An event unique to this area was recently held at Temple Beth David of Palm Beach Gardens. This was its 13th Annual Yom HaShoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day Vigil of Remembrance with a special theme: Remember the Survivors.
During the 12-hour period from 9:45 a.m. to 9:45 p.m., congregants, their families, and members of other communities of faith came together to read aloud names of Jewish martyrs who perished in the Holocaust, as well as those of the Righteous Among the Nations, non-Jews who risked their lives to aid and shelter Jews during that dark period in the world’s history.
The Vigil began as it customarily has, with the chanting of prayers and a talk by Beth David’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Danielle Bensimhon. In addition, moving and inspirational words were delivered by Scholar-in-Residence Rabbi Debra Eisenman, as well as by Pastor Michael Zdorow of The Gathering Place. This was followed by the lighting of seven memorial candles: six in memory of the six million slaughtered during the Shoah and a seventh in memory of those murdered in the massacre of October 7. This was followed by a screening of the 1995 Academy Award-winning documentary short film One Survivor Remembers, in which the horrors of the Shoah are recounted through the words and story of Gerda Weissman, a woman who lived through it and survived. Individuals and families then began to read the names of Jewish victims of the Nazis and their cohorts. Art created by Jewish children martyred in the Holocaust as well as photos of Jewish partisan groups were on display in the temple sanctuary, and images of pre-war Jewish life in Europe were projected on the walls while ambient music provided a counterpoint to the ongoing recitation of names.
Temple Beth David’s Rescued Holocaust Torah Scroll, saved and preserved from wartime destruction and recovered from a destroyed Czech synagogue, bore silent witness during the Vigil, as a living symbol of the connection between our community and the now departed congregations that once read and learned from scrolls like this so many decades ago.
Members of area churches including The Gathering Place of Palm Beach Gardens, which holds its services at Temple Beth David, and the Church of St. Paul of the Cross of North Palm Beach participated in this ceremony of remembrance by reading the names of the Righteous Among the Nations.
Each participant lit an individual memorial candle that, as the day lengthened and darkened, provided ever-increasing numbers of flickering flames, and more and more light. Each reader and listener signed a large placard attesting to their status as witnesses to this solemn ceremony of memory and resolve.
Temple Beth David’s Yom HaShoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day Vigil was a unique and moving experience – and never more so than this year, as the theme Remember the Survivors was both communal and yet highly personal — a remembrance of horror and loss and yet an affirmation of survival and life, a harkening to a darker time in history and yet enforcing the resolve of never again and an ongoing plea for justice and tolerance.
