Yehuda Kaploun, a rabbi and U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism at the State Department, told attendees at International March of the Living in Kraków, Poland, on Monday that ensuring that people have a proper burial is an important commandment in Judaism.

“The more than 1 million souls who were brutally murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz never received a proper burial. There was no shomer. There was no watchman to watch over the body. There was no rabbi to say kaddish, the mourner’s prayer and no family to sit shiva, the week of mourning,” he said. “Yet every one of those victims was an individual. They were mothers. They were fathers, sons, daughters, babies, rabbis, lay leaders, regular people. They were all individuals.”

“But it was the German Nazis’ greatest fantasy to strip them of their humanity and to reduce them to just being a number,” he said. “To erase their stories and to consign their memories” to oblivion.

It’s still impossible to bury the Jewish dead 81 years later. “The Nazis made certain of that when they tried to destroy the camps, the evidence of mass graves and their crematoria,” Kaploun said. ”Still, there is a commandment we can fulfill, another way to achieve a small measure of justice for those victims of the Holocaust and for those who perished.”

By gathering to honor the victims, “we ensure that the stories of the survivors are told and the stories of those who perished are told and their memories will not be forgotten. We affirm that they were not faceless victims but each one an individual, real people with real lives and real stories,” he said. “We refuse to grant the perpetrators a ’posthumous victory.'” 

Remembering means being “unapologetically Jewish,” the ambassador added.

“Together as one people, we will bear the memory of the 6 million Jews,” he said. “We will carry forward their stories by living the lives that they could not.”

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