“The Holocaust is really beyond belief and beyond words but before you go forward into the future you have to somehow engage it and honor the memory,” said Rabbi Mark Shapiro of Sinai Temple in Springfield, where the April 11 service for Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day will be held.
The observance, which the public is invited to attend, will be at 7 p.m. It will feature the reading of “The Shoah Scroll” with a musical background provided by Boris Kagan and Sofya Shainskaya.
Created by Avigdor Shinan, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the scroll was published in 2003 and is described as the “first liturgical text ever written to commemorate the Holocaust.”
The Holocaust resulted in the deaths of some 6 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators who regarded Jews as “inferior.”
Homosexuals and members of the Socialist and Communists parties were hunted down and killed on behavioral and ideological grounds, as were Gypsies, the disabled and some of the Slavic peoples — three groups also regarded as inferior by the Nazis.
“It is hard to be Jewish without having a long memory,” said Shapiro. “It is difficult and painful, but Jews understand that the Holocaust is part of who we are.”
The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933.
By the end of World War II, they succeeded in murdering nearly two out of every three European Jews.
While labeling the Holocaust a “very Jewish event,” Shapiro also called it a “universal event” that raises issues on how individuals respond to contemporary conflicts.
“The vast majority of people in Europe were not perpetrators. They were bystanders,” Shapiro said.
“The enduring ethical question is how all of us as human beings stand by today and watch history unfold. Are we passive and neutral or do we get involved? That is the universal issue.”
Shapiro noted that the scroll, which incorporates prayer, poetry and prose, tells “what happened before and after the Nazis.”
“It is not a history book, but in a poetic way reviews what was done and how people reacted.”
The observance, for which Martin Levson will be cantor, will include the participation of young people as well as the lighting of candles.
“There is a custom in Judaism that when the anniversary of a death comes around, we light a memorial candle,” Shapiro said.
“We have taken that custom and instead of lighting one memorial candle we will light six – one for each million of the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro said he hoped participants at the observance, which is co-sponsored by the Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center and the Jewish Federation of Western Massachusetts with support from the William and Lynn Foggle Holocaust Foundation, will be “moved and inspired and touched, too, by the enormity of the Holocaust.”
Charlotte L. Meyer, of Longmeadow, who is being honored for her many years on the board of the Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center in Springfield, will provide the light to the other candles.
“Growing up during World War II with vivid memories of the calamitous events for European Jewry, Hatikvah has given me the opportunity to be pro-active in combating prejudice and discrimination,” said Meyer.
She is a clinical geriatric social worker who has chaired several of the center’s programs and has been a strong advocate of its educational mission.
Those who will light candles include George Torrey, who survived the Holocaust as a child; Simon Fuchs, whose parents were Holocaust survivors; Hanna Perlstein Marcus, who is writing a memoir about growing up as the child of a mother who survived the Holocaust; Pearl-Anne Margalit, associate executive director of the Jewish Federation of Western Massachusetts, and her husband, artist Nathan Margalit, who is on the faculty at Trinity College in West Hartford and Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, both children of Holocaust survivors; and David Karolinski, grandson of Polish-born Bernice Rosentzweig Karolinski, who lost four sisters, two brothers and her father in the Holocaust.
Bernice, who is in her 90s, is expected to again sing the “The Partisan Song” a cappella. The hauntingly moving piece is considered a hymn to Holocaust survivors around the world and is said to have been written by a young Polish Jew from Vilna, who fought as a partisan and died at the age of 22.
Martin J. Pion, director of the Institution for Theology and Pastoral Studies and professor of religious studies at Elms College in Chicopee, will also light a candle, representing the “Righteous Among Nations.”
He was invited to represent those who helped the Jews for his work with the Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center.