Holocaust Expert: Look Beyond the Numbers and Pictures

Everyone knows the number. It begins with a “six” and is followed by six zeroes. Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

But how many can you name? If your list begins and ends with Anne Frank, or maybe even the two or three other names that have become synonymous with such an overwhelming tragedy, then you are doing a great disservice to the memory of those who perished, said Dr. Rachel Korazim, an Israeli Holocaust expert and daughter of Holocaust survivors who spoke at the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley’s Yom Hashoah commemoration Sunday night.

Before these Jews were numbers, or captured at their lowest low in black and white imagery, they were people. Mothers, fathers, lawyers, doctors. Children with colored ribbons in their hair. Let us not forget and honor their memory by recapturing who they were as people, not as victims, Korazim implored to the hundreds of community members in attendance.

It’s something the Federation’s Holocaust Resource Center is striving to do. Working in conjunction with Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, the center is urging those with relatives who died in the Holocaust to participate in the Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project. Through the project, 4.2 million names of Holocaust victims have been recorded, along with photos and biographical information when available. But 1.8 million remain.

“It is a race against time before these names are lost forever,” said Shari Spark, Holocaust Resource Center coordinator, who is also collecting the names of local survivors – including second and third generation -- for the center’s own database. “It’s up to us to make sure that these people, our relatives, are remembered.”

A few of those memories did start to come to life Sunday as audience members called out the names of lost relatives. Children and grandchildren of survivors lit the six memorial candles, representing one million Jews each.

We represent the next generation. We will not let the lessons of the Holocaust, the lessons of our grandparents, be forgotten, said Lauren Rabin, on behalf of the grandchildren, as she lit the final candle.

The ceremony also featured a tribute to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on its 70^th anniversary, delivered by Brayden Koch, a 7^th grader at Springhouse Middle School, along with other memorial readings and prayers.

Visit http://db.yadvashem.org/names/search.html to search the Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project database and download pages of testimony to submit your relatives’ stories. Pages are also available through the Holocaust Resource Center, 702 N. 22^nd St., Allentown, 610-821-5500, hrc@jflv.org, www.jewishlehighvalley.org.  To submit names of local survivors, contact the Holocaust Resource Center.