Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Rememberance Day, Part I

Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Rememberance day. At 10am, all of Pardes gathered in the Beit Midrash to hear the siren that was sounded all over the city (and the country). I wasn't standing near the windows, but my friends who were said that all the cars and buses stopped, and people got out of their cars to stand where they were.

Standing for the siren reminded me a lot of listening to the shofar blasts on Rosh HaShanah. Like the shofar, it was a call to listen, to pay heed, to remember, to reflect. And like I often feel as I stand for the sounding of the shofar, I couldn't quite figure out what emotion(s) I was or should be experiencing. It was hard to connect to such an enormous tragedy that happened before my lifetime and that I didn't personally experience, and it was hard to feel sadness/be moved at a proscribed, set minute in time.

After the siren, we had two presentations in a row: a powerpoint on 8 famous/important Jewish figures and the vibrancy of Polish Jewish life before the Holocaust, and a presentation by Morris Wyszogrod, an artist and survivor who had been in the Warsaw ghetto and in the camps and who shared his story with us (he also wrote about it in his book, A Brush with Death). During lunch, I went to a third presentation given my some of my fellow students who had gone on a Pardes trip to Poland during spring break.

Before lunch/mincha, we recited El Malei Rachamim, a prayer for the dead, and read out loud the names of family members submitted by Pardes students and family who had been killed in the Holocaust. As the names were read and I looked around the room, I was very moved. It reminded me, as I stood with a community of over 100 Jews (most of us from Eastern-European descent), that pretty much each and every one of us has several or more family members who were destroyed in the Holocaust.

After lunch, classes resumed as normal. I think it took all of us in my Philosophy of Halacha class a while to readjust, after such an intense morning. Our faculty stressed that having normal classes in the beginning and end of the day was intentional, though: For some, Jewish learning is a way to attempt to make up for what was lost. For others, having normal classes was a reminder of the importance not only of mourning the past, but also of looking towards the future.