Asbury Park Press, NJ
April 23 2006
This week marks the Holocaust
Events to target hatred, strife
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 04/23/06
BY RICHARD QUINN
STAFF WRITER
The emptiness where the Twin Towers once stood is more than an
unnerving scar from Sept. 11, 2001.
It’s a reminder of what killed more than 1 million Armenians in the
first quarter of the 20th century. Of how 6 million Jews died in the
Holocaust of World War II. Of why Rwanda, Somalia and Darfur are more
than answers to a geography quiz.
“This is deep-seated hatred,” said Susan Rosenblum, a Lakewood High
School teacher whose self-created class is titled “Holocaust and
Man’s Inhumanity to Man.”
Rosenblum is the keynote speaker at today’s New Jersey Jewish War
Veterans ceremony at Liberty State Park, in the shadow of the New
York skyline torn apart when the Twin Towers collapsed Sept. 11,
2001. The event will be held to remember the Holocaust.
Sadly, there is a lot of hatred in history to remember this week.
Monday is the day Armenians across the globe remember the April 24,
1915, arrests of more than 200 Armenian community leaders in
Constantinople. Hundreds more arrests followed and, eight years
later, the estimated death toll was 1.5 million people.
Tuesday is Yom HaShoah Ve-Hagevurah – a Hebrew phrase that roughly
translates to Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, although most
people refer to it simply as Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
And a week from today is a national march in Washington to protest
the atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan, where an estimated
200,000 to 400,000 people have died and 2.5 million people displaced
in a feud between ethnic Africans and Arabs.
The thread woven between these and future genocides is hate, said
Paul Winkler, executive director of New Jersey’s Commission on
Holocaust Education.
In fact, this year’s state-sponsored Holocaust commemorations will be
linked to the strife in Darfur to show that the sins of the Holocaust
are just as real today as they were in the 1930s and 1940s, Winkler
said.
“The importance is that the same systematic approaches have been used
in every genocide that has occurred,” he added. “It’s the same
ingredients of find someone to blame, make those people seem as
though they are lower than human, use the bias and prejudice and
bigotry to carry out the genocide.”
Holocaust recalled
At the Shore region, the Holocaust is remembered most publicly.
Across Monmouth and Ocean counties this week, schools and community
centers will host survivors and rescuers who tell firsthand accounts
of the world’s most-talked-about genocide.
Manfred Lindenbaum, 73, of Jackson is one of those survivors. He
still has trouble comprehending how such crimes against humanity
could be committed, but he speaks to schoolchildren to fuel
understanding in today’s generation.
“When a survivor speaks, the kids listen in a different way,” he
said. “We can really testify how rapidly the deterioration of
humanity came about.”
Fellow survivor Abe Chapnick also speaks.
Now 75 and living Howell, he spent more than three years as a young
man in three concentration camps in Poland and one in Germany.
“I speak because I feel that somehow I can relieve the suffering,” he
said. “I speak because I have an obligation to all the people who
didn’t make it.”
Connecting with history
Stories like those told by Lindenbaum and Chapnick only matter if
someone’s listening.
Dale Daniels, executive director of the Center for Holocaust Studies
at Brookdale Community College, said her center is working to create
more programs to connect history to today. The center now has a
traveling exhibit – featuring haunting black-and-white stills of
survivors – that will be in Monmouth and Ocean counties later this
year.
“Unfortunately, we know they won’t always be with us,” Daniels said.
“This is a way of permanently making them a part of the center.”
In her keynote address at Liberty State Park, Rosenblum will
emphasize that education can prevent genocide.
“Because they have become so sensitized to hatred and bigotry, they
look at things with much different glasses,” Rosenblum said. “That’s
the whole point.”
ON THE WEB: Visit our Web site, , and click on this story
for more information on Holocaust education in New Jersey.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
