GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP, NJ (CBS) – Jewish people around the world on Monday, including in the Philadelphia region, recognized Yom HaShoah, known as Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center at Stockton University held a service Monday evening at Congregation Beth Israel in Northfield to remember the six million Jewish people murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Mike Kleidermacher, who survived the Holocaust as a child, served as the keynote speaker.
‘Hopefully my speech will be too [have people] Take away the fact that hate does not solve any problem,” Kleidermacher said. “What is going to solve any problem is through understanding, peace and communication.”
He was born in 1942 in Georgia, then a Soviet republic, after his family escaped the Nazis in Poland.
When the Nazis began invading the Soviet Union, the Soviets placed Kleidermacher’s family in cattle trucks and sent them to Siberia.
“Life in Siberia was extremely difficult, very difficult,” Kleidermacher said. “It was a great time staying there.”
Although he said it probably saved his family’s lives as they were far enough away from the Nazis’ reach.
“When we came back to Poland after the war to find out what had happened, my parents discovered that their entire family had been murdered,” Kleidermacher said.
Kleidermacher eventually emigrated to South Jersey, where he now watches protests are taking place on college campuses across the countrymany of which, are calling on universities to divest and boycott Israel.
“No matter what you feel about Israel, you cannot condemn the entire Jewish people,” Kleidermacher said. “That’s what’s happening now with all this anti-Semitic passion and hatred.”
Brandon Goudner
