Holocaust Week

For eight days starting April 22 and ending April 29 Americans will commemorate the six million Jewish and five million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Preceded by Congressional resolution and the proclamations of President Carter, state governors and hundreds of mayors, ceremonies in numerous cities in all sections of America will remember the martyrs of the worst mass human destruction in history. The central memorial event will be the national civic commemoration in the rotunda of the nation’s Capital at noon on April 24 which also is international Holocaust Commemoration Day.

The President’s Commission on the Holocaust has announced that Carter and Elie Wiesel, the distinguished author of numerous writings on the Holocaust who is the Commission’s chairman, will speak at the ceremony. Both the Senate and the House will recess for the occasion to permit their members to attend. A children’s chair will sing songs composed in the Nazi death camps. Since April 24 is also the memorial day for the Armenian genocide, an additional memorial prayer for the Armenians will be recited.

SPECIAL EVENTS FOR THE WEEK

The week of remembrance, the Commission said, includes state and city memorial programs, religious services and special lectures and conferences in universities and community centers. Special religious services are to be held April 22 and April 28 and 29. The Commission, which coordinated the ceremonies, estimates that more than 10,000 congregations will incorporate the Holocaust in their liturgies during these days of remembrance.

The Commission has established a national religious council for remembrance consisting of 12, Protestants, 12 Catholics and 12 Jews, each to call upon his or her own tradition to commemorate the Holocaust. “The number,” the Commission observed, “is symbolic of the 36 righteous people who, by assuming responsibility for others sustain the world.” Jewish families, the Commission has suggested, may light 24 yahrzeit candles on the evening of April 23 to burn past sundown April 24.

The Commission and its advisory group will meet April 24 to determine where the permanent memorial to the martyrs will be established. It is understood that the Commission’s majority leans toward Washington as its location and that it be in the form of a museum with appropriate facilities to enable visitors to study, learn and understand the toll of prejudice, hatred and violence, and the apathy of bystanders during the Holocaust.

In a letter to directors of programs for the remembrance, Rabbi Irving Greenberg, the Commission’s executive director, quoted Wiesel’s remarks that closed the Commission’s first meeting. Himself a survivor of the death camps, Wiesel urged that “our remembering aims at saving as many men and women as possible from apathy to evil, if not from evil itself…When war unleashes its evil against one people, all are engulfed in the fire.”