Interfaith ceremonies remember Holocaust victims, survivors
Mary Ann Wachsner was 14 years old when her family departed Germany in 1940, taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad through Manchuria, China and Korea, eventually crossing to Japan and sailing to Seattle.
“For a teenager, that was very exciting,” said Wachsner, noting that her family departed in a hurry as soon as they received their visas — they were Jewish, and they were escaping the Nazis.
Wachsner and her husband, who now live in Sherman Oaks, were among the Holocaust survivors and family members of those who escaped the systematic genocide who lit six candles in a pair of solemn events last week commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah, in memory of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.
At back-to-back candle-lighting ceremonies last Tuesday night at Burbank City Hall and Temple Beth Emet, a seventh candle was also lit for the millions of other victims who died at the hands of the Nazis and in other atrocities, including the Armenian Christians massacred by Ottoman Turks during World War I.
Area residents, religious leaders from several faiths and elected officials took part in the ceremonies, sponsored by the Burbank Human Relations Council, which Temple Beth Emet Rabbi Mark Sobel touted as not just about “my people, the Jews,” but about members of all faiths coming together.
“My colleagues are here, my friends are here... the people of Burbank and other surrounding areas are here, and this is truly an interfaith endeavor,” Sobel said in opening his remarks, which highlighted not only the Holocaust, but also the Armenian Genocide and the persecution of Bosnian Muslims.
The temple event included a brief moment to recognize the volunteers who give presentations about the Holocaust to Burbank school students. Afterward, author Ann Stalcup gave a presentation based on her nonfiction book “Three Who Survived,” about three young girls who endured WWII in different ways.
“All three children survived the war for different reasons,” Stalcup said. “All three had wonderfully happy childhoods — childhoods that [changed] suddenly and unexpectedly for each of them when they were 7.”
Pat barely lived through bombing raids in England during the war, Hilda escaped Germany just before the war began and Ursula survived a concentration camp. After recounting their stories, Stalcup presented a slide show of family pictures from the era, illustrating the lives that were disrupted by the war.
Wachsner, an artist, had donated several of her Holocaust-related works, which were displayed throughout the temple.
Roughly two years before escaping Germany, Wachsner had watched as the synagogue in her hometown of Breslau burned to the ground following Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass,” when Nazis smashed windows of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues.
That synagogue and several others were depicted in two prayer shawls Wachsner made while in art school and later donated to the temple, along with a quilt and a statue depicting the hands of Jews interned in concentration camps surrounded by tangles of barbed wire.
The incorporation of literature and art into the commemoration was important, Sobel said, because the Nazis had attempted not only to destroy Jewish lives, but also their cultural works.