Louisiana’s Jewish community protests nitrogen gas death row executions, seeing a link to ‘the decimation of our people’

(CNN) — Before the Nazis sent him to a forced labor camp, young Leo Lewis’ grandmother paid him one last visit.

“I will not be here when you come back,” she told the boy, who had voluntarily handed himself over in hopes the Nazis would spare his stepmother and sisters.

“But you will survive this.”

She was right: Both Leo and the woman he would marry, Zelda, were the only members of their families to survive the Holocaust, their granddaughter Sara Lewis recently told CNN.

Many of their loved ones, she said, were killed using gas.

Today, Lewis is a member of the Jews Against Gassing Coalition, a New Orleans-area group decrying the state’s efforts to use nitrogen gas to execute death row inmates because, members say, such a method echoes the Holocaust, when 6 million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany. Nearly half of them were slain using poison gas, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, at death camps like Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.

Members of the Jews Against Gassing Coalition, which does not broadly oppose the death penalty, emphasize there is no equivalence between the execution of a convicted murderer and the systemic massacre of millions of innocent people mainly using a compound called Zyklon-B.

“But to use a method that was a form of state-sanctioned murder and genocide of literally millions of people … to re-implement that as a form of justice in 21st-century Louisiana seems to us equally abhorrent,” said Naomi Yavneh Klos, a member of the group and a professor at Loyola University New Orleans, “because of the way that method of execution is so horribly and intrinsically linked to the decimation of our people.”

Louisiana officials had planned to use nitrogen hypoxia for the first time Tuesday to fulfill the death sentence of Jessie Hoffman, who was convicted for the 1996 murder of Mary “Molly” Elliott.

But a federal judge this week halted the execution, finding Hoffman had shown the method – which involves depriving an inmate of oxygen by forcing him to breathe pure nitrogen – would cause him “psychological pain, suffering, and terror” and possibly violate Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. Louisiana has appealed.

Indeed, critics have argued nitrogen hypoxia causes suffering, pointing in part to witness accounts that inmates shook on gurneys during recent gas executions in Alabama, the only US state that has used the method, which differs from some US states’ use of gas chambers to execute inmates starting a century ago.

However the case against Hoffman – a Buddhist – plays out, the Jews Against Gassing Coalition remains staunchly against the prospect of nitrogen gas executions overall.

“We feel that as Jewish people carrying the legacy and trauma of the Holocaust, the use of gas as a form of state-sponsored murder is anathema to what we believe in,” said Yavneh Klos. “It’s cruel and unusual punishment, and it also reflects the procedures of an authoritarian, genocidal state.”

Common but ‘horrifying’ knowledge

The Jews Against Gassing Coalition formed in response to the Louisiana legislature’s adoption of nitrogen hypoxia as a legal execution method during a special session on crime called by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry in early 2024. It became the fourth state to do so, behind Oklahoma, Mississippi and Alabama.

Proponents in Louisiana and elsewhere had cast the method as humane, painless and reliable – in contrast to lethal injection, for which states in recent years have struggled to secure drugs or faced criticism as executions went awry of official plans.

The bill, HB 6, authorized nitrogen gas executions and reauthorized electrocution as available execution methods in addition to lethal injection. Its Republican author believed the bill would provide a clear path for executions to resume for the first time since 2010, he told CNN at the time – though he also expected most executions to be carried out using lethal injection.

State officials have cast the return of executions – Hoffman’s would be Louisiana’s first in 15 years – as an effort to uphold state law and provide justice to the victims of the state’s death row inmates. Louisiana “has failed to uphold the promises made to victims of our State’s most violent crimes; but that failure of leadership by previous administrations is over,” Landry said in a statement February 10.

“These capital punishment cases have been reviewed at every judicial level, have had decades of unsuccessful appeals, and the death sentences affirmed by the courts,” the governor said. “I expect our DA’s to finalize these cases and the courts to move swiftly to bring justice to the crime victims who have waited for too long.”

But HB 6’s inclusion of nitrogen hypoxia horrified some members of the Jewish community, they told CNN, and by the time the 2024 regular legislative session began, the Jews Against Gassing Coalition – which Yavneh Klos estimated includes dozens of active members – had organized with the intent of pushing a new bill to undo the addition of nitrogen gas.

Its members worked to share their message, meeting with lawmakers and testifying before legislative committees. But after passing in the Louisiana Senate, the bill, SB 430, failed to pass a House committee vote.

Lewis had been shocked and sickened, she said, when she’d learned of the method’s adoption. For her, the link between nitrogen gas executions and the murder of millions of Jews was obvious; growing up in Buffalo, New York, and attending a Jewish day school, she knew many children whose grandparents, like hers, were Holocaust survivors, and what had unfolded in the gas chambers was “common but still horrifying knowledge.”

“I think some of the legislators just didn’t realize that this also impacted people that are technically their constituents that they may not have taken into account,” she said.

Rabbi Phil Kaplan of Congregation Beth Israel – a Modern Orthodox congregation in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, Louisiana – was not surprised lawmakers had not made the connection.

“I don’t necessarily expect them to be thinking about each minority community and thinking about their history in every legislation they propose,” he said (about 1% of Louisianans are part of the Jewish faith community, according to a 2020 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute).

“But I would hope that (with) a legitimate concern raised by one of the communities that are their constituents, that they would listen,” he added.

‘Particularly abhorrent form of execution’

Long before the emergence of nitrogen hypoxia, gas executions had been undertaken in the United States, beginning in 1924 when Nevada used the gas chamber to put to death Gee Jon, a Chinese man convicted of murder.

Newspaper reports from the time cite doctors who claimed Gee did not suffer; some then said lethal gas was the most humane execution method ever, according to a report by the Associated Press.

But the Holocaust “forever (shattered) the gas chamber’s image as a ‘humane’ method of execution,” the late journalist Scott Christianson wrote in his book, “The Last Gasp: The Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber.” While the method continued to be used sparingly until 1999, it was eclipsed by others – namely the electric chair and, eventually, lethal injection, which remains the dominant execution method in the United States.

Nitrogen hypoxia also differs from historical lethal gas executions in a couple key respects: First, the fatal gas is not administered in a chamber but – in Alabama and Louisiana – through a mask worn by the inmate, said Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School who for decades has studied the death penalty and execution methods.

And second, nitrogen is a non-toxic, inert gas, and almost 80% of the air we breathe is nitrogen. Historically, states used for their gas chambers the toxic hydrogen cyanide – similar to the Zyklon-B compound used by the Nazis – according to Christianson’s “The Last Gasp.”

But “the association of gas with the Nazi Holocaust is horrifying to people in general,” said Denno. “This is a cultural stigma that I think is really a challenge to overcome.”

Yavneh Klos wants to believe the United States has “evolved” away from “some of the more barbaric” execution methods, including the gas chamber.

“Our coalition now, looking back towards the Holocaust, really sees this as a particularly abhorrent form of execution because of that connection,” she said.

“The fact that it was previously used,” she added, “does not mean that it was acceptable then.”

‘Extreme caution and respect’

Jews Against Gassing’s mission is not to argue for the abolition of the death penalty, and its members hold differing views on capital punishment beyond nitrogen executions.

In Judaism, an oft-cited “core teaching … says that a court that executes a single person in seven years is considered particularly destructive, and some say once in 70 years,” said Hazzan Kevin Margolius, a member of the clergy at Touro Synagogue in New Orleans.

“When a life hangs in the balance, we need to do all of this with extreme caution and respect,” said Margolius, who added he personally views the death penalty with “extreme skepticism.”

Jewish law and theology unquestionably allow for capital punishment, said Kaplan, the Congregation Beth Israel rabbi, who is personally against the death penalty. But the sages of the Talmud signaled its use should be “exceedingly rare,” he said, with stringent requirements for evidence and witnesses.

With that guidance, members of his community today are left with “troubling and important questions,” he said at a news conference last month.

“The biggest question,” he asked, “(is) who gets to decide? What is the threshold of evidence that is sufficient for us as fallible human beings to make such a decision about the fate of our fellow men? And if we as a society decide the death penalty is appropriate to mete out, how should it be conducted?”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.