Combatting Antisemitism at Center of New Castle’s Yom Hashoah Ceremony

This year New Castle’s fifth Annual Yom Hashoah Holocaust Remembrance Day Ceremony was unlike any other that preceded it.

On Apr. 29, more than 300 people filled the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center to honor the six million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II. But speakers also addressed growing antisemitism following the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas at the Nova music festival in Re’im, Israel. Every speaker mentioned the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, which has fueled a dramatic wave of antisemitism playing out across the U.S. and around the world.

“This Yom Hashoah following Oct. 7, the day of the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust, is a true call to action to actively educate now on understanding genocide and hate,” New Castle Supervisor Victoria Tipp said.

Stacey Saiontz, co-chair of the town’s Holocaust & Human Rights Committee, also remarked on the surge of antisemitic protests.

“They are happening throughout the country and on college campuses and have skyrocketed to levels we thought we would never see in our lifetime,” Saiontz said. “At the same time the number of Holocaust survivors continues to dwindle.”

According to a 2024 study by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, about 245,000 Jewish survivors are still living across more than 90 countries.

The keynote speaker was survivor Aliza Erber, 81, a rabbi and a podiatrist and recipient of the 2019 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award from the New York City College of Technology. She also received the Torch of Freedom Award this year.

An infant survivor born in Holland during World War II, Erber was hidden from the Nazis in an underground bunker along with other newborns and babies. For two years, she was kept alive on a diet of grass and roots and never saw daylight. She was eventually reunited with her mother after the war and grew up in Israel. In 1959 the family immigrated to the United States.

The Israel-Hamas war and the taking of Israeli hostages was a painful reminder to Erber of losing her father and great-grandmother, both of whom were murdered at Auschwitz. Other family members of Erber’s from Poland, Austria and Holland were also killed at concentration camps including Dachau and Bergen-Belsen.

“A couple of weeks ago we sat in a Seder to celebrate the festival of freedom while more than 130 hostages were, and are, still being held in captivity in Gaza,” Erber said. “I’d like to know where are our people? In the last six months since Oct. 7, have they been murdered?”

As a young adult, Erber said she was driven to learn as much as she could about the Jewish diaspora.

“I wanted to better understand why there was so much hatred directed at my people,” she said.

Speaking at conferences and ceremonies around the world is part of Erber’s fight against Holocaust deniers. At last week’s ceremony she reiterated that fight to the youth in the audience.

“When I speak to young people, I emphasize to be upstanders and not bystanders,” Erber said. “Don’t look away from evil. Today, with antisemitism at its highest and most dangerous levels since the Holocaust, with so many deniers of the Holocaust out there, I want you young people to remember that the Holocaust did happen.”

Many of the students in the audience were are part of Educate Now on Understanding Genocide and Hate (E.N.O.U.G.H.) at Horace Greeley High School and Seven Bridges Middle School. They presented awards to the student winners of the fifth annual Holocaust and Human Rights Writing & Arts Contest.

Greeley sophomore Baily Card captured first place in the high school writing contest. She read her winning essay “We the Keepers.” Card wrote about how collective memory of the Holocaust informs antisemitism today.

Middle school ninth-grader Aditi Vijil won for her poem “Birds,” and sixth-grader Nolan Kim was recognized for “Combating Antisemitism,” stressing the importance for all citizens to combat antisemitism and hate.

Speakers also included Westchester County Executive George Latimer, state Sen. Peter Harckham (D-Lewisboro) and Assemblyman Chris Burdick (D-Bedford).

Latimer emphasized how misleading information about the Hamas attack in October has perpetuated the notion that Israel is the aggressor, not the victim.

“What happened on Oct. 7 was clearly a terrorist act, no different from 9/11 or any of a hundred other terrorist attacks we have witnessed,” Latimer explained. “What was different was that the people who perpetrated the attack and people who were their allies had changed the narrative and they now project to the Jewish community at large that it’s the Jewish community that’s the oppressor, not the victim of what happened that day. We have to push back on that and we can do it with love, education and fortitude.”

Latimer cautioned the students, in particular, about being susceptible to misinformation.

“Every generation gets tested like this,” he said. “If we don’t speak out now, there will be nobody left to speak out later.”