Yom Hashoah 2018 Commemoration Video (Part 1)

I'll ask that you please rise for El Malay Rachamim on page 4

[El Malay Rachamim]

Let us read together the translation on page four. Exalted compassionate God, grant perfect peace in your sheltering presence among the holy and the pure, whose radiance is like the Heavens, to the souls of all the men, women and children of the house of Israel, who were slaughtered, strangled and burned in the Shoah. May they rest in paradise. Master of mercy, may they find eternal shelter beneath your sheltering wings. And may their souls be bound up in the bond of life. Adonai is their portion. May they rest in peace. And let us say, Amen. You may be seated.

Good evening. I’d like to thank you all for joining us. We want to recognize and thank the following elected officials for their attendance this evening. Senator Tom Brewer, Senator Rick Kalowski, Omaha City Council member Ben Gray, Omaha City Council member Vinny Palermo, Lincoln City Council member Jane Raybould. We also want to thank Mayor Gene Stothert, who this week signed a proclamation recognizing the week as Holocaust Days of Remembrance for the city of Omaha.

Memory in Jewish tradition we are taught is sacrosanct. Some historians and sociologists have gone as far as to say that Jews have a sixth sense, that along with our ability to hear, see, feel, smell, and taste to those five, we should add the ability to remember. To remember in Judaism is not a passive exercise or experience. As Jews, the primary purpose for our ritual and liturgy is to abolish time, to make Jews who are divided by history, geography into contemporaries, into neighbors. In this way the many communities of Judaism were unified into a single people and the experience of many Jews into one single story. To take a moment and to think about that. That the goal of Jewish ritual practice is to abolish time, to create a unified people that share a common story, a common past, and a common ancestry. Two and a half weeks ago, Jews around the world sat down together to relive the exodus from Egypt. To do as the Torah teaches, to tell our children the story of how God brought us out of the land of Egypt. Nothing in Jewish history is remembered without ritual. Memory in Judaism is attached to action. We do not simply think about the story of the Exodus, we relive it. We teach it, we see it, we taste it, and we remember it. When we sit with our children and grandchildren on Purim and remember what happened to us in Shushan, we use groggers and we hear it. When we want to remember the journey our ancestors took in the desert, we build a sukkah to feel the elements around us. When we want to remember the miracle of Chanukah, the oil lasting eight days, we light candles so that we can see it. We come together tonight to remember the over six million men, women, and children. Yet what is our ritual that we are commanded to do? What is our call to action? Tonight, we are called to listen to their voices and to remember their stories. We are a people who remember through ritual and through action. For those who survived the Shoah, as well as those who perished, their legacy is secure. They bore witness to horrors for which we cannot imagine and walked out the other side to see the rebirth of Jewish life all over the world. world. Tonight we come together as a community in solidarity to memorialize and honor those who witnessed and experienced the greatest atrocities in our people's history. Tonight is a night where we get to hear from the survivors in our community in their own voices. Thank you again for joining us.

It was the systemic, bureaucratic, brutal persecution and slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its leader, Adolf Hitler, designed to wipe out the entire Jewish population, first in Europe and ultimately everywhere in the world. Jews were ripped from their homes, families separated forever, untold numbers herded onto trains, taken to ghettos, to labor camps, to concentration camps, to hell. Those who didn't die lived in fear. Some were hidden in private homes, barns, sewers, or haystacks. Some were hidden in orphanages or convents. Some hid in plain sight, passing for non-Jews, having false papers. The forest people hid in the woods and the partisans stayed to fight. Still others escaped to Russia, Japan, South America, Israel, and the United States, and some ended up in Omaha, Nebraska, which brings us to tonight. There are 14 survivors who live in our community today. You might know them as family, friends, neighbors, or co-workers, or you might not know them at all, but you're here to honor them, and we thank you. Over the last few months, nine of the survivors were interviewed at length, especially for this year's commemoration. What you'll hear tonight are excerpts from those interviews in their own words.

In the ghetto, when I had to stand in the line to go to work, one day they called my mom's name and I never saw her again. My mother was one of 200 people who had to dig their own graves to undress before the Gestapo shot and killed them. The clothes of the dead were stored in the building. An old man who worked there recognized my mom's dress and brought it to us. Pinned to one of the pockets was a small piece of paper and she had written on it, “save yourself”. I carried that piece of paper with me every day until I got to America. During the war, I had no feelings like I was frozen. I was trying to survive. Did I dream of a better day? I didn't have the energy to dream. If the world had not tolerated the killing of the Jewish people, if it hadn't looked the other way, if President Roosevelt had let that boat land in America, things might have been different. I think many people were glad to get rid of the Jews. This is how it all began. But I don't think American Jewish people understand how much hate there is for the Jews. Being Jewish is in my blood. It keeps me closer to God. Even after everything had happened, I would never give up being Jewish. After the war, I came to America on a military ship. And when I saw the Statue of Liberty, I thought I saw God. When my children were young I decided to go back to school and become a nurse. That's when I really began to love America. When I went to work as a nurse and started to make money. The money was mine. I was independent. I was somebody. I spoke very little about the Holocaust to my children. It was too painful. What happened was bad enough. We need to know that not everybody will love us. It's nothing we can change. We can decide to live a good life. Don't discriminate. Don't hate because someone else hates. Hate is like a bad disease. It hurts your heart. Let it be a red flag when one human being tries to put another human being down.

It began on a cold December morning, 1939. We were forced out of our home in Pabianice, Poland, marched four abreast to the center of town to the train station, and herded into smelly cattle cars. After 36 hours without food, water, or sanitation, we were dropped off at a burnout synagogue in Sidlisk. We managed to get across to the Russian side, then arrested and transported north 700 miles through Arkhangelsk, where my brother, Velvel, was born. We were relocated to Central Asia, and the long journey in box cars began. Four thousand miles, lasting three months, going from town to town in the heat of battle on the Tran Siberian rail line. My mother was nursing Velvel. I was responsible for my younger brother, Herschel, and it made me feel like a grown-up. Herschel was weak and dependent. I could hear him cry a mile away. My father, my birth father, was a horse and wagon delivery man who taught me how to fight. His motto was “always throw the first punch.” He was a survivor. It was built into his DNA. One day he got off the train to barter for food and never came back. Mother was smart but fearless. On the farm she would sneak out to where the cows would graze and bring back milk. And the factory where she worked she would steal tobacco used to bribe the guards and barter for food. There was nothing she wouldn't do to keep her babies alive. After the war, we lived in a DP camp in West Germany. Aaron Kleinberg, a good and gentle man, married my mother and then became my father. I liked him from the first, from the first moment I saw him. Nobody has to be a victim. When we came to America in 1951, I couldn't read, write, I was Jewish and we didn't have much money, but no one in my family ever felt disadvantaged, nor did they act like it. I'm a patriot and have been so since the first time I saw the Statue of Liberty. I love everything about America. America might not be the most perfect country except when compared to any other country in the world. The world doesn't appreciate what it lost. Jewish people were always a small percentage of the world population, yet we made significant contribution to the foundation of Western civilization. How many of those laws could have helped to cure illnesses, save the environment, or develop internet technology? They made a bad devil's bargain when they decided to kill the Jews. And now anti-Semitism is rearing its ugly head again all over Europe. Let it be a red flag when one human being tries to put another human being down.

When the Nazis came for us, they told my mother to pack enough for two weeks. I had a porcelain doll that I loved very much. So I went into the living room to pick her up. And one of the Nazis followed me. He started shaking my arm and saying, “where you are going, you won't need this doll.” I thought to myself, he wants that doll. And I said, “if I can't have that doll, you can't have her either.” And I threw her on the floor and she broke into many pieces. I was very, very upset and suddenly thought, I just know we're never gonna see this place again. I took a hold of a kitchen table leg and wouldn't let go. My mother had to pry my hand loose to get me out of the door. Then they took us to the railroad station. In the camps some people try to escape over the mountains into Spain. I used to beg my mother at night “please, please let's go, let's go over the mountains” and she looked at me and said, “We couldn't make it. You and your sister are too weak.” But I said, “yes, we'll make it, don't worry.” That's me, don't worry. I was always thinking of ways to escape. Almost two years later, my mother arranged for me to be rescued by a Jewish, French children's organization. But that organization was required to tell the Nazis where they were taking us, so we were constantly hunted down. I was moved 14 different times. Because of that, I didn't know how to make friends, and I never felt safe. Five years later I moved to America. My father had left a letter saying if anything happened to him and my mother that we should go to the United States. When I got to America everything was so big. It was wonderful living in a democracy. Today, I am scared of what is happening in this country and all over Europe with right-wing extremists. To people who say what happened in Nazi Germany can never happen again; I say it can. It can. Let it be a red flag when one human being tries to put another human being down.

As is the tradition in a Yom Hashoah observance, survivors light a candle in memory of those who perished in the Holocaust. As we remember the six million, Cantor Leo Fettman is lighting a candle in memory of his parents, his sister, and her three children, his brother, and extended family. In Cantor Fettman's words, not one week goes by that I do not dream that I am still in a concentration camp. I think about my parents and fantasize about how wonderful it would be if only they could see their grandchildren. When there is a simcha, a happy occasion, I cannot enjoy it fully because my parents are not able to share it with me.

As we remember the six million