Bergen County Commemorates the Holocaust

As attendees sat under a tent outside the Bergen County Courthouse amid Wednesday's rainy conditions, Rabbi Dr. Wallace Greene of Fair Lawn said that if they imagine the same weather—but 40 degrees colder, working sunrise until sunset with little to eat, until falling or being sent to a gas chamber—they might "begin to understand the magnitude of the Holocaust."

Greene—a consultant for March of the Living, an international education program that brings Jewish teens to Poland—was the keynote speaker for the county's Holocaust Remembrance Week (May 1-8) ceremony in Hackensack. Rabbis Berel and Mendel Zaltzman, both of , led the memorial service and candle lighting portion of the program.

"The facts were know in the capitols of the world and in the Vatican," Greene said of the plans to exterminate European Jewry. "Governments knew, only the victims didn't know."

As the generation of Holocaust survivors grows smaller and older, the public at large is "responsible for memories," Greene said.

"For the dead, and for the living, we too must be witnesses," Greene said.

"We must bear witness to their memories, and their nightmares," he said.

Greene said the Holocaust should serve as a motivation to participate in social justice, take action against both local and global discrimination, proactively learn about different ethnicities and beliefs.

"The tale [of the Holocaust] must be told," he said. "There are no simple answers. But indifference is a sin."

County Executive Kathleen Donovan said that "it is our responsibility as elected officials to make sure people know that Bergen County honors the people who were killed" in the Holocaust.

"Let us respect the past and go forward together in the future," Donovan said.