The grand marshal of this Sunday’s Celebrate Israel Parade along Fifth Avenue, marking 75 years of the state of Israel, has dedicated his life to giving names to Jews slaughtered by the Nazis and dumped anonymously in mass graves.
Upper East Sider Harley Lippman, founder of IT consulting firm, Genesis 10, was honored last week in Poland for his work in discovering previously undiscovered Jewish mass graves from WWII and he said that his mission is more critical now than ever.
“With the rise of antisemitism at record levels, it’s more important than ever to show unity and support for Israel — not just among American Jews, but non-Jews as well,” said Lippman, 68.
“As we’ve learned from history, when people reveal their bad intentions, we have to pay attention,” said Lippman. “It’s not just Iran that wants to wipe Israel off the map,” he said, with plenty of hate right here in NYC, especially after the now-infamous CUNY Law graduation speech demonizing the Jewish state. “All the more reason for us to show our pride and commitment to the strong America-Israel relationship.”
The descendant of Holocaust survivors who said he lost 86 members of his family, many of whom were Polish, has worked since 2009 to locate graves of murdered Jews and hold memorials to honor and preserve their memory.
Lippman has identified some 50 Polish Jewish mass graves killed at the hands of the Nazis between September 1939 and March 1942 and dumped in mass graves, before concentration camps were constructed to carry out Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution.
Lippman made a PBS documentary, “Safeguarding Memory: Commemorating Jewish Mass Graves in Poland,” about this phenomenon.
“While most of us know the names Treblinka and Auschwitz, it’s often those nameless, faceless people who had the bad fortune of being just picked by the Nazis and just shot in the woods – without ever having the dignity of a burial,” Lippman said. “We want to give those poor souls the dignity they deserve – at least in death.”