One month after a mezuzah was torn from the entrance of his Toronto home in an apparent attempt to intimidate Jews, 98-year-old Holocaust survivor Nate Leipciger will be presented with a mezuzah crafted especially for him from fragments of an Iranian missile.
The ceremony will take place today on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during an event marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the launch of an Israeli high-tech delegation that will take part this year in the March of the Living at Auschwitz, alongside Leipciger and dozens of other survivors.
Several elderly Jewish residents, many of them Holocaust survivors, live in Leipciger’s building. Mezuzahs were torn from the doors of all their apartments. “If this had happened in the 1960s or 1970s, I would have left Canada and moved to Israel to escape antisemitism,” Leipciger admitted.
Today’s event is intended to strengthen him. Leaders of 25 Israeli high-tech companies and venture capital funds will close the trading day at the exchange. As a gesture of remembrance and renewal, they will ring the iconic bell alongside four Holocaust survivors, including Leipciger and Sara Weinstein of Israel, who earlier addressed the plenary session of the United Nations General Assembly.
The mezuzah was created by artist Yaron Bob of the Eshkol region near Gaza, who crafts Judaica from missile metals, including missiles launched at Israel from Iran and fragments of Iron Dome interceptors. Leipciger’s mezuzah was made from an Iranian missile and designed in the shape of the American B-2 bomber, one of the aircraft used in strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The mezuzah will be presented to Leipciger by Revital Yachin Krakowsky, CEO of the March of the Living in Israel, and Micha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr, who initiated the Israeli high-tech delegation and organized the New York Stock Exchange event.
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The mezuzah made from Iranian missile fragments that Holocaust survivor Nate Leipciger will receive
(Photo: Milman LTD)
“Holocaust survivors are our moral compass, and it is a great privilege to honor Nate at the heart of the world’s economic capital, the New York Stock Exchange,” Kaufman said.
Yachin Krakowsky added, “The mezuzah created for Nate in Israel is a symbol of strong Jewish and Israeli protection, given to one of the strongest people I know. Nate survived Auschwitz as a teenager, marched in the death marches, was liberated from Dachau and became a witness who has told his story to thousands of young people who take part in the March of the Living each year. This mezuzah represents the connection between Holocaust memory, Jewish identity and today’s reality.”
Leipciger was born in Poland in 1928. After the German invasion, his family tried to flee but was eventually sent to Auschwitz, the last place he saw his mother and sister alive. Nate, imprisoned alongside his father, survived several concentration camps before both were liberated in 1945. They arrived in Canada two years later.
Since then, Leipciger has led youth delegations from Canada to the March of the Living in Poland. He has participated in 21 marches to date and will take part in his 22nd this April. Each year, after the ceremony at Birkenau, he enters the barracks where he was held as a child and tells hundreds of visitors what he endured there.
Last year, inside that barrack, he made an emotional appeal to young people from his country: “Never hide your symbols. Stand up to whoever it is, because they want you to bow your head and hide your identity. But no more.”
He also shared that what troubles him most is that Jews in the diaspora, especially young people, are afraid of attacks and therefore hide their Jewish heritage or even deny it, seeing it as a burden rather than a source of strength. He noted with sorrow that some remove the mezuzah from their homes out of fear of retaliation.
“Woe to us if we hide our Judaism,” he said. “I will continue to carry my Judaism with pride and call on young Jews to do the same.”
Few imagined that he himself would soon become a victim of such an antisemitic act.