Holocaust memorial follows attack
Days after a gunman terrorized a California synagogue, San Francisco Jews and community members gathered Wednesday to remember relatives and friends who were among the millions killed in the Holocaust.
The Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, event at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco featured a talk by the Rev. Patrick Desbois, a French Catholic priest whose organization locates the sites of Nazi-era mass graves in Eastern Europe and interviews eyewitnesses to the executions — primarily villagers who were spectators or those who took clothes and possessions from the dead.
“Everybody wanted to watch,” said Desbois, whose team has talked to more than 6,000 witnesses to the slaughter. “It was like a carnival.”
Desbois described the killings in graphic detail to the audience that included survivors who dodged a similar fate, and their descendants.
Jews in the village, confined to ghettos, were often told they were being deported to Palestine and then walked toward a train station. Instead, they were redirected to what would become their burial place — a grave dug to the exact specifications for how many Jews were living in the town, Desbois said.
Nazis did not always use bullets, he said: Babies and the elderly were often buried alive. Witnesses told Desbois they saw the dirt over the bodies move for hours and sometimes days afterward.
When the women in line realized they were about to be shot, they would toss their jewelry away so the Germans couldn’t take it. Desbois and his team have excavated the Stars of David and wedding rings that victims cast aside, located not far from the remains.
The somber San Francisco memorial came after a 19-yearold San Diego resident opened fire inside a Poway synagogue during services Saturday, killing a 60-year-old woman and injuring three others, including a rabbi and an 8year-old girl, before his gun apparently jammed.
Officials said the shooter yelled anti-Semitic slurs, and they were investigating whether he was the author of a manifesto posted online that was filled with white nationalist conspiracy theories, claimed responsibility for a mosque arson attempt and praised the terrorist attack on Muslims in New Zealand in March.
Hate crimes in general, and violence against Jews in particular, are on the rise. According to the FBI, hate crimes increased 17% from 2016 to 2017, the most recent year for which data are available. Hate crimes against Jews accounted for nearly 60% of all religious-based incidents and increased 37% between the two years.
Physical assaults on Jews more than doubled in 2018, driven in part by the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh by a white supremacist in October, according to a report released Tuesday by the Anti-Defamation League.
“The same disease is coming back, and it’s progressing,” said Desbois, who does similar work in Iraq, locating the victims of ISIS.
Rivka Spiegel, 89, who survived the Birkenau concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland, is among those called to speak at Bay Area schools after an anti-Semitic incident happens on campus.
At one San Francisco school last year, the principal invited Spiegel to share her story with students after a series of such cases, including a fourthgrader defacing an art project with a swastika.
Morgan Blum Schneider, director of the Holocaust Center of the Jewish Family and Children’s Services, said it’s not just the misdeeds of children but the “lack of sensitivity and thoughtful education” that troubles her.
Spiegel said the Poway shooting hardened her resolve to keep telling her story.
“It’s getting to be very bad. Every day it gets worse,” she said. “I know I’m 89, and my life is short. I’m going to go fight the bad guys, or whoever they are.”
“The same disease is coming back, and it’s progressing.” The Rev. Patrick Desbois, on hate crimes against Jews