Synagogues Memorialize Holocaust Dead

Members of three Huntington temples came together Sunday night to remember their losses and affirm that the evil visited on the Jewish community will never happen again.

Temple Beth El served as host to the moving service, which included a talk by Mordechai Miller, a Polish Jew who survived the Nazi onslaught during World War II, and the lighting of candles for relatives lost to the Holocaust.

One after another, people intoned the names of those they were remembering, with one man citing his father’s parents and other relatives, “too many to name.”  A woman honored her lost great-aunt,  “Who I am named for.” When a man named two of his families and said, “more than 100 in all,” a quiet gasp could be heard in the audience. Another resident lit a candle and said, “For the sake of all for whom there are no survivors.”

Miller told the harrowing story of his childhood, surviving with his parents and brother, escaping a ghetto in a town near Warsaw, hiding in the woods and later working in German military kitchens by concealing their Jewish identities. Noting that his immediate family was among the few to survive the war intact, Miller said, “Miracles happened every day.”

He recounted a series of brushes with death, from the German army invasion in 1939 until their liberation by Russian troops in 1945.  “In the darkest times there were some righteous people,” he said, describing the good deeds of some contrasted with those of others who tried to betray them to the Germans.

“I lived 64 months on death row because my mother was Jewish,” he said. 

Temple Beth El Rabbi Jeffrey Clopper, with Cantors Deborah Zeitlen of Temple Beth El and Israel Gordan of the Huntington Jewish Center, led the annual Yom HaShoah service,  which was sponsored by the Temple Beth El, Huntington Jewish Center and Kehillath Shalom. 

The service included prayers, a choir and the recitation of powerful words about the  Holocaust and the determination not to let it happen again.

One passage read:

"Tonight, we remember the six million, and so many more, who died when madness ruled and evil darkened the earth. We remember those of whom we know, and those very names are lost.

"We cherish the memory of those who died as martyrs, those who died resisting, and those who died in terror."

After the service, Clopper was asked about how the Jewish community copes with the evil of the Holocaust. “There were points of light, good people who existed then and exist now, people who did what they could, they helped,” he said. “The second is that we try to take the essential lesson of NEVER again, so that others don’t have to face that atrocity. We will have made something good.”