A Holocaust survivor fought antisemitism on TikTok and now he’s a social media star

PRAGUE — At nearly 88, Holocaust survivor Gidon Lev has gone head to head with Joe Rogan, befriended a former neo-Nazi, appeared on television morning shows, and is now the subject of an upcoming documentary – all after posting a handful of TikTok posts promoting his new memoir, “The True Adventures of Gidon Lev.”

Lev’s TikTok account, co-managed with his life partner and editor Julie Gray, has racked up over 427,000 followers and millions of “likes” since the pair felt they had to address the viral spread of misinformation and Holocaust relativism during the coronavirus pandemic. Their messages, often couched in the memes and trends sweeping the platform, resonate with youth – who are overrepresented on TikTok and also most likely to be uninformed about the Holocaust – and serve as a moral anchor in a swelling sea of misinformation.

Lev is no stranger to propaganda, having spent much of his childhood in Theresienstadt, the Nazi concentration camp and ghetto in the Czech Republic’s northeast that was often used as a decoy to placate foreign governments and organizations such as the International Red Cross.

While the Nazis did permit a semblance of cultural life to exist in Theresienstadt, visitors were only shown a small portion of the premises. The vast majority of prisoners interned there either died of disease, overwork or starvation or were shipped off to extermination camps where they were summarily murdered.

Lev lived in Theresienstadt for four years between the ages of 6 and 10, and lost his grandfather there, among other relatives. His father, one of the camp’s earliest laborers, was transported to Auschwitz where he died.

Despite it all, Lev has remained a lifelong optimist. Until recently, he worked part-time delivering flowers in the central Israeli city of Ramat Gan, where he lives in his retirement after spending years as a dairy farmer on two kibbutzim. He’s also followed in the footsteps of many other aging Holocaust survivors and turned to sharing his story with Israeli schoolchildren as a means of preserving the memory of the genocide. And while other survivors – such as Lily Ebert (who can count Lev among her many fans) – are using social media for Holocaust education, Lev is unique among them in the way he jumps on the latest fads to broadcast his messages.

Gray, the brains of the operation, has fueled Lev’s launch to TikTok stardom, learning how to curate content and navigate the platform through a long process of trial and error. These days, she’s also putting her hard-earned social media knowledge to good use by helping museums at former Nazi camps update fossilized social media strategies to capture the attention of today’s youth.

The Times of Israel caught up with Lev and Gray at a recent European Jewish Association conference in Prague commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day, where Lev was the guest of honor and where Gray gave a presentation on the opportunities that social media offers for Holocaust education.

In the conference hotel lobby, between occasional interruptions from well-wishers, they discussed life stories, Holocaust education, social media, and the upcoming documentary about their own true adventures.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Gidon, when did you get involved in educating people about the Holocaust?

Gidon Lev: What actually happened is, I was married for 40 years to my second wife, and she died 12 years ago. And people had told me in the past, “Why don’t you write what you remember, the Holocaust, your family, what you did, where you come from?” I was on my own, my wife was gone, so I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wanted to make it into a book – but for a book, you need to have an editor.

Julie Gray: [Walking up with a drink in each hand] Booze car just arrived.

Lev: So I was searching for an editor, and there she is. At first she said, “No, I don’t know anything about the Holocaust, I do fiction, I don’t do personal stories,” but somehow I smiled and I convinced her. And here we are six years later. We published a book, and then once we had the book, we wanted to sell it. And Julie said, “You know what? Let’s go on TikTok.”

Gray: I read an article in the Wall Street Journal, and it was like, “Author Goes Big on TikTok.”

Lev: [Pointing at a drink] Is this for me?

Gray: That’s for you. I have to get a picture of you drinking it – this is his favorite drink, everywhere we go we take a picture of him drinking it.

What is that, an Aperol spritz?

Gray: It’s an Aperol spritz. [Snaps a photo on her phone.] Here we go, Aperol spritz in Prague. So we read this article in the Wall Street Journal that said that authors were selling books on TikTok because there was a hashtag, BookTok. And so we look at TikTok – neither one of us had seen it before, like, “TikTok? This is ridiculous.” But you look at this hashtag, and it was a big hashtag.

When was this exactly?

Lev: This was a couple of years ago.

Gray: About a year and a half – like July 2021.

Lev: A year and a half ago.

Gray: So it came out during the pandemic, we hadn’t been able to really promote our book, and we look at TikTok. So we made, like, one TikTok: Here’s Gidon Lev, he’s a Holocaust survivor, you should read his book. And then we made two or three like that. And people liked it. Suddenly people start commenting, and then what made us go viral was –

Lev: Then we saw that when we spoke about certain things that I had gone through in the war, Holocaust, surviving, there were people who were antisemites hating and being really nasty.

Gray: But when it really went off for us was when people started comparing COVID to the Holocaust. That’s what made us go viral because we started seeing – yes, we see some antisemitism on our account – but we started seeing people on TikTok comparing having to wear a star to COVID. In particular, Joe Rogan, the famous American podcaster, did a piece on social media comparing COVID restrictions to the Holocaust. And that infuriated both of us. So we made a TikTok about Joe Rogan, directly took him on. And that’s when we got on Newsweek, and the Daily Mail in England – the media picked us up because we took on Joe Rogan and we asked him to apologize. That did not happen, but our account went viral. And that’s when all this – we were doing Holocaust education, but that’s when all this antisemitism really started manifesting itself. And we said, this is no bueno. We’re not going to ignore this. We have to tell Gidon’s story. And if people buy our book, we’re happy, but this is something we have to take on.

Can you tell us about your creative process?

Lev: Let’s make it very clear – Julie is the brains, the creator, the innovator behind it… And you know, it can be 8:00 in the evening, I’m already in bed reading –

Gray: And I’ll see a TikTok, and be like, Gidon, get up. We gotta do this, put a shirt on.

Lev: I think she has good ideas – sometimes more, sometimes a little bit less – but basically they’re very creative, very innovative, and if we could do some good, why not.

Were you involved with Holocaust education prior to TikTok?

Lev: Actually, I also had been invited over that period to high schools. For example, there’s a high school in Tel Aviv that specializes in the arts, the Thelma Yellin High School, and one of my grandsons was a student there. So they invited me, and they said, do you want to talk to one class? And I said, the more the better. So I ended up talking to the whole grade – instead of 30 kids, 120 kids. And I spoke, I told them my story in a short way, and slowly I got the hang of it a little bit. And in most cases, I was able to make some personal contact.

Gray: Actually, Gidon, can I ask you a question? Because I’ve been with you for this whole run. I know you like speaking to people personally, you much prefer a smaller crowd. So was TikTok weird for you? You took to TikTok very quickly – you know, you would do the dances, you would do the memes. You still do. That must be so different from talking to small groups. What’s that like for you?

Lev: It’s totally different. It’s a different way of communicating. And it turns out I enjoy actually acting. I’m a dancer – well, a folk dancer, not a dancer.

Gray: Gidon just did a TikTok with Montana Tucker, who is a TikTok celebrity with 8 million followers.

Oh my gosh.

Gray: And she’s Jewish. And we’re making a documentary, and Montana and her entourage just went to a studio in LA last week, and our director met her, and she got on Zoom with Gidon, and talked to him about his life, and Gidon taught her an Israeli folk dance. So that’s going to be part of our documentary.

When did you begin filming the documentary?

Gray: About two years ago. Did you ever see the film “Queen Mimi?”

Nope.

Gray: “Queen Mimi” is an award-winning documentary directed by an American Israeli named Yaniv Rokah. I met Yaniv in Israel about eight years ago when “Queen Mimi” played at the Haifa Film Festival. And we became friends and we stayed in touch. And then he called me one day about two years ago and he said, “I’ve decided to do my next film, it’s going to be about you and Gidon.” So we started shooting almost immediately, and I think all of our shooting is done, but he just did this zoom with Montana Tucker. And he also just interviewed the new executive director of the Shoah Foundation.

We also have in our film somebody very surprising. I don’t know how he contacted us, but there’s a man named Jeff Schoep, who until about two or three years ago was the head of the American Nazi party. He is now what we call a former. He quit. He was the head of the National Socialist Movement for like 20 years, and he got a hold of us – I think he found us on TikTok – and he said, “I want to talk to Gidon.” And so we got on Zoom with a former Nazi. And he looks like one – he’s covered in tattoos. And he talked to Gidon, and he wept. And they had a really meaningful conversation. Jeff now works with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and because he’s a former, he talks about recruitment methods, because he used to recruit. So he’s going to be interviewed also for our film.

Gidon, you have been going into schools to teach young people about the Holocaust. When you were school-age, you spent four years imprisoned at Theresienstadt. Was there any sort of education going on there at all?

Lev: There was none. Certainly not allowed. But of course, sometimes you can learn also when you’re not allowed. You hide in a room, or in an attic, or in a cellar. I must have learned how to read and write somewhere. And I think it was a cousin, one cousin that was in Theresienstadt for some period. And I remember vaguely that I used to go to her from time to time and I guess she taught me how to read and write. Because by the time the war ended in 1945 and we went back to Carlsbad, to Karlovy Vary, I registered for the school and they gave me a little test and they actually allowed me to enter grade three. Not grade one, not grade two, but grade three. I should have been in grade four, but I went to grade three, and that must have been because I knew how to read and write already. The barracks that we lived in at Theresienstadt were for mothers and children under the age of 10. And the mothers would be sent to work at 6:00 in the morning, they were gathered in the middle of the courtyard and marched out, and the children stayed. And you can ask, okay, so what did you do all day?

Actually, that was going to be my next question.

Lev: I didn’t just stand there, of course. Honestly, I don’t remember all of what we did, but we did many things – mostly connected to trying to find food because we were hungry. Hungry all the time, from morning to evening, from evening to morning. There was no fridge or icebox or cupboard that you could go to and take out a piece of bread or cookie or something. No such thing existed. You were fed a slice of bread and a bowl of soup, which was mostly just colored water. So the search of somehow finding some food somehow, somewhere, was a constant. And for us kids, that’s one of the things that we were doing. For example, when we saw that the truck was coming to unload loaves of bread, somebody had to unload it and put the bread into the storeroom. So we would run to the truck and help unload. They put four, five, six breads on your arms, and we walk from here to the thing and back and forth. Why do we do it? Because maybe we could pinch something, or we could break off a little piece.

And the fact is, I can even say, yes, we did play games. There were soccer games. “What, they gave you a ball?” No, they didn’t give us a ball. We made a ball out of rags. We took old clothing, cut it into strips, rolled it up into a ball, and as long as it held together, we could play. When it started falling apart and there was nothing left, the game finished.

Before we go, I just wanted to ask how you are taking to your new social media fame.

Lev: You know, sometimes I’m flabbergasted by the attention. This conference is an example of how things sometimes develop and you don’t know ahead of time. This morning when I came down from my hotel room, there were so many people who were friendly and wanted to speak to me and ask me questions. What the heck?

I’m not from a government, I’m not from an agency, I’m not from some organization. I’m just Gidon Lev, who moved to Israel 65 years ago, and here I am. I came to Israel not to become a dentist, a doctor, an engineer, a professional. I became a farmer. I plowed the field in the Jezreel Valley. I milked 200 cows a day, sometimes twice a day. I was simply a dairyman. That’s my profession.

The True Adventures of Gidon Lev: Rascal. Holocaust Survivor. Optimist. 320 pages; Julie Gray

This article contains affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something, The Times of Israel may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.