Remembering to tell the Holocaust Story

More than 1,000 people representing the Five Towns and surrounding communities and 24 area synagogues gathered in Congregation Beth Sholom in Lawrence on May 4, Holocaust Remembrance Day, to honor both the victims and survivors of Nazi Germany’s cultural genocide.

Survivor Rachel “Chelly” Slagter, the mother of longtime Woodmere resident Reuben Levine, was the keynote speaker. Slagter is a lecturer and docent at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angles, a Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum.

The Hebrew Academy of Long Beach’s fifth-grade choir, under the direction of Sandy Shmuley, performed. Jordana Mastour, a seventh-grader at the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway, spoke. This is an excerpt of her remarks.

“My parents and grandparents have told me about my great-grandparents and what they and their families endured at the hands of the Nazis since I was practically a toddler. I felt their deep love for my great-grandparents but I also felt my family’s pain. I know my family is troubled, like many of you, by the fact that our generation will be the last to hear personal testimony from Holocaust survivors. What will happen in the future? What will happen when the last survivor passes away?

"I am here before you today telling you about my great-grandparents so that my family can take some comfort in knowing that I will do my part to make sure their beloved parents and grandparents will not be forgotten and that the world won’t forget the Holocaust even when we no longer have survivors among us. I will do my part to tell my children the stories the way that my mother told me, so that when I am not here, my children and grandchildren will be here to tell the story of a little girl named Regina and by doing so, telling the world, in kind, the truth about the Holocaust.

"I will also honor my great-grandparents by being a good Jew and following the laws of the Torah and teaching my children to do the same. My mother told me that my great-grandpa Joe always told his children and grandchildren: “Remember that you are Jewish.” I realize that loving Judaism defeats Nazism. I am sure my great grandparents realized this too.”