The only crime Israel has committed is being terrible at telling our own beautiful story.
We are the real rainbow nation: Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Bedouins, people from every color, background, and corner of the world.
Different stories. One country.
That is Israel. 🇮🇱🌈
Lviv, 1941.
A young Jewish woman sits on the pavement, stripped naked, surrounded by a hostile crowd.
She tries to cover herself with her hands; her clothes lie discarded beside her. People stand and watch. One person reaches down toward her head as she looks directly into the lens.
Look at her face.
There is fear, shock, and profound humiliation. But beneath the cruelty surrounding her, there is something immutable:
her fundamental humanity.
She had a name.
A family.
A home.
People who loved her.
A future she was never allowed to claim.
The image was captured on 8mm film by German personnel. Later discovered by U.S. forces in an SS barracks in Augsburg, the footage is now preserved in Holocaust archives—a permanent record of an atrocity that was meant to be forgotten.
Before the Holocaust, more than 200,000 Jews called Lviv home. Under Nazi occupation, that community was systematically persecuted, deported, and murdered. Only a fraction survived.
During the 1941 pogroms, Jewish men, women, and children were targeted relentlessly, with women subjected to targeted, public degradation.
This photograph captures more than physical violence. It captures the mechanics of dehumanization—the deliberate, witnessed destruction of a human being's dignity.
We may never learn this woman’s name.
We may never know her final moments.
But by looking at her face, we refuse the ultimate aim of her tormentors: to erase her from memory.
We remember that she was someone.