In our time it is impossible to appreciate the full measure of Simon Wiesenthal’s contribution to the Jewish people and to the world. It’s not just Simon’s longevity and that at 96 he had outlived most of the perpetrators of the Nazi Holocaust he doggedly hunted. The real problem is that in our time, where memory of the Holocaust is so central a societal theme – with Holocaust Remembrance Days, museums, films, and Web sites – it may not be within our grasp to fathom the loneliness and aloneness of the path he embarked on 60 years ago as he stumbled out, a skeletal ghost into the hands of American liberators at Mauthausen.

Make no mistake, Wiesenthal was virtually alone in his quest for justice for the 6 million Jewish innocents murdered in the Final Solution. After the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals the victorious alliance morphed into the bitter confrontation of the Cold War. As far as the Soviets, Americans, and British were concerned, dossiers of ex-Nazis were to be scoured, not for evidence of crimes against humanity, but for their potential in abetting their respective intelligence, military, or strategic goals.

Wiesenthal also had to face the brutal reality that many post-war Jewish leaders could not fathom the utility of “dredging up” difficult memories and generating needless confrontation with politicians about “the past.” In the 1950’s, 1960’s, and into the 1970’s prominent and influential Jews would admonish Simon: “Forget about your Don Quixotic quest; it’s time to Forgive and Forget!”

For his base of operation Wiesenthal chose Austria. After a brief stint in Linz he would move to a nondescript office in Vienna – 100 yards from the site of Gestapo headquarters. Everyday as he strode among largely apathetic populace, he was an unmistakable, if unwanted, reminder of the ghosts of genocide that no one wanted to confront. Vienna yielded leads, increasing threats from unrepentant Nazis, and later, after Adolph Eichmann’s capture, death threats against his family. When his embattled wife begged Wiesenthal to move to Israel, he sent his daughter, but would not, and could not, close the Documentation Center. Not even a neo-Nazi bomb that blew apart their apartment would succeed in breaking Wiesenthal’s bond with his mission.

What drove Wiesenthal? There’s no doubt, that like many Holocaust survivors he sought meaning and purpose in the unfathomable fact that he, rather than his mother or 88 other members of his extended family had survived the Nazi onslaught. He simply could not walk away from the past. But from the outset his pursuit of Nazi War Criminals precluded any cooperation with ex-partisans seeking to dispatch murderers with a righteous bullet. Wiesenthal saw his mission as utilizing the very concepts of law and rights that the Nazis had laid waste to during their Blitzkrieg across Europe. It would turn out that the only rebuilding project this architect would ever undertake was to re-lay the foundations, legal brick by brick of the fundamentals of justice and human rights Hitler and his followers strove to obliterate. Each arrest and every trial was not only a token to the families of the victims of Nazi terror. It was in Wiesenthal’s words “an inoculation against hate and a warning to tomorrow’s potential mass murderers that they would be held accountable for their deeds.” It meant that Wiesenthal’s commitment to bring Nazi mass murderers to justice extended beyond Jewish victims to include the Gypsies and other targeted victims. It slowly but inevitably also brought him into contact with contemporary challenges to fundamental Human Rights. It accounted for his speaking out on such diverse issues from threatened indigenous tribes in the Americas to helping to lead the campaign to save Andrei Sakharov during his pivotal and historic confrontation with the Soviet Empire.

In the end Wiesenthal told me he took a measure of solace from the fact that he had lived long enough to see presidents and prime ministers stirred occasionally to action when new genocides loomed on the horizon. But alas, from Rwanda to Darfur to North Korea, humankind’s record is spotty at best, for we have failed to yet to fully embrace Wiesenthal’s vision of “Never Again.” Wiesenthal also said that he was shocked that he lived long enough to witness the reemergence of violent anti-Semitism in Europe.

And what of his 6 million constituents? Wiesenthal told of a Sabbath meal in Italy in the late 1940s. His friends were urging him to pick up the threads of his life and start building the houses he had been trained to design. His response as he looked into the twinkling candles: “Like all of you I believe in the World to Come, and I can safely say that in this world, you the jeweler, the doctor, the businessman will become rich, and I will have to struggle. But when we die we will have to pass before the 6 million and only I among you will be able to declare: ‘I never forgot you.’ In that world I will be the richest amongst us.”

Rest in peace, Simon and G-d bless.

Rabbi Cooper is the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He worked with Simon Wiesenthal for nearly three decades.