Jewish Students Protest Outside Home Of Former Nazi Guard
Never Again: Former Nazi guard Jakiw Palij was also subjected to protests outside his home in 2013. Image by YouTube
By Aiden Pink April 25, 2017
Jewish high school students protested on Monday outside the home of the last known Nazi concentration camp guard in the U.S.
The Queens, N.Y. home of Jakiw Palij, 92, was the site of signs and chants by students from the Rambam Mesivta on Long Island.
“It is outrageous that a Nazi who is involved in killing thousands of innocent men, women and children should be able to walk the same streets that we do,” student Benjamin Kattan, who helped organize the protest, told the New York Daily News.
Palij worked at the Treblinka concentration camp during World War II. He moved to the U.S. in 1949 and became a citizen in 1957. He was ordered to be deported in 2004, but no European country would take him.
“People will ask me, why not leave him alone? He was 20 years old when these crimes took place,” school dean Rabbi Zev Friedman told the Daily News. “I view him as a 20-year-old murderer that got away with crimes for 72 years, not a 92-year-old nice old man.”
“If Osama Bin Laden moved into the neighborhood, we wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, he’s an old man, leave him alone.’ He’s a murderer!”
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter at @aidenpink.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
