Holocaust Remembrance Events in NYC

Never forget.

The Annual Gathering of Remembrance, New York’s largest Holocaust commemoration event, is Sunday, April 28, at Temple Emanu-El, in observance of Yom HaShoah, honoring the six million souls lost in Europe’s WWII concentration camps and Jewish ghettos.

FREE tickets to this important annual remembrance are still available.

Because we must never forget, and we must work together to prevent and stop genocide anywhere in the world.

The remembrance event includes songs from many of the countries of Europe which suffered the most under the Nazis, brief statements from elderly survivors and the lighting of memorial candles by survivors and their decendants.

In addition to the 2,000 people expected to attend in person, the event is being live streamed around the world.  Last year more than 45,000 people attended the ceremony virtually, including elderly Holocaust survivors now scattered throughout the world and too frail to attend.

The Holocaust commemoration is 2pm to 4pm, and tickets are required for admission.

Sign up here for free tickets to this always moving event.

The program is co-sponsored by the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park, which openz a major exhibit on Auschwitz next week.

Here is the statement by MJH president Michael S. Glickman at the 2017 remembrance event, which included Holocaust survivors telling their stories about survival:

Remembering the lives lost in the Holocaust is an act of resistance against the Nazis’ attempts to dehumanize and destroy the Jewish people.

The full horror of genocide is in its ambition not only to murder individuals, families, and communities, but also to wipe out the entire people to whom they belonged—the people who could tell their story, acknowledge their humanity, and preserve their memory.

In their attempt to obliterate the Jewish people, the Nazis sought to change the future and master the past. There would be no Jews to remember the Jewish people who were exterminated; there would be no Jewish perspective on Jewish history, no Jewish insistence that each life is important and should be mourned. Having been denied their humanity in life, victims of the Shoah would be denied it in death.

There would be no survivors’ voices or rallying cries.

Today, we are still here. The Jewish people persist, and we refuse to forget.

Other Holocaust Related Events in NYC

Who Will Write Our History

In November 1940, days after the Nazis sealed 450,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a secret band of journalists, scholars and community leaders decided to fight back. Led by historian Emanuel Ringelblum and known by the code name Oyneg Shabes, this clandestine group vowed to defeat Nazi lies and propaganda not with guns or fists but with pen and paper.

For the first time, their story is told as a feature documentary. Written, produced and directed by Roberta Grossman (“Above and Beyond”), “Who Will Write Our History” mixes the writings of the Oyneg Shabes archive with new interviews, rarely seen footage and stunning dramatizations to transport us inside the Ghetto and the lives of these courageous resistance fighters. (95 min)

Who Will Write Our History – Theatrical Trailer from Abramorama on Vimeo.

After the FREE screening, there is a Q&A with Jewish history professor Samuel Kassow

• FREE on Monday, April 29, 6pm to 9pm, at Pulitzer Hall, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University
• Registration recommended to ensure space.
• Co-sponsored by Columbia University’s Dept. of History and Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP).

Kindertransport—Rescuing Children on the Brink of War

It’s not exactly an event, but this exhibit commemorates the 80th anniversary of the Kindertransport, which rescued thousands of children from Nazi Europe to Great Britain in the 1930s. 

It was an act of desperation – and love – by the parents who sent their children away.  It’s a historic exhibit, of course, but also timely today because of the controversial Trump Administration policy of separating parents and children of would-be immigrants.

The exhibition explore’s the children’s difficult and often heartbreaking journeys through personal stories, artifacts that include letters from both parents and children to one another, clothing and other artifacts, including toys, of the surviving children.  Many of those Kindertransport children eventually immigrated to America.

See this important exhibit FREE before it closes on May 24th.

Special Kindertransport Events

Attend a special Curator’s Tour at 6:30pm on May 13. 

• Get $10 tickets here.

Attend a panel discussion Child Separation and Refugee Crises from the Kindertransport to Today

• Mark Hetfield, CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and Alex Aleinikoff, Director of the New School’s Zolberg Institute on Migration & Mobility and the former UN Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees, discuss the history of popular opposition to refugees and especially how it has impacted children fleeing violence and poverty, from the Kindertransport to the Trump Administration’s child separation policy. Moderator is NPR international correspondent Deborah Amos, who has reported extensively on refugees in the Middle East and across the globe.
• 6:30pm on May 21.  Get $10 tickets here

Following up on behalf of Carvel Ice Cream ahead of the iconic ice cream franchise’s 85th birthday.