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Speakers slammed Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust, threatening Israel and seeking nuclear weapons.

“It is time to isolate Iran,” Rabbi Aaron Bergman, of Adat Shalom synagogue in Farmington Hills, said to the crowd. “If you call for the destruction of others, you have lost the right to such technology.”

Bergman, who lost family members in the Holocaust, said the Iranian leader is a serious threat.

“As a child of a survivor who lost everyone he loved, I am saddened and angry … by a man who says Israel is a cancer,” he said. “When Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, he’s kicking over their headstones, saying our loved ones did not die, that they did not even exist.”

The rally was held by the Jewish Community Council of Metropolitan Detroit and included students from local Jewish schools. A similar rally was held today in New York City.

One of the local speakers was the Rev. Kenneth Flowers of Greater New Mt. Moriah Baptist Church in Detroit. “I speak out against evil in any form,” Flowers said. “If you have a person like Ahmadinejad, who speaks about the annihilation and destruction of Israel and the U.S., as a man of faith, I have to come against something like that. You can’t sit idly by and do nothing when someone is talking about blowing up an entire country and destroying an entire people.”

The protesters held up signs that read: “Never again, act now,” “Israel is on the map to stay,” “Stop Iran nukes” and “Don’t let Iran wipe Israel off the map.”

Sarah Spitzer, a student at Yeshivat Akiva school in Southfield, said there is a problem with Islamic extremists with “backward beliefs” who “wish to conquer the world with them.” She added that the Iranian leader is coming to New York with a “smile on his face, sugar in his words and a knife in his pocket.”

Zoe Pinter, 16, of Franklin Jewish Academy, said that being “anti-Israel is synonymous with being anti-Semitic.”

Israel “is the land promised to us by God in the Bible” and by the United Nations, she said.

“Ahmadinejad must be stopped,” Pinter added. We cannot be silenced.”

Other speakers said the Iranian government has cracked down on rights for women and gays, and is spending money on terrorism rather than helping its own people.

“Increase the sanctions on Iran,” Robert Cohen, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, said to the crowd