Encountering Survivors Exhibit

August 11 and 12
First United Methodist Church
23 Willow Street
Mystic, CT

Encountering Survivors Exhibit

This exhibit located in the community room at the First United Methodist Church will be on display. It is timely and can illuminate the contemporary focus on survivors of tragedies in our daily news. Encountering Survivors focuses on the understandings of each holocaust survivor, and how he or she learned to take their experience and live a vibrant and productive life. Students from 7 area schools interviewed survivors. Seeing and hearing eyewitnesses made history come alive. Come see their work and reflect on their understandings.

Encountering Survivors program 2011-12 sponsored by the Rose and Sigmund Strochlitz Holocaust Resource Center of the Jewish Federation of Eastern CT

In order to draw lessons from the unique horror of the Nazi genocide, the Holocaust Resource Center used a grant from the Bodenwein Foundation for a program entitled “Encountering Survivors.”  This is our fourth year working with local high schools and this year, a middle school.  This year’s Encountering Survivor program includes seven schools that are represented by the following teachers and their students:   David Williams (Bacon Academy); Pam Neidig (Fitch Senior High School); Marceline Macrino (Ledyard High School); Joel Farrior (Leonard J. Tyl Middle School, Montville); Chris Marot and Bridget Joyce (New London High School); Henry Laudone (Norwich Free Academy); and Lynn Frazier (Windham High School).  Through the “Encountering Survivor” program, students interact with survivors/children of survivors individually through a socialization and interview process in the interviewee’s home.  This year’s participants included Henny Simon, Rae Gawendo, Lola Fox, Oleg Elperin, Edie Kil-Freeman, Dr. Stephen Powell, and Romana Strochlitz Primus.   During these intimate meetings, the students learned of the survivor’s childhood, war time experiences, and liberation.  The students also begin to comprehend the survivors’ attitudes and feelings toward these events, and ultimately gain an understanding of precisely what the survivor experienced.  Seeing and hearing an eyewitness to the Shoah makes the history come alive.  These students are now able to represent the survivors and tell their stories with accuracy and feeling to any audience for at least another 50 years.  In a way, the lives of the survivors have become immortalized. 

Students also attended a talk given by Mr. Ben Cooper, a WWII veteran and liberator of Dachau.   For a concluding project, students wrote articles documenting the life of each survivor and these articles were presented in newspaper format at our final meeting held at Ledyard High School.     These posters represent their hard work.

Holocaust Remembrance Day 2012

Yom HaShoah  2012
Temple Emanu-El Waterford, CT

Some things resist our words, especially on an occasion like this Remembrance Day 2012. I find that I am at a loss for words.  I search for the words but they seem so trite, so incomplete.  I have even begun to think that words escape us most at the moments of greatest joy and the times of unbearable pain.

Of course the Psalms (tehillim) set a good example for us.  The tehillim remind us that we must not remain silent even at the moment when we have sensed a loss of words.  The tehillim are bold and sometimes audacious.  The tehillim transform everyday experiences so that we can more adequately express the greatest joys and deepest sorrows of our lives. When it comes to speaking on the occasion for which we are gathered here this evening words often inadequately express the grief so many have experienced at the hands of other humans. 

Those of you who have experienced directly the horrors of the Holocaust may have even greater anguish, if not anger, that sometimes seems inexpressible.  Yet listen to the words of Holocaust Survivor Estelle Laughlin.  It is “… not enough to curse the darkness of the past. Above all, we have to illuminate the future. And I think that on the Day of Remembrance the most important thing is to remember the humanity that is in all of us to leave the world better for our children and for posterity.”  Estelle’s words shatter any hesitancy we have to express our deepest thoughts.

Those of us who come here this evening because we are the indirect, if not direct, descendants of those who have perpetuated the atrocities often stand dumbfounded and at a loss for words.   Fortunately some of Christians did not remain silent but acted as did Irena Sendler, recipient of the Righteous Among the Nations medal in 1965. It is this resistance to words that brings us together for this occasion of remembrance.  We must be reminded that despite the Holocaust we continue to see what happened in Bosnia, what happened in Rwanda, what happened in Darfur. There are still millions of people being killed.

We must this evening remember that indeed we do have each other and that presence should give voice to all our efforts to resist anything that would ever again tear us apart.  As Jews and Christians we have at least one library of books that reminds us of a common bond that we can never let be torn asunder.  That is the Hebrew Scriptures.  They hold together the common words expressed over time that we ponder, pray and perplex over together again and again. 

And this year as the theme of rescue focuses our attention we must remember the words of our common book, the Torah.  The ones I am thinking of have just been spoken at the Passover Seder with the four cups of wine, “I will free you….; I will redeem you….; I will take you….; I will bring you…..”  This is our hope.  So as Holocaust survivor Estelle Laughlin, says, “Memory is what shapes us. Memory is what teaches us. We must understand that’s where our redemption is.”  And I say we must not resist words and remain silent.