This year, on Yom HaShoah, the duty of remembrance is shifting to a younger generation as the numbers of survivors dwindles, as most are old and often in
frail health.
Yom HaShoah, which falls on May 5-6, also rings differently this year with the increase in hate directed toward Israel and Jews, said Ron Halber, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington.
“As we bear witness to burgeoning antisemitism, it’s more important to remind our own young people and the world at large of the Jewish genocide and the danger of unchecked hate,” Halber said.
The Yom HaShoah commemoration is JCRC’s most sacred obligation, Halber said. The commitment to education is year-round with a speaker’s bureau that public schools and organizations can tap into.
Second- and third-generation survivors are available to speak. The latter were trained by 3GDC, a nonprofit that empowers the grandchildren of survivors to carry on the lessons and legacies of their grandparents.
“There’s not a week that goes by where we don’t have either a survivor themselves or a second- or third-generation survivor going into a school to speak,” Halber said.
This year, the Sunday afternoon ceremony on May 5 will be virtual, because COVID precautions since 2020 have demonstrated that thousands more can be reached online than in person, Halber said. The event will be live and recorded for later viewing.
Another event is an in-person Yom HaShoah commemoration that will take place Monday, May 6, from 7-9 p.m. at the Sixth & I historic synagogue in Washington, D.C. It is sponsored by 3GDC.
“We are honoring our grandparents’ legacies by telling their stories as a means to combat antisemitism,” said AJ Siegel, president of 3GDC. “My paternal grandfather survived the Holocaust escaping from a death march in Germany in 1945. He actively told stories across Connecticut where I grew up. He spoke for 30 years, and I always wanted to do his story justice so the organization is giving me an outlet to do that.”
Siegel, who is 40 and a resident of Washington, D.C., has spoken at schools in the region as well as in Connecticut.
Edward Godin, 74 of Potomac, recently took a course to learn how to present his mother’s story to students. His mother, Nesse Galperin Godin, died recently at 96, but she was an active speaker in the survivor community until age 91. She was a presenter at past JCRC Yom HaShoah events.
She was transported to several concentration camps and was sent on a death march in January 1945. In the freezing cold winter weather and with little food, many of the prisoners died. On March 10, 1945, she was liberated by Soviet troops. In 1950, after spending five years in a displaced persons camp in Feldafing, Germany, she immigrated to the United States.
Godin introduces his mother’s videos when he presents the Holocaust to students. “The kids are amazed,” he said.
His mother’s legacy is Holocaust education, “how she would make sure that with every program that she spoke at and all the people she spoke to, she would prepare herself in words that they understood. In a very meaningful way, she made the lessons of the Holocaust be a part of their life. People would come up to her after she spoke and just cry with her.”
Ellen Braunstein is a freelance writer.