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Just one candle Students fill the gap as survivors dwindle May 2-8, 2025 • Tazria-Metzora • 4 Iyar 5785 • Vol. 24, No. 15
By Ed Weintrob The Yom Hashoah commemoration in the Five Towns was different this year. And it was a preview of what’s to come. In prior years, six Holocaust survivors would each light one candle in memory of one million of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. This year, as the community assembled in Beth Sholom in Lawrence last Wednesday night, only one survivor was in the room. He lit one candle. Additional candles were lit by five high school students in memory of relatives who survived but are no longer with us to retell their stories themselves. “Sadly, as we reach the 80th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, we are approaching the loss of the generation of witnesses,” Sharon Fogel, who co-chaired the event with Nathaniel Rogoff, told The Jewish Star. “This means we have a responsibility to instill in the next generation the importance of keeping alive the experiences of those who are no longer with us here to tell their stories.” The survivor who delivered the evening’s Fanya Gottesfeld Heller keynote address was Paul Gross, a member of the Young Israel of Lawrence Cedarhurst and earlier of the White Shul in Far Rockaway. He lit a memorial candle accompanied by his wife and family.
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Paul Gross, a child survivor from Hungary, accompanied by his wife and family members, lit a candle at the Greater Five Towns Community Yom Hashoah Commemoration last Wednesday. Ed Weintrob, The Jewish Star
Gross was born in 1937 in a small town in Hungary where the Holocaust came in 1944. In introducing him, Rabbi Yaakov Trump of the Young Israel of Lawrence Cedarhurst, said Gross had told him that it took 75 years for his family to rebuild the numbers of those who were lost in the Holocaust. “We celebrae every one of their lives,” Rabbi Trump said. “Unfortunately, not many Holocaust survivors are alive anymore, therefore I feel more obligated to tell my story,” Gross said. He described how he first encountered antisemitism, how the relative safety of living in Hungary disappeared when the Germans entered the country in 1944 and forced Jews inside a walled ghetto, and how he was stunned when neighbors turned on their Jewish friends. “On the last Shabbos in the ghetto, we got word that we would be going to labor camps,” Gross recounted. “The rabbi of our town, with a long white bear, showed up in the shul clean shaven. I was a young boy but it shook me up. It made me realize that nothing would be normal from that point on.” The rabbi had heard that the Nazis were ripping out the beards of Jews. “Many of us in this room grew up hearing Holocaust stories that most people in the world can’t even imagine,” Fogel told the gathering, composed of members of several Five See Just one candle on page 2
Torres issues call to action to stop Jew-hate By Ed Weintrob Rep. Ritchie Torres told a Yom Hashoah commemoration in west Hempstead on Sunday night that to be successful in the fight for Israel and against antisemitism, Jews must be “politically engaged, civically engaged.” Torres, a gay Latino Democrat whose district includes both the South Bronx and Riverdale, is one of the staunchest supporters in Congress of the Jewish state and American Jews. “We need every member of the Jewish community who cares about fighting antisemitism, who cares about Israel, to be politically engaged, because the soul of America is at stake,” he told the more than 300 people assembled at Congregation Shaaray Shalom for the event hosted by the Jewish Community Council of Long Island and sponsored by 20 organizations from different parts of Long Island. Eying local developments, he cautioned that “what’s unfolding in New York is terrifying.” In a reference to Zohran Mamdani, one of the leading candidates in June’s Democratic primary, Torres said, “We have a mayoral candidate who said that if he were elected mayor, he would direct the NYPD to arrest members of
Rep. Ritchie Torres is interviewed by Larry Rosenberg, Holocaust Remembrance chair, at a Holocaust Remembrance Day event in West Hempstead on Sunday night. Madison Gusier, LI Herald
the Israeli government.” Torres recalled that in 2020, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, which has endorsed Mamdani, sent a questionnaire to City Council candidates with two questions: “Do you pledge never to travel to Israel if elected to the City Council [and] do you pledge to
support the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement against Israel.” “So in the Democratic Socialist worldview, it’s morally permissible to go travel to China, which has committed genocide against Uyghur Muslims; to travel to Russia, which has invaded a sovereign nation state Ukraine; to travel to Iran,
which is the leading sponsor of terrorism in the world,” Torres said. “But travel to the world’s only Jewish state, that is strictly forbidden.” Linking Jew-hatred in Nazi Germany to antisemitism today, Torres pointed out that “Germany at the time was the most educated society on Earth. How could the most educated society on Earth be so barbaric to commit the greatest crime against humanity?” “The lesson,” he said, “is that education is no guarantee of morality. Education without ethics will not bring civilization, it will bring barbarism. One of the cruel ironies is that some of the most academically educated people in our society often are the least morally educated.” Shifting his focus from a society’s educated elite to its mass of ordinary people, he referenced a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt in her coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial: Banality of evil. “One need not be like Hitler to be monstrous,” Torres said. “There were masses of everyday Germans who were complicit in the Holocaust, who were content to be cogs in a machine of industrial mass murder against See Torres issues a call on page 2