Shoah survivor’s grandson fights IS, daubs Hebrew

A British man whose grandfather survived the Holocaust said he would move to Israel when he is done fighting Islamists in Syria.

Timothy Paul Jacobs-Woodworth, 37, revealed his plan to immigrate in an interview published Sunday by the news site Ynet. Photos posted on Facebook, under the name Batn El Ghoul, showed the anti-IS fighter had daubed graffiti with slogans of the Breslov Hasidic sect on a building.

“ISIS turned this school, 50 km from their capital in Al-Raqah in to a prison,” he wrote. “I was part of horrible fighting in the area, my friends and I fended ISIS off when they tried to recapture the prison from the next village. ISIS left women’s clothes and underwear on the floors of the cells, a lot of it, evidenice [sic] of un-holy crimes. I wrote Rabbi Nachman’s name here to bring some light in to this black sink hole of torture, rape, murder and savage war. Amen.”

One of Jacobs-Woodworth’s grandfathers survived the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau, after losing his mother at Auschwitz-Birkenau and his father in Theresienstadt.

But Jacobs-Woodworth’s Jewish grandfather converted to Christianity after the Holocaust, and he was brought up as a Christian.

Still, Jacobs-Woodworth, who used to be a soldier in the British army, considers himself to be of Jewish origin and has drawn Hebrew-language graffiti reading “Nachman me’Uman” — a slogan of the Breslov Hassidic sect – on buildings which he took over while fighting as a volunteer in Syria with Kurdish soldiers against Islamic State, or ISIS, fighters.

Jacobs-Woodworth tried to immigrate to Israel in 2005 under its law of return for Jews and their descendants but his application for immigration, or aliyah, was declined because his grandfather is not considered a Jew following his conversion to Christianity. Jacobs-Woodworth was eventually deported for overstaying his visa and banned from re-applying for 10 years, Ynet reported. But he told the website he would re-apply this year.

His connection with the Breslov sect began three years ago in London. “A Jewish Orthodox friend got me to join him on a trip to Uman,” Jacobs-Woodworth told Ynet in reference to the Ukrainian city where the sect’s founder, Rabbi Nachman, is buried. “That was in 2012, and I have visited Uman three times since.”

Jacobs-Woodworth said that before he joined the Kurdish fighters, he used to visit London’s North Western Reform Synagogue.