One of my greatest memories of living in Israel was the sirens that wailed across the country, as everyone paid tribute to the six million Jewish people who perished in the Nazi Holocaust which now took place 70 years ago.
For two minutes every year on this day, pedestrians and traffic come to a standstill, and motorists stand next to their vehicles with heads bowed on one of the most solemn days on Israel’s calendar.
All radio and television programs are connected in one way or another with the Jewish destiny in World War II, including personal interviews with survivors. Even the musical programs are adapted to the atmosphere of Yom Hashoah. There is no public entertainment on Yom Hashoah, as theaters, cinemas, pubs, and other public venues are closed throughout Israel.
I was studying at Hebrew University at the time and the day had tremendous significance to me personally and as a Jew. I attended a rally at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum, and I’ll never forget the then Prime Minister, Yitzak Shamir, bellowing out calls for it never to happen again. Standing amongst hundreds, if not thousands, of survivors at the museum left a mark on my soul and I vowed never to forget.
This morning at my synagogue, we remembered the 6 million Jews who perished during the war and it was clear how faint these voices are becoming. Seventy years later, many of the survivors are leaving this world or have already left, and dozens of members of my congregation stood up to salute their beloved members of their families whose lives were cut short so senselessly. Grandmothers, uncles, aunts, sisters, brothers…we have lost so many beloved members of our families. It was hard to hear.
In the room next door to the memorial service, my son, a first grader, was exploring the art of Mordechai Rosenstein with the artist himself. He was spending a weekend in residence at our temple and gave a wonderful presentation during Shabbat services yesterday. At the same time we were remembering the millions of Jews who died during the Holocaust, he was learning how to turn the letters of the Hebrew alphabet into a story of his life. If the six million could talk, they would have had cheered. Everytime we teach a child something sweet about life, we push a stake into Hitler’s heart. He didn’t succeed in wiping out a nation and we have our children and so much more to prove it.
Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation has recorded hours and hours of actual testimony from survivors, which are so important to preserving this ugly part of history. I worked with the Shoah Foundation in my 20′s and helped to preserve some of these stories. The moments with the survivors are engraved in my memory and will follow me for the rest of my life. I have friends whose parents are survivors and they still can not talk about their experiences, as dreadful and torturous as they were. I have roamed the halls of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and have been back to Yad Vashem many times to revisit the stories, the testimonies, the realities.
The photo above is of my synagogue’s monument to remember the the Holocaust. On it are the names of victims who are relatives of my synagogue’s members. We are building an interactive Holocaust Learning Center to be a source of learning not just about the facts about the Shoah, but to show the human side and how it affected our families. I am proud to be a member of that committee. We feel that beyond the dark statistics of the Holocaust, the tragedy can best be taught, remembered, and transmitted through the personal stories that WJC member families actually experienced.
As the voices get fainter, we must remember… and never forget.
I leave you with this poem from a play I was in as a teenager, I Never Saw Another Butterfly. The play centered around Raja, one of the children who survived in Terezin, and her family and friends. She shares her story of living in the concentration camp, while retaining a world filled with butterflies and flowers with other children in the camp.
The Butterfly
The last, the very last, So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow. Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing against a white stone. . . . Such, such a yellow Is carried lightly ‘way up high. It went away I’m sure because it wished to kiss the world good-bye. For seven weeks I’ve lived in here, Penned up inside this ghetto. But I have found what I love here. The dandelions call to me And the white chestnut branches in the court. Only I never saw another butterfly. That butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don’t live in here, in the ghetto.
- by Pavel Friedman
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