Thousands Gather to Begin Commemoration of Yom Hashoah

"Ben, do you remember me?" "Ben, where are the politicians seated?" "Ben, which way should the first candle be lighted?"

It seemed that nearly everyone who toiled to assemble Sunday’s gathering of 5,000 Holocaust survivors and their children at Madison Square Garden here was ultimately depending on Benjamin Meed, the man who for the last 25 years has brought together Holocaust survivors to remember.

As the noise swelled inside the cavernous hall, Meed, who is president of the American Gathering/Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization, was answering every last-minute question.

As this was happening, the children’s chorus from Park East Synagogue and the Yeshiva University Choir were getting ready to sing; children from the Yeshiva of Flatbush were assembling to march with candles; and the Shomrim, Jewish members of New York City’s police force, were directing the coterie of political figures in attendance to their seats.

There were 32 women in black readying to light candles. Among them was Guta Trokenheim, who spent 22 months surviving in a grave with her daughter, who is now a grandmother in Israel.

There was petite Rose Goldman, whose father told her to flee the Lodz ghetto for the woods. She alone in her family survived, often by sharing her one daily potato with a mouse.

In the gathering sat Jonas Rosenberg, also of Lodz, and Auschwitz, formerly the "main mixer" of Levy’s Jewish Rye. Rosenberg said he would "like to help Israel gain. freedom … Something has to be done."

CEREMONIES IN MANY OTHER CITIES

The Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which has worked with WAGRO for five years on the annual gathering, sent a letter to 70 rabbis in the greater New York area adjuring them to encourage their congregants to participate in commemorations of the Holocaust.

Meed, a retired export businessman, has worked on this project for the last eight years, increasing the numbers of attendees from 200 to 5,000 for the last few years in New York.

That is slightly less than the number that Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum accommodates. But on Sunday, the hall was almost totally filled, despite sunny skies outside and the festivities marking the bicentennial of George Washington’s inauguration, which brought President Bush to New York.

Meed, who is also chairman of the Days of Remembrance Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, noted that Sunday began the Days of Remembrance, which includes the official Yom Hashoah that is celebrated Tuesday in Israel.

Sunday there were services of remembrance in Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Montreal and many other cities.

Tuesday, a commemoration will be held in Miami, at a Holocaust memorial whose roof is not yet in place.

Ceremonies also will be held Tuesday in Washington, in the Capitol Rotunda and on the Mall. Senators and survivors will light candles.

Memorial ceremonies will end Sunday in Skokie, III., at the monument erected in memory of Holocaust victims by the Chicago suburb that is home to so many survivors.

About a million people will take part in all these ceremonies, said Meed. And they will speak of "solidarity with Israel," he said. He was the first of many Sunday who sounded that theme.

A PEOPLE WHO REMEMBER

Among them was New York Mayor Edward Koch, who said he thought of this event as he stood next to Bush at the bicentennial festivities.

"I stood there and I thought, the security of Israel is so vital, and I’m not sure everyone remembers that," said Koch.

Seymour Reich, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organization and president of B’nai B’rith International, asked what if there had been an Israel during World War II? We must help her now, he said.

But the most plaintive call came in Yiddish, from a child survivor who is now the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv.

Israel Lau, who was leaving Sunday evening to visit the Jews of the Soviet Union, recalled surviving Buchenwald with his brother, Naftali Lavie, who became Israel’s consul general in New York.

Lau remembers looking at line after line of women for their mother, who had not survived.

Now "I look for the memory," he said. "I speak of the memory of the Jewish people."

He added, "A people without a memory has no future."