Beginning the night before, all over the world, in synagogues and centers, the world of most Jews and caring and civilized people stopped. In Israel it literally stopped on Monday morning, an entire country halting, cars on highways stopped in mid lane, people stopping in mid step and for two small, inadequate minutes, they remembered their brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, grandparents, friends and whole families wiped out with no one left to say, "Once there was such a family."
Today,all over Palm Beach County there are memorials, lectures, people with tear stained faces, remembering, mourning. This year is the awful anniversary, 70 years, of the fanatically quick destruction of close to 500,000 Hungarian Jews, the last surviving Jewish community in Europe aside from that of the British community. January to June 1944 and the ovens of Auschwitz roared as the evil gray smoke poured out of the stacks and the ash fell over the countryside.
Last night there was a powerful memorial program at the Morse Traditions building, a cooperative effort of the Jewish organizations of Palm Beach County and included a Deacon of the Catholic Church. Interfaith cooperation, yes, but where was the world all those years ago? Where? Why did they stand silent, or worse, acquiesce in this fiendish plan to destroy the entire Jewish people, the people who gave the world so much, the basis of our civilization and the mother faith of the other two major religions of the world. And what is worse - where is the world today when anti Semitism once again rears its ugly head, when anti Semitism is disguised, barely, as anti Israel and anti Zionism. Where is the world when Jews in France are beaten in the streets and buy homes in Israel - just in case! Why is anti Semitism and the spectre of registration for Jews raised once again in the Ukraine, a land historically rife with anti Semitism, a bloody one at that? And why is it possible that a man shoots up a Jewish Center in Kansas?
Remember, people, remember and do not think that you and yours are immune. When hate rears its ugly head, one never knows where its appetite stops. It is never satisfied. It is only when the voices of all are raised in unison against a vicious hatred, when we realize that we are all G-d's children, only then will we have a chance to fully understand and achieve - "Never again".
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