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AUGUST 6, 2020 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Jewish History
My Personal Holocaust Memorial Day By Rabbi Baruch Fogel
With my grandparents
T
here has been much debate how best to remember and memorialize the Holocaust as a community. Some have chosen to focus on Tisha B’Av, while others focus on Yom Hashoah or Kristallnacht. Whatever day each individual community chooses, we are all in agreement that it is important for each person to internalize what the Holocaust means to them. I think that it is also appropriate for each person, if possible, to find a day that has specific meaning for them and their family and use that as a day of reflection so that the meaning and the lesson of the Holocaust remains alive for the next generation. As a grandchild of survivors of Auschwitz, and a great-grandchild of many great-grandparents murdered in Auschwitz, there are many days
throughout the year that I could have chosen. As a family, we commemorate the day(s) that my great-grandparents, with their young children, were taken to the gas chambers. I
A recent photo of my grandmother and me
grandmother, Yolan Altman (née Riedermann), a survivor of Auschwitz, is still alive. As her oldest grandchild, we share a very special bond and relationship that contin-
I cannot fathom their cruelty in having her sign her entry papers into Dachau
could choose to commemorate the day(s) of liberation. But I chose August 1 as a commemoration to the Holocaust because of a unique document that haunts me constantly. I am blessed that my maternal
ues until this day. In 1997, she courageously gave her testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation detailing her personal Holocaust story. Though she did not talk about it much with us, throughout the years I was able
to hear snippets of information that helped me paint a better picture of all that she suffered and experienced. One story that she told often has particular meaning as we approach the fast day of Tisha B’Av. She always told us that even though she was starving in Auschwitz, she nevertheless resolved to fast on Tisha B’Av to commemorate the destruction of the Holy Temple almost 2,000 years ago. Being that she was a Hungarian, and that Hungarians were only rounded up in the spring of 1944, she had only been in Auschwitz for a couple of months when Tisha B’Av (July 29, 1944) occurred. She was approached by women from Poland and Lithuania who had been in Auschwitz for a number of years who derided her decision to fast on that day. And yet, she resolutely refused to eat, saying
