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WHEELING -- Evil succeeds when good people do nothing to stop it, Rabbi Joshua Lief told guests at the Temple Shalom Wednesday night.
And as war again rages in Ukraine, he said it's a message worth repeating and remembering.
The Temple Shalom on Wednesday hosted its program for Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, with about 30 in attendance.
Lief spoke of the atrocities and 6 million deaths that occurred among Jews and others opposing Nazi oppression during World War II, and he compared actions then to those occurring now during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It was on Sept. 19, 1941 that 33,771 people, most of them Jews, were massacred at Babi Yar, a ravine in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. The site would go on to become a mass grave for what is estimated to be at least 120,000 people, Lief said.
Most recently on March 1 -- more than 80 years later -- the Babi Yar memorial site was bombed during a Russian missile attack.
And there are other parallels, Lief said.
"It's interesting that the Russian disinformation narrative was that there were Nazis in Urkraine who were terrorizing the ethinic Russians who lived in the Eastern part of the country," he said. "In fact, Russia (today) just wants to seize the totality of the territory for it to be part of a dominion of a Russian empire that dissolved with the end of the Soviet Union in 1991."
The Russians are acting "eerily" like the Nazis in claiming such territories should be theirs, he said.
"That lie hasn't gone away," Lief continued. "We are seeing it in a terrifying fashion. It is astonishing to see the Ukrainians fight back against this. And the Western World needs to be more responsible because it was largely silent 80 years ago when Jews were being murdered by the Nazis ...
"Just as then, evil succeeds if good people do nothing."
Lief termed Yom HaShoah "a relatively recent event" added to the Jewish calendar that commemorates not just those who died in the Holocaust, but also those who survived and those who fought back against the Nazis with acts of heroism.
"There are still people treating others as less than human ... and we as a society are failing," he said. "Yom HaShoah begs us to remember."
The world has not come very far from the remembrances of Babi Yar. There are still people treating others not like humans, but with hatred and contempt, Lief explained.
To move on, people need to see themselves less as individual factions, he said.
"It takes each of us reaching out to the world and saying we have much more in common than we do differences," Lief continued. "Each of us would benefit if each of us behaved better toward our neighbors."