Donald Trump and right wing human rights violators created an Auchwitz concentration camp in the Florida Everglades

‘Alligator Auschwitz’❓ Critics’ nickname for ICE’s Everglades detention facility renews debate over Holocaust comparisons.

Published in Jewish Telegraphic Agency news by Andrew Silow-Carroll

Nazi comparisons surge in response to aggressive, and evil immigrant detention and enforcement policies, as do rebukes that such language trivializes the Nazi Holocaust.

Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Rick DeSantis had a giddy name for the temporary ICE facility they built quickly on an airstrip in the Florida Everglades: “Alligator Alcatraz.”

“We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison,” Trump boasted July 1 as he toured the detention facility for undocumented migrants, where a forbidding swamp surrounds tents featuring rows of bunk beds behind chain fences.

Some critics put forth another name for the facility: Alligator Auschwitz.

The disparaging, historically loaded nickname for the facility surged on Bluesky, X and other social media platforms, and was featured in the headlines of articles denouncing the facility. Syndicated cartoonist Pat Byrnes drew an image of the tents under the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate that welcomed Jewish inmates to Auschwitz.

“When I saw the picture of the metal bunks in tiers, my thought was ‘Alligator Auschwitz,’ not Alcatraz,” wote an L.A. Times reader.

Like many previous comparisons, such language sparked an immediate debate over when, if ever, it is appropriate to use Holocaust comparisons.

Some Jewish watchdogs argue that using even a term like “concentration camp,” which long preceded the Nazi camps where millions of Jews were killed, can dilute the meaning of the genocide and dishonor the memory of its victims if used outside the context of the Holocaust.

Jewish groups have called out such language by progressive politicians referring to previous Trump policies, by GOP lawmakers denouncing their opponents, and even by Pope Francis when he decried European migrant and refugee holding centers.

“Don’t call it Alligator Auschwitz. Don’t trivialize the Holocaust,” Stuart Rojstaczer, a novelist and former professor of geology at Duke University, wrote in a Threads post critical of the facility. “I lost too many family members for me not to feel a sting whenever I hear the Holocaust being trivialized.”

“Every ass-clown who compares Alligator Alcatraz to Auschwitz clearly has no mental comprehension of how horrible the Holocaust was,” read a post on X by the Monterey County Republican Party in California. “#NeverForget the true horrors, and pray that the reality of Jewish genocide never happens again.

And yet, others have suggested that the many aspects of Trump’s draconian (evil) immigration policies invite such comparisons — not to the Holocaust, per se, but to harsh measures that dehumanize outsiders, operate outside of a country’s established legal system, and seem to at least pave the road to, well, another Auschwitz.

In a sermon he delivered on July 5, Rabbi Ammos Chorny of Beth Tikvah congregation in Naples, Florida warned against the “Auschwitz” comparison, but nevertheless invoked the Holocaust in decrying the ICE facility.

“Let me be clear. Although this is not Auschwitz, nor Bergen-Belsen, we must not disrespect history by making false equivalencies,” he said in his sermon, which was shared on Facebook by the Rabbinical Assembly, “but we would be dangerously blind not to hear the echoes of history in our midst. We know how it begins, always: with camps for those labeled ‘outsiders,’ ‘illegals,’ ‘undesirables.’ We know how even democratic societies can, little by little, begin to unravel the threads of human dignity, rendering people invisible.”

“Let us name it plainly,” he said. “A camp has opened for the detention of undocumented immigrants. It stands here, in the shadow of our own community, amid the sawgrass and swamplands of the Everglades. It is not a prison, but it is not freedom. It is a place where human beings: men, women, and children; will be confined, silenced, and uprooted from any semblance of stability or dignity.”

Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,” wrote that Alligator Alcatraz deserves to be called a “concentration camp” based on an objective definition of the term.

“This facility’s purpose fits the classic model: mass civilian detention without real trials targeting vulnerable groups for political gain based on ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation rather than for crimes committed,” she wrote in an article for MSNBC.

Pitzer notes that long before Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, other nations, including Spain and Great Britain, “set up concentration camps in colonial regions.” She also applied the term to the internment camps where thousands of Japanese Americans were held during World War II.

Rojstaczer, the novelist, acknowledged such history in his comment about “Alligator Auschwitz.”

“Call it Alligator Arkhangelsk, a region of gulags where Stalin shipped many Polish Jews and Poles, including my mother,” he wrote. “What Trump is doing is far more akin to what Stalin was doing than what Hitler was doing.”

The tendency to invoke the Nazis in heated political debates is so common that it has a name: “Godwin’s Law,” which postulates that as an online discussion grows longer, a Hitler or Nazi comparison becomes inevitable.

Critics of “Alligator Alcatraz” say they are basing the Holocaust comparison on policies, not politics.

While Trump and DeSantis have promised that the facility, which currently can accommodate 3,000 detainees, will house ”the worst of the worst” awaiting deportation — presumably undocumented aliens with criminal records or gang affiliations — the Miami Herald published a document by the state showing that the facility is prepared to take in children.

And ICE itself, which in the first five months of the Trump administration had been targeting migrants with pending or criminal convictions, has since the beginning of May arrested an increasing number of migrants with no criminal convictions, according to an ABC News analysis of ICE data. The shift followed a directive by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who is Jewish, to greatly increase the number of detentions.

Pitzer, the historian of concentration camps, referred to rushed procedures that immigration groups say deny migrants due process. But she also wrote of “Alligator Alcatraz” as a capstone to an array of policies — plans to revoke naturalized citizenship, undoing birthright citizenship and targeting immigrants for their political activism — that “wants to define who can be an American in ways that appear profoundly racist.” She offered another Nazi-era analogy: the Nuremberg Laws, the legal framework for the systematic persecution of Jews in Germany.

Nazi-era comparisons are also being used to refer to the expansion of (evil) ICE and its aggressive tactics, which have included masked agents, large shows of force and telegenic raids. The domestic policy bill signed by Trump on Friday funds a doubling of the current immigrant detention capacity, from about 56,000 beds to potentially more than 100,000. The bill would more than triple ICE’s annual budget, with funding to hire 10,000 new agents over the remainder of Trump’s term.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz referred to ICE in May as “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo,” leading to a rebuke from the Department of Homeland Security. In June, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism issued a report showing that comparisons on social media between federal law enforcement and the Gestapo had risen to “records highs”; the foundation said that comparing ICE or any other agency to Hitler’s secret police “is more than just rhetorical excess. It trivializes the Holocaust, distorts history, and erodes public understanding of both the past and present.”

Trump officials and supporters welcomed Alligator Alcatraz in ways that felt distinctly cruel to many critics of who used the “Auschwitz” label. The Florida GOP and supporters of the facility are selling “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise. MAGA influencers gleefully posted photos of the caged-in bunks. Pro-Trump activist Laura Loomer, also Jewish, wrote on X that “alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now” — citing a number equal to the entire Hispanic population of the United States.

Joan Walsh, in an article in The Nation headlined “The Abominable Sadism of ‘Alligator Auschwitz,’” called such language and actions “performative fascist cruelty.”

In her remarks during last week’s tour of the facility, Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem appeared to acknowledge that the forbidding conditions were meant to frighten migrants into self-deporting. “If you don’t,” she said, “you may end up here.” She also urged other states to contact her if they wanted to set up similarly intimidating facilities.

Defenders of the administration’s policies argue that they are working. The number of people crossing the southern border illegally in June — just over 6,000 — was the lowest monthly level seen in decades.

“Another all-time record low has been set, smashing every record on the books,” Miller wrote on X, celebrating the numbers.

In his sermon, however, Rabbi Chorny described Alligator Alcatraz as not just a political story, but a moral story — and that Holocaust comparisons notwithstanding, it should be debated on its own terms.

“Yes, every nation has the right and the responsibility to maintain secure borders. But how we uphold those borders matters,” said Chorny, a native of Colombia and a former U.S. Army chaplain. “Law does not require cruelty. Security does not require inhumanity. There are lines that must never be crossed, lines that once crossed, are not - and ever will be- easily uncrossed.”

Passover celebrated in the war ravaged Ukraine

"The thousands of Jewish arrivals to Western Europe, and especially Germany and Austria, will also have seders especially designed for them, including at the Lauder Chabad Campus in Vienna."

Echo report published in The Times of Isreal

Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) — Between air raid sirens in Odesa, Svetlana Niselevitch, an 84-year-old Ukrainian Jewish Holocaust survivor, has been preparing to join a Passover seder for the first time in her life.

“We didn’t observe Jewish traditions in my family,” Niselevitch, a poet who was born in Kharkiv, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. But she said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, convinced her that “every chance to practice Jewishness is important.”

Niselevitch, who will celebrate Passover at an event organized by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC, is among the thousands of Ukrainian Jews who are preparing to celebrate the Jewish holiday in dozens of group seders both in Ukraine and outside it for Jewish refugees from Russia’s war.

Emergency curfews, supply-chain interruptions and the dangers of war are complicating Ukrainian Jews’ efforts to celebrate Passover, the holiday that celebrates Jewish freedom and security.

Still, the fact that so many Jews are participating demonstrates both the robustness of the worldwide relief effort supporting Ukrainian Jews, and Judaism’s ongoing resilience in a region scarred by the Holocaust and communist suppression of religion.

Thousands of Ukrainians have died in the ensuing conflict and millions have left the country, mostly into neighboring European countries and, for Jews and their family members, to Israel. Millions more have become internally displaced, seeking refuge in places they hope are unlikely to draw Russian bombings.

For the Jews who remain inside Ukraine, wanting to participate in large gatherings in such circumstances may seem counterintuitive, especially considering that the pandemic is still raging across Eastern Europe. “But it’s only natural,” said Gershon Birenboim, a Jewish teacher who is helping to prepare a group seder for Jewish refugees from Odesa, Kharkiv, Kyiv and beyond who are staying at a resort in Irshava in western Ukraine.

“When you’ve fled a war, sometimes being separated from family, leaving behind everything, that’s when you’ll start looking for the things that connect you and tie you down,” he said.

Chabad and JDC have been organizing group seders across Eastern Europe for decades, including under challenging geopolitical circumstances. Other groups, such as the HIAS Jewish refugee agency, are departing from their normal activities to offer Passover events.

At least 20 cities in Ukraine will have group seders run by Chabad, similar to normal years, according to Motti Seligson, the Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s director of media relations.

Chabad alone has collected at least 20 tons of matzah in Ukraine despite border closures, customs delays and other supply chain failures connected to Russia’s invasion.



There are other complications. Part of the tradition of Passover is to discuss the story of the Jewish exodus from Egypt late into the night, but most of the country’s cities have emergency curfews in place.

Some seders, including one for 300 guests in Kyiv, are being held at hotels where the seder participants can sleep over.

For people unable or afraid to attend in-person seders, the JDC has set up a virtual online seder. The event will build on technology and techniques the organization has perfected during COVID to relieve loneliness among thousands of elderly aid recipients without exposing them to risk, funded by the UJA-Federation of New York, the Jewish Federations of North America and the Claims Conference. The New York federation said it had sent more than 20,000 prepackaged seder kits to Ukraine in advance of the holiday.

Niselevitch, the poet from Odesa, is opting for the online celebration, which is held before sunset so as not to violate the Jewish legal prohibitions around using electricity on Passover.

“We celebrate Jewish holidays at home the way we are able to and the way we know, probably, not the most perfect way,” she said.

Evgenia Malikova, a 67-year-old retired international aid professional from Kyiv who last month fled Ukraine to Belgium, has attended seders in the past — but only a couple of times.

“My father was Jewish, my mother was not. I’m not very deeply immersed in religion in Judaism, though I am attached to it,” she told JTA.

In Brussels she has decided to join the seder being organized by HIAS at the city’s European Jewish Community Centre. She feels she’s “very much behind” on celebrating Jewish traditions generally but part of what made Malikova, who has one daughter and two grandchildren in Berlin, want to attend a seder is “the symbolic similarity of the exodus [of the Israelites from Egypt], which reminds me of what’s happening now,” she added.

Many Ukrainian refugees outside their country are also seeking a seder and the company of their fellow Jews, according to Rabbi Zushe Abelsky, the director of Chabad in Moldova, where hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have fled, including many members of the Jewish minority of Ukraine, which numbers at least 43,000 people.

Demand for seders in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital, is so high that Abelsky and his staff have had to open the Central Synagogue of Chisinau even though it is currently closed for renovations. The local community, which numbers about 1,900 people, according to a 2020 study, had planned to celebrate in a smaller, alternative venue this year.

Chabad of Moldova, which usually stocks up on matzah and other Passover supplies months in advance, has received them only this week.

“We were hunting for matzah, every piece we could get,” Abelsky said. Part of the problem was that Moldova’s Jewish community relies on Ukraine’s for such supplies. They had to be imported from Israel and Hungary this year, with help from the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.

Many other groups sent supplies to Eastern Europe in advance of Passover. The Orthodox Union, for instance, said it had sent more than 200 tons of food and medical supplies, including 70,000 pounds of matzah, 50 tons of kosher meat and chicken and 14,500 gallons of grape juice.

In addition to Moldova, Poland, Hungary, Romania are among the East European countries where Jewish communities are organizing public seders for refugees, complete with Russian-language haggadahs containing the seder text.

In Chisinau, Abelsky, a 55-year-old who has four children with his wife Chayah, is preparing to deliver a few words addressed to the hundreds of Ukrainians who have joined his community, at least temporarily — and its three public seders.

“The Israelites began fleeing Egypt under the cover of darkness, at night,” he told JTA. “But then the sun rose and a miracle happened,” he said, referring to the story of the parting of the Red Sea for the fleeing Israelites.

“The same will happen for our refugees: It’s the middle of the night for them now but soon the sun will rise and a path to safety will present itself,” he said. “They will rebuild a life better than the ones they left behind.”

Chef José Andrés Sets Up World Central Kitchen on Ukraine-Poland Border to Feed Refugees

In Poland, World Central Kitchen, the food aid group operated by Chef Jose Andres, will be serving 15,000 kosher-for-Passover meals a day to Jewish refugees there, according to the New York federation.

In Hungary, the government this week set aside, at the request of local Jewish leaders, one refugee housing facility to be made kosher for Passover. They chose the lush Őszöd lakeside resort, 70 miles outside of Budapest, where 200 Ukrainian Jews were already staying. (The resort is where a former prime minister in 2006 delivered a famous profanity-laden speech accusing his own Socialist party of corruption, widely seen as a factor in bringing Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s right-wing Fidesz party to power.)

The thousands of Jewish arrivals to Western Europe, and especially Germany and Austria, will also have seders especially designed for them, including at the Lauder Chabad Campus in Vienna.

And in Israel, where thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have moved because of the war, the Jewish Agency, Chabad and individual municipalities, such as Nof Hagalil, are also giving public seders for refugees, mostly at the hotels where they are being housed.