CLOSING REMARKS: RABBI NEWBERGER
The Sephardic civilization that took root in Spain was a monument to Jewish creative genius. Whether in the complex pages of the Talmud, or in poetry, or kabbalah, or Bible, or philosophy, astronomy, or commerce. What an ornament. What a gifted people. But try to find the traces of those gifts on the Iberian Peninsula today. To visit Spain is 10 be made cruelly aware of how yesterday's final solution to the medieval Jewish question resolved itself.
We are told that all Jews are bound up with each other. In the Holocaust the ashes of Ashkenazim and Sephardim wen hound up with each other in an unparalleled covenant of blood. We are here this evening to affirm that the Holocaust was not an Ashkenazic catastrophe. It was not a Sephardic catastrophe. It was a Jewish catastrophe and beyond that a human catastrophe, a catastrophe of absolute evil and moral bankruptcy on all levels.
Every national and political and religious institution on earth failed the Jews. Every national and political and religious institution on earth failed themselves and yet somehow out of this imploded black hole of moral catastrophe there emerged a light, the very vision of the prophets as bone cleaved to bone and sinew to sinew. And then the trickles of life became a stream and the stream a torrent. Ashkenazim no more. Sephardim no more. "Am Yisrael Chai" - The people of Israel reborn. The streams of life gathered us from all the ancient charnel houses of death and hatred in Europe and the Middle East and brought us to the one place on earth that is truly and eternally our own.
We are all survivors - even we Jews here in America. We dare not forget that for even a moment. It is a searing reality and a soaring burden. It is a sacred challenge to make this world safe, completely safe for life. For Jewish life here, for Jewish life there, for Jewish life everywhere. Forever.