On Monday, Jan. 27, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman joined other elected officials and Jewish community leaders to illuminate the dome of the Theodore Roosevelt Executive and Legislative Building gold in observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The ceremony was part of a series of events to recognize perhaps the most heinous attack on humanity against one group of people in history – the slaughter of 6 million Jews, men, women and children at the hands of the Nazis.
A day earlier, the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Nassau County in Glen Cove hosted a program that featured a second-generation survivor and excerpts of a film intended to honor the past and foster tolerance and understanding for future generations.
The observances of International Holocaust Remembrance Day are welcomed. But they are not enough.
To truly honor the lives lost in the Holocaust, we should ensure that all Nassau students know what took place during the Holocaust – something that none of us should forget.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) on Monday reintroduced legislation to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day that calls for identifying which states call for teaching about the Holocaust and describing the quality of that education. His goal is to expand education efforts to everywhere in the United States.
Currently, 29 states require Holocaust education. But the message is not getting through.
Surveys indicate that a significant portion of Americans are unaware that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. A 2020 study by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found that 63% of U.S. Millennials and Gen Z did not know this figure, with 36% believing that 2 million or fewer Jews were killed.
A 2021 survey by the American Jewish Committee revealed that only 53% of Americans over the age of 18 correctly identified that 6 million Jews perished in the Holocaust.
This year’s observances coincided with the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi extermination camp in southern Poland.
More than 1 million people, 90% of them Jews, were murdered at the Auschwitz camp, which operated from May 1940 until its liberation on Jan. 27, 1945. Other victims included the Roma, Polish political prisoners, homosexuals, communists, Soviet prisoners of war and disabled people
Some 75% to 80% of Jewish deportees were immediately sent to the gas chambers on arrival. Others were forced to labor in inhumane conditions, beaten and when they could no longer work sent to the gas chambers.
Auschwitz was also a site for medical experiments and pseudo-scientific research, using the inmates as guinea pigs, and mass sterilization programs.
This story is no small matter in Nassau where approximately 222,000 Jews live – accounting for about 16% of the county’s total population.
Nassau County’s Jewish community is one of the largest in the United States and many of its residents lived through the Holocaust or heard the stories of it from family members.
Other Nassau County residents recall the dark stain on Long Island cast by the Camp Siegfried, the Nazi camp in Yaphank operated by the German American Bund in the 1930s and early 1940s.
The camp was intended to promote Nazi ideology in the United States and featured parades, speeches, and other activities that glorified Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. It had roadways named Adolf Hitler Street, Goebbels Street (named after Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister) and Himmler Street (named after Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS).
Jews in Nassau County grew accustomed to feeling secure in the United States until recent years when antisemitic attacks began to rise at an alarming rate in the United States and Europe. This included incidents across Nassau County where Nazi swastikas have been found on sidewalks, the sides of buildings and school bathrooms.
The antisemitism rose further during protests on college campuses when it became part of the demonstrations against Israel’s aggressive response to the Oct. 6 attack on Israel by Hamas.
This is not just a problem for Jews. It’s a problem for all Americans and a giant failure of our education system.
The Holocaust, like the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, shows how freedom cannot be taken for granted and its loss impacts all of us.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
