As has become our tradition for Yom ha Shoah, Israel and the Jewish world’s annual day of remembrance of the Holocaust (and also on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January), we highlight some of the many monuments that name names — that personalise the victims.
This year marks the the 80 anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began on April 19, 1943.
Here are the names on the memorial at Umschlagplatz — the place from which the Nazis deported hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to their deaths. The memorial bears only first names — typical Jewish first names.
Naming names makes us remember that each of the vast number of people who were murdered was an individual — a person, not a number; they in this way keep alive the memory of those who were murdered — and the living Jewish worlds, stretching back generations, that were destroyed.
Some of the memorials consist of long lists of names….Some personalise the dead in other ways. These include the more than 70,000 “stumbling stone” or “stolpersteine”commemorative cobblestones around Europe placed by the German artist Gunter Demnig as a memorial art project in front of the houses of people who were deported.
(We want to note, also, the work of the Polish project “People, Not Numbers,” spearheaded by the Polish Olympic athlete Dariusz Popiela, which focuses on erected memorials in Poland that list names.)
We also would like to draw attention to the major new — and developing — online resource that will seek to create a comprehensive digital inventory and history of Holocaust memorial monuments worldwide:
The digital database “Holocaust Memorial Monuments,” which has been launched as a partnership project of the Center for Jewish Art, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies/The George Feldenkreis Program in Judaic Studies, University of Miami, Florida; and theInternational Survey of Jewish Monuments, Syracuse, New York.
May the souls of all the dead be bound up in the bond of life — may their memory be a blessing, and an inspiration not just to remember, but to learn!
You can watch our video about Holocaust monument that name names…
1 comment on “Yom ha Shoah 2023: Shoah memorials that name names, and personalize those who were murdered”
In every generation they rise against us . . .
The Nazis almost triumphed. They destroyed so much of what we held dear. AND PEOPLE STTD BY. People helped, too. BUT THE MAJORITY STOOD BY.