On Monday night, the Kean University Wilkins Theater for the Performing Arts hosted the community’s annual Yom HaShoah commemoration. The theater was filled with survivors and family members, WWII war veterans, dignitaries and administrators, and Jewish and non-Jewish community members of all ages.
Barbara Wind, director of the Holocaust Council of Greater MetroWest, introduced Professor Keith Nunes, who served as master of ceremonies. Nunes has taught Holocaust studies at Kean for many years and is one of the engines behind the Kean Holocaust Resource Center online and on campus. Kean University President Dawood Farahi also spoke, and identified three central issues that make genocide possible: denial, ignorance and insensitivity. He implored all people to wage battle with those issues and to take action against these seeds of hatred and genocide.
The traditional candle-lighting ceremony honoring the six million created a moving testimony and message, as candles were lit by Holocaust survivors, second-, third- and fourth-generation survivors, righteous rescuers, veterans and liberators, and Holocaust educators, as well as those moved to generate light against the darkness of ignorance and evil.
Twin brothers Bernard Schanzer, MD, and Henry Schanzer, Esq, spoke of their experience as hidden children. Their “tag-team” narrative related the terrors of their childhood, from escaping from Belgium to being rescued by the Jewish children’s agency in France. They also recounted how they connected with a single surviving relative in Israel almost 40 years later, who also thought no one else from the family had survived.
The keynote speaker was the Honorable Irwin Cotler, PC, OC., a former member of the Canadian Parliament, former minister of justice and attorney general in Canada. He is the founder and chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and founder and past chair of the Interparliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism. In his address, he outlined several lessons that civilized societies must learn from the Holocaust and the history of all genocidal actions.
“The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews,” he said, continuing,“No great society was ever built on hate.”
By Ellie Wolf
