92-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Votes for First Time

A 92-year-old Holocaust survivor from the Bronx has cast her vote for the first time, opting for mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo to counter front-runner Zoran Mamdani.

“I’ve never participated in an election before. Now I’m voting because I see Mamdani as an anti-Semite with troubling fiscal ideas,” Galina Guterman shared through a Russian interpreter after voting at the Riverdale YMCA.

“We don’t trust him,” Guterman remarked about Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist. “His actions don’t show that he cares about everyone, or even about me.”

As a child, Guterman had to escape to Siberia when the Nazis invaded her home country, Russia.

After the war, she stayed in Russia and became a pathologist. However, in the early 1990s, she and her family left the former Soviet Union due to oppressive socialist policies.

A family representative noted that a villa she owned near Moscow was burned down by an arsonist who accused her of anti-Semitism.

“What should I ask? [Mamdani] said something like, ‘globalize the intifada,’ and that’s just not acceptable,” Guterman expressed.

Mamdani endorses the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and has suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested as a war criminal. He, however, denies being anti-Semitic, advocating for Palestinian rights and opposing the situation in Gaza.

The Democratic front-runner has also stated that he no longer supports the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which is often interpreted as a violent call against Jews.

Yet, Guterman remains concerned about Mamdani’s potential impact. “Mr. Cuomo is just what the city needs,” she stated. “Cuomo is trustworthy and honest. I feel I can rely on him—he’s a good person.”