NY street adds Yad Vashem tag

The way Dani Dayan figures it, many people will walk along 67th Street in Manhattan, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, and notice the new sign for “Yad Vashem Way” and have no idea what the first two words mean.

“Some of them, not all of them, but some of them will Google ‘Yad Vashem’ and learn about the Shoah,” Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, told JNS at the street naming last week.

“This is one more way to accomplish the goal of bringing people to learn about the Shoah,” he said.

A dedication ceremony for the new street name was held across the street from the new sign, at Park East Synagogue. Ofir Akunis, the consul general of Israel in New York, was on hand, as were local officials, including.

Rabbi Arthur Schneir of Park East and a Holocaust survivor, told attendees that he hopes the sign will inspire people to visit Yad Vashem in Israel.

“This is a very personal moment,” he said. “I was liberated in Budapest in January 1945, and Auschwitz was liberated on Aug. 27. Millions of Jews were still under the yoke of the Nazis, and thanks to the allies, the United States, France and England who were united at the time with the Soviet Union, we were liberated.”

“I could have been one of the one-and-a-half million children who never made it,” he said.

Dayan told JNS that Holocaust denialists cannot “present authenticity, because they lie, and we therefore should use the advantage of our authenticity to educate.”

“We have to find innovative ways to spread knowledge, to tell the story of the Shoah, through education, through museums, through exhibitions, through films, through all kinds of ways that engage new audiences,” he said.

But Holocaust education alone is insufficient to combat Jew-hatred.

“’m not claiming that Shoah education is a silver bullet and the cure for antisemitism,” Dayan said.