Every Person Has A Name event imparts crucial lessons
As I sit down to write this month’s column, it is a couple of days after we held our Seventh Annual Every Person Has A Name event. Each year, I am so moved by the dedication and commitment community members have shown to this event, feeling like they NEED to be there and participate.
During the Commemoration Ceremony, I shared a statistic that I could see (and hear) surprised attendees. Even though we have held the event seven times, we have only read the names and available biographical information of about 58,000 people. This approximate total is still less than 1% of the 6 million lives that were taken due to the brutality and viciousness of the Nazis during World War Two.
A few moments stand out for me as I reflect on this past weekend’s event. The first was seeing some of our community’s youth and their parents standing at our podiums and reading names. During the event, two religious schools sent three of their older student classes to participate as a way to provide a Jewish learning experience outside of the classroom. Since we knew this was happening, we arranged for Pasadena’s Armory for the Arts to do a weaving project at our event as a way to tie together the past and the present for attendees on Sunday morning. I can only imagine the conversations as the parents and students drove away after participating in the event.
The second observation pertains to this year’s Holocaust exhibition we had on display. As you may be aware, for the last number of years, in addition to reading names, we have coordinated displaying a Holocaust-related exhibition, oftentimes in partnership with Yad Vashem, in a further attempt to educate those who stop by to read names or those who drop by. This year’s exhibition was entitled Anne Frank – A History for Today. It was provided by Anne Frank LA, a local nonprofit that creates and presents innovative, educational, and cultural programs and community events that further the legacy of Anne Frank. They use this exhibition in local high schools and train teens to be docents of the exhibition, and arranged to have four of these docents on hand to take people through the exhibition. What struck me the most was these teen docents’ enthusiasm for educating others. Even though it was a Sunday morning, they were excited to be there.
The last observation focuses on our volunteer name readers. This year, our volunteers ranged in age from 11 to 96 years old and came from all across our community, both Jews and non-Jews, who felt it was their duty, their responsibility to participate. In fact, two of my fellow commissioners on the LA County Commission on Human Relations participated. As we get further and further away from when the atrocities of the Holocaust took place each year, events like Every Person Has a Name, and or visiting museums like Holocaust Museum LA, the Museum of Tolerance, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and even Yad Vashem become even more critical for us to keep our past in mind as we move forward in time.
I think it’s also important to share that so many of our elect officials who participated in this year’s Commemoration Ceremony shared how important it was for them to participate in our event and how honored they feel to both be invited and feel their participation is helping to temper the rise of hate we are experiencing in society today.
Jason Moss is executive director of the Jewish Federation of the Greater
San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys.
