INTRODUCTION TO CANDLELIGHT AND TORAH PROCESSION
Tonight we kindle these yellow candles to remember six million Jewish men, women and children and six million non-Jewish men, women and children who perished at the hands of the Nazis.
We have added an extra candle to honor the memory of the Hasidi Umot Haolom The Righteous among Nations. More than 19,000 are recognized by Yad Veshem:
May their souls be bound up in eternal life.
Many of the Jews who survive the Nazis owe their lives to The Righteous who risked their own lives to save them.
Manny Saks
The penalty for trying to help the Jews was death. Many hundreds of The Righteous were executed. Hostile neighbors could be as dangerous as the Gestapo, often betraying both: those in hiding and those hiding them.
Many of the Jews who survive the Nazis owe their lives to The Righteous who risked their own lives to save them. The penalty for trying to help the Jews was death. Many hundreds of The Righteous were executed. Hostile neighbors could be as dangerous as the Gestapo, often betraying both: those in hiding and those hiding them.
Those who had hidden the Jews included Roman Catholics (among them the Franciscans, Benedictines, and Jesuits), Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians, Baptists, Lutherans and other Protestant denominations, as well as Muslims in Bosnia and Albania. They were nuns, priests, nurses, nannies, teachers, classmates, neighbors, friends, as well as employees and colleagues.
It took at least ten to save the life of one Jew. What were the motives of those who tried to save our brethren? Why did they save their lives?
The Righteous chose to act in a civilized human manner–rather then to do nothing or become apart of the Nazi Barbarism.
Si Fromkin, a survivor of the Kovno Ghetto said of The Righteous: “They ignored the law, opposed popular opinion and did what was right.”
How many of us could measure up to this standard?
The Talmud in Mishna Sandedrin teaches us: “Whoever saves one life, it is as if he save the entire world.”
After the Candelight Procession, we will pass Torah scrolls, saved from the Holocaust, from one generation to the next. This symbolic act not only links the generations to each other, but it serves also to bind those generations to the holy Torah.
These sefrei Torah represent many things to our people. Contained within them is our story and history, the telling of creation and redemption, and of G-d's revelation through the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. The Torah is called the etz chayim, the tree of life. It is, in fact, treated with the same respect as a human life - we kiss it, dress it, even count it as a tenth in a minyan. These Torahs are particularly precious to us because unlike so many lives and so many sifrei Torahs lost in the Shoah, these were remarkably saved.
We embrace this opportunity to gently pass these Torah scrolls as we pass on the precious legacy from one generation to the next.