Yom Hashoah

On Sunday April 7 at 2PM, the Newburgh Jewish Community Center (along with my synagogue, Congregation Agudas Israel) joined with Mt. St. Mary College for a Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) Commemoration.  An annual program of the Newburgh JCC, this year’s program was organized by Debbie Sanford, that organization’s Executive Director.

I (Rabbi Philip Weintraub) was proud to participate in this program, offering memorial prayers and psalms, as well as inviting participants to light 6 memorial candles, representing the 6,000,000 Jews murdered by the Nazis and their associates during the Holocaust or Shoah.  Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, was created by an act of the Knesset(Parliament) in Israel to be a world-wide memorial to those murdered by the Nazis, but also as a reminder of the Jews who had the opportunity to fight back, who rebelled against the vicious Nazis, for example in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Debbie Sanford brought a powerful speaker, Rudy Rosenberg, to educate us about the horrors of the Holocaust.  Rudy Rosenberg was born in Belgium.  He and his family went into hiding in 1942 and remained there for the rest of the war.  The author of And Somehow We Survive, he shared the difficulties of a life in hiding.  While he hid with his mother, he was separated from his sister and father for much of WWII.  Over the course of an hour, he shared details of his wartime experiences.  This included numerous close calls and the difficult decisions his parents made to survive.

Rudy is part of the Hidden Child Foundation (http://archive.adl.org/hidden/default.asp) which seeks to share the experiences of those who survived the Holocaust in hiding, many of whom lived separately from their families during the war, and remain as the sole survivors from their families.

For more information about Yom Hashoah, see the websites of the US Holocaust Museum in DC: http://www.ushmm.org/remembrance/dor/

In NYC, we have the Museum of Jewish Heritage: http://www.mjhnyc.org

In Rockland there is the Holocaust Museum and Studies Center: http://www.holocauststudies.org/

The Newburgh Jewish Community Center hosts numerous educational and social programs: www.newburghjcc.org/

My congregation is Congregation Agudas Israel www.congregationagudasisrael.org

And I can be found on facebook https://www.facebook.com/RabbiPhil or Twitter @tweetedtalmud