By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Rivkah Dougherty works on a poster to be part of a Yom HaShoah display April 23 at The Temple (Photo by Andrew Adler)
It was a question at once inevitable and unanswerable: How could one people hate another people so virulently, so murderously, to produce what became to be called the Holocaust?
“I think the main reason was people needed a scapegoat,” Sammy Springer suggested, “so a small, different group – a minority – is usually a good target.”
At this point we should note that Springer is an 8th-grader with wide, black-rimmed glasses giving him an air of ageless introspection. He was attending Sunday morning religious school at The Temple, sitting across a table from a considerably older Community editor.
Like many of his fellow students, Springer had recently returned from a trip to Washington, D.C., where they visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. That experience was an apt prelude to Yom HaShoah, observed annually on the 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nissan, which in 2025 begins on the evening of Wednesday, April 23.
Organized by the Jewish Community Relations Council, The Temple will host this year’s 6:30 p.m. public commemoration, bearing the theme L’dor V’dor – from Generation to Generation. Representatives of area congregations will participate, but students — not adults — will lead nearly all of the program.
The Jewish Federation of Louisville — together with the Jewish Heritage Fund and generous endowment donors like the Ida and Bernhard Behr Holocaust Memorial Education Fund, the Ernie Marx and Ilse Meyer Holocaust Education Fund, and the Rosetta Handmaker Fund — made these trips possible for students from the Temple, LBSY and St. Francis of Assisi.
“We cover all the costs, and in exchange the kids agreed to participate in the Yom HaShoah event this year,” said Trent Spoolstra, director of the Federation’s Jewish Community Relations Council, who is leading the commemoration’s planning committee. “Of course, with it being the 80th anniversary (of the Holocaust’s ending in 1945), this year is particularly poignant.”
“Our goal this year was to do something different,” says Matt Golden of the Federation. “We worked with these three schools to make sure that the Holocaust education they offered would be complemented by this important life experience of going to the Holocaust Museum. In turn, we wanted those students’ learnings from their trip to connect back with our community here. They would participate in, and in reality, lead, our community’s Yom HaShoah commemoration. We are handing our story to the next generation of young leaders.”
No doubt many of those young people will carry fresh memories of their Holocaust Museum visit. As Jews on either side of formal adulthood, they are at least two generations removed from the Shoah – “the Catastrophe” – a specifically Jewish reference that to some is preferable to “Holocaust,” which summons up images of victims consumed by terrible fire.
The Museum does not make for easy diversion, especially images of places with names like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor and Treblinka.
“I saw a lot of gory videos,” 6th-grader Kyler Meeron “I was a little bit surprised. It was hard for me to watch those videos. Really hard.”
Students had various opinions about which imagery affected them the most. Springer spoke of an array of photographs depicting everyday people before they were sent to the camps. For Ellie Blake, who’d be celebrating her Bat Mitzvah on the upcoming Shabbat, “it was this Torah, torn and burnt, all over the ground.”
“Apparently the Nazis had stolen a Torah – they threw it into the street and cut it up,” she said. “I don’t know why, but there was something hard about that – because the Torah is such an important part of Judaism. There was something about destroying it.”
Perhaps perspective is bound up in upbringing. In Israel, “I grew up in a neighborhood where about half of the people were Holocaust survivors,” remembers Temple Senior Rabbi David Ariel-Joel. “So we knew if somebody went through the ‘hardcore’ Holocaust and were in Auschwitz or one of the death camps – or were just hiding,” he said.
“My best friend’s mother was not considered by other Holocaust survivors to be a ‘real’ Holocaust survivor because she was taken by a friend of the family who had a farm, and for four years was hidden in a small hole beneath a pile of poop from pigs,” Ariel-Joel recalled. “The thinking was that the Germans would never think to start digging there.”
Students have been spending portions of their Sunday mornings crafting artwork and posters to be displayed at the April 23 Yom HaShoah commemoration, collaborating with Kyla and Eden, the Israeli ShinShinim spending this school year in Louisville.
“My theme is that ‘there’s always something brighter,’” Rivkah Doughtery explained while gluing shimmering nodules to a deep black background. “I’ve got a black canvas, (with) little specks of light as a sign of hope – because even in dark times, there’s always something you can be happy about.”
Over at the Camp J building – students from LBSY (the religious school serving Adath Jeshurun, Keneseth Israel and Temple Shalom) were working on their versions of Yom HaShoah posters.
Amari Cohen was among several participants collaborating on a piece referencing life beyond the Shoah.
“We’re talking about programs and charities that people have done for survivors,” Cohen said, “people who have found their families.”
Not everyone associated with the upcoming Yom HaShoah ceremony is Jewish. One such exception is Pillar Nasr El Deen, a member of Israel’s Arab Druze community who’s spending this year as an intern with The Temple. She accompanied the students on their recent excursion to Washington.
“I think the trip to D.C. opened their eyes,” she says, “and I know they went to Chicago last year to the (Illinois) Holocaust Museum” located in nearby Skokie. “I love how they’re engaging with the subject and raising awareness, because they might (face) discrimination when they get older. If you don’t know your history, how will you proceed to the future?”
Visits like these are meant to complement instruction at religious school and elsewhere.
“All this semester my sixth-grade class has been studying the Holocaust through journal writing, learning the history behind it and reading stories,” explains Assistant Rabbi Matt Derrenbacher.
“Going to the museum itself was an opportunity to see more closer up,” he says, where “there’s a gravity, an extra sense of realness. Because it’s one thing to learn about something, and another to see actual artifacts from an event like that.”
Still, another question hangs in the air: How can students – some of them not even teenagers – adequately process so disturbing a subject?
“At this age, every student of course is going to be different in how they parse it, interact with it, and integrate into their lives and understandings,” Derrrenbacher acknowledges. “But I think this is a good age to really dig in and explore the history, because in sixth and seventh grade they’re getting ready to become Bar or Bat Mitzvah, so they’re approaching the age of religious maturity in the community. There is an extra responsibility to begin to understand their own Jewish journey and their own Jewish story. Part of that history involves the Holocaust. And it helps inform them how we can deal with antisemitism in our modern world, which unfortunately is continuing to skyrocket.”
The Yom HaShoah program will also include students from St. Francis of Assisi School, where the celebrated educator Fred Whittaker has taught legions of middle-schoolers about the Holocaust and have travelled to D.C and the Holocaust Museum.
“The work of evolving Shoah remembrance and awareness amongst our youth and of binding it specifically to their being as a calling to stand in defiance of antisemitism remains profoundly important,” Whittaker said not long after the events of October 7, 2023. “The context which this history can and should afford all who learn from it surely casts a more nuanced and informed light upon today’s events and upon the need and obligation we all have to encounter one another as family.”
Anticipating a trip to D.C., Whittaker added: “My students and I are honored to have the chance to take this journey to the United States Holocaust Memorial and to hold the wisdom we will gather there in our hearts always. What we learn will become life lessons which guide our hearts, form our conscience and call us always into a sense of family with our Jewish brothers and sisters.”
The 90-minute April 23 remembrance will feature music, a lighting of 11 memorial candles (one Yom HaShoah candle and 11 candles representing the 11 million individuals who perished during the Holocaust). There will also be remarks by members of the Klein family, honoring Ann Klein, a survivor of Auschwitz who spoke often to groups about her experiences prior to her death in February 2012 at age 90.
“With this being the 80th anniversary, we wanted to make sure to hone in on the theme of L’dor V’dor,” Spoolstra says, acknowledging that eight decades after the Holocaust, “there are not a lot of survivors remaining. So we’re trying to share the message – by having as many students as possible participate – that it’s now on future generations to continue telling these stories.”