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Congregations B'nai Jacob, Temple Beth El, and United Synagogue of Hoboken held a joint Yom Hashoah commemoration program April 20 in the sanctuary of Congregation B'nai Jacob, Jersey City. The evening's program started with my welcome remarks, an invocation by Rabbi Kenneth Brickman of Beth El, and a benediction by Rabbi Robert Scheinberg of USH.

The program included a number of musical offerings and two speakers. The United Synagogue of Hoboken choir, under the direction of Scheinberg, performed two musical selections from Psalms, including the singing of the 23rd psalm by Gerald Cohen. I performed my own arrangement of music of the Holocaust, including "Unter Deine Weise Stern" by poet Abraham Sutskever; "Eli, Eli," "Ani Ma'Amin"; "Hatikvah"; and "Lo Yisa Goy El Goy Kherev."

The featured speaker for the evening was witness and survivor of the Holocaust Ed Mosberg. Mosberg is a member of the Speakers Bureau of the Holocaust Council of MetroWest New Jersey. His stirring talk described not only his experiences as a youth in the Krakow ghetto and time at the Plasczow labor camp -- presented in the film "Schindler's List" -- but the numerous concentration camp experiences of his wife, as well. He juxtaposed recollections of the most terrible times in his and his wife's lives with accounts of the present and his current journeys with his children and grandchildren as part of the March of the Living, revisiting the places of horror of his past where most members of his family were killed. Mosberg brought a Torah saved from the Holocaust and shared with the assembled communities of three congregations that this is one of 12 Torahs he has donated for charitable purposes that survived the Holocaust. On its cover were embroidered the names of all the Nazi concentration camps to serve as a reminder that "We shall never forget."

Jessica Lemmon, a member of B'nai Jacob, is a third-generation survivor. She spoke about her grandmother's experiences during the war and immediately thereafter in a DP camp. Her grandmother was a journalist and contributed to the daily newspaper that was published in the camp. Members of the community had an opportunity to look through the now brittle and faded pages of the bound books, which document daily life in the DP camps for the now displaced survivors of the Shoah.

A candle lighting ceremony followed the speakers, with survivors and relatives of survivors now deceased lighting six candles for the 6 million lost in the Shoah. Mosberg lit a seventh candle for the righteous gentiles. Following the candle lighting, I chanted the "El Malei Rachamim" and recited Kaddish with Brickman, alternating the words of the Kaddish with the recitation of the names of the concentration camps, followed by the community singing "Hatikvah."

In his closing remarks, Scheinberg told the story of a torah in the town of Oswiecem (Auschwitz) in Poland that had been hidden during the Shoah. He described how in recent times someone found it and determined it might be in the Jewish cemetery. Through a long search process it was recovered, and now it rests in Israel.

Cantor Marsha Dubrow is the spiritual leader at Congregation B'nai Jacob of Jersey City.