More than 1500 Washington area residents marked Heroes and Martyrs Day (Yom Hashoa) at Congregation Bnai Israel in Rockville, Md, honoring the Jewish resistance movement against the Nazis and the six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis. The memorial meeting Sunday also marked the 30th anniversary of “Exodus – 1947” symbolic of the “Aliya Bet” of Holocaust survivors to Israel.
In a candle lighting ceremony, six children from local Hebrew schools marched into the synagogue and handed lighted candles to six survivors of the Holocaust, symbolically representing the victims of Nazism. A menorah handcrafted by Erwin Thieberger, a survivor of Blachhammer concentration camp, was presented for the occasion.
“Despite the bestiality and inhumanity of the Nazi oppressors, the Jewish people will survive and will continue to defend and safeguard the principles of humanity, decency and morality,” declared Bernard S. White, president of the Greater Washington Jewish Community Council. He acknowledged the presence in the audience of a number of leading Catholic and Protestant clergy with whom the Jewish community has shared many concerns. The program was arranged by the Council.
Rabbi Matthew Simon, of Congregation Bnai Israel, said “Hitler’s purpose was to destroy a people. Our answer must be to survive as a people. We must not give Hitler the final victory. There is a 614th mitzvah to the traditional 613: ‘Thou shalt survive as Jews; the Jewish people shall survive.’ “
Abe Malnik, president of Club Shalom, called for maintaining the memory of those who perished. “If we fail to keep their memory fresh, if we falter and forget, they will shamefully die a second death,” he said. On display were posters of the Holocaust era and lithographs and silk screen paintings by Samuel Bak, a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto who now resides in Israel. The lithographs were loaned to the Council for the occasion.
OTHER YOM HASHOA EVENTS
In other Yom Hashoa events, the World Jewry Committee of the Jewish Students Coalition-Hillel at the University of Albany in New York, sponsored a 24-hour vigil for Soviet Jewry tying it in with its Yom Hashoa observance. The theme of the vigil was “In 1938 we did not know; in 1977 we have no excuse.” The vigil, designed as a learning experience for the Jewish and Gentile students included speakers, films, dramatic readings and songs.
In New York, the first sculpture memorial to the six million Jews was dedicated today at the national headquarters of the Workmen’s Circle. The 7 1/2 foot bronze cast was sculpted by Natan Rapoport whose granite tribute to the Warsaw Ghetto defenders stands on the site of the original Polish Jewish community in Warsaw and whose other memorials are at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and Kibbutz Yad Mordecai.
Bernard Backer. Workmen’s Circle president stated: “It is ironical that for 34 years there has not been a memorial erected in New York commemorating the Holocaust. Philadelphia has a Rapoport sculpture. Paris has its Monument for the Jewish Heroes of the Second World War, also by Rapoport. Now we have one in New York.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
