TIME: 6:45 PM EST | PLATFORM: Facebook Live | ATTEND: bit.ly/3sewRTN
To mitigate the risks to our local survivors and those who normally join us to HONOR AND REMEMBER the victims and survivors of the Holocaust, the rescuers and liberators, as well as the students who have earned awards in our Elie Wiesel competitions and the educators we recognize for their impactful teaching, we will NOT hold a large communal gathering this year. Instead we will bring you a live streamed commemoration featuring guest speaker, survivor Marion Weinzweig of Arizona.
Born in Apt, Poland, in 1941, Marion Weinzweig is among the youngest of all Holocaust survivors. When she was eighteen months old, her parents entrusted her to a non-Jewish business associate and his wife to protect her. When the Nazis were closing in, that family felt all would be safer if they placed her in an orphanage. Because of her fair hair and blue eyes, she was taken in and raised as a Catholic child by the nuns, who had no idea of her Jewish background.
Sadly, Marion’s mother perished at Treblinka. At the war’s end, Marion’s father, who had survived ghettos and slave labor camps, came to retrieve her, and after much effort, the nuns were forced to relinquish her to him. She did not know the “strange” Jewish man who took her, as she had not seen him since she was a baby. Poland was not a safe place for Jews after the war, so Marion’s father and a surviving uncle smuggled her into Germany, which was ironically now the safest place for Jews, with the Allies in control. As the only Jewish child amid the displaced persons, speaking only Polish and having to learn German and Yiddish, Marion felt lonely and isolated, and she also came to realize that her presence reminded many around her of the children they had lost.
She moved with what remained of her family to Canada when the opportunity arose. Her journey to healing and back to Judaism began there, and continued after her move to the United States. Today she lives in Arizona and travels the world sharing her story of survival, documented in her book, Lonely Chameleon, to make sure that the history is not forgotten.
We will again seek to offer the community online options for observing this important day, as well as provide MEMORIAL CANDLES for those locally who wish to light them, as we did last year with the help of the Beth El and Temple Israel Men’s Clubs.
The work of the Holocaust Commission, which sponsors Yom Hashoah each year, is needed now more than ever. In 2020 we pivoted our programs to be as virtual as possible, and still provide resources to teach the lessons of history’s lowest period to students, the military, and to the community at large.