In an earlier version of this story, her last name was incorrect.The Mandell JCC and Jewish Federation Association of Connecticut will host a community-wide ‘Reading of the Names’ on April 24 in West Hartford for Holocaust Remembrance Day. * Editor's note: Camille Wilson, a tenth-grade student at La Quinta High School, read her second-place essay to the crowd of several hundred people. "Over six million mothers, fathers, grandchildren, children, brothers and sisters, who all disappeared in the Holocaust," said Bruce Landgarten, CEO of the Jewish Federation of the Desert. "Considering all that's going on in our country, in our world, with regard to tolerance, it's a reminder that we can never let this happen again." Throughout the ceremony, speakers condemned intolerance and anti-Semitism in a variety of forms - especially people worldwide who deny that the Holocaust happened. OBITUARY: Tolerance Education Center founder Earl Greif remembered And those surviving here today who have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, you were the most successful resisters," Braff said. "The most important (component) of how people resisted was simply surviving. While some partisans took up arms against the Nazis, Braff said, others continued Jewish religious traditions, distributed newspapers and spoke Hebrew, all of which were acts of resistance in ghettos and concentration camps that forbade them. He said the partisans he's interviewed have encouraged him to teach youth that young people can make a difference, that they must stand up to discrimination and hate early and often, and that they should never give up. PALM DESERT: Program drills home need to never forget the Holocaustīraff said the stories of Jewish partisans are especially powerful among young people, because many of the fighters were teenagers. "I was taught only that the Jewish experience during the Holocaust was one of victimization," Braff said."Students are so curious to learn about Jewish resistance because the myth of Jewish passivity is so prevalent." Today, his foundation publishes documentaries and teaching materials that reach an estimated one million students per year. He has interviewed 50 people who fought as "partisans," or guerrilla fighters, and estimates that some 30,000 Jews fought the Nazis in forests and between battles alongside about one million non-Jews.
Walker Risenmay, an eighth-grade student at Palm Desert Middle School, also read his prizewinning essay about how young people need to be mindful of the information they consume on social media - "to recognize what propaganda is and avoid it."īraff spoke to the crowd about the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, which he founded in 2000 to educate people about Jews who resisted the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. Students from across the valley had written and created art in response to a question about how propaganda can be distributed in the present through social media. Glass also awarded $2,400 in prizes to 12 winners of the Federation's annual essay and arts contests. VALLEY VOICE: Standing against bigotry in all forms on Yom Hashoah "The world has changed dramatically, but the human capacity for inhumanity has not changed," Glass said. Her family boarded as soon as her father had been released from Buchenwald, a concentration camp, where he had been imprisoned. Several Holocaust survivors lit candles during a 90-minute memorial service in Rancho Mirage on Sunday, as local Jewish leaders read poems and led prayers.Įllen Glass, who spoke during the ceremony, said she was aboard one of the last ships out of Germany in 1939. READ MORE: Hidden from the Nazis, Palm Desert woman grateful for 'Righteous Gentiles' "The shoah is intertwined forever with the courage and the heroism of the uprising," Braff said. It's Yom HaShoah V’HaGevurah - in remembrance of the "shoah," or destruction, and the heroism and courage that ocurred alongside it.īraff, speaking to a Jewish Federation of the Desert event Sunday, explained that the holiday's founders chose to schedule the annual memorial on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jews in Warsaw fought German soldiers who were destroying homes and removing their residents to concentration camps. Yom HaShoah, an internationally recognized Holocaust Remembrance Day, is Monday.īut according to Mitch Braff of the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, most people don't use the day's full name. Watch Video: Dutch grocers saved Rita Dukker Mazer from the Nazis
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