The ritual continues with readings, including elegies taken from the liturgy for Tisha b’Av, the Jewish day of mourning that marks the destruction of the ancient Temples in Jerusalem, as well as diary entries from Holocaust survivors and a family story shared by a participant. “Before long no one will be left to say: ‘I was there, I saw, I remember what happened.’ All that will be left will be the books of research and literature, pictures and films and archives of testimonies. “The age of the Holocaust Survivors is drawing to a close,” the call begins. If a Holocaust survivor is present at the gathering, he or she reads “the survivors’ call,” a short text composed by survivor Zvi Gil. It begins with an invitation to gather, much like the invitation at the beginning of the maggid, or storytelling, portion of the seder. But the new version is part of a comprehensive approach aimed at shifting Holocaust remembrance events into smaller gatherings and comes as a time when how we come together is in flux due to the pandemic.Ĭalled Hitkansut, which means gathering in Hebrew, the new program is modeled in part on the Passover seder, with a modified haggadah guiding the ritual. The idea for a Yom HaShoah haggadah is not new: Rabbi Avi Weiss, the former leader of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, created one more than twenty years ago. The Hartman Institute plans to expand the program next year with gatherings held in smaller group settings, like in synagogues, community centers and even private homes, and has trained more than 70 American rabbis and educators to lead them. More than 500 people are registered for the American institute’s Zoom program on Wednesday night. It’s not going to work forever,” said Rebecca Starr, the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America’s Midwest director, who is working to bring the program to the United States. “We do need new ritual around this experience because we can’t continue to just have Holocaust survivors speak. It’s an attempt not only to create a lasting ritual to commemorate the Holocaust that can outlive the survivors, but also to shift the focus from the tragedy to spend more time on internalizing its lessons about combating evil. The program, which Govrin developed in Israel as a researcher at the Van Leer Institute and launched in 2015 at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, is being held in the United States for the first time this year. “How are we going to transmit? This is the big question, and that is why I started the whole project,” said Govrin, whose mother survived Auschwitz. That reality drove Michal Govrin, an Israeli writer and professor, and the daughter of a survivor, to adapt perhaps the most universally recognizable Jewish practice, the Passover seder, into a new ritual to mark Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. Images of acts of remembrance will be displayed at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in partnership with the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum on the 26th and 27th of January.Įducate the world by taking to social media: Facebook users who searching for keywords associated with the Holocaust are encouraged to learn more at WJC and UNESCO’s On TikTok, individual posts related to the subject contain a notification encouraging viewers to do the same.Holocaust remembrance day programs in Jewish communities have stuck to a familiar form for decades, featuring Holocaust survivors sharing their stories followed by the lighting of yahrzeit candles and the recitation of commemorative prayers.īut that model of memorial faces a problem that is growing more pressing each year: the dwindling number of survivors still living and able to share accounts of their painful past. Additional content will be made available throughout the month of January.
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