By LOIS KINDLE
Beth Israel, the Jewish Congregation of Sun City Center, and United Methodist Church of Sun City Center hosted a community-wide Yom HaShoah Holocaust Remembrance service May 5 at the church.
About 200 people attended and participated in the 80-minute service, which gave members of the Jewish community, Christians and others in the area the opportunity to gather and reflect on the Holocaust’s unfathomable loss of life caused by the Nazis between 1938 and 1945. Solemn, poignant and moving, the service was filled with prayer, song and special observances.
The purpose of Yom HaShoah is to commemorate the 6-million Jewish lives lost during the Holocaust and to recognize the need for keeping its memory alive so history never repeats itself. The service included the lighting of six candles in memory of the Holocaust victims, the promise never to forget the atrocities committed and the one-by-one reading of cards given to attendees containing the name and age of an individual who perished.
“The Holocaust is the nadir of the Jewish people’s history over more than 2,000 years,” said Joanne Sudman, coordinator of the Yom HaShoah service for the past 15 years. “It is unique in its breadth, depth and scope.
“Remembering what happened is extremely important, because we can’t let it happen ever again,” she said.
The Holocaust was among the darkest of moments in human history. It involved the state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of an estimated two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. Entire generations of families were ripped from their homes and sent to concentration camps via rail in cattle cars or killed in their villages. They were stripped of their names, which were replaced with numbers tattooed on their arms; their identities; their histories; their clothing; their personal belongings; and even the fillings in their teeth. They lost everything they loved and owned before their lives were brutally ended.
Millions of others, including Romani people (derogatively known as gypsies), the intellectually disabled, political dissenters, Serbs, Jehovah’s Witnesses and gay men, were also murdered.
“The Holocaust is not just about the Jewish lives that were lost. It’s about all the lives that were lost,” Sudman said.
Twenty-seven choir members from Beth Israel, the United Methodist Church of Sun City Center, Our Lady of Guadelupe and Prince of Peace Catholic churches, St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, Ruskin Methodist Church, St. John the Divine Episcopal Church and the King’s Point Women’s Chorus were led by Jeff Jordan, director of worship arts at the United Methodist Church of Sun City Center.
Another 20 or so representing various faiths throughout the community came to participate in the rites of the service.
Sudman noted the April 11 passing of longtime Beth Israel Congregation member, Marianne Finke, who escaped persecution by the Nazis and the impending Holocaust at age 16, shortly before Kristallnacht, when her family sent her from Germany to live in America. Described as an amazing woman who was “always hopeful, positive and engaged” by those who knew her, Finke lived to be 103.
About the observance
Yom HaShoah was first held in Israel in 1951. Eight years later, the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day Law, which called for its annual observance to be held at a specific time always on the 27th day of Nisan [one of the months in the Jewish calendar], was passed by the Israeli Knesset.
The law’s purpose is to commemorate the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust and the heroism of survivors and rescuers.
Since the early 1960s, the sound of a siren during Yom HaShoah stops traffic and pedestrians for two full minutes of silent devotion throughout the State of Israel. The siren blows at sundown as the observance day begins and again at 11 a.m. the next morning. Theaters, cinemas, pubs and other public entertainment venues are closed.
Since the solar-lunar based Jewish calendar is different from the Gregorian calendar, used by most of the world today, Jewish holidays and observances fall on different dates each year. Next year, for example, Yom HaShoah will be observed on April 23.