Last year it rained in Moscow on Simchat Torah. Nevertheless, thousands of young Jews and Jewesses were not deterred; they came and they sang and they danced for hours. We who have come this evening are determined to do no less. We shall not let the rain dampen our spirit, even if it drenches the flesh. I think you will agree with a bargain I am willing to strike with the Almighty: keep open the floodgates of Heaven and let it pour tonight – provided you also open wide the doors of Russia and let our fellow Jews stream out in their hundreds of thousands. Indeed that is precisely why aroused representatives of New York Jewry are here assembled under the auspices of the New York Conference on Soviet Jewry and its 34 constituent organizations. The adult organizations, together with the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry and other concerned youth groups, express their solidarity with Russian Jewry, and especially its reawakened youth. We are here to express three central themes: sorrow, solidarity, and protest. Unfortunately, there is much to be sorrowful about. Fifty years of Russian repression have taken their toll of this once magnificent, creative Jewish community of three million souls. Now, we do not want to indulge in exaggerations. Unlike the Soviet representatives who, in this complex of buildings of the United Nations, cheapen the coin of international rhetoric, debase civilized discourse, and desecrate the martyrdom of Hitler’s victims by comparing Israel’s so-called “atrocities” to the barbarous crimes of the Nazis, we shall not turn the tables and be guilty of the same vulgar extravagance. We acknowledge openly: Soviet repression of Judaism is not identical with or in any manner as severe as the Nazi oppression of Jews. What is the difference between them, between Nazi persecution and Russian repression? It is the difference between fire and ice, between burning and freezing. The Nazis burned Jews. Six million Jews were consumed in the flames of hatred, in …

"Arbaim shanah akut be'dor" – For forty years our generation struggled to understand the mystery of those fatal years of the Holocaust. Neither our speech nor our silence helped us to uncover the secrets of God or of man. Perhaps we shall have to wait another forty or another four hundred years, or perhaps we shall never be wise enough even to know how to react. But events march on, and history does not permit us the luxury of contemplation. Hence, some reactions began to emerge fairly quickly. The first and enormously significant response to the Holocaust was the political one: the founding of the State of Israel. Powerlessness would never again be considered a Jewish virtue. The desperate struggles of the heroic Jewish fighters in Warsaw and elsewhere were metamorphosed into the pride of statehood and the military confidence of the Israeli Defense Forces. Today, the future of the Jewish people is unthinkable without the State of Israel.Another response has been a holy, compulsive drive to record and testify. We do not want to forget, and we do not want the world to forget. We have resolved to keep the memory of our Kedoshim alive by demonstrations and by meetings such as this. And many of us have undertaken projects of sculpture and art and museums and exhibits to perpetuate the memory of the Six Million. As the years slip by and memory begins to fade, we desperately want to prevent their anguish and blood and cry from being swallowed up by the misty, gaping hole of eternal silence, banished from the annals of man by the Angel of Forgetfulness.The efforts at remembering and reminding must continue. As long as so-called “revisionist historians” deny that the Holocaust occurred; as long as Babi Yar and Buchenwald behind the Iron Curtain contain almost no reference to Jews; as long as it is even conceivable that an American administration, which preaches more compassion for the victim than for the criminal on the domestic front, can see nothing wrong in its Presiden…