Northwestern community members gathered around The Rock to read names of Holocaust victims in recognition of Yom HaShoah Tuesday.
Yom HaShoah, also known as Holocaust Remembrance Day, takes place on the 27th day in the Hebrew month Nisan to preserve the memory of Holocaust victims by recalling their names.
Tuesday’s remembrance event was co-organized by NU Hillel and Zeta Beta Tau.
NU Hillel Campus Rabbi Jessica Lott began the gathering by reciting the Holocaust Mourner’s Kaddish prayer. Between each line of the prayer, Medill junior and Daily staffer Eli Kronenberg read names of concentration camps.
Lott and Kronenberg also led the group in singing the poem “A Walk to Caesarea,” also known by its first words, “Eili, Eili,” by Hannah Szenes.
“Especially because we’re on a university campus, I wanted to think of those people whose opportunities to learn, whose lives were cut short because of the brutality of the Nazis,” Lott said at the beginning of the event.
Lott encouraged members of the group to step up and read the names of their own family members who died in the Holocaust.
As the event continued, Lott and Kronenberg opened the floor for any interested participants to read printed lists of victims’ names, which Kronenberg provided upon request.
Lott said one list of names had been provided by an NU student. The list included victims’ country of birth, their age at death, and their year and place of death.
The next list contained the names of victims documented as students who had been born between 1919 and 1921.
“These were people who are our age and didn’t get to live any longer because of this atrocity,” Communication sophomore Michah Kier said. “It just made me think about how everything can change in just the blink of an eye.”
Lott encouraged participants to “hold on” to the name of one of the victims they heard.
NU Hillel Executive Director Michael Simon closed the event with a recitation of “Oseh Shalom,” a Prayer for Peace, with other members of the circle joining in.
Simon explained to the circle of about 30 students that reciting victims’ names meant more than just “murmuring into the void.”
“By reading a few names, we’re helping to reanimate all of those lives,” Simon said. “As you think back over names you heard, try to remember one of the names, and just think and imagine for yourself what that person’s life was.”
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