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For Sharon Frant Brooks, the legacy of the 160 Jews who were murdered in Dubiecko, Poland, the town's old Jewish cemetery, and her grandfather's music all came together in one memorable ceremony.

Frant Brooks, a Clinton resident and a member of the Flemington Jewish Community Center, has been working since 2006 to restore the cemetery (which has no gravestones) and memorialize Dubiecko's Holocaust victims, including 80 shot by the Nazis on June 24, 1942. Her father, Milton Frant, and grandfather Chaskel Frand, who was part of a group that played religious and secular music in Dubiecko, both escaped the Nazis.

Along with several other relatives, Frant Brooks recently made her third trip to Poland for the June 24 unveiling of a monument in Dubiecko's town square in memory of the town's Jews. Rabbi Michael Schudrich, chief rabbi of Poland, and the mayor of Dubiecko both attended, in addition to Polish print and broadcast media. After the unveiling, Schudrich recited the "El Malei Rachamim" prayer for the deceased at the cemetery, a priest read a translation of the prayer, and three high school girls read the names and ages of the 160 slain Jews. The program ended with a performance of Frand's violin and sheet music by a local group.

The day's events represented not only a moving memorial for Dubiecko's Jews, but also a "catharsis" for the older non-Jewish residents of the town who are still trying to come to grips with the atrocities of the Holocaust, Frant Brooks said.

"The emotional response from the older people in the town was quite moving," Frant Brooks said.

"As I like to say, they are doing teshuva (repentance) now," she said.

There was only one family in Dubiecko that hid Jews during the Holocaust, Frant Brooks said. One woman who was saved by that family, Miriam, now lives in Chicago and mailed Frant Brooks a note to give to Teresa, one of the family's daughters. Frant Brooks discovered Teresa because Miriam's granddaughter lives in Lakewood and is her co-worker. At the ceremony, Teresa showed off her medals from the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.

"She was so proud of what her family had done," Frant Brooks said of Teresa.

Frant Brooks is still waiting for the Polish government to approve a marker at the cemetery's mass grave, and Schudrich has assured her that the funding for that project will be attained. Along with the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODZ) and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), Frant Brooks is also trying to establish a scholarship fund for Dubiecko high school students who submit art or writing projects displaying an understanding of the Jewish culture that existed in Dubiecko.

Before the Holocaust, Dubiecko had vibrant Jewish, Ukrainian, and Polish communities that didn't love each other but "at least coexisted," Frant Brooks said. Berta, an innkeeper where Frant Brooks stayed during the trip, told her that while other Polish towns openly discuss the Holocaust, "Here in Dubiecko, they have silent memory."

The crowd at the ceremony was particularly moved when the high school girls read the names and ages of the murdered Jews because a number of them died as infants, Frant Brooks said.

"If they didn't get the magnitude of it before, they got it then," she said.

Frant Brooks was also moved by hearing her grandfather's music played by non-Jews.

The local musicians "interspersed the modern with the old" by also playing their own music, she said.

Bernice Bernstein of Highland Park, Frant Brooks' cousin, also came to Poland and said of the music that, "There was encore after encore, they just didn't want these people to stop playing." During the ceremony for the monument and at the cemetery, "I just cried through the whole thing," Bernstein said.

Bernstein said she is often asked why she wants to visit Poland -- this was her second trip -- considering that seeing the town where her relatives were killed is such a painful experience. Bernstein responds that just like American Jews who visit the gravesites of their relatives before Rosh Hashanah, and just like those who visit the sites of former concentration camps in Europe, she goes to Dubiecko because somebody needs to be there for the Jews who died.

"Who's going to go to the [Dubiecko] cemetery for these people?" Bernstein asked.

Dubiecko made a "monumental effort" to clean up and pave the streets of town square for the unveiling, Frant Brooks said. Town square is called a "Rynek" in Polish. The Rynek is where Dubiecko's Jews used to live because of its proximity to government buildings and the police station for safety purposes. Synagogues were also located in the Rynek, she said. Having the ceremony in town square "kind of brought home that [Jews] were a major part of the community" in Dubiecko before the Holocaust, Frant Brooks said.

Shevach Weiss, Israeli ambassador to Poland, submitted a letter that was read at the ceremony.

"I am very grateful for your initiative to restore memory of people, places, and events -- in a very positive spirit," Weiss wrote. "It is very important and necessary in defining the future and to draw conclusions from the painful lessons of history."