![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Oh, see, I didn't miss it after all, as I erroneously told Moggy.
Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day.
If a Name Captures the Soul, These Thousands Live On
By CLYDE HABERMAN
THROUGH the night and into the day, the roll call flowed on and on, a river of memory and pain.
This was a book of the dead, thick with names, so many names, tens of thousands of them bearing silent witness to the industrialized slaughter called the Holocaust. They formed a great weight, all those names, read aloud yesterday on the Upper West Side.
Aach, Bernhardt came first.
What kind of man was he? Impossible to tell. The book, an archival record in German, said only that he entered the world on May 16, 1883, in Trier, a town in western Germany, and died at Maidanek, a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. What date? "Verschollen," the book said. Never found.
Next was Aach, Johanna. She, too, lived in Trier. Bernhardt's wife, maybe? She would have been the right age, born on Feb. 22, 1882. She met her death at Auschwitz. When? Verschollen.
The roll call continued in alphabetical order. Abramson, Isidor. Abt, Henrietta. Deutsch, Zoltan. Epstein, Mathilde. Fuch, Siegfried.
So many names. It took 20 minutes just to recite the Adlers. There were 14 Max Adlers alone. And 10 Hedwig Abrahams. Or was it 9? It was easy to lose track. So many names. There was not enough time to get much beyond people named Glaser.
In varied ways yesterday, New Yorkers observed Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. On the Upper West Side, a tradition for much of the last decade has been for synagogues to band together to call out the names of the Nazis' Jewish victims. Through names, memory endures.
With six million Jewish dead, the task has to be made somewhat manageable. So the West Siders focus on a different nationality each year. It was the turn of German victims this time, their names preserved in German government records.
For 20 hours, from late Wednesday night until nearly sundown yesterday, people took turns reading from the grim book of memory. They began at Congregation Rodeph Sholom, on West 83rd Street, reading by the light of tall memorial candles. After sunrise, their vigil moved to the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, on Amsterdam Avenue.
Some read in a strong voice. Others could barely manage a whisper. More than a few added the names of relatives of their own who had perished.
One's name, many Jews believe, captures the soul. Jewish tradition is to name children after dead relatives, never the living. "That's the way you keep memory alive - the person lives on in the name," said Rabbi Carol Levithan, senior director of learning programs at the Jewish Community Center. "You say: May the memory be for a blessing."
For some, the remembrance ceremonies this year loom large because they coincide with the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Round numbers mean a lot to most people: a 30th birthday, a 40th, a 50th. It was lost on no one yesterday that by the 70th anniversary, precious few men and women who survived the Nazi nightmare will be around to tell what it was like to an all-too-forgetful world. In a sense, for those determined to keep Holocaust awareness alive, now comes the hard part.
"We were given life and placed on earth with a solemn obligation," said Menachem Rosensaft, a New York lawyer whose parents survived the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany and who was born at Bergen-Belsen in 1948. That obligation, he said, is to "ensure that their memories, which we have absorbed into ours, will remain as a permanent warning to humanity."
That is always the hope for memory, that it will serve to avert the next horror. But recent events show - in places like Rwanda, Bosnia and Sudan - that misery seems never to fall short of a quorum.
Yet it does not diminish the sense of duty felt by Holocaust survivors. Several went yesterday to Battery Park City for ceremonies at the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. There, they spoke to visiting school groups about what they experienced and how they avoided becoming one more name on that frightful roll call.
"I managed through some miracle," said Frederick Terna, who had passed through several camps, including Auschwitz. He is 82, an artist living in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. "When every 10th one was shot, I was No. 9," Mr. Terna said. "I'm a statistical accident, nothing more."
But that is more than enough. To tell his story yet again can be "emotionally exhausting," Mr. Terna said. But he does it. "I feel I should," he said. "How many of us are around?"
----------
Holocaust means "wholly burned". The word used to refer to a sacrifice in which everything was burned, not just the parts you didn't eat anyway.
In Romany, the Holocaust is known as Porrajmos, the Devouring. The Hebrew word is Shoah, which means the Ruin.
And this is how I deal with large numbers.
If a Name Captures the Soul, These Thousands Live On
By CLYDE HABERMAN
THROUGH the night and into the day, the roll call flowed on and on, a river of memory and pain.
This was a book of the dead, thick with names, so many names, tens of thousands of them bearing silent witness to the industrialized slaughter called the Holocaust. They formed a great weight, all those names, read aloud yesterday on the Upper West Side.
Aach, Bernhardt came first.
What kind of man was he? Impossible to tell. The book, an archival record in German, said only that he entered the world on May 16, 1883, in Trier, a town in western Germany, and died at Maidanek, a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. What date? "Verschollen," the book said. Never found.
Next was Aach, Johanna. She, too, lived in Trier. Bernhardt's wife, maybe? She would have been the right age, born on Feb. 22, 1882. She met her death at Auschwitz. When? Verschollen.
The roll call continued in alphabetical order. Abramson, Isidor. Abt, Henrietta. Deutsch, Zoltan. Epstein, Mathilde. Fuch, Siegfried.
So many names. It took 20 minutes just to recite the Adlers. There were 14 Max Adlers alone. And 10 Hedwig Abrahams. Or was it 9? It was easy to lose track. So many names. There was not enough time to get much beyond people named Glaser.
In varied ways yesterday, New Yorkers observed Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. On the Upper West Side, a tradition for much of the last decade has been for synagogues to band together to call out the names of the Nazis' Jewish victims. Through names, memory endures.
With six million Jewish dead, the task has to be made somewhat manageable. So the West Siders focus on a different nationality each year. It was the turn of German victims this time, their names preserved in German government records.
For 20 hours, from late Wednesday night until nearly sundown yesterday, people took turns reading from the grim book of memory. They began at Congregation Rodeph Sholom, on West 83rd Street, reading by the light of tall memorial candles. After sunrise, their vigil moved to the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, on Amsterdam Avenue.
Some read in a strong voice. Others could barely manage a whisper. More than a few added the names of relatives of their own who had perished.
One's name, many Jews believe, captures the soul. Jewish tradition is to name children after dead relatives, never the living. "That's the way you keep memory alive - the person lives on in the name," said Rabbi Carol Levithan, senior director of learning programs at the Jewish Community Center. "You say: May the memory be for a blessing."
For some, the remembrance ceremonies this year loom large because they coincide with the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Round numbers mean a lot to most people: a 30th birthday, a 40th, a 50th. It was lost on no one yesterday that by the 70th anniversary, precious few men and women who survived the Nazi nightmare will be around to tell what it was like to an all-too-forgetful world. In a sense, for those determined to keep Holocaust awareness alive, now comes the hard part.
"We were given life and placed on earth with a solemn obligation," said Menachem Rosensaft, a New York lawyer whose parents survived the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany and who was born at Bergen-Belsen in 1948. That obligation, he said, is to "ensure that their memories, which we have absorbed into ours, will remain as a permanent warning to humanity."
That is always the hope for memory, that it will serve to avert the next horror. But recent events show - in places like Rwanda, Bosnia and Sudan - that misery seems never to fall short of a quorum.
Yet it does not diminish the sense of duty felt by Holocaust survivors. Several went yesterday to Battery Park City for ceremonies at the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. There, they spoke to visiting school groups about what they experienced and how they avoided becoming one more name on that frightful roll call.
"I managed through some miracle," said Frederick Terna, who had passed through several camps, including Auschwitz. He is 82, an artist living in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. "When every 10th one was shot, I was No. 9," Mr. Terna said. "I'm a statistical accident, nothing more."
But that is more than enough. To tell his story yet again can be "emotionally exhausting," Mr. Terna said. But he does it. "I feel I should," he said. "How many of us are around?"
Holocaust means "wholly burned". The word used to refer to a sacrifice in which everything was burned, not just the parts you didn't eat anyway.
In Romany, the Holocaust is known as Porrajmos, the Devouring. The Hebrew word is Shoah, which means the Ruin.
And this is how I deal with large numbers.
no subject
WW II? Generations of bloody imperialism?
No, we have learned nothing - and how dare anyone suggest that we had anything to learn?
::weeps::
no subject
no subject
WW II? Generations of bloody imperialism?
No, we have learned nothing - and how dare anyone suggest that we had anything to learn?
::weeps::
no subject