“The first Holocaust Remembrance Day took place on December 28th, 1949, a year-and-a-half after Israel’s independence. The ashes and bones of thousands of Jews were brought over from the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp near Munich. They were placed in a crypt, together with decorated Torah scrolls, in a Jerusalem cemetery. A rabbi appointed by the Rabbinate…
As Germany welcomes new immigrants, teachers struggle to show these students that Germany’s story belongs to everyone, no matter their background. Israel-born teacher Aya Zarfati, who teaches and studies in Germany, describes her experience: “Particularly in Berlin, every fourth pupil comes from a non-German background,” Zarfati says. When one seeks to answer the question of what…
Perpetrators of the genocide in Rwanda that occurred over twenty years meet the victims of their crimes and ask for forgiveness. Here are the stories.
A series of artifacts collected by the Holocaust museum in Israel, Yad Vashem, documents people’s lives before, during and after the Holocaust. Many of these items also demonstrate how people participated in acts of resistance by merely using every day items to deny the Nazi regime total power over the human spirit. Find more links…
Read about Holocaust Remembrance Day around the world.
Tobi Zausner is a research psychologist, a social worker, and an award-winning visual artist with works in major museums and in private collections around the world. She writes, “My work is about possibilities depicted as actualities to inspire dreams in the viewer. The images balance between known and unknown. Their careful rendering suggests reality while…
In 1946, David Boder went to Europe to interview survivors of Nazi concentration camps, specifically to record their stories in their own voices. At the time, this was a new idea, so new he was the only one who went. What he got were the first oral histories of Holocaust survivors before it was even…
The Holocaust in a Global Context 