Yom HaShoah commemorations are supposed to make you feel sad, reverent, even a little angry at the world. They are not supposed to make you angry with your own community.
Although some 350 people attended the community-wide Yom HaShoah memorial and remembrance Sunday afternoon, it was painfully apparent to many attendees that several groups of people were conspicuously absent again this year. They include, with a few exceptions, our clergy, people under 60 (boomers and their children), and Jewish community leaders and professionals.
Before my phone begins ringing, let me say that I realize that there are funerals and shiva calls and family obligations and long work hours during the week. But I also know that there are birthday parties and shopping and movies and tennis practice and whatever else we manage to fill our time with.
I know something else with equal certainty. Keynote speaker Aaron Elster, a child survivor who only in recent years has been able to tell his story and to work toward educating young people about hate, deserves better.
Elster didn’t have birthday parties, tennis practice, shopping and movies during his childhood. At the age of 10, he had hunger, disease, loneliness, separation from his parents and terror — years of terror fighting for his life, alone, without physical or human warmth.
Even today, after telling his story many times in public places, he cries for his mother’s ultimate sacrifice in sending him away from her to help him survive. It was hard not to cry with him.
Maybe it will become a bit easier each year for Elster to get up in front of a crowd and speak of his painful childhood. But even if it does, it will become that much harder for local survivors to ascend the bimah to light candles of remembrance. They are bent with age, and their presence will not grace our lives much longer.
They deserve better, too. And so do our children.
When the community holds a commemoration, we need to show our children what the right thing to do is, even if it’s hard and painful and interrupts our day. We need to teach them that there are some things we do as a community, not only for ourselves, but also for the world at large.
It doesn’t matter if we’ve taken our children to the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., if they learn about the Shoah in school, if we’re active in our own synagogues or communal organizations, or if we fight against hate in other arenas. It doesn’t matter if we disagree with the scheduling of the program, its content or who runs it. There are other places to work out these differences.
Attending the community-wide Yom HaShoah commemoration is about respect. Respect for those who died, for the local survivor community and for people like Aaron Elster, for whom the telling is both a valiant act and a cry for our future. More of us should have been there to hear it.
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