Memorial Hall, the most hallowed spot at the U.S. Naval Academy here, was the setting for a Holocaust memorial service on Sunday that included the dramatic presentation of a Torah saved from a Czechoslovakian town whose Jewish residents perished in the tragedy.
Longtime observers of the Navy noted the significance of such a ceremony, the second annual Yom Hashoah commemoration to be held at the academy, and the level of Navy and local dignitaries who participated.
Jewish residents of Annapolis were moved while listening to Hebrew prayers sung by the 50-voice Naval Academy Glee Club and Cantor Melvin Luterman of Baltimore in the academy halls.
Rear Adm. Virgil Hill, superintendent of the Naval Academy, said in his remarks to the audience of more than 400 people that it was fitting for the service to be held in stately Memorial Hall, where Navy men who died in U.S. wars are memorialized.
He noted, though, that the deaths of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust were “infinitely more tragic,” because the Navy men chose their profession, with its risks, while the Holocaust victims died “not for what they chose but for who they were.”
Hill said that many of those who have served and died in the Navy have been Jews, and he stressed the importance of remembering what took place during the Holocaust.
TORAH PRESENTED BY B’NAI B’RITH
“Today we remember so that we may never have to ask, ‘What does this have to do with me?'”
He said the Navy was proud to receive the Torah, whose history was traced by Gerald Kraft, past president of B’nai B’rith International.
The Torah, donated by B’nai B’rith, was one of 1,564 sacred scrolls brought from Czechoslovakia to London’s Westminster Synagogue in 1964.
Kraft explained that the Torah came from the town of Kyjov, in Moravia, Czechoslovakia. All of the Jews from the town were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Austria, and from there to Buchenwald and Treblinka in Germany, Only a few survived.
The one-hour ceremony also featured readings from poems written by children in concentration camps; the recitation of the Kaddish led by Lt. Cmdr. Norman Auerback, Jewish chaplain at the academy; and several hymns, in Hebrew, chanted by Cantor Luterman and the Glee Club.
At the conclusion of the service, Cantor Luterman sang the Shma Yisrael as he led the Torah procession from Memorial Hall to Mitscher Hall, where the Torah was installed in a glass case in the Jewish chapel.
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.
