This year’s community-wide Yom HaShoah program, sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council, Pouring Out the Heart: Learning from Personal Stories of the Holocaust will be Monday, April 28, at 7 p.m. at the Kentucky Center for the Arts, in the Bomhard Theater.
It will be much more than a solemn commemoration of the events of the Holocaust and remembering the victims. It will also be a recognition and tribute of the bond of compassion and understanding that today’s middle schoolers from St. Francis of Assisi and the Jewish Community Center’s Teen Connections program have forged with several local survivors.
The young teens, with guidance from St. Francis teacher and Yom HaShoah Chair Fred Whittaker, interviewed the survivors, Anna Belenkiy and Sima Furman, Russian immigrants to this country who hadn’t shared their stories in 22 years, as well as Fred Gross, Abe Jakubowicz, John and Renée Rothschild and Dan Streit.
To complete the project, the students learned to listen compassionately and create safe space so the survivors felt comfortable talking with them. The students also learned video-making and editing skills and bonded with each other.
The Yom Hashoah program will also include two Israeli soldiers, participants in the Hatikvah [the hope] Program, who will speak about the Holocaust from an Israeli point of view.
As has become tradition, there will be the opportunity to remember those who perished in the Holocaust with prayers and ceremony.
This event is offered free of charge to the entire community.