Pomp and pageantry attended the commemoration here Sunday of the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The presence of Vice President Al Gore, the accompaniment of an army band playing Jewish prayers and Holocaust lullabies and a full military presentation of regimental color guard lent no small measure of respect to the proceedings, which were held at the refurbished Paramount theater at Madison Square Garden.
Standards of the various regiments whose men had liberated the concentration camps were paraded into the theater with full honors, and the Stars and Stripes was brought to stand beside an Israeli flag, both of them borne by American servicemen.
An army soloist, Staff Sgt. Robert Petillo, gave an emotional, faultless presentation of Yiddish songs of the ghetto. Jewish folk singer and actor Theodore Bikel chaired the proceedings in Yiddish and English, which were held on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
For the event, some 6,000 survivors of Nazi concentration camps, members of resistance groups and those who came out of respect lined up more than two hours early to get into the Garden. They completely filled the cavernous indoor arena, where tens of others who had no tickets found space, even just to stand.
And the vice president was there, from beginning to end, as he had promised.
Gore, wearing a small black yarmulka, sat attentive to the children’s songs, the lighting of memorial candles and every person’s speech, speaking only at the end of the proceedings.
‘MUST SUCH HORRORS GO ON AND ON?’
The vice president’s lengthy speech illustrated his grasp of Holocaust history and its meaning for Jews and the world. He began with a detailed accounting of “the unspeakable.”
“How could the human race have allowed such a calamity as the Holocaust to fall upon us?” he asked.
“Numbers, of course, seem so pitifully incapable of conveying the meaning of an episode that stands outside the borders of all customary moral judgment.”
“The story of the Warsaw Ghetto is sacred text for our time,” the vice president said.
He drew parallels with the Serbian “ethnic cleansing” campaign against Moslems in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
First calling up the image of the little Jewish boy with his hands in the air surrendering, Gore said, “I recently saw the photograph of another child of Europe. He was 10 years old. He lived in Sarajevo. He was killed by shellfire in the Serbian siege of the city.”
“Must such horrors go on and on? They must not,” he said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
