This year, the annual Yom Hashoah Holocaust Remembrance Day program was about the victims of the Holocaust - all of them.
It didn't just remember the Jews, but the Gypsies, the disabled, the homosexuals, the dissidents, the Freemasons and everyone else who fell victim to the brutal German regime."As we remember the 6 million, we need to remember the others - the millions of others - who suffered from Nazi terror," said program chair Nicholas Lane. "We need to remember the words of Elie Wiesel: 'All the Jews were victims, but not all the victims were Jews.' "
The program was one of several planned around western Pennsylvania and West Virginia to mark the Holocaust. Before a smaller than normal crowd at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall in Oakland - it was the first time the Yom Hashoah program was held there - six Holocaust survivors performed the annual ritual of lighting candles in memory of some or all victims of the Holocaust. This year's candle lighters were Sam Gottesman, Fritz Ottenheimer, Abe Salem, Jack Sittsamer, Sam Weinreb and Yolanda Avram Willis. Sittsamer told the silent crowd how the S.S. shot his father "right in front of me and my family."
But the program soon returned to the theme of remembering all victims of the Holocaust regardless of their background. Steve Zupcic, a Holocaust Centre Commission board member, lit a candle for the righteous gentiles, retelling a story of two Croatian brothers who risked their lives to save 300-plus Jews from the capital, Zagreb. And Sister M. Noel Kernan, a co-founder of the National Catholic Centre for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University, Greensburg, lit a candle honouring all other victims. "It is tragically clear to all of us that letting evil go unchecked allows it to replicate itself," she said.
The keynote speaker, Henry Friedlander, professor emeritus of history at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, reminded the crowd that the three groups specifically marked for extermination - Jews, Gypsies and the disabled - were chosen based on their heredity, "and they could not change it." Himself an educator and a survivor, Friedlander lauded the participants for taking the time to remember what had happened.
"Teaching about these events is about as much homage as one can do [for] them," he said. Soloists Sara Stock Mayo and Rowina Sutin led the audience in the U.S. and Israeli national anthems. Temple Sinai Intergenerational Choir performed "Ani Maamin" (I Believe). Rabbi Ezra Ende, also of Temple Sinai, chanted "Keyl Maley Rachamim" and Rabbi Mordecai Glatstein led the assembled in the Mourners Kaddish.
In addition to lighting a candle, Salem again led everyone - in Yiddish - in the Partisan Song, once sung by the Vilna Ghetto partisans. United Jewish Federation Chair Barbara Burstin quoted philosopher Emil Fackenheim, who posited that a 614th daily commandment has existed since the end of the Holocaust - to remember it. ·
Elsewhere, the Hillel Jewish University Centre held its own Holocaust remembrance ceremony on Sunday in Oakland at the JUC. Organisers Rebecca Lehner and Jennifer Kurtzman read a passage from "Night" by Elie Wiesel, showed slides from their trip to Poland last year on the March of the Living, and took questions from the participants. "We made it a very intimate-like setting," Kurtzman said. About 15 people attended.
The South Hills Interfaith Ministries plans its own remembrance ceremony on Sunday, April 22, at 7 p.m. at Southminster Presbyterian Church, Mt. Lebanon. The theme is "Korczak's Children: Orphans in the Warsaw Ghetto." · At Penn State, Hillel held a Holocaust memorial at the Pasquerilla Spiritual Centre. Visitors viewed historical photographs from the Holocaust, as well as photographs from Hillel's Holocaust/educational programming co-chair Alyssa Rosenblum's summer 2005 trip to Poland. There were also memorial cards for people to fill out, so that they could express their personal remembrance for the six million Jews as a whole, for family members affected by the Holocaust, or for any memoriam they chose. ·
The West Virginia University Hillel held its annual "Unto Every Person There is a Name" program, a 24-hour reading of names of Holocaust victims on Wednesday, April 11, outside the Mountain lair student union. · A reading of names also was held Sunday at the Charleston Town Centre in Charleston, W.Va., a remembrance service took place later that day at Temple B'nai Israel. · Temple Shalom in Wheeling, W.Va., sponsored a remembrance ceremony for its members and religious school children on Sunday. · Temple Beth El in Beckley, W.Va., held a ceremony at Mountain State University.
A Holocaust survivor, Daniel Kereth of nearby Bluefield, W.Va., and a former librarian at Concord University, recounted his experiences. The ceremony also included a recounting by Margaux Siegel of the story of Max Lewin, a Holocaust survivor who lived in Beckley until his death in 2002. Siegel promised Lewin she would tell his story when he no longer could. Lewin, whose parents and siblings died in the Holocaust, donated money to Mountain State in the 1990s to build a bell tower that bears his name. By Lee ChottinerExecutive
EditorPittChron.com 19th April 2007