by Michelle Lubin Terris President JEXIT, Inc. | JEXIT
If my grandparents were alive today, they would be horrified.
My family was Russian Jewish aristocracy. They had a life, a home, a community, and a future. None of that mattered when hatred came for them.
They fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe, where Russian Cossacks stormed Jewish communities on horseback, wielding pitchforks and terror. Their only “crime”? Being Jewish.
As a young girl, my grandmother hid in haystacks while Cossacks searched for Jews to kill. She watched her world collapse around her.
She was forced to witness horrors no child should ever see. She had to watch as a rabbi was dragged into the street and forced to dance, humiliated, for the amusement of the mob before being sliced into pieces alive, brutally murdered. It was a trauma she carried for the rest of her life. The fear, loss, and terror never fully left her. She knew firsthand what hatred looks like when it is allowed to grow unchecked.
My grandmother’s family survived only because a brave Christian family hid them in their attic, risking everything. Discovery would have meant death for all of them.
When she finally reached America through Ellis Island, officials gave her a new name and a birthdate. Her Yiddish name was Pessy, meaning “daughter of God,” and they renamed her Pearl.
By then, everything had been taken from her. The family that had once enjoyed privilege and security arrived with almost nothing. She came wearing shoes made from potato sacks.
Imagine that: a child escaping persecution, stepping onto American soil with nothing but exhaustion, trauma, and fragile hope.
She built a life from scratch. Delivered bagels. Worked tirelessly. Never asked for handouts. She rarely spoke of what she survived, not because it didn’t haunt her, but because she refused to pass that darkness on to her children and grandchildren.
Yet it still found her in the night.
As a child, I would hear her crying and screaming in her sleep. Decades later, I understand those nightmares. She never truly escaped what she fled.
That is why her story isn’t just history. It’s a warning.
And it is why we must tell these stories.
Jewish history is being rewritten, edited, erased, and deleted before our very eyes. The stories of Jewish families who survived persecution are being forgotten, distorted, dismissed, and, in some cases, openly denied. If we do not tell our stories, others will rewrite them for us.
Hatred doesn’t start with tragedy. It begins with tolerance. With silence. With people convincing themselves, “It’s not that serious yet.”
My grandmother believed America was different, a place where the poison she escaped could never take root again.
Today, the Democrat nominee for U.S. Senate in Maine is Graham Platner, a man who wore a tattoo long associated with Nazi SS units for nearly two decades. Seeing a major party nominate someone connected to a symbol with such a history is shocking, alarming, and unacceptable. It evokes exactly the kind of normalized hatred my family barely survived.
When I picture my grandmother standing at Ellis Island in those potato-sack shoes, I see everything she lost and everything she rebuilt through courage, sacrifice, and quiet strength.
History does not repeat itself on its own.
It repeats when people forget.
It repeats when people stay silent.
It repeats when good people look away.
We cannot afford to make that mistake again.
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