Temple Beth El observed Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) on Sunday with an emotional community-wide interfaith service of song and prayer and a talk by Holocaust educator Dr. Bernie Furshpan.

The synagogue’s observance coincided with the 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, which was the day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.
Patchogue mayor Paul Pontieri, Rev. James E. Reiss of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, and Rev. Dwight Lee Wolter of Congregational Church of Patchogue offered readings. Rabbi Ilan Pardo of Temple Beth El sang in Yiddish, “The Partisan’s Song,” which was sung by the Jewish resistance fighters in the Vilna ghetto and other ghettos during World War II.

Furshpan, an educator and board member of the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Nassau County in Glen Cove, brought the message that hate thrives when people stand by without intervening.

It’s a lesson the world seems not to have learned as, since the Holocaust, some 50 million people have been killed in other genocides around the world in places like Cambodia and Rwanda, Furshpan told the audience, which numbered about 60 people.

“There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the Holocaust,” Furshpan, a Bohemia resident, said in an interview before his talk. “And for some reason we can’t seem to learn them, and we keep repeating history. That’s why, even though it’s a 90-year-old story, we have to keep telling the story so that we learn the lessons and the next generation will pick up on these lessons and make a difference: to stand up for justice, not to be a bystander. To be very cautious and careful about the spread of hate.”

Furshpan discussed the Holocaust through the experience of his father, Moshe, and his mother, Zahava, both of whom miraculously survived the Holocaust.

Moshe was a 10-year-old living in Ludvipol, a small town in Poland of 1,500 mostly Jewish inhabitants when the Nazis invaded. The Nazis slaughtered all but 30 of the town’s Jews. Moshe was the only member of his family to survive, which he did by fleeing and hiding out in the woods outside town for three years from the ages of 10 to 13. After the war ended, Moshe was liberated and lived in two displaced persons camps in Germany before emigrating to Israel, where he met Furshpan’s mother, Zahava. The family eventually settled in Brooklyn.

Zahava had her own harrowing story of survival. She was only 2 years old when she and her mother and other siblings fled the Nazis by traveling by train from Poland to Russia, where they thought they would be safer. When the train stopped, Zahava’s mother disembarked to find food for the children. The train took off without her, with the children onboard. Zahava and her siblings wound up in an orphanage in Russia. It took her mother five years to find Zahava and her siblings.

Furshpan talked of how the traumas of the Holocaust are handed down within families to the children of survivors, something he experienced firsthand. Furshpan said that growing up in Brooklyn, he felt he had to work extra hard in school and not give his parents any trouble, to spare them any additional heartache. He was taught to always be on guard for potential trouble and to not complain about things, which led to ignoring potential health problems.

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t seem to learn the lessons of the Holocaust and the story needs to keep being told, Furshpan said.

“It’s not about depressing people or making them upset,” he said. “It’s about giving the young generation hope for the future, that they can make a difference.”