Yom HaShoah Ceremony held at Westpark Cemetery
The Jewish community gathered as they commemorated the six million who had their lives taken through the Holocaust.
It was a day of solemn remembrance at Westpark Cemetery recently when many in the Jewish community gathered for a Yom HaShoah Ceremony.
Hosted by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, the event was attended by dignitaries, such as the Israeli Ambassador to South Africa, Eli Belotserkovsky, various local Jewish schools, such as King David Victory Park and a vast number of people.
Yom HaShoah is also known as Holocaust Remembrance Day and in the Jewish community, this day of remembrance is said to start on the evening of April 27 and ends on the evening of April 28.
This event, to all in attendance, was a painful reminder of the six million Jewish people who were slain by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. In commemorating those who were brutally murdered, they also celebrated the courage of those who survived. Siblings, Joshua and Tali Pimstein passionately spoke of their great-grandmother, Cecilia Boruchowitz, who was one of those survivors.
The significance of the day was not wasted on any one of the attendees. Whether they watched on as a soloist, Melissa Krawitz, a King David Linksfield learner, sing Eli Eli. This song is described as being a poem written in 1942 by Hungarian Jewish WWII resistance fighter Hannah Szenes and one they also said in silence as the memorial lamps were lit one by one to the calling out of names of the victims. Everything on the day was significant and each one a powerful statement.
When speaking of the Holocaust, Belotserkovsky said it was a huge scar on the face of humanity. “A scar that should never heal, should constantly remind us as human beings how a civilized and cultural nation in the middle of Europe could be harnessed by a group of criminals who were motivated by racist ideology just in order to exterminate the Jewish people.”
