A Brooklyn middle school principal rejected an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor as a speaker because of his views on Israel, sparking outrage from Jewish leaders and accusations of viewpoint discrimination.
Arin Rusch, principal of MS 447 in Brooklyn, sent a letter to parents on November 18 stating that Sami Steigmann’s presentation would not be “right for our public school setting, given his messages around Israel and Palestine.”
Steigmann, who has spoken to more than 300,000 people over 17 years, was scheduled to address students on December 3. His website makes no mention of the current war, Palestine, Gaza, or Hamas. His biography notes that his family moved to Israel in the 1960s and that he served in the Israeli Air Force. His presentations focus on Holocaust education and motivational messages urging young people never to be bystanders.
“She didn’t even have the courtesy to call me,” Steigmann told the New York Post. “Years ago, neo-Nazis objected. I would expect that from them, but not from a Brooklyn principal.”
The decision drew immediate criticism from Jewish leaders and elected officials. Moshe Spern, president of the United Jewish Teachers and grandson of a Holocaust survivor, sent an email to school officials calling the principal’s stance “appalling,” “discriminatory,” and “personally offensive.”
“Are we now censoring Holocaust survivors for their views of Israel?” Spern wrote to Brooklyn District 15 Superintendent Rafael Alvarez and aides to Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos. “There are only so many survivors out there who still speak. This is not meeting the moment.”
Brooklyn City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, a Ukrainian-born Jew, accused the school of potential First Amendment violations. “It’s particularly abhorrent to deny someone who lived through the horrors of the Holocaust the opportunity to share his experience with students—particularly during a time when antisemitism is skyrocketing among our youth,” Vernikov told the Post. “The school is potentially engaging in viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment and of Equal Protection that covers religious or ethnic discrimination.”Steigmann’s website contains no discussion of current Middle East conflicts. It features motivational content and his biography as a Holocaust survivor.
Steigmann told JNS that he has never encountered this problem in nearly two decades of speaking at schools. He said his talks are educational about the Holocaust and inspirational, not political. “I do not give political speeches,” he stated. He added that he would agree to any requested restrictions if school administrators asked.
In online lectures, Steigmann has expressed support for Israel and promoted StandWithUs, a nonpartisan Israel education organization. “What’s happening in the Middle East, we will prevail. We will win,” he said in one YouTube lecture. “In every generation they tried to annihilate us. We prevailed.”
On his Facebook page, Steigmann has posted historical content stating the historically accurate fact that “Palestine” referred to the Jewish homeland before 1948. In October 2023, days after the Hamas terrorist attacks, he posted an image of an actual 1929 French newspaper headline about “fanatic Arabs” massacring Jews in Jerusalem. “No modern, reestablished state of Israel, no ‘territories,’ no talk of ‘occupation’ or ‘settlements,'” Steigmann wrote. “This killing spree was, and is, about Jew-hatred and incitement to kill.”
These statements and opinions were never included in Steigman’s Holocaust lectures.
The New York City Department of Education defended Rusch’s decision. “We thoroughly evaluate every classroom speaker and are careful to ensure speakers maintain political neutrality, especially on contentious current events, as required in a public school setting,” spokeswoman Nicole Brownstein said. She added that the school system has “welcomed many Holocaust survivors into our schools, including MS 447, to share their stories.”
Mayor Eric Adams’ office initially backed the principal, saying Steigmann “wasn’t the right fit.” A City Hall spokesman said, “While this speaker wasn’t the right fit, we will continue to ensure our students hear from the living survivors of this history into the future.”
After public backlash, Adams reversed course. On December 4, he wrote on X: “Let me be very clear, I’ve previously met with Sami Steigmann, and he is ABSOLUTELY the right person to speak with kids about the atrocities of the Holocaust.”
Steigmann said he was pleased to read the mayor’s statement. “I was glad to see the mayor’s statement, and I appreciate it. I’ve met him and know him, so it never made sense that his office would not approve of me.”
Former Democratic Assemblyman Dov Hikind, founder of Americans Against Antisemitism, called the incident “outrageous, disgusting and pathetic.” He questioned how the Department of Education approved the decision. “To reach the point where a Holocaust survivor is rejected from speaking at a school, you have to wonder how much worse it can get,” Hikind told JNS. “People are such cowards; they are so afraid they are going to offend someone on the radical left. Canceling a Holocaust survivor who is 85 reaches a new level of sickness and disgust.”
The principal’s approach reveals the problem. She claims to welcome Holocaust education and speakers about antisemitism, just not this particular Holocaust survivor. The clear implication: Holocaust education is acceptable when sanitized of Jewish particularity. Teaching about dead Jews raises no objections. But a living Jew who connects the Holocaust to Jewish survival and Jewish sovereignty? That crosses a line.
Steigmann was born in Czernovitz (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) on December 21, 1939. From 1941 through 1944, he was incarcerated with his parents at the Mogilev-Podolsky labor camp in Transnistria. He has been recognized by the Claims Conference Compensation Program as a victim of Nazi medical experiments. “I was subjected to Nazi medical experimentation,” he writes on his website. “I suffered all my life from neck, head and back problems. The severity was so great that I had days and weeks that I could not sit, lay down or walk. My headaches were so severe that I was crying in pain.”
Dozens of his relatives were murdered during the Holocaust. His life was saved by a German woman who gave him milk when he was dying of starvation.
After the war, he grew up in Transylvania. His family moved to Israel in 1961, where he served in the Israeli Air Force. He moved to the United States in 1968, returned to Israel in 1983, and settled in New York City in 1988.
He has received the Harmony Power Award from the city’s Museum of Tolerance and been honored by the state Assembly “as an example of courage, compassion and for his work speaking with students and visitors to New York.”
Despite the rejection, Steigmann said he has been flooded with speaking requests since the incident became public. On December 3, the day he was supposed to speak at MS 447, he addressed about 80 students at Byram Hills High School in Armonk, Westchester County. “It went great,” he said. “Everyone was very nice.”
He appeared on WABC radio’s “Sid & Friends in the Morning” and Zev Brenner’s radio show to discuss the cancellation.
Steigmann views the incident as potentially beneficial. “This is a good thing,” he told JNS. “Hopefully, this will go viral, so many can see the exposure of bias that is going on. That a principal would act this way, without giving any reason, is a sign that absurd things are going on.”
He emphasized the importance of Holocaust education at a time when antisemitism is rising in America and fewer survivors remain alive to share their testimony. He said Holocaust curricula exist in public schools but enforcement is lacking.
Steigmann maintains his characteristic optimism. “There’s a lesson to be learned from everything,” he said. “We are living in a strange time where right is wrong, and wrong is right. But I am always an optimist.”
The MS 447 incident joins a series of controversies in New York City schools that have alarmed Jewish activists. Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos was forced to apologize last year for linking a “Stop Gaza Genocide Toolkit” in a Department of Education newsletter. In November 2023, an anti-Israel student riot at Hillcrest High School in Queens forced a Jewish teacher to take shelter in a locked office.
Steigmann encourages students to develop critical thinking skills and to do their own research on antisemitism, particularly as it relates to World War II and the Holocaust. He urges them never to be bystanders. “Life is based on the choices we make,” he writes on his homepage. “Choose wisely.”
At 85, Sami is not slowing down. He described the attempt to silence him as an “opportunity.”
“We need to speak up even louder, to wake people up to the truth,” Sami said.