The deals he signed were largely symbolic, and the connections he made were more friendly than financial. Nevertheless, Gov. Chris Christie’s five-day visit to Israel was considered a success by the Jewish leaders who were invited to tag along.

“Although no formal agreements have yet been announced, there were some significant high-level meetings on the business front,” Mark Levenson, chair of the New Jersey-Israel Commission (NJIC), said in an April 9 phone interview. “We believe these meetings will lead to growing Israeli businesses with a presence in New Jersey.”

For much of his April 1-5 trip to Israel and later Jordan, the media focused on the political impact of the visit. They speculated what it might mean for the popular Republican governor’s vice-presidential or presidential prospects.

Dr. David Marwell, the historian and director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, is the featured speaker Wednesday night at the community-wide commemoration of Yom Hashoah. Holocaust Remembrance Day, as it is known in English, falls out annually on Nisan 27. Because Jewish days always begin at sundown of the previous day, this year, on the secular calendar, the commemoration begins at sundown on Wednesday and continues until after sundown on Thursday.

This year, the community-wide event will be held at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at Temple Beth Sholom, 40-25 Fair Lawn Avenue, in Fair Lawn.

The annual event is sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey and is co-chaired by Rosalind Melzer and Allyn Michaelson. For information, call (201) 797-9321, or e-mail Dr. Wallace Greene at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

David Marwell once hunted Nazis for the United States government.

Now, he is working to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive in a future in which there will be no surviving survivors to tell their first-person stories.

A former investigator for the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), since 2000 Marwell has headed the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.

He will be speaking at community-wide Yom Hashoah event Wednesday night at Temple Beth Sholom in Fair Lawn.

His topic will be “Memory and Hope.”

After debarking the train, he chose to stand in line with his father, rather than his mother. He would not, for many years to come, comprehend the eternalness of the decision. He was told there would be showers ahead and, because he was 11 now, he figured he would find more comfort among men. Birkenau, however, had only discomfort in store — violent guards, the smell of burning hair, electrified barbed wire, meager food, dysentery, urinals that reeked from blocks away, days and frigid nights in a coat without lining, not a bird in sight, the constant fear of extermination.

When Bob Bennett (born Benno Benczkowski) stood to recount the horrors of the Shoah for the Gerrard Berman Day School’s (GBDS) George and Arline Haar Middle School, he gripped the desk in front of him until his knuckles went white, and wept for the mother and sister he could not keep safe. He saw them afterward only through barbed wire, until he saw them no more.

If you are Jewish, living in northern New Jersey, and between the ages of 22 and 30, you are invited.

A new young leadership group is being organized by the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey (JFNNJ).

The group does not yet have a name. Choosing one is on the agenda of its first meeting, scheduled for April 23 at the federation’s offices in Paramus, as is drawing up a calendar of activities.

“It’s an exciting opportunity to be in on the ground floor,” says Joshua Prell, a 25-year-old financial adviser for Wells Fargo, inviting his peers to attend.

Synagogue libraries face a variety of challenges — from low (or no) funding to increasing competition with would-be patrons’ electronic resources.

Add to that the “standards of excellence” required by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) for accreditation (see box), and it is no wonder that only one local library has sought that distinction.

Indeed, says Kathe Pinchuck — who heads AJL’s school, synagogue, and community center division — “Many places confuse a book room with a library,” especially since accreditation guidelines require that a library have a professional librarian for a certain number of hours a week, and that is extremely rare in local congregations.

Passaic resident Pinchuk, a professional librarian who works at the Montclair public library, recalls that in 2007 she led Teaneck Congregation Beth Sholom’s accreditation efforts.

The synagogue, school, and center division of the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) has set out “standards of excellence” for Jewish libraries, embracing areas from a facility’s library committee to its mission statement, record-keeping, staffing, collection, and catalogue. [http://www.jewishlibraries.org/ajlweb/accreditation/accreditation_guidelines.pdf]

According to these guidelines:

“The library should have the support and guidance of a library committee, which serves as “the liaison to the Board of the parent institution and provides advice, support, and guidance to the professional staff of the library.”

In April 1966, the Jewish soul of New York — and the entire world — was severely wounded when a devastating fire tore through the stacks of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS).

“For a century and more, [the library had] one of richest collections of books relating to Jewish subjects, and especially Hebrew manuscripts,” remembers Dr. Menahem Schmelzer, emeritus librarian for JTS, and coordinator of the book and manuscript rescue effort after the fire.

Thousands of books were damaged — or ruined — in the blaze. Of those, some 10 percent “were extremely difficult to replace.”

Schmelzer, who served as librarian from 1961 until 1987, and who teaches medieval Hebrew at JTS, said it was a huge task to salvage whatever was possible.