Providing perspective on the Holocaust

In commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah in Hebrew), Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway (HAFTR) High School students assembled in the school’s auditorium for a moving ceremony in memory of the more than six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. 

The program featured the 18 members of HAFTR’s senior class who participated in the second annual Abraham Scharf Z”L Mission to Poland last month. The trip also included a visit to Germany.  

Rabbi Gedaliah Oppen, principal of Judaic Studies and leader of the mission, told the students in the auditorium that they would hear from classmates who had visualized the victims of the Shoah as they arrived at the concentration camps, entered the gas chambers, were murdered in mass graves, starved in the suffocating ghettoes, and perished in the most evil places on earth. 

The students relayed their experiences on the mission, including their moving trip to the Auschwitz death camp, where it is estimated that more than one million people were murdered. 

Elisheva Engel, a mission participant, screened a meaningful documentary video she created showing highlights of the students’ journey to Germany and Poland. As HAFTR students viewed images of the mission, participants explained how the trip gave them a new perspective on the atrocities through visiting the sites where they occurred. 

Students lit six candles, representing the six million Jews killed by the Nazis in Europe. The message that every mission participant conveyed to their classmates was: “Zachorv’altishkach — remember and never forget.”  

The poignant assembly concluded with the reading of tehillim and the lighting of a seventh candle, the candle of hope, followed by the singing of “Hatikvah,” the national anthem of Israel.   

To view Engel's video go to http://bit.ly/1OC7y2g