April 21, 2009

• Yom Hashoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day — NEVER FORGET

  Tuesday, April 21

  Yom Hashoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day — NEVER FORGET!!!!!

  

  It is marked on the 27th day in the month of Nisan.

  At 10:00 am on Yom HaShoah, throughout Israel, air-raid sirens are sounded for two minutes.

  Israeli television airs Holocaust documentaries and Holocaust-related talk shows, and low-key songs are played on the radio. Flags on public buildings are flown at half staff.

  After taking power, the Nazis gradually restricted the rights of German Jewish citizens and encouraged their followers to commit acts of violence and destruction against Jews and their property. During World War II (1939-1945), the Nazis implemented their “final solution,” a plan to concentrate and annihilate all European Jews. Jews were first crammed together in ghettoes and slave-labor camps, where disease, brutality, and malnutrition ran rampant. Eventually, they were sent to death camps, where millions were murdered in special facilities designed to kill a tremendous number of people over a brief period of time. In addition to the six million Jews who died – two-thirds of the European Jewish population – the Nazis also killed millions of others, including Roma (Gypsies) and Slavs, political and religious dissidents, the handicapped, and gays and lesbians.

  Today, many commemorate Yom HaShoah by lighting yellow candles in order to keep the memories of the victims alive
  

  From Siddur Sim Shalom for Shabbat and Festivals

      Adonai, Master, Creator
      who set the round course of the world,
      birth, death, and disease -

          Creator, who caused veins, brains, and bones to grow,
          who fashioned us air that we might breath and sing

      Remember that we are incomplete
      and inconsolable, our vision clouded by ashes.

          Remember the chimneys, the ingenious habitations of death where part of
          Israel’s body drifted as smoke through the air.
          Remember the mutilated music of their lives.

      We lament in fields of loneliness
      for six million of our number torn away. Remember them.

          There are some who have no memorial.
          They are perished as though they had never been.
          Forget them not.

      Remember the landscape of screams
      engraved at entrance gates to death.
      Remember the unborn dreams.

          Remember the terror of children, whose tears were burned. Remember the
          agony of parents, whose blessings were consumed.

      Remember the prayers of the dying,
      the shame and suffering of the innocent.

          Remember. We have not forgotten You
          though all this has befallen us.

      Remember the God-forsaken millions in a silent world,
      their loneliness was matched only by Yours.

          Who is like You, Adonai, among the silent,
          remaining silent through the suffering of Your children?

      Are You not God, Adonai, that we may hope in You?
      Renew the light of Your creation, which has been dimmed.

          Renew in Your creatures Your image, which has been desecrated. Restore the
          covenant, which Your people have maintained.

      Remember the hopes of the slain
      by sending redemption to Your shattered world.

          In spite of everything which strangles hope,
          help us to continue the sustaining song of their lives.

   

  • 12:22 pm
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