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At Rider University June 30, an audience of about 90 listened to Mark Weitzman, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Task Force Against Hate and Terrorism and its chief representative at the United Nations, talk about the center's history and activities.

The event was sponsored by the Jewish Community Center. Weitzman spoke first about Simon Wiesenthal, the well-known Nazi hunter, who was an architect before the Holocaust. As he was shuttled through 13 concentration camps during World War II, he used his skill in writing and drawing to memorialize instances of what he saw in the camps.

When he was liberated from Mauthausen in May 1945, weighing less than 100 pounds, he noticed that ex-camp guards were being interrogated, and he quickly offered to help the interrogators. After they pressed him about why he thought he could be useful, he proved his mettle by putting together a hand-written list, with the assistance of other survivors, of Nazi war criminals, what they had done, and where. "It marked the course of the rest of his life," said Weitzman.

Whereas most survivors moved on to build families and careers, Wiesenthal dedicated his life to tracking down Nazi war criminals and bringing them to justice, working to ensure that the memory of the Holocaust will not be forgotten, and trying to ensure that nothing like the Holocaust would happen to another people.

Weitzman described the first time he met Wiesenthal, who died three years ago in Vienna, where he lived. Wiesenthal was visiting their offices in New York and first stopped to talk with a colleague, whose desk was very neat. Then he wandered over to Weitzman's desk, which was piled high, and said, "Wow, now I feel at home." That started a conversation, which became a friendship, and the two men spoke every two weeks nearly until his death.

Weitzman remembered asking Wiesenthal once, "How can you still live in Austria?" Wiesenthal responded, "To catch a Nazi, you have to go where the Nazis are."

Actually Wiesenthal's reach was much wider than just hunting Nazis, and he became a champion of human rights for all who suffered oppression, whether the Roma under the Nazis, the Kurds, or the Cambodians under Pol Pot. He brought evidence before the international community that led to the creation of international courts to deal with crimes against humanity and genocide.

The Wiesenthal Center was established more than 30 years ago, when Wiesenthal was in his 60s doing all the work on his own, through his Jewish Documentation Center, out of a two-room office in Vienna.

The center's major educational arm is its Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. It also has a Center for Human Dignity and Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, a division for campus outreach, and a New York Tolerance Center to explore issues of prejudice, diversity, tolerance, and cooperation with educators, law enforcement officials, and state and local government.

Its film division, Moriah Films, has produced a number of films. Two well-known ones are "The Long Way Home," which examines the struggle of displaced Jewish refugees to find dignity in the period immediately after the Holocaust between 1945 and1948, and "Genocide," narrated by Elizabeth Taylor, which tells the story of the Nazi Holocaust.

The center also has NGO (nongovernmental organization) status at the United Nations. Recently Weitzman gave a talk about extremism on the Internet for an Unlearning Intolerance seminar sponsored by the U.N. This yearly all-day seminar program developed in the wake of the 2001 Conference against Racism in Durbin at the behest of Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1997 to 2006, after a lot of lobbying, political work, and diplomacy by NGOs in the United States, Israel, and Europe.

Weitzman described the experience at Durban. "The conference was hijacked by Arab and Muslim extremists," he said. "The only issue it focused on was Israel and Zionism, and it became a forum for anti-Semitism." Not only was Israel singled out and demonized, he continued, but Jewish delegates felt threatened.

Annan, Weitzman said, felt that the United Nations had let things go too far, and he stated that the United Nations should be a place where all Jews feel at home. Although the U.N.'s Geneva branch remains very anti-Semitic, New York has seen a lot of progress.

After the Durban conference, Annan initiated the first Unlearning Intolerance seminar. Then in November 2005 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution condemning all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment, or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief and also designated Jan. 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, as an annual International Day of Commemoration to honor victims of the Holocaust.

The resolution set up an office of Holocaust outreach at the United Nations and urged member states to develop educational programs. This office took copies of a book Weitzman had written with Steven Jacobs, "Dismantling the Big Lie," the first refutation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zionism, and sent copies to United Nations offices in 65 countries, including some that were Arab and Muslim. Many staff members in these information offices were also brought to Yad Vashem for training in how to memorialize the Holocaust.

On Jan. 26, 2007, the General Assembly issued a resolution condemning any denial of the Holocaust. "Ahmadinejad was not named, but everyone knew who it was aimed at," said Weitzman.

Another organization that the Wiesenthal Center has worked with is the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which was set up originally to deal with the Soviet Union regarding human rights. Under its office of tolerance and non-discrimination the OSCE deals with hate crimes and anti-Semitism and has appointed one representative to investigate in the field and another to create teaching materials.

As an NGO representative, Weitzman also was able to join a State Department delegation that participated in a meeting of The Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research. Its purpose is to train teachers, work with them on texts, and secure commitments from senior diplomats to support Holocaust education at all levels, provide open and free access to all World War II-era archives, and set up a day of Holocaust commemoration. "Once countries are in the task force," said Weitzman, "they are pressured to fulfill that commitment."