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By JNS Staff
(Jan. 27, 2026 / JNS) Hours after the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington said, without mentioning Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz by name, that it was inappropriate to compare people in the state to Anne Frank, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) referred to two civilians killed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “righteous among the nations” on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The term “righteous among the nations” is one that Yad Vashem-The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem and others use to refer to those who “mustered extraordinary courage to uphold human values, risking their lives to save Jews by hiding them in their homes, providing false papers and assisting their escape” during the Holocaust.
The congressman, who is Jewish, stated that he “today recognized Tuesday’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day by calling Renee Good and Alex Pretti, killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis for standing up for a just cause, just like the ‘righteousness among the nations’ who saved Jews from the Holocaust.” (The congressman used the word “righteousness” rather than “righteous.”)
“He noted that the painter Marc Chagall credited the ‘righteous’ non-Jews for saving his life after he fled to Marseille during the Second World War,” Cohen’s office stated. “The Nazi assaults, like current ICE outrages, are being conducted by agents of government.”
“Every year, we recall the loss of the millions killed by Nazis during the Second World War, a holocaust of innocent humanity unlike anything in history,” Cohen stated. “We may not always remember the heroes of that period, those who stood up despite immense personal danger and in defiance of real evil, to protect innocent people they barely knew.”
“In recent days, we have seen what Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, calls ‘the righteousness of the nations’ stand up to the inhumane, uncivilized and brutish attacks on peaceful protestors by the immoral ICE raids in Minneapolis,” the Jewish Democrat added. “Renee Good and Alex Pretti were exercising their right to object to the lawlessness and are now dead. They are, on this Day of Remembrance, among ‘the righteousness of the nations’ and will be forever remembered for their exemplary sacrifice.”
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Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America and the child of Holocaust survivors, told JNS that “it’s a painful disgrace for Cohen to compare the monstrous, earth-shattering massacre of six million innocent Jews to the tragic deaths of two individuals, who were illegally obstructing the legal work of law enforcement officers trying to protect legal American citizens by their removing dangerous, illegal alien criminals, rapists and murderers from America.”
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