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The Villages
Thursday, March 28, 2024

Temple Shalom to virtually commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day

Temple Shalom is preparing to virtually host Yom Hashoa, an Interfaith Holocaust Remembrance Day, on Thursday, April 8.

Yom Hashoah is an internationally recognized day of remembrance and is a time when caring people from around the world, Jew and non-Jew alike, join together as a reminder to protest genocide in any form.

This year’s event theme is titled “Has the Hate Stopped? 75 Years After World War II.” The event is co-chaired by Susan Sirmai Feinberg and Phyllis Kalter with a standing committee of dedicated workers from the Temple.

Since its inception, Temple Shalom has commemorated Yom Hashoah, starting as a small gathering at the lake behind La Hacienda Recreation Center and moving to bigger venues as the number of attendees has grown. For the past five years, up to 1,500 people have attended the service in person at St. Timothy’s Catholic Church, including members of local churches and the local Interfaith Peace Partners Group. Since a large group gathering isn’t possible this year because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the presentation will be presented virtually at www.tscfl.org/holocaust.

Heinz Jaffe

This year’s event will include testimony from local Holocaust survivors and members of the second generation about their experience before and after the war and honor local military and righteous people.

Keynote addresses will be given by Heinz Jaffe, who is a German survivor and a decorated United States soldier; and Mark Newhouse, who is a second-generation survivor born in a displaced persons camp and author of award-winning books on the Holocaust.

Second-generation members will introduce stories of other local survivors, liberators and Rightetous Gentiles. Second-generation survivor Syd Tenenbaum will sing an impactful performance with local musicians Billie Thatcher and Kevin O’Connell. Rabbi Zev Sonnenstein will blow the Shofar and say Kaddish for the six million Jews killed during World War II.

Temple Shalom also will award and recognize student winners from The Villages Charter School and Sumter County Middle School Holocaust Writing and Art Competition, with cash awards from the Jack Vitale Education Fund. Students from 10 classes studied the Holocaust and wrote essays or created artwork from a common set of study prompts. School administrators Peggy Irwin (The Villages Charter School) and Jessica Christian (South Sumter Middle School) worked with Mike Broverman and a group of Temple evaluators to select the final winners.

The committee hopes that members of The Villages and the local congregation will take part in the program, which will begin at 3 p.m. Thursday, April 8, at tscfl.org/holocaust. Video streaming will be available to watch on-demand at a later time. Questions can be directed to communications@tscfl.org.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, Temple Shalom has integrated technology into its worship services. It upgraded its technology and improved infrastructure to keep in touch with congregants and has weekly Shabbat services, holidays, board and committee meetings, cooking events, book clubs and even fashion shows on Zoom. The High Holy Days also were celebrated on Zoom.

Last year, the Temple presented an abbreviated Holocaust Remembrance Yom Hashoah service on Zoom that was well attended right after the pandemic started. Based on the limitations of Zoom and quality, the Temple filmed and streamed the service at its website.

Since then, the Temple has created three outreach programs with the Temple Sisterhood that were shown at 18 local assisted living and memory care facilities for Sukkot, Hanukkah and Passover. Those were instead of the regular live programs commemorating the holidays.

Each of the efforts was an improvement in technology and received great feedback from the target audience. The Temple wants to share those holidays as an outreach to the community and they can be viewed at tscfl.org/outreach.

For the upcoming Holocaust Remembrance, the Temple partnered with Jagmin and Associates to create the special multimedia program with survivors, second-generation survivors, music and cutting-edge digital graphics to showcase the speakers and history. The program was directed by Susan Sirmai Feinberg and Jeff Jagmin.

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