Hillel Foundation to Feature Week-long Holocaust Observance

The Hillel Foundation on the Brooklyn College campus believes the Nazi holocaust of 25 years ago contains an urgent warning for the generation growing up today. It will devote the week of April 19-22 to a program of multi-media activities focussing attention on the genocide committed against six million Jews in Europe. In “An Open Letter to the Generation After,” the Holocaust Observance Week committee declared, “Yesterday’s scapegoats were the Jews of Europe. Tomorrow’s victims; the Blacks? The ‘radical liberals’? Even You.” The Hillel students, under the chairmanship of Iris Elyakin will sponsor public lectures, a guerrilla theater, poetry readings, ghetto folk singing and creative dance interpretations of the holocaust theme. Several films dealing with the Nazi period in Europe will be screened, among them the Czech film “Shop on Main Street.” Evening torchlight processions accompanied by readings from the Book of Lamentations and a 28th anniversary Warsaw Ghetto photographic exhibit will be part of the observance.

Prof. William Forman, president of the Faculty Hillel Associates, said in a letter to the faculty today, “In the light of Mylai the conscience of every American has been painfully and dramatically alerted to the grim possibility and frightening truth that ‘It can happen everywhere.’ ” At the same time, the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization announced a candle-lighting ceremony at Carnegie Hall April 18th to mark the 28th anniversary of the uprising. Guest speakers will include Sen. Jacob K. Javits of New York, Rabbi Herschel Schacter, chairman of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry and Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld, president of the American Jewish Congress. The Zionist organization’s youth movement, Masada, in Chicago, announced today that it will hold special programs on April 17 and 27 to commemorate the holocaust and memorialize Israeli soldiers fallen in battle.