipson said.

Many of the Lublin Yeshiva books that arrived in Israel are likely still undocumented. The Hebrew University kept some books from Poland at the National Library of Israel but distributed the rest to smaller libraries, schools and synagogues across the country.

Nazaruk expects that much of the library’s collection has ended up in private hands. He frequently sees Lublin Yeshiva books crop up in online auctions, fetching prices from $200 to $11,000 — far out of budget for his research project.

He believes that his digitally reconstituted library of 850 books is just the tip of the iceberg.

“A few years ago, most people thought that the entire collection was destroyed,” he said. “Eight hundred books is maybe 5% of the original holdings — so on the one hand it’s not a lot, but on the other hand, it proves that probably thousands more are still around.”

Nazaruk’s scavenging resembles other efforts to revive Jewish history across Poland. Since the early 2000s, about 40 festivals of Jewish culture have been instituted in cities and towns across the country, many of them organized by non-Jews. According to Zubrzycki, this revival points to a nostalgia among some Polish groups for a past in which Jews are a symbol — in a country where Jews as a living people are sparse.

“Many [of those leading the revival] are practicing Catholics, but they want to recover this kind of pluralism that no longer exists in Poland,” said Zubrzycki. She noted that Poland is about 95% ethnically Polish today, one of the most homogeneous states in the world. “They feel that recovering the Jewish history of Poland is a way to build multiculturalism.”

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“The Tattooist of Auschwitz,” a six-part original series based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Heather Morris, will air on Peacock in the United States. The show stars Academy Award nominee Harvey Keitel, renowned for his collaborations with Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, as Sokolov.

English actor Jonah Hauer-King of “The Little Mermaid” and Polish actress Anna Próchniak of “Baptiste” star as the younger versions of Sokolov and his eventual wife, Gita Furman, in the drama series, which is executive produced by Claire Mundel and directed by Tali Shalom-Ezer.

Morris, whose 2018 novel “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” was inspired by interviews with Sokolov before his death in 2006, also appears as a character played by Emmy Award nominee Melanie Lynskey (“The Last of Us,” “Yellowjackets”).

Despite selling over 12 million copies around the world with the tagline that it was “based on the powerful true story of love and survival,” Morris’ novel drew criticism for inauthentic portrayals of Auschwitz. A report from Wanda Witek-Malicka of the Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre pointed out several historical inaccuracies in the book, ranging from a sexual relationship between an SS commander and a Jewish prisoner to a storyline about penicillin (which was not widely available at the time) to the incorrect number tattooed on Furman’s arm. The book also changed the spelling of Sokolov’s first name from Lali to Lale; the movie has changed it back.

The creators of the Peacock series say they made efforts to authentically reproduce a love story in Auschwitz, visiting the death camp to recreate the historical location and casting Jewish actors as their stars.

“It was important that both young and old Lali were played authentically by Jewish actors who were able to deliver the part with nuance, empathy, compassion, and the complexity that we need from that character,” said Shalom-Ezer.

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A similar law enacted in Latvia has also taken effect, giving Holocaust survivors from that country the chance to secure one-time payments of about $5,300.

“For many people, these agreements are not just about money; they’re about recognition,” Gideon Taylor, president of the World Jewish Restitution Organization, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It’s countries coming to terms with the past, acknowledging that there were Jews there, that every house, every building represents an individual story.”

Both of the Baltic nations contained rich centers of Jewish life and history before World War II. The Nazis, together with their Lithuanian and Latvian collaborators, killed 90% of the 220,000 Jews in Lithuania and 75% of the 95,000 Jews in Latvia. Today, there are about 5,000 Jews living in Lithuania and 9,500 in Latvia.

Both countries were occupied by the Soviet Union during the war and remained part of the Soviet Union until its dissolution. That explains why they are only offering restitution more than 80 years after their Jews were expropriated, deported and killed, Taylor said.

“The communist ideology was that they were those who had fought against the Nazis and they had no responsibility,” he said. “So there was never any possibility of reparations or compensation for property, and in addition, property was all confiscated by the communist government and belonged to the state.”

Some Latvian and Lithuanian survivors might draw compensation through the annual reparations packages negotiated by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which last year secured $1.4 billion, the most ever, for survivors. But the former Soviet countries have not offered their own direct compensation programs, and most programs for descendants of those who were killed, imprisoned or had their property seized by the Nazis and their collaborators have expired.

Starting in 1991, for example, Lithuania passed a series of laws dedicated to the restitution of private property expropriated by the totalitarian regimes — but since these laws required applicants to have current Lithuanian citizenship, they effectively excluded most Holocaust survivors and families who fled the country.

Now, the Lithuanian restitution program is open to both survivors and direct heirs of private Jewish property that was nationalized or illegally expropriated under the Nazi and Soviet regimes. A 2022 law granted 5 to 10 million euros (roughly $5.4 to $10.8 million) to be distributed among Holocaust victims by the Good Will Foundation. The exact amount of each one-time payment will be determined based on the total number of approved applicants, who will receive their compensation by July 1, 2025.

The Latvian program, also launched in 2022, offers a payment of 5,000 euros (about $5,370) to survivors who lived in Latvia as of June 21, 1941, during the country’s brief German occupation, meaning that only people 82 and older could be eligible. The Latvian Jewish Community Restitution Fund will approve the compensation funds on a rolling basis.

The World Jewish Restitution Organization is attempting to find survivors and direct heirs who might be eligible for restitution across the Jewish world, including in Israel, the United States and Canada. Survivor databases have allowed them to contact some people directly. But they are also running social media campaigns, placing ads and even partnering with influencers to reach the shrinking number of people who still hold a connection to the past.

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Susan Tweedy posted a video to Instagram on Oct. 10 of her husband Jeff Tweedy, frontman of the beloved rock band Wilco since 1994, strumming his guitar in his yard as his sons sing “Mi Shebeirach.” The Jewish prayer for physical and spiritual healing was popularized as a folk tune by Jewish musician Debbie Friedman, who wrote her Hebrew-English version in 1987.

In the video, which Susan noted in a comment was recorded “a while ago,” 27-year-old Spencer Tweedy and 23-year-old Sammy Tweedy take vocals. The song asks for the blessing of “r’fuah sh’leimah” (“complete healing”) and “the renewal of body, the renewal of spirit.”

The most recent photo on Sammy’s Instagram page, posted Sept. 30, indicated that he was in Israel. His Instagram bio suggests that he lives between Chicago and Tel Aviv.

Sammy has been vocal about the conflict on his account on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. On Oct. 14, he wrote: “Cutting anyone and everyone out of my life who supported or celebrated the attacks on Saturday, who mocks Jews in our time of pain. Your hatred deserves no place in our lives.”

Jeff Tweedy, whose wife is Jewish, converted to Judaism in 2013. At the time, Sammy was struggling to study for his bar mitzvah and begging to stay home from Hebrew school. So Jeff proposed a deal: They would attend temple every week together, and while Sammy worked on his Torah portion, his father would study to convert.

“[I]t seemed to work. He ended up getting bar mitzvahed and I ended up converting,” Tweedy told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2019.

The Wilco singer and guitarist, who has released over 20 studio albums through his various bands and projects, also sang at both of his sons’ bar mitzvahs. He even brought the legendary gospel singer Mavis Staples on stage for Sammy’s ceremony.

Tweedy has collaborated with his sons for years. In 2020, while the family quarantined together in Chicago, he released the solo album “Love Is the King” with contributions from Spencer and Sammy. The trio also live-streamed their jam sessions at home on Instagram, calling these evenings “The Tweedy Show.”

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