By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Vera Goodkin was the first person to light a candle Tuesday night at the Jewish Center of Princeton, in memory of lives lost in the Holocaust.
Survivors like her and their descendants gathered for the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony inside the synagogue on Nassau Street, for a service marked by prayer and the traditional lighting of six candles.
“We are the last generation who will know survivors,” said Rabbi Adam Feldman of the Jewish Center in his remarks. “It’s so important to know the stories and the lessons.”
The candelabras used during the service belonged to a now late Holocaust survivor and synagogue member, Abraham Krotowski. He was a regular at the Jewish Center, who used to sit in the third row, Rabbi Feldman recalled. He would bring them for past Holocaust Day Remembrance services.
“And every year, Abe would bring these candelabras that were part of his family from Poland, that he somehow smuggled here to this country when he came here,” he said.
After he died, the family gave the candelabras to the Jewish Center. Rabbi Feldman said they now “sit on our showcase every day, but we bring them out to represent the six million who lost their lives and their survivors who share their stories with us.”
Later, keynote speaker Julie Kohner, whose mother, Hanna, survived four concentration camps including Auschwitz, said her parents had imparted life lessons to her.
“They taught me that I had to stand up for my beliefs, so that what happened to them during the Holocaust would never happen again,” she said. “It is upsetting to me that, mistakenly, some people might make light of what happened when Nazis oppressed and murdered Jews.”
This year’s Yom HaShoah service took place amid some soul-searching within the wider Princeton community after the revelation that students at Princeton High School during spring break had played an anti-Semitic beer drinking game called Jews vs. Nazis. A photograph of the game — posted on a social networking site, Snapchat — showed the young men and cups arranged in the shapes of a swastika and a star of David. The controversy came up Tuesday night.
“And I know the Holocaust has been on people’s minds in this local community in the last few weeks, incidents in our community about trivialization of the Holocaust,” Rabbi Feldman said.
Ms. Kohner was scheduled Wednesday to make the same presentation at Princeton High School, an event that was closed to the media. In New Jersey, Holocaust education is mandatory in schools.
On Tuesday, she showed a video of her mother appearing on the TV show “This is Your Life” on May 27, 1953. She was reunited with people whom she had not seen in years, including her brother and one of the American servicemen who had liberated her. But the TV appearance was important for another reason.
“This was the first time in our country when Americans were exposed to the subject (of the Holocaust) and could understand the enormity and the horror of what took place,” Ms. Kohner said.
Inside the sanctuary, a group of youth attended the service. Rabbi Feldman said that earlier in the evening, the teens had participated in a workshop about anti-Semitism and “to speak up” when they see hatred.
“Too many people in Germany identified with the oppressor and were not able to step forward and speak up,” Ms. Kohner said.
