The more than 3500 persons that today attended the 33rd annual commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the memorial service for the victims of the Holocaust at Temple Emanu-El were urged by speaker after speaker not to forget the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis lest it happens again.
“We are the spokesmen of the dead,” Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, declared. “It is our solemn duty to be their witnesses.”
The theme of remembering was carried out in the emblem of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization (WAGRO) which sponsors the annual memorial in conjunction with major Jewish organizations. It said “remember” in Hebrew, Yiddish and English.
This theme was also echoed in one of the most poignant moments in the ceremony when, after children from New York City Jewish schools walked in carrying candles, the choir of the Ramaz School, a Manhattan Jewish day school, sang in Yiddish “We Cannot Forget,” a song of the Warsaw ghetto. Many men and women could be seen weeping and also when Cantor David Kusevitsky sang the traditional El Mole Rachamim.
Other solemn moments came when 30 women survivors of the holocaust, dressed in black, lit memorial candles for the six million dead as the Temple Emanu-El choir sang “Ani Maamin” and later when six persons representing the death camps and the Jewish partisans lit six other memorial candles beneath which were the words “zechar” (remember).
UN TODAY RECALLS START OF NAZISM
Chaim Herzog, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, told the gathering that the situation in the UN today is “reminiscent” of “what occurred forty years ago when Nazism was on the rise and the anti-Semitic rantings of Hitler reechoed across Europe sounding the warning note to humanity, a warning which went unheeded until the world was plunged into a bloodbath which was to lead to a holocaust such as humanity had not yet witnessed.”
He said it was fitting to meet in the shadows of the UN “and recall the selfless courage if those who rose in the Warsaw Ghetto 33 years ago and proclaimed that man’s spirit is stronger than the arms of oppressors who announce to the world that never again will we, the Jewish people, fail in our duty to our tradition and values in our history, and that we will always rise to fight against the forces of evil which threaten us and which threaten the free world.”
Schindler, who is also president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, said that Jews must learn from the Holocaust that they are a united people and also that they are linked to all humanity. He said Jews must help any other Jew or Jewish community that is in trouble. “As we were brothers in death, we are brothers in life,” he declared. But he stressed that Jews must also not stand idly by when others are in trouble.
IT COULD HAPPEN HERE
Mayor Abraham Beame, reminding the audience that his parents came from Warsaw, said the Holocaust must be remembered as “a reminder that it doesn’t take much for civilized people to degenerate into murdering savages.” He said that while many say it could not happen in the United States, “we would be foolish to go to sleep….We may be free today, but only because we have continued to remembers what happened four decades ago which made a mockery of all social progress up to that point.”
WAGRO President Benjamin need, also stressed that “Never again can we let the world sit idly by, while the Jews of a nation face the threat of extinction, whether it be cultural or physical.”
He said each passing year makes clearer the “enormity” of the loss the Jewish people suffered as a result of the Holocaust. But he also noted that the “heroism and martyrdom” of the Holocaust is part of the foundation of the State of Israel where “the children of the survivors of the Holocaust stand side-by-side with other children of Israel guarding the land from the hills of Golan to the desert of Sinai.” Other cities across the country held similar ceremonies today or are planning to hold them tomorrow.
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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.
