YOM HA'SHOAH

I dedicated the entire session this past Tuesday and Wednesday, to teaching about and discussing the Shoah (Hebrew for Holocaust). Yesterday was "Yom Ha'Shoah" (Holocaust Memorial Day) in Israel. At precisely 10 a.m. on this day each year, the air raid sirens sound all over Israel, and everything - everybody - comes to a halt in the country. For two minutes the sirens sound, during which Israelis remember the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazi's.

I began the session, as I always do, reading from the novel "A Shout in the Sunshine." Ordinarily, I would not have read from the story, but this time it served as a perfect segue to what we would be learning about the rest of the session. This story is about how two Jewish communities - the Sephardim from Spain and the Romaniote of Greece are forced to live together after the Spanish Exile in 1492. The children have come to know the main characters of the story very well by now, and have learned how the communities at first eyed each other with suspicion and even refused to accept each other's rituals and beliefs relating to Judaism.

As soon as I finished reading the chapter, I shared with the students how over the next few centuries, the two communities did finally accept and learn to respect each other. The Sephardi community was the larger of the two, and ultimately Salonika (where the story takes place) almost became a "Jewish Republic," where Ladino could be heard everywhere since most of its inhabitants were Jews descended from the two communities. I then introduced a video segment I was about to play, taken from the video I had previously shown the students called "From Toledo to Jerusalem." In this video, the Israeli singer Yehoram Ga'on shares how his family originated in Spain and, following the exile, moved over the European continent and into Asia, eventually settling in Jerusalem. I shared a video segment describing his ancestors' life in Salonika. Most of this video segment is dedicated to what happened to the entire Jewish population in Salonika during the Holocaust - they were rounded up by the Nazi's and shipped in trains to Auschwitz where all but a handful perished.

He then sings a Ladino (Spanish-Jewish) song called, "Arvoles" ("Trees Cry for Rain"). This song was first sung by those Jews exiled from Spain, and a recurring line is "I will die in a strange land." Ga'on shares in the video that as the Jews were brought to the trains in Salonika, they sang this song, but changed the last few words of this recurring line to, "I will die on Polish soil." As we listen to the song on the video, no words are spoken, and the images we see are of a train and then the entrance to Auschwitz. The camera then pans over the camp (which is now a memorial to those who died there with a museum on its grounds).

When this video segment finished, I handed out an outline of the major events in European history leading up to World War II and the Holocaust. We used this as a springboard for a discussion about how the seemingly "civilized, cultured" Germans could possibly have succumbed to the hatred spouted by Hitler and his Nazi party. It was during this discussion that students were able to share stories they had heard about family members caught in the Holocaust, and were able to ask questions they had about the era. For the final half hour of our class time, I shared an age-appropriate presentation I created many years ago using video segments from the "Heritage: Civilization and the Jews" dvd-rom program. This presentation shared what life was like for Jews living in Europe between the two world wars, and what happened to them during the Holocaust, as well as how righteous Gentiles helped many to survive.

For the final half hour of each session, we joined the 3rd-7th graders in the Beit Knesset for a special Yom Ha'Shoah assembly. Below are video clips I managed to take of parts of the very somber and moving program:

Rabbi Greninger and Ben, our music director, led assembly. All the students around me were attentive and focused on the somberness of this observance.

Rabbi Greninger began by introducing the poetess Hannah Szenes, who, while living in a kibbutz in the 1920's in Israel, wrote many poems, some of which have been set to music. She lost her life when she volunteered to help the British by parachuting back into Hungary, the country of her birth, to help collect intelligence. She was captured, and eventually executed. We then read one of her poems together, called "Blessed is the Match." 

Ben then led us all in singing another of her poems set to music, "Eli, Eli."

After sharing some statistics about how many Jews and other people were murdered during the Holocaust, Rabbi Greninger asked the teachers present to come up to light 7 memorial candles, 6 for the 6 million Jews murdered, and 1 for the other peoples murdered. We then all sang the English translation of a Yiddish song, "Dona, Dona."

We then listened to TA's and students read 3 poems from a collection of poems written by children held in the Terezin concentration camp (a model camp set up by the Nazi's to show International Red Cross and other people how well they were treating Jews). The collection of these poems takes its title, "I Never Saw Another Butterfly" from one of these poems. Following the readings, Ben led us all in singing this poem, which has been put to music.

We then listened to Ben chant "El Maleh Rachameem," ("God Filled with Compassion").

We then all recited the "Kaddish" (the Mourner's Prayer), followed by singing "Ha'Tikva" ("The Hope"), Israel's national anthem, to end the observance with the most Jewish of emotions - optimism for a bright future for ourselves and all the people of this world.

Next week, we'll be celebrating Yom Ha'Atzma'ut, Israel's Independence Day - a very special one this year as the country marks its 70th birthday on Thursday, April 19th!