The Holocaust hovers like a dark memory over the Jewish people -- out of its long and somber shadow comes the response "Never again."
The words were uttered yesterday by Jews across the globe as part of "Yom Hashoah," or Holocaust Remembrance Day, an annual rite that began in 1951.
For Staten Island survivors of the Nazi exterminations during World War II, rabbis, academics and concerned members of the community who gathered yesterday at Wagner College, the question "why?" took many forms.
For students at New Dorp High School -- who are generations and thousands of miles removed from the campaign to murder 6 million Jews and untold numbers of gypsies, gays, socialists and the disabled -- multi-media lessons gave them a sense of something they never experienced.
They saw the looted homes, the haunted eyes of Jews in cattle cars and human ovens of concentration camps, while contemplating the ongoing suffering across the globe.
"When we think of the Holocaust, we have to think of what is happening now," said Dr. Lori Weintrob, a professor of history and the Holocaust at Wagner College, who will lead a contingent of students Sunday to a Washington protest against the genocide in Dafur, Sudan. "What if instead of ignoring a Holocaust, we could prevent it? What will history say about us if we don't?"
Staten Island Advance Deputy Editorial Page Editor and senior columnist Stevie Lacy-Pendleton echoed Dr. Weintrob's sentiments.
"We have a moral obligation to protect those who are targeted by evil. If we don't, slaughters of innocents will happen over and over again."
Rabbi Judah Newberger of the Congregation B'nai Jeshrun, West Brighton, said news reports about what was happening to European Jews in the 1930s and early 1940s gnawed at his family, even as life went on as usual in the United States.
"As a child here in America, I was playing in the snows of West Virginia while my brothers and sisters were being slaughtered in the snows of Ukraine, Hungary and across the breadth of the continent," he told the audience of roughly 30 at Wagner College. "If you are a Jew and you are conscious, you have to grow up with it."
Before escaping to Spain and then the United States, Rosebank resident Ernest Buehler was one of those children.
He recalled the infamous November 1938 Kristallnacht in Nuremberg, Germany -- the sounds of the rifle butts knocking down doors of Jewish households at 1 a.m., the shattering of glass, the feathers from mattresses and pillows floating in the air like snow and the screams from people being herded into the streets.
"There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about why I am so lucky to be living in this country, why I am still alive, why I got a passport," he said.
He walked the audience through a display he had brought to the college: The family's canvas oil painting of flowers that Nazis had slashed during the raid and his mother smuggled with them on their journey out of the country; the pictures of his great-grandparents that his grandmother cut to fit into the soles of her shoes she wore on her journey to the Terezin work camp and the silver crowns for Torahs rescued years after the Holocaust by a good Samaritan and returned to Buehler's family.
Stories similar to Buehler's filled Christine Varacalli's Global Studies class at New Dorp High School yesterday as part of "Echoes and Reflections," a curriculum created by the Anti-Defamation League, the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education and Yad Vashem.
The program includes 10 lessons that address issues of diversity, prejudice and modern-day genocide. They are illustrated with time lines, glossaries, maps, photographs, original documents, testimonies from survivors and eyewitnesses and much more.
The high school is one of many across the country that has implemented the Holocaust curriculum.
"It's one thing to hear what survivors have experienced, but it's another thing to watch and hear survivors talking about what they actually went through," said Ms. Varacalli. "I think that many students prefer visual firsthand accounts of history rather than reading about it on a worksheet or in a textbook. "
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