The theme of the Yom Hashoah commemoration this year was “Resistance – lighting a Dark space”. Our High School students and staff community came together to remember those we lost in the Shoah but to also focus on the power of our spirit and the resistance of our people in the face of tyranny.

Daniel Samowitz

Part Time Jewish Life Teacher

Click here to watch Rachel Turtledove’s performance at the ceremony.

In this excerpt from What Really Makes Us Free by Elie Wiesel https://docs.google.com/document/d/16ACX-rWxwWVwMjb6Iq8y0ZQsSSW0CoH_wT5Etwz0NlU/edit I see obvious connections that can be made to the festival of Pesach which we just celebrated. Wiesel speaks about how people in captivity can remain free.

It takes free people like Moses to stand up to those who are keeping others in captivity, He risks everything in order to maintain hope and freedom.

The story of Pesach teaches us that freedom is engrained in the Jewish people, regardless of what situation we are in. This is what Wiesel speaks about, the inherent freedom experienced by the Jewish people even in times of trouble and captivity.

By Matthew Joffe

The Holocaust. The systematic murderer of millions of Jews. An enforced oppression which created a divide in who was seen as ‘perfect’ and who was seen as ‘damaged’. We could never truly understand the hardships and hopelessness of those who suffered. In Polish cities under Nazi occupation, like Warsaw and Lodz, Jews were confined in sealed ghettos where starvation, overcrowding, exposure to cold, and contagious diseases killed tens of thousands of people. While many Jews could not escape their inevitable future, some managed to overcome these obstacles, demonstrating resilience and rebellion.

The Holocaust is most often-associated with prisoners in their striped uniforms set against a backdrop of barbed wire and long rows of bleak-looking barracks. However, this was not the case in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. For nearly four weeks, Jews revolted against the Nazis as they entered the ghetto to deport the remaining Jews to concentration camps.

These Jews managed to hold the ghetto for nearly up to a month, but they eventually ran out of supplies to keep fighting. Their resistance became a symbol that counteracted the often-misleading narrative that Jews went to their deaths without a fight. As Viktor E. Frankl stated: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” 

As we commemorate on Yom Hashoah the legacy of those who perished, we are responsible for recalling more than the horror alone but also the acts of resistance and bravery against man’s inhumanity. In remembering this great tragedy of our people and of our world may we find the strength in ourselves to stand up against the injustices confronting us today.   

By Lachlan Corne