Just one candle

The Yom Hashoah commemoration in the Five Towns was different this year. And it was a preview of what’s to come.

In prior years, six Holocaust survivors would each light one candle in memory of one million of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.

This year, as the community assembled in Beth Sholom in Lawrence last Wednesday night, only one survivor was in the room. He lit one candle. Additional candles were lit by five high school students in memory of relatives who survived but are no longer with us to retell their stories themselves.

“Sadly, as we reach the 80th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, we are approaching the loss of the generation of witnesses,” Sharon Fogel told The Jewish Star. “This means we have a responsibility to instill in the next generation the importance of keeping alive the experiences of those who are no longer with us here to tell their stories.”

The survivor who delivered the evening’s Fanya Gottesfeld Heller keynote address was Paul Gross, a member of the Young Israel of Lawrence Cedarhurst and earlier of the White Shul in Far Rockaway.

He lit a memorial candle accompanied by his wife and family.

Gross was born in 1937 in a small town in Hungary where the Holocaust came in 1944.

In introducing him, Rabbi Yaakov Trump of the Young Israel of Lawrence Cedarhurst, said Gross had told him that it took 75 years for his family to rebuild the numbers of those who were lost in the Holocaust.

“We celebrae every one of their lives,” Rabbi Trump said.

“Unfortunately, not many Holocaust survivors are alive anymore, therefore I feel more obligated to tell my story,” Gross said.

He described how he first encountered antisemitism, how the relative safety of living in Hungary disappeared when the Germans entered the country in 1944 and forced Jews inside a walled ghetto, and how he was stunned when neighbors turned on their Jewish friends.

“On the last Shabbos in the ghetto, we got word that we would be going to labor camps,” Gross recounted. “The rabbi of our town, with a long white bear, showed up in the shul clean shaven. I was a young boy but it shook me up. It made me realize that nothing would be normal from that point on.” The rabbi had heard that the Nazis were ripping out the beards of Jews.

“Many of us in this room grew up hearing Holocaust stories that most people in the world can’t even imagine,” Fogel told the gathering, composed of members of several Five Towns shuls including Bais Tefilah of Woodmere, Irving Place Minyan, YI of Hewlett, YI of Woodmere, YI of Lawrence Cedarhurst, and the Jewish Center of Atlantic Beach.

“We are the last generation to meet a survivor face to face, and in a few years, no Holocaust survivors will be left to tell their stories. What will happen when that day comes? Will we remember? Will we keep the stories alive as the last ones to hear their voices?”

The student ambassadors who lit candles, and later distributed yahrzeit candles bearing the names of Jews murdered in the Shoah, came from HAFTR, DRS, SKA and Rambam, “demonstrating that they are a link in the chain, that they will serve as torches in a world of darkness and live for the ideals that so many died for,” Fogel said.

HALB’s fifth grade choir opened the event.

The event was co-chaired by Dana Frenkel and Nathaniel Rogoff.

The article was updated on May 2 to correctly identify the co-chairs.