A well-known Yiddish poet is engaged in a one-man campaign to build a memorial in New York City for the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Wolf Pasmanik is button-holing everyone he can, either in person or through poetry readings in coffee houses and on radio and television to convey his singular message about the need for a memorial. “I am fearful that the younger generation will forget the horrors of World War 11 and its tragic attendant circumstances,” he said.
Active in many literary and arts groups, Pasmanik wrote a poem, “There’s No Monument in New York,” to dramatize the situation. The first stanza reads: “There is no Monument in New York–/ Nor memorial to our slain./ I walk with my grief alone./ The two of us bent./ As dogs howl,/ And write down my anguish / With the rears of my eyes / By the light of the setting sun.”
“I must have read my poem a thousand times before all kinds of societies and organizations, as well as before important governmental and nongovernmental personalities,” Pasmanik stated. His persistence, he feels, may have borne results in that others are now also taking up the cause for a monument “to carry the message of sadness all people feel about the death of those who were killed without any cause during the war,” as Pasmanik put it.
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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.
