The Weeping Woman of New York

The two young women are separated by 82 years, but to look at their photographs you might think they were sisters. And in a sense they are.

As Israel and its friends prepared to mark the third anniversary of the October 7 atrocities, I considered but then abandoned the thought of contributing a piece for the occasion here on PJ Media. I’m not a Jew, after all, nor did I know anyone who suffered the horrors of that day. Others, I reasoned, were better suited to write on the topic, as indeed they did (see here and here, for example).

But then, as the hours passed yesterday and I began to see images of the pro-Hamas marches taking place in New York City and elsewhere, I was jolted into awareness that this is not a time to remain silent.

While scrolling through X yesterday, I came across this post from Rabbi Elchanan Poupko, the video from which originated with Freedomnews TV. The video shows a young woman, in her late teens or early twenties, watching from a New York City sidewalk as the local chapter of the Hamas Admiration Society marches past braying their insipid chants.

The woman in the video is plainly overcome with sadness, but no one in the nearby crowd can bestir himself to offer her comfort or even a kind word. “If she is one of our people,” writes Rabbi Poupko in concluding his post, “there is no sympathy. Like in the 1930s, the world has decided it can be cruel to Jewish people. If you do know her, please let her know that every Jewish person stands with her.”

The video has been widely viewed on X and elsewhere, and I hope that in writing about this woman I don’t bring additional unwanted attention upon her, but I want her to know it is not only Jewish people who stand with her.

In seeing her anguish I was immediately reminded of a haunting picture. On March 25, 1944, the Weeping Woman of Ioannina was photographed as she and the 2,000 other Jews of Ionnanina, Greece, were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. Nearly all of them would die there, though the woman in the iconic photograph somehow survived.

Perhaps we will learn why the woman in New York was so moved, but I suspect she fears that if all those people marching in the street were to have their way, she and her family and friends will one day hear the knock on the door, the same knock heard by the Jews of Ioannina and so many other cities and towns across Europe in the 1930s and -40s.

This is not hyperbole. As they have been since even before the bodies were counted three years ago, the Hamas fans were very explicit in expressing their hatred for Jews yesterday. “There is only one solution,” they shout, “intifada revolution.” This is much more than a dog whistle; it is a not so thinly veiled call for the elimination of Jews, not just from Israel but from everywhere. If you doubt this, consider that some of yesterday’s marchers held posters of Yahya Sinwar, who, while imprisoned for the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers, had a life-threatening brain tumor removed by Israeli surgeons. He was among the more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners released in exchange for a single captive Israeli soldier in 2011. He repaid these acts of mercy by going on to plan and lead the savagery of Oct. 7, 2023. (He was killed in battle a year later.)

     Also read: Non-Carlsons, Part 3: Two Non-Jewish Women With Media Voices Standing With the Jews and Israel

Later in the video in which the crying woman appears, we see a verbal confrontation between a marcher and man seated at a sidewalk café. In word and gesture, the man calmly expresses his contempt for the marcher and his cohorts, but what I found more interesting was the reaction of two young men seated next to him. Rather than risk being associated with their fellow customer, they move to an adjacent table in the hope of avoiding any escalation that might occur.

Perhaps this was the prudent choice in the moment, but the day is fast approaching when prudence must give way to courage. The Weeping Woman of Ioannina and the millions of Europe’s Jews were rounded up and sent to death camps because the world, like the two men at the café, like everyone who fails to recognize evil and confront it, stood by and allowed it to happen.

“Never again” is not an idle slogan. “Never again” starts with you.

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