The grandson of Holocaust survivors was blocked from attending the United Nations Holocaust Remembrance Day event in New York City after taking a photograph of influencer Lizzy Savetsky’s confrontation with security over an Israeli flag.
Julian Voloj was going through the security line at the UN General Assembly Hall when he saw security guards “harassing” Savetsky, a prominent pro-Israel social media influencer.
The security guards told Savetsky that she could not enter the event wearing her blazer, which had a bedazzled Israeli flag displayed prominently on its back. She was eventually allowed into the General Assembly Hall after checking her jacket.
“I do find it interesting that I was asked to check my Judaism at the door of an International Holocaust Remembrance Day event. Kind of ironic, no?” said Savetsky in an Instagram post about the incident.
After instinctively using his phone to take photos of the confrontation between Savetsky and security, Voloj said a security guard “stormed right to me, moved me aside, took my phone, used my face ID to access my photos and made me delete the pictures.”
From there, Voloj, who serves as the executive director of Be’chol Lashon, a nonprofit promoting Jewish diversity, said the security guard took his pass for the event and escorted him off the premises.
Voloj said he was not at the event in a professional capacity, only as the “grandchild of Holocaust survivors.” He said the experience left him “furious.”
International Holocaust Remembrance Day was created by the United Nations in 2005. Voloj said attending the annual event had become a “meaningful” tradition to honor the legacy of his grandmother, who survived a Nazi concentration camp in Transnistria as a teenager.
“Being a grandson of Holocaust survivors and then being so badly treated at the UN and kicked out for standing up for someone who, politically, I might not even agree with, I mean, I’m just beyond words,” said Voloj.
Savetsky, a pro-Israel influencer who left the cast of “Real Housewives of New York” in 2022 over antisemitism claims, has long posted provocative pro-Israel and politically conservative content on her Instagram page, which has 480,000 followers. She has shared her support for President Donald Trump and drew criticism last year after she posted a video saying that the late far-right rabbi Meir Kahane “was right” about how Israel should respond to terrorism.
In two separate posts about the jacket incident, Savetsky took aim at the United Nations, saying, “You know, the United Nations knows no bounds when it comes to antisemitism.”
Israel and its allies and supporters, including many Jewish groups, have long accused the United Nations of having a bias against Israel, citing the disproportionate number of resolutions condemning Israel. Most recently, those tensions intensified in September after a UN commission concluded that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza and a wave of countries formally recognized Palestinian statehood at the UN General Assembly.
“In recent years, we have heard many warnings from this podium about the rise in antisemitism, about dangerous lies, about how hatred begins with language,” Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, said at the event on Tuesday. “Those warnings are right, but they ring hollow when the lies that fuel antisemitism are allowed to spread, including here in this building, in the UN.”
According to the UN’s New York visitors' services website, guests are prohibited from public displays, including “clothing, banners, placards or other written or visual means” that disrupt the “normal functioning of the organization’s programmatic activities.”
Voloj had never seen someone targeted for wearing clothing with flags
After attending the ceremony nearly every year since 2007, Voloj said he had never seen someone targeted for wearing clothing that featured a national flag.
“The UN obviously always had an anti-Israel bias,” said Voloj. “I feel like, probably, given the whole world climate, he felt empowered to do this because it was an Israeli flag on a jacket.”
Savetsky claimed in an Instagram post that a UN staffer had told her a Palestinian flag would not get the same treatment.
Savetsky did not respond to a request for further comment on Tuesday. Calls and emails to the UN Headquarters’ visitor services department and the office of the spokesperson for the UN secretary-general were not immediately returned on Tuesday.
Savetsky also posed with an Israeli flag in the UN General Assembly hall that she said had been “smuggled in” by another attendee. Stephanie Benshimol, another pro-Israel influencer, later took credit for bringing the flag into the comments on Savetsky’s post and in an Instagram post of her own.
“Hi, I'm the someone who let you take a photo with our flag, and then a few minutes later I was given a choice by security: either go to the security office with my flag or be escorted out of the building,” wrote Benshimol. “I chose with proud dignity to leave with my flag out of the building.”
Savetsky reported that the actual International Holocaust Remembrance Day event was a “beautiful event.”
Having missed the event, Voloj described an “underlying PTSD inherited from my grandparents that definitely came out and made me feel so shaken up after this,” though he emphasized that he couldn’t compare his experience to what his grandparents had endured under the Nazis.
“I felt like, really, the Gestapo was just kicking me out,” he said. “Standing up for something that is wrong and being then punished for this, I’m just very shaken.”
Looking ahead, Voloj said he was unsure if he would make his annual pilgrimage again to the UN’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day event.
“I’m not sure if I’m coming back next year,” he said. “This left such a bitter taste for me.”