Torres issues call to action to stop Jew-hate

Rep. Ritchie Torres told a Yom Hashoah commemoration in west Hempstead on Sunday night that to be successful in the fight for Israel and against antisemitism, Jews must be “politically engaged, civically engaged.”

Torres, a gay Latino Democrat whose district includes both the South Bronx and Riverdale, is one of the staunchest supporters in Congress of the Jewish state and American Jews.

“We need every member of the Jewish community who cares about fighting antisemitism, who cares about Israel, to be politically engaged, because the soul of America is at stake,” he told the more than 300 people assembled at Congregation Shaaray Shalom for the event hosted by the Jewish Community Council of Long Island and sponsored by 20 organizations from different parts of Long Island.

Eying local developments, he cautioned that “what’s unfolding in New York is terrifying.”

In a reference to Zohran Mamdani, one of the leading candidates in June’s Democratic primary, Torres said, “We have a mayoral candidate who said that if he were elected mayor, he would direct the NYPD to arrest members of the Israeli government.”

Torres recalled that in 2020, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, which has endorsed Mamdani, sent a questionnaire to City Council candidates with two questions: “Do you pledge never to travel to Israel if elected to the City Council [and] do you pledge to support the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement against Israel.”

“So in the Democratic Socialist worldview, it’s morally permissible to go travel to China, which has committed genocide against Uyghur Muslims; to travel to Russia, which has invaded a sovereign nation state Ukraine; to travel to Iran, which is the leading sponsor of terrorism in the world,” Torres said. “But travel to the world’s only Jewish state, that is strictly forbidden.”

Linking Jew-hatred in Nazi Germany to antisemitism today, Torres pointed out that “Germany at the time was the most educated society on Earth. How could the most educated society on Earth be so barbaric to commit the greatest crime against humanity?”

“The lesson,” he said, “is that education is no guarantee of morality. Education without ethics will not bring civilization, it will bring barbarism. One of the cruel ironies is that some of the most academically educated people in our society often are the least morally educated.”

Shifting his focus from a society’s educated elite to its mass of ordinary people, he referenced a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt  in her coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial: Banality of evil.

“One need not be like Hitler to be monstrous,” Torres said. “There were masses of everyday Germans who were complicit in the Holocaust, who were content to be cogs in a machine of industrial mass murder against their Jewish neighbors.”

“The Holocaust is a time not too distant from our own, and that’s why we must never forget,” he said. “That’s why we must remain eternally vigilant in the fight against antisemitism.”

“Israel has no greater friend in the world than the United States,” Torres concluded. “For me, one of the greatest traditions of American exceptionism is America’s exceptional commitment to the Jewish people in the Jewish states, and I’m proud to uphold that tradition as a proud Zionist member of the United States Congress.”

Now that there are few survivors left to deliver in-person testimony, recordings made of their stories have become an essential component in the arsenal of Holocaust remembrance.

Several years ago, Shira Stoll, then a videographer for the Staten Island Advance, teamed up with Lori Weintrob, founding director of the Wagner College Holocaust Center on Staten Island, to create a series of videotaped testimonies. These NY-Emmy award-winning videos have been shown for six years at the West Hempstead event, Holocaust Remembrance Chair Larry Rosenberg said.

This year’s video presented testimony by Hannah Steiner in which she describes how her young mother died in her arms after liberation and how her future husband carried her photo with him for seven years during and after the war.

In addition to the lighting six memorial candles for the six million Jews murdered  in the Shoah, each by generations of survivors, a seventh candle was lit in memory of the non-Jewish victims and an eight candle for the victims of the October 7th attack and the fallen IDF soldiers.