Hostage Poster Vandalism and Policing Jewish Grief

When I first saw a video on social media of a self-proclaimed “social justice activist” tearing down a poster publicizing the kidnapping of an Israeli civilian, I had a chilling sense of déjà vu. The woman’s eyes— looking over her left shoulder, then her right, to make sure she wasn’t being watched, and clearly missing the hidden person filming— were eyes I had seen before. They were the eyes of a person on a mission, determined to erase any evidence that a Jew was ever in pain. 

The hostage posters became a target for vandalism precisely because the Jews and our allies who put up those posters drew attention to our broken hearts, to the Jewish grief that could not be contained after Oct. 7. And I knew that I had seen that look in the vandal’s eye before, the gaze of a person determined to police Jewish grief. I had seen those eyes previously in the faces of the Polish tour guides who supervised my visit to Auschwitz in 2023. 

All visitors to the Auschwitz-Birkenau “museum” must be supervised by a Polish guide to ensure compliance with the rule that no “disruptive” activity is allowed. So, when I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of a group of 60 Jewish college students— 12 of whom were direct descendants of Auschwitz survivors— a slew of Rabbis, and a professional Holocaust historian (who, yes, was also a Rabbi), we had our own Polish tour guide overseeing our every step.

The moment our group entered the camp, we dropped everything to organize a minyan on the train tracks so that we could recite the Kaddish. Tefillin had been successfully bound, prayer books distributed, a prayer leader selected, Tallitot adorned, when our Polish tour guide informed us that loud prayer was prohibited and we must move so that the (non-Jewish) group of Germans and Poles behind us could enter, as if we were on a miniature golf course with a line forming behind us. We recited Kaddish anyway. 

When we entered the latrines of the camp, where one million Jews relieved themselves into holes in the ground without a shred of human dignity, our Rabbi shared with us the remarkable true story of a prisoner who swallowed the same diamond earring every few days, searching for it in the latrines, so that she would have enough currency to rebuild a life after liberation. Given the inherently off-putting nature of this discussion, our Rabbi tried to put us at ease and break the tension by making a sarcastic quip, the details of which I cannot remember. Our group let out a fleeting chuckle, followed by a noticeable relief in discomfort, and we continued our discussion. 

Our attention then immediately shifted as a voice from behind us cut through the room. “Hey!” The Polish tour guide of the group behind us stood in the back of the room, pointing a finger at our Rabbi. “Be quiet!” he shouted. 

The chutzpah of silencing a Rabbi under the roof of a barrack was inconceivable to us, and we remained in stunned silence for several moments. Among our group were a dozen direct descendants of Auschwitz survivors, yet he felt he had the authority to control Jewish voices on our unfortunately sacred soil, where he is but a guest to our collective grief.

I memorized his face and began looking for him as the groups dispersed. I eventually found him on the train tracks, saying something that sparked “oohs” and “ahhs” from his audience, in a way that made it clear they were fascinated with our torture and suffering on an intellectual level, but evinced not an ounce of sensitivity for the soil beneath them that was fertilized with blood— our blood.

I waited for him to finish speaking before I approached him. “Are you Jewish?” I asked him privately. He shook his head. Calmly and clearly, I told him, “You are not allowed to silence Jews on this soil. It is a gross display of disrespect.” He rolled his eyes, then zeroed in on mine.

“I don’t like it when the Jew smile and laugh here,” he said in a thick Polish accent, pointing to an exaggerated smile on his face and then the roof of the latrines behind us, seemingly to ensure he got his point across. He seemed to think that he could dictate not only what Jews should and should not feel in this location, which is not up to him to decide, but also that he had the right to enforce his self-appointed “appropriate” standards onto us. 

“Jews are allowed to feel and react in any way they desire when they are grieving,” I said to him. He seemed to assume that because he wasn’t grieving the blood spilled here— the souls that gasped for their last breath while reciting Shema, reciting our prayer— that we weren’t, either. He rolled his eyes once more, told me his group was waiting, and walked away.

By the time I rejoined my group, they had begun reciting “Oseh Shalom,” the quintessential Jewish prayer for peace. The words themselves gave way to the melody universally associated with them, and before long we were singing our prayer for peace, swaying arm-in-arm. This prayer was followed by the musical chant of “Am Yisrael Chai,” which means “the people of Israel are alive,” an expression of Jewish strength, resilience, and defiance in the eyes of those who seek to destroy us— an appropriate notion to be expressed at a death camp, if you ask me. 

Before long, our own Polish tour guide began shouting over us that we needed to stop immediately, as apparently being too loud on the train tracks is “against the rules of the ‘museum,’” again treating a former death camp as if it were nothing more serious and required no more sensitivity than a modern art museum. 

When I quietly and respectfully asked her why we weren’t allowed to chant our expression of Jewish resilience, she replied, “for non-Jewish groups who come here, they are inconvenienced when Jews sing too loudly”—so clearly we weren’t the first Jewish group to do this—“and they get confused because they don’t understand that it’s prayer. So we don’t allow it.” Our expression of Jewish survival and perseverance was silenced to accommodate those who had no connection with or understanding of the people who were killed under our feet.  

This experience is but one example of an infuriating yet inevitable phenomenon: Jews have not been allowed to express our grief in the way we deserve.

For example, acclaimed author and Holocaust survivor Ellie Weisel’s first book was not Night; it was another, rawer book that expressed his rage at the world that stood idly by and did nothing, titled And the World Remained Silent. But his publisher refused to print this book, deeming it “inappropriately angry for print.” This man had seen his entire generation exterminated, but his resulting rage was too inappropriate. Got it.

The publishers told Weisel to rewrite the book in a more agreeable manner, so he produced Night which focuses on his hope for the goodness of humanity to return; a more palatable, digestible depiction of the ineffable hellscape Weisel experienced and wanted the rest of the world to confront from the safety of their reading room. 

This story of controlling Jewish grief is further compounded by the eerie sensationalizing of Anne Frank’s diary. When I visited the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, myself and the rest of the visitors were treated to a mural of all the different editions and languages in which the book had been published, likening it to any other fan-favorite on the New York Times bestseller list. Such a grandiose display of the book’s success, at face value, appears to demonstrate that the world is in fact committed to hearing Jewish stories. But just as with Weisel, the world was only interested in hearing Frank’s story as controlled through publishers and the “appropriateness” police. 

Frank’s diary is best known for her quote, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Ah, how heartwarming and touching to see this little girl’s moving display of hope— except for the fact that Frank was not allowed to express her incomprehensible, unfathomable rage at the senseless murder-spree that commenced around her for two and a half years. I wonder if the world would still read her book if it wasn’t quite as heartwarming, and a little more of an accurate account of her grief.

In addition to the control and redacting of first-hand-account Holocaust literature, the world also likes to tell the State of Israel how to best honor our Holocaust survivors, as if they are experts on such matters. 

On the anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation, the State of Israel informed Poland that they desired to fly jets piloted by children of Holocaust survivors over the camp as they made their way to the Holy Land. Israel said they wanted to rev their engines in a display of perseverance and defiance of all odds. Poland agreed, on the condition that the jets flew quietly. “It’s only respectful to be quiet on this land,” they told Israel. The “appropriateness” police of Jewish grief had spoken. 

The plan moved forward, as Israel agreed to fly the jets quietly. And they did in fact do so. That is, until they reached Auschwitz. Once above the camp, the pilots revved their engines in an ultimate middle finger to those who arrogantly assumed they had the right to tell us how to express our grief, without experiencing it themselves. 

The world may claim it is interested in hearing Jewish stories, but it is interested in hearing muted, palatable Jewish stories. Stories of us that the non-Jewish world deems “appropriate.” Where Jewish stories must be edited and cannot be narrated authentically. Our true rage, emotions, expressions— our grief— is unwelcome. 

My group came to Auschwitz that day not as tourists to receive a history lesson. We came as physical manifestations of Jewish continuity, our very act of turning oxygen into carbon dioxide a direct revenge against Hitler, with the goal of not just learning about the lives lost, but to personally grieve for them. We came to finish the Jewish prayers that ended in the middle. When we sang Shema Yisrael on the tracks, we weren’t “disturbing” the other tourists; we were finishing the prayers that our ancestors started but couldn’t complete. We were avenging blood spilled. We were literally saying the prayers that Hitler tried to silence. But yet the “appropriateness” police of Jewish grief tried to silence these prayers once again.

I bring up this phenomenon now not because it is finally the convenient time for me to sit down and write about my trip to Poland from over one year ago. I bring this up now because we are witnessing the pattern of the “appropriateness” police repeat itself before our very eyes. 

I personally put up 250 hostage posters on my college campus. Twenty-four hours later I retraced my steps, ensuring that the posters were still there. All 250 had been ripped off their respective walls. Viral videos showing “activists” scratching out the eyes of hostages’ pictures with a knife, or writing “Nazi” on the face of kidnapped child Kfir Bibas, capture the world-wide sickening phenomenon of erasing displays of missing Israeli civilians, a fate too low for even a missing dog poster to receive. And how do these self-proclaimed “activists” justify their actions? According to most of them, it’s because the posters are “insensitive” to the carnage in Gaza. Those posters are a physical display of our grief— which, I might add, results from the worst attack on the Jews since the Holocaust— and it is once again being deemed “inappropriate.” 

When I taped those posters on my campus, I was expressing my grief for the 1,200 innocent civilians who were executed on Oct. 7 for the crime of being Jewish. And when antisemites (no wait, sorry, they’re just “anti-zionists”) rip down the posters of our missing hostages, they not only convey the message that the hostages’ lives don’t matter, but that our grief is not welcome. They are policing Jewish expression— policing our reactions to being persecuted, butchered, and hunted as if for sport. 

Yes, I am angry at the fact that in our time, being Jewish is still considered a crime punishable by death. But I am also angry at those who tell us that our reaction to the incomprehensible murder spree of Oct. 7 must be silenced. Jews are being hunted by extremists, but also silenced by the seemingly more innocuous cowards who erase any evidence of our kidnapped civilians because they are threatened by our expression of pain, sorrow, and loss. We are being killed, and then policed in how we grieve our dead. 

Author Dara Horn wrote a phenomenal book about the way in which the world remembers the Jewish populations that once lived in their borders. The common theme, Horn points out, is that the ostensibly well-meaning monuments of Jewish heritage in such countries all conveniently neglect to mention the reason why Jews no longer live there, the reason why their Jewish population exists in a museum and not in their homes.  “People love dead Jews,” Horn writes as her book’s title; the living ones, not so much.

I affirm this description, and extend it one layer deeper— the world loves dead Jews, yes, and doesn’t care about protecting the Jews who are alive. But the world doesn’t love dead Jews as much as they purport to do so, because if they did, they would let the dead Jews’ memories remain alive in the expressions of grief of their survivors. Ultimately, despite what the fly-off-the-shelf success of Holocaust novels would suggest, people love to pity dead Jews, but not to remember them, to honor them, or to grieve for them. They love to look down at the dead Jews and feel bad for them, but not so bad that they have any motivation to protect the ones who are still living, and not so bad that they can let their memories be expressed without policing those who are mourning the loss. 

Finally, I am afraid that the purpose of policing Jewish grief is something much more sinister than just manipulation of the bereaved— I fear that it is a subtle tactic to allow for the mass-murder of Jews once again. For, the almost compulsive-like drive to erase the hostage posters— to erase our pain and silence our grief— is not an end in itself, but a distraught means to an even more nefarious end.

If Jews are allowed to grieve, then that makes us human. And being human is exactly what antisemites claim that Jews are not— we are rats, devils, anything but flesh and blood. Jews are dehumanized precisely because acknowledging Jews as human makes it that much harder for the genuine antisemites to brainwash the well-intentioned masses into hunting us. This mind-control of the well-intentioned masses, conducted by the select few who actually seek to execute their genocidal agenda against the Jews, is something that the Nazis achieved with the European civilian population, and something that is happening on college campuses right now all across America amongst students who just want to be do-gooders in the world and make a difference, to be “on the right side of history.” The real, genuine antisemites know that to get these well-intentioned do-gooders to join their cause against the Jews, they must first paint the Jews as subhuman. And what could be more human than grieving the dead?

Funerary rites are a unique phenomenon not expressed in the animal kingdom other than in humans. To grieve is what makes one alive. And silencing this grief is the first step in dehumanizing the Jews, the process of which is itself conducted so that we can be killed again with revitalized zeal without the public outcry of the well-intentioned world. In this way, those who vandalize hostage posters are but the most recent iteration of a millenia-long cycle: Kill as many Jews as possible, silence the survivor’s grief, paint the survivors as non-human because they don’t grieve, then kill the Jews again. If you’re a well-intentioned college student who has partaken in vandalizing Israeli hostage posters out of sensitivity to the carnage in Gaza, you aren’t humanizing Gazans— you are dehumanizing Jews.

So, dear reader, my message to the Jewish community is this: do not be brainwashed against your own kind. Get angry. Remember that it has never once been socially popular to stand with the Jews, and doing so has always been painted as being on the “wrong side of history,” because that is precisely how antisemitism works. So do not be afraid to express your grief publicly, loudly, and openly, if you so desire. Cry your heart out. Scream about your pain until your lungs deflate. Certainly, do not censor yourself or police your own grief. And most importantly, continue to remind the world that Jews can feel pain, that the entire Jewish nation bleeds when only one of us is stabbed. In doing so, we become living symbols that Jews are afflicted, broken-hearted, grief-ridden, and yes, very, very human.