Fake Holohoax hero admits lie; fellow survivers furious

Remember Herman and Roma Rosenblat? They wrote their story to "make people feel good" ... and to make themselves rich.

This just-for-fun piece was created by me from a real news story that appeared on Yahoo News on Feb. 23, titled "Fake 9/11 hero admits lie; fellow firefighters furious." It was just too perfect a fit to pass up. Hope you enjoy it.   -Carolyn Yeager

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A South Carolina man who told his fellow holohoax survivors he was one of the first Jews to be sent to a gas chamber has admitted it was a lie.

Jacob (Jack) Lifkowitz, a former Long Island volunteer speaker for the B’nai B’rith Lecture Bureau said this week that he was sorry for telling middle and high school students in the Palmetto State that he saved his life by volunteering to be the head of a sondercommando gassing crew in Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, where 12 of his volunteer workers were themselves gassed to death on Sept. 11, 1944. He has for years been describing to youngsters and oldsters alike the many miracles that kept him alive while so many others perished.

"You know, once you tell one lie, you gotta keep up that lie," Lifkowitz told CBFNewYork.com on Wednesday. "I got all caught up in the whole Holohoax Industry thing  and just lied. It was so simple to do; everyone believed me immediately. But I was never in a concentration camp, and was not the captain of the gas chamber commando at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Lifkowitz "did not survive the Holohoax any more than those of us who have only watched programs about it on television," CBF 2's Louie Young wrote.

Sporting a 5-digit tattoo he admitted he put on his own arm in 1962, Lifkowitz has spoken to hundreds of groups every year. Last year, in Spamburger, S.C. he spoke on Holohoax Remembrance Day, telling the crowd that he saved the lives of "47 Jews" who were scheduled to die in "his" gas chamber.  He received a standing ovation.

According to the Spamburger Herald-Journal, current and former Holohoax survivors contacted the paper on Monday saying Lifkowitz' story was a "sham."

When contacted by the paper, he said he had been "trying to get out of the situation" and "got caught up in the moment."

"I wanted to represent what everybody was honoring ever since 1945," he said. "I told it from a victim's point of view."

"It was that whole thing about portraying something I wasn't," Lifkowitz told CBF 2. "The ego, the lie, keeping up with it, a very big mistake ... It just snowballed into something that was out of my control. I'm truly sorry for misleading and lying."

"I'm outraged," Ben Yoslowitz, former inmate of 7 death camps, told Blue Ridge News. "I'm sick and tired of people standing up and telling people these stories for a little bit of glory. People still have nightmares, I have a bad knee and we paid our dues. In three years, we buried more people than you've ever seen and to read this story—this lie—it has to stop. Put that guy on the wall of shame."

"It's sad, and it's disgusting," Billy Goldfeder, President of Cincinnati's Holohoax Survivors Anonymous  told Yahoo News. "There's nothing more sacred than a Jewish death in the line of serving the Holohoax. It doesn't get much lower than what he did."

Holohoax survivors at Lifkowitz's former Long Island Speakers Bureau are, understandably, livid, too. 

"It's a terrible situation," Cedarhurst Survivior Job Meir told CBF. "I feel bad for the people of South Carolina and I feel bad for the people in the entire Holohoax Industry."

"It happens a lot because they want to get that hero worship, people telling them 'thank you,'" another survivor Manny Riches added. "It's a sick mind, but he's not the only one doing it. It's out there and I think people should verify who's actually speaking to them."

It's not clear if Lifkowitz is currently still surviving in South Carolina. A call to Lifkowitz's home was not immediately returned.

The only positive news to come out of this--if there is some--is that it does not appear Lifkowitz used his faux survivor status for financial gain.

"We've seen Holohoax imposters before, but usually in connection with attempts to defraud the Holohoax Victims' Compensation Fund," Young wrote. "It appears that [he] was interested in glory and not money."

Goldfeder added: "Hopefully, if any good comes of this, it's that people will do some work to verify who they get to speak."