Rome civic leaders hear rabbi for Holocaust Remembrance Day
Rome Rotarians marked Holocaust Remembrance Day this year with a visit from the director of a Jewish museum in Atlanta.
Rabbi Joseph Prass heads the Weinberg Center for Holocaust Education at the Willliam Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in midtown.
He told community leaders Thursday that April 8 corresponds to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Communities around the world observed what is called Yom Hashoah in Hebrew from Wednesday evening through Thursday evening. It honors the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis in World War II.
Prass said it’s important to be ever vigilant against hate in the world. The galleries at the Breman, he said, prove to be an amazing tool in the midst of a rising tide of Holocaust denial and antisemitism.
“When we bring individuals through, what we talk about is how anti-semitism is not something the Nazis invented,” he said. “When we talk about anti-semitism, this is something that the Nazis refocused ... Antisemitism is something that’s been around for centuries.”
The galleries were designed in part by Holocaust survivor Ben Hirsch. He wanted people to feel what was happening at the time. One of the exhibits replicates the Warsaw ghetto in Germanoccupied Poland, where the Jewish residents fought back in 1943 against a roundup to send them to death camps.
“Jews were integrated into the society in many ways, just like everyone else ... but the Nazis wanted to have a scapegoat so the Jews were that perfect scapegoat,” Prass said.
Prass explained that the Holocaust took a marked turn on Kristallnacht, Nov. 9-10, 1938, when riots took place all over Germany and authorities stood by to make sure that only synagogues and Jewish businesses burned.
On that night, 30,000 men were arrested and brought to the first of the concentration camps at Buchenwald, most arrested for no reason other than they were Jewish.
Aside from the stories of terror and tragedy, Rabbi Prass said the story that needs to be told is the story of the resourcefulness of those who survived.
He said that many were the only survivors in their entire family.
“The lessons we learned from the survivors, and try to convey to others, is about how we as human beings have great capability for horrors but incredible capability for resilience. It is a lesson we try to be great stewards of,” he said.
Jeremy Katz, the senior director of archives at the Breman Museum, also spoke with the civic leaders about the vast archives, a central repository for Jewish history in Georgia and the Southeast.