Rabbi Jack Bemporad wants it known that the visit he organized of eight Muslim-American leaders to concentration camps was a historic success.

Bemporad, director of the Carlstadt-based Center for Interreligious Understanding, called the Aug. 7 to 11 trip to Auschwitz in Germany and Dachau in Poland “a breakthrough in many respects, because … we took imams like [Yasir] Qadhi, for example,” who 10 years ago called the Holocaust a hoax. (Bemporad led the trip, which was sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, with Prof. Marshall Breger of the Catholic University of America.)

Following is a statement issued by the Muslim leaders who visited Auschwitz and Dachau last month.

“O you who believe, stand up firmly for justice as witnesses to Almighty God.” (Holy Qu’ran, al-Nisa “The Women” 4:135)

On Aug. 7-11, 2010, we the undersigned Muslim American faith and community leaders visited Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps where we witnessed firsthand the historical injustice of the Holocaust.

The Union for Traditional Judaism’s Teaneck headquarters sold at auction early last month, but a motion filed last week in U.S. bankruptcy court last week cast doubt on the transaction.

UTJ’s attorney, Janice Grubin, filed a motion on Aug. 27 requesting an extension for her client to file a Chapter 11 plan. Extending this period of exclusivity, during which the debtor can create a plan to pull itself out of bankruptcy without imposed outside solutions, is not atypical in bankruptcy cases, she said. The property went to auction on Aug. 4, which was won by 333 Realty for $1.45 million.

Calling Florida Pastor Terry Jones’ proposed burning of the Koran on Sept. 11 both “catastrophically stupid and fundamentally immoral,” Rabbi Jordan Millstein, religious leader of Temple Sinai in Tenafly, said such an act would have major repercussions.

Jones — pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla. — has proposed that 9/11 be declared “International Burn a Koran Day.” Defending his idea on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Aug. 26, the pastor said, “We want to send a very clear message” to Muslims that Sharia law is not welcome in America.

Teaneck resident Alan Brill’s new book, “Judaism and Other Religions: Models of Understanding” (Palgrave MacMillan), is a sort of post-tolerance manifesto for a post 9/11 world.

The humanistic approach to tolerance in today’s Western world treats “the other” as secular without requiring any understanding of the other’s religion, argues Brill, an Orthodox rabbi, interfaith activist, and Cooperman/Ross endowed professor in honor of Sister Rose Thering at Seton Hall University in East Orange.

Members of Temple Emanu-el of Closter, led by Rabbi David-Seth Kirshner, recently returned from an 11-day family b’nai mitzvah trip to Israel.

Nearly 80 members of the congregation (20 families) participated in the trip, held Aug. 16 to 27, visiting sites from the Western Wall to Masada.

What was a young black bear doing in a playground at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly Monday night?

“Playing a little bit,” said Avi Lewinson, the JCC’s executive director. “He was climbing some of the apparatus.”

Lewinson and Paul Costa, the facility director, were close enough to be “almost dancing with the bear,” he said. But, he added, “it was looking to stay away from me as much as I was looking to stay away from it.”

Joyce Heller has some great stories.

Hired four years ago to teach math at Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School for Girls, she learned that while students there had performed dramas, they had never done any musicals.

Setting out to remedy that, she directed and produced their first musical, “Oliver,” which she describes as a “great success.”