An 89-year-old Holocaust survivor and a 31-year-old survivor of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel shared a stage in Boca Raton on Monday night to speak about the scourge of antisemitism.
At a South Florida benefit dinner for the Washington D.C.-based United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Nat Shaffir, 89, and Noa Beer, 31, told stories of resilience and warned of allowing history to be repeated.
“ I think that the reason that a lot of the antisemitism today exists is that the Holocaust has been put in a place of the past,” Beer said on stage in the Boca West Country Club.
Beer was at the Nova music festival when thousands of Hamas militants poured into southern Israel after a surprise barrage of rockets, killing at least 364 people and taking more than 40 hostages. In all, 1,200 people were killed in the surprise attack and 251 people taken hostage.
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Her appearance Monday came on the same day that Israel announced it recovered the remains of the last hostage taken by Hamas.
“ It feels like a big weight has been taken off the shoulders, but at the same time. We don't stop here because the hatred towards us is still very strong,” Beer told WLRN before the program.
Shaffir, who spoke alongside Beer, also leads tours at the Washington, D.C. museum and regularly shares his experiences about the Holocaust.
In 1942, Shaffir was a child, living on a dairy farm in Romania. After Romania allied itself with Nazi Germany, a local priest outed his family as Jewish and they lost their land and livelihood, he said.
After his father was conscripted into forced labor in Ukraine, Shaffir said he had to care for his mother and sisters in a ghetto in the country.
“ The day that he left, he told me that things will get worse before they get better, but never give up,” Shaffir said, “These four words really kept me (going) really for a long time.”
Years later, his family was liberated, and his father survived, but he lost many relatives to the Nazis.
The dinner occurred as antisemitic incidents in the U.S. and worldwide have risen since the Hamas-led attack and kidnapping of many Israeli citizens on Oct. 7, 2023.
Last year was an especially demoralizing year for the Jewish community, as gunmen killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia, in December. Months before that, two people were killed at a Manchester, England, synagogue on Yom Kippur after a man drove his car into pedestrians then stabbed congregants.
The Anti-Defamation league, a nonprofit that fights antisemitism, reported an increase in assaults and harassment in the U.S., especially during anti-Israel demonstrations.
The ADL counted more than 9,000 antisemitic incidents across the U.S. in 2024, the latest year of data available.
However, the organization, and some of antisemitism’s loudest opponents, have been scrutinized for including criticism of Zionism — the movement to establish and protect a Jewish state in Israel — as antisemitism.
Some Jewish groups have taken aim at Israel’s violence against Palestinians and the ADL’s methodology for lumping in criticism of the state of Israel and its leaders as hate speech.
The Gaza Ministry of Health reported last November that more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s military offensive, in response to the Oct. 7 attack. The war’s heavy death toll and the Israeli military’s killings of Palestinian civilians, journalists, aid workers and doctors has incensed protestors and international groups.
The murky issue came up during a speech at the museum benefit, by Florida Atlantic University trustee Barbara Feingold.
“ We've chanted ‘never forget’ as we witnessed the far left, the far right, the neo-Nazis, the Jew haters, the anti-Semites, the anti-Zionists, the Islamists, the Jihadists, the Muslim infiltrators, the deniers, the media, and the influencers,” Feingold said. “Is that enough?”
Feingold, appointed to the museum’s governing council by President Trump, said education and speaking out are important — given the increased hate incidents towards Jews.
“ We all have to fight this. We can't say it's gonna be somebody else,” Feingold said. “Silence is complicity. Silence gives permission, silence gives acceptability.”
