Holocaust Remembrance Day to be marked on Long Island

Holocaust Remembrance Day takes place Thursday, as groups across Long Island recall the 6 million Jews and other people killed by the Nazis.

The day also will remember the 75th anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, when Jews in the Polish quarter fought back against the Nazis.

The Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County and other organizations are holding events throughout the week to honor the victims, recall the horror and issue a call to end genocides that continue today.

“We not only pay tribute to all the Jews and non-Jews who perished and those who miraculously survived, but we also celebrate the legacy of Holocaust descendants because they symbolize that hate-filled regimes are not the ultimate victors,” said Beth Lilach, senior director of education and community affairs at the center in Glen Cove.

Although Jews were the main victims of the Holocaust, others targeted included Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, people with mental and physical disabilities, Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents.

Ronnit Kessler, 53, of Dix Hills, said Remembrance Day was a time for her to recall relatives killed in the Holocaust and to give thanks her parents survived.

Her father, Meir Usherovitz, 91, of St. James, survived three Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, before a Jewish brigade rescued him, Kessler said. Her mother, Doris Usherovitz, 89, escaped from the former Czechoslovakia.

Holocaust Remembrance Day exists so that people “never forget and to remind us that we need to keep future generations aware so that it should never happen again,” said Kessler, who spoke at a Wednesday night event at Dix Hills Jewish Center.

Earlier Wednesday, Lilach presented a program on the Warsaw uprising at the Nassau center. Another program, on the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of Muslims, is scheduled for Sunday at 2 p.m.

In Nazi-occupied Poland, the Warsaw ghetto imprisoned as many as 450,000 Jews into one square mile, Lilach said. By 1942, the Nazis were allotting a meager 3 ounces of moldy bread — about 180 calories — a day to each ghetto Jew.

Facing starvation, and witnessing the horrors of deportations and killings, about 750 Jewish youths launched an armed attack on German troops on April 19, 1943. The ambush caught the Germans by surprise and they retreated quickly.

After receiving military and SS reinforcements, the Nazis crushed the revolt on May 16, 1943, executed the resistance leaders and deported remaining Jews to death camps.

Lilach said the lessons from these horrors were still relevant because “genocide is continuing today in many regions of the world and we cannot remain silent.”

In a refugee camp in Bangladesh, she recently met with Rohingya Muslim survivors of a genocide in Myanmar, she said.

“The progression of Nazism could have been halted, but no country had the political will to intervene during the 1930s and 1940s, just as no nation has intervened to halt the genocide of the Rohingya,” Lilach said. Holocaust Remembrance Day “is not just a day of reflection. It is also a clarion call for intervention.”