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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

Yom Hashoah commemorates the Holocaust

Rabbi Sue Silberberg, an executive director at Helene G. Simon Hillel Center speaks about the Holocaust during a Holocaust Remembrance Day event Thursday at the Woodburn Clock.

People walked between Woodburn Hall and Ballantine Hall on Thursday afternoon just as they would any other day.

Nearby, a group of people gathered in a semicircle, sharing personal stories of their connections to the Holocaust, in effort to never forget the tragedies that occurred more than 50 years ago.

Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, is an annual holiday on the 27th of Nisan in the Jewish calendar to commemorate the 6 million Jews that lost their lives in the Holocaust.

In observance of the holiday, Hillel, a Jewish organization on IU’s campus, hosted a discussion, walk and Third Seder to allow students to both share their personal connections and be educated of the atrocities of the past and those that are still prevalent today.

“This is a remembrance of how lucky I am to be here,” Ben Apter, an IU sophomore, said.

To commence the event, students gathered around the Woodburn clock tower, surrounded by posters that displayed images of the Holocaust as people walked to and from class.

Various students shared personal stories of their families’ journeys through the Holocaust and anecdotes of visiting concentration camps themselves. IU junior Jessie Nejberger shared her family’s journey through the Holocaust fleeing shtetls, small villages that Jews were forced to live in in Poland and Hungary when men started ?disappearing.

She shared her family member’s story of coming home one day from school to find loved ones arrested and never to be seen again.

Nejberger traveled to Budapest, Hungary, to study abroad this past fall and shared emotions of being in the same place her family had lived before the war ended their lives.

“When I landed in Budapest, it was amazing to walk on the same streets and speak the same language that they did before the war,” Nejberger said.

Two other participants shared their stories of oppression for others to hear the connections to the 6 million who died. Rabbi Sue Silberberg, director of Hillel, shared a story of when her mother was growing up in the United States.

She said she believed her parents were from Chicago, but actually they were from Poland and Russia.

It wasn’t until high school that Silberberg’s mother realized her parents both had accents and weren’t from Chicago, ?previously shielding her heritage out of fear.

Silberberg said that her grandmother, after telling her mother the truth about their origin, had immense fear of her knowing and begged her not to tell anyone because “you never know what would happen if people knew.”

This showed the constant fear and hostility that lived within the lives of all Jews in the 1940s, during the time of prosecution, Silberberg said.

People also shared readings from survivors, relatives of survivors and historians, allowing all voices to be heard.

Once everyone had the opportunity to speak, the group walked to Hillel, reciting names along the way of people that had lost ?their lives.

The evening concluded with a Yom Hashoah tradition of the Third Seder.

During the holiday of Passover, two Seders are community-led service meals which take place on the first two nights of the holiday that celebrate the liberation of the Jews ?from Egypt.

The Third Seder commemorates the lives lost in the Holocaust and allows discussion of the modern genocides of today.

“The Holocaust didn’t just happen because of Hitler,” Silberberg said. “People can’t just stand idly by.”

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