‘Nazi go home’ rally in Qns.
A GROUP OF YESHIVA students got a real-life lesson in Holocaust remembrance as they rallied Thursday outside the home of a former Nazi living in Queens.
About 200 students from the Rambam Mesivta High School in Lawrence, L.I., protested in front of Jakiw Palij’s house in Jackson Heights, chanting, “His hands are drenched in blood!”
The annual rally comes a month after New York’s entire congressional delegation urged Secretary of State Tillerson to boot the 94-year-old Palij. The war criminal worked as a guard at the Trawniki concentration and SS training camp in Germanoccupied Poland. In November 1943, about 6,000 Jewish prisoners were shot to death there during a massacre code-named Operation Harvest Festival.
When Palij arrived in the United States in 1949 he claimed he worked on his father’s farm in Poland and at a factory in Germany during the war.
In 2002, the Department of Justice moved to deport him. After a two-year legal battle, a federal judge stripped Palij of his U.S. citizenship. An immigration judge later ordered he be sent to Germany, Poland or Ukraine. But those countries have refused to take him in.
The rally was held on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 1938 “Night of Broken Glass,” a runup to the Holocaust when Jewish synagogues and stores in Germany were torched by roving Nazis.