Testimony and Presence on Long Island: A Yom HaShoah Reflection

Testimony and Presence on Long Island: A Yom HaShoah Reflection

Rabbi Menachem Creditor

I am still sitting with the strangeness of it.

I stood as keynote speaker at a Yom HaShoah VeHaGevurah commemoration on Long Island, the place of my childhood, and I am not a survivor. I am not the child of survivors, nor their grandchild. I carry no direct familial testimony of the Shoah. And yet, I was entrusted with words in a space defined by memory that is as sacred as it is searing.

And perhaps that is precisely the point.

Shoah Survivor Egon Salmon z”l spoke through recorded testimony, his voice bridging the abyss between then and now. My beloved friend, Shoah Survivor Ben Stern z”l, was with me in spirit, as he so often is, his moral clarity still marching, still teaching. And I felt, with unusual force, the truth of Shoah Survivor Elie Wiesel z”l’s teaching that to be witness to a witness makes one a witness. That sacred chain does not end with biology. It extends through sacred listening, through carrying, through refusing to let memory dissipate into abstraction.

Returning to Long Island for this moment carried its own emotional weight. This was not only a communal gathering. It was, for me, a kind of homecoming into responsibility. To stand there and help articulate a response to the Shoah, to hatred, to the persistence of antisemitism, while also insisting on Jewish beauty, on Jewish life that is not only reactive but generative, felt like a delicate and necessary balance.

The purposes of Yom HaShoah VeHaGevurah are many. Education. Moral formation. Historical clarity. But the ritual itself is profoundly clear. Testimony. Knowledge. Awareness. Honoring the dead. These are not abstract ideals. They are acts. They are obligations.

I was deeply moved by the presence of Scouts BSA Troop 240, who sang the national anthem. I shared with them that I, too, was once a Long Island Cub Scout, formed in part by the values of that movement. And then I noticed something that stayed with me. There were no identifiable Jewish scouts in that troop. There were boys and girls. One scout was wearing a hijab.

I found myself speaking not only to the Jewish community gathered there, but to her. To all who were listening from outside the boundaries of Jewish identity. I spoke about the blasphemy of the Shoah as the denial of the full humanity of the Jewish people. And I spoke about what Judaism demands of us in response.

Our ethical reflex is ancient. Emerging directly from the memory of our own enslavement in Egypt, the Torah commands us not to oppress the stranger, precisely because we know the experience of being othered. That memory is not meant to harden us. It is meant to sensitize us.

And then Hillel, under Roman occupation thousands of years later, sharpens the teaching even further. What is hateful to you, do not do to another. Not only to your fellow Jew. To another. Full stop.

At one point I locked eyes with that scout. I wanted her to know that I saw her, not as a symbol, not as a contrast, but as a human being standing in a sacred space of Jewish memory. And I wanted her to feel that the values I was teaching demanded that I see her that way. Just as her presence there suggested, to me, that she saw me.

Was it a full reckoning between communities, histories, and identities? Of course not. That is not what a single gathering can accomplish. But there was something real in that moment. Something intentional. A shared willingness to be present within a structure that asked something of us. That held us steady for the moment.

It was not the chaotic, unbounded, often dehumanizing space of public discourse we have grown used to. It was a ritual. And ritual, when it works, creates the conditions for truth to be carried with care.

I left feeling humbled. Grateful. A bit unsettled in the way that sacred responsibility often leaves a person.

And I pray that, in some small way, it brought honor to the memory of the six million.

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Photo: Jewish Community Relations Council - Long Island (JCRC-LI)/Congregation Shaaray Shalom Holocaust Remembrance Service, April 19, 2026 (photo: Raya Creditor)

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Reentering History: The Days of Rising

Reentering History: 

The Days of Rising
Rabbi Menachem Creditor


Yesterday we gathered in learning and in testimony for Yom HaShoah veHagevruah, the Day of Holocaust and Heroism. But that day does not stand alone. Time, in our tradition, is never isolated. It flows.

We now find ourselves in the quiet current between Yom HaShoah and what awaits us next week, Yom HaZikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day) and Yom Ha’Atzmaut (Independence Day). This stretch of days asks something of us. It is not empty time. It is sacred transition.

We are used to thinking of sacred arcs in the calendar. From Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, the Days of Repentance carry us along a path of introspection and return. So too, I believe, these days form their own sacred arc. A modern cycle of holiness. Beginning in the depths of memory and loss, and moving, not abruptly but deliberately, toward remembrance, sacrifice, and ultimately, renewal.

What shall we call these days in between? They are not Days of Repentance, “Yemei Teshuvah.” They are something else. Perhaps they are “Yemei Tekumah,” Days of Rising, Days of standing again.

For what is the journey we are tracing, if not the movement of a people from devastation to dignity, from powerlessness to the fragile, necessary assertion of self-determination. From the Shoah, through the memory of those who fought and fell, toward the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in our ancestral home. This is not a simple progression. It is a trembling ascent. And we are still within it.

This week’s Torah portions, Tazria and Metzora, meet us in this space with their own unsettling language. They speak of bodies out of balance, of conditions that disrupt, that isolate, that render a person uncertain of their place within the community. There is a deep discomfort here. Not only with the physical realities described, but with what they represent. A loss of control. A vulnerability we cannot easily master.

And yet, the Torah does not leave a person there. It creates a process. When something is unclear, when the body or the self feels out of order, there is a path of discernment, of separation, and ultimately, of return. A way back into community. A way back into time.

We know that feeling. Not only in our bodies, but in our history. The long experience of exile carried with it a profound sense of dislocation, of insecurity, of not being at home in the world. Zionism, in one of its deepest readings, is a response to that condition. Not a denial of vulnerability, but a refusal to remain defined by it. A commitment to stand again.

Still, not everything comes under our control. Not then, not now. There are forces within and beyond us that unsettle, that confuse, that frighten. And unlike the biblical world, we do not have a single figure who can definitively tell us what is happening or what comes next. But we do recognize the feeling. The uncertainty. The longing for clarity and for return.

That is why these days matter.

We cannot move directly from Yom HaShoah back into ordinary time. To do so would be to deny the weight of memory and the work of grief. Instead, we are invited into a process. A sacred interval in which we begin, slowly, to reenter.

Yom HaShoah opens the space of remembrance. It asks us to witness, to mourn, to refuse forgetting. But it does not ask us to remain there. It begins something. A movement, however tentative, toward standing again.

And so we walk these days with care. Not rushing. Not collapsing the distance between loss and renewal. Trusting that, like our ancestors who sought a path back into the community, we too are learning how to reenter history with strength, with memory, and with hope.