The Anti-Defamation League reported the most antisemitic incidents in the 46 years it’s been tracking them, and Jewish leaders are already expressing concerns for the New Year with Zohran Mamdani — a Muslim Twelver — inaugurated as mayor of New York City, with more Jewish people than Jerusalem.

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The night of his election, a man on Times Square shouted that Islam must enter “every home,” and the next morning someone was emboldened to paint swastikas on a Yeshiva in Brooklyn.

On day one as mayor, Mr. Mamdani removed protections for Jewish people that his predecessor, Eric Adams, put in place, and days later, protesters were chanting, “We support Hamas here,” outside a synagogue and Jewish school in Queens.

This is a perfect time for New Yorkers to revisit the story of a Jewish teenager hiding from Adolph Hitler’s Nazis. Opened January 27, 2025, the Anne Frank Exhibit in New York City was extended, but now it must close after February 1.

Miss Frank also found herself in a culture where antisemitism was on the rise.

She was born in Frankfurt, Germany, where she lived a normal, happy life, with dreams of growing up to be a writer. Unemployment was high, and poverty was severe, and Hitler blamed all of that on the Jewish people.

Miss Frank’s father, Otto, moved his family to Amsterdam, Holland, away from the hatred of Jewish people and the poor economy.

The Anne Frank House has a page about Miss Frank’s story, which says, “Before long, Anne felt right at home in the Netherlands. She learned the language, made new friends and went to a Dutch school near her home.”

On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, which launched World War II. The Nazis invaded the Netherlands in the following May.

The Anne Frank House describes how things changed for Jewish people:

Jews could no longer visit parks, cinemas, or non-Jewish shops. The rules meant that more and more places became off-limits to Anne. Her father lost his company, since Jews were no longer allowed to run their own businesses. All Jewish children, including Anne, had to go to separate Jewish schools.

In 1942, Mr. Frank began furnishing a hiding place in an annex of his former business. When their older daughter, Margot, was called to a “labor camp,” they went into hiding, where they were joined by four other Jewish people.

It was in those cramped confines that Miss Frank filled a diary she received for her 13th birthday.

The Exhibit

New York City is the first place the Anne Frank Exhibit has been displayed outside of Amsterdam. It puts you in a full-scale recreation of the hiding place where the Frank family and their Jewish friends stayed for two years while the Nazis were kidnapping the Lord’s Chosen People.

She may not have known where the soldiers were taking her friends and relatives, but in one room of the exhibit you walk over a plexiglas floor, revealing a 3D map of Europe during World War II, showing some of the 44,000 concentration camps, major sites of mass killings by the Einsatzgruppen (the Nazi task force), extermination camps (Auschwitz was a concentration and extermination camp), and the 1000 ghettos (where Jewish people were forced to live with inadequate food and almost no medical care).

The largest mass killings were done in Babyn Yar, a ravine near Kyiv, Ukraine. On September 29 and 30, 1941, Nazis killed more than 33,000 Jewish people there, and by the end of the war, that number rose to 65,000.

After walking across that map, there’s a 1935 photo filling the wall. It’s of Miss Frank and her classmates in kindergarten. Fifteen of them were Jewish. Only five survived the Holocaust. As the names of the others are mentioned, their faces light up as the stories of their deaths are told.

In August 1944, Dutch neighbors betrayed the Franks and their friends, and Nazi officers arrested them all. The next year, Miss Frank died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen at the age of 15.

Her classmates were as young as 12 when they died. After each story is told, his or her image becomes a silhouette. After all ten are honored, they all fade out of the image.

How could this happen?

The exhibit includes more than 100 original items from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. One of them is a ballot from November 12, 1933, with one candidate and one party to choose: Adolph Hitler and the National Socialists (National Sozialistische, shortened to Nazi). On the pencil beside the ballot was the phrase “Deutchland wähit Hitler,”  “Germany elects Hitler.”

A desire for government supply and protection lured the German people into a dictatorship, and millions of Jewish people and political dissidents paid the price.

There was a display about the Wannsee Conference, where Adolf Eichmann presented a document that “uses a neutral bureaucratic language, where euphemisms were deliberately employed to obscure the true nature of the plan.” That plan was to exterminate all Jewish people everywhere that the Nazis had control.

The Diary

Otto Frank was the only one of the eight in the annex who survived the Holocaust. He shared a copy of his daughter’s diary with friends. Mr. Frank told the BBC in 1976: “One of them was employed in a publishing firm and he told me ‘you have not the right to keep the diary as a private property, it’s a human document and you should publish it’. And so I did.”

At first, it was rejected in America because of “lack of literary merit,” according to one of the exhibit displays. Then Doubleday picked it up, and Eleanor Roosevelt wrote the introduction. Now it’s sold more than 30 million copies, translated into 70 languages.

Plays based on the diary had Broadway runs in 1955-56, 1958, and 1997-98, which I saw with 16-year-old Natalie Portman in the title role.

Numerous film and television projects have told her story.

While I was reading about the ghettos at the exhibit, a woman told me about her relative who was a member of an uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto of 1943. I mentioned the Broadway play Irena’s Vow, which tells the story of a Catholic woman who hid a dozen Jewish people in the basement of the highest-ranking Nazi official in that region of Poland. It had the longest standing ovation I’ve ever experienced.

Others overheard and said they wanted to watch something that night to help them process and go deeper in their understanding of that era. I recommended the movie written by Dan Gordon, the playwright of the Broadway show, also called Irena’s Vow. I also recommended The Hiding Place and Return to the Hiding Place about the Christian ten Boom family, who were hiding Jewish people in Holland.

The exhibit and films about that era can focus our prayers on stopping the growth of antisemitism in NYC and around the world, before it’s too late.

Elizabeth Ojutiku, the IFA State Prayer Group leader for Georgia and our partner for the second and fifth Tuesdays for Headline Prayer Live, is in Brooklyn, so we invited her to pray for the Jewish people here and around the world:

Post your prayers for the Jewish people below.

Rich Swingle has presented in 42 nations on six continents, mostly with his own one-man plays. Rich and his bride Joyce Swingle have 41 screen children. They have developed a “singing play” about the Welsh and Asbury Revivals. The Swingles live in New York City. www.RichDrama.com. Photo Credit: John Halpern.