he reiterated these views in a speech at Bergen-Belsen on the 60th anniversary of its liberation. The children and grandchildren of the survivors, he declared: Rosensaft has struggled with the theological implications of the Holocaust. "Where was God when the fires of Auschwitz failed to ignite the universe," he asked at a 1995 commemoration at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. As reported in The New York Times, he "posed the question of how God could be praised if he did not stop the killing. Then he suggested an answer: 'What if God was not with the killers, with the forces that inflicted Auschwitz on humanity?'" He explained that, "To me, the incredible element of the Holocaust is not the behavior of the murderers, because that is pure evil. It is the behavior of the victims and how they remained human and in many ways behaved in a superhuman manner. ... So the God I choose to pray to was at Auschwitz, but it was not in the manner of the victims' deaths, it was in the way in which they lived." Following the September 11 attacks on New York City in 2001, Rosensaft elaborated on his belief that evil is perpetrated by human beings, not by God: Rosensaft elaborated on this theme in a guest sermon at Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City on September 7, 2013, the Saturday between Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), in which he concluded that as he remembered his parents on the anniversary of their death, "perhaps God did not hide His face from them after all during the years of the Shoah. Perhaps it was a divine spirit within them that enabled them to survive with their humanity intact. And perhaps it is to that God that we should be addressing our prayers during these Days of Awe and throughout the year." In response to this sermon, Pope Francis wrote to Rosensaft in a personal email message that: Holocaust Remembrance related activities In the spring of 1985, Rosensaft was an outspoken critic of President Ronald Reagan's decision to pay homage to fallen German World War II soldiers, including members of Hitler's Waffen-SS, at the military cemetery at Bitburg during a state visit to Germany. Addressing some 5,000 Holocaust survivors and their families in Philadelphia on April 21, 1985, Rosensaft said, "For heaven's sake, let him find another