More than a dozen Jewish organizations on Long Island welcomed Rep. Ritchie Torres to West Hempstead for a Yom HaShoah talk hosted by the Conservative Congregation Shaaray Shalom. The Bronx lawmaker stands out as one of the most outspoken pro-Israel voices in the Democratic Party, offering honest commentary in a social mediascape dominated by opposition toward Israel, influenced by anti-Semitism. Security for this high-profile event was provided by the Nassau County Police Department and the volunteers of CSS, which is comprised of local Jewish community members.
“Remembrance is simply not enough; we need to be reminded that we live in challenging times,” event host Larry Rosenberg said. “The murder of six million people is too vast a scale for many of us to comprehend. We have children and grandchildren lighting a candle for the survivors in their family.”
He spoke of individual responsibility, exemplified by Hannah Senesh, a young woman living in British Palestine who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Hungary to save Jewish lives. Captured shortly after her landing, she wrote poems in prison before being executed at age 23. One of her works was sung by Chazan Benjamin Warschawski of the Merrick Jewish Center as descendants of Holocaust survivors lit candles in their memory.
Among them was Alan Skorski of West Hempstead, a longtime pro-Israel activist who interviews people in the news on his YouTube show, Alan Skorski Reports. After six candles were lit for the millions of Jewish victims, a seventh was added to represent the gentile victims of the Holocaust, lit by Father Mike Durso of St. Thomas, the Roman Catholic church in West Hempstead. The eighth candle was for Israelis killed by terrorism, lit by a group of young Jews serving in the IDF.
Rosenberg noted that with few survivors remaining to share their experiences, recorded testimonies preserve their stories. “Survivor Hannah Steiner passed away; her daughter and granddaughters are here. Her testimony was recorded by the Staten Island Advance,” he said.
Her daughter and granddaughter were present at the event. In 1944, Steiner’s boyfriend was taken to a Hungarian labor camp, and she was taken to Auschwitz with her mother. Toward the end of the war, forced marches and starvation reduced her weight to 28 kilograms [62 pounds]. “We were liberated on April 15. My mother died April 27. I ended up in Sweden. I was there for five years,” Steiner said.
She reunited with her boyfriend Abraham in 1950 as a result of a letter to a newspaper. They married in Israel and had three children. At the time of her interview by the Wagner College Holocaust Center, she was a widow living on Staten Island, who spoke of her victory as a grandmother of seven with four great-grandchildren.
Torres spoke with Rosenberg before the packed synagogue, with additional viewers on Zoom.
“I see the lack of Holocaust education as a real crisis in this country. If that is not evidence of a catastrophic failure, I don’t know what would be.” He noted that state law requires teaching the Holocaust in public schools, but its effectiveness depends on how it is being taught, if at all.
“Not every district has a mandate, and not every district is faithfully implementing it. For me, it raises two questions: Has Holocaust education become so generalized that we’ve lost the focus?”
Torres’ second question was whether the Holocaust is being downplayed as a result of a new racism against Jews. “The ideology of the far left is about oppressors and the oppressed. Jews cannot be the oppressed.” He heard from one Jewish professor that the American Psychological Association told him that he’s a member of a privileged class.
He said that teaching the Holocaust “reveals the worst of human nature and the best among the righteous.” Concerning his own education, Torres said that it was nonexistent, but since his first visit to Israel in 2015 as a City Councilman, he’s been to the Yad Vashem memorial complex six times. “Before entering the main museum, you walk through the Garden of the Righteous with about 20,000 names. Consider Danish society: 90 percent of Danish Jews were saved – a powerful example of a society. The culture of righteousness is something to which we should aspire.”
He contrasted the example of Denmark with the photo of a Nazi soldier aiming his rifle at a mother clutching a child. “It’s on our minds, as is the murder of the Bibas family, the culmination of a long process of dehumanization of the Jewish people.”
Torres then examined the lives of the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
“I saw biographies of the leaders of the Reich. They all had advanced degrees – the most educated society on earth. Education is no guarantee of morality. We’re seeing that in our own time. The most educated people in our society are the least morally educated.”
At the same time, the killing of millions was enabled by an indifferent populace. “I spoke about the elites, but also the masses. They were content to be cogs in the machine of mass murder.”
Concerning domestic anti-Semitism, Torres said that it has taken on a new intensity. “October 7 didn’t change the state of anti-Semitism in America; it revealed it. Anti-Zionism has become the latest mutation of anti-Semitism – the algorithmic amplification of anti-Semitism, pervasive silence, indifference, and cowardice.”
He concluded his remarks on a positive note. “Zionism will work because it must. One of the great traditions of American exceptionalism is support for Israel, and I’m proud to uphold that tradition as a Zionist and a Member of Congress.”
Offering encouragement to the audience, Torres urged everyone to be politically engaged. “The power of the Jewish community lies not in its numbers but in its impact. It’s a collective, closely knit family. There’s no limit to what this community can accomplish.”
By Sergey Kadinsky
