By Leyna Krow, Assistant Editor, JTNews
In Israel, Yom HaShoah is a day of collective sorrow. Flags are lowered to half-mast. Midmorning, air raid sirens sound and all activity comes to a halt for two minutes while the nation reflects on everything and everyone lost during the Holocaust.
In the U.S., Holocaust Remembrance Day is a much quieter affair. But this does not stop many Jews, and non-Jews a like, from taking the time to remember.
Across Washington State, members of the Jewish community gathered at a variety of locations to mourn the death of the 6 million European Jews lost in the Holocaust, as well as the victims of more recent atrocities.
More than 300 people attended a Yom HaShoah commemoration ceremony sponsored by the Washington State Holocaust Resource Education Center on Mercer Island on May 4. The event began at the Stroum Jewish Community Center with a memorial service and a candle lighting ceremony. Participants then walked across the street to the Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation for a talk on “Moral Responsibility in Our Post-Holocaust World,” given by Holocaust scholar and Claremont McKenna College professor John Roth.
Pastor Barry Keating from the Maplewood Presbyterian Church also spoke during the event, emphasizing the need for remembrance to extend beyond just the Jewish community.
“It’s important for those of us in the Christian community to be reminded of this horrific brutality,” Keating said of his motivation for speaking at Herzl-Ner Tamid. “We need to be vigilant and make sure that [that] kind of bigotry doesn’t take hold in our society today, whether it’s directed toward people of different religions or members of the gay and lesbian community, or anyone else.”
Although the majority of those in attendance were Herzl-Ner Tamid members, Holocaust Center co-executive director Laurie Warshal Cohen noted that a sizable percentage of people came from other parts of the community, including the 12 student winners of the Holocaust Center’s annual writing and art contest, most of whom were not Jewish.
“We always like to think of this as a community-wide event,” Cohen said.
Herzl-Ner Tamid has been hosting Yom HaShoah commemorations in conjunction with the Holocaust Center since the early 1990s.
Temple Beth El in Tacoma and the community of Winthrop, Wash. also hosted memorials in honor of Yom HaShoah, with the help of the Holocaust Center.
Both events featured guest speaker Henry Friedman, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust thanks to the kindness of two Ukrainian families who hid both him and his parents during the last two years of the war.
In Winthrop, Friedman was joined by Leo Hymas, who was part of the American military team that liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.
Students from Liberty Bell Junior/Senior High School were also in attendance at the Winthrop commemoration to present a multi-media project which linked stories of heroism from the Holocaust with those of other 20th century humanitarian catastrophes.
Cohen feels that presentations like the one by the Liberty Bell students (which link the Holocaust to other, more recent tragedies) are a crucial part of Yom HaShoah.
“Yom HaShoah is certainly a time for survivors to reflect on their loss, but [it is]also a time to connect past losses with lessons for the future,” she said.
On May 1, more than 70 people gathered together at St. Mark’s Cathedral on Capitol Hill for a Christian memorial service in honor of Yom HaShoah.
The service was co-sponsored by Temple De Hirsch Sinai and Seattle University’s School of Theology.
According to Rabbi Daniel Weiner of Temple De Hirsch Sinai, the service included prayers in both Hebrew and English, a candle lighting ceremony and the blowing of a shofar.
“I hope people took away a greater awareness of what the Holocaust’s significance was from a Christian theological perspective,” Weiner said. “We also made an effort to link more broadly to issues of contemporary genocide and the obligations on the part of both communities to stop it.”
On the same day, students at South Seattle Community College heard from several survivors during its fourth annual commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Students at the University of Washington took a slightly different approach to Holocaust Remembrance Day. Instead of a memorial service, members of several campus organizations, including Tzedek UW, Huskies for Israel, the Jewish Fraternity AEPi, and Students Taking Action Now for Darfur all set up a display about the Holocaust in the center of campus on May 2, and encouraged the students passing by to stop and light a candle, or to just reflect for a moment on the loss of those who were killed.
Hannah Zommick, student member of Tzedek UW, said that a portion of the Yom HaShoah display was also dedicated to the memory of those who had died in the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides, as well as the current genocide in Sudan.
“We can always say ‘never forget’ and ‘this will never happen again,’ but it has happened again, and it’s important to keep that in mind when we talk about the Holocaust” she said.
Zommick said that throughout the course of the day, students from a variety of backgrounds stopped to ask questions, read names, light candles or say the Mourner’s Kaddish.
“There were no petitions, no protest, no political agenda,” she said. “We just wanted to give people a chance, [while] walking between classes, to take a moment and remember.”