Port Jervis Memorial Day ceremony honors sacrifice, urges remembrance

Dozens gathered in Port Jervis’ historic Orange Square for a Memorial Day ceremony that paired music, prayer and a direct challenge to remember the fallen long after the holiday crowd went home.

Tri-States Naval Ship Post 7241 commander Fabrizzio Morejon, serving as master of ceremonies, framed the observance around the cost of freedom and the gap between a day of cookouts and the lived memory carried by veterans and Gold Star families. He urged residents to visit cemeteries, say the names of the dead and teach children their stories, turning the city’s annual tribute into a call for civic responsibility rather than a routine holiday stop.

Students from the Port Jervis School District supplied patriotic band, choral and solo performances, while the Broome Street Band also added music to the tribute. The ceremony gave Orange Square the look and feel of a shared public lesson, with younger performers and veterans’ organizations standing together in the city’s central memorial space.

Steve Kronimus, chaplain of Roosa-Fleming VFW Post 161, offered a prayer that asked for remembrance of those who lived and died defending freedom and for the community to remain true in war and peace. The message matched the setting. Port Jervis, a city at the junction of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, has long used Orange Square Veterans Memorial Park as a focal point for military memory.

That memorial tradition dates to the Civil War. The monument at Orange Square was dedicated on July 5, 1886, before about 10,000 people, and historical sources say it was funded through the will of Diana Farnum. A local historical society says 428 Port Jervis names were on the town’s Civil War honor roll and 45 were killed, figures that still give weight to the square’s role in the city’s public life. After World War I, the site broadened into a memorial for veterans of all wars.

The observance also fit into a wider national ritual. Memorial Day fell on Monday, May 25, 2026, and the White House proclamation set aside 11:00 a.m. local time for the National Moment of Remembrance. In Port Jervis, that hour landed in a place that has repeatedly been used for public veterans observances, including a Veterans Day ceremony in 2024 and the addition of a canine soldiers monument that same year. Together, those events show a city that keeps returning to Orange Square not only to mark a date, but to define what remembrance should demand from the living.