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